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Apply Skew Transformations in Photoshop CS6

Dan Moughamian — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:09:50 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

This video explains how Skew Transformations work in Photoshop CS6. You’ll see how it can be used to match the perspective of a shape layer, to that of a photographic layer, so that you can add creative effects like blend modes and opacity to finish the look. This segment is part of a new tutorial [...]

Inspired Art: Time Lapse Photography – The Unseen Sea

Dan Moughamian — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:26:19 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

This group of time lapse sequences (called The Unseen Sea) was shot and produced by Simon Cristen. The vantage points he staked out and the quality of the light and compositions are fantastic, and the music adds a nice touch as well. Sorry for the on-again off-again nature of my posts lately. I have three [...]

Photoshop CS6 Actions Panel: Recording Tool Actions

Dan Moughamian — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:25:09 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Creative Cloud Week – Day 6 This Photoshop tutorial covers enhancements made to the Actions panel — a great time saver but one that is often avoided by some users, even though it’s quite easy to use. The Actions panel in Photoshop CS6 now allows you to record tool steps as part of your actions. [...]

Photoshop CS6 Properties Panel

Dan Moughamian — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:57:32 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Creative Cloud Week – Day 5 Photoshop CS6 offers many enhancements that will make our photography and design workflows more efficient. In particular the Photoshop CS6 Properties panel goes a long way to creating a more consistent user experience from one tool to the next, and in having one go-to place for modifying important settings. [...]

Premiere Pro CS6: Streamlined Editing

Dan Moughamian — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:47 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Creative Cloud Week – Day 4 Photoshop CS6 isn’t the only major update in the new Creative Cloud suite of applications and services. Premiere Pro CS6 has a brand new user interface that streamlines the media browsing and editing process, moving many non-critical and distracting elements out of your way so that you can focus [...]

Photoshop CS6 Tilt-Shift Effect

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:45:36 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Creative Cloud Week – Day 3 Adobe has been hard at work, speeding up our favorite application with a little help from the Mercury Graphics Engine including: a completely overhauled 3D workflow, a vastly improved Lighting Effects workflow, and a new photographic filter called the Blur Gallery. The Blur Gallery is a collection of three integrated [...]

Create 3D Text with Photoshop CS6 Extended

Dan Moughamian — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:00:48 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Adobe Creative Cloud Week – Day 2 We have been able to create and modify 3D text objects in Photoshop since CS4, but the workflow was more complicated than it needed to be. CS6 changes all that with a brand new 3D workflow that is more powerful, faster in many cases, and much easier to [...]

Photoshop CS6 Crop Tool

Dan Moughamian — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 05:00:49 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Adobe Creative Cloud Week – Day 1 Welcome to Creative Cloud Week at Colortrails.com! To help spread the word about Adobe CS6 and Creative Cloud, Colortrails will post a new tutorial every day, focused either on Photoshop CS6 or a combination of Photoshop and other CS6 application workflows that you’ll find useful. Non-destructive Cropping in [...]

Adobe CS6 and Creative Cloud Announced

Dan Moughamian — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:16:15 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Adobe CS6 Announced The wraps have been lifted on Adobe CS6 and Creative Cloud today, which means I can start sharing more information with you about some of the excellent new features and upgrades! If you haven’t heard about Creative Cloud already, it’s a suite of online services that can help you sync information between devices, provides 20GB of [...]

Inspired Art: The Yosemite Time Lapse

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:42:43 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Produced by the Yosemite Project, this time lapse video is an amazing look at one of America’s most impressive and popular National Parks. Related ItemsPostsInspired Art: Iceland Volcano Time LapseInspired Art: The Arctic LightInspired Art: Light Painting Tweet

Export to 500px with Lightroom

Dan Moughamian — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:18:14 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

What is 500px? 500px.com is a social photography site that makes it easy for professional photographers to enjoy each other’s work in a professional setting, while providing extensive tools for sharing, organizing and even selling your photographs! Unlike Facebook, which is not designed specifically for photographers and has a somewhat confusing interface, 500px uses a simple [...]

Photoshop CS6 Quick-Tips

Dan Moughamian — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:17:42 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Some of the best new features in Photoshop CS6 are small ticket items that can make your workflow smoother and more efficient. While I have a ton of new information to share with you (announcements soon!), here are two of my favorite workflow enhancements that you should check out in Photoshop CS6 Beta. Transformation Display [...]

