DV for Teachers

I used to use iMovie much more often; now I do almost all my video editing in Final Cut Pro. Many in the college either use our small Mac lab for video and DVD creation or have their own Macs now. The new iLife, which incorporates iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and more, has achieved hit a sweet spot in power and usability. It’s still not a piece of cake for those used to Windows, but it’s stable, flexible, and really easy. Read through this exhaustive review from uber-tech site Ars Technica for a solid learning experience whether you’re a Mac rookie or experienced user.

Ars Reviews iLife ‘09: making the cut with iMovie and iPhoto – Ars Technica.

There are alternatives to some of the paid apps they link to in this nice list of quick tips. Regrettably I don’t have time at the moment to link to them.Those aside, this is a good list for the Mac newbie, from TechRadar UK: 69 really useful OS X timesavers | News | TechRadar UK.

50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials | Tutorials | Smashing Magazine

Because you can never know enough about Photoshop.

Macworld posted this video showing of some of the nice new things Finder can do with images and in dialog boxes while opening or saving files. Worth watching.

Chris Pirillo runs LockerGnome, a huge, busy site full of pointers, tips, news, opinion, geektalk, and more. At his own site, last week he posted Top 100 Mac Apps.

I hadn’t heard of a few of these. Most are shareware, some are free. There are several similar apps too, so there’s some overlap. One that I hadn’t seen before includes HyperDither, which makes nice high-contrast 1-bit (black and white) images from your photos. It’s fun.

If that headline isn’t geekspeak, I don’t know what is.

Got a Jpeg or other digital file you’d like to make into vector art? Try the VectorMagic site, hosted by Stanford University. The above image, from their website, shows the difference between vector and bitmap. I tried it with a photo of Ellen and got an interesting, drawing-like effect. There’s nothing to download but the finished pic, and it all happens on the server, so it doesn’t tie up your computer. Try it out.

Derrick Story details the overhauled Adjust Palette in the new iPhoto..

...I’m particularly enthused about the overhaul of the Adjust palette with the inclusion of Highlight and Shadow sliders. These are professional-level tools that can really help you improve your pictures.

I think the improved Adjust palette is a truly a highlight for iPhoto ‘08. Photographers now have the most vital image editing controls right there in their digital shoebox, eliminating the need to roundtrip to outside applications for the bulk of their editing work.

Pro photo editors make very frequent use of the adjustment capabilities he describes – this makes iPhoto a much more valuable application. Does anyone know of an app with a similar degree of control for free, or nearly so? If so, leave a comment.

Thanks to Ellen, I found Mashable’s post listing 400+ Tools for Photographers, Videobloggers, Podcasters & Musicians under the post title Online Media God. I linked to their 150 Online Video tool Sites a couple of weeks ago, and that 150 is part of the 400+. Go ahead, take all day.

I’m back from vacation. Will got his well-deserved black belt in Taido (pictures here) and we spend most of a week in Destin. And now, we return to our irregularly scheduled blogging with these 18 Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts. I learned many of them at Photoshopworld in April and I’m glad to have this nice reference from Digital Photography School as a reminder.

Did Andre Gunther actually peg the true Top Ten Most Common Photographic Mistakes? Who knows, but it’s a good tag to generate interest. (It worked for me, or you wouldn’t be reading this.)

Andre Gunther’s “mistakes” are really aesthetic recommendations for improving your composition, and they all have to do with how you as a photographer see, and capture, the world around you. It’s a combination of careful consideration, imagination, and determining what to leave in and what to leave out… and not depending too much on Photoshop. Put another way, it’s a distinction between reacting to a stimulus – the near-reflexive whipping of your camera to your eye and snapping – versus a thoughtful response to what you see. To do it well, as with any skill or discipline, to do it well takes practice.