TNT3: More Photoshop Secrets for the Web

Joel Pattison: My name is Joel Pattison. I work for the College of William & Mary and I'm Associate Director of Creative Services. We are located in Williamsburg, Virginia. Just to give you a little bit of background really quick about our institution: it's a public institution, we have about 5,500 undergrads, and it's the second-oldest institution of higher education in America founded in 1693 right after... not right after Harvard, but, you know, they were first.

I work for Creative Services, which is a new unit at William & Mary. We put it together this January. Susan Evans, some of you may know her, she has presented here in the past, she is the Director of Creative Services. And this is really the College's first integrated marketing and communication organization.

It came from combining the Web team and the Publications office, so we have print designers, Web designers, multimedia folks, project managers, photographers, and Web developers all working for us in one office, so we can take communication projects from beginning to end in-house. So like we're working on an iPhone app right now, we can do the design, the illustration, the project management, and the technical implementation all within our team.

It's a pretty good setup. Like I said, we've only been in existence eight months so we're still kind of experimenting and fine-tuning. Maybe next year we'll do a presentation on how that's going. But this year I am one of the Photoshop gurus in Creative Services, so I'm going to be talking about Photoshop.

Again, as they'd mentioned, not everything... Some of the stuff I'm going to show you today is specific to CS5, but there's a lot of stuff that's not specific to CS5. So if you don't have CS5 yet, don't leave; hopefully there will be a lot of good stuff in here for you even if you haven't made the upgrade yet. If you have made the upgrade, if you're thinking about it, hopefully you'll get to pick up a few things that Creative Suite 5 can do.

And I'm hoping to leave a few minutes at the end for Question & Answer, so hopefully we'll get some time to catch up then.

All right. I'm going to start with what is my favorite part of Photoshop, which is Adobe Camera Raw, starting with Photoshop CS3.

You can open JPEG images in Camera Raw. You don't actually have to shoot in raw to use Camera Raw. And it's a pretty powerful piece of software. To open a JPEG in Camera Raw, you just go to File, Open. Well, mine's automatically set to Camera Raw because I use it so much.

Normally, what you would see when you click on a file is it's going to say 'Format - JPEG'. You just change this to 'Format - Camera Raw', and click 'Open'. And basically Camera Raw has a dialogue box that lets you make lots of edits and changes before you actually take something into Photoshop.

So this is the Camera Raw dialogue box. This photo I snapped at William & Mary's orientation. Colonial Williamsburg did a special thing for our freshman orientation this year. This was taken right at dusk. And as you can see, there's some problems with it. Hopefully you can see on the screen all right. It's a pretty dark photo and there's some problems with the white balance. So that's what we're going to work on first.

I don't know how many of you use the Histogram up here. It's basically showing you the exposure. So as I play with this exposure tab, you'll see the Histogram moves. This little triangle in the top corner is an exposure warning thing. So if you click on this, it tells you when you start to lose detail because you're overexposing.

So let's keep sliding this up. See all the red that's starting on my screen? That means that's overexposed. I'm losing detail there because I've taken the exposure too high. So I'm going to take this back down so I don't lose any detail from exposure. So there, I'm losing detail. Pure white.

Here I'm not losing much detail.

But it's still kind of a dark photo, so I'm going to use something called Fill Light which basically only brightens the darkest parts of the image. It does not affect the bright parts of the image. So you'll see, as I use it, the shutters and the boys' shirts will not change very much, but the dark background will.

[Pause]

Joel Pattison: This photo's got some bluish tones, so we're going to change the white balance. I often do... I let Photoshop try. I do Auto-White Balance, but it often overdoes it. Actually there it looks pretty good. Sometimes I have to mess with it after I do Auto. I might take this down a little bit. It might be a little too yellowy there.

Something else, once you play with the white balance, the photo can start to look kind of flat. So if you take up the blacks, you get some of those rich, dark tones back with the blacks. That's what that's for. You don't need much in the way of blacks, usually. If you take it way up to like 20, you don't get a very good photo.

