What is it?

An update to Photoshop’s Web Photo Gallery was long overdue; the design and format of the gallery templates hadn’t kept pace with the real world forcing web-savvy photographers to look elsewhere for Web galleries to match the sophistication of their Web site. Well search no more, Adobe updated and consolidated Web Photo Gallery, Contact Sheet, Picture Package and PDF Presentation into the Output To Web or PDF panel.

The only downside to the Output to Web or PDF panel is the lack of tools for creating standardized presets. This is one of the cornerstones of an a efficient workflow and the inability to save presets is a disappointment, particularly since they are present in Lightroom.

This new panel allows you to build, and preview within Bridge PDF contact sheets, picture packages and HTML or Flash Web galleries. Before you can begin using the Output to Web and PDF panel, you need to first activate it in Bridge Preferences using the following steps:

1) Open Bridge Preferences (Bridge CS4>Preferences (Mac), or Edit>Preferences (Win)) select the Startup Scripts tab and click on the Auto Collection CS4 heading. Alternatively, you can select Enable All to activate all Startup scripts. Press Ok.

2) Quit, then relaunch Bridge. Startup Scripts are only activated when the application is launched.

Why is it important?

Anyone needing to share photos with clients will benefit from the speed and ease in creating client approval documents, either printed or online. What’s more, the improvements in Bridge cascade through every stage of the editing process, saving you time at every step, from image download, through image selection, to the application of metadata and delivery to the client. This compounds the benefits from each improvement minimizing the time you spend processing images.

Bonus Tip: Once you’ve configured Bridge with the login and username for your Web site, publishing your Web galleries becomes a one-click process.

Check out a sample gallery here.

What Is It?
As evidenced by the popularity of the iPhone, the world is rapidly reaching a tipping point for the adoption of the mobile internet. For many people, particularly in developing countries, their portal to the Internet is not via a computer, but a mobile phone. Photographers and designers wanting to stay ahead of the curve will find the new online device libraries in Device Central CS4 to be a blessing. By posting the device registry online, instead of locally, Adobe is able to keep the mobile device database up to date with current models, and fill in the information gaps found in many device profiles.

Why Is It Important?
Specific device profiles can be downloaded to your hard drive by dragging the online device profile into the Local Library panel. From here, you can group and organize device profiles to best suit your workflow.

Bonus Tip: Automated testing scripts can be used to test your content against batches of device profiles. The Log window compiles snapshots of how your content looks on all tested devices. This ensures your content is consistent on a wide-range of devices. For more information on batch testing watch the Adobe TV tutorial.

What is it?
Device link profiles are a powerful color management tool that, until now, have not seen widespread adoption due to limited support, most notably in Photoshop. Traditional ICC based color management uses a device-independent color space, like Lab, to serve as a bridge between two device-dependent ICC profiles, like Adobe RGB and US Web Coated SWOPv2. Device link profiles eliminate the intermediate color space linking two profiles together.

To access your device link profiles within Photoshop CS4, click on the Advanced button in the Convert to Profile dialog. If the device link profile is grayed out, you don’t have any device link profiles in your Profiles folder.

Why is it important?

Device link profiles allow you to fine-tune the color conversion to protect highlight detail, control the conversion of specific logo colors or ensure black text doesn’t become a rich black. They streamline color conversions when both the source and destination profiles are consistent.

Bonus Tip: Creating Device-link profiles requires specialized software. X-rite offers a plug-in for Profile Maker for creating device link, but the most commonly used Device-link software is Link-o-later from Left Dakota software.

What is it?
The Soft Proofing feature is a useful tool for photographers to preview and predict the color and tonal changes that will occur when an image is printed, output to a specific device or converted to a different profile. A new feature in the Proof Setup menu allows you to preview the effects two common types of color blindness have on your image, giving you the ability to see how a color-blind person will view your image.

Why is it important?

