ThePlugInSite B & W Styler
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 29, 2007
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Photoshop has good black and white conversion capabilities, but if you want to go the extra mile, you’ll need something more powerful. While DxO Labs’ FilmPack 1.1 is available as a Photoshop plug-in, FilmPack 1.1 is mainly aimed at providing a film look-and-feel to any photograph, including colour images. B & W Styler, however, does only that: convert a digital photograph to monochrome. And it does a splendid job.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: More Photoshop Than Lightroom
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 26, 2007
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After having turned Photoshop Lightroom inside out, I can’t but conclude Adobe did a better job than Apple did with Aperture. Perhaps Aperture looks a bit nicer in some interface areas, but when it comes to functionality, I’ll take Lightroom any time. In Fact, Photoshop Lightroom is superior in many areas, not just cataloguing.
When Adobe made Lightroom available as a beta version, I downloaded the application as so many others, and tried it out. It somehow didn’t look like it was going to be much better than Aperture. Then came the release version and Camera RAW 4. Well, there’s no denying to it: Adobe Lightroom is faster, converts from RAW better, does that with a lot more cameras than Aperture, and has some nice extra features up its sleeve that make working with it a pleasure.
DxO FilmPack 1.1: Give Your Digital Photos A Film Look and Grain
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 19, 2007
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DxO Labs launched FilmPack 1.1 as a plug-in to DxO Optics Pro 4.2, a plug-in to Photoshop, and as a stand-alone application. FilmPack does only one thing, but it does it effortlessly: it gives your digital shots an analogue-style look.
ExpoDisc Helps To Make Better Photographs (UPDATED)
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 15, 2007
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Perhaps the most difficult part of shooting beautiful colour photos is setting up the camera correctly so that it will “see” colours accurately. The human eye will accommodate to various conditions of light, and even when we see a white wall under greenish fluorescent light, we will still be able to recognise it as white. A digital (and analogue) camera is not that intelligent. It will simply record the light bounced back from the wall, i.e. green. Correcting this is easy with the ExpoDisc.
Most serious amateur photographers and certainly professionals, will calibrate the camera whenever the light conditions change. They will use the camera’s white balance feature to correct for lighting conditions. Traditionally, such a white balance calibration is done using a GretagMacbeth ColorChecker colour chart. GretagMacbeth has a number of these charts, of which the latest and probably the best is the Digital ColorChecker SG. But these charts cost a lot of money and they are bulky to carry with you. A better alternative is to use ExpoImaging’s ExpoDisc, a special contraption to set white balance and do a whole slew of other things.
Photoshop CS2 RAW
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 12, 2007
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Mikkel Aaland is a professional photographer who wrote nine books. In this book, he discusses how you should use Photoshop Camera RAW to obtain best results.
Digital Photography Expert Techniques
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 12, 2007
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O’Reilly published the 2nd edition of the book written by Ken Milburn on digital photography techniques. The book is a sort of personal coach for digital photographers who don’t yet know how digital photography differs from analogue.
ExpoAperture 2 Depth-of-Field Guide
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 11, 2007
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Imagine a scene that you want to catch with the object closest to your camera in focus, and all the rest out-of-focus. Or imagine that you want to capture as much of a scene sharply. Traditionally, you’ll have to calculate the depth-of-field or look it up in a table. Enter the ExpoAperture, a rotating dial guide that will tell you the maximum and minimum depth of field for a given focal length and aperture size.
Jack Lowe, Photo Printing and Colour Management Expert
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 04, 2007
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IT-Enquirer had an interview with Jack Lowe, a recognised digital imaging specialist, photographer and service provider to photographers. Jack has clients such as Saatchi and Saatchi, Honda, Duracell, and photographers such as Jonathan Knowles, Julian Germain, and many others.
Jack Lowe mainly provides scanning and printing services. He puts technology at service of the image, and does not indulge in technology for the sake of technology. No sweaty palms when the blue channel looks noisy but the image looks great. Oh, and Jack Lowe also has a nice sense of humour as I had the pleasure of experiencing during our interview --unfortunately, that topic doesn’t lend itself for publication.
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended: Most Wanted New Features That Adobe Included
By: Erik Vlietinck
March 29, 2007
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When Adobe decided to release two versions of Photoshop CS3, I for one wondered why. Now that I’ve seen the pre-release, it’s obvious. The Extended version has a lot more power, but some of that power is overkill to amateur and semi-professional photographers. Except for the DICOM support, most other image editors will want Extended, though.
In Extended you will get 3D visualisation and texture editing right in Photoshop (still too buggy to test properly at this stage), motion graphics and video layers (also on Mac OS X, with Capture Scratch QuickTime files right from Final Cut Pro or Express), measurement and data tools in the Analysis menu, DICOM support (medical), MATLAB support, and movie paint. You’ll get more complete support for adjustable cloning and healing with overlay previews, 32-bit HDR, a more powerful vanishing point feature, animation tools for Flash projects, better ruler and count tools, and more advanced image stack processing (especially useful for medical use).
Aperture 1.5: Appealing Enough To You Folks?
By: Erik Vlietinck
September 27, 2006
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Apple is about to release Aperture 1.5, claiming it delivers compelling new features. The company did so when Aperture was first released, with a lot of disappointment on the side of photographers as a result. Still, it looks like Apple has listened. The ‘compelling new features’ include flexible library management. Aperture’s library management was a major stumble block, but now the application should allow you to store images anywhere you’d like.
AVCHD
By: Erik Vlietinck
May 12, 2006
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Panasonic, the brand name for which Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. is known and Sony Corporation today announced specifications for “AVCHD”, a brand new high definition (HD) digital video camera recorder format the two companies jointly established.
DxO Optics Pro v3
By: Erik Vlietinck
May 03, 2006
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What do professional photographers need most in the era of digital photography? A camera capable of even more pixels than today’s 11 megapixel devices perhaps? Or software that helps them to quickly correct their photographs for the typical defects modern cameras introduce to photography such as noise, chromatic aberration, vignetting, etc? Not to mention Camera RAW to TIFF, JPEG or DNG conversion.
