How to use OBS Studio to Record or Live Stream Second LifeFiled under TECHNOLOGY, TUTORIALS, VIDEOS5I continue to get numerous questions about this so I thought I would do a detailed tutorial with a video so you guys can also get into Second Life vlogging and live streaming.Watch my video on YouTube for all the information: https://youtu.be/NLciu-Dt7Q4
Now, Motion Graphics Artists Can Set Up Templates with Elements That Can Be Easily Modified by Premiere Editors
Adobe updated its Creative Suite applications today with a workflow built around the new Essential Graphics panel in After Effects and Premiere Pro.
In After Effects, the Essential Graphics panel allows users to put the most important elements of a composition in one place, where they will be easier to update. Using a new Motion Graphics Template feature, the AE user can hand that composition off to a Premiere editor (via exporting it as a file or saving it to a shared Creative Cloud library), after specifying adjustment properties that should be available in Premiere such as text, color and opacity. That allows the editor to easily make adjustments to the composition without sending it back to AE for revisions.After Effects CC Essential Graphics panel
After opening the Essential Graphics panel in Premiere, the editor can easily change the color or background image used in a template, or can use controls to increment episode numbers, change graphics styles, or adjust the screen position and scale of elements. To help users get up to speed, 70 sample motion graphics templates will be installed with the new version of Creative Suite, Adobe Director of Video Product Management Bill Roberts said.The goal is to make it easier for Premiere users who have never dabbled in After Effects to adjust AE-style compositions without learning a whole new program. In order for the workflow to function, After Effects must be installed on the editor’s computer, but does not have to be licensed. “Premiere users without After Effects will be just fine using this,” said Adobe Senior Product Manager for Video Editing Patrick Palmer during a press briefing introducing the new workflow…..
Source: Adobe Adds New Essential Graphics Workflow to After Effects and Premiere – Studio Daily
Apple’s Live Photos are fun — they’ve definitely captured a few unexpected magical moments for me that standard stills would’ve missed. But for the most part, they live on your phone and stay within the confines of your apps. Seeing them floating around the web, especially on a desktop browser, has always been something of a rarity.
Tumblr kicked down that wall a bit last year by adding Live Photos to its web version and releasing a tool to let others do the same. When it came to an official Apple-approved method, however, there was nothing to be found.
That quietly changed this morning, with Apple updating its developer portal with a new tool they’re calling LivePhotosKit. It’s a JavaScript API built specifically to bring Live Photo playback support to your sites.
A new component to this year’s Spring 17 Art Show are Art Talks! These classes feature a variety of subjects, including SL photography, copyright and creative commons, how to market yourself as an artist and more! Below are speakers for these classes:
Art Talk #1: Second Life Photography Tips
Presenter: Strawberry Singh
Date & Time: Tuesday, April 4, 2017 @ 7 am slt
Location: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Water%20Haven/157/15/22
Art Talk #2: Copyright & Creative Commons
Presenter: Veruca Tammas
Date & Time: Tuesday, April 4, 2017 @ 5 pm slt
Location: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Water%20Haven/157/15/22
Art Talk #3: Beginner & Intermediate Photography Class
Presenter: Kaijah Chrome
Date & Time: Wednesday, April 5, 2017 @ 5pm slt
Location: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Water%20Haven/157/15/22
It’s come a long way since those days, and it has made that journey in no small part because our team here at Photofocus (particularly Rich) have decided to chip in and work with the software developers to make it even better.The combined efforts of the Athentech team and the Photofocus team have yielded a program by photographers FOR photographers. It’s slicker, more powerful, and faster. In my opinion, it is better in every way.
The new Face-Aware Exposure helps with automatic exposure fixes.If you get a chance to look at the new version the first thing you will notice is a new user interface. It’s preset driven but can be infinitely customized. It is friendly, faster and easier to use than ever and is no longer as portrait-centric as it once was.
