Corrections have been made to yesterday's post Peggy Roalf: Which came first, the pen, the brush, or the tablet? Julia Breckenreid: The pen, the brush. No tablet! I use my finger on my trackpad in Photoshop. It is a bit ridiculous. PR: Please describe your work space and how it figures in to the way you work. JB: I had rented shared studio spaces … Read the full Story >>
Adobe has updated a number of its Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, which gets a speed boost and new editing tools. DIY Photography is happy to see the Legacy Healing Brush returned to Photoshop. There’s also Content-Aware Crop, which automatically fills in the gaps when you rotate or expand a canvas beyond the original image size, notes PDN Pulse. And there is Face-Aware Liquify, which uses the Liquify Tool while keeping the face in proportion by automatically identifying eyes, noses, mouths, and other facial features. Read the full Story >>
Knowing how to clean the sensor on your digital camera is a valuable skill for any photographer, especially a pro. For many, it’s a daunting proposition, but, notes Blake Rudis of f64 Academy, cleaning your camera’s sensor is a lot easier than you might think. And you can save a lot of money by doing it yourself. What you’ll need: a Giottos Rocket Blower, a D-SLR Sensor Cleaning Brush and a VSGO Sensor Cleaning Swab Kit. DIY Photography adds some tips of its own. Read the full Story >>
Q: Originally from the Northeast, what are some of your favorite things about living and working in the Bay Area A: Now I’m in San Francisco, where I am blissed out by the food, people, politics, and panoramas. Q: Do you keep a sketchbook? What is the balance between art you create on paper [or other analog medium] versus in the computer? A: Yes. … Read the full Story >>
Amid intensifying competition in the AI image generation space, Midjourney has unveiled an updated version of its website with a new editor interface that unifies various existing features such as inpainting (repainting parts of an image with new AI generated visuals using text prompts) and outpaining (stretching the boundaries of the image in different directions and filling the new space with new AI visuals). The new web editor also features a new virtual “brush”-like tool for inpainting, replacing the previous square selector and lasso tools, allowing for more precision, notes VentureBeat. Read the full Story >>
In 2015, Brazilian photographer Vitor Schietti began a series, titled “Impermanent Sculptures,” that incorporates light painting to surround trees and other natural objects with fiery streaks of illumination. These glowing landscapes evoke the magic of fairy trails, but they are the result of a delicate photographic process, notes My Modern Met, which features the work. “The light becomes a brush, the space around me is the canvas, the paper on which I write questions, sketch answers, rehearse thoughts, reveal or hide mysteries,” notes Schietti. Read the full Story >>
If you’re looking for documentary know-how, go to Indiewire: It’s “ultimate guide” to documentary filmmaking advice will direct you to online destinations where you can learn about everything from documentary film production to documentary distribution channels. Want tips on finding funding for your film? Interested in how animation and graphics are revolutionizing docs? It’s in there. You can also brush on current thinking about hybrid documentaries that blend fact and fiction. Meanwhile, you can go here to learn about 10 grants that support documentary filmmaking—and the deadlines for applying. They include the MacArthur Foundation Documentary Open Call grants, whose deadline is April 14 to May 1. Read the full Story >>
Artificial intelligence is changing image search, notes PDN Pulse, which reports on a “pretty incredible” new tool from 500px that lets users find images by drawing out a rough sketch of what they’re looking for. Called Splash, the tool gives you a field and an adjustable brush to draw your sketch. You can also adjust colors via a palette. “[I]mages are instantly populated into several categories: landscapes, people, animals, travels and cities. As you add color and design to your sketch, the images change in response,” notes PDN. Read the full Story >>
It is not uncommon to discover that film directors carry their visual creativity over into other art forms. A number are well-regarded photographers, and many are handy with pen and paper. Film.com features Guillermo del Toro’s sketchbooks, which will be of interest to motion artists: Del Toro is known to begin creating his film worlds in the pages of his sketchbooks—he once left his Pan's Labyrinth notes in the back seat of a cab, and the loss might have killed the movie if not for the kind efforts of the cab driver to return the book. Read the full Story >>
Post-modernist author and Beat Generation icon William Burroughs used stream-of-consciousness writing to warp our sense of time, but his lesser known experimental photography was no less mind-bending, declares Alex King at Huck magazine. Burroughs, notes King, was seduced by photography’s power for destruction: “Like the pen and his infamous .38 – the gun he used to kill his wife in a drug-fuelled game of William Tell – the camera was a weapon, which he wielded like a voodoo priest,” King writes. Read the full Story >>
