The Blog of Colin Smith (aka kiwicolin)

Spyros has worked as a Story Artist on a number of successful feature films including: Flushed Away, Curious George, Kung Fu Panda, The Bee Movie, Coraline, Stuart Little, Stuart Little 2 and the not-yet released Shrek Forever After.

Currently working at Lucasfilm on George Lucas’ innovative television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, he has also worked at DreamWorks Animation, Walt Disney Studios and Industrial Light and Magic, where he trained in computer animation.  
He was layout supervisor on the feature film Rugrats Go Wild by Klasky Csupo.

Read whole interview

A few years ago, on a particularly hot spring day, Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin pondered the possibility of joining forces. Sharing a fascination with monsters, spacemen, and everything in between, CreatureBox crawled to life. Over the last three years, the venture has provided a manic peek at the collaborative development of characters for video games, comics, television and film. At CreatureBox.com, Dave and Greg continue to debut their weekly trials and tribulations while in search of innovative design. The site continues to be a hub for critiques, discussions and the occasional mindless rant on the various aspects of character design.

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/interviews/creaturebox.htm

Visit the Lightroom Learning Site

What’s new in Lightroom 3 beta?

Import
The import module has been completely re-written. This is clearly obvious when you go to import photos from a card or a hard drive. This is a welcome change, I always thought that Lightroom was a little weak in this area. When you choose Import, you will be faced with an interface that simplifies the process. The “mini” import dialog box offers most of the features you need in a simple dashboard. Clicking the arrow at the bottom (5) will expand to offer more options than you can shake a stick at. The addition of an import preset will save a ton of time and clicking.

1. Choose the source
2. Choose what happens to the images (Convert to DNG, copy, move or add).
3. Where does it go?
4. Apply a metadata preset (Copyright info etc). Also fintune the destination, subfolder etc.
5. Click this button to expand the view to see thumbnails and other information Continue Reading »

This show at the Javits Center is always a big hit. There were 25,000 people at this international show.

The PhotoshopCAFE booth was a huge success. We were swamped with people, usually 2 deep all the time. It seems that they have seen our ads in Outdoor Photographer and Digital Photo magazines. It was great to see a ton of repeat customers snapping up all the new DVDs as well as meeting lots of new faces.

Overall I was very happy with the Easy Coast reception. We are better knows on the West Coast at shows, but it seems this is changing as there were a lot of East Coast CAFE fans.

Then to add to the excitement, we snapped up tickets for the New Youk Yankees and Angels final Playoff game at the new Yankee stadium. Oh boy! What a crowd. The Yankees really do have fans. More about that in the next post

Bridge in Shreveport

Originally uploaded by kiwicolin

This old abandoned bridge is Shreveport was very interesting. I had to tread carefully because a lot of the wood was rotten.

We are almost fully recovered from Photoshop World, and what a time we had. Sure there were the parties, after all it is Vegas, but the highlights for us were the PhotoshopCAFE Freemont Street Photowalk and getting to meet all of you cafe crew out there. There was no shortage of enthusiasm at the convention or on the trade show floor. We were lucky to have many of our authors teach right at the booth. Tim Cooper gave us some tips on how to take better Photos, Stephen Burns was on hand with his special brand of Photoshop Artistry. Jeff Foster revealed his animation secrets, and Wes Magio gave us some pointers for getting the most out of a Wacom tablet. It was the first time we brought so many authors out to a show, but it wont be the last.

The “CAFE Crew”

We were very lucky to not only have such talent speak at the booth, but we had incredible talent working the booth. These guys really out did them selves this time, a special thank you to them, and to the PhotoshopCafe community for making this such a successful show for us. If you were not be to make it out to this one, we hope to see you at another show. These days it is rare to have such an incredible learning experience while having a blast as well.

Read on for more and tons more pictures!

Continue Reading »

Here is a report and pictures from Greg Mellang (AKA Photodog). Ill post more soon

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/cafe/viewthread.php?tid=52491

Co blogging

Get a full list of Photoshop World cobloggers here …

Corey Barker
John Paul Caponigro
RC Concepcion
Dave Cross

Jim Divitale
Laurie Excell

Richard Harrington
Scott Kelby
Matt Koslowski
Deke McClelland
Joe McNally
John Nack
Moose Peterson
Jeff Schewe
Colin Smith
Ben Willmore
David Ziser

Vectors Explained
As you know, Photoshop is primarily known for its ability to manipulate pixels, those tiny building blocks that join together so tightly that they seem to form a smooth image, usually a digital photograph. But Photoshop is also handy with the other important family of computer-graphics building blocks: the little guys called vectors.

Vectors are lines, whose curvature, thickness, and length are determined by mathematical formulae. You don’t need to know any math; it’s all done for you. If you want a shape like a circle, your job is to simply draw the circle; Photoshop defines the center point and the radius to create a circle. At that point, you can specify the circle’s color, line thickness, and so on. Continue Reading »

Golden Gate Shadow

Originally uploaded by kiwicolin

From the Golden Gate Bridge. Just shot this an hour ago. A little HDR and also some other little adjustments.

I wanted to do something different than the usual Golden Gate Photos you see. (Of course I captured a bunch of those too)