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The Almanac - History Of Photoshop

Published by Hari Kumar Balasundaram under , , , , , , on 4:20 AM

While you won’t find it printed on any calendar, 2009 marks a quiet anniversary for the program that you, and many other graphic designers, probably use the most. It was 20 years ago in February that Adobe shipped version 1.0 of Photoshop – still its most popular (and lucrative) application, and possibly the only bit of software to have spawned its own verb form.


But the true origins of Photoshop go back even further. The program whose splash screen now displays 41 names was originally the product of just two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll, as fascinated by technology as they were by art. It was a trait they’d inherited from their father, a photography buff with his own personal darkroom in the basement and a penchant for early home computers.


Thus Thomas dabbled with photography, learning about colour correction and contrast in the darkroom, while John happily tinkered with his dad’s Apple II computer. When their dad – clearly an early adopter – bought one of the first Macs on the market in 1984, both were bowled over by its capabilities. Yet ironically it was its frustrating inadequacies that would eventually lead to the multi-million dollar application sitting on nearly everyone’s hard drive today.


In the beginning
By 1987, John Knoll was working at Industrial Light and Magic – Lucas film’s nascent special effects division, founded for Star Wars – while Thomas was studying for his Ph.D. on image processing at the University of Michigan. Having just bought a brand-new Apple Mac Plus to help out with his thesis, he was dismayed to find it couldn’t display greyscale images on the monochrome monitor. So, in true hacker style, he set about writing his own code to do the job.

Unsurprisingly, John was also working on image processing at ILM, and during a holiday visit he became very impressed with Thomas’s progress. Thus the pair began to collaborate on a larger, more cohesive application, which they dubbed – excitingly – Display.

It wasn’t long before John had bought a new colour Macintosh II and persuaded Thomas to rewrite Display to work in colour. Indeed, the more John saw of Display, the more features he began to ask for: gamma correction, loading and saving other file formats, and so on.

Although this work distracted Thomas from his thesis, he was quite happy to oblige. He also developed an innovative method of selecting and affecting only certain parts of the image, as well as a set of image-processing routines – which would later become plug-ins. A feature for adjusting tones (Levels) also emerged, along with controls for balance, hue and saturation. These were the defining features of Photoshop, but at the time, it was almost unthinkable to see them anywhere outside of specialist processing software in a lab – or at ILM.

By 1988, Display had become ImagePro and was sufficiently advanced that John thought they might have a chance at selling it as a commercial application. Thomas was reluctant: he still hadn’t finished his thesis, and creating a full-blown app would take a lot of work. But once John had checked out the competition, of which there was very little, they realised ImagePro was way ahead of anything currently available.

From ImagePro to Photoshop
Thus the search began for investors. It didn’t help that Thomas kept changing the name of the software, only to find a name was already in use elsewhere. No one is quite sure where the name ‘Photoshop’ originally came from, but legend has it that it was suggested by a potential publisher during a demo, and just stuck. Incidentally, splash screens from very early versions show the name as ‘Photoshop’ – which seems far more in line with today’s craze for Extraneous Capitalisation.

Remarkably in retrospect, most software companies turned their corporate noses up at Photoshop, or were already developing similar applications of their own. Only Adobe was prepared to take it on, but a suitable deal wasn’t forthcoming. Eventually, though, a scanner manufacturer called Barneyscan decided to bundle it with its scanners, and a small number of copies went out under the name Barneyscan XP.

Fortunately for the future of digital imaging, this wasn’t a long-term deal, and John soon returned to Adobe to drum up more interest. There he met Russell Brown, then Art Director, who was highly impressed with the program and persuaded the company to take it on. Whether through naivety on Adobe’s part or canniness on the brothers’, Photoshop was not sold wholesale but only licensed and distributed, with royalties still going to the Knolls.


It wasn’t as if this deal meant the Knoll brothers could sit back and relax; if anything, they now had to work even harder on getting Photoshop ready for an official, 1.0 version release. Thomas continued developing all the main application code, while John contributed plug-ins separately, to the dismay of some of the Adobe staff who viewed these as little more than gimmicks.

Curiously, this attitude still remains among some purists, who claim that most Photoshop plug-ins are somehow ‘cheating’ and not be touched under any circumstances, while others swear by their flexibility and power when used properly.

As in the program’s formative days, there were always new features to be added, and somehow Thomas had to make time to code them. With the encouragement of John, Russell Brown – soon to become Photoshop’s biggest evangelist – and other creatives at Adobe, the application slowly took shape. It was finally launched in February 1990.

Digital imaging for everyone
This first release was certainly a success, despite the usual slew of bugs. Like the Apple of today, Adobe’s key marketing decision was to present Photoshop as a mass-market, fairly simple tool for anyone to use – rather than most graphics software of the time, which was aimed at specialists.