And then Clarity and Vibrance. Clarity is basically kind of a sharpening tool. It pops the mid-tones. And Vibrance is a very magical tool. It basically saturates the colors of the photo, but it ignores skin tone. So if you've ever saturated a photo of people, a lot of times their faces turn orange, their skin turns orange, they look like Oompa Loompas.

Vibrance will saturate everything except it ignores the skin tones, so you will get the greens and the blues. Everything starts to saturate, but not the skin tones. This photo actually doesn't need much.

Now when I take it into Photoshop, the default is set to 'Open - Image'. When I do that, I can't go back to Raw. If I hold down the 'Shift' key, I can see 'Open - Object'. That will open it as a smart object, and it allows me to go back into Camera Raw later if I want to.

Audience 1: [05:37 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: 'Shift', yes.

So now that we're in Photoshop, we can just apply all the effects that we might apply to this in Photoshop. If I want to take this photo back to Raw, I just click on this little box in the Layers palette, and it takes me back to Raw. And I can put adjustment layers on top of this, do all the things you would normally do in Photoshop.

Let me give you another example. This is a more powerful example of Fill Light. I shot this on the bridge last night before making it over to the Contemporary Arts Museum. And this will really show you how wonderful Fill Light is.

So you see you're getting all that detail with the bridge. But if you had used the exposure slide, what's going to happen is the sky is just going to go to white. So let's go back to normal exposure, bring up the fill light, and the recovery brings the sky back in. The recovery darkens the brightest parts of the photo. It's kind of the exact opposite of Fill Light.

[Pause]

Joel Pattison: I showed you all some of the stuff last year. I just thought I would give a quick repeat for anyone who didn't see that, who didn't catch my presentation last year, maybe doesn't have an excellent memory and didn't remember it 365 days later.

All right. The next thing, this is specific to CS5, and that is Noise Reduction. I don't know if you ever tried to use Noise Reduction in Photoshop before. People joked that it didn't even really work. It was just a slider that did absolutely nothing. They just kind of put it in there for you to play with. But Noise Reduction in CS5, especially in Camera Raw, works really, really well. So this photo, I'm going to zoom in and you're going to see some noise on it.

One thing before we get to that, in Camera Raw, if you pay attention to this top bar, there's some tools up here. This is a straightening tool. All you have to do is click on that and draw what should be a straight line. And when you take it into Photoshop, it fixes it.

I'm sorry, it's right up here. It's this little arrow with the angle. Straightening tool.

Audience 2: [07:53 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: I'm sorry?

Audience 2: You need to draw a line?

Joel Pattison: Yes.

Audience 1: [07:59 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: So I'll take this into Photoshop. So if I zoom in, you can see there's a lot of noise in this photo. Hopefully you all can see that on the screen. I don't know if it's kind of hard to see in a projector, especially in the back of the room, but there's definitely some noise here.

So I'm going to duplicate this image so that we can have something to compare it to... and go back to Camera Raw by double-clicking on the smart object in the Layers panel. And then on this detail of the little triangles tab, there's something called 'Noise Reduction - Luminance'. And all you have to do is amazingly easy: you slide this up. And hopefully this will be impressive.

So I don't know if you can see. There's the original. There's the edited version. If you couldn't, you can see a little better.

[Pause]

So you can see, it got rid of a lot of the noise in that photo. Can you all see that? I'm sorry, it's kind of... I know showing noise in a projector is kind of a challenging thing.

So, yeah, that is in Raw, on the details tab, Luminance. And if you start to lose detail... because that's the other problem with Noise Reduction, right, sometimes things get fuzzy... you can bring up this Luminance detail.

I don't know, like I said, how well this is showing up, but I will promise you this is actual real noise reduction in Photoshop, I think, for the first time here in Camera Raw CS5. So if you have CS5, this might be worth the upgrade right here.

All right. One of the things I said in the book I was going to talk about is HDR. How many people are familiar with HDR? OK. How many people have heard of HDR? Same group.