The most obvious use of the Color Blindness proofing is in Web design. To ensure that visitors to your site can read the text against a colored background, previewing your design with the Color Blindness profiles will help identify any problem areas. This is particularly important as more photographers are building their own sites in Photoshop, either to slice up for use in Dreamweaver, or to build the site completely using a tool like Sitegrinder. Ensuring all visitors can access your site is a fundamental component in building an effective Web site.

Bonus Tip: Color blindness is thought as an evolutionary advantage in detecting certain types of patterns. This was useful as hunter gatherers and is useful today in detecting certain types of camouflages. Today, approximately 5-8 percent of males and only 1 percent of females are color blind. More fascinating information on Colorblindness can be found on Wikipedia

What is it?
Adobe Lightroom makes it easy to zoom in and out of an image quickly. Sadly, the same feature has been lacking in Photoshop. Jumping between 100 percent view, and the full image required the use of two separate keyboard shortcuts. The new Bird’s Eye View feature offers a possible solution to the problem. And while it works well for the intended purpose, it does take a little practice to feel comfortable zooming in and out of your picture.

Here’s how it works. Begin by zooming into your image. To jump to 100 percent, press CMD+Opt+0 (zero) on the Mac or CTRL+Alt+0 (zero) on Windows. Activate the Bird’s Eye View by pressing the H key. Click, and hold, to zoom out to the Bird’s Eye view. Reposition the bounding box to jump back in to a new area. The important thing to remember is to click and hold. Clicking and releasing starts this dizzying cycle of zooming in and out rapidly.

Why is it important?

Common correction steps like retouching, sharpening or masking require a split attention. You have to pay attention to your image on the pixel level ensuring blends are smooth and there are no errant brush strokes to draw attention to your adjustments. On the other hand, you have to pay attention to how your micro-corrections are affecting the image as a whole. Here’s where the Bird’s Eye View comes in handy. Using the Spring Loaded Keyboard Shortcuts you can work with the Clone Stamp tool, press H to switch to the Bird’s Eye View to jump back to the full image to see how well your cloning blends with the surrounding image then dive back into your cloning, all in a matter of seconds.

Bonus Tip: The real bonus tip for this feature is to combine it with the Spring Loaded Keyboard Shortcuts. Perhaps more important however, is to remind you that this, like other cool display features in PSCS4, can only be accessed with a supported graphics card. If the Bird’s Eye View isn’t working for you, revisit the GPU Acceleration post and check to see if your graphics card is supported.

What is it?

Have you ever noticed how print sizes and layout windows almost never correctly match the dimensions of your photo. This is particularly aggravating when you’ve composed your photo carefully and tightly. In the end, you have to sacrifice the quality of the photo to fit the crop.

The new Content-aware scaling promises to alleviate this problem by intelligently scaling an image to fit a given dimension without compromising the content of the photo. At least, that’s the promise. In practice, the use of Content aware scaling is a little more complicated.

The concept behind Content-aware scaling is to preserve areas with high details or visual importance while distorting the unimportant information to fit the new image dimensions. The problem is that you and Photoshop won’t always see eye to eye on what is important or unimportant detail in your photos. In this first image I was able to stretch the width of the image without too much difficulty. This is the ideal use of Content-aware scaling, making small adjustments to an image with a soft or repetitive background.

In the second image, the shortcomings of Content-aware scaling are more apparent (at least I hope so). Pushing and pulling my portrait shows me to be the pencil-headed geek I really am.

Why is it important?
Designers often have to stretch and clone images to fit a layout window or make room for text. Content-aware scaling is ideal for this purpose, particularly when the image is a simply-composed stock image with lots of blue sky or white space. A second potential use of Content-aware scaling is in the wedding and portrait industry where photographers are frequently asked to make their subjects appear thinner than they actually are. This is a quick way to slim the groom without a lot of heavy retouching. The Content-aware algorithm will preserve the detailed regions (eyes, smile, corset) while shrinking smooth tones (tuxedo, forehead).

