First, VTC has been around a while. They offered training cd’s over a decade ago, when the concept was still new. So VTC definitely has a solid background in application training. But the second reason is what caught me: The email was from Mark Vernon,  the founder of VTC.

vtc.com is an online learning library similar to lynda.com, but with 80,000 tutorial videos. We started in 1994, delivering online in 1997, so we’ve been around a bit longer than most.
Check out the library using a 7 day free pass, using promo code “twitter”, at vtc.com/promo
cheers

Mark Vernon

The Virtual Training Company

So please, feel free to sign up and give it a whirl. Read on for a short review of the material as well as my overall opinion.

I actually received this email about two weeks ago.I didn’t publish it then because I wanted to try out some of the videos myself, gather an opinion, and put that into the post for anyone interested. First the bad.

The site design for VTC.com is a bit aged. It’s definitely not as colorful or friendly as Lynda.com. Even the videos tend to feel a little more old school in their presentation and feel. The videos themselves are current (training is available for the Adobe CS4 applications, for example), they just look like they were put together by older technology.

The navigation is a little spartan as well. Lynda offers navigation with multiple drop down menus, allowing me to choose by subject, vendor, application, or even author. VTC offers navigation by subject, and then takes me to a page offering a list of applications. There is a search tool however, so typing in Photoshop will take you to all Photoshop related lessons.

So why would VTC.com use an older platform to showcase their videos?

My guess is that it’s to maintain compatibility with their own LMS (Learning Management System), which allows them to offer their training as a system for corporate clients. This is good and bad. It’s bad because there are obvious limitations to the technology behind the LMS. To maintain compatibility, they can’t go too cutting edge.

But the benefits are numerous. VTC offers courses in English, French, and Spanish, and subtitle captions for several videos. If you’re hearing impaired, speak Spanish or French, or simply like to read along with your videos, then VTC.com is for you. Lynda.com will only give you videos in English, with no captions. It’s good to have choices. I’m actually considering taking some of the Photoshop courses in Spanish (which I speak and read, but only at a basic level) in order to learn the lingo for creative applications in a different language.

They have nearly 80,000 videos, covering a gamut of applications that I never even knew existed. How bout networking and security? How bout learning a new programming language? VTC.com goes beyond the standard creative applications that Lynda.com does (though Lynda.com offers courses on certain niches like Ebay, and WordPress).

They offer Quicktime and Flash, as well as having a High and Low bandwidth option. This can be nice when you’re on the road using a wireless card rather than a dedicated home network. It also helps when you want to view something quickly rather than wait for the higher quality download.

Content wise, the training is solid. Personally, I don’t recognize many of the names of the trainers for either VTC or Lynda, but I’m not necessarily in the e-learning industry, so I don’t know the bigger names as far as online training is concerned. In fact, the one name I recognized instantly on Lynda, Deke McClelland, I recognized from Total Training videos I had viewed.

VTC seems to have hired people from around the world, as is evident by some of the accents. I kinda dig that, but it can also cause me to break concentration when I decide I’m quite happily trying to do an impersonation of the various accents.

On another note, I did recognize the Photoshop instructor, Dwayne Ferguson. Kind of a weird character, but as it turns out, he was the guy behind Mutant League Football. The earth cracks in half during a normal game, radioactive stuff turns players into all sorts of mutants, but wanting to keep earning that paycheck, they play on in a new mutant league. Anyone who knows me knows that mutants playing sports and ripping each others appendages off sounds like something I’d want to watch even now as an adult. Where were we? Oh yes.

VTC offers payment options for one, three, and six months, as well as a yearly. The cost is the same for each of the plans except the yearly, averaging 30 dollars a month. The yearly is priced at 250 dollars. This is about the same as Lynda.com, which offers a monthly of 25 dollars, or a yearly of 250.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to compare VTC to Lynda. They both try to achieve similar goals, but in very different manners. If we were going by style alone, Lynda.com would win. But that’s just window dressing. Content being the main selling point, VTC offers a lot more options and features that Lynda doesn’t match. But if you don’t need to take a course on Sharepoint, then some of the subjects that VTC offers training in may not mean much to you.