[Laughter]

HDR is kind of a new... well, it's not new. It's actually not new, but it's becoming very trendy in photography. It stands for High Dynamic Range. That's not really important. But it's basically a way of taking different exposures of photographs and blending them together.

I don't know how much all of you know about photography, but cameras, even the most expensive cameras, do not have the same light range as the human eye.

This is a photo I took in Rhode Island recently. When I took it, I could see the boat and I could see the sky. The camera can only see one or the other. So this is a really dark exposure. You can see the nice sunburst and the clouds. The boat's gone, though, because it's so dark.

So I adjusted my camera, and now you can see the boat, but the sky is gone. And this is the problem with all digital cameras. You can spend $10,000, you're going to have this problem. It's just the way cameras are made.

And of course you can also take kind of the middle-range picture where you can kind of see the boat and kind of see the sky, but really they both kind of look like crap. This isn't really a very good solution.

So HDR takes these three exposures, dark, medium, bright, and it combines them into something like this.

[Laughter]

Joel Pattison: So this is the dark. So basically the way you take HDR is you have to take three exposures with your camera. Cameras can be set up for bracketing... every camera is a little different... or you can simply just adjust your exposure. Say, dark, take a shot. Medium, take a shot. Bright, take a shot. Bracketing is different on every camera. I won't go into it. You can just Google it for your camera and they'll probably tell you how to do it.

So basically you take three shots: the dark shot, the medium shot, and the bright shot. And then you put them in Photoshop, and you get this. Hopefully.

Audience 3: You guys need a tripod for that too?

Joel Pattison: You can use a tripod. It's recommended if you shoot really high-speed so that it stays pretty close. So if you bracket, you're basically telling the camera, "Automatically take a dark, a medium, and a bright."

So you set it on high speed, you say, 'Take me three shots, a dark, a medium, and a light.' You just hold down the shutter, it goes boom-boom-boom, it takes all three. And Photoshop is actually pretty good at figuring out, OK, here's the edge of the boat, they don't line up perfectly, but... Yeah.

Audience 4: [12:23 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: I have done that before. In fact, I have an example of it. It yellows it, it kind of fuzzes it. It says, 'You didn't really do this right. This isn't three separate exposures.' And if you just click 'OK' it does it anyway.

[Laughter]

Joel Pattison: And I can show you the example of that. You'll get better results with this because you get a lot of noise when you do all that brightening and darkening in Raw. But, yes, you can go back. I've done it before.

Audience 4: [12:46 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: No, that's all right.

So to do this, you need to start with Bridge. There's also another application that can do it. I assume everyone here has Photoshop, but there's one called Photomatix Pro. It's about $90. So if you don't have CS5 or you don't have Photoshop at all, Photomatix can do this as well. There it is, there at the bottom.

So in Bridge, I just go to my three photos. I select my three photos that I want to merge into HDR. From the Tools menu, I select 'Photoshop', 'Merge to HDR Pro'. 'Merge to HDR' was in CS4 but it didn't work really well. CS5 made it a whole lot better. So you can do HDR in CS4, but they made it a whole lot better in CS5. So it does...

[Pause]

Audience 5: [13:49 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: The only way I know is from Bridge.

Oh. The question was, can you make the selection straight from Photoshop when you have to go through Bridge? The only way I know is to go through Bridge. I don't love Bridge, either, but, you know.

[Laughter]

There's a bunch of different ways you can do HDR. You may have seen those really surrealistic shots, like the Crazy Sky and things like that. Those are HDR photos. So there's kind of two styles. There's like the Photo Realistic style, which is what I tried to do with this boat, and there's kind of a more Surrealist CGI look.

So you just have to play with the settings. Photoshop has these built-in kind of default settings. They don't work great... like here's our surrealistic.

[Laughter]

Joel Pattison: I'm not sure I'm going to hang that on my wall. But it's sometimes nice to start with one of the pre-sets.

Let's start with this top box, Edge Glow. The Edge Glow happens where the darks meet the brights. So you'll get this kind of glowing area. You see that? Where the dark areas meet the bright areas. And this Radius and Strength box control that glowing radius around the darks and brights.

