Damien Symonds

Next, run CleanMyMac.

You have to set that up manually, via Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts. Have you done so? By default, Ctrl L simply opens the Levels dialog, which is much different, and of course destructive.

Sure it will, just press Cmd - (minus), the same way you'd zoom out in Photoshop itself.

Oh yes, for sure. It will be easier to replace the entire thing, rather than trying to line up that squiggly pattern.

No, that's great!!! Perfect.

Hi Jodie, simply add a "Solid Color" adjustment layer, white in colour, and mask it on to the background. It should only be the work of minutes.

Oh gosh, this is such a tricky question. The face-value answer is: They'd need to be the same number of megapixels as your own camera (I assume you're combining them with some of your own photos?) so that their quality is a good match, if you know what I mean. However, it isn't always so. If you're using a stock image for a background, well, backgrounds tend to be blurrier than a subject, so you might get away with a smaller file. In fact, sometimes I've successfully used very small phone photos as backgrounds (artistically blurred, of course) for composites. I guess what I'm trying to say is, get them as close in size to your own photos as possible. If you can't get them that big, pay very close attention to how you use them, to make sure your composite doesn't end up with glaring disparities of focus.

Hi Donna, is this a new problem? I mean, has it been working ok in the past?

Oh yeah, jpegs must not enter into this. I can't stress this enough. That vector text is crucial.

The reason they say that stuff about text is to prevent problems with black text. But as far as I can tell from a quick skim, you don't have any black text anyway, so I think you'll be fine. Stick with your sRGB work. Please be sure to read this if you haven't already - it's vitally important.

My first thought with a question like this is, do you have an entirely clear photo of the backdrop you can borrow from? Did you take any snaps of your setup without any subjects in front of it?

Hi Jennifer, There's nothing wrong with the actual calibration, though, right? It's just this reminder thing?

Just save it as a jpeg for upload here.

They'll change your life, I promise.

Yep, that's what makes Image Processor completely foolproof. It is literally impossible for it to ever accidentally save over original files.

Image Processor makes a "box" for your images to fit in. If you set it to 900x900, for example, it would make all the landscape images 900 wide, and all the portrait ones 900 high.

There sure is. Do you need to watermark them too? Just to clarify, the 72dpi part is completely meaningless, you don't have to worry about that. Only the dimensions matter.

I think this would be a task for Frequency Separation. I don't have any resources on it, but Google will find you some, and I'm going to move the post to the General Discussion area so that other people can suggest tutorials too.

Yay!!!

Hi Melissa, may I see a 100% crop of a particularly severe area?

The trick is to simply make the height something crazy - like 4000 pixels, or whatever - in the Fit Image dialog. Let me know if that doesn't work, but I'm pretty sure that's it.

Well, it's just after lunch, and it's really stinking hot here today, so it is very tempting!

In the footer of the main site. But it's not necessarily, truly. I'm so grateful to you, and other people who have been quick to embrace the our new forum home.

That should pass most scrutiny, don't you think?

PSD download link