My advice is that you take the seven day trial to see if their offering suits you. The promo code will run through the end of April.

Everyone has different ways of dealing with this. For some it’s a matter of exposing properly, and then bringing up the shadows in post process, either with something like the Fill Light tool in ACR, or Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop. Using these tools have their problems, as bringing up shadows also brings up image noise. It can also look unnatural if used improperly.

Another method is to expose for the face of the subject, letting the chips fall where they may on the rest of the exposure. Caveats here include nuclearizing your subject’s white uniform, or radiating the entire field if it’s a bright color. Fun fun.

Over the weekend I was shooting the Arizona USSSA Independence Day Classic, a fastpitch softball tournament held over in Pinetop, AZ. With start times of noon, though, getting the entire range of an image captured was difficult. Read on to find out what I did to combat this, from steps I took in the camera, to an action I made in Photoshop that helped with post process. Oh and it’s a downloadable action. =)

Depending on what camera you use, you’ll have a variety of options available to you in order to squeeze the most dynamic range out of your camera. The first and most obvious thing you can do is to shoot RAW. Lots of advantages here, mainly the ability to adjust white balance in post, and having between 12-14 bits of image data to work with. But shooting RAW also means a huge file increase. While most 10mp jpegs are 3-4mb, RAW files can easily be 10-12mb. This increase adds up quickly. I typically shoot 500 or more images per game for youth sports, and that would be 2gb in jpegs, but 6gb in RAW files. Multiply that by the 20 or so games covered over the weekend, and we now are looking at 120gb of storage. While this isn’t a big deal to some, for others, that added overhead can be an encumbrance.

So, what if you just shoot Jpeg, what then? For one, I would reccomend shooting Adobe RGB, but only if you understand now that you must convert to sRGB later, and know what that entails. Viewing an Adobe RGB image on a web browser is a hit or miss proposition and you may get color errors and overall flat color. But using Adobe RGB gives you a wider color gamut. That means that colors that might fall out of the range of what sRGB can “see” may still fall into Adobe RGB. By keeping that information, you can later edit that image with more accuracy. BTW, if you shoot RAW, colorspace isn’t important, as you can do this after the fact.

Newer cameras offer in camera adjustments to help with dynamic range. Nikon offers D-Lighting, which is an adjustable setting that fills in shadows in camera for every image. Not only can you do that as part of the image setting, but you can also edit images after you’ve taken them, and add D-Lighting to them. Nifty.

Canon offers Highlight Tone Priority. It basically shoots an image at a lower ISO than stated, but renders out the image processed properly, keeping the highlights from blowing out. By doing so, you can shoot a little brighter than usual, without blowing out highlights as easily.

Cameras offer different color looks, such as neutral, vivid, portrait, landscape, etc. These images adjust colors and tonality. Since this is all a formula for adjusting certain colors, the adjustment may end up hurting your image. Go with a setting like Neutral, that offers little to no adjustment.

Now you’ve got a pretty basic baseline image to edit, but how to process them?

It may sound crazy, but using noise reduction on your image can be really beneficial, even on low ISO images. This is because, as you edit your image, you will be bringing up your shadows, and doing brightness adjustments, and those effects will be most prevalent in your shadows, which also contains the noise in any image. Here’s a common trick: First change your image to 16-bit mode in photoshop, then use noise reduction. Because you’re working with a larger bit space, any formulas (such as noise reduction) applied to the pixels (which are just number values for colors) will have a larger range of numbers to fall on (after they’re adjusted). Remember, you need that lattitude as you make all your adjustments.

As I stated before, you could use the Shadow/Highlight tool to adjust your images, and it’s pretty effective, but it has it’s issues. For one, it’s not an adjustment layer, so once you save the image, you can’t really undo it. Sure, you can duplicate your layer, but if you don’t like the effect it has on certain parts of the image, you’ll have to use a mask to edit that out.

