Photoshop Phriday

There are a lot of bizarre little Web sites on the Internet. One of them is SomethingAwful, which does a pretty good job of being funny and sometimes offensive. They have a contest every week called Photoshop Phriday, where you are given a theme and offered the chance to create an image to go with that theme. Sometimes they put out a starting image and people make changes to it. Definitely amusing, if you are not easily offended! That is always the problem with sites that are based on user contributions, of course.

Link to site

Metadata and You

I first encountered the word metadata back when I started creating Web pages in the mid 1990's. Programs called "search engines", like Webcrawler and Altavista, would automatically find your page and make it available for the world to find. They did have issues adequately describing your page, so as a Web developer adding "meta tags" was critical. It was a way of adding text that did not show up in the Web browser, but allowed search engines to find information about your site.

Metadata is something that is used today in many areas, from computer forensics to corporate espionage. I will give you a regular example first. As a professor, there are times when I think something might be an exact copy of someone else's file. The first thing I will do is take a look at the file properties. In Office 2010, I would go to the File tab and select "Info". On the right side are properties. I can see very easily the name of the person who created the file. In a computer lab, most people probably have the same user name, so that may not tell me anything. However, if you created it at home and gave it to a friend, there is pretty damning evidence since your friend has handed in a file with your name in it. Other ways include "date created" - this tells me the day and time the file was created. I am of course not opening up my whole bag of tricks here, but these are two ways to investigate a file further.

In terms of corporate espionage and hacking...many times, the metadata in programs such as Word (and most of the rest of Office) includes data like username, company name and a file path. If this file was created on a network drive, I now know the name of one of your company's internal servers and possibly your username. This information is valuable for hackers!

If you are distributing a file from Office, also be aware if your company uses tracking changes, revisions, comments, or hidden text, that information can be included in a file you distribute. If a member of a company's staff left a comment in the file, there is a good chance it could be found. You can use the Office 2010 Prepare for Sharing options to minimize this risk, though once again, most people do not realize this.

Even programs like Photoshop can cause metadata issues. Let's say you have an image, and you choose to blur out bits of it. Photoshop will save a thumbnail as part of the file, to make it quicker for the operating system to give users a preview. Therefore, a smart hacker may be able to see your original image using some advanced techniques. Programs such as jStrip will help minimize this risk, but many people don't realize it is a risk.

Like many other technology issues, the only way people know about this generally seems to be if they are burned by it.

Photoshop Trickery

Image editing is not something new.  The Soviet Union did this back in the 1920's and 1930's, famously editing people out of photos who had become enemies of the government.

This has been made a lot easier nowadays with the invention of tools like Photoshop, and has been used in a lot of situations.  For example, Time Magazine darkened a picture of O.J. Simpson in 1994, which Newsweek ran without changes.  Many people felt that Time Magazine's portrayal was in poor taste, if not racist.

In a more amusing twist, the Buffalo Bills recently fired their head coach, Dick Jauron.  They gave out team photos to fans at a recent game, and edited the former coach out, even as they left players there who had been cut from the team.  Viewing the high-resolution version of the picture, you can see a lot of things that aren't quite right, for example, look at the size of #31 Jairus Byrd's right arm.  There is a complete discussion of this on a Bills message board, and this also appeared on ESPN's Web site.

From Trotsy to O.J. to Jauron, image editing has many forms, and you can see why a simple photograph isn't evidence enough nowadays.

You Suck at Photoshop

I have posted this before, but it's definitely worth a revisit, especially since there are now two seasons worth of episodes.

There is a series of Photoshop tutorials (training) called "You Suck at Photoshop". They are very informative and I've learned stuff about Photoshop watching them. However, there is a twist. It's basically half comedy and half training. It's training, but set against the story line of the guy teaching you Photoshop going through a rough time in his life. It's very amusing. My Web Graphics class seemed to like it a lot last week.

It's kind of NSFW (not safe for work) - there is some cursing involved - don't click if you are easily offended!

Link to Site

Painting online

One of my biggest weaknesses is that I am not a very good artist. I've got a very logical mind, and the creative process just never really worked with the way my brain works.

For those of you who have been in my class, you know my famed drawing of someone using a computer and communicating with their friends in chat as they also use Microsoft Word...which has also been called "stick figure touching a box".

Ok, so my art skills aren't that great. Even if they aren't, I've had fun at times messing around in programs like Microsoft Paint or Adobe Photoshop.

Paint is of course free, but the issue is that you have to save your art and then either upload the or email to someone else. There is a Web program on art.com that allows you to do basically the same things you do in Paint, with a few more options added in. In addition to all those, you also have the opportunity to share the drawing, and your friends can watch your creative process in action - it stores the exact keystrokes you used to create the painting, all for free.

For example, the quarterback on my fantasy football team got injured, and I created a visually stunning representation of how this injury happened:
http://artpad.art.com/gallery/?k6usn815mt0s

Amazing to see the creative process in action, is it not?

Web Site Link:
http://artpad.art.com/gallery/

Bitmap image conversion to vector image

Image editing application software such as Photoshop or Fireworks contain a tool that will allow you to convert a bitmap image (such as one taken with a digital camera) in to a vector image (one that looks "drawn" - and one that can be resized easier.

If you are ever doing any professional logo design and have very little Graphic Design talent (guilty!), you can take an existing photograph and turn it in to a vector image to save yourself time drawing. For example, let's say you wanted to make a cell phone logo - you could take a picture of a real cell phone, "vectorize" it, and then just edit it to suit your needs.

If you're curious as to what I am talking about, you can actually try it for free on a Web site such as vector magic - they will let you try it for free without letting you save - or you can do it in a tool such as Photoshop or Fireworks.


Try it on Vector Magic's Web site for free

How to do it in Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop Express

Image editing is a fun little task to do, but the problem is that in order to do the really powerful stuff (outside of the simple things like "remove red eye" and "rotate 90 degrees"), you need application software to do it. When you talk about this application software, you are probably looking at a tool like Adobe Photoshop, which is very expensive for a home user.

Adobe is starting to figure out that sites like Flickr, Photobucket, and Webshots are actually competitors on some level, so within the last few months, they have released Adobe Photoshop Express, a Web based tool that allows you to do a lot of the things that Photoshop does. They also give you 2 GB of storage for free. The goal here, of course, is brand recognition, which many software companies are finding is incredibly important.

https://www.photoshop.com/express/

Photoshop Tutorials

Adobe Photoshop is one of the most powerful image editing tools available. Many people stick with the tools they get with a digital camera, but if you have the money to spend, Photoshop is an incredibly versatile and potent tool.

The folks at Photoshop Roadmap have put together a list of free tutorials (training) for specific tasks you might want to perform - from the easy (removing red eye) to more difficult (removing wrinkles, changing a person's facial expression).

Here's the link...scroll down past the ads up top and you'll find tons of tutorials that might be of use!

Link to site