Who is this “pxlfxr”. . . get it? Pixelfixer

Brush Pilot

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:06:47 -0400

OK. You have downloaded all those thousands of free Photoshop® brushes out there in the “ether”. Now if only I could remember which ones were in which sets. Set26- Oh what were those for? Or, a big set and your fading mind, permanently stunned by the cool depth of field stuff in CS4, cannot figure out what that brush for a blonde aliens’ skin was called.
So many brushes - So little time.

Enter Brush Pilot tm(wow 2 actual words instead of an internal cap.- How refreshing!). Open Brush Pilot and it searches out you brushes files, listing them conveniently on the left (sidebar style). Clicking any collection brings up adjustable size previews of all the brushes in the collection. Too easy. I might actually start using a lot of these brushes I have collected.

Screencapture on steroids

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:11:45 -0500

You thought that all you ever needed to grab screen images was shift-option-3. Then you discovered shift-option 4 with the cursor so you could capture a cropped area. Finally a friendly Creative at the Apple Store showed you how to add the spacebar after the shift-option 4 routine above and got a cute little camera that let you capture individual windows even when they were mostly hidden. OH Wow! You had it all. NOT.......

Discovery of the month - Layers (the applications) from - Guess? the.layersapp.com.

This little and inexpensive wonder can capture everything on the screen with each object as an individual layer in a photoshop (psd) file. It even groups the different classes of icon etc to make it really easy use the pieces and parts that you need.

Bokeh is the Bomb!

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:07:11 -0500

It has been awhile but I was so excited by the latest offering from Alienskin I had to get this on the blog.
BOKEH - It’s japanese for blurry or something like that. Anyway the results of the this Photoshop plug-in are spectacular, perfect. the bomb, whatever term for wonderful you want to use. Make a simple selection. Open the filter and make your choices for the full monty of possibilities. control the depth, control fall off front to back or radially. All kinds of lens simulations to choose from plus tons of options for popping the highlights and even making them little heart or stars
See the results (by the way about 30 seconds on this 12 mb file) then

Colorvision Strikes Again!

Thu, 6 Dec 2007 14:00:40 -0500

If you have attended my classes or seminars you know that I am a big fan of the calibration and profiling products from Colorvision. Well they are at it again. Making the stuff even better, faster, easier to use and more accurate as well. Let’s take a look at what has me all juiced up.
Spyder3 Elite. What is not to like. The old Spyder worked well for me to keep my monitors in line creating profiles for all of my neat imaging programs (and my OS since I use a Mac) to refer too. So what is better? Faster, more accurate, smaller unit w/stand, reads ambient light. The new, compact, “stealth” design and the stand look great so I keep it on the desk always at the ready to do a quick ReCal (that’s new too.)

Filechute - You Want to Send A File How Large?

Sun, 2 Dec 2007 18:08:02 -0500

It is another treasure from Yellow Mug Software that gets me to making a new entry in this busy holiday season.
How often have you had to send a large file to a client or a friend and email won’t handle it. FILECHUTE to the rescue.

Linked is to your .Mac account (a whooping 10GB these days), or any FTP or WebDAV accessible server. Perform the one-time set up by following the built-in Help. Once it is properly set up, FileChute works just as perfectly with non-.Mac servers. You drop the files to send onto the mailbox shaped icon and Filechute creates an archive in you favorite format, uploads the file and returns a link for you to send to the reciever. If you control click in the field it even has an option to “compose email” which launches Mail, creates a new message and drops in the link to the upload.

The filechute window keeps you updated as to the upload progress and shows any previous uploads, upload date and how longs it has been there. It can handle multiple accounts as well thru a simple pull down.

Explore all of the great little applications from Yellow Mug:
EasyFrame, EasyCrop, FolderBrander, and 2 more of my almost everyday tools, EasyBatchPhoto and SnapNDrag.

More Science - not fiction!

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:38:31 -0400

Once upon a time, many moons ago a group or “really smart people” created a way to process film with Pixeldust. Really! A dry process that at the end gave back digital files on a cd and a strip of blank film base. You don’t believe me do you. It’s True!

Then they set out to make some very good plug-ins for Photoshop to restore old faded color, remove noise and generally make life easier for many of us digital darkroom people.

Time passed and some of these same wizards of 1’s and 0’s started Image Trends with a calling to make even cooler plug-ins. Not the usual whiz bang wild stuff, just tools to do needed tasks with the least amount of user input. The results. . . . . . .
PearlyWhites – Cleans up the subject teeth with a click.
ShineOff – Removes shine (glare) from the subjects skin.
Fisheye Hemi – Perfectly corrects for fisheye distortion.
and ... a series of stand alone aps to get rid of dust with
a click that sadly are not for the mac Yet!

The first three are Mac and PC so being a Mac geek I have been playing with those listed first.

The great part is that they work without input from the user. Just run the filter and your done. I like simple when it works this well. See the samples I grabbed from their site. If you are a pro these can be just the thing to make your work better than the other guy’s and it is so easy to make an action to batch process. They even walk you thru how to do it.
Check of the latest Sci-Fi tools from Image Trends.