So in this case I'm going to take down the strength because I think that doesn't... I don't want the boat to look like it's radioactive.

The Gamma just affects the overall darkness and brightness of the photo I've shown you. Exposure does exactly what you would expect it to do. The Details, Shadow and Highlight also do pretty similar... Details is kind of a sharpening tool. Shadow and Highlight deal with the shadows and highlights of the photo.

One thing I've done, too, if you can't get it right here, because it's still kind of primitive even though they've upgraded this, is if you can get it close, then you can save it as a JPEG and bring it into Photoshop and make all the adjustments you would make to a normal photo. So if you can't get it to look quite right from these sliders, you can do it that way.

It looks dark on your screen, so I'm going to bring up... And then it basically just merges them together and creates a JPEG. Mine has been acting weird, so let's hope it does what I...

Let me show you that file that I created using this gentleman's question, which was, can you take an existing photo where you only have one exposure and create a dark one using Camera Raw, create a medium one with Camera Raw, and create a bright one with Camera Raw?

And I think... No. I might not be able to find it. Well, maybe at the end we can catch up. But, yeah, it does work. Like I said, it just fuzzes a few and says we shouldn't be doing this.

OK. This is... Going back to Photoshop. This time we don't actually have to use Raw. Or actually... Yeah.

This is an HDR image. I created the Wren Building, which is William & Mary's principal building. And the point of this photo is you can see there's some lens distortion here.

This is a really old building, but the building is not sagging like this. You see how this brick line on the building would be straight, not bowed like that? That's distortion from the lens because I shot it with a really wide-angle lens standing right under the building.

So under the Filter menu, we have a Lens Correction tool. This is something else they've improved with CS5. You just can choose your camera, choose your model, and choose your lens. And it just fixes it. Did you see that?

Audience 6: [17:43 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: The lens you shot with. So you choose the lens you shot with. Or you can just click and say, 'Oh, that one looks OK. That one looks OK. That one looks the best.'

[Laughter]

Audience 6: [17:56 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: And just for those who don't have CS5, this would be what you would see without CS5 is this Custom tab where you can actually make all these adjustments on your own. So let's take this back to... Actually, I don't know if I can. Just cancel out, go back to Lens Correction.

Let's pretend we don't have CS5 for a minute. You can go into this Custom tab and say, 'Oh, I think it's a little too round. Let me drag this to make it straighter.' Actually, I've gone too far now. You can see the bow is the other way.

You can also make adjustments. In this case, it's going to be hard, but you could make it look like the building was taking more of this straight-on shot... or even more of an angle, if you really want to make it look like a tall building.

So this is what existed prior to CS5, this custom Lens Correction tab. The Auto-Correction tab is going to be added in CS5 where you just say, 'Here's my camera. Here's my lens,' and it does it for you. So let's do it.

[Pause]

Joel Pattison: Oops. Oh. Interesting. I'm getting some interesting. I think that's an interesting fact there. So that's Lens Correction in CS5 and CS4. And I think CS3 is the same way, too.

Let's do Lighting now. And Content-Aware Fill. Who's heard of Content-Aware Fill? OK. That's a flashy new thing in CS5.

Audience 7: [19:44 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: Content-Aware Fill. I'll show it to you in just a second.

So this is a photo I took on a Spring day. It was a student walking in the background. Something really simply you can do to kind of draw people's eye to where you wanted it is if you just create a 'curves adjustment layer'. So it's down here in the Layers menu. I go to Curves. It creates a curves adjustment layer which sits on top of the main image. And I'm just going to bring this down, make the whole image darker.

Then, if I create a circular marquee... or actually I'm going to use the Paintbrush. And this is a layer mask. I don't know if you can see that down here. So I'm going to paint black on top of the flower, which is hiding the curves adjustment layer I just created. So this is brightening the flower.

And just so it doesn't look too obvious, you can also do a 'Filter - Blur'. I'm blurring the layer mask right now, not the flower. Put a big blur on it so you don't see that paintbrush line that I created.

