Raise your hand if you were excited about Snow Leopard coming out last Friday? I admit, I was intrigued, and went ahead and picked up a copy at my local Apple Store. But before I even got to open the package, I started reading reports that people had problems with older applications not being compatible, and even newer applications needing updates and patches just to be compatible. A personal computer having problems isn’t that big a deal. Maybe you’re inconvenienced because you can’t sync the latest songs to your iPhone, or can’t use Tweetdeck or who know’s what else.

But what if this is your work computer? What if your entire business depends on this computer? What if Snow Leopard creates incompatibilities that wouldn’t just inconvenience you, it would prevent you from working? Think I’m kidding? Adobe CS3 application users have already expressed concerns, and you would think CS4 users are safer. Maybe not.

If only there was a way to test out Snow Leopard on your system, without jeopardizing your current setup. Well, there is, and it’s not very complicated. So if you’re an expert level user, I won’t be sharing anything too mind blowing. However, for the novice to intermediate user, this may just make your day. Read on for more.

First things first, here’s what you’ll need:

• The latest updates for all your software. Developers have been scrambling to put together updates and patches for Snow Leopard. At the very least, update the software you use the most. Read any information on the developer’s site to be sure that you updated properly.
• An external hard drive. You could use pretty much anything, so long as it contains enough space to hold all the files on your current Macintosh HD. It could be a flash drive, one of those portable drives that don’t require power, or a full fledged external drive. Try to connect via Firewire 800 if possible, if not 400, and if all else fails, USB will do just fine. Oh and it should be empty. You’re going to have to format it.
• Carbon Copy Cloner is free (donationware) software that allows you to easily make your external drive a copy of your current Macintosh HD. Done right, you can boot from this drive (basically run OS X from the external drive). Which makes it a perfect guinea pig. Please download and install it.
• A copy of Snow Leopard. You can get it at the Apple Store, or buy it online. At 29 dollars, it’s pretty affordable, and if you have multiple Mac’s, 49 dollars gets you a 5 license family pack. There’s also a full version, in case you’re not currently on Leopard. For the purposes of this post, we’re using the upgrade.
• Time. Using CCC to copy everything over took a few hours, which was 100GB of data, via USB, to an external mini hard drive. Basically, the slowest possible drive I had handy. That’s ok. Just take a nap or go to lunch while this runs.
• More time. Ya, installing Snow Leopard took about an hour on my drive. Maybe a little less. Again take a nap (I did. That’s why I said it took about an hour, I’m not really sure).

Ok so let’s begin. In order to format your external drive, go to your Utilities folder (shortcut: Shift Command U). Then select Disk Utility.app. This utility provides basic functions for formatting, erasing, partition, etc, of all your data drives, both internal and external. You can even set up a software RAID.

Using Disk Utility, go to the Partition tab (up top, middle), then select your external drive. It will be listed by its size (in my case 232.9GB) and manufacturer (WD). Note mine already has “BOOTABLE” as the name under it. That’s because I’ve already done this. But in the case of your external, it should match the name of the drive that appears on your desktop when you plug in.

Under Volume Scheme, select 1 partition. type in any name (I like BOOTABLE, it’s very clear that way). Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). And one last bit: select Options, then choose GUID Partition Table. It even explains that you need to select GUID to use the disk to start up an Intel-Based Mac. Hit Ok, and then go ahead and hit Apply. It shouldn’t take too long. Once it’s done, you can go ahead and close out Disk Utility.

Now that you have a freshly formatted external drive that you can boot into, you need to load it with your data. Start up Carbon Copy Cloner. At this point, you need to select your Source Disk (which is the disk you want to copy), and your Target Disk (the disk you wish to copy to). It’s fairly straightforward, but just in case:

For Source Disk, please select Macintosh HD. This is where OS X is installed, complete with all your applications and other files, such as settings, are written to. All your other drives, internal or external will not be affected by the upgrade, so we don’t need to worry about them, but you could unplug them just in case.

Then, for your Target Disk, please select the drive that you just formatted. In my case, it’s titled BOOTABLE. I labeled it as such in order to make it pretty obvious which drive I would be copying to. Be careful in selecting the proper Target Disk, so you don’t accidentally erase any important data. Again, if you wish to be totally safe, you can disconnect all your other drives except for the Macintosh HD and your external bootable drive.

Once you’ve selected your Source and Target Disk, choose the Backup Everything option. You can leave the “delete the items that don’t exist” option unchecked. If everything is fine, you should see the green light below the options, stating that this volume will be bootable. That’s exactly what we need. Select Clone to start the process, and let it run to completion.

With your external drive now a clone of your current Macintosh HD, it’s time to boot into it, so we can proceed with the Snow Leopard install. To do this, reboot your Mac, and hold down Option as it starts up. You should see a screen with various drives. Select your external drive (it’s the orange one), and press Return. For more info, click on the image to go to the Apple Support page about Startup Manager.

