thewayne | Entries tagged with photoshop

You can do a lot of things with Photoshop that don't include photography, so I put that little disclaimer there.

Once again, Humble Bundle has launched their Luminar Bundle. Lots of good software and add-ins, starting at $1 for their Photolemur entry product and $20 for the whole shebang. The charity for this package is Razom for Ukraine, provides "The current emergency response is focused on purchasing tactical medicine items and supplies for Ukrainian hospitals. supplies for critical situations like blood loss and other tactical medicine items. They have a large team of volunteers that tracks down and purchases supplies, and a logistics team that then gets them to Ukraine. They’re coordinating with several partner organizations worldwide and are also working with governments and embassies on establishing humanitarian corridors."

The money you pay for bundles, and you can pay more than the $20, is split three ways: between the charity, Humble, and the publisher. There's a widget on the right side that will let you divide the percentage split. Myself, I usually divide it into roughly even thirds.

The Bundle is up for twenty days.

One word of warning re: Luminar vs Photoshop. Unless Luminar has been changed to allow this, it is missing one feature that I find is kind of critically lacking. In Photoshop, you can create a new, blank, canvas to work with. For example, if I want to excerpt a graphic screen shot for reference and save it as a JPEG or TIFF, I can create a new file in PHotoshop, and it may recognize that I have a graphic in my paste buffer and size a new empty canvas appropriately, ready for me to paste my graphic into it.

Luminar does not (or did not) have the capability of creating a new blank canvas. It can (or could) only open photo files for editing. Which is absolutely fine for editing photos. It's just a slightly different layer of capability of functionality between the two products, and if this is something that you need to do sometimes, you're not going to find it in Luminar. I just wanted to give you a heads up and save you some frustration.

Luminar, and Photolemur, as amazing programs. But they're not the same as Photoshop. Some aspects are better, some worse, but they are not point to point the same.

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/photo-editing-cyber-bundle-with-luminar-ai-software

I apologize for the crudity.

First, they are "considering" doubling the price of some of their monthly subscriptions from $10 a month to $20. (The Verge) So an annual fee goes from $120 to $240. Ouch. And I believe that's billed as one big chunk, not on a monthly basis.

Now read this, I just found it on Slashdot:
Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers who haven't updated their apps in a while may want to check their inboxes. The software company has sent out emails to customers warning them of being "at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties" if they continue using outdated versions of CC apps, including Photoshop and Lightroom. From a report:

These emails even list the old applications installed on the subscribers' systems, and in some cases, they mention what the newest available versions are. In a response to a customer complaint on Twitter, the AdobeCare account said users can only download the two most recent variants of CC apps going forward.

A spokesperson said in a statement, "Adobe recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications. Customers using those versions have been notified that they are no longer licensed to use them and were provided guidance on how to upgrade to the latest authorized versions." However, the spokesperson said Adobe can't comment on claims of third-party infringement, as it concerns ongoing litigation.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/05/14/1353209/adobe-warns-creative-cloud-users-with-older-apps-of-legal-problems

This is the problem with renting software. When Adobe went to their rental program however many years ago, I bought full versions of their Creative Suite CS6 and still use it. I'm going to have to figure out what I'm going to do in the future as Apple is drifting towards an architecture change that may require me to lock down my OS version or run Photoshop in a virtual machine, but I'll worry about it when it becomes an issue. Plus, I paid a one-time cost of probably about $500 when the change happened, which I could easily afford then as I was employed. Since that job ended, my employment has been spotty, never lasting more than about 2.5 years, and paying annual subscriptions would have been a real PITB.

Oh, and by the way, if there's a problem with processing your payment through your bank: your software is shut off. And as has happened to someone I know, if you download a trial of a product and uninstall it, it can utterly bork your production apps.

This is also a problem with cloud services and anything encumbered with DRM in general. I received an email a couple of months ago from the movie streaming service Ultraviolet that they were ceasing operations and any movies that I'd bought from them would no longer be available. OH NOES! Now, I could care less. As it happens, the only reason why I had an account with them was because I'd taken all of my movies that came with digital copies and gone on a binge and activated all of them, and a few had gone through Ultraviolet. Now, if I'd paid money for them, I'd be deeply pissed, and I'd be out the money and without the movie. But I did not, and I still have the physical copies. When I buy music, I get a physical CD and rip it myself to MP3. So yes, I'm sort of a belt and suspenders kind of guy. I don't trust companies to take something away and not give a damn whether or not I get screwed in the process.

I am ever so glad I bought that Adobe DVD with all that software on it, and Adobe can fall off the edge of a cliff for all I care.

[/rant]

Crossposts: https://thewayne.livejournal.com/1143544.html

This is actually a combination of two photos.

I was shooting at the observatory last year in June, using an interval timer to do some experiments with star streaks. Lots of fun, very tedious compositing the photos! But worth it. What I did not know was that I caught a transit of the International Space Station!