And this might look a little bit subtle, but if you hide, or if you know this trick, you can option-click on one of the eyes and it will hide all layers except for that one. So I'm going to option-click on this eye right here. It's going to hide the layer above that.

Is it showing up on your screen? It's just a little dark, but it's very effective at kind of drawing people's eye where you want it to go.

So let's go in on this layer and fix some of these problems. The Spot Healing Brush has been around in Photoshop for quite a while. It's the J tool, the very first thing. Spot Healing Brush. It doesn't work like the Clone Stamp tool. You don't have to select something; you just literally take the brush, size it roughly to the spot, click on it.

But these larger areas are problematic. So this is something called Content Aware Fill, what they added in CS5. If I just draw a little lasso around the area, and I go to 'Edit - Fill', you get a couple of different things. You can fill up with black, you can fill up with white, Pattern, History. Content Aware is something that you only see in CS5. And if you just click 'OK', it just gets rid of it for you. And that works.

It's pretty slick. It gets rid of it most of the time. This might be dicey up here. Let's see...

Audience 8: [22:13 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: It samples the entire layer when you're doing this. It looks at the entire layer. Yeah, it did a pretty good job. So if I look at my History... So here's when we opened it. And here is just a little bit of that Content Aware filling, getting rid of some of the... making the flower look like it just bloomed.

[Pause]

Joel Pattison: Something else we can use, panoramas in Photoshop CS5... or, actually, CS4 as well. I shot these two photos last night, literally just used a tripod, just clicked, clicked. I don't know if anyone's used the Panorama tool. It's under Tools at Bridge, Photoshop, Photo Merge. It's right under the HDR tool.

It gives you all these choices. I usually say Auto. Now when you're shooting these, it does help to do a little bit of overlap. So if there's a tall building, put the tall building in both pictures to kind of give Photoshop a point of reference.

But as you'll see in just a moment, it generally does a really good job blending the layers together and fixing all the... you can see right now that the sky is slightly different colors right there? In just a minute, that will be gone. It's going to fix that.

Audience 9: [23:40 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: That's actually... If you go into 100%, you won't see that.

Audience 9: [12:48 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: Yeah. It's because there's two different layers right now.

Here's another trick. I don't know if you know... Rather than flattening if you hit 'Command-Option-Shift-E', it will create a layer on top of all the other layers with all the layers beneath it.

So that created... I don't know if you can see right here, the left of two layers, intact below it, but it just created the layer on top. So that's 'Command-Option-Shift-E'.

Audience 10: On a Mac?

Joel Pattison: On a Mac, just switch out 'Command' for 'Control' on the Windows machine. Yeah, I'm not even going to try. I kind of like the distortion in this one, actually.

This might be another area where we could use Content Aware Fill. So let's try it. Just select this area down here and say, 'I have to create that blend of layer before I can do this.' Fill, Content Aware. See what it does? Hopefully it will put water in there.

It doesn't seem to affect it too much. If you don't get what you want, you can either try a more specific selection or you can just do it again, because it doesn't do the same thing every time. So if it doesn't do what you want right away, just do another Content Aware Fill on top of the old Content Aware Fill, and it will often... you'll get closer to what you want.

This isn't a 100%... this is something you kind of have to monkey with once you get it there, but it certainly gets you a lot closer than if you went in with the little Clone Stamp tool and painted all that water in. It's a pain in the neck. So hopefully it's just a few of the little things you have to fix.

See, now I'm getting this little... repeating pattern. So I'm going to use the Spot Healing Brush actually and just say those are... Nope. Nope. Doh.

Another great tool is this Patch tool. It allows you to patch whole areas. You really can't see, there's a repeating pattern there. I drag this area, it samples another area and fixes that. Can you all see that? I can't really see it. But that's under the same thing as the Clone Stamp tool. So it's the Patch tool.

This is something that's also in CS5, that's been pretty hyped. Have you all heard about Refine Edge? No one has heard of Refine Edge? OK.

So, this is everyone's favorite job, right? Let's say we have to take this girl and put her on this beach picture. Not going to be fun.