Continue reading “Photofocus | Perfectly Clear Complete Version 3.0 – A Quick Look”
One of the unique things about Instagram Live is that the video has always been disappearing. After your live stream is over the content is deleted forever – unlike Facebook Live or Periscope which save your video so audiences can view it after the fact.
Until now.
The company just announced that broadcasters will have the option to save live videos to their phone after they are done streaming. It’s pretty simple – when your stream ends you’ll see a save button in the upper right corner – you tap it and the video gets saved to your camera roll.
Notably, these live videos still won’t be saved on Instagram – so viewers should still feel an urgency to watch since it will still be their only chance to see the stream.
That being said, the fact that broadcasters will have the option to keep their stream should increase the occasions that people decide to go live. Previously users may have been hesitant to go live during an important moment (and instead record with their camera app or Snapchat) – because they know they’d lose that footage forever. Now users can get the best of both worlds – they can share interesting live content with their audience while still having the option to save it forever if it’s a special moment.
The update will roll out today for iOS and Android phones.
Source: You can now save your Instagram Live streams to your camera roll | TechCrunch
If you’ve uploaded to Facebook, you may have noticed that Facebook does something funky with the pictures that you post. With 350+ million pictures being uploaded every day, it is no surprise that Facebook wants to save on bandwidth and costs.
The Problem
Photographers know that the images uploaded to Facebook tend to look like junk, especially after they’ve gone through hours of editing (or have spent money for someone to retouch their images). Even clients get a little crazy when the images they upload– those wonderful family pictures that they’ve received, turn out strange and degraded online.
Facebook resises your images when you upload them besides compressing them– which alone could typically kill the quality of images.
The Solution
Here’s the deal straight from Facebook’s Help Center:
We automatically resize and format your photos when you upload them to Facebook. To help make sure your photos appear in the highest possible quality, try these tips:
Resize your photo to one of the following supported sizes:
Regular photos: 720px, 960px or 2048px wide
Cover photos: 851px by 315px
To avoid compression when you upload your cover photo, make sure the file size is less than 100KB
Save your image as a JPEG with an sRGB color profile
Remember, you can batch resize in Lightroom with the File > Export command or choose File > Scripts > Image Processor to do the same in Photoshop.
Another option is to upload to an album in high quality. This option is a little buried but works well.
Also, change your settings on Facebook Mobile, so that your photos are uploaded in HD by default.
Digging around on Facebook’s Help Center has revealed some good guidance. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been on there and I’m sure they’ve heard numerous complaints about image quality since then, so they maybe have updated it earlier to me finding it!
Try it out! See if Facebook’s tips work and let me know in the comments if you’ve noticed any difference at all in the quality.
Source: Photofocus | Make Facebook Display Your Photos in the Highest Quality!
When you make edits in Lightroom, those changes are usually stored in your Lightroom catalog settings. That’s useful right? But not always. What happens if the catalog is lost or damaged? What about if you want to open a photo up in another application outside of Lightroom? Well there’s an easy change to fix this.XMP to the RescueAdobe uses XMP or Extensible Metadata Platform to hold information about the file. This is an open system and it makes your files more compatible with other apps. It also means you pictures are backed up.
Continue reading “Photofocus | Lr FAQ: How do I Backup my Lightroom Edits?”
Photoshop is a sort of neverending story: just when you think you know all its features and tricks, you discover something new. This great video highlights ten such features you might not be aware of. Even if you’ve proficient with Photoshop, chances are there’s a more efficient or effective way to do some things that you might not have heard of. For example, I only learned about calculations in the last few years and have found them especially useful for dealing with complex selections of hair (my eternal nemesis). Further features like color decontaminate and rotating the clone stamp tool can simply make it easier to take full control of your work to achieve cleaner results in less time. For me personally, learning to use color LUTs has saved me a ton of time in my landscape work and has also increased the consistency between my images, an important aspect of developing a recognizable personal style. My favorite trick, though, was the hidden sharpening view, which makes it very easy to quickly see just how much sharpening you’re applying and to take more granular control of the process…
Good news, pocket photographers: Your mobile device just became a much more powerful camera thanks to a new update to Lightroom Mobile. The app for iOS and Android now supports RAW HDR capture on newer devices, including the iPhone 6s and above, as well as the iPad Pro 9.7-inch; on Android, Galaxy S7, S7 Edge and Google Pixel users can join in the fun.
