Hope everyone is enjoying the current flagship BBC nature documentary series fronted by David Attenborough that covers the use of colour in nature for survival in all its forms. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000styx

I was very happy to work on the images for the book and utilised my specialist workflow to ensure that video frame grabs and stills photography could be used in a seamless and consistent way. Colour grading was of course even more important for this title and my tight colour management  enabled me to “see” the printed result before the proofs came back from the pre press house.

This is a smaller format book than before but it is also a little different in having some very interesting and detailed text that goes a little deeper into the subject and that is a very good thing.

Always nice when one of my clients wins a major competition! it reminds me I’m lucky to be working with some of the best photographers in their field.

Interesting that the BBC picked up on one of my favourite images by Sue of the polar bear on a drifting piece of ice but its the conceptual North Pole image that won the climate change category. Well done Sue!

On thin ice © Sue Flood: BBC Website

North Pole Underwater © Sue Flood: The Royal Photographic Society Website

Its been a funny year for work (as can be expected!) travelling for workshops and visiting clients was not an option for most of it.

I have been busy all the same and this month I was happy to receive a couple more books I had been working on. The first is to accompany a new major nature series with David Attenborough called “Perfect Planet” (Silverback films for the BBC), here my dedicated work on getting the most out of the high dynamic range high resolution video grabs and making them as good as dedicated stills shots was at play. The CMYK printing process is much more limited than a bright TV image but with some love and care its possible to translate the feeling. I’m particularly pleased with this years effort and hope it achieves the five star reviews of recent books in the series. The series will be shown on the BBC soon, you can view an extended trailer here: BBC. The book is available at all good book stores (or Amazon).

The other book to arrive is from the Natural History Museum entitled “How Wildlife Photography Became Art”. This is a weighty book, both physically and in its subject matter. The images are from 55 years of Wildlife Photographer of the Year submissions so as you can expect this book includes the best wildlife photography in existence. Such a pleasure to translate the images into CMYK to retain the authenticity and intention of the photographers and avoid the all too common pitfalls of the printing process that would have taken their power away otherwise. Avoid Amazon and order it direct here: NHM Store

I hope 2021 will be a better year to get out and help clients with their systems and processes. I will be planning more imaging workflow and grading/retouching classes to help people get the most out of their photography. Also planned is a stock image site for my old stock photography, some images still as fresh as the day they were created and others now “retro” stock, look out for the launch of pixelstock.com early in the New Year.

I will be also working on some personal photographic projects to create new images and enjoy some photography again in my spare time. I would encourage everyone to dive into a creative art and enjoy creating stories with it.

I recently made a “pop up” store to help Sue sell her new photography cards. Sue’s images are very popular and she has chosen some of her favorites to produce 4 sets of blank cards that are ideal presents or a distinctively different Christmas card to send. I used my Selectimage domain that has been on the back burner for a number of years.

2021 Update: Sue now has a shop setup on her website to sell these items, you can find it here: https://www.sueflood.com/shop/

One of three books delivered this week from clients. This book is the definitive story of Rattan, the sustainable and elegant furniture material. A fascinating journey through the subject with beautiful, interesting and well chosen historical images.

Wonderful to work with Lulu and Elisa to help them get the best possible reproduction of some rare images that needed careful handling in order to match the high level quality of the rest of the book. When dealing with a wide variety of images from multiple sources it is doubly important to make sure that there is consistency in colour and tone quality and to ensure that no image lets down a page or section.

Much of the book was completed so I was just involved with the problematic images and after careful work injecting some love and attention I’m pleased to see that the whole book feels very consistent and this helps strengthen the fascinating story of rattan. You can order or buy the book from all good bookshops or Amazon.

If you are planning an important book that has a wide variety of images of varying quality then get in touch for a chat, printers can correct for some (limited) things but usually by compromising other images on the same page or strip. My careful grading and detail work ensures that consistency is built into every page and reduces reproofing and printing costs as well as elevating the overall quality of the book.

WD Red SMR vs CMR Tested Avoid Red SMR | ServeTheHome

We tested WD Red SMR v CMR drives to see if there was indeed a significant impact with the change. We found SMR can put data at risk 13-16x longer than CMR

Update: 25/06/2020.
Western Digital have decided to sort this problem by introducing a third tier to their “Red” drives. The only purpose of this development is to get out of the problem upper management created and wished was gone away.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15878/western-digital-cleans-up-the-red-smr-nas-hdd-mess

From now on Red Drives mean “avoid”.

I have recently had a cluster of new clients who for one reason or another approach me after losing images or other assets in Adobe Lightroom.

Whilst Lightroom is a pretty good program for managing large amounts of images there are certain “quirks” that can cause real problems.

On of the biggest problems comes from mistaking images that are either “deselected”, “selected” or “most selected”.

You can work on more than one image at once, you can tell when one or more images are selected because their colour surround changes to a slightly different shade of grey, if you get these mixed up (easy to do!) you can lose a lot of work.

I helped a client via the Mac screen sharing app this Sunday to help retrieve a book he had been working on for many hours, without the 15 minute intervention he may have faced many hours of work to recover. Fortunately I had set him up to make sure he saved backup copies of his Lightroom catalog as well as have a time machine drive attached at all times, this belt and braces approach makes for a much better ability to recover from a bad situation.

If you have hit a major problem or just want help in setting things up correctly then get in contact with me and we can sort it together.

Help is available!
Stephen Johnson
Stephen@copyrightimage.co.uk
Mobile: 07776 448621

Photoshop version 21.1.1 is now available on the Adobe Creative Cloud.

This has fixed an issue clients were having where save steps in actions was not working. I have tested this and it does seem to be fixed. No rush to update as there may be new bugs introduced and its best to let things settle for a while if you are not affected.

Other bugs have been reported fixed, you can see the details here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/fixed-issues.html#photoshop-desktop-fixed-issues