What's going on?

I haven't been blogging for a week now however few things happened since my last post. Some good and some bad ones.

The bad is that my camera is broken :( Yup, I'll save you details but something is wrong with a viewfinder. All is blurry when you look through it. I've just sent it to Nikon and I have to wait...

But I can't wait to long because on 6th of November I'm going to Japan for my holidays! Which is a really gooood thing. I can't wait and I'll definitely write something more about that in the next few days.

So the another good thing is I'm probably going to buy a new camera. Although I don't want to do that so badly ;-) I have no choice There's no sense to go to Japan without it! Actually this is the main reason I'm going there :-)

Honestly I wanted to get myself a new camera anyway but maybe just not now. Anyway it's going to speed up the process. So I'll keep you posted which camera and why I'm going to buy. Probably I'll do it in the same way as I did with the wide angle lens. If you haven't read about it you can take a look at these posts:

http://photocrumble.blogspot.com/2010/07/wide-angle-lens.html
http://photocrumble.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-baby-has-arrived.html
http://photocrumble.blogspot.com/2010/08/sigma-review.html

Meanwhile I will fill the blog gap with some photos taken few months back, some Photoshop tips and things like that.

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Photoshop Top 40

A year ago Lynda.com started very nice video series called "Photoshop Top 40". They released 40 videos with the best Photoshop features ranked from 1 to 40. Some of them are well known but it's really worth watching to refresh your memory and learn something new! Below I placed an introduction so see yourself.

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I'm back!

Oh, didn't I mention I was going somewhere? Well, it's only a long weekend in Poland which was great but unfortunately I had to leave my camera back home, so no photos for the next 7 days :/ Sorry guys, I know it wont be an easy thing to live with but I promise, I'll catch up :)

So in the next couple of days I'll write something about gear, maybe some Photoshop tips etc... we will see.

Another thing I wanted to do is to share some photos I took in the past. So today few shoots I especially like. Take a look at the Howth boat :-)

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Photoshop Tip - scratch disk is full

Have you ever had a Photoshop message “could not perform this action because of a program error” (something like that) or “scratch disk is full” and didn’t know what is going on?

Scratch disk is just your hard drive which Photoshop uses temporarily... something like virtual memory. If you get this kind of message you might run out of a disk space. You can have this kind of problem when you work on big files (like posters for print) or on multiple hi-quality photos at the same time. You can deal with it in three ways:

1. Create some disk space on your C: drive (where Photoshop is probably installed) by removing some applications, games or your porn collection ;-)

If you can’t do so...

2 ...and have more than one partition go to Photoshop and from top menu select Edit -> Preferences -> Performance. Then tick two or more of your partitions and click Ok. That should solve the problem.

But if you have just one small hard drive I’d suggest you to...

3 ...just buy an external one. Prices are very decent right now and it will make your workflow stresless and much easier.

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Photoshop Tip - Actions

Some of you probably know this Photoshop feature very well but if you don't... well, just keep reading. In online photo printing post I helped you save some money, now I'll save your precious time!

Actions may be use in many different ways but I'll use an example to illustrate how you can automate your work in Photoshop. So let's say you took 1000 photos on holidays and really don't have time to work on each photo. Moreover your girlfriend/boyfriend wants to upload them on Facebook (today!) and your parents are coming over on the Sundays dinner. You just want to make jpgs smaller in size (for web), turn up contrast a little bit and let's say do a default sharpening. It would take ages right? Not necessary.

Here's what you have to do:

1. Run Photoshop. It doesn't matter which version you use.
2. Open first photo from your holiday collection.
3. Go to Windows from top menu in Photoshop and click Actions to open Actions panel
4. On the bottom of the panel you'll see a small icon looking like a document. If you roll over it should say "Create new action". Just click it, name it and click "record".
5. Now all operations you do on your opened image will be recorded. So as an example you can do the following:
Image -> Image Size -> Resolution to 72dpi (if it's a hi-res jpg) -> set width to 900px (horizontal photo) -> Ok
Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast -> set Contrast to let's say +30 -> Ok
Filter -> Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask -> set Amount to 50% (should work fine with most of the images) -> Ok
6. Now go to your Actions panel and click stop icon on the bottom left and that's it. You have your action recorded.

And now it's the best part:

1. Go to Bridge and open folder with your holidays pictures.
2. Select all images inside it (CTRL + A)
3. From top menu go to: Tools -> Photoshop -> Image Processor... and a new window in Photoshop will be opened.
4. Now you have few options. You can select location on a hard drive to save your images, set quality of jpgs etc. The most important is step number four. Just tick "Run Action" box and choose an action you've recorded just a couple minutes ago.
5. Hit "Run" on the top right and Voila!

It's going to take a while but Photoshop will do all the work for you. You can go and relax, or even call your parents that photos are ready for Sunday.

It's of course up to you how to use actions. You can record as many actions as you want - especially those you'll be using often. In this example I also used Bridge but you can use your recorded actions in Photoshop by clicking "Play" icon on your Actions panel. It's that simple.

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