So, first thing I'm going to do to use Refine Edge is take the Quick Selection tool. If you're all familiar with that. It's there with the Magic Wand. Much better than the Magic Wand. And it's kind of sticky. It figures out pretty well.

So I make the best selection I can. And if I can hold down the 'Option' key, 'Alt' on Windows, to get the minus, I'm going to take that off. So that's pretty good. So now I'm going to go to 'Select - Refine Edge'.

Now this is a very nice tool, but it's a little confusing. The first thing I'm going to do is say, 'Show radius.' Then I'm going to select Overlay. And then I'm going to start dragging up the radius.

Now, everything inside this line, it's going to keep. So her face is going to keep. Everything outside of this line, it's going to throw away. And everything inside to where the line actually is is where it's actually going to work to refine the edge. So we have to make it big enough to get all of her hair particles.

And if you can't make it big enough using the tool, you can actually paint it in. So you can see, OK, there's a little hair particle there, some hair here. So I'm just painting right on the... to get this radius the way I want it. Again, obviously not doing a very careful job compared to what I would have to do to really...  

So then I'm going to say, 'I'm going to turn off the radius', and I'm going to say, 'View on Layers'. Now you could see, it did a decent job. The next thing we want to do is Decontaminate Colors. So you can see there's still some green in her hair there from the background? So if we just increase Decontaminate Colors.

And then these Smooth, Feather, Contrast tools are really to help you kind of blend the style of the two pictures together. So sometimes someone will come in and their hair will look really, really crisp compared to the background of the new picture. It just doesn't look natural. So you can kind of play with these smoothing tools to try to make it look more natural. This is a really high-contrast monitor, but hopefully you can see that was a whole lot easier than going in and painting on her hair.

So that's a slick new thing they've added under Refine Edge. So first you make the selection with the Quick Selection tool, use Refine Edge, define the radius as carefully as you can, and then just let it do its magic. You might have to decontaminate the colors a little bit.

All right. I'm running out of time. I'm supposed to show you a few more things with Type in Photoshop. I don't know how often people use Type. I don't know if we have any typography, dare I say, geeks in here, but if we do, they're going to look at this text and say, "What on earth is going on here?"

So it's pretty easy to fix. If you just put your cursor there, hold down 'Option' or 'Alt' on the Windows machine and just do 'Left Arrow', it will just move that right over. And you can do the same thing. 'Option-Right Arrow' or 'Alt-Right Arrow' goes the opposite way. You can select everything and hold down ''Option-Left Arrow'. It does your whole row. Or 'Option-Right Arrow'. It expands. And then the same thing is true between rows. Up and down.

So these are... I'm putting in line breaks. It's just changing... You can mess... Probably we're all familiar with this horrible little box over here where you change the numbers and you try to get it to look right. But this is much better, trust me.

Audience 12: [30:17 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: No. I don't know how far this goes back, but this goes back, I think, quite a few versions. All right.

Well, we're running out of time. I have prepared a bunch of these. Is there anything that anyone would like to know more about or have any questions about? Maybe I'll just treat it that way from here on out. Questions? Sure.

Audience 13: How do you stay updated on all this stuff?

Joel Pattison: Yeah. I use the National Association of Photoshop Professionals quite a lot. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, NAPP. They have a membership; I think it's $100 a year for education. And they have a website. There's all kinds of online tutorials. They have a magazine. They do conferences around the country.

I'm not affiliated with them, by the way. I know I sound like a show right now, other than I paid to be a member. But they've been really helpful to me, so check them out. Scott Kelby, you may have heard his name? He founded that organization.

And just read blogs. There's a lot of blogs and things like that.

Audience 14: [31:22 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: Right.

Audience 14: [31:31 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: We have run a few seminars. I didn't get into... Oh, I'm sorry. The question was, have we prepared any materials for communicating to offices about Photoshop and preparing images for the Web?

