Oops!

BillyBoy wrote on 10/20/2003, 7:17 PM
File under how easy it is to make a mistake:

I just opened Photoshop and silly me I spilled some coffee, not a lot, enough to go get a paper towel. So call it fate. I have Photoshop open but no file open yet, so you see just the default gray background. As I'm dabbing up the spill, the screen color catches my attention. It seems the gray has just a bit of red tint to it. It shouldn't. I grab for my ViewSonic monitor manual for my VG175 LCD.

I'm thumbing through it to see if I messed something up and I see this:

Preset 1 Adds red to the screen image for warmer whites and richer red.

Preset 2 Adds blue to screen image for cooler white, good for offices
with fluorescent lights.

User adjustable; adjustments for red, green, blue.

Of course originally I had the 3rd option set. Somehow without noticing this week while adjusting something else on the monitor I somehow selected Preset 1.

Explains why for the last week everything looked a little too red on the computer monitor. And I was starting to wonder why I'm using the Photoshop tool color balance and always going toward Cyan. Now I know why. ROTFLMAO!

Comments

farss wrote on 10/20/2003, 7:21 PM
Don't panic Billy, I,m certain you can hang the appropriate gel in front of the monitor to correct the problem :)
kentwolf wrote on 10/20/2003, 8:25 PM
>>...I just opened Photoshop...

Question:

Can you tell me, is Photoshop really *that* critical for video use.

I do use stills from time-to-time, but I have been able to accomplish what I need with Paint Shop Pro 8...which is dramatically easier to use. I'm not stupid, but Photoshop for the uninitiated is very cumbersome...and VERY expensive.

Just curious as to your opinion...

Thanks.
BillyBoy wrote on 10/20/2003, 8:39 PM
Short answer: No. For most things Paint Shop Pro offers enough features. Then there is GIMP which also is very good and you can't beat the price. Totally free since it was originall written for Linux as open source. It has been ported to Windows.

A lot use Photoshop mainly because they've used it for years. Like me. Like Vegas, you kind of get comfortable with it. It can be expensive. I got my first copy as a freebie with my first scanner many years ago. I don't know if they bundle it yet or not. Anyhow I've been going to upgrade route skipping every other version or so.

Photoshop, like Vegas is one of those rare applications that works well both at a basic level and if you invest the time in either you can do some amazing things. So it really boils down to want to want to do.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 10/20/2003, 8:42 PM
Photoshop isn't critical for video use. Any picture editing program would do, but photoshop is an "industry standared."

I'm buying Corel painter 8 this January. It's about $250, but I can upgrade from my old v5 for under $150. It doesn't do as much picture editing as photoshop does, but it does allow me to edit/create AVI's and it's a picture creation program.

A photoshop like program that isn't bad is Gimp. It's freeware! :)

BB: that reminds me of the time when I thought my monitor was dead: i turned it on and there was no picture. After 2 hours of panicing, i realized i accidently turned the brightness and contrast all the way down (it was an old monitor with knobs). :)
rmack350 wrote on 10/20/2003, 11:21 PM
I use photoshop every day for much of the day. It has a lot of great tools for batch processing and recorded actions. I think you can also restore a specific thing you've undone without restoring the in between steps. Never used it but I think that's one of the things the history palette can do.

I've also used Gimp on both the windows and Linux sides. It's very capable but lacks a lot of the production tools I like in Photoshop. Also, I don't think it uses screen real estate quite as well. Still, it's very capable and free. There's also Film-Gimp which is supposed to do a lot of stuff directly for film. It requires compiling and I just never got around to it.

On the color front in Photoshop, ctrl+y puts you into "Proof colors" mode. Suddenly your colors are off because you were flailing at the keyboard and you're not sure what happened. I've done it enough times now to know what it is but there've been a few times when I was just completely stumped.

Rob Mack
Spot|DSE wrote on 10/20/2003, 11:25 PM
Photoshop isn't critical, but can be VERY useful. For measuring colors/matching colors, doing tutorials where color comparisons need to be exceptionally accurate, it's great. For just creating titles, graphics....Heck, most freeware can output tga, png, and jpg, which are the important formats for Vegas. Ulead's Photo Impact is a GREAT tool for video, as it's got all the tricks that Pshop has for 89.00, plus has lotsa little things that pshop doesn't have.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 10/20/2003, 11:46 PM
Hey rmack, you may be interested to know, the way Gimp is setup is the same as for Photshop on NON windows platforms (SGI/IRIX, MAC). It's windows scattered all around. Wierd, huh?
BillyBoy wrote on 10/21/2003, 12:02 AM
Another low priced one is Photo Brush. Someone else mentioned it here awhile back and I checked it out. Rather nice, but a little limited in features. Still nice for basic image touch top, etc.. Also ACDSee comes in several flavors. Its mainly a thumbnail/browser thing, but it has a bunch of tools and don't cost much. There's really a lot of good lower priced graphic applications out there in the $25-99 range. You don't really need Photoshop, but if you have it, you kind of get a little snobbish. Its still the king for photo retouching. ;-)
rmack350 wrote on 10/21/2003, 12:06 AM
Well, Linux too. Maybe I haven't used the most latest and greatest. I had seen on the Gimp site that this was something they were addressing.

I just didn't find that the tool boxes fit together very well.

My linux box is all packed up right now because I'm getting ready to move. It'll be a few weeks...

Rob
BillyBoy wrote on 10/21/2003, 12:49 AM
That's one gripe I have with GIMP. All the tool boxes and what not float freely so your desktop can get awfully messy pretty quick.
aboukirev wrote on 10/21/2003, 7:33 AM
Been using PhotoImpact a lot. But it has a single most critical problem to me: while it has nice vector tools, it just cannot save vector path to the proper vector file format (.wmf or .ai). Considering that Cool3d (also Ulead product) requires vector data in .wmf or .ai and does not have its own facilities to do vectors properly (i.e. no rulers, rather limited), that's a shame. You can still save a regular image and restore/convert to vector in Cool3d (be prepared for a vector path with a bunch of extra points), but Ulead recommends Photoshop or Illustrator for vector paths. I e-mailed to them a couple of times with suggestions. Still no luck with PhotoImpact 8.
Otherwise PhotoImpact and Cool3d are great companion products to Vegas.

Alexei
johnmeyer wrote on 10/21/2003, 11:30 AM
I use Ulead Photoimpact. They gave me a copy years ago when I did some consulting for them. It was far faster and required far less memory than Photoshop or Corel's Paint program. I don't like bloated products, which is why I've stayed away from Adobe. The one regret on this decision is that many plugins do NOT work with Ulead's Photoimpact. Also, the healing brush in Photoshop would be very useful for my restoration work.