Why would you want this if your phone already shoots HDR images with the basic camera app? Because RAW files preserve a lot more information about light and color captured in an image, and Lighroom’s built-in camera snaps a group of three automatically, including one it considers overexposed, an underexposed version, and one right in the middle where it deems exposure balanced overall.
Continue reading “Lightroom Mobile gains RAW HDR capture on iOS and Android | TechCrunch”
Kultivate Contributor Myra Wildmist is back with another SL Photography tutorial. This time she discusses how to use a 300 mm telephoto lens.
In real life, a telephoto lens is often used to in situations where it’s difficult to get close to your subject, such as sports photography or wildlife photo.
Getting close to your subject in Second Life, isn’t usually an issue. The likelihood of being mauled by a tiger in SL is fairly low.
That doesn’t mean a telephoto lens doesn’t have uses in SL. A telephoto lens still gives your photographs that zoomed-in-from-a-distance appearance, which yields an appealing, real-life effect, especially if your subject is an action scene or animals.
For my 300mm lens, I’m using the specifications from the Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 300mm. Open your Phototools (Alt-P). Select the DoF/Glow tab. Check the box by Enable Depth of Field (DoF). Use the following settings:
View angle – .143
FOV- 8.2 degrees
Foc Length – 300
f-number – 2.8-22 (Recommended range.)
View angle, FOV (Field of View) and Foc Length (Focal Length) are the important settings. These three settings “attach” the lens to your camera. Once they’re set, there’s no reason to adjust them, again, until you want to return to your default.
View angle is the the FOV expressed as radians.
The f-number controls the depth of field effect. Lower numbers yield more bokeh, blur.The range of 2.8-22 is a physical limitation of the real world lens. It’s just a recommended range in SL. If you want to mirror the effect you get with the Nikon lens, stay in this range; however, feel free to go outside of the f-number range if it fits your purposes.
WARNING: Do not fuss with View angle, FOV, or Foc Length, once you set them for a lens. These parameters are all dependent on each other and should correspond to the specs of the lens you want to use.
Settings for other popular lenses can be found in my previous article, Simulating Popular Lenses in Phototools.
Sample photos taken with a 300mm lens:
A quick way to resize several photos for a project is with Photoshop’s Image Processor script. It works very well when you need to convert several JPEG files to PSD or TIFF. It can also be used to process multiple Camera Raw files with the same setting. The greatest benefit is the ability to quickly size photos as part of the command.
Choose > File > Scripts > Image Processor.
Choose the images you want to process. You can use open images or navigate to a folder to select specific images.
Select a location to save the processed files. Click the radio button next to Select Folder, and then click the Select Folder button. Click the New Folder button and create a new folder on your media drive called Processed. Highlight the folder and click Choose.
Introduction
Open source photo editor GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the best free alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It offers
one-click tools and filters to give your pictures an instant boost, as well as advanced settings that give you full manual control over levels, curves, saturation, and much more.GIMP also comes with a superb set of user-created extensions, but you can make it even more powerful by installing plugins originally designed for Adobe Photoshop. There are several Photoshop plugin formats, including 8BF, 8BA, 8BI and 8LY, all of which should work fine in GIMP. Photoshop Actions (ATN files), however, are essentially macros that perform a series of operations automatically, and therefore aren’t compatible…
Adobe Illustrator is not as well-known as its eponymous cousin Photoshop, but it’s far from a niche application. Illustrator is a piece of vector graphics software that’s better suited for creating certain types of digital artwork than Photoshop, which works in raster images. Here’s a primer on when and why to use Illustrator – and its best alternatives, if you don’t want a monthly bill from Adobe.
