Now we’ve got rumors of PS8 coming out in late 2003. As if I’m not going nuts enough waiting for the next Harry Potter book, Return of the King, Daredevil, Hulk…. Sheesh.

More rumors and speculation at Macmerc, and AllOSX, and an article that was pulled at Think Secret. The quick article removal is reminiscent of the blink and it’s gone preview information that was around for PS7.

I was going through some of my favorite Photoshop sites today, and something occured to me – unless you are up in the Deke McCelland/Kai Krause guru/master level of photoshop godhood, you just aren’t going to be able to perfectly duplicate natural surfaces and textures. By this I mean creating from scratch a surface/shape/texture that is completely photo-realistic. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Photo-realism is not always needed or necessary – a lot of the completely digital stuff I or anyone else does is on the level of illustration. And illustration isn’t supposed to look 100% real. That’s kind of the point.

However, there are lots and *lots* of tutorials out there (and some less than cheap books) that claim to be able to teach you how to make realistic textures from scratch. The end results of these tutorials vary – some are pretty near the mark. Some are good as abstract art. Some miss the target completely. For the beginning digital artist, all of them are a good thing, because they push you to learn the software in ways you might not have thought of before. They show you some neat tricks that you might never have come up with on your own. But what about the next step?

For me, the next step has involved a lot of photo compositing, collage, and digital enhancement. Projects where I either start with a base photograph and do cruel and unusual things to it, or take several photographs and pure digital pieces and mate them in ways nature and a darkroom never intended. For a lot of this work, I find that faking nature just won’t cut it. No matter how good the method for creating dirt, mud, wind, highlights, etc…. nothing beats an actual photograph.

Working from reference shots is nothing new to anyone who has studied art, but there are a lot of people getting into the art/design field who never had any training pior to getting their computer and discovering the possibilities of pixels. There is an attitude I see reflected in a lot of the tutorial/photoshop sites that photoshop is the *only* thing you need to create anything short of a 3-D world. Not true.

Say you’ve digitally created a great sand/gravel texture, but it’s lacking that subconcious oomph that says “real” in the back of your mind. You could play around with the lighting filter, but you could also either find a good shot of dirt/mud/ground or go out with your trusty camera after a rainstorm and snap away. Then you take the digital and the “real” images and mate them.

Papryus is one of those very nice but tragically overused fonts. Usually when I see it, I’m prejudiced against whatever it’s being used for, regardless of what it is. So when I find an example of it being used and I actually like it, someone is doing something very right. Hilde Schneider-Mott has done this with her portfolio site, and I have to make mention of it.

Being a pretty pictures junkie, I’m always looking around for new photographers whose work I can ogle, drool over, and wish to hell I could reproduce on my own. Stphen Voss is the target du jour – lush, super saturated images that just pop out loud.

And here I thought I didn’t have enough things to drool after….. Adobe’s coming out with Photoshop version 7. I am such a graphics geek. But now I have something obscure to lust after for at least the next month (Adobe *says* they’ll be shipping in March) which is good, since with the weather warming up again, Bill is back into the land of Paintball and lusting after new barrels and better paint. (For someone who doesn’t play, I know a hell of a lot about the sport)

I am becoming more and more enamored of the Graphire. No question that I’m buying a tablet of my own in the near future. Big question – Graphire or Intuos?