Adobe has officially launched Photoshop Fix, a mobile app it demoed at Apple's iPad Pro launch in early September, notes DP Review. Available for iPad and iPhone, it brings tools like the healing brush and liquify to mobile devices along with adjustments like paint and defocus. The Verge loves all the free stuff. (BTW: Adobe has also released updates for desktop apps, including better support for Windows 10 touch devices, local dehaze adjustments in Lightroom and Camera Raw and a customized toolbar for photos in Photoshop.) Read the full Story >>
The latest trends in camera design? If you used to dream of installing underglow on your souped-up Honda Civic, then Pentax has a DSLR for you, declares PetaPixel, which thinks the flashy new Pentax K-S1 from Ricoh pays homage to Star Trek. It has a new 20.1MP APS-C sensor, the same on-demand anti-aliasing filter system found in the much-loved K-3, in-body shake reduction, and a Prime MII processor that allows for 51,200 max ISO and 5.4fps continuous shooting. Meanwhile, Olympus hopes its PEN E-PL7 will attract smartphone users who like to take selfies. Read the full Story >>
Just when I was wondering, “where are the latest DART Q&A replies,” I received a message from long-time subscriber Anthony Freda, wondering if I was still looking at sketchbooks. Ha! Problem solved—here’s what Anthony sketched and wrote: I often write in my sketchbooks while listening to interviews on radio talk shows. I write down their thoughts in real time, hence the lousy penmanship. Some … Read the full Story >>
What will government-sponsored propaganda in authoritarian states look like in years to come? China is leading the way, notes the New York Times. Decades after Mao Zedong declared the pen as important to political power as the gun, the party still churns out old-school propaganda — colorful posters with wooden slogans, mawkish movies with patriotic themes, meticulously censored newspapers written in dry, impenetrable language. But China’s current leader, President Xi Jinping, is demanding propaganda that resonates with Millennials. That means online animated videos that pay attention to details. Read the full Story >>
Peggy Roalf: Which came first, the pen or the brush? Veronica Miller Jamison: I love this question. Right now, for me, the brush comes first. I love putting down large strokes of color and the challenge of communicating objects with just a few passes of the brush. The way color behaves as you move the brush from one side of the page to the … Read the full Story >>
Troubled by what he saw as corporate control over modern society, Argentina-based illustrator Juan Nacht decided to express his ideas in the best way he knew how--with pen and paper. The result was a satirical series of artworks titled "Inks About Power," which was named a winner of the first annual Latin American Ilustracion competition. "It's a visual essay about the arms industry and … Read the full Story >>
The new Inklet app allows users to turn the Force Touch trackpads in Apple's new MacBook and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro computers into pressure-sensitive writing and drawing pads. The app, from TenOneDesign, makers of the popular Pogo and Pogo Connect tablet pens, takes advantage of the new haptic feedback technology in the trackpads, which uses pressure sensors to record levels of pressure and magnets to supply feedback. Fstoppers asks wonders if the app can replace your Wacom Intuos tablet. Read the full Story >>
Mexican photographer Miguel Angel de la Cueva first “came face to face” with the Baja California’s rugged Sierra la Gigante mountain range in 1995. He’s been working to protect it ever since. He is the founder of Planeta Península A.C., an NGO focusing on conservation of Baja California’s natural and cultural heritage, and his 2011 book La Giganta y Guadalupe has helped focus attention on the area, with the goal of establishing a 650,000-acre biosphere reserve. He has been a member of the International League of Conservation Photographers since 2008. Read the full Story >>
Two historic Leica Luxus cameras from the 1930s were recently sold at a Bonhams auction in Hong Kong—fetching $620,000 each—indicating growing interest and value for early, collectible photographic materials, notes Artinfo, while in November a one-of-a-kind Leica made by Jony Ive and Marc Newson for the 2013 (RED) Auction sold for a whopping $1.8 million, proving there is an appetite for exclusively-designed gear, such as the Olympus PEN E-P5 Art Edition by Suzko ($26,200) and the Leica M9-P Edition Hermès ($50,000). What’s on your shopping list? Read the full Story >>
Q: Originally from New York what are some of your favorite things about living and working in the Big Apple? A: I grew up in the Seaport, when it was a very smelly fish market, and I still live nearby, which is either a sign of the utmost uninventiveness or total security. Because my family and so many of my friends are here, from … Read the full Story >>