So, in playing around with a few images, I tried to find a simpler, more automated way to do all this. As I’ve stated before, I’m a huge fan of actions, and have a few articles on the topic. Anytime I can automate a process, I save time, and ultimately that means I can either get my work done faster, or get more work done in the same time. Either way, it’s a win win. In this case, I took 11 steps, and turned it into one shortcut (F4)

You may notice that it says crop, 16 bit, and Noise Ninja in the history pallete. These are not part of my action, as cropping and your noise reduction of choice are all personal preferences. As for 16 bit, just make sure you try that before whatever noise reduction you choose. There are plenty of choices for noise reduction. A few popular ones include Noiseware, Neat Image, Noise Ninja, and others. Some offer free trials, or even free editions that have feature limitations (the killer here is that most of the free versions often limit themselves to 8-bit images only).

On the left here, you’ll see the result of the action. It will maintain your original image as is, but create a separate shadow layer with its own adjustment layer, as well as an adjustment layer for the original, and a hue/saturation adjustment for the entire composition. Since it’s all adjustment layers, you can double click on them and change the settings. If you hide all the layers, you can see the original as is. One thing I noticed after all the adjustments and layers was a bump in saturation. I added a simple hue/saturation adjustment in order to tone it down. You can adjust this to taste as well.

Instructions are simple. Download the action, and install. Hit F4 to invoke the action. Preferably do this on images that are shot in daylight, and try to do this on images that are 16 bit.

If you need further assistance with the action, please feel free to email me (the link is on the sidebar on the right).

The action can be downloaded by clicking on the link below. The name is addon, because it’s only a single action, and I intend to add it onto my PShizzy Action Set 2:

PShizzy Addon

Oh, and I have a small gallery of images from the tournament. All in all, it was a great time. One last tip: If clouds do show up (which they almost never do in Arizona), shoot as much as possible! Cloud cover is like a big softbox for the sun. Use it to your advantage.

The gallery may be seen at:

Independence Day Classic

As the lead slowly dissapeared, Taurasi and the rest of the team looked frustrated. When they fought back to get the win, I expected the players to have some sort of outburst, and after a shot and a foul, I captured the image shown.

More on the game, and the full gallery, in the post.For the Mystics, Alana Beard really did her best to keep the Mystics in the game until a late surge by the Mercury led to the Mystics loss. While I waited for Taurasi or Pondexter to let off some steam, I followed Beard to see if she would do the same after letting the Mercury build the lead late in the game.

Each possession being crucial in the fourth quarter, I captured this image. Trying to urge a referee for a call in their favor, time running out (as shown by the clock in the background), Beard could only hope the ref would listen to her plea.

To me, these moments were more important than any image of a jump shot, or a defense collapsing on a post player. It’s important to anticipate these moments, as I mentioned in previous posts.

The full gallery can be seen here:

Washington Mystics at Phoenix Mercury

I think I did a fine job with the idea of the image: An expectant bride, recently married, is waiting for her husband. The empty chair sells me on that vibe.

But look at the white balance. It’s this sickly yellow that envelops the entire image in its tint, and to me, it’s especially noticable on the dress, and on the brides skintones.

In this post, we’ll look at different ways to get a good white balance.The first thing you can do to make sure your white balance is dead on? Shoot RAW. Shooting RAW means that white balance can be adjusted in post process without loss in image quality. Even if you get the balance wrong in camera, you can fix it in post process without loss of quality.

I shoot RAW for all weddings so I can adjust the image to get the best color balance. In this case, Adobe Camera RAW actually did a pretty good job of selecting a white balance:

I think that looks a lot better. The dress has no yellow film over it, the skin tones look pretty good, and in general I’m much happier with this image. Could it be better? Yes, but not by a lot.

