All that is prologue, however, to actually SEEING what I’m talking about, so if you are still reading this far, go ahead and check out this little preview of what Dirty Pictures is all about (and apologies for the somewhat annoying mic popping…):

[See post to watch Flash video]

Update – It’s ALIVE! Head on over to Dirty Pictures at the Totally Rad Store and pick it up!

Before:

and After:

Just makes a huge difference, IMO, having that extra bit of snap and detail in the final image.

In case you were wondering how we got to this image BEFORE the before image – some new goodies, mixed with a tiny bit of POS lens (from TRA2) with the highlight flare unchecked and the edge blurring turned down (and masked off the guy’s face).

The SOOC image looked like this:

Just workin’ away on new ways to make things even radder.

In other news – can the frickin Cubs PLEASE stop losing now?  Every time they add another game to their losing streak, a little piece of me dies.  Thankfully, the Brewers have decided to suck at precisely the same time, so the standings haven’t changed… but still…

• TRA2 – The Revenge!  Largely because I was so busy with TRA2 for a couple weeks around launch, I didn’t actually get around to posting about it.  So in case you’ve been living under a rock without internet access for the past couple months… it’s here!  It rocks!  Our second set of Photoshop actions comes with 57 new ways to spice up your images and polish your pics.  The actions definitely have a different overall look and feel from the first – less bright and glowy, more gritty and worn.  We sorta took cues from the direction our photography (Chenin and mine, individually) was taking, mixed that in with some broad industry trends, and distilled it into some fabulous new tools.  BAMF B&W might be the coolest BW conversion ever, IMO.  Check Them Out!  If you like em, Buy Them!  I’m still trying to slot time in to get some recipes up and do a couple video tutorials… soon.  I would have had all that done by now, but I’ve been busy with…

• We bought a new house!  After living in our condo in Ladera Ranch for a few years, we decided it was time to get something with four walls.  I blame the new neighbors that moved in, and bought their kid a drumset, encouraging him to bang randomly upon them for hours at a time in the middle of the day.  The unit next to ours was practically empty for the three years we lived there, and the gal that lived in the unit on the opposite side was never home.  So it was nice and quiet, and a great place to work from.  But my office was in the garage.  The kid with the drumset was in the garage next door.  Those garages shared a wall.  So if I didn’t answer your phone call between May and July, it’s because I knew that I would have just had to tell you to call back later anyway, on account of the “music”.  Maddening.  The worst part is that I’m a drummer myself, and have had to forego owning a kit for years because we lived in condos and apartments.  You don’t get to have a drumset if you share walls, I thought.  Because it’s, well, rude.  So it was like a kick in the balls to have the little kid next door get to bang randomly on the skins while I sat next door, drumless, trying to get work done.  Anyway, moving and home improvement has taken up a disproportionate share of time the last two months.  Basically I’ve only had time to do the minimum with the actions, surf a bit, and play with power tools… but I’m glad the home improvement is getting taken care of now, because…

• I’m gonna be a daddy!  Sometime early next year, we’ll finally stop torturing our parents and give them a real grandbaby (unlike the furry one that’s been an acceptable substitute since 1999).  It’s been a long time coming.  Chenin and I have been married over 6 years, and dated for 7 years before that.  Slowly, relentlessly, our aversion to the idea of having a small person running around waned, and eventually, we decided it might not be the worst thing ever.  Heck, we’ve managed to keep our dog alive way longer than nature would have liked, and he still seems happy… maybe we wouldn’t be awful parents after all.  I mean, I’m sure our kid will hate us once they turn 14 anyway, but until then, we’re super thrilled to be adding another little creature to our family.  Bummer is, we won’t be able to do the tradeshows next year because of the timing.  Good part is, it doesn’t screw with wedding season for Chenin.  Speaking of weddings…

• My little sis got married!  Two weeks ago.  To a lovely young British boy.  And now she’ll be living in London pretty permanently.  We’ve become accustomed to missing her, since she’s been living in the UK almost full-time since college.  But it was different saying goodbye to her this time… I shot the wedding, and it was refreshing to know that I still know how to use a camera.  Kinda.  And Chenin shot some as well, in between being the maid of honor, and lamenting the fact that she was the only one there that couldn’t drink.  And Chenin’s frequent second-shooter Nic filled in the gaps for us, and shot most of the reception, so we could try to relax a little and at least pretend we were just going to a family wedding like normal guests… Check out the pics  at Chenin’s Blog.  Congrats Carrie and Adam!
• Chenin got me a bitchin license plate!  Not that it took up any of my time, but it sure does kick ass.  I do get the occasional dirty look from people who completely miss the irony, and instead assume that I’m just another self-important prick that thinks people should thank me if I condescend to fart at them.  But I’m not, and they’re wrong, and I like it.

