2. To make the © using a PC, hold down the Alt key and type 0169. On a Mac, press Option + G. Then type in a copyright notice (your name, your company, etc.) as you want it to appear. Pick a font you like — you’ll be stuck with it.

3. Now hide the Background layer. Do this by clicking the eye icon to the left of the Background layer’s name on the Layers Palette. Make sure your Type layer is still selected (click on it if not). Then select your text: Go to Select > Color Range, move the Fuzziness slider all the way to 200, and click OK.

4. Then make your custom brush: Choose Edit > Define Brush Preset. Enter a descriptive name for the brush (like MyCopyright), and click OK.

5. To test your new brush, open an image you’d like to stamp. Grab the Brush tool (type B). Then, from the Options bar at the top of your screen, pull down the Brush menu and scroll to the bottom. The one you just made is the last on your list. Click on it to select it, then click the spot in your image where you want to stamp your copyright. If it’s too small to see, increase your brush size.

You can find the artists site here (Nico Di Mattia):

http://www.speed-painting.com/

And grab the wallpaper version of John Locke here.

Creating your own Planet style pictures from Panorama shots. Most compact cams have a panorama mode and even the newer phone cameras have the feature which allows you to easily stitch a few shots together.

Our pal Dirk wrote up a tutorial that shows you how to turn any panorama or landscape photograph into a full-fledged planet!

Best of all, once you’ve selected an image to work with, the process takes only 5 minutes. (Launching your new planet into solar orbit may take a bit longer.)

360 degree shot of San Francisco taken from the Coit Tower made into a planet.

Pretty neat eh?

You can find the full tutorial and examples here:

How to Create Your Own Planets Using Your Panoramas

There is also a big Flickr set of examples and a Flickr Group dedicated to this.

The neck extension part is the one that freaks me out..

It just shows the power of creative lighting, good makeup and hair, a good clean photograph and a LOT of post processing.

The girl looks just about average to begin with, but so striking on the billboard.

I can recognise most of the moves, quite a lot of perspective transformation, can you see them all?

I’ve mastered some of these techniques, but certainly not to this degree of expertise.

Lose this:

And end up with this:

Pictures from: earthboundlight.com

This stupid software installs a plugin to Photoshop without your permission and overides the default RAW handling.

You can find the Nikon NEF plugin at

Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop CS\Plug-ins\Adobe Photoshop Only\File Formats

There you can delete it, after that you may get an error message such as:

could not complete your request because it is not the right kind of document

After you can go to the Adobe Camera RAW site and download the latest version (3.6 at this time).

Adobe Camera Raw and DNG Converter for Windows

After you’ve download this plugin put it in:

Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS\Plug-Ins\File Formats

And all should be well!

Before manipulation

After manipulation

This brings me to the thoughts where photographs can be altered for various reasons. I am not posting this to start a debate on what is right and what is not but you can feel free to share with us your thoughts on this.

Since the dawn of photography, some photographers have strived to change reality pre and post exposure. Salon photographers pay cyclists to cycle in the sunset to capture their silhouttes and they also pay old men to dress up as monks so that they could be interesting subjects. Today, in the digital realm, the manipulation of reality is more prevalent with tools like Adobe PS being ubiquitous and graphics artists use such tools as tool to create fantastical creations.

The only stance I take firmly is if a photograph, used for purposes of documentation, is altered. I do not agree to this.

The Channel Mixer is a relatively powerful tool. It can be accessed in PS by these menus – Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer. I actually use this in the Layers mode but that is another discussion for another day. Once you understand this concept, you can easily apply it to any photo for conversion.

Here’s the original photo…

Now, click on Monochrome and pull the Red channel to 100% (leaving the other two channels as zero)

If you select 100% of Green…

And Blue 100%

Achieving the desired result requires you to mix and match the percentages of Red, Green and Blue channels and they do not necessarily have to add up to 100% (you can go beyond). Here’s what I chose for this. There are specific guidelines as to how your black and white photos should look like but they are only guidelines not gospel.

Final Result Red 80%, Blue 20%

Compare it with the simple Desaturate function…

You will see that the Channel Mixer method yields more details and contrast in the clouds and the reflections especially.

Good luck!