It’s autumn and the leaves have transformed from green to rich and vibrant orange, red, yellow and brown. No one can deny that a bold change in color makes a difference to how we feel and react. Whether it’s hair, a new suit, the living room walls or the latest email blast, color choice affects the audience. Enduring clichés hammer home the strength of color as a communications medium - green with envy, paint the town red, back in black, feeling blue and pretty in pink to name a few...

Color can set the mood of just about anything to be fresh, classic, exciting, calming or as zany as you may require for whatever reason imaginable. Set aside your inhibitions and try out a new hue. Offer your clients multiple palettes to choose from and savor the opportunity to go beyond off-white boundaries in advertising and direct marketing. The power of color is at your fingertips, and putting it to use can revive a stale creative or an all too tired Web site in need of a facelift. Change. Change is good.

I recently read that orange inspires creativity. I look forward to creating great expressions on this year’s pumpkins. Happy Halloween!

Best regards,
Kim Dixon
President and CEO

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1. Calibrating your screen is the start of obtaining predictable results. Before performing critical tonal or color corrections to your images, you need to use the Adobe Gamma screen calibration program to optimize your display settings.

2. Don’t like your last image change? Then undo it. Use the Ctrl + Z keyboard shortcut to undo your last action. Use Ctrl + Alt + Z to sequentially undo multiple steps.

3. Add an even border around a picture. Instead of working out exactly how much the new dimensions of a picture will be, try ticking the Relative Button in the Canvas Size dialog (Image > Canvas Size), then input the size of the extra width and height you want to add to the picture.

4. Ensure that you capture only the pixels you need. Think of what the end product of your digital process will be, and use this as a basis to determine the number of pixels you need to capture; after all, if you are making a poster, you will definitely need a larger digital file than if your goal is to produce a postage stamp.

5. Good exposure is the first step in making great pictures. Getting your exposure right, either in-camera or when scanning, will help ensure the best possible images. Use whatever exposure features are available to ensure that delicate shadow and highlight details are always captured.

6. Make the Healing Brush behave more like the Clone Stamp tool. By switching the Healing brush’s blending mode to Replace, the tool behaves more like the Clone Stamp tool. In this mode, the sampled area is not blended with the pixels below but rather pasted over them.

7. Always preview filter changes at 100%. When applying filters, always make sure that your image (or preview thumbnail) is displaying at 100% or greater so that you can check the results more fully before pressing the OK button.

8. Increase / decrease brush size on the fly. Increase the size of a brush by clicking the right-hand square brackets ] and decrease the brush size using the left-hand square brackets [ .

9. Name that layer. To rename a layer from the default name supplied by Photoshop, click on the text of the layer in the layer palette; this will enable you to enter a new title.

10. Mastering Selecting techniques will help you produce professional results. Often it is the quality of the selections used in editing and enhancing techniques that determines how professional the results look. Practice the many selecting techniques available in Photoshop to improve your skills.

Bio
Philip Andrews is an international best-selling imaging author. He currently has 11 titles to his name, including Photoshop CS - Essential Skills Series, Adobe Photoshop Elements - A Visual Introduction to Digital Imaging, and Advanced Photoshop Elements for Digital Photographers. He has also written over 100 articles, published in more than 15 magazines. Philip is an accomplished teacher who over the last 16 years has lectured on photography, digital imaging and multimedia at schools, colleges and universities in the UK and Australia.

As a subscriber to this newsletter, you might know that Hemera sells subscriptions to two different online image services – AbleStock and Hemera Image Express. AbleStock offers super high-resolution images (28+ MB) and caters to the creative professional who needs large images for serious print work. Hemera Image Express offers low- and medium-resolution images (1-15 MB) to Web designers and people with more modest print needs. Both customer segments download images from our servers every day in order to fulfill their creative ideas. We recently decided to take a look at our image download frequencies and present the most popular choices to our readers. This is Part 1 of 2 in the series “Our Most Popular Images” for 2004.

With its close to 80,000 high-quality, high-resolution images, AbleStock.com offers something to almost everybody. It’s hard to say exactly why the images below are more popular than others – are they more versatile or inspirational? Who knows? We have divided them into five categories: stock photos, stock photo composites, Photo-Objects images, raster illustrations and vector illustrations.

Next month, we’ll take a look at Hemera Image Express and our favorite low- and medium-resolution images.

1. Stock photos
Stock photos are the number one category in download numbers at AbleStock. Figures 1-4 feature our top four downloads in 2004: a signpost, a family of three, a group of business people in an office, and a landscape with grass and clouds. If there’s a pattern there, it’s not obvious to me… Click on each image to see a larger version.

2. Stock photo composites
Stock photo composites are layered images, consisting of two or more images and/or Photo-Objects images. These are often used as conceptual illustrations. In fact, if you search for the keyword “conceptual” on AbleStock.com, you will see many more examples of stock photo composites. Click on each image to see a larger version.

3. Photo-Objects images
A Photo-Objects image is a photographic object with the background removed. This can be very useful if you want to avoid the typical square box of a photograph. Objects (or people) are often photographed from several different angles, which makes it easy to find just the right image for your project. Again, if there’s a pattern in this selection, it’s pretty well hidden… Click on each object to see a larger version.

4. Raster illustrations
AbleStock is renowned for its large collection of stock photos, but we also offer raster illustrations, which are illustrations originally created in vector-based applications like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. The final image is exported as a high-resolution bitmap image. Raster illustrations often have a very specific, hand-drawn quality. This top-4 selection seems to have a distinct business theme. Click on each illustration to see a larger version.

5. Vector illustrations
Vector illustrations have one great advantage over bitmap images – they can be resized without any loss of quality. A bitmap image consists of a certain number of pixels, and if you try to enlarge it, you might end up with artifacts such as jagged edges and other problems. Not so with vector illustrations. A vector file consists of mathematical descriptions of curves, and can be stretched indefinitely. These images have a traditional clip art feel, a category more associated with Hemera Image Express than AbleStock. But more about that in next month’s issue of Hemera News and Part 2 of this article series.

Bio
Mats Lindeberg is Communications Manager at Hemera and the Editor of Hemera News.

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