Many thanks to all the people who turned up to my workshop at Wildscreen on Friday. It was a fun if intense three hours and I appreciate everyone’s patience as we worked through some of the fundamentals of the critical process of editing
Informational reality
Interesting article over at Petapixel about early beauty retouching. Before Photoshop there were soft leaded pencils in contact with large format negatives.
What I find interesting is the before and after, if one or the other image was presented on its own it would be accepted as a reasonably good portrait.
When they are presented together however there is a ton of new information ready to be digested, concepts of “age”, “beauty” and “the idealized” are there to explore.
Client Story: BBC
Earlier this year I helped work on images for use in the BBC Book “Life Story” to accompany the new series about to air on the BBC in the UK.
What was especially interesting (and historical!) about this work was that a large portion of images in the book were actually shot on the new RED Ultra HD video cameras (4k and 5k)
I have worked with RED UHD video files before but this was the largest and most intense job yet using special video software to set white balance/colour and tone before exporting the high resolution stills as 16bit tiffs for further work in Photoshop.
Photoshop CC 2014.2 update: unwelcomed welcome screen
If you are a Photoshop CC user you may have updated to the latest 2014.2 version released yesterday that has some minor updates added to it.
No major changes noticed so far but here is however an annoyance with the new version – a “welcome” dialogue that appears after a delayed start and stops you from using the program as usual before clicking the thing away.
It is possible to turn this off but Adobe has decided to hide this option and not put it on the opening screen (where it belongs). To turn off the welcome dialogue select the “New Features” tab and click the relevant box – you may need to scroll down to the bottom of the dialogue depending on the content of the page you see.
50 Years of Wildlife Photographer of the Year
The Natural History Museum will be releasing a book this month looking back at the last 50 years of “Wildlife Photographer of the year”
It is a compelling book that charts developments and trends in the photography of wildlife over the last half century.
The book is edited by Rosamund Kidman Cox and I was delighted when she asked my to help prepare the image files for publication.
I worked very carefully and slowly on the more problematic historic images to bring out their authentic nature and present a consistent high standard across the sections of the book.
You can read more details of the book here:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/business-centre/publishing/books/art-and-history/wpy-50/index.html
Microsoft’s Lumia smartphones flash technology
Looks like companies in the consumer space are outwitting conventional camera makers in the evolution of imaging. Came across this on the BBC news website:
Creative Cloud Lightroom Advisory
Adobe updated a number of their programs on the Creative Cloud yesterday.
The new Photoshop CC 2014 installs alongside Photoshop CC and offers to transfer settings from Photoshop CC. Only some setting are transferred across (actions for instance) and others such as interface colour etc are not so be ready to tweak a little. If the worse comes to the worse you still have the older Photoshop CC to go back to so not too bad (and means you can play with the new features without compromising your stable working version).
Adobe have taken the opportunity in Lightroom 5.5 to now allow the updating of lightroom from the Creative Cloud Control Panel. Previously Lightroom could only be updated by using the Lightroom program to check for updates and them manually downloading the new version.
Unfortunately there appears to be problems with the new form of updating via the CC panel and Lightroom may fail to start when updated in this way.
Until Adobe fix this problem I suggest you download and install the new version of Lightroom directly via these links:
Windows: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5792
Mac: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5791
Adobe write some great imaging software but they are really rubbish at building cloud infrastructure. My assertion that Adobe Creative Cloud is not a robust method of delivering critical imaging software still stands.
Stephen
Workshop at the Wildscreen Photography Festival
Very pleased to announce that I have been asked by Rosamund Kidman Cox to run an imaging workflow workshop at this years Wildscreen Photography Festival on Friday 24th October in London.
I will be condensing all the important ingredients of a good imaging workflow into a 3 hour workshop, details here:
http://www.wildphotos.org.uk/workshops/processing-pictures
I was considering calling it “Zen and the art of image processing” but didn’t want to give the impression that the workshop started off with 10 minutes of silence! The minimalist way of working through images and finding out what is important about your images, reducing effort and making things flow are however important aspects of what I will be covering.
If you have booked a ticket why not send me a quick introductory email letting me know a little bit about you and what you would like to get out of the workshop.
Stephen