• Surf’s been great this summer!  I’ve had a whole lot of super-fun sessions at Uppers, San-O, and even Oceanside, where we expected knee-high mush one morning, and instead found head-high beachbreak barrels.  Almost made one of em, too (they were all pretty much suicide anyway).  Bought a new 6′1″ Al Merrick Flyer II early in the season, and have been trying to break it ever since (rocks in Cabo, rocks at Trestles, rocks at Salt Creek).  I’m surprised the thing still floats after as many times I’ve tried to snap off a fin or bury the nose in the sand at a beachbreak.  Also picked up a 6′4″ Flyer for smaller days.  Super fun board.  And Labor Day weekend was killer, again (last year it rocked, too).  Surfed all weekend.  My arms feel like I just swam over here from Tahiti.

• I have a real office!  Like a big boy!  With furniture that didn’t come from Ikea!  One of the up-sides of all the hassle of moving is that I have an office with a window and air conditioning.  With a fully finished floor.  And I bought some big manly furniture to put in it.  And a new Mac Pro, which means I’m pretty much just another grunt in the Apple Army now.  But it does have its perks… like pretty animations whenever I switch applications.  And ridiculously fast DVD rips for our Apple TV… or my iPhone… or the waterproof headphones for my iPod shuffle that I take surfing sometimes (told you I was Apple crazy).  Anyway, I still have enough PC parts sitting around to coordinate a mission to Mars, but I’m thinking more and more lately of just putting them all on Ebay – “Whole shitload of PC parts – NR”

• We’re Your Favorite!  Bludomain’s blog readers voted the Totally Rad Actions their favorite, beating out Kevin’s stuff, JB’s stuff, Jesh’s stuff, and others.  Quite an honor!  Thanks to all who voted… I promise to keep making kickass tools that you can’t live without.  Or at least to keep coming up with the best names for actions that I can.

• In other, minor, action-related news, we have a new tutorial on the site on using Yin / Yang, Big Blue, and Green With Envy.  It’s been up for a while now, but I never actually posted about it.  Showcases a cool way to use them that you might not have thought of.  And I’m going to be contributing regularly to the new DWFU section of the Digital Wedding Forum with video tips and tricks… the first video is online now, and covers how to use multiple raw conversions to extend the dynamic range of your photos, in a quasi-HDR technique that’ll save your bacon someday.  Check out the Yin / Yang video in the Tutorials section of our site, and the DWF video at DWFU.
• I also just picked up a refurbed Deardorff after my old 8×10 took two successive dives off the tripod, face first, onto the concrete.  Which is fine, because I’ve always wanted a Deardorff, and this was a good excuse to get one.  Also picked up a minty 250mm f/6.3 Fujinon-W to go with it, and to compliment the 14″ f/6.3 Kodak Commercial Ektar I already have (which might not even work properly after taking the brunt of the first fall to the concrete).  Made a new ghetto-style homemade lensboard for the 250, and just checked the camera for light leaks… looks good to go!  Anyway, it’s been way too long since I shot anything, and I’m going to force myself to get back in the saddle, now that most of the springtime craziness is behind me.  And the new lens is a lot more modern than the old Kodak… syncs at 1/400.  Which makes me happy because outdoor flash stuff likes 1/400.  Copal-2?  Dunno… I like it, though.  Gotta get busy making some of those images in my head come to life… Look for some LF stuff sometime soon.  (update – I thought the 250 would cover 8×10, but I’m pretty sure it’s made for 5×7… vignettes pretty bad even with no movements… so I’m back in the market for another wide lens for 8×10)
• Found a really cool old rusted ceiling tin at an antique store, and just screwed it to the wall in our living room last week.  I like it.  Prettiest piece of $50 junk I’ve ever seen.

That’s just about all I can think of for now… Now that life is somewhat back to normal, I’m going to try to get back to posting and shooting some more.  Been way too long.

What have y’all been up to?

Q: Will TRA2 be an update to the Totally Rad Action Mix, or a separate product?

A: TRA2 is a completely separate set of actions, and will be sold as such. Any updates / bugfixes will be made available for free to customers who already own the product, but TRA2 is a completely different product, with its own pricetag. Think of it more as a sequel than an updated version.

Q: How many actions will be in the new set?

A: Currently we have about 50 new actions in the set, but the final number will probably change a bit. I have at least three more additions that I want to write, and we might yank one or two from the final version. If it’s lame, it doesn’t make it into the set, and I’ve killed at least a dozen actions that I wrote for the next set, only to decide later that they’re just not good enough.

Q: How much will TRA2 cost?

A: The price will likely be $149.00 or similar. We’ll probably also make a combined package with both sets of action available, as a discount vs the combined retail total of both sets.

Q: Are you developing something for Lightroom?  Now that I have LR, I hate using Photoshop, and want cool presets.