With Photoshop, you could be achieving the same things on your home desktop Mac that were previously only possible with thousands of dollars of advanced equipment… at least, that was the implicit promise. There was also the matter of pricing. Letraset’s ColorStudio, which had launched shortly before, cost $1,995; Photoshop was less than $1,000.

With development of version 2.0 now underway, Adobe began to expand the coding staff. Mark Hamburg was taken on to add Bézier paths, while other new features included the Pen tool, Duotones, import and rasterisation of Illustrator files, plus, crucially, support for CMYK colour. This was another canny move on Adobe’s part, as it opened up the Photoshop market to print professionals for the first time. The program’s first Product Manager, Steven Guttman, started giving code names to beta versions, a practice which survives to this day. ‘Fast Eddy’ – version 2 – was launched the following year.

Until now Photoshop was still a Mac-only application, but its success warranted a version for the burgeoning Windows graphics market. Porting it was not a trivial task: a whole new team, headed by Bryan Lamkin, was brought in for the PC. Oddly, although there were other significant new features such as 16-bit file support, this iteration was shipped as version 2.5.

Like that difficult third album which can make or break a band, version 3 had to really deliver if it was to corner the market. Fortunately, the team had a whopper of an ace up their sleeve: layers.

By general consensus, the addition of layers has been the single most important aspect of Photoshop development, and probably the feature which finally persuaded many artists to try it. Yet the concept of layers wasn’t unique to Photoshop. HSC – later to become Meta Creations – was concurrently developing Live Picture, an image-editing app including just such a facility. While an excellent program in its own right, Live Picture was vastly overpriced on its launch, leaving Photoshop 3.0 for both Mac and Windows to clean up.

Nothing in later versions quite matched the layers feature for its impact, but there have nonetheless been significant changes. Version 5 introduced colour management and the History palette, with its extra ‘nonlinear history’ behaviour, which certainly opened up whole new creative possibilities. A major update, version 5.5, bundled Adobe’s package ImageReady in an entirely new iteration, giving Photoshop excellent Web-specific features. Layer styles and improved text handling popped up in version 6, and the Healing brush in version 7.

Today and tomorrow
Surprisingly given the age and market leading position of the application, Adobe continues to come up with new features for Photoshop. With Photoshop now part of the rebranded and remarketed Creative Suite 2, Adobe appears to be currently emphasising interoperability through the likes of Bridge.

And the future? Unsurprisingly, Adobe isn’t telling. Photoshop is the jewel in its crown and its development is closely guarded. But there have been hints. Bryan Lamkin, now Senior Vice President of Digital Imaging and Digital Video, speculated earlier this year on a true 64-bit version of the application, and perhaps support for Apple’s CoreImage technology, which would bring enormous speed improvements. Rumours that Illustrator will merge with Photoshop have also abounded for years.

Whatever happens, it’s likely that Thomas Knoll will be involved in some way. Although not directly concerned with Photoshop these days, he still keeps his hand in, recently developing the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in and posting occasionally to the Adobe forums.

His brother still works at ILM too: appropriately enough, he was Visual Effects Supervisor on all three of the new Star Wars films. Without the original Star Wars, there would have been no Photoshop; and with no Photoshop, your job, this magazine and the entire graphics design industry would be very different from how they are today.

Content reproduced from a magazine.

Hari Kumar Balasundaram

Assignment - Monsoon

Published by தம்பி... under on 4:21 AM

Dear All,
Please post your photo in this Discussion thread.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/ctcstudio/discuss/72157622725511109/

Theme : Monsoon
Entry Date: 22-November-2009 00:00:00
Last Date : 10-December-2009 23:59:59

Monsoon still hitting Chennai. Come on Guys lets hit the wet and register the moments.

How to post your entries?
1. Upload your photo in the Flickr
2. Copy the Photo URL
3. Reply to the Discussion Topic given and paste your url in the following format (URL should be enclosed with the Square brackets)
[URL]
Ex:

Monsoon Desktop - Chennai Iravil Mazhai kaalam by you.


4. Add more details in the reply and post the reply

Thanks,
CTC Studio Team

The Almanac - Metering Modes in Digital Cameras

Published by Hari Kumar Balasundaram under , , , , on 2:18 PM

After a brief hiatus, The Almanac is back with basics in metering again. This time though we take a peek into the world of digital cameras & DSLR’s & their inbuilt modes for metering the correct exposure for every picture shot.

So what happens when you look through the viewfinder and decide to take a picture, many cameras require you to first press the shutter button halfway down. This allows the camera to properly focus. To capture the shot, typically requires the shutter button to be fully pressed.