But that’s why you shoot RAW. If this still doesn’t make me happy, if it’s still a touch off,I can adjust it again. And again, and again, to hearts content, until it’s perfect.

Eventually, this is the image I came up with. I adjusted the Adobe Camera Raw selection, adding a little bit more blue to offset the yellow, and bumping up the magenta to work with the skin tones a little more. I also added a little something to it to get the contrast to be punchier.

I’m glad I shot this image RAW, but I don’t shoot raw for every event. For weddings, I think proper color balance is critical, and I have no problems shooting RAW and managing the files and space that entails.

But I also shoot sports. A lot of sports. If I shot sports in RAW, I’d have piles of hard drives all over the place. Actually, I kinda do, so I can’t begin to imagine if I shot RAW all the time. So I shoot jpeg. Shooting jpeg means that the camera handles all the processing of the image. You get a file that can look good, but you need it to look good coming out of the camera, because there isn’t nearly as much latitude as there is with RAW. In fact, if you really screw up the white balance, you will probably lose a lot of image quality trying to get it to look normal.

In the camera, you have four different options for white balance: Auto, Presets, Kelvin or Custom. Auto means you let the camera figure out what the lighting is and adjust automatically. It does a good job, but it can be fooled. Just look at the first image in the post. That was auto.

Presets are generic settings for color balance. Tungsten, Flash, Daylight, Shade, Fluorescent, are all common lighting situations, but not every situation is that clear cut. What if you’re in a room with a lamp on, and a window that has daylight coming in. There’s no tungsten/daylight hybrid preset.

Kelvin is where you dial in the color temperature for the current lighting. For a lot of us, this isn’t easy. Rule of thumb: If you don’t understand where the term Kelvin comes from, just skip this.

Finally, there’s custom. Custom requires a little bit of work on your end to determine the lighting. You also need a gray card, a neutral card with no color bias. When you take a picture of it, the camera can easily look at the color from the lighting that spills onto the card. It then figures out the proper white balance to neutralize the color bias of the lighting. This is the most exact method of getting white balance, because it takes your specific lighting situation into account.

For the most part, when shooting jpeg, do your best to get an accurate white balance. If you don’t already have a gray card, get one. Start using it. If you’re in a difficult situation, where you can’t get a white balance reading off a gray card, the other options can work in a pinch. Kelvin could work, if you understand the color temperature of different light sources (like tungsten is about 2900, daylight is 5500, shade is 7000 or so).

You can also try the presets. If your lighting is obviously all tungsten lighting, then why not give that preset a shot? Out on a nice sunny day, why not go with Daylight?

And if all else fails, if nothing works, then by all means, try auto. It’s there for a reason. But you shouldn’t rely on it as your goto white balance. Just look at the first image in the post. Auto White Balance is not perfect, but armed with a better understanding of the white balance settings in your camera, and knowing that RAW can allow for that latitude, you at least now have options with which to get a better image with truer color.

Last weekend I spoke about the key elements to covering an event. This time around, I’ll cover the bases on the technical side of an image.

What makes for a good clean image? What keeps the images looking consistent in their color, white balance, and exposure, not just from one image to another within one event, but from event to event (as an example, compare last weekends gallery to the one for last night’s game).

In this post, I’ll do an overview on things you can do to keep a consistent look and quality to your images.

First things first: Get the proper exposure. Everyone is going to have a different opinion on this. Aperture priority mode, Program mode, Manual mode, everyone has a different way of achieving the same goal. Whatever you do, make sure that your exposure is good. If you consistently have to take images into Photoshop and adjust the exposure, than you should consider looking into different modes and techniques for proper exposure.

White balance is also key. By getting the right white balance, your colors will look more true to life. Cameras have come a long way, but even the best auto white balance can be fooled under tricky lighting situations. Your best bet is to learn how to lock down that white balance. Most cameras offer preset white balances like tungsten (the light bulb), fluorescent (the blinking bar), daylight (sun). Some cameras will also allow for a custom white balance. You can set a custom white balance by shooting a gray card (this is a card that is measured for color accuracy to be neutral). This will measure the hue of the light, and neutralize it.

