News

I don’t know of any clients still running Windows XP but there may be some who don’t automatically apply Windows updates when they become available.

If you employ IT support for your site then get in touch with your IT team and check that they have your system supported against wannacry.

If you do not have external IT support, manage things yourself and have not applied security patches recently then I suggest you reconsider and run automatic update and accept any new security patches, if you are not sure how you can learn how to do this here:

Windows 7 users:
http://www.wikihow.com/Run-Windows-Update-in-Windows-7

Windows 10 users:
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-update-security-settings-windows-10

Mac users can take the opportunity to feel a little smug but do be aware that its unlikely that the NSA is just looking for Windows exploits, the next NSA leak may be a Mac vulnerability:
https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/news-stories/2015/discovering-solving-sharing-it-solutions.shtml

Tom Fletcher and Gary Adcock have compiled a PDF breakdown of current state of the art video cameras across multiple brands and containing lots of useful information. You can download the PDF here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8uBU7GdVMLMU2FJczdERE9uYUk/view?usp=sharing

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Adobe have released the 2017 versions of Bridge and Photoshop. Looks to be a mixture of interface changes, performance enhancements and extended functionality.

Initial impressions are good and I will be giving it test drives over the next few days.

With important customer jobs in progress I have of course kept my current versions of Bridge and Photoshop installed so I can run both. This is also important as only some of my third party filters have been transferred across with the install.

If you would like to test the new version as well then consider doing the same and run the install so that it doesn’t write over your current setup, to do this click on Advanced Options in the update dialogue and untick Remove old Versions (Keep Import previous settings and preferences ticked)

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Very much looking forward to seeing Planet Earth II with Sir David Attenborough starting next Sunday on BBC1 in the UK. The first episode is titled Islands.

My involvement in the project was to retouch and colour grade the stills and 4k+ video grabs for The Book that accompanies the series. Thanks goes to the Editor Kate Fox and the Project Editor Roz Kidman Cox for asking me to do the work.

Television shows images in RGB and has a high brightness and contrast range, paper in comparison has a very low colour and tone range that starts off with a creamy white for the highlights and then makes up the rest of the colour and tone by darkening the paper with Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black process inks.

The challenge is to retain all important highlight and shadow detail but keep a good dynamic contrast and colour in the mid tones and overall, this does mean quite an involved grading process using multiple layers and adjustments to get this right. (I discussed this split grading in my recent workshop).

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