Last year sometime I mentioned Chromasia as a good place to see amazing photographs.

Well, around the time I bought my camera, the folks at Chromasia started offering some photoshop tutorials for sale. I've been debating buying for a while and last week cracked.

They're very comprehensive and easy to follow. The results speak for themselves when you look at their before and after pictures. Hopefully, some of the things I've been learning have started to appear in some of the recent pictures I've posted as well (certainly the foot steps picture was haveily influenced by some of the tutorials).

You can buy individual tutorials for about a fiver, annual subscriptions and lifetime subscriptions are £25 and £75 at the moment. To my mind they're well worth a small investment.

There's also a sample one available which looks at Tonal Range and Curves

You can find the tutorials below or by using the handy link I've added on the right menu.

Photoshop tutorials by chromasia

I came across a couple of different online image editors recently, specifically Photoshop Express and Flauntr.

Both work via a web interface and seek to provide a selection of simple tools for image manipulation and management. Now, before I go any further – replacements for GIMP/Elements/CS3 they aren’t, but they maybe fill a niche in the whole web portfolio sphere by allowing some tweaks here and there. 

Essentially both sites offer free registration and a certain amount of free web space (2GB for Photoshop, but no obvious limit mentioned for Flauntr) to host pictures for editing. Both allow image uploading from hard drive as well as imports from a range of photo hosting sites (including flickr in Flauntr’s case and photobucket in Photoshops). Finally both offer the ability to save your pictures back to your hard drive. It's worth noting at this point Photoshop Express is restricted the the United States only, but there was nothing stopping me creating an account and pretending to live there (I'm a bad boy...)

So far they’re both pretty similar.
 

Photoshop Express




Flauntr

 

They’re both reasonably well equipped with a standard set of tools (crop, rotation, resize) as well as with some more advanced stuff like sharpening and highlights etc.

What sets them apart?

 

Well, based on a lunchtimes play, I’d say that Photoshop Express is the easier product to use. The majority of features are on the left hand side of the page and usually have handy previews above the image you’re editing to show you what’s possible with the tool selected.

Express also offers some nice features, like the colour pop tool above which reduces the image to black/white and your chosen colour and what appears to be the clone/repair tool from it’s big brothers under the guise of a touchup button.

Photoshop Express - Pop colour Tool

Flauntr approaches the usability question from a slightly different angle, making use of a set of tabs to offer different functionality in sensibly clustered blocks. The downside of this is that unless you know what you’re looking for you have to spend a lot of time exploring to see what’s possible. I’d suspect once you know what you’re doing it will all be so much faster, but I could see this putting a new player off.

Flauntr also provides a pretty little tool called PicasR which allows you to blend your photograph with the colour tones from some old masters paintings resulting in some lovely effects. Here's a few samples based on this picture.
 

Flauntr - Carnlough with Beachside Colours
using



Flauntr - Carnlough With Sunsetsea Colours
using
 

What sets Flauntr apart though, and what makes me think it’ll be used by the web generation it’s aimed at is the addition of a couple of simple tabs for social networking and mobile sites. Using these it’s painless to take your photograph and sculpt it into something to use as your logo/screen saver on LiveJournal/Bebo/WhereEverTheKidsPlayNow

So, what do I think?

Well, I reckon if you’re into the infernal complexities of CS3 then this isn’t for you. However, if you enjoy playing with images or if you want to be able to make small tweaks to existing pictures quickly without needing to get too complicated then these are definitely appealing. If I had to pick one, right now it would be Flauntr – in a world where it takes years to get to grips with CS3, allowing 10 more minutes to learn Flauntr over Express is not much of an ask.

 

(Since the web is immortal, it’s worth noting that Photoshop Express was in Beta on build version 448357 and Flauntr was in Alpha with no obvious build number).

I've done some playing around with HDR over the past few months, but if you want to see it done well, try looking at "Stuck in Customs" a photoblog by Trey Ratcliff.

Some of the pictures border on obscene they are so beautiful.

There is also a nice tutorial on HDR that's worth a read.

I thought it was about time to mention a couple of other photoblogs I visit quite a lot.

Both are local (Belfast) based part time photographers with oodles more experience than me.

Darrell's blog, WingedMonkey, has a lot of different shots on it, ranging from extreme macro to landscape. It's well worth checking out.

Andrews blog, NothingToBeSaid, concentrates on people and uses mostly black and whit. He also uses some strange sort of camera that takes 'film' memory cards...

 

Check them out!

John mentioned durhamtownship to me last week during the photography thing and I finally got a decent chance to check it out last night. It's a photo blog by Kathleen Connally recording the area she lives in.

When he said it was a fantastic example of a photo blog with some amazing pictures, he wasn't understating the thing.

If you haven't visited already, take a look at durhamtownship. It's pretty bloody brilliant.

No pictures today (again!)

Instead I thought I'd mention this magazine (again!) and say that my first copy as a subscriber arrived last night. I've been buying this for the last few months and some of the articles are brilliant.

While hunting for my chosen toy and debating the whole passage of time, I bought a few different magazines. My responses to them ranged from "I wanna spend how much???" to "I just spent £4 on a book of adverts!". A lot of magazines seemed obsessed with selling me thousand pound lenses and cameras rather than telling me what was in my price range. Little things in Digital SLR Photography like how to make your own reflectors and how to improvise filter mounts make it so much more accessible to people on a budget.

It was their review of the D40X against the 400D helped push me into Canon's laps (mmmmm comfy), and it was their features of David Nightingale (Chromasia) and other fantastic photographers which makes me want to take better shots.

For those trying to learn the art, the fact the provide the exposure settings for a majority of their shots is superb (and it's why I do it to).

My one complaint is that their website doesn't live up to the quality of the magazine. 

If you're looking for a magazine on Digital SLR Photography you can't beat this. It does exactly what it says on the tin...erm cover.

Learning To Snap

I have no idea what other people are using to view image libraries. I'm sure there are some great tools out there, but when I first got a digital camera a friend recommended Picasa as a neat utility that did what I needed.

It provides a nice interface for scanning your images and number of functions including basic contrast, brightness and cropping. Most importantly when you're a camera noob like me it has a patented(?) Google-esk button 'I'm Feeling Lucky' which makes the changes it thinks the images need.

As a camera noob it's been my stalwart photo utility since the E550 came to live with me.

Lately I've been playing with Gimp, but thats on my list of things I need to learn so it'll be a while before I feel qualified to say anything about it other than "The name keeps making me snigger"

Almost forgot. Both Picasa and Gimp are free under their various license models.

When I first started shopping for a digital camera and ended up buying my E550, there were two sites I found invaluable.

DPReview gave fantastic information about all the cameras in the market, ranging from my little point and click through to the market leading pro DSLR's of the day. I used this site again when buying my 400D and was glad its only got better with age.

If you've ended up here and are thinking about buying a camera, then go there next.

I first came across Chromasia via an article in the Financial Times I think. the daily pictures are amazing. Of all the sites on the web, of all the pictures out there, David Nightingale is the person who drove me to do this. I've never spoken tot he man, never exchanged an email, never posted comments on his site, but I think his work is fantastic and if I ever get to be half as good I'll be happy. 

Learning To Snap