Of course, the most popular use of Content-aware scaling will be to create cartoonish caricatures to show the true inner-self of our subjects.

Bonus Tip: Use A Mask: To improve the results of the scaling, build a mask around your subject. In the Content-aware scaling menu select your mask from the Protect pull-down menu.

Guest Post: James Dimagiba
When researching the origins of Content-aware scaling, my assistant James, who is far more mathematically inclined than I, unearthed some valuable information on how this feature works. For those of you wanting a technical background on Content-aware scaling, read on.

Traditional scaling in Photoshop has a tendency to distort all of an image and getting around it involved a tedious process of selecting regions and retouching. With the new content aware scaling, Photoshop is able to differentiate between reigons of high complexity and low complexity and adjust them so that an image can be rescaled without disrupting the proportions of the content. Additionally, Photoshop can automatically protect skin tones, preventing the distortion of people. Regions can also be manually protected by selecting regions and saving them as alpha channels.

http://danluong.com/2007/12/21/seam-carving-matlab-implementation-tutorial/

What is it?
As more of the Photoshop’s display and manipulation commands are moved to the graphics processor, Adobe’s engineers are able to do some cool things to make navigation within the program more interesting. One example of this is the Toss panning introduced in Photoshop CS4. Toss panning allows you to throw your photo as you move and pan through it. This makes moving through images at a high zoom percentage not only faster but more fun.

Toss panning works with the Hand tool, or the temporary hand tool (hold spacebar). Grab your image and “flick” the image in any direction. The photo moves quickly at first then slowly settles as though gravity were taking hold.

Why is it important?
Okay, it’s hard to justify this as a significant time-saver or productivity feature. It ranks higher on the cool factor than anything else. In a month full of keyboard shortcuts, productivity enhancements and new features you have to stop every once and a while and be amazed at how much better our tools are than they were five years ago.

Bonus Tip: Toss panning, like the Rotate tool work via GPU acceleration. This means that it won’t work on older graphics cards. Be sure to check your graphics card against Adobe’s list of supported cards.

What is it?

I can almost always gauge someone’s Photoshop skill level by the way they change their Brush size. This created two neat categories.
Beginner Photoshop Users use the Brush Preset Picker to select a brush, hover their mouse over the image to gauge brush size then return to the Brush Preset Picker to adjust the brush size and so on.
Advanced Users use the bracket keys ([,]) to change the brush size or add the Shift key to the mix to change the Brush Hardness.

Photoshop CS4 adds a new method of adjusting brush size breaking my two easy classifications. The Drag-Resizing Cursors which allow you to click and drag on your image to resize your brush using a special keyboard shortcut. In Photoshop CS4, with the brush tool selected, hold the Control/Option keys (Mac) or Right-click+Alt (Win) while clicking and dragging the mouse. Move the mouse down for a larger brush and up for a smaller brush. A red overlay will temporarily appear to show the size and hardness of the brush.

Why is it important?

The two classifications of Photoshop users aren’t meant to be pejorative. Instead, they’re based on practical experience. People who use Photoshop (or any application for that matter) gravitate toward the fastest, and most efficient way to work. In order to perform their work effectively, and not get bogged down in the maze of pull-down menus, dialog boxes and options, master users let their fingers do the walking, fluidly jumping back and forth between tools, changing brush sizes and generally working their magic on images without breaking rhythm.

If you want to work more efficiently, try learning the keyboard shortcuts for the tasks you perform every day. It will take a little while to memorize them, but after a short period, you’ll find yourself forgetting to remember, your fingers select the correct tool automatically without thought or attention.

Welcome to the Master-level. I’m glad you could join us.

Bonus Tip: To get into the Ninja-level, use the following keyboard shortcuts to drag-resize brush hardness. Control/Option/Command while clicking and dragging on the Mac or Shift/Right-click/Alt on Windows.