Photoshop CS6 Beta: 6 Great Features for Photographers

Dan Moughamian — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:33:00 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Photoshop CS6 Beta: My Favorite Features for Photographers The Photoshop CS6 Beta is now available. Many of you have seen the “sneak peeks” over the last several weeks, but there a ton of other, great new features for photographers, 3D artists, designers, and video pros! This a first look at what I consider to be the [...]

iPad 3 Review

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:00:53 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

iPad 3 has Arrived This week I thought it would be good to write a review of the new iPad 3 (or 3rd Generation iPad if you prefer). Unlike various rumor sites you will be pleased to know I won’t be dissecting the iPad. Nor will I attempt to: puree it in a blender, microwave it, or perform [...]

Apple Introduces the iPad 3

Dan Moughamian — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 04:48:23 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Next Generation iPad Today Apple announced the next generation iPad (often called iPad 3 in the news and social media), for photographers and mobile computing enthusiasts of all types. I’ll post a review in the near future to give you my thoughts on everything from the new high resolution screen performance, to the new iPhoto [...]

Lightroom 4 Overview

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:55:48 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Introduction Lightroom 4 graduated today, from public beta to finished product. It is available for download from Adobe.com right now. One of the most impressive things about this release is the new pricing: just $149 for first-time users, and a $79 upgrade fee! That’s pretty amazing, considering the quality of the software. I’ll be blunt: [...]

Photoshop Touch: Full-Featured Photo Editing for iPad 2

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:31:10 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Introducing Photoshop Touch Yesterday Adobe released an amazing iPad application: Photoshop Touch for iPad. This is a whole new ballgame. Photoshop Touch is like having Photoshop’s core features right inside the iPad 2, all for the price of a good e-book! If you’re curious about iPad3 support, your guess is as good as mine. I [...]

Apple Reveals Mac OS X Mountain Lion

Dan Moughamian — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:03:55 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Mountain Lion to Use iPad Tech [UPDATED 2-17-2012: video link] This morning the Mac community awoke to a nice surprise from Apple, which provided a look at the next Mac OS, due out summer 2012. Mac OS X Mountain Lion will likely follow the pattern of Leopard and Snow Leopard, with the “specialized species” being more [...]

Nikon D800: First Impressions

Dan Moughamian — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:11:07 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Nikon D800 Overview This week Nikon D800 DSLR was officially announced this week, targeting all types of fine art and landscape photographers. The changes in spec as compared to the D700 (a camera I own and love as much as the old F-100 film camera I started with back in the 90s) fall into all [...]

Inspired Art: The Northern Lights (Norway)

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:46:44 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

More good news for astrophotography fans: this winter has seen a lot of extra solar activity, which in turn creates more spectacular viewings of the aurora borealis (or “the northern lights”). Since it’s been a while, I’ve posted another inspired art segment this week, covering one of the more impressive aurora time-lapse videos that I’ve [...]

Perspectives: Why Every Student Needs an iPad

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:00:15 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

iPad Makes Learning Better Let me get this out of the way from the start: if you haven’t figured it out by now, I love Apple gear. I’ve been using Macs for more than two decades and waited in a (relatively short) line the first day the iPad 2 was available, as my latest tribute [...]

Photoshop Tutorials: Learning Perfect Photo Suite 6

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:32:47 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Perfect Portrait Recently, onOne Software announced a major upgrade to their collection of Photoshop plugins, called Perfect Photo Suite 6. Now at version 6.0.2, the suite includes major upgrades including Perfect Mask, Perfect Portrait, Perfect Layers (for Lightroom users), Focal Point 2, and more. To share a few of the best features from my five [...]

Top New Features in Lightroom 4 Beta

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:03:58 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

[Updated 1-12-2012] Adobe released the public beta of Lightroom 4 this week. The big question with each new release is: “What’s New?” Below is the short list of the new features in Lightroom 4 (there are several others I’ll be writing about that are really cool), which I believe will help photographers to [...]

Perspectives: How SOPA Could Hurt Photographers & Creative Pros

Dan Moughamian — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:52:43 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

SOPA Background The Stop Online Piracy Act –more commonly known as “SOPA“– is a piece of legislation recently introduced by the U.S. House of Representatives which has as its stated goal, protecting copyright holders and their livelihoods. On the face of it, that sounds good for photographers and other content providers, but it’s not that [...]

Tutorial: Working with Aperture 3 and Viveza

Dan Moughamian — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:08:45 +0000

Colortrails.com - Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials, photographer interviews, product reviews and more

Aperture 3 Plugins Plugins are mini applications that you can add to your favorite photo editing applications, to extend their capabilities. They serve many useful purposes, including color enhancement, improved contrast and detail in black and white photos, special effects (like fog or blurred backgrounds), and many others. Viveza 2 from Nik Software, is as [...]