We've run a few seminars, say, for Web-teaching people. Like it needs to be... Are you familiar with the 'Safe for Web' dialogue box in Photoshop? Yeah. So we've taught offices about that so that they're saving 300 DPI images, they're not saving PNGs, they're saving JPEGs and things like that. We've not created a lot of materials.

Fortunately, we have enough staff that we often just say, "Can you just send it to us, and we'll take care of it?" Especially if it's something for a high-level website, we usually ask to take care of it since we have the staff.

Audience 15: When you do Refine Edge... how do you deal with difference in light sources, and then maybe shadows that don't exactly match up when you put the two layers together?

Joel Pattison: Yeah. The question is, how do you deal with the different lighting of the two photos when you're putting them together like with Refine Edge or whenever you're putting people on top of each other?

That is a tricky question. I kind of chose two really bright images here. She was really well-lit in the first picture and then she looked fairly natural at the beach. But that's not always the case. If somebody's got studio lighting and you're putting them outside, it looks really bizarre.

I would probably just try to use Raw to tweak them before anything. So tweak the two images in Raw and get them as close together as you can, and then use Refine Edge on the two photos. That's probably what I would do.

One thing I wanted to mention about Refine Edge, unfortunately, is it doesn't work for probably the Number 1 thing you'd like it to work for, which is... or it works, but it doesn't work as well for putting people on a white backdrop or a colored backdrop. You know how a lot of times we have to cut people out, put them on a white backdrop? It's not as impressive for that. It does work, it's probably worth a shot, but it's not going to be quite as impressive for that, unfortunately.

Other questions?

Audience 16: I have a question. [33:47 Unintelligible]?

Joel Pattison: I have not... The question was, have I done any screen capture for this type of thing?

Audience 16: [34:02 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: Right. For Photoshop, like teaching people Photoshop? I have not done much of that. Are you a Mac user?

Audience 16: Yeah.

Joel Pattison: If you're a Mac user and you have 10.6, QuickTime actually has screen capture built in. It's pretty wonderful. If you open QuickTime Player and you say, 'New Screen Recording,' and you just hit that, it records your screen. So I discovered that one day randomly, and I was extremely happy.

[Laughter]

Audience 17: [34:34 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: Yeah, I would do audio separately, probably. Yeah. I have Final Cut, too. I'm not quite as quick with that. Or iMovie.

Other questions? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah.

Audience 18: [34:50 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: Yes.

Audience 18: [34:57 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: Yeah. The question is, have I ever played around with creating a panorama from three separate shots without a wide-angle lens?

Yeah. It should work. This is also a wide-angle lens. I have a panel with three shots here. You can actually do five or six, even. It starts to wrap around, but... This I took of a ballpark. And it works pretty well.

Like I said, the big key is overlapping a small section, maybe 20% of each photo, so that it has some reference. Sometimes what it will do if you don't have that overlap is it will put three together and it will just create another layer down here with the fourth image. I didn't know what to do with this. I just put some random location.

[Laughter]

Joel Pattison: The real key, I think, with the panels is getting them to overlap.

And I did want to mention, other than just being kind of the cool factor for panoramas, on the Web we have lots of little slices of images, it seems like. These awkward 100x900 pixel spaces where you can't put a person's face in it. There's not a lot you can do with it. So actually, panoramas can be a really nice thing to put in that space. So that's a three... again, that's a wide-angle cut.

Audience 19: [36:17 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: Exactly, yeah. And if you really wanted part of it, you could try to use Content Aware Fill to fill in the edges.

Audience 20: I just wanted to know, [36:34 Unintelligible]?

Joel Pattison: Right.

Audience 20: [36:38 Unintelligible]

Joel Pattison: And I've done one. I've only done this once. I was on an HDR panel.

And to do that, you do each of the HDR images. So, say, you're doing three images across, and then of course you have three images layered on each one. So you take the three, run all three through HDR, then you run them through the panel process.

I've only done that once. And it turned out pretty well. I just didn't like the composition of it when I was done, actually.

[Laughter]

Is there a question in the back?

All right. Well, we're at 11:25. So if there's no other questions, thank you all very much for coming today. Hope you learned something.

[Applause]