Stephen Johnson

Apologies for the slow response times recently, with retouching deadlines and a slowing PC system I have had to run to walk fast.

Only myself to blame of course, I normally rebuild my PC every two years with the latest and greatest components, with the flattening out of PC development I have left it a little too long this time.

All being sorted now, I’m retouching on the old whilst building the new, a six core monster with large amounts of RAM and the latest high speed disk technologies to cope with the larger megapixel images from the latest cameras as well as being able to handle 4k video.

If your computer needs a refresh you may want to consider purchasing soon before the pound losess any more of its value….

Not too sure why Adobe didnt call the latest Photoshop “CC 2016.6” but I’m sure they know better.

Small incremental improvements though as its a full install update you will need to reinstall any plugins that you use.

If you do decide to install then click on the advanced install options and select to keep your previous version of Photoshop so you can go back to it easier if things go South.

The only really useful thing I have found so far is that there is that when selecting “quick mask” the layer dialogue changes to show the quick mask colour you have selected, this is a real improvement for me as its an emotional/visual clue as to if you are in quick mask mode or not and is much better than the previous light grey/slightly less light grey cue from earlier versions.

Client News is a new section on Copyrightimage, it will allow clients exposure of their projects and give an understanding of how good digital imaging workflow can produce real world results.

Clive Nichols one of the worlds leading garden photographers is planning two photographic workshops at the beautiful garden at Pettifers this year, here are the details:

Pettifers Garden and Photography Master Class with Clive Nichols

Tuesday May 10th 2016 and Tuesday 20th September 2016

10am – 4pm

Venue:
Pettifers,
Lower Wardington,
Banbury,
OX17 1RU

Clive is pleased to announce that he has secured two workshops at one of the country’s leading gardens. Pettifers, in the lovely Oxfordshire village of Wardington. The garden is owned by renowned plants woman Gina Price who has created a stunning garden crammed full of choice plants.

The day will begin with a talk on garden and flower photography by Clive followed by practical sessions in the garden. Clive is a very experienced teacher  who will guide you through the techniques that have made him into one of the world’s leading flower and garden photographers

Fee: £100 per person
Maximum capacity 20 places in May, 20 places in September
Skill level: General
includes lunch with wine and refreshments

Plan your journey to Pettifers here: https://goo.gl/TlGK03

As many of you know (and hate!) captioning and keywording is an important part of the imaging workflow.

Whether searching a large collection or preparing a batch of images for market a good caption and set of keywords is important.

Lightroom does not come with a structural set of keywords to help you build a proper keywording tree so you either have to make your own from scratch or you buy a ready made “base” one that you can adapt and grow to your own needs.

Up till now I have been recommending a US based list to clients but have recently come across a competitively priced list that is both logical and deep, Its written by a real stock photographer called Tim Makins who lives in Ireland. It even has a set of Getty conceptual keywords and we all know how we love conceptual keywords 🙂

The base list already has a good selection of wildlife and plant items for the geographical area chosen but this can be further enhanced by adding free additions from the site such as the 7209 item list of plants with both common and scientific name or the extensive mammal and bird lists..

If you dont have a very good keywording tree or are in the market for one this is an excellent place to start: http://www.photo-keywords.com/ Not only does Tim provide a selection of lists his site gives very comprehensive guides and advice in using and adapting them, recommended reading for cold winter nights.

Its always a pleasure retouching  images for MINT and ensuring that they have a contemporary feel as well as meeting the quality standards of the market.

MINT images are driven by its founder Duncan Grossart who is very much concerned that the photography represented is centred around the environment, sustainability and issues of health and well-being.

These are very real issue and concerns for Duncan (as they should be to us all). Supplying the market with positive high quality images helps to engender these values.

Read more

Very please to see Adobe have listened to its users and reinstated the older fully functional interface for importing images. (CC 2015.3 Build 1052427 with Camera Raw 9.3) Available now for download.

Not quite as pretty as the cut down previous version but this is more than made up for by the return of control into users hands, thanks Adobe.

Stephen