But there was a problem: the dome was facing north. The photo was a great shot of the streak of the ISS, plus the blank back wall of the dome, the butt of the telescope, so to speak.

So yesterday evening I did a little Photoshop work, very little work, actually, and produced this.

I'll explain just how easy it was and show you the original under the cut.

( Read more... )
The question is: is this altered photo still a photograph? I would say no, for the most part, I would call it a photographic illustration. If I were to sell the rights to it, I would make sure that the buyer understood that it was a composite, and I would show them exactly how I did it.

I tried doing it in the other direction by erasing the back-facing dome, which would mean the star field would be true to the time of when the ISS transited, but the sky's exposure around the dome was different as it was 40 minutes later. It just didn't work.

Even though this video isn't from that shoot, it shows what I was trying to accomplish.

Here endeth the lesson.

THIS was the end result of the shooting of that night:

This last photo represents a composite of 298 photos shot from 10:16pm to 12:51am! During that time the telescope observed many different objects, thus accounting for its spinning back and forth like a dervish.

Crossposts: https://thewayne.livejournal.com/1102197.html

I was doing OK on the photography side, my main problem was not assembling the pile of photos correctly in Photoshop. Now I know how! Now I also know that I REALLY need to get an intervalometer! I shot these using an infrared remote release to trip the camera to do 30 second exposures (Canon 6D, full-frame 20ish megapixel, 17-40 zoom at 17mm, f4.5 at 30 seconds, ISO 800), but was inconsistent with firing at precise 30 second intervals and that's what causes the little 'dot breaks' in the streaks. Theoretically I can use my laptop as an intervalometer, so that's something that I'll experiment with tomorrow and I'll (maybe) come back to the observatory tomorrow night and try again.

This is my wife's telescope, the 3.5 meter. The structure to the right is the 'arcade' that connects the operations/administrative building to the telescope.

The telescope on the left is the Sloan 2.5 meter, in front you again see the 3.5 meter, the two smaller domes are the NMSU 1 meter and the ARCSAT 0.5. The rightmost building is the dome/barn for the Sloan 2.5: it's on railroad ties and is moved away from the telescope when the telescope is opened.

Getting Polaris almost centered in that shot was sheerest luck.

Another view of the Sloan 2.5.

Unfortunately for the last set I only got 7 images for 3.5 minutes duration before they had to temporarily shut the telescope down for a cartridge swap. The slight blur was because they were slewing the telescope to point to where I was, prior to pointing the telescope straight up for the cartridge change. But all telescopes are always constantly moving, albeit ever so slowly, so getting a perfectly crisp shot of one probably means that it's not tracking and it's a totally staged shot.

Since this was just a test-run, I wanted to go inside and do the post-processing to see how things worked out.

And I was pleased.

Crossposts: https://thewayne.livejournal.com/1015324.html

Adobe Photoshop contains a buffer overflow vulnerability in its TIFF features that has already been the target of a public proof-of-concept exploit, as well as another unspecified security problem that allows attackers to secretly infect systems simply by getting users to open a specially crafted file.

I just bought, new, full student price, Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5, late last year. Probably 7 or 8 months ago. And now they want me to pay $200 for a bug in the system that everyone else patches for free. There's another wonderful quote from the article: "Adobe only makes the general recommendation that its customers should "follow security best practices and exercise caution when opening files from unknown or untrusted sources" as the holes do represent substantial threats."

"Security best practices" from everyone else is to download and install a patch that is freely available from the vendor. This idiocy from Adobe is going to cost them a lot of customers who are going to stop paying for the product and start pirating it. I am very happy with the feature set of the 5.5 suite and see no need to upgrade to PS 6 at this time, so I think I'm going to risk staying unpatched. I don't normally deal with files from untrusted sources, I'll have to be more vigilant about TIFF files, though. The unspecified vulnerability does concern me, though.

And there is proof of concept code for this exploit in the wild. Now that Adobe says it's not going to help people with software less than a year old, it will massively raise the visibility of this bug on the radar of exploiters and IT WILL be targeted.

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Adobe-puts-a-price-tag-on-security-updates-for-Photoshop-and-others-1571517.html

But it's really not a problem! Adobe, all hail, says that Photoshop is not a target, so there's nothing to worry about!

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Adobe-Photoshop-is-not-a-target-for-attackers-1572717.html

EVERYTHING is a target these days. NO SOFTWARE SHOULD GO UNPATCHED. While I hate the ~~amount~~flood of patches that Microsoft releases, they are very good at patching their products. Apple releases patches at a slower rate, but is also very diligent about patching. Adobe needs to stop seeing this as a revenue stream and recognize that this is a responsibility that, if not fulfilled, is going to cost them customers.

Idiots. I wish I owned some Adobe stock so I could start a shareholder action to whack them upside the head with clue-by-fours.

EDIT: Adobe backs down, will release a patch for PS 5 and 5.5.

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Adobe-backs-down-will-release-patches-for-critical-holes-1574341.html