I am always brushing up on my technical knowledge of the printing process and color management, so I obviously have found this little field guide to be most helpful. Alex Cornell and Scott Hansen of ISO50 have put together an impressive and definitive Field Guide to Color Management.
Though there are literally thousands of guides on the web like this, ISO50’s is not only replete covering everything from lighting to print settings but also comes from a trusted resource plenty experienced with color management and printing.
Consider this advice for workspace color management:
An additional step you can take to ensure ideal lighting conditions in your workspace is to paint the walls with Munsell 8 Gray. This paint is specially formulated to have a flat spectral response with no color bias. Unlike other hues, this type of gray will not affect your perception of other colors in the spectrum. It creates a “pure” and neutral viewing environment. You may have noticed this color on the wall of photo studios and print shops.
Common misperceptions about RGB and CMYK are cleared up:
Illogical as it may sound, when working at home, you want to send your printer (which is a CMYK device) RGB images to print. The conversion occurs within the printer and the software addresses the printer as an RGB device. This is where — at least amongst the student population — much confusion is generated. Given the fact that the printer is technically producing CMYK output, it sounds like the logical mode to use is CMYK. This is not the case. Not only is the printer designed to receive RGB output from the software, but you would also be shortchanging yourself of certain colors that both RGB and the device can address that are outside the gamut of the CMYK color mode (within the software).
Calibration, color space, and color profile management are also covered. The guide concludes with specific instructions for printing Photoshop artwork on a local printer.
Hats off to Alex and Scott for covering the topic extensively and authoritatively.
Whenever you see the Paragon blog go quiet for a while you know it’s because we’re really busy. But I wanted to share a quick tutorial that came in handy last week for one of the projects that’s been keeping us busy.
We needed to create several natural effects like snow, sand, fog and a waterfall and use them as transition elements for this project, but we were also on a tight deadline so trying for photo-real wasn’t an option. CC Particle World to the rescue!
I’ll tackle the waterfall in this post and share the other natural effects in a separate post.
Here’s the effect we ended up with.
Simple huh? I bet the seasoned pros can already tell how this is done. But for the rest of you, here goes…
Some time back I had the opportunity to create some artwork for an indie film shot by Epic Image Entertainment’s, Justin Lutsky. The idea was to create something that looked big budget Hollywood circa 1990’s Action movie, but the director needed us to turn things around REALLY quickly. So, of course, I turned to my go-to 3D software for all things awesome: Cinema4D. I’d been introduced to the world of C4D last year when looking for a simple program to create some 3D text for an album cover I was working on, and since then I’ve been constantly amazed at the results you can achieve in a short space of time, and with a very shallow learning curve.
When I first started web coding a few years back, I did some really really strange things. Self taught from books, cereal boxes and decoder rings meant code was jumbled with misused “if statements”, “for loops” and various bits of hackery. I often think of the simple “ah ha” things that would have helped me get through those bumpy first few years and thought I’d share a few. Read More of this post
I remember learning about this one from the Photoshop Guys some time ago, but recently I’ve been using it a lot in some web designs so I figured I’d share it in case you could find it useful as well. It involves using smart objects within Photoshop to keep a layer’s resolution intact even after resizing it.
If you’re as indecisive as I am when you’re designing then you like to make sure your changes are reversable as much as possible. And if you’ve ever tried to scale an image up after scaling it down you’ve realized that that’s not exactly reversible. Unless you use Smart Objects.
I discovered this little gem of a time saver completely by accident. Thanks to a former co-worker of mine I knew about the benefits of Alt+ dragging a layer’s layer effect icon to copy that layer’s style onto another layer.
But what I didn’t know was that you could do the same for the layer’s mask. Just make sure the cursor’s over the layer mask icon.
As my first attempt at writing a tutorial I figured I’d start small and share a simple little tidbit using shape layers.
I used to try and achieve this effect by using masks but that was too final for me. I wanted the freedom to play around with the shapes, and come back later and mess with them some more if I wanted to.
