In only two years, Taylor McCormick has transformed herself from a budding photographer into a one-of-a-kind artist.  Through an involved and self-driven process McCormick matured from a high-school student with a camera and an imagination into a gallery-sponsored artist, traveling to Atlanta, Washington D.C., New York and Los Angeles for her work. Her journey can be described by the same word used to describe most of her published images: dreamlike.

Taylor’s breakout photography caught my attention with its originality and cultivated process. McCormick is a young woman talented beyond her years, whose portfolio illustrates a combination of both tenacity and creativity.

I recently had the chance to talk to Taylor about her breakout photography career and found her story to be an example of what young photographers can achieve with the right tools and vision.

At age 17, after a few years of shooting photos, McCormick began using Photoshop CS5 to create artwork out of the images she shot on her camera. She had no formal training in Photoshop, and learned the software through YouTube training videos and relentless trial and error. Her goal was to work on an image for a week, creating and learning as she made each photo increasingly more detailed and complex.
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Last fall, the Photoshop Elements team ran a contest on Facebook called Sensational Friends that asked the community to submit photos of the loved ones that make their lives “sensational.”

Our grand prize winner, Terence H., received a trip for two to Miami and a copy of Photoshop Elements 11. He was kind enough to share a brief summary of his vacation and some photos from his trip.

Day 1:

After a luxurious limo ride, a speedy check-in and complimentary champagne at the Z Ocean Hotel, my wife Julie and I were taken to our spa suite. King-sized down bed, huge balcony with a hot tub, a shower the size of a small apartment, complimentary espresso machine … it goes on. “Wow” doesn’t do it justice.

We hit Ocean Drive first for a stroll, soaking up the warm sun, the gentle ocean breezes and the smells of all the delicious offerings at the patio restaurants. South Beach is all about Art Deco architecture. Each building is different, some are all angles and edges, others are sleek and smooth. All of them are colorful, pastels during the day and bathed in neon at night. I thought my camera was going to have a meltdown.

Our concierge hooked us up with a last-minute reservation at De Rodriguez Cuba for what he promised would be the best meal we’ve ever had. He was right – authentic Cuban cuisine and every taste was a new and delicious experience.
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Photoshop’s Faking It Contest has seen it all: Ghosts, “Manimals” and even the extraterrestrial. Inspired by the Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Faking It contest took place on the Photoshop Facebook page for eight weeks and collected nearly 400 manipulated submissions.

We’ve had a great time celebrating manipulated photography with you. Now that the contest is over, there’s only one more thing to celebrate: our grand prize winner, Shane M., whose photo titled “Paranoia” was chosen by the Photoshop Facebook community. As part of his grand prize, Shane will receive a trip for two to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX to see the Faking It exhibit in person.

“I grew up learning Photoshop years before I ever even picked up a camera,” said Shane in his video. “It’s very interesting how my work really gravitated more toward this fictional use of the camera.” He describes his wining photo as, “a moment that was created rather than captured.”
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Photoshop Touch is now available in a version specifically built for phones! Following up on the very popular tablet version, Photoshop Touch for phone is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play for US $4.99.

This app shares an almost identical set of features with the tablet app, in an experience designed for smaller screens. I am particularly excited about this new app because I always have my phone with me. I can be creative anywhere using the powerful tools in Photoshop Touch, even when I don’t have my tablet with me.

Much like the tablet version, Photoshop Touch on the phone has core Photoshop features like layers, advanced selections tools, adjustments and filters. We also packed in features exclusive to Photoshop Touch, like Scribble Selection for high-precision selections using only your finger, and Camera Fill for real-time creative blending of your camera feed with layers. This app features the same creative filters as the tablet version, like Color Drops and Acrylic Paint, and also a new Ripple filter.
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What do Smokey Robinson, Copernicus and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) have in common? Other than just the right mix of science and creativity…they all share a February 19th birthday. ACR fits right in with this group of right and left-brained all-stars. Astrologists say that those born on February 19 have, “the ability to put ideas into form,” and are, “born builders.”  Also on this date, the stars aligned for Thomas Edison to patent the first phonograph, for Cracker Jack to insert the first prize into a box and Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” to win a Grammy for album of the year. Coincidence? Probably not.

Whether you believe in astrology or not, you can celebrate along with us at Adobe as we commemorate the 10^th birthday of Adobe Camera Raw, a technology that has fundamentally changed the relationship between cameras and computers. More than 10 years ago, Thomas Knoll went on vacation to Italy and in classic overachiever form, came back with the beginning of a solution that would forever change the way Adobe products interpret information recorded by digital cameras.

