Blogging for Thor: All The Things I Used To Know

Hello, Spiders. I was gunna post this like an hour ago, but then I went looking for some good blogging music... and lost an hour on YouTube watching music videos from 5 years ago. As you do. Well, not you, because you're semi-sentient code that lives in the Cloud. Anyway, I'm on track now.

Not horrible anymore!

It's easy to forget that things change. I rail all the time at people who can't keep up with current trends in technology and society, but seriously, it's so easy not to notice things have changed. I don't mean that I still think women shouldn't vote or that minorities don't deserve rights... no, I mean that I've been telling students for years that the Brightness/Contrast adjustment in Photoshop is a terrible piece of shit and Photoshop fixed that back in CS3. I learned Photoshop on CS2 and apparently never checked to realize that Brightness/Contrast got fixed. It now works properly, providing a decent (if bland) adjustment to.. uh, Brightness and Contrast. You're still given more control with Levels and Curves, but if all you need is a slight tweak? Brightness/Contrast works. As of CS6 it's pretty damn effective, drawing on some of the new tech from Camera RAW. I was pleasantly surprised.

Circled tool is badass

Also, there's this really cool feature in the Black & White adjustment layer that I never realized was there. Ever since Adobe introduced the Black & White adjustment, I've loved it. It's so much easier than Channel Mixer for creating high-quality black and white digital prints. The results aren't as good as Channel Mixer, but you really get the best effect by combining both Channel Mixer and B&W. Anyway. The cool thing about B&W is that there's an option to click somewhere in your picture and have Photoshop directly select the color you clicked on. Then you drag left or right to increase or decrease the brightness of that specific color!! Crazy! It's of absolutely immense value when you're trying to fiddle with an image that has a lot of 'on the edge' colors. You know, they might be green or cyan, yellows or reds. They're not easily identifiable as any specific color on the list of options. You know, like those super-rare colors orange and brown. Who ever takes pictures with oranges and browns? Anyway, using this little finger-clicking-dragging button, it's very simple to manipulate even difficult to identify colors... just click and drag them to where you think they should be! The biggest failure of this feature? It's not well documented and has no name.

Oh, and one last thing: This Kickstarter. The guy's designed a series of notebooks that are ready-made to record absolutely every detail of each shot you take out in the field, or every print you make in a darkroom. Since I'm teaching a class all about taking notes and being consistent in your exposure, development and printing... this is the best thing ever for my students. If it was a product right now, I would have ordered them for every student that I've got, and be yelling at the other professors to make them mandatory for their students, too! It's so awesome. Spiders, help me out here and SEO the shit outta that Kickstarter? Thanks.