Can anybody recommend a good photoshop forum?

[Picture North Carolina]

I would like to join a photoshop forum that is popular and large like this one. I have a few questions I need help on, and I would assume the moderators here would judge the posts as being off topic.

Which are the largest photoshop (CS2) forums?

thanks.

[Unreal_Nature]

In my opinion, the best Photoshop forum is the User to User forum at Adobe.com.

Go here: http://www.adobe.com/support/forums/index.html and scroll to find the forum the two Photoshop forums (Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady for either Mac or Windows - you choose).

-Julie

[RAitch]

I haven't joined... but worth1000.com has some crazy-amazing artists that are exceptional with Photoshop contributing all the time.

If you don't join the forum, it's worth the look (1000 times??)
Retouchpro is another one I stumbled into... but again... have limited participation other than browsing.

[vetkrazy]

You might try

http://www.photoshoptv.com/

[maderito]

I believe this forum was spawned from the Adobe forums. A lot of useful information here - but like any forum, sometimes hard to find what you're looking for.

http://photoshoptechniques.com/forum/index.php?

[EOS_JD]

Why not here?

[ssim]

Why not here?

I agree. It would be nice to see a photoshop forum where you could go and ask questions related to this product that aren't necessarily related to images. I personally wouldn't want the post processing forum to get littered with questions about rasterizing text layers so a separate area would be a good idea, imo.

[ejwebb]

My life is like one big RAW file....way too much post processing needed.

At least you're not living in JPEG:)

[Picture North Carolina]

Thanks to all for the excellent links. I'll be checking them out and joining the forums

Why not here?
Well, unless the moderator judges it off topic, I guess it's worth a try.

I guess the problem I want to solve with photoshop is simple, but I'm just not that good with masks.

I'm shooting some infrared. the camera I use has a hot spot in the middle of almost every shot. it's apparently a sensor issue. the spot is a hue shift, not a brightness or contrast problem.

I just need a simple mask or action that I can use in the workflow to automatically remove the hot spot.

The two pics below show the hot spot. The red one is straight from the camera and shows the hue shift spot. the second is desaturated to show that it is not a brightness issue.

any help would be appreciated.

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/497/samplered2dm.jpg

http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/9915/samplebw7ne.jpg

Thanks,
-Dan

[RAitch]

Well, you could add a hue adjustment layer and a radial gradient mask (white in middle). That'll get it close enough that you can match the colour shift.
Then it would be a matter of touching up the mask with painting tools.

OR, since it all looks like a red colour cast, you could sample the colour, desaturate the image, and apply a colour layer filled with the sample to the image and play with the opacity.
You can use that technique to hand colour the image.

I'm guessing they shouldn't all be like that though.

[maderito]

Switch to LAB mode and apply this curve to the b channel. Seems to fix the problem in this image. Very odd problem.

[RAitch]

There's still a hint of it there... but that's another cool option.
Just like everything else, it'll need tweaking.

[Picture North Carolina]

Maderito,

Thank you very much for taking the time to try to help. I learned much.

I put your your suggestion to work, and had mixed results.

The first problem I had was a small one. If you'll notice, you have more bar sections in the grid of your curves adjustment box than I do. I could not find a setting to change that. I am using CS2. If you could tell me how to change that, I would appreciate it.

Nonetheless, I managed to adjust as you suggested, and as you can see in the top image below, the hotspot is mostly gone.

I am still trying to develop a workflow for the infrared, but one of the things I do is to swap channels which could not be done in LAB mode, so I switched back to RGB mode and applied the workflow (which also included auto levels, contrast, color).

The middle picture below is the one with curves adjusted in LAB mode, and the bottom picture is the same workflow applied to the raw image with no curves adjustment.

As you can see, the one with the curves adjustment also has less of a hotspot, but the curves adjustment also resulted in a slight color shift and a substantial loss of color saturation.

The bottom picture has nice color, but also shows the hotspot which is much more obvious after the workflow

I tried to increase saturation in the curves-adjusted one, but it did not come out looking like the bottom picture. I also tried to apply the curves adjustment to the picture after the workflow, but was unsuccessfull.

If you (or others) have any further advice, I appreciate your help. Nonetheless, you have put me on the road toward resolving the issue and I'll continue to work on it. Again, thanks for your help.

-Dan


http://img113.imageshack.us/img113/9453/upload4zd.jpg

[maderito]

The first problem I had was a small one. If you'll notice, you have more bar sections in the grid of your curves adjustment box than I do. I could not find a setting to change that. I am using CS2. If you could tell me how to change that, I would appreciate it.
Alt-click the adjustment layer grid to switch between 4 and 10 grid lines.

Sorry - can't help you with the rest. Swapping channels in RGB mode takes your problem to another level.

You might try working with HSL layers (hue, saturation, lightness). See this article for pointers:
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/J_DIGIT/ADVTECHS.HTM

It may not be obvious from what's written, but you can convert your RGB channels to HSL channels usinng the plugin found in your CS2 "goodies" folder. After conversion, the channels are still labeled RGB, but they are, in fact, HSL - in that order. There are a lot of articles on the net about working in HSL "mode." The above link is just the quickest one I found with info on the plugin.