Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Bryan O’Neil Hughes, senior product manager for Adobe Photoshop, has begun to release a series of short videos called Hidden Gems. These Hidden Gems are lesser known features within Photoshop, new functionality, updates made since the last official launch, or even new uses for well-known tools that have been developed in a way that Adobe never originally imagined.
Whenever Adobe releases new features or updates existing ones, it takes a while for the total significance of that feature to take hold and really become part of the fabric of use for the general public. Sometimes a feature is intended for one particular use, and someone else comes along and figures out a new one.
To that end, O’Neil Hughes has put together an Adobe Photoshop Channel that features YouTube videos that will show you, through short clips, how to access and use these Hidden Gems. He has started off with five Hidden Gems that include:
• How to manipulate and synthesize an image using Puppet Warp and Content-Aware fill to let you change the pose of a model, easily remove artifacts, and take care of hours of cleanup work in seconds.
• Showing you how to straighten images with ease through the use of Puppet Warp’s pin feature.
• Through the use of Pixel Bender, one of the emerging technologies from Adobe Labs, you will see how this hardware-accelerated plug-in for use in Photoshop CS5, will allow you to get amazingly fast special effects.
• You will see, through the use of Content-Aware Fill, restoration has never been easier. He will show you how it can help quickly restore an old photograph that has tears and marks to quickly fix what once took hours.
• He will show you how, by Content-Aware Fill, with a new option for the Spot Healing Brush you can now easily remove power lines and wires from an image – a trick not possible before.
While these are short and sweet, they provide a lot of punch! There is quite a few tricks that you can learn in just a minute or two that can help in ways that you may not have thought of – and best of all, they’re free.