Continue reading “The best alternatives to Adobe Illustrator”
Finding free and legal images to accompany your web content has never been difficult, thanks to Creative Commons. The nonprofit organization offers copyright licenses that creators can use to share their work more broadly, while putting them in control of where and how their work can be used, how it should be attributed and more. Now the organization is making it easier to access this content with a new search engine, CC Search, launched into beta this morning.
Lightroom is to photo processing as Microsoft Word is to word processing. You use MS Word to read or edit a word document. It doesn’t store your document files inside Word—it stores your documents in a folder you select. You can take a document file and open it on a different computer that has the same version of MS Word installed.
Applying this Concept to LightroomHere’s how the “concept” of Word and Lightroom are similar. Simply put, Lightroom is a photo processor and image organizer program. It allows the viewing, organizing and retouching of a large number of digital images. It does not store your photos inside the program. I need to repeat that again. It does not store your photos inside the program. Your photos are stored on your hard drive in a folder you selected—either using Lightroom to import them or your operating system’s file management. Just like Word, you can use Lightroom on another computer as long as you have the files you need—a catalog and the images.
Great tutorial for you Blender users:
This week is not a Python breakdown week. It’s just the code because my brain is still recovering from Scheme tutorials. And I really wanted to make a functional (or semi-functional) batch UV layout exporter. The script below does a blanket Smart UV Project for all selected objects and stashes the resultant UV layouts into a specified folder.
View original post 310 more words
Using Photoshop to edit your images is one of the simplest ways of doing so. However, it is worth considering the way you can make and save your changes. It is possible to edit your images directly to the original file – what is called destructive editing. Once you’ve done that and saved it, there’s no way back to the original image as it’s been saved over. It’s a good option whether you think you won’t need to make any further changes. How can you be sure of that, though? What if you or your clients change their minds? What if you make a mistake?
Since its version 3.0, Photoshop has offered the option of doing non-destructive editing (sometimes called NDE in short). This is the answer for your further changes! This method is possible due to the feature named layers. Instead of saving your edits directly to your original image, non-destructive editing allows you to save it in different layers from the original. Thus, both edited and original images are saved separately. Therefore, you and/or your clients are free to go back to the original image whenever you feel like doing.Experts say that working with non-destructive editing gives you more flexibility besides allowing you to keep the original image resolution intact. This method is not only adjustment layers, though. There are plenty of different ways in Photoshop it can be performed depending on the desired outcome of an image.
You can: duplicate the background layer (this will keep the adjustment layers intact. Letting you start afresh), use smart filters (letting you free to add filters to an image and undo them whenever you change your mind), use layer masks instead of the eraser tool (using a layer mask you can hide off parts of an image rather than using the eraser tool to permanently remove parts it), dodge and burn non-destructively (used to lighten and darken areas of an image), use the clone stamp non-destructively (used to remove bits and pieces you may not want in an image), to name a few.So far you can see many good reasons to use non-destructive adjustments. They can prevent you from start from scratch whenever you change your mind, or even make a mistake. Whether both a destructive and a non-destructive adjustment can lead you to the same results, which makes you wonder “when should I use destructive adjustments?” This kind of adjustment (the destructive one) is very important if you want to keep your work unaltered whenever you work on a shared computer, for instance.
A raster image is created by using pixels in different colors to form it. While a vector image is formed by paths with vectors (mathematical formulas) which are responsible for telling the paths their shapes and colors they are bordered and filled by. The major difference between raster and vector images can be noticed whenever the images are enlarged. Whether a raster image is enlarged, it will lose quality and become blurry. However, when you enlarge (to any size) a vector image, it will keep the same appearance as before due to its mathematical formulas. There are many common raster file extensions (.jpg/.jpeg, .png, .gif, .tiff, .bmp, .exif, .raw, and .webp) and vector file extensions (.ai, .eps, .svg, .vml, and .cgm)….
Source: Working With Images – Site Title
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