News

Advisory: Clients buying bare hard drives


scanIm currently building and configuring a 6 Terabyte NAS for a client and have taken delivery of the two hard disks for the small device (its going to be raid 1 to duplicate images files in the case of one disk failing)

Good to see that www.scan.co.uk still pack bare hard disks correctly, an excess of layered well taped bubble wrap its one of the reasons I recommend them to my customers (I dont get any kickback from Scan btw).

The worst supplier for buying hard disks is Amazon, they pack the drives as if they were paperback books with no effective protection, they will of course refund you for obviously broken disks damaged in transit but the disks that appear to work “for a while” are not the kind you need. Never buy disks from Amazon.

Lightroom 6 advisory for users experiencing poorer speeds than usual

lightroom6Whilst Lightroom 6 has added a few minor extras compared to Lightroom 5 it was disappointing to find that performance is still pretty poor, even with a supported video card.

For users that have been experiencing heavily degraded performance compared to Lightroom 5.7 you may want to check your video card, it looks like Adobe and ATI are not as in sync as Adobe and nVidia, you can read more about the problem on the Adobe site: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/lightroom-amd-graphics-cards.html

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Wildphotos Notes


Many thanks for the patience of the people who attended my Imaging workshop at Wildphotos towards the end of last year.

A combination of urgent retouching work and an increasing desire to put more and more detail down on paper meant that the promised notes took a back seat untill recently.

Part of the reason being that because the workshop subject matters were quite wide ranging it did attract people with a wide range of abilities and skills from beginner to advanced.

My desire is to cover the whole range and therefore I have decided to split the notes up into separate sections and release them together with an accompanying video which can explain more than written notes alone.

Producing videos also allows me to split a subject into beginner / advanced versions.

The first video is now on YouTube and you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9OBX0zaT_TyYPrIAkftK8w 

(If you watch it on YouTube you can select HD from the viewing options and see it in its 1920×1080 full screen mode) (A small low res can be viewed above):

You can find notes about the items covered in the video by downloading the accompanying PDF here: https://www.copyrightimage.com/video/video01/Video 1 introduction.pdf

You may recall the retouching environment was just one of the many topics covered in the talk, I intend to cover all the subjects from the talk – and also the ones we couldn’t cover because of time.

I have a provisional list of the titles for videos I will be producing over the coming months here:https://www.copyrightimage.com/video/VideoList.pdf 

All these videos and all their accompanying notes and resource files will be available to workshop attendees for no charge, if you attended the workshop and have not yet given me your email address then please email me with your details so you can see more videos as they are produced.

Future videos and notes may be made available to people who didn’t attend the workshop for a fee.

Please feel free to send feedback.

Many thanks

Stephen

Wildphotos Notes – first video and pdf available now.

Many thanks for the patience of the people who attended my Imaging workshop at Wildphotos towards the end of last year. A combination of urgent retouching work and an increasing desire to put more and more detail down on paper meant that the promised notes took a back seat until recently.

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New 50.6mp Canon cameras available in June


Long wait is (nearly) over. Canon announced the Eos 5DS and 5DS R today. The 5DS R is £200 more and contains either a modified low pass filter or no low pass filter depending on what you read.

Clients shooting landscapes (and gardens!) will certainly benefit from the extra detail these cameras should deliver (there was certainly a big difference between my Nikon D800E images when compared to Canon 1DS MKIII images in such environments so I would expect nothing less with these).

The 8688 x 5792 50.6 mp files does equate to 144mb as an uncompressed 8bit tiff (288mb in 16 bit) so if detail / large crops are not your requirement then this is overkill.

Image Quality from the sample I have seen would suggest better shadow detail when lightening compared to the 1DS MKIII but its a shame they decided to make the sensors in house rather than use a Sony sensor.

For clients holding out for a higher res Canon body – looks like this is it.

Everybody is taking pre orders / selling the 5DS for £2999 inc vat and the 5DS R for £3199 inc vat. Retail price maintenance is illegal in the UK  – choice? you have none!

Stephen

New 50.6mp Canon cameras available in June

 Long wait is (nearly) over. Canon announced the Eos 5DS and 5DS R today. The 5DS R is £200 more and contains either a modified low pass filter or no low pass filter depending on what you read. Clients shooting landscapes (and gardens!) will certainly benefit from the extra detail these cameras should deliver (there was certainly a big difference between my Nikon D800E images when compared to Canon 1DS MKIII images in such environments so I would expect nothing less with these). 

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Software advisory: ColorNavigator Fogra validation in Photoshop CC

fograA bit of an obscure one that may be of interest to a few clients who do their own repro:

I was checking  my secondary calibration target I use for judging CMYK images for repro. (This has a dedicated white point setting that matches my viewing booth so I can get a good screen/print correlation using the Epson fogra certified proofing paper)

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