Link Roundup 11-01-2008
By Brian Auer • November 1st, 2008Halloween is officially over, and I hope everyone had a safe evening. Here’s what’s been happening around the web over the last week.
- Seagate FreeAgent Go Drive “Fall” Photo Contest
Photography Bay
Here’s a great project for the Fall season, and it fits in nicely with the stuff I’ve been talking about related to photo backups. All you have to do is enter your best “Fall” photo for a chance to win one of three external hard drives from Seagate! - Exploring Small Strobes: Why Use Speedlights Off Camera
DIYPhotography.net
Tips and techniques for using off-camera strobes in a variety of situations: replacing natural and artificial light, macro lighting, background lighting, backlighting, and using multiple strobes. - Always Use a UV Filter
Beyond Phototips
A few good reasons why you might consider keeping a UV filter on your lenses. - Review: Adobe Photoshop CS4
Creative Pro
A full review of the new features in Photoshop CS4, ACR 5, and Bridge CS4. - Ultimate Guide to Taking Portraits at Night
Photojojo
Tips and tricks for shooting night portraits, including ISO, flash, lighting, background, motion, color, and more. - An Over Due Review: Digital Railroad vs. Photoshelter Collection
JMG-Galleries
A quick look and comparison of these two services, and their eventual failure. - Review: The Art of Black and White Photography
Photodoto
John gives us a good honest review of this book and who he’d suggest it to. - Tips for shooting star trails pictures
ADIDAP
Star trails photography is at the same time easy and rewarding, it can produce results that will leave most viewers in awe with very little effort. Here are some tips for getting started. - How to photograph smoke abstracts
Words: Irrational
A great tutorial on shooting smoke — things you’ll need, setting up your equipment, and processing the images.
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Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from San Diego, California. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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I’ve been testing Photoshop CS4 for a few days now on my laptop. When I started the review I had to disagree with the first pro, “Well-designed new interface”.
What Adobe has done to the interface is something I really hate about interfaces. Replace the standard Windows-style with their own, this is just a minor annoyance, but Adobe has made it even worse. There’s a reason why the close button is always in the rightmost corner of the screen. This makes it possible to throw your mouse to the upperright and click. Adobe’s close button is not in the corner, it is offset a little bit and to make things worse, the underlying window is showing through in the upperright corner. So what happens when I throw my mouse there and click is: I close the window behind it!!!
Besides this absolutely failure I really like the new way of using adjustment layers and masks. The new ACR is great too with the selective adjustment brush. Content aware scaling is a fun feature, but I don’t think I would use it a lot. I still have to look into Bridge to see how it’s improved.
I also installed it on my PC (Vista x64) and really like the improved speed with the 64-bit version and the use of my graphics card. The tossing of a file while panning is a great new feature.
Overall I would say this is a very good update, but probably people should ask themselves if the new improvements are worth spending a lot of money on…
Hi Brian,
Just a quick thank you note for the plug on the smoke abstracts article. I hope your readers enjoy it.
Regards.