Here are a few random Creative Notes for a quiet Friday afternoon:
- James Delaney has posted a tutorial for using Photoshop’s Match Color feature to change the color of your digital photos to match those of famous paintings. Delaney’s process is fascinating and a little wacky, but it’s fun to play around with, especially if you’re looking for a new technique for your editing toolbox, or hoping to break through a creative impasse.
- O’Reilly Digital Media’s Inside Aperture and Inside Lightroom are two good resources for users of Apple’s and Adobe’s competing digital photo workflow applications. This week, on the Aperture blog, I did a podcast with Derrick Story on fine-art printing, but it’s worth listening for anyone who might be interested in the latest round of pigment printers from Epson, Canon and HP. Over on the Lightroom blog, James Duncan Davidson talks about why he’s leaving Aperture for Lightroom. As I have repeatedly said over the past few months, choosing one of these programs over the other is as much a function of the way you want to work, and Davidson’s explanation is spot-on for his type of workflow.
- Speaking of printers, I’m finally coming out from under the Aperture-Lightroom comparison for Macworld , and I should have something up here next week on the Stylus Pro 3800, Epson’s latest fine-art printer. And—lo and behold—it looks like Canon is finally ready to ship the Pixma Pro9500, its 10-ink, pigment-based, desktop printer. I have seen this printer at nearly every Macworld Expo and photo conference for the past year and a half, and at last it looks real. We’ll see how good it is pretty quickly, but it’s really a great thing for all of us that HP, Epson and Canon are competing in this important market.
- The tenth annual Art Directors Master Class is over, and the results are in: you can check out the finished projects on Russell Brown’s site. Watching 200 art directors, photographers and artists working into the wee hours of the night on point-of-purchase displays for their very own pirate doll was a pretty exhilarating experience. If you’re looking for a way to jump-start the creative juices in a fun—and intense—environment, I’d keep an eye out for the announcement of next year’s conference. Russell Brown and his crew of presenters and workshop helpers were amazing.
- And a final (shameless) plug for general photography enthusiasts: While I was in San Jose, Derrick Story and I spoke about my strange “obsession” with Polaroid cameras, in a podcast posted on the Digital Story Web site earlier this week. Derrick is a natural interviewer, and he made me realize how this interest in an analog oddity of the photographic world has some validity with regard to digital photography and imaging in general. Even if you’re not interested in the podcast, it’s worth bookmarking Derrick’s site —it’s a great regular read.