If you want to buy the cheaper frames, and don’t want to do your own matte cutting, what are you to do. Today out tip is how to simulate the matted look right in Photoshop.

A few notes on the video. You can take this much farther, maybe we’ll look at some of those options in a future video. Try adding a texture to your blank white layer. Maybe a watercolor paper look or even velvet. Play with the sliders in the inner glow panel to get thicker or thinner looking matte layers.

Lightroom is an amazing tool. From time to time I may post about it or other software. Today I’ll just post one thought, one thing I’d personally like to see.

Adjustments
This is a quick post, but there is one thing I would love to see in Lightroom. It’s something we can sort of do already in photoshop so I think they could figure it out. Smart Plugins, In Photoshop if I place a raw file I get a smart object. I can apply filters and things to that and at anytime go in and change the original raw conversion settings. I want the same thing in Lightroom. If I add say a topaz filter in Lightroom, I don’t want to make a non raw version and then adjust it. I want it to add something to the edit stack right under the default Lightroom controls. So just save what the filter did to the image rather than baking it in right then. If I need to change exposure a touch or white balance later I still can and I can keep my plug-in edits. I realize it would have to do the processing again for the filters every time I made an adjustment, but it would be well worth it. So smart filters in Lightroom. Imagine how nice that would be.

Update for any Apple computer users out there. Aperture 3 is out today. It looks pretty cool. Here’s my take.

Video:
It does video, and it looks like it does video very well. Finally you can work both stills and video in one great app.

Adjustment Brushes:
The new brushes feature looks wonderful. I’m excited to give it a try. This was the main reason I started using Lightroom about a year ago. I needed (Wanted) non destructive localized adjustments, now we have it in aperture and it looks great!

Book Plugins:
If you are a wedding shooter, you now have a very wonderful way to layout your books from companies like Leather Craftsman, or GraphiStudio and others. This will be huge for anyone who makes these high end books for their customers.

Slideshows:
The new slideshows look really good. Easily add video and stills, titles and motion. Plus you have multitrack audio. This could make for some amazing slideshows.

Adjustment Presets:
These will be very useful, in the last version you had to find an image you used some settings on and copy and paste them to your new file.

naturally there is much more. These are some of the features that caught my eye. Will I switch back to Aperture? I can’t say at this point. I have always preferred aperture to lightroom for portraits, it’s retouching tools have always been far superior to lightroom. But I am pretty entrenched in lightroom now, and I’m wondering what lightroom 3 will have in the final release. But even if it’s just for the great slideshow and book layouts I’d say it’s worth it to have.

Have you been itching for some fixes to lightroom? LR3 beta is out! I’m dumping a ton of images into it to see how it handles around 50000 images. I’ll update you on what I find after having a chance to use it for a little bit. Most of the new features look promising. I’ll still be doing my main work in LR2 while I test out LR3. Stay tuned. Here is the link to download.

Be heading out tomorrow for Photoshop world in Vegas. I’m planning on posting from my phone while I’m there. So stay tuned.

Tags: photoshopworld

Lucis Art is above and Topaz Adjust 3 was used for the image below.

Here is this image again with a couple filters ran on it for pop. What do you think of these?
rPix

Snow Leopard was the easiest os install I’ve ever done. I just chose to upgrade the system and it did it’s thing. I did check the install Rosetta under the customize so i could still use my Epson printer drivers. I did have to reinstall my printer drivers for my big epson printers. I thought to update all my software while I was at it. The new Nikon NX2 update 2.2.2 broke so I had to uninstall it and go back to 2.2.0. It works fine now. I have found three things I need an update for. Blogo does not work at all, I’m posting this from muly phone. I have a Riso HC5500 at work that won’t show up. It’s using AppleTalk to communicate so that was a given since AppleTalk is completely gone now.
The entire system is snappier and overall seems to run even better than it did under Leopard. Here is a list of some of the apps I’ve used so far that are working.
Adobe Photoshop CS3
Adobe CS4
Rapidweaver installed update
All the i apps
Aperture
Lightroom
Runtime Revolution
Chicken of the vnc
Filemaker Pro 10 Advanced
Microsoft Office
Snapz Pro
Screenflow Pro

Printers
Epson 4800
Epson 3800
Epson 9900

I got the Epson 9600 to show up but I haven’t tried to print to it yet.
As you can see most of the apps I’ve tested and use everyday are working fine. I won’t be upgrading my desktop at the office until I get the riso printer driver fixed for that machine.
I’m very happy with this upgrade. Apple came through again. They do a good job.
rPix

Tags: Mac Computers