Most cameras come with color modes. Things like Vivid, Portrait, and Standard, try to punch up different hues in order to produce a great image. I like to avoid these, because in lower light situations, the images tend to have a lot of image noise, and those color modes will accentuate this noise. Rather, I like to shoot in a neutral or no adjustment mode. From there, I have a set recipe that I use in Photoshop to color my images. A lot of people like to experiment with different adjustments, using levels, curves, brightness/contrast, etc, to punch up their colors, but I find those to be too time subjective. By finding the right recipe, I can apply it to any of my images automatically, with an action, and not manually adjusting each image.

All the images I’ve posted from the last galleries for the WNBA games were processed with a simple Photoshop action. I do not manually adjust anything to taste, except for cropping the image. From there, my action automatically uses noise reduction, then applies my color recipe, and then resizes the image. If I didn’t have a consistent exposure, white balance, and color mode in the camera, the process would take each image all over the map as far as their “look”.

Keep your work consistent, and you will see that no matter what your post process is, it will be a lot less time consuming, and the results will look that much better.

Please feel free to comment with your opinions and ideas on how to get a consistent “look”

The link to last nights game can be found here:

Seattle Storm at Phoenix Mercury

To me a gallery is a vehicle for your images. If the images are good, and the pages are easily navigable, you don’t need to bling it out to make it work. So in this video, we create a web gallery in a matter of minutes. It’s so easy, even I was surprised at how quickly I finished the video. Click through to check it out!

If you go through the video, you’ll see that I don’t go through each and every feature (though I do touch on most of them). That’s intentional. Rather than inundate you with too much information, I give you the basic info you need to create your web gallery. How far you take it after that is up to you. That’s how you learn. If you wanted an overview of each and every feature, you’d get a book =)

As always, I appreciate your comments and thoughts on the video. I need your help to really guide the direction and scope of this blog. I could make it more advanced, or more in depth, with longer videos and accompanying files or information to make for a very robust instruction, or I can keep it simple enough to follow along and quickly get going. The choice is up to you. I went with simple because it’s easier for me to turn around a video in a few hours, and I can focus on a topic with each presentation.

Without further ado:

Adobe Photoshop Web Gallery

I’ve received quite a few comments on my black and white conversion, and I finally decided it would be best to post my own personal workflow on the process. My method by no means tries to be scientific nor accurate, only pleasing to my own eyes. I did not invent anything here, I picked up some info from various books and over time, found the following method to give me the most pleasing results. Hopefully you will find some use in the following.

First, we need a test file, so please download the following raw file (Note: this is a 1D tif file, and I renamed it to all lowercase, so if Photoshop tries to open as TIF, rename it to .crw or something). I’m also including a link to my PShizzy 2 Action Set, since I won’t go into exact detail how it converts to B/W

Ortega (1D RAW file, please use save link as)
PShizzy Action Set 2

Open up ortega.tif in ACR, and use the follow settings (which you might want to save for future reference, I call it “flat”): 0 everything out, from exposure to saturation, and make sure in the next tab, that sharpness and color noise is also set to 0. White balance is on a per picture basis, but for this example, please use ACR’s Tungsten setting, which is temp 2850, tint 0. Go ahead and and hit ok to get the file into Photoshop. If you haven’t loaded a 1D raw file before, please make sure that you have your file set to 16 bit and Adobe RGB

Looks pretty flat huh. That’s on purpose. Good B/W photography is about tonality, which is the range from black to white. Good tonality often means overcontrasted images, because it tends to seperate the subject from the background, and adds a heavy feel to the image. This in turn lends itself best to certain dramatic subjects and events. This is why boxing photography, photojournalistic features, and film noir tend to use b/w. This lets us focus on things other than color. Form and contrast end up becoming more important. If we process the image into B/W by using ACR, or by using an in camera B/W converter (such as in the 20D), then we lose control over our image. The computer, who has no idea of what is and isn’t important, does all the work. It cannot bias its conversion (as we will do) to favor the subject. We can manipulate the work that our camera gives us after it has already converted, but we are then working with an incomplete deck, as we are only receiving a fraction of the photographic information taken in by our camera.

