You can see the list of folders in the left hand window above. To add a folder to the list, you would just right click on the folder in the right hand window and choose “Add to Favorites” and when you wanted to remove a folder (or drive) from the Favorites window on the left hand side, you would right click on the folder (or drive) and choose “Remove from Favorites”.

You could also revert to the operating system dialog by clicking the button (highlighted above) in the lower left hand corner of the box. The operating system dialog would look like the one that is shown below. You could revert to the Adobe Dialog by clicking the “Use Adobe Dialog” button (highlighted below).

I have three different hard dives on my computer that hold photo files. One holds all my raw files and the other two hold my converted Tiff files. On each drive are many subfolders and when I am processing a lot of images, having to navigate to the correct folder every time that I save something is a real pain.

So when Adobe added this item to Photoshop, I was ecstatic. This made my life a whole lot easier. Then along came Adobe Photoshop CS4 and I could not find the “Use Adobe Dialog” button and all of a sudden, my life became more difficult. I hate it when I have something that I like so much and then it it taken away. I recently found out that Adobe removed this feature from Photoshop CS4 because it caused too many compatibility problems.

I started looking for a solution and found that I already had it on my computer but was not using it as it should be used. The great little program that takes up the slack after Adobe dropped the “Use Adobe Dialog” function is free and it is named FileBox eXtender. It is available in a 32 and 64 bit version. The current version as of March 3, 2010 is version 2.00.04.

Installation is a snap and after the program is installed and opened, you will see the following:

The window on the right hand side of the box will not have any entries in it. To add new ones, click on the “New Item” button and navigate to a folder or dive. You will see the following dialog box:

Click on “Browse for a Folder” or “Browse for a File” and navigate to the file, folder or drive that you want to add to the shortcut list. In the example below, I navigated to my F: drive which is where I store my Raw files.

After choosing the target, you can either except the default name in the “Item description” box or you can give it a name of your choosing.

Click “OK’” and it is added to the list. To reorganize the list, you can drag each of the lines into any order that you want. When you are done, click “Hide” on the main screen and you are ready to go. There are many other things that you can do with FileBox eXtender but I am not going to go into them in this blog.

As an example, I have opened a file in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and I am going to save it using the “Save As” menu choice.

To get your folder, file or drive list, clock on the icon of a file folder with a red heart in it and you get the following dialog box:

If the folder, file or drive that you want is not on the list, click on “Configure” and add it to the list. If what you are looking for is on the list, click on the appropriate name and you will be taken directly to that file, folder or drive. What’s great about this feature is that it is available in all of your other programs. Sweet and Easy! I am a happy person once again!

© 2010, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

In the first photo, I had the head of the praying mantis and one of the legs in focus.

In the next photo, the back of the praying mantis and a portion of the left leg was in focus.

In the last photo the back of the praying mantis and the left middle leg are in focus. In Adobe Bridge, I left clicked on the first photo, then held down the Shift key and clicked on the third photo, selecting them all.

From the top menu, I chose:

Tools, Photoshop, Load Files into Photoshop Layers. This would take the three photos and load them into separate layers in one Photoshop file.

Once in Photoshop CS4, I saw the three photos in the Layers box. I did not do anything to these raw files before starting this exercise except to open them up in Adobe Camera Raw and use the Clarity slider on each of them. Other than that one action, they are just as I shot them in the camera. I needed to work with all three layers so with the first layer selected, I held down the Shift key and clicked on the third layer – selecting all three. The layers box now looked like this:

I went to the top menu bar and chose Edit, Auto Align Layers.

I was presented with another choice box:

I chose the default Auto selection and clicked OK. The program did its thing and I ended up with the following:

You can see that I moved the camera between shots but Photoshop CS4 did a great job of aligning the layers. The next process would be to Auto Blend Layers and Photoshop would create layer masks to hide the out-of-focus parts of the image and show the in-focus parts of the image.

Back to the Edit menu and I chose Auto Blend Layers. I was presented with another choice box:

I chose Stack Images since I was shooting a panorama and I left the Seamless Tones and Colors box checked. Again, Photoshop CS4 did its thing and you can see in the Layers box that layer masks were created to mask out the out-of-focus areas.

Here is a layer mask of the middle layer. You can see it by holding down the Alt button (Cmd button on a Mac) and left clicking on the layer mask.

Now for the final result:

Now this isn’t the best photo that I have ever taken and I wish that the white area in the lower left was not there. It is actually a white molding on the corner of the house but you can see by looking at the first three photos that the final result is miles better than any of the three by themselves.

I have included a Quicktime movie to show you everything that I explained above. Please use the controls at the bottom of the image to view the movie. If you cannot see the movie, please update Quicktime. The movie doesn’t seem to work with older versions of Quicktime. Click here to update.

I hope that you find this tutorial interesting.

© 2008 – 2009, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

What we have here is a bergall (also known as a cunner), a member of the wrasse family checking out a Lion’s mane jellyfish. I have seen bergalls taking bites out of the jellyfish in the past although it is a behavior that I don’t see on a regular basis – mainly because I don’t see lion’s mane jellyfish near the bottom where bergalls hang out. As you can see, there is a lot of backscatter in the photo. I have tried a lot of methods to remove this from photos but this is a brand new method that looks really good. So far, it only works on photos with a black background. Initially, you could open this photo in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and set the black point for the background to be sure that it is a solid black color but in this case, I did not do that. From Adobe Bridge, I right clicked on the photo and choose “Open in Camera Raw”.

