CD Covers

Painted Hand Ruin
©Joe Bridwell
Some of our Four Corners heritage springs from Ancient Anasazi habitations. The inset is Painted Hand ruin in sw Colorado. Anasazi inhabited the area from 700-1300 AD. Often, their protective towers sat atop a canyon wall, giving wide view.

Could such ruins help create a provocative CD cover and generate an appealing, marketing tool from a memorable Anasazi ruin?
Here is an original Anasazi tower near sunset. With some masking in Photoshop CS3, we simply created a circle with the elliptical marquee, clipped the ruin by making a white circular mask shaped like a CD, then used an arc to impose various semi-circular embossed texts to advertise workshop particulars.
Now, having ignored HDR during capture, I decided to enhance this capture using Lightroom. Two opposing dark-to-light gradients modified outer boundaries on nne and ssw azimuths, creating filters roughly parallel to the ruin's broken edge. The left gradient also sharpened and enhanced mid-tone clarity of the ruin. In effect, this choice of gradients focuses the viewer’s eye along the ruin's jagged edge, thence upward to our Lightroom 2 Workflow title in an upcoming Workshop. Then the eye can finally ascertain other information, should the viewer desire to explore farther.
An image like this, a CD Stomper, CDs, CD Cases, and Matte White Labels – and you’re prepared to supply Workshop CDs… or perhaps you prefer another way to get to a similar goal!

Odds & Ends…

In today’s financial strains, blogging photographers are seeking and defining optimism…
James Duncan Davidson has an interesting piece – An Opportunity and Obligation.
Alain Briot considers Audiences and Best Sellers.
David Ziser lists ways to Don’t Stumble, Fumble, or Fall…
And, I would imagine you are finding your own sources of faith, as well!

For you HDR buffs…
HDRSoft is continually improving it popular software. With a new tie-in back to Lightroom, it just released PP 3.1.3 beta 5.
If you are used to LR passing information back after external processing, as it clearly does with CS3/CS4 or want the same in other often used in your digital processing, then this release is also good news.

What if you’re quickly trying to produce lots of images for an event using Lightroom?
Syl Arena usually suggests cogent ideas.  In Managing Event Photography with Lightroom, Syl offers a workflow designed to both speed production and consider client needs.  With Library work panels, Syl shows how to really speed your processing.
This is the class of workflow which makes it easy for amateur and professional.

Since many of us rely on Adobe Camera Raw (knowingly or otherwise)…
Jeff Schewe has just updated the renowned Fraser-Schewe series on ACR with CS4.
I’ve been following this series since CS2 – it’s the grease behind Lightroom and CS4.

And, finally, Adobe Lightroom User to User Forums reports user concerns about LR2.3RC…
My present sense of user concerns suggests memory leak is not such a large problem in the new 2.3 version. Granted, there are other issues, some of it simply because Lightroom can either have a steep learning curve or because some particular feature is still a bit klunky.
This forum is a good area for learning; some of the heavy weights occasionally chime in with real nuggets.

Mama was a Painter…

Bob Hope's theme song was Thanks for the Memories...
for me, memories of her painting involve an easel, a canvas, a palette filled with oils, and something she decided to paint.  My walls are adorned with her charcoal, watercolor, pastel, and oil paintings.
For a long time, I didn't think of myself as a painter.  Then I became a photographer.  Slowly, I began to delve into Adobe Photoshop; when I had become proficient with brushes in CS3, I still didn't realize that perhaps, just perhaps, I was a painter.
But with advent of Lightroom 2, with local Adjustment Brush and Auto Masking, I had begun to change.  I was using the brush, I was making subtle adjustments to color, texture, and sharpness; perhaps I was becoming a fine art painter!
With recent, careful capture of an HDR image at Shiprock, these ideas began to congeal as a digital photographer who captured a superb image, then with always improving brushes, finally started to paint ever so subtle changes / enhancements into the beauty of an evocative landscape.
One day I began to think of matting which might also enhance an image.  Camera club judges had harshly criticized straightforward black and white mats using the same inner mat color.  Black and white mats... they seemed like old charcoal paintings.

I began to think, "What about an outer gradient mat which softens colors in the picture and an inner mat with stronger picture colors ~ but opposing gradient?"  Using image colors, the inner mat might become a small, enhanced focus point.  Again with image colors, the outer mat emulates the softness of a watercolor or pastel.  Together, perhaps they represent fine art paintings.

Dare I suggest that combination of superb fine art 'paintings' and color conscious mats actually does represent an advancement from just digital into fine art photography...