Conrad Chavez

Conrad Chavez writes, edits, and illustrates a wide range of books and training materials, with a particular focus on digital imaging. His holistic approach to projects draws from more than 15 years of experience providing technical writing, training, and support for digital imaging, graphic arts, video, and Web software products. Most recently, he is the author of Real World Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers, Peachpit Press Conrad is also a photographer. Through his camera, Conrad observes the textures, tones, and colors of life. His exhibition prints combine archival materials with advanced digital printmaking techniques. You can find out more about Conrad at his Web site, http://www.conradchavez.com.
  • Features: Written by Conrad Chavez on April 23, 2013

    Conrad Chavez shows you how to find the best photo hosting website for your work by considering the purpose of your photography, your budget, and your design requirements, and your workflow.

  • Features: Written by Conrad Chavez on April 10, 2013

    Digitizing an archive of film images can be a time-consuming process. Instead of opening hundreds of individual scans in Photoshop, things will go much faster if you use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw with Adobe Bridge. Their streamlined workflows and ability to edit TIFF and JPEG files can accelerate the process of importing, editing, and organizing incoming scans.

    This article assumes that you have some experience using Lightroom 4 or Adobe Camera Raw 7. What you’ve learned editing digital camera images in these applications will help you with film scans too.

  • Features: Written by Conrad Chavez on October 31, 2012
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    Five Ways to Help Protect Your Images Online

  • Features: Written by Conrad Chavez on April 9, 2012
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    Pros: Improved develop engine extracts surprising dynamic range out of single images.

  • Features: Written by Conrad Chavez on June 18, 2009

    A lot of photographers ask me why their pictures don’t look sharp. Answering them can be complicated, because you affect image sharpness by many decisions you make at all stages of the process -- even before you take a photograph. And after you shoot a digital photo, image sharpness is affected by how you manage image contrast. The sharpening settings you apply in software are only the last link in that chain. So the focus of this article is about the steps up to that last link. Follow along and you'll create a solid foundation for sharp images.

    Shoot for Sharpness

  • Features: Written by Conrad Chavez on February 13, 2006

    Adobe Illustrator gives you many of the same compositing features found in Photoshop, such as control over blending modes, opacity, and masking. While Photoshop is a better tool for editing at the pixel level, Illustrator is perfectly suitable for compositing vector and whole bitmap objects. Sharon Steuer (painter and author of many books, including The Illustrator WOW! series) chose to create a Valentine's Day card design in Illustrator because it's a mix of type, vector graphics with applied effects, and imported bitmap images (Figure 1).

  • Features: Written by Conrad Chavez on April 20, 2005
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    Automatic tracing gets a big boost in Adobe Illustrator CS2 in the form of LiveTrace.

  • Features: Written by Conrad Chavez on February 8, 2005
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    Excerpted from "Adobe Illustrator C