A: We are, but don’t expect miracles.  Lightroom is an impressive program, but most of the things that you love about TRA, and will love about TRA2, just simply can’t be translated into a preset for Lightroom.  The capability for tweaking photos afforded by LR is actually a lot more limited than people would think, but we’re going to be looking into exactly how far we can push the program very soon, so maybe we’ll discover some things we didn’t know… stay tuned.  But don’t expect LR presets to be able to replace or replicate the functionality available in Photoshop.  It ain’t gonna happen.  Adobe isn’t going to take a 60% pay cut by replacing Photoshop with something that costs half as much.  Beyond basic color and exposure corrections, Photoshop is still king.

Q: I read some earlier blog posts about scripts and plugins – what exactly IS TRA2?

A: TRA2 will be another set of straight Photoshop actions. What follows is a slightly geeky rant, so beware… When I sat down to start working on another set of Photoshop tools, I looked at all the different ways that Photoshop is programmable and extendable, and every option was on the table. Photoshop’s scripting system allows you to automate the program in three ways – with actions, scripts, or automation plugins. Actions are great because they offer single-click operation via button mode on the layers palette, and because people who want to learn more about Photoshop can pick them apart to learn what’s going on. So they simultaneously offer a way to accomplish complicated tasks, as well as a learning tool. One big downside is that they don’t offer any ability to modify their own behavior based on the context of the image, which means that they operate in a very “dumb” way. For instance, there’s no way to change the radius of a gaussian blur step based on the pixel dimensions of an image. This means that many actions will behave very differently on web sized images than they do on full-res images. The other downside is that they are stateless (geek terminology for the fact that they can’t remember information between executions). And finally, they don’t offer any kind of user interface, aside from the ability to pop a simple, alert-style dialog via the “stop” command.

Photoshop scripts circumvent all those major issues, but unfortunately, Adobe decided that scripts would be called via the scripts menu, which, unfortunately, is very cumbersome. It’s too many mouse clicks to get to things, when you’d be calling 4 or 5 scripts per image, and the scripts menu itself doesn’t offer you any way to organize things. So if you had 50 scripts, it’d be a pain to use. We looked at having scripts run most of the logic, and just calling the scripts through actions, but, again, Adobe unfortunately chose a very cumbersome way of referencing scripts from an action. Actions in Photoshop reference scripts through OS-specific, hard-coded paths. So basically, installation would be a nightmare for most people. Since the .atn file format is proprietary, and unpublished, and basically a nightmare to try to parse, generating custom, installation-specific atn files is out, too. So scripts were a non-starter, ultimately, because I just didn’t like the user-experience compromises that they entailed…

Which brings us to automation plugins.  Those don’t have the drawbacks of scripts, from an integration perspective, but they also are compiled machine code – which means different versions for mac and windows plus decreased compatibility overall.  Since plugins are actually compiled, and not interpreted code, they have the potential to crash Photoshop, and otherwise cause more system instability than interpreted programs that run inside Photoshop.  Plus, they’re much more of a headache to develop, and relying heavily on automation plugins would have doubled development time, or more, meaning less actions for you guys, or a higher price tag, or both.

So the long and short of it is that just writing things as actions gets us most of what I wanted for this next product, and the other options, after much exploration, all had fatal flaws, based on my priorities for what the end user experience would be like.

Check them out at www.gettotallyrad.com/recipes

So in case you’re looking for them, now you don’t have to go sifting through pages of old blog posts to find them. More videos are on the horizon, too…

void DoFilter(void) {
// a, b coordinates, and the offset between adjacent pixels in the a and b dimensions
double _a, _b, aOffset, bOffset, burnFactor;
// only works for 8-bit images this way…
uint8 * pixel = static_cast<uint8 *>(fr->outData);
uint32 rectHeight = fr->filterRect.bottom – fr->filterRect.top;
uint32 rectWidth = fr->filterRect.right – fr->filterRect.left;
aOffset = (1 – (rectHeight * 0.5) / (rectHeight * 0.5));
bOffset = (1 – (rectWidth * 0.5) / (rectWidth * 0.5));

fr->inRect = fr->outRect = fr->filterRect;

// fetch some data – moved this down to the processing loop
//    *gResult = fr->advanceState();
//    if (*gResult != noErr) return;

// start kicking some ass
for (int16 plane = 0; plane < fr->planes; plane++) { //process planes
SelectPlane(plane);
*gResult = fr->advanceState();
if (*gResult != noErr) return;
pixel = static_cast<uint8 *>(fr->outData);

…

…

…

[See post to watch Flash video] ]]> http://dougboutwell.com/2008/02/11/totally-rad-action-mix-tutorial-action-basics/feed/ 20 http://dougboutwell.com/2008/01/24/tra-recipe-cards-8-me/ http://dougboutwell.com/2008/01/24/tra-recipe-cards-8-me/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:40:42 +0000 admin http://gettotallyrad.com/dougboutwell/?p=48 That’s right, yours truly, and my recipe for Totally Rad Actions sweetness…