http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/

The second, and my personal favorite is the Russell Brown site. Dr. Brown has probably forgotten more about Photoshop than I’ll ever learn. A word of caution, this guy is an eccentric goof-ball for sure (sorry Dr. Brown… I can’t shade the truth :), but once you can get past his corny sense of humor, one thing’s for sure… You’ll end up learning a TON of stuff from him, things no other site will teach you as well as some of the more elemental things. Some of his techniques are quite unique and well thought out. The site has an amazing amount of tutorials on it.

I’ve found that I have to watch a particular video several times before I even begin to grasp the deepest part of the concept he is teaching, so patience is absolutely required with his videos. I have however learned more about Photoshop from this man than any other single source.

http://www.russellbrown.com

His videos are available through the website, however, if you’re looking to use this as a resource for extended learning (and I highly recommend you do) I’ve found it best to access the videos via ITunes. That way you can download the videos to your computer and watch them at your leisure many times over without having to use your internet connection every time. I even ripped them to DivX and put them on my Archos so I can watch them when I’m out and about. When I’m not working on my laptop on the bus (like I am right now), I’ll often pull out the Archos and watch a tute or two.

Like I said, Dr. Brown’s "style" can take a little getting used to, but I believe you’ll find you’ll learn more from him and his videos than you will from any other resource, myself included :o)

An aside, I wrote this article about StumbleUpon and I am really starting to love this sites methodology, especially the toolbar. Do yourself a favor, if you want to find good tutorial sites, head on over to StumbleUpon.com and do a search for Photoshop Tutorials, you may just find a few surprises.

I will either update this page or write a new article (likely the latter) as I find new tute sites and confirm that they are actually worth your time—the two listed here most definitely are.

On the surface, it almost seems there are very few changes to Photoshop in the new CS4 version. It’s the underpinnings of the program that are jaw dropping for me. They have incorporated GPU technology into the software’s rendering engine. I know nothing at all what that means, I did find this one article that explains GPU it a bit, but what I did glean from that article is that this new version is capable of pulling in huge files quickly and one can actually work on the photo once it’s in… imagine that! I have always saved my stitched pano’s out at manageable sizes due to the constraints of working on them after they are saved.

Understand that before I get all the way into this, I’m just a regular joe. Not a pro photographer, not a pro writer, just a guy with a d200 and a bogen 303sph head. I’m not an expert, I’m not even that good of a photographer, so be advised as you read on. Anyway…

So I said to my self, self, lets see what this thing can do right out of the box. I opened up ptGUI and pulled in the very first immersive 360° I ever did and ran a psb (large document format) at maximum size, which ended up being 17650 x 8825 pixels—a whopping 155 megapixels. I ran the stitch and save with no compression at all and included all 41 layers in the stitch and save. I ended up with a 19gb file.

I opened up CS4 and just dragged it in to see what happened. Understand that while my main box is fast and powerful, it’s fast and powerful with 4 year old technology—an Asus PC-DL mother board, 2 Xeon 3.06ghz with 1mb level 3 cache, 3 gig of old school pc3200 ddr dual channel hyperthreaded via the motherboard, and a total of 2.75tb internal. A ton of power in its day, but lacks fast memory, fast fsb speed etc. It took over 15 minutes to load the file, that was expected. I can hardly imagine pulling in a 19gb file into photoshop before this version—a 2gb file took longer to load in CS3, so comparatively, it actually loaded faster than expected.

To my amazement, Photoshop was only using 1gb of ram once the photo was fully loaded; that was the first amazing thing. I brought the file up to 100% view, hit the spacebar to go into hand tool mode and started dragging around—I would have thought it was a far smaller file by the way I was easily able to move around in this massive amount of pixels. The experience was just super smooth. OK, so then I figured let’s take it through some paces. The shot was fine as far as tone, exposure and the rest, so I went to the master visible layer in the file and turned it into a smart object. Took about a minute to accomplish that, which really is pretty amazing considering the machine I’m on and the size of the file. I went into the smart sharpen filter, again, a little slow (40 seconds, give or take), set the filter to my usual settings and committed the changes, another 30 seconds or so. I saved my work, amazingly only took about a minute and a half, flattened it, that was very quick, and saved it as a jpeg.

Click the thumbnail to see a full res presentation in a zoomify window

This is a full 360° with the top and bottom cropped off, as they always look weird on a flat equirectilinier (especially because my tripod is stretched across the bottom 1/6th of the shot).

If I didn’t know the physical file size and its dimensions, I would never have believed I was working on a file of such massive proportions. I was just absolutely amazed that this could even be done on my machine, much less getting it done in such a short time frame all things considered. No doubt, this is going to be somewhat revolutionary for panorama shooters, as I’m sure that there are many like me that yearn for that huge presentation.

Yearning is over for me. There were reasonable limitations I put on myself for the maximum size of work I would do, now all that changes. It’s nice to know that I can move towards gigapixel range and be able to do it on an old school 32 bit box. Without even considering the other improvements, I am fully satisfied and outright amazed at Stonehenge.

If anyone’s interested, you can visit my 360° site and check out some of my full screen fully immersive 360 work: http://www.sobe360.net