Anyhow, the file looks flat. At this point, I usually use noise reduction softwate to take away some of the color noise. The bad news is that these plugins cost money. The good news is that black and white conversion doesn’t really need this. The grain in the noise tends to look “interesting” and “gritty” so it’s not necessarily bad. So let’s move on.

So far, we’ve open the image in ACR, processed it flatly, and noise reduced. Feel free to crop a little (I did, just on the top and right). From there, the next step is pretty easy: Use the PAS2 B/W converter to get your image into grayscale. Explanations on that are in the PAS2 thread, complete with instructions for it.

But PAS2 is half the battle. Really all it does is use the LAB mode to extract the luminosity. I won’t say this is the best way to convert to B/W for accuracy, but I will say it’s better than desaturating. Try desaturating a solid green blue or red, and you’ll see it gets taken to 128 across the board, which means that fire engine red or nuclear chroma green somehow becomes neutral gray. . . seriously, that makes no sense. With LAB, it tends to max out at about 220 across the board, which makes sense… as those colors, no matter how nuclear, would never be true white, but they should definitely never be neutral gray. Those of you who swear by using color mixer, I’m not saying you’re wrong. Color mixer is a great way to convert, but it is a biased conversion, where LAB is based only on lightness. Also, I just couldn’t make an action for color mixer, since a good conversion requires user input. So there.

PAS2 leaves you with 2 layers, the background (original) color layer, and a new b/w layer over it. Go ahead and delete that color layer if you like. I sometimes mess with it and use it to create old print looks (muting it and overlaying it over the b/w), but for this, it can go.

Curves: Learn it, live it, love it. Levels is nice, but it’s very underpowered. You can only control the ends, and pinch your contrast, then bias your midtone. Curves lets you set multiple points in order to determine the distribution of the values. This means you could use your midtones as your highlights, or your shadows as midtones (seriously). Now, this doesn’t mean you can under or overexpose your shots and miraculously save it with curves. It just won’t work. Curves doesn’t make a picture, it makes a picture better.

My method uses between 2 and 4 points (sometimes more, but rarely). It’s best to do it in a certain order, because figuring out your first point usually makes the second and subsequent points easier to determine. First, we start by opening curves, and we’ll notice the line thru the box. This just shows the basic representation between input and output. Say we take a value of 128 input and set it to 192 output. This basically takes our midtone (128) and sets it to 3/4 tone, more of a highlight. Everything between 0 and 128 now is redistributed to go between 0 and 192, and everything from 128 to 255 gets pushed to go between 192 and 255. Don’t worry about posterization too much if you shot raw. 12 bit data means you have 4096 levels of red green and blue within the image, despite only showing you a range of 255. Think of those extra values as fractions that get rounded later. They definitely come in handy. Oh, ya, another thing… shoot raw when you can for B/W. It’s just better.

BTW: Do not hit OK after each point is set. You need to set all the points in one curves to work this right.

First Point: Go ahead and open up curves and move it out of the way of your image, so you can see it well, because curves lets you live preview what you’re doing, and this is necessary to feel your way to the right tonality. go ahead and click a point in the midtone area, then drag it up. You may get some nuclearness going, but this is just fine. In fact, it’s reccomended. Often, people get scared to go over the edge. This is true for curves, for sharpness, for a lot of things. Just do it. Heres what I chose, btw: input 128, output 220. I got this by grabbing my midtone (128), and pushing it up until our fighter Ortega looks pretty bright. Remember, this is about him, not anything else, so if we blow out the ring ropes, or black out the background, who cares. HE IS THE FOCUS. Heres a pic of the curves dialog box and my image, so you can follow along visually.