What is it?
I have a bad habit. I drop my horizons to the left. Sure, it isn’t as destructive as a heroin addiction, but it forces me go in and rotate my photos to correct for the sagging horizon. If I spend a day at the beach or lakefront shooting, that amounts to a lot of work. The rotate tool in Photoshop makes these types of corrections far easier than they were before.

In the past, rotating an image was a multi-step process. First you had to doubleclick on the background layer to rename it. Then you had to select the Ruler tool (did you know there was a ruler tool?) and drag a straight line. You get the idea.

The Rotate tool makes this process as simple as it should be. Select the Rotate tool from the Application bar near the top of the screen or use the keyboard shortcut “R”. Click and drag on your image to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise.

Why is it important?
The simple, quotidian commands should be easy. There’s no need for a photographer to have to remember four steps to rotate a document. Instead, it should be simple, effective and easy to use, just like the Rotate tool. I hope Adobe continues to refine Photoshop in ways that make the program simpler to use while making it more powerful.

Bonus Tip: In order for the Rotate tool to work correctly, you will need to have a supported graphics card. (No, that first generation iMac isn’t supported.) For more on GPU Acceleration and a link to a list of supported graphics cards, check out my earlier post on the subject.

What is it?
The Refine Edge command, introduced in Photoshop CS3 gave users a set of tools for improving the quality of selection edges and adding a visual preview to a set of useful, if obscure commands in the Select menu. In Photoshop CS4, Adobe took the commands from Refine Edge and added them to the newly created Masks panel giving you control over the edges of masks instead of selections. Refine Mask helps you clean up the edges of masks to eliminate the color contamination along edges, often called edge spill, or smooth out ragged selections from tools like Magic Wand or Color Range.

Why is it important?
The differences between a beginner’s layer masks and a master retoucher are found in the edges of the mask. The beginner’s edges appear as visible seams between layers. The master’s masks have no visible seams and layers blend naturally without interruption. Achieving a Master’s edge often meant a lot of time and elbow-grease manually smoothing the edges of a mask. Now, with the Refine Mask command you can control the feather, contrast and smoothness of an edge. All tools that will help you attain master-level results in a minimal amount of time.

To jump start your apprenticeship, young Grasshopper, here’s a quick summary of the Refine Mask’s features:
- Radius: Used to “tease” out fine detail along mask edges and force the mask to match the contours of the masked object. A high radius setting will make the edge of the mask exceedingly soft and “gray.” Remedy this with the Contrast Slider.
- Contrast: Used in conjunction with the Radius slider to create realistic masks along difficult edges. As the Radius slider is increased, the mask edge becomes very wide and diffuse. Adding Contrast helps to reclaim the integrity of the edge to make a viable mask.
- Smooth: Eliminates the rough and jagged portions of a selection edge often found in selections made with the Magic Wand or Color Range tool. Generally, you’ll want to use as high of a Smooth setting as possible, but be careful, high Smooth settings tend to round corners and eliminate points.
- Feather: Blurs the edges of the mask slightly to make the transition between layers less visible. I recommend feathering your mask to match the sharpness of focus. If your subject is sharply focussed, you’ll want to use a very low radius. If the subject is softly focused, say with a shallow depth of field, a higher Feather setting is needed to create a natural-looking transition.
- Contract/Expand: The best way to remove color contamination along the edge of a selection is to contract the selection slightly, eliminating the offending pixels. Be sure you’re zoomed into 100% to preview the edge of the mask to protect against excessively contracting the edge of the mask.

Bonus Tip: Preview Modes: Cycle through the five preview modes at the bottom of the Refine Mask dialog by pressing “F”. These mode are, from left to right; Standard selection border (marching ants), Quick Mask (red overlay), Black Background (useful for light objects), White Background (the litmus test for cutouts), and Mask mode, ideal for seeing the effect of the feather. I tend to jump back and forth between the black and white backgrounds since these give the most critical assessment of edge quality.