I clicked on the “Adjustment Brush” in the top toolbar. It is the fifth icon from the right.

This brings up the “Adjustment Brush” dialog box. My interest was to reduce the exposure on the backscatter.

I chose to move the exposure slider to the left to –4 f-stops of exposure. At the bottom of the “Adjustment Brush” dialog box are the sliders for the adjustment brush. I chose a size of “10” and a feather of “0”. The feather of “0” gave me a hard edged brush so that I wouldn’t feather any of my brush into the main subjects – the bergall and the lion’s mane jellyfish. I left the flow and density at their defaults.

I started to paint around the subjects, making sure that I did not get too close. If you make a mistake, you can go to the adjustment brush dialog box and click on the “erase” button at the top of the box and brush away any areas that you don’t want the –4 stop exposure to affect.

Once the large areas were done, I changed my zoom to 100% and painted out areas that were close to the bergall and the lion’s mane jellyfish. When you change the zoom, the brush changes to accommodate the new view. You can see the sizes of the brush in the two photos above. I did not make any size changes when I zoomed in.

Zooming out to “Fit on Screen”, I checked my brushing by holding my mouse over one of the pins on the screen. In this screen, you can see four pins. Each pin is placed when I start a new adjustment brush. For example, if I started with my original brush using –4 stops underexposure and found that I made a mistake and choose “Erase” to remove a bad area. When I choose “Add” and started painting with the –4 f-stop exposure brush again, a new pin would be seen on the page. It is not a big deal, you just have to know that it happens.

I am holding my mouse over another pin to see what areas it has affected. After spending a few minutes cleaning up more areas, here is the final result:

I have tried many methods of removing backscatter in the past but I am really happy with this one. In some of the other methods that I have used, I have found that when I zoomed in, I would see noise in the main subject but there was no noise in the areas that I fixed. This looked pretty fluky and I knew that it wouldn’t work. The next view is of a 100% crop of the bergall. You can see that it looks really good.

You can see that there is no difference in noise between the fish and the black background. This really worked well for me.

Here is another really great tip when using Adobe Camera Raw 5. Try using the “Clarity” slider on your photos. You will be amazed on how much it helps your pictures. I took some photos that I thought were pretty sharp and used the “Clarity” slider on them and I was amazed at how much better then looked.

Finally, as an observation, Veronica and I attended the Camera Show at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City this weekend. We didn’t think that it was particularly well attended as other years in the past and that could be because of the economy. What we did see is that the majority of clusters of people were found at the software vendors. We saw lots of people at the Adobe area, the OnOne Software area, the Live Books area and the Vertis Fluid Mask area. This tells me that digital photography is exciting people and that the software that supports digital photography excites people even more.

I met a fellow who took some of my underwater photography courses many years ago and he was telling me how well he was doing with his photography and I was elated. He did tell me that he was struggling with the computer end of digital photography. I can tell all of you this. If you are going to embrace digital photography, you are going to have to master the computer end of it. I believe that there will be mediocre photographers who are great with the computer that will produce images that are better than better photographers who are not proficient with computers. That’s not the way that it used to be but I am afraid that that is the way of the future. Don’t be afraid of technology, use it to make yourself better.

© 2008, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Today, I am going to visit one of the new tools in Adobe Camera Raw 5 that really impressed me. Before I start I want to make a point about Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). You can open up jpegs and tiff files in ACR, not just raw files. To see the advantage of opening tiffs and jpegs in ACR, see this page in my Digital Photography section on my web site.

My dive buddy, Beth Dalzell, of Brick, NJ took a photo of me with her point-and-shoot camera in an Ikelite housing. I really like the photo but the floatation arms that I use and my housing were overexposed. To open the jpeg in ACR, right click on the photo in Adobe Bridge and choose “Open in Camera Raw”.

I wanted to reduce the exposure on the two floatation arms and on the housing itself. To do this, I used the the adjustment brush. You can open the brush by clicking on it. It is the fifth tool from the left. You can also choose it by using the “k” key.

Once the brush is selected, the adjustment brush box opens on the right side of the panel. There are sliders for exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness and color. There are also sliders to adjust the brush settings. I choose to reduce the exposure by 1 f-stop so I slid the exposure slider to the left to –1.00.

I changed the size of the brush by using the “[ or ]” keys. The left “[“ makes the brush smaller and the right “]” makes the brush larger. I brushed over both white floatation arms and then over the housing itself.

You can see the the exposure was reduced only on the areas that I brushed and I accomplished what I wanted to do.

Here is a look at the photo before I lowered the exposure on the floats and the housing:

I was able to see before and after by unchecking the “Preview” box to see the before view.

And I rechecked the “Preview” box to see the what it looked like when I was done.

The great thing about using Adobe Camera Raw is that when I was finished, I clicked on the “Done” box and my jpeg was saved with the settings that I applied. These settings are reversible. When I was writing this, I forgot to capture one of the views with the arms and housing were too bright. I reset all the settings in ACR by clicking the “Clear All” button at the bottom of the Adjustment brush box and everything was back to the way it was when I started. Pretty cool.

There are also some other new settings in ACR 5 like a graduated filter tool that I will visit at another time.

One last note about the 64-bit version of Adobe Photoshop CS4. It sure seems to run much faster than CS3 did. I have not processed a lot of photos on it yet but I think that it will really speed up my work flow.

© 2008, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.