Notice the top right of the curves, it just flatlines at the top. That means all those flatlined values will become 255, which you can see leads to blowouts.(such as Ortega’s chest and speculars on the face). This is called crushing your white. When you flatline at the bottom, that’s called crushing your black. This is usually bad. This will get fixed. We just needed to set that first point, and we’ll uncrush later. But for now, we got our highlight area figured out.

Second point: Let’s get our shadows. Make a new point around the first quarter area (use the lines to guide you… first line is first quarter, second line is mid, third is third quarter, end is fourth) and drag it down til you get some good contrast on our pal Ortega. I got something like input 64, output 34, which now makes the image look like this: Looks pretty good to me. Now let’s uncrush.

Third point: This one, and other points past the second are sometimes optional. Sometimes, the first two points lead to no flatlines. In those cases, don’t bother with this, as it’s pointless. But most times, especially in B/W, you will need to uncrush. First lets uncrush our highlights, as they’re much more noticable. Make a new point somewhere between the first point (our highlight point), and the end. Drag it down til you have no more flatlines, but be careful to not pull down too much. If it is not possible, you may need 2 points in here. Usually 1 point is enough. A note of caution: Never set a point to create a dip in the highlights or a bump in the shadows. This is like value switching and creates funky effects. Just make sure that as you go to the right, your curve always goes up, and as you go left, your curve always goes down. You can make it almost straight, but never have a curve go away from the grain, this is bad. Anyhow, make the third point, and have it kill your flatline. I used input 166 output 247, which looks like:

Fourth point: Same concept as third point, but for shadows. Grab a point between the leftmost line (the beggining) and your shadow point. Pull it up to curve the lower flatline. I used input 38, output 7, which looks like:

And there you have it. Obviously, this is to taste, so you could go ahead and edit your first point to lower the contrast, or raise it even more. You can do the same for the shadows. And uncrush points work off those, so those can be moved around too. It’s all in the eye. After I finished that curves, I went ahead and used the PAS2 Web Long action to get the final product, as seen below.

I hope this helped, as I know B/W conversion can be a bit of a mystery, so I hope this post clears some of the mystery up

Leave a comment, and if you see someone’s comment and agree, then say so. If I see 10 comments on the same subject, I’ll know that’s a great idea. But just in case you’re not sure what to consider, I’ve created a list of ideas I already have in mind.

So here’s what I’ve got in mind for the future

• Obviously, I plan to do more on Actions
• Noise Ninja, something I promised to write about on FM, will be a post/video here
• Green Screens. They tend to be tough, what with spill, and getting a good key to pull the green off an image.
• Lightroom. Not everyone uses Photoshop, so something on Lightroom might make sense.
• For that matter, what programs would you like to see in use? There’s so many out there.
• Anyone remember the video of me packing a Minitrekker into the photo equivalant of a turducken? Ya, well I’ve got a Computrekker, and an Airport Security too. So, uh, who wants to see me pack that?
• I’m considering an article on data storage/backup. From how to make backups in realtime, to maintaining proper offsite storage, etc.
• Aside from lenses and cameras, what else do I take with me to shoots?
• Someone mentioned this. Honestly, I’m not sure it would be that interesting, but if enough people are interested, I would do it: Day in the life, like a video of me and what I normally do on a shoot day.
• Someone also mentioned this: What the different modes on a camera are, from manual to aperture to shutter priority. Oh and I am a Canon and Nikon friendly person, so it would be geared to both those cameras. Kinda like how I have a PC laptop, but own a Mac Pro. The duality of man, the Jungian thing. (btw, that’s a Full Metal Jacket reference).
• Anyone notice I put a student tag on some articles? Well not every student can afford photoshop, so I’m considering articles on alternative apps for students on a budget. You’d be surprised what you could pull off without Photoshop.

That’s stuff of the top of my head. But there’s so much more I’m sure I haven’t even touched on. So you tell me, what would you like to see on PShizzy.com?