Between the time you first press the shutter halfway and the camera takes the shot, your digital camera's brain does the following...
  1. Determines what the subject of your shot is
  2. Focuses the lens
  3. Figures out how much light there is for your subject
  4. Calculates the correct combination of shutter speed (how long the shutter will remain open) and F-stop (size of the aperture) to properly expose your photograph

But the most impressive thing is that your camera accomplishes all of these feats in a fraction of a second. In terms of photographic basics, when your camera "meters" the scene, it is calculating the correct shutter speed and F-stop, based on the light at your subject.

The three most common metering modes that are available on most digital cameras are the Matrix Metering Mode, the Centre Weighted Metering Mode, and the Spot Metering Mode. Each of these metering modes have their strengths and weaknesses and the key to making great pictures is understanding those strength and weaknesses because only through understanding them will you know which mode to use in a given shooting situation.

These common metering modes are available on all DSLRs but the way you access these menu items vary from camera to camera so once again dig out the manual that came with your camera and read up on its metering modes and how to access them.

Matrix Metering
Matrix Metering Mode, in this mode the camera divides each scene up into a number of discrete segments, the numbers of discrete segments vary from camera to camera. When set for matrix metering the camera takes separate reflected light readings from each of the zones in the matrix. The camera then selects an exposure setting that is best for the majority of the frame zones sampled. Matrix metering, also known as multi-segment metering or multi-pattern metering, is the best metering mode to use most of the time because it assures you the best overall exposures under most conditions.

Centre-Weighted Average Metering
Centre-weighted average metering gives special emphasis to the centre of the frame, but also covers the surrounding area. Some photographers prefer this metering mode because it’s simpler and more predictable than multi-segment metering, which uses complex algorithms to sort through the data from all the different points of measurement.

Centre-weighted metering is a good mode to select when you want to capture a brightly lit subject and be sure it’s exposed correctly compared with the surrounding areas. This is an excellent compositional technique because people’s eyes are always drawn to the brightest part of a photograph.

Unlike multi-segment / matrix metering, which interprets virtually the entire picture area, centre-weighted metering does not attempt to identify and correct situations like backlighting. This means you have to be a bit more careful when using this type of metering. However, many experienced photographers prefer this mode because they can apply their own exposure compensation (+ and –) and know that the camera hasn’t automatically tried to do likewise.


Spot Metering
Spot metering measures only a small area in the centre of the frame. Typically, this area is a spot that’s only about two or three percent of the entire area of the picture (hence the term “spot” metering). When you have a select area of a picture that you want to precisely meter, and don’t want other areas of the scene to affect your exposure. However, it can be a challenging metering mode to use because you really have to pay attention to exactly what it is measuring and interpret the brightness of the spot yourself. The size of the spot varies from camera to camera, with high-end cameras usually having a smaller spot than entry-level cameras.

Partial metering
Not all cameras have spot-metering mode. For those that don’t, they’ll typically offer a partial-metering mode instead. Partial Metering covers an area exclusively at the centre of the scene, taking up about 10 percent of the total picture area—not quite as small as that of a spot meter. Here, too, if the surrounding area is darker or lighter than the main subject, this mode is a good choice. It will usually give you the correct exposure for your subject, as long as your subject isn’t very light or very dark.


Now that you know what your camera does when metering a subject, May use the light to good use and come back with perfectly exposed photographs.

Until then – Happy Clicking Mavericks!!!

Hari Kumar Balasundaram
[Content sourced from various blogs]


Pools Special -1

Published by makka under on 3:38 PM
Taken By ravi Gosh.




By ,
Bhagath makka

October Assignment Results

Published by makka under on 3:07 PM
Hi All,

Here Goes October Assignment selections:Festival of lights


First place:

From camera Kirukan
Diwali clicks ...

Second place :(from jyashree)




Nice going,

Thanks.
Bhagath makka
http://www.flickr.com/bhagathk

Kids Lighting Howto

Published by makka under on 10:47 PM
Hi all,

Recently lot of friends asked about a kids Photo shooted 2 weekes back.
so a minimal howto tutorial for that pic.

Actually speaking the photo about 50% camera 30%expression and 20% PS . ;-)

1.Lighting Setup


Some points in lighting:
*It 's Night ,So less distracted BG
*It's a outdoor shot ,shot from a doorway
*SB600 ,remote triggered.and made angle that the flash bounces on the sun shade and lit the kids.
* I used D300 in ,A priority F1.8 and sport metering

2.Original output:

*So i got this shot with perfecr expression of that day
*From here ,i got 2 way ,once is to enhance the vibrancy ot go for black and white


3.Final Processing:
*Colour (added soft-focus and vibrancy)



*Black & White(this is a next shot of above photo ,I preferred closed eyes for B&W)
தோழிகள்

And finally i shared this in flickr ;-),More photo properties available in above pic's EXIF data.

comments and doubts are welcome.

Thanks,
Bhagath makka
http://www.flickr.com/bhagathk