digital toolbox
It's nice to have a man around the house, particularly one who's handy - and lucky for me, Clayton is not only good with power tools, but he's a whiz at all things digital, including Photoshop. He often sends me tips he finds online to help me in my quest to learn that crazy program. Right now, I'm helping a friend with her new CD cover - I'll show you later - and we're doing a little beauty retouching to the photographs taken by Atlanta photographer Greg Ponder.
©Greg Ponder
The above photo is one of his, no retouching needed here, but it's just a sample of the beautiful work that will be showcased on this CD package. Clayton found some great resources for me on beauty retouching - I watched this tutorial over at Layers magazine and learned some great tips to add to my arsenal.
I was also exploring how to make halftone dot patterns from photographs that I could use for screen printing - and I learned some tricks I can re-purpose for my needs in this tutorial
Then Clayton sent me another interesting tidbit. According to CreativeTechs there's a new autotrace tool that even outdoes Adobe Illustrator's built-in Live Trace feature, and it's free! I haven't had the time to check it out for myself, and I've got Live Trace tweaked to my satisfaction, but I'll be interested to give this a whirl at some point.
And back to photography - somewhere out there on the horizon, I see a new lens in my future (for my Nikon D70). We've been debating it for awhile, but are decided on one thing, we want a 50mm. (still deciding on the 1.4 vs. the 1.8) Here's a persuasive article titled "Ditch That Zoom for a Classic 50mm" that got us started on the subject. I'm ready for a little bokeh in my life after looking at the Greg Ponder photo above.
