What is JamNow?
Jamnow.com is a next generation Internet entertainment site that enables anyone to broadcast live and communicate with their audience live ‘on the air’.
Musicians (or anyone interested in an open mic) can play live to the world.
Audience members can tune in live.
Fans can join in and talk back or participate (on stage pass) becoming part of the stream in real time.
All content can be recorded, posted, searched, downloaded.
We offer a collection of high-fidelity music and unique audio content found nowhere else on the Internet.
How does JamNow work?
To find unique audio content
Go to jamnow.com – browse, search, and play stored unique content – all recorded live on JamNow!
To play live to the world
Plug in guitar, microphone, mixer, whatever – launch jamnow client – you are live to the planet!
To tune in
Browse to live content – enjoy
To get into the mix
Artists invite other fans or artists ‘on stage’ and into the mix – live and in real time
Why JamNow?
Take internet music to the next level.
Until JamNow, it’s been all about downloads – the same old stuff available from a zillion sites, and streaming from big venues, concerts, PPV.
We empower everyone with a PC and a broadband Internet connection to broadcast and interact with a live, worldwide audience.
This is a unique opportunity for both artists and fans.
Artists can reach the world, get feedback, and develop an audience – easy – free.
Fans can peruse a diverse assortment of live events and posted content that is unavailable anywhere else.

www.jamnow.com/asburylanes
The first concert venue to use JamNow to broadcast live shows 4 nights a week

http://www.jamnow.com/rickflorino
A heavy metal podcaster using JamNow to broadcast interviews with well known bands

http://www.jamnow.com/jupiterone
Live performance by a great band

Image Extraction in Photoshop
How do you use Photoshop to remove someone or something from an image? How do you use Photoshop to isolate an object or a person and put them in a new scene? It has to be the most common question and one of the most common tasks, but it is also impossible to answer definitively. The answer to that question is slightly different for every image and every Photoshop user. In this case the image will be the one you see below and the Photoshop user will be me—big surprise.

I have chosen this image, not because it is of digital media guru Alex Lindsey, but because it represents a common problem in image extraction; a subject that’s difficult distinguish from its background. Did I say “a common problem”? More like the problem. This is the kind of image all those masking programs and image extraction tools avoid in their demos. They focus on pictures of windswept hair on homogenous colored backgrounds…child’s play—select the background color using Select Color Range, invert the selection and you have your subject locked inside marching ants and begging for mercy. It’s images like the one above that cause that kind of software to fail and the kind of images that might make you feel like a failure. Don’t feel that way.

There are some tips that will help you make short(er) work of images like this one.

Layers and Layer Masks
First and foremost, make the process non-destructive by duplicating your image on a new layer and use a layer mask to paint in and out areas to define your subject.

Vector Masks or Layer Masks?
Personally, I don’t like to use paths, so I don’t use Vector Masks. To be honest, I’m not all that quick with a bezier curve and I find the results to be too hard and unnatural. They’re great for times when, for some reason, you need an EPS with an embedded clipping path of if you need to be geometrically precise. But for isolating people, animals or natural things, paths have never seemed right to me. I go with Layer Masks.

Use Clipping Masks
Never heard of Clipping Masks? I’m surprised at how many Photoshop users don’t know about this feature—it rocks! Basically what it does is it makes the bottom-most layer in the Clipping Mask stack the master transparency model for all the layers above it. This comes in handy when extracting people from difficult images because it allows you to work on a single Layer Mask that is being applied to multiple image layers. And why that might be useful should become clear as we go along here.

Photoshop’s built-in image extraction tools
I haven’t found one foolproof, perfect tool but Photoshop provides a lot of time saving “first steps.” These tools will not do all the work for you, but they will get you a rough selection that you can modify and refine as a layer mask. Let’s have a look at them…

Quick Selection Tool: This tool resides in the palette in the same location as the Magic Wand Tool and in a lot of ways it is a comparable tool. You may have seen online demonstrations of this tool where it magically makes an accurate selection of the background of an image. Unfortunately, in the real world, people don’t always contrast their wardrobe with their surroundings and, as a result, photos of people wearing dark clothes photographed on dark backgrounds with less than perfect lighting are just as difficult to isolate with the Quick Selection Tool as they are with anything else. Another weakness of the Quick Selection Tool is that it has no Tolerance setting; no way to say “could you be a bit more picky about what you consider a match to the color I sampled?” It occurs to me that there may be a very good reason why it is called the Quick Selection Tool and not the Accurate Selection Tool.

Extract Filter: Another of Photoshop’s Überfilters (the ones at the top of the menu that have no categories and just look intimidating), the Extrude filter is one that, in my opinion anyway, Adobe has abandoned in the woods and left to die. Adobe didn’t even finish the interface (i.e. no scollbars on the preview when the image is zoomed in). I have posted an in-depth tutorial of how to use the Extract Filter on MacMerc.com ( http://www.macmerc.com/articles/Graphics_Tips/344 ) The benefit of the Extract filter is that you can paint the outline of your soon-to-be-extracted subject rather quickly and get the filter to make a fairly smart interpretation of the image and where the subject begins and ends. The downside is that it is a destructive filter (meaning it actually removes pixels) and it often creates really rough edges.

Secret Weapon #1: Equalize Adjustment
Hidden away in the Adjustment menu, this Photoshop feature is a total mystery. According to an old Photoshop manual, “The Equalize command redistributes the brightness values of the pixels in an image so that they more evenly represent the entire range of brightness levels. When you apply this command, Photoshop finds the brightest and darkest values in the composite image and remaps them so that the brightest value represents white and the darkest value represents black. Photoshop then attempts to equalize the brightness—that is, to distribute the intermediate pixel values evenly throughout the grayscale.” What I do with it is apply it to the whole image on a duplicate layer and add that layer to the top of my Clipping Mask stack. Once applied to the image it often reveals details I couldn’t see before and helps me to find edges that were previously hidden. Adding it to the stack of layers in my Clipping Mask allows me to continue to refine the Layer Mask on my main image at the bottom of the stack while using the Equalized image at the top as a guide. You can also use a Layers Adjustment Layer in the same way; darken you image if it’s too blown out to see detail or lighten it if it’s too dark.

Secret Weapon #2: Invert
The point of using a Layer Mask is to be able to visually add and remove parts of the image on the layer without actually affecting a single pixel on that image itself. It frees you up to experiment and make mistakes because if you erase something accidentally, you can always paint it back in—it’s not gone, it’s just hidden by the mask. You really need to take advantage of that freedom. Do you know what happens to your mask when you invert it? All the parts of the image that were visible go away and the parts that were hidden are now revealed. If you invert the mask again, it goes back to the way it was. With this is mind, you can switch back and forth between these states of inversion to check whether or not you have missed any parts of the person you are extracting or if you’ve gone too far in places. I often find it easier to erase fine details than to paint them in; I invert my mask and erase the parts of my image that I want to keep. When all of pixels of my subject are hidden, I invert my mask and “presto!” my subject is extracted!

Secret Weapon #3: Smudge to soften edges
A lot of tutorials out there will recommend blurring your layer mask and adjusting its levels to take the fringe off your isolated subject. That’s kind of a quick and dirty method. My favorite technique for selectively removing a fringe is to use the Smudge to pull in a fringed edge and make it look more natural. I use a fairly big (relative to the area needing to be “defringed”) and soft brush and pull the edge of my subject in a pixel or two and then pull it out a bit.

PRODUCTS SHOWN
Photoshop CS3