Ethical / Natural grading and retouching services – Photoshop and Lightroom training – Imaging workflow design and advice
Its not usual for Adobe to tell people about new things they are considering for future Photoshop releases so its interesting to see this (and also its pretty amazing):
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/10/video_new_from_adobe_labs_content-aware_fill.html
Its a natural progression for the healing and patch tools and will certainly help reduce retouching costs…
Stephen
Canon have said that they will release an update for the 5D MKII next year so that it can be switched to 24 and 25 frames per second as well as the current 30 fps. This will make it easier to convert to different system standards and is good news, their statement can be seen here:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0910/09102003eos5dfirmware.asp
However, dont wait for the new firmware, if you are in the field and think there may be a salable sequence in front of you then go ahead and capture it.
Stephen
In the past I have advised (for good reason!) not to use sleep and hibernate modes on machines used for retouching.
However, considering the price of electricity these days together with the fact that LCD screens reach a stable state much faster I think there is some room to use these power saving states.
Use with care, if your going to lunch then hibernating the machine is fine, if you know that you will be doing some critical colour work on images in a short while then dont sleep the machine.
Clients who run large batch processes overnight are advised not to use power saving as this will compromise the process.
Stephen
I couldnt quite understand why building profiles with the colorchecker passport was leading to reds (especially) being a little oversaturated.
I got out my (more expensive) Gretagmackbeth SG chart and suddenly all was clear.
The colours on my SG chart are much richer, specifically the colours in the center which should share common values with the passport.
Now my SG chart is a few years old and should if anything have faded, the colour should not be richer!
I can only conclude that the nice matt finish on the passport that makes it easier to light and photograph has the side effect of not being as rich in colour as it should due to light scatter.
However the profile calcualtions must be based on the colour values from the reference chart, becasue the passport colours are weaker the profile is pushing the colours up too far.
I can still work with the passport but I will need to tweak the resulting profile with the Adobe DNG profile editor, less than ideal though maybe a better path if lighting the SG chart is problematic.
Oh well..
(Photograph shows SG chart and passport under the same lighting, the white rectangle shows the colours that are common to the charts and used to build profiles)