Getting right to the point, I’ve discovered a couple bands recently that kick ass, and that I think everyone needs to know about, and another band I’ve been listening to for a while just released a bitchin new album.  So I want to share

Be Your Own Pet - Get Awkward

Garage-Punk Chick-Thrash.  And they aren’t even 21 yet.   Songs have so much attitude that you might get slapped in the face and then wake up hungover in a hotel bathtub in Century City by the end of the album.  The most rockin new album I’ve heard in a while.  And they have two more.

Bomb The Music Industry - Get Warmer

If you like Rancid, Nintendo Music, and summer backyard bbq all mixed together, then this is for you.  Really an eclectic mix of punk styles, and each song on the album is a treat (well, maybe the title track being the exception).  Keyboards, horns, backup vocals, and overall really well-written melodies.  One of my new faves.

The Phenomenauts - For All Mankind

The Phenomenauts are what you’d get if you mixed Devo and The Cramps, and then cyrogenically froze the resulting cocktail until the year 3000.  It’s sci-fi themed rock with elements of rockabilly and new wave.  Infectiously campy, and they put on a helluva live show.  My favorite of their three albums.

Go buy all three!

I’ve been getting a lot of email from excited photographers about our next set of actions, set to debut in mid-June, and I thought I’d take a little time to answer some of the questions people had. So from my hotel room in Chicago, here are some things that you might want to know (or might not give a rat’s ass about):

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.

I’ve been busy for a while now working on a new set of Photoshop actions, and as we’re getting closer and closer to having a polished, complete sets of tools, I’m beginning to get really, really excited. I really think that we’ve completely out-done ourselves this time, and I’m pretty darned proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish with actions within Photoshop… Everything you loved about the original TRA will be amped up even farther, and I think there will be a new favorite action for everyone… I’m hoping to have everything set to go in a couple weeks, but in the meantime, here’s a little preview of what you can expect from the new goodies!

Hope Jess doesn’t mind me using her image for a sample here, but this is three actions together, a recipe that I think will become really, really popular… By the way… that’s not a bitmap texture - it’s procedurally generated (for those of you who don’t understand geek-speak, that means it will be slightly different every time)

Before:

And after:

Next, I think this B&W action might just change the way I think about digital B&W… lots of local contrast, with a soft overall tonal scale, and exceptional retention of highlight and shadow detail… all with a single button click. I’m super-proud of this one… check out the shadow and highlight detail in the after…

Before:

And After:

Finally, another random action from the set:

Before:

And After:

All of these were finished with our new, improved Web Sharpening action, which I’ve been using for my own stuff for about a year now, and consider just about ideal. And of course, we have the usual utility-oriented actions… in particular, I think our highlight recovery tool will rock your socks off (no, it’s not the same as the one already in Photoshop, and yes, I think it kicks ass all over what Adobe has already written…)

I’m hoping for a mid-June release date, so sit tight until then! I’m feeling pretty sure that this is going to be the best set of actions…. period. I already felt that way about the first set, but we’re never content to rest on our laurels. Hope you feel the same! Until then…

Head on over to the site to check out the latest video tutorial for the Totally Rad Action Mix.  This time, we’re dealing with how to use Yin / Yang, Big Blue, and Green With Envy on your photos to control contrast, shape tones, and make your color scream.  The video is a departure from the previous tutorials in that I’m not actually on camera at all.   Figured it was best on this one to just let people watch along as we get down and dirty in Photoshop.  Also, I know that “accenuate” isn’t a word.  YOU try speaking in complete, coherent sentences while you retouch… it’s harder than you think

Congrats to Cyndi Montgomery of www.barefootphoto.net, who is the winner of our drawing for a $500 gift certificate toward Apple products.  Yesterday marked the close of our week-long contest, and we were thrilled to have such an overwhelming response…

How did we pick a random winner?  Simple.  Everybody who downloaded our Totally Rad Action Mix sample was entered into a spreadsheet, which automatically assigns a row number to their name.  Then we went to random.org, had a random number generated, and picked the person from that row (and since the order in which people signed up was already random, this just made it double-random).

Thanks again everybody for the great response to the new site!

-Doug

PS - if I’m taking a little longer than usual to get back to emails, please forgive me… my volume of email has increased just about tenfold since the launch of the new site, and it was all I could do last week to keep up at all… took a couple days off from dealing with anything except emergencies this weekend (I mean, I had to find time to take my mom to the Pirates Dinner Adventure yesterday, right?)  Should be back on top of things in a day or so, though.  Thanks for your patience!

PPS - Pirates Dinner Adventure sucked.  Don’t go.  There isn’t enough beer in the world to make it tolerable.

That’s right!  To celebrate the launch of our new website, we’ll give you $20 off the Totally Rad Action Mix through this Friday 5/9/08 with the coupon code totallyrad5508.  Just enter that at checkout and save!

Also, we’re giving away $500 in Apple gift certificates to one Rad Photographer in a drawing this week.  To enter, all you need to to is download a sample set of three Totally Rad Actions from the Download Sample section in the new site.  We’ll announce the randomly-chosen winner here next Monday.  Good Luck!

Perhaps that’s a bit lofty a title, but it sure feels like it for me… Today we finally launch the brand-new Totally Rad Stuff For Photographers site at www.gettotallyrad.com. Some new goodies, and a super-bitchin flash interface. Head on over and check it out!

There’s yet another great new resource for getting the most out of the Totally Rad Actions (well, it’s a small one right now, but it’s a start).  Go to www.gettotallyrad.com/forum for a whole slew of troubleshooting tips, quoted from emails I’ve answered in the past.  I don’t have any plans for making this an active community for photography discussion (Jeff Caplan does wonderful job of that already), rather a place where some of the problems and solutions I’ve helped people out with can be accessible to everyone else as well.  Enjoy!

More super boring news! I’ve grouped all the recipe cards that we had at the tradeshows into a neat little gallery where you can view all nine of them! The TRA recipe cards are a great way to learn about the actions and what they can do. Nine different photographers, along with their photos and how they processed them, are all there for your educational pleasure!

Check them out at www.gettotallyrad.com/recipes

Not very exciting news, but I’ve grouped all five video tutorials into one place so they’re a bit easier to find… www.gettotallyrad.com/videos

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…