It just so happens that Adobe is also celebrating the 23^rd birthday of Photoshop and the 6^th birthday of Lightroom on this same momentous day! Since ACR is a strong driver of continual improvements to Photoshop and Lightroom, it’s only fitting that the three coincidentally share a birthday.
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I was fortunate enough to sit and chat recently with INSA, a bleeding-edge urban artist out of the UK, who gained notoriety with his animated GIF graffiti projects he calls GIF-iti. In Part 2 of my interview, INSA discusses his affinity for ladies footwear and tells me which building he’d most like to graffiti. He also shares a Twitter feed that offers a glimpse of his delinquent side, and we learn what projects INSA has on-deck for the next few months. If you missed Part 1 of my interview with INSA, you can find it here.

Take a minute to check out the time-lapse video below, which was part of the ‘White Walls Project’ from Unit 44. It will give you an idea of the kind of labor it takes to complete one of INSA’s GIF-iti pieces … then enjoy the rest of my interview with INSA.

What are the recurring themes in your artwork, what subject matter do you find most inspirational?
Constantly recurring themes in my work are the contradictions in our wants and needs, exploring commodification and objectification, and the way female sexual identity is aligned more with consumerism rather than real human connection. Or to put it simply, I paint a lot of high heels.

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Dedicated. Stubborn. Certifiable. A sucker for punishment. All ways to describe the UK-based graffiti artist, INSA, who recently gained global recognition for his new-school approach to the old-school craft of graffiti, or as he calls it GIF-iti. His approach shows a mad dedication to the traditions of graffiti, where rather than take the shortcuts that Photoshop might allow, INSA chooses to travel the long road, sometimes taking many days to complete a single 600-pixel-wide animated GIF.

He creates his labor-intensive GIF-iti by painting and re-painting the walls of buildings – each time making slight changes – and then photographing each change in order, later creating a looping sequence of images, which make an animated GIF. The biggest challenge and the key he says, is to ensure that the last image layer links smoothly back to the first, which may have been painted a week earlier. His most recent GIF-iti project was a collaboration with artist Stanley Donwood, commissioned for the album release from new supergroup, Atoms for Peace, featuring Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers.

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MacWorld 2013 has the legendary Russell Brown up to his classic shenanigans. I caught up with Russell at the MacWorld ‘LIVE Zone’ floor, where he was preaching the gospel of Adobe Revel and Photoshop Touch as his whacked-out alter ego, ‘Doctor Brown.’ Riding shotgun with Russell was ‘Jim the Zombie’ who happily posed with hundreds of MacWorld attendees in an old-school, monster-movie-poster-themed photo booth, flanked by a pair of alien assistants straight out of Area 51.

Photos were snapped with iPhones and then instantly shared to the cloud  using Adobe Revel. Anyone who wanted to add effects to their photos or do some compositing, had access to iPads loaded with Photoshop Touch.

Russell’s favorite moment was overhearing a MacWorld passerby exclaiming, “This is marketing GENIUS!” while mine was overhearing a visibly hesitant attendee ask, “Do I have to go into the booth with the zombie or can I just stand a safe distance away?”

Kudos to Frank Ippolito, the makeup artist behind Russell’s and Jim’s extraordinary characters. Frank will be switching things up for the next two days at MacWorld, giving Russell and Jim completely different extreme makeovers.

Check out some of my photos from yesterday below or see the ghoulish results of the all-day photo sesh by visiting the Revel MacWorld album or the Photoshop Touch facebook album. Or better still, visit Russell Brown and his monster buddies in person at MacWorld if you’re in the neighborhood.

Aliens, clones, chameleons and contorted faces – we’ve seen our Photoshop fans create incredible images since we introduced the ‘Faking It’ contest last month. For the past six weeks, we’ve challenged fans of the Photoshop Facebook page to create manipulated images inspired by artwork in the Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

There are still two more weeks to submit your own altered images to be entered for a chance to win a weekly drawing for a print copy of the 296-page exhibition companion, Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop by Mia Fineman. Fans who submit short videos of how their photos were made will also be eligible to win the grand prize: a trip for two to see the Faking It exhibit in person at either the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. or the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

The contest is a celebration of image manipulation and encourages fans to explore what creations are possible with Photoshop. So far, we’ve been thrilled to see some incredibly imaginative photo and video submissions. All of the submissions can be viewed here, but we wanted to share some examples of the work that has resulted from the contest. Below are a couple of images from each of the six themed weeks so far. Today, we will kick off the seventh week, which focuses on ghostly images. The contest runs through February 6.

Week 1: The Tall Tale Postcard

Week 2: Colorization

Week 3: I Want to Believe

Week 4: Camouflage Photography

Week 5: One Figure Multiple Times

Week 6: Photo Caricature

For more information about the Faking It contest, visit our Facebook page and read the official contest rules. Happy manipulating!