brian - March 2006

not quite the usual photoshop tuition, but maybe something for the traditionalists. in order that those who have adopted digital technology out of necessity or practicality (if everywhere else is like islay, traditional film and developing is hard to come by) can continue to enjoy the look and feel of 'analogue' film, try this (or these)

makers of a range of photoshop plug ins, alien skin (we will never wear suits) now have 'exposure' - a suite of plug-ins that emulate a wide variety of traditional film stock, including black and white.

by way of two examples, i've started with a 6 megapixel fuji digital photo of islayseasafari's 11metre rigid inflatable at port ellen pontoons. this is followed by an example of a colour film filter emulating e6 cross processed in c41chemicals (no, i don't know what that means either).

the black and white example below that is a calotype - i did look this up on google, but the explanation (from the university of glasgow) is way too wordy to put up here. but it creates a darn good b&w pic and a lot more easily than faffing about with channels, layers, levels etc.







the sooper-dooper part is that it creates the filtered version on a new layer, leaving your original alone to live another day and because of this, you could create several different filtered versions and experiment with the blend modes in the layers palette. hours of endless fun





according to the alienskin website, the plug-ins run with photoshop cs or later and photoshop elements 3 or later (and photoshop elements 4 for mac has just been released) and although it specifies at least a 1ghz mac, mine is only 667mhz and it still works (if a bit slowly - just like its owner)

all these screenshots were taken in photoshop cs2.

obviously a sign of age, because i forgot to mention it earlier, but the long awaited (by me at least) cd release of the sheena swanson quartet recording at last year's black bottle islay jazz festival is actually here.

as i may have mentioned before, we're selling this cd at £10 each (plus p+p) to raise funds for the west of scotland adult cystic fibrosis unit. they're the only ones making any money out of this, thanks to generous sponsorship from black bottle and duffies of islay (transport). also to paul and mario for foregoing any income or royalties.

if you'd like a copy, drop me an e-mail at ssq@ileach.co.uk

italian cycle component manufacturer, campagnolo, has had electronic gearchanging in development for a number of years now without putting it on the market.

however, photographs have popped up of an electronic shimano groupset at the paris-nice race, so we presumably now have a race (if you'll pardon the pun) to see who puts a whole set on sale first.

there are those of us, however, who want to know why you'd want to in the first place.