Booting into your external drive may take a while longer than your standard startup procedure, again depending on various factors. This isn’t about speed, it’s about safety.

Once you’ve booted up, you are all set to install Snow Leopard. Insert your Snow Leopard disc into your Superdrive, and select Install Mac OS X.app. You’re now on your way to installing Snow Leopard. Just follow the instructions and let it run its course. When asked which drive you’d like to install to, just select your external drive.

Once you’ve finished with the install, you’re ready to test your Snow Leopard install. Just run all your usual apps, and see if any of them pose any problems. For me, I had a few key apps fail. You can try and see if reapplying any patches, or updating will help, but if you did that before installing Snow Leopard, then there’s not much more you can do.

So now what? Well, if you’re in the same boat I’m in, just hold off on upgrading your Macintosh HD. Simply reboot back into your main drive, and that’s it. This is a very safe way to test things out. And once more Snow Leopard updates come out from both Apple and the software developers for your most used applications, you can try the test install again. Simply format the external drive, and follow the steps above.

But what if Snow Leopard worked out well? Then you can simple boot back into your Macintosh HD, and run the Snow Leopard install on that drive.

I would still suggest you play it safe, and reformat that external drive, and then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your Macintosh HD again before it’s upgraded. If anything happens to your Macintosh HD after upgrading it to Snow Leopard, say a week down the line, you can just clone back the info from the External to the Macintosh HD.

It’s definitely time consuming, but the few hours it took me were well worth it. I experienced color shifts on my monitor, some key apps did not work, and I generally was not prepared for the upgrade. If I had gone about it on my Macintosh HD, I might not have been able to blog about this experience.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

But it’s there. And in order to explain it, I used Lightroom. Yes, I used Lightroom to explain Photoshop curves. It makes sense if you watch the presentation. I also had to make this more like a video, with full motion captures in order to show the effect of curves on an image.

So, continue on to read about the making of the curves presentation, as well as the link to the presentation.

First, the reason I used Lightroom was simple: Tonal Curves can be adjusted by clicking on the image itself. I like this a lot, because it’s very hands on, while curves is not. If you have Lightroom and Photoshop, try this in Lightroom first, you’ll understand what I mean. In fact, if your workflow involves Lightroom, and it’s not out of place in your workflow, just use Tonal Curve adjustments there. It’s very slick.

Becuase of the full motion video, there were some glitches, display errors with the mouse cursor in Lightroom. I tried to edit the cursor but it just wasn’t happening. So I’ll let it be.

Explaining curves with Lightroom: Easy. Explaining it with words: Very difficult. I could have gone more in depth, but if I did that, I may as well break out the chalkboard and trigonometry examples. I tried to keep it more hands on, and very simple to see the cause/effect of it. I want to keep all my flash presentations light, and simple to take in. That’s also why I try to stick to one topic per presentation. If I tried to do a Photoshop presentation, It’d be the PShizzy.com equivalent of Stephen King’s “the Stand”

I’ve already got more ideas for presentations on the horizon. In fact, I have too many. But I’ll keep em coming

And here is the presentation:

Photoshop Curves

Feel free to leave feedback, especially if you view the presentation. I’d love to know what I did right, what I did wrong, and how to improve that for future topics. I’d also like feedback and ideas for future topics.

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

By reading the rest of this post!

In this video we build upon the first video. In fact, I reference the original action we created, because it could work as a batch folder action if we tweaked it a little.

Tweaking it isn’t nearly as hard as it may seem, and you don’t have to start another action from scratch, so get that idea out of your head, see the video, and jump on into photoshop and fix your action.

Oh and there will be more. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to actions.

Enjoy

Actions II: Making Your Action Batch Friendly

Keep the comments coming. I intend for this blog to cover a lot of territory, but I need to know what’s on your mind so I can concentrate on the important stuff first.

Lawrence Lightner recently offered me eternal gratitude for a walk through on actions. So I made a flash video. I figure he now owes me his eternal soul. The rest of you have no such burden. Well, not really. . .

So, rather than doing a simple images and step by step tutorial, I created a simple Flash presentation. I wanted to keep it simple, so I could actually accomplish this and turn it around quickly. I made this in about an hour or so, from first recording (and trust me, I edited it out a lot of bad audio. Mostly me cursing when I screwed up saying something).

It’s pretty simple, but I hope to make more of these, in multiple parts, and much more advanced than this. But I need to know that these videos will actually be effective as a training aid. And I’d like to know that they are a good reason to come to my blog. So here’s what I’m gonna ask everyone to do:

If you like the blog for the content, tell someone you know that doesn’t already know about it. If you like a specific post, please hit the new DIGG button and digg it. And if you like the video, and want to see more, then please leave a comment here, and let me know that you like it, and better yet, what you would like to see more of.

Remember, it worked for Lawrence.

Actions Flash Presentation

BTW, you may get a dialog box talking about security settings in Flash. Just click ok and move on.