Museum of Obsolete Media

A great online resource that catalogues current and obsolete formats for Film, Photography, Video, Audio, and Data http://www.obsoletemedia.org/film/

100 Open Source programs for Audio and Video

Open source applications make it easy to create, listen to and view digital audio and video content. Animation 1. Blender Replaces: AutoDesk Maya Suitable for professional use, Blender is a 3D animation suite that offers modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and game creation capabilities. It also features a customizable interface, and it can import and export from a wide variety of file formats. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X. 2. Art of Illusion Replaces: AutoDesk Maya Art of Illusion isn’t quite as polished as Blender, but its developers claim the latest version (released September 2013) “is both stable Read more

How to Retouch Portraits Without Losing Skin Texture with Frequency Separation

Here’s a great introductory retouching tutorial by photographer Sara Kiesling, who writes, Basic skin retouching using frequency separation and dodging & burning. I use this process on every photo that I do, and I usually spend about 4-5 minutes on headshots like this (and less time on full body shots when there is obviously less detail in the face). This is not intended to be a high-end retouching tutorial, but techniques that can help people who want to do natural-looking retouching while maintaining most of the natural skin texture! Frequency separation is a technique that allows you to give skin a smooth-yet-sharp Read more

Enlargement software for digital images

There are a range of Photoshop plugins to assist with enlarging image files. Attached Mac User article article discussing the most recent versions of these plugins. The conclusion to draw is the type of enlargement software used, really depends on the file you start with. The plugins mentioned make a noticeable difference to enlargement of web-graphics.

Everything you need to know about buying a camera

Cameras! It’s almost impossible to get away from cameras nowadays, yet most of us use them with the bare minimum of knowledge required to snap the nearest tweet-worthy scene. That’s not because we don’t care about truly pretty pictures — even casual observers know the difference between good and bad photography — but have you tried to make an educated choice between cameras lately? Spec sheets are laden with alien terminology like ISO and F numbers, and once you manage to get a grasp of what those mean, you’re still confronted with a spectacular variety of options. To help you Read more

SLR Camera Simulator

Want to play around with SLR Camera settings and see how it affects your photo, but without actually using an SLR? Well, you can do just that with the Online SLR Camera Simulator. This simple application allows you to choose the lighting, ISO, shutter speed and aperture. A great tool to teach someone the basics of photography. Website: http://camerasim.com/camera-simulator.html

Software at UCL Clusters

There are many applications available at UCL Clusters that would be useful to Slade students, such as Photoshop It’s worth noting that some Clusters, such as those in UCL Libraries, are open 24 hours at certain times of year. Full list of software is on this webpage: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/purchasing/software/software_bid/applications