Photoblog

Inspired by how different images Carmen and I came up with after shooting together at Chureito pagoda in Fujiyoshida, I decided to write this post to show our workflow and how we achieved those results. For my image I chose a horizontal frame (I was wider with my 16-35mm lens) and very close to sunset, when the sun was down behind the hills on the right of mount Fuji. We were not lucky with tremendous amount of colour that evening so the purpose was to accentuate that orange that you can see close to the horizon. I am a big fan of Sleeklens Photoshop actions for landscape and I am using them quite a lot recently in my workflow. So I started with an “BASE expanded Dynamic Range” combined with “ALLINONE Subtle sunset” (both of them turned down to 20 and respectively 25%). The colours where suddenly begin to pop, especially the oranges in the foliage and on the sky). After that I decided I want to correct the perspective a bit (I know, I am quite a mess regarding the orde...

After reviewing some weeks ago the great View Point 2 from DXO labs, this week I found out about a new excellent tool for straightening and perspective correct your images: the new feature that Adobe released into their Photoshop CC. We all know about the controversies around the new business model of Adobe for Photoshop software and even if some people complained about the need to pay monthly fee instead of buying a software for life, I still think that this CC is a great deal, especially because of getting new features much often than before, in the old major release way. So, what is this new feature about? It is a tool called “Perspective Warp” and as it name suggests it is intended to be used for correcting perspective. The first impression about it is that it is an extremely powerful tool; this mean in Adobe world that you can do great things with it but you can also royally screw up your images if used incorrectly. I would suggest to start (as I did as well) by watching...

Recently I heard about a new tool for Black and White conversion called Tonality Pro. It is on of the interesting product produced by the guys from MacPhun and it addresses only to Mac users. Tonality Pro can be downloaded and tried for free for 15 days. I will write this informal review having as a reference Nik Silver Efex Pro which is what I currently use for my black and white work all time. As Nik Silver Efex is generally recognised as a market standard and a product of high quality and maturity in the world of photography plugins, I must admit that the bar is very high for any competitor. Tonality Pro comes as standalone application or as plugin for Photoshop CC/Lightroom/Elements/Aperture. I am going to test it only as plugin for Photoshop as my workflow is entirely in CC, so going out in an external application and importing image back to CC does not really make sense for me.The first think I must say is that it is a bit slow. Both lunching it and applying some p...

Couple of days ago I have received a newsletter from the friends from Topaz Labs , featuring an offer for ViewPoint 2, software made by their partners DXO. I knew about DXO before from their well known DXOMarks, cameras and lenses reviews, benchmarking’s and ratings, but I was not aware that they are also producing photographic software’s. The geek in me was really curious and decided to give ViewPoint 2 a try. View Point comes as both Photoshop plugin and standalone application and according to their website: “The indispensable companion to your wide-angle lens, DxO ViewPoint fixes perspectives and easily restores the natural shapes of the subjects located along image edges.” As an architecture photographer I was getting interested to learn more about this, so I installed the trial version and watched a quick tutorial movie. Since I am a Photoshop user, I am much more interested in the plugin version, as it integrates much easily in my workflow, so this is what I have used for t...

Few days ago, I was contacted by Jane from Sleekness, offering the chance to review their Landscape adventure workflow for PS .  Sleeklens are having a large collection of actions for Photoshop and Lightroom . They also offer professional photo editing services . Sleekness Landscape adventure workflow for PS is a collection of Photoshop actions, containing a lot of helpful adjustments covering most of the steps that are normally part of post-processing workflow for landscape photography: exposure, contrasts,  tones, temperature, details, Orton effect, clarity, sharpening. There is a similar collection for Lightroom as well, but since I do most of my work in Photoshop, I opted for this one. The collection is organised in logical processing sequence, following steps that combines multiple action of the same kind: exposure, base (global adjustments), tones, enhancements, temperature and web preparation of the file. There are two other categories available among them...

Ever since installing CC 2015 I started having problems with the Healing Brush tool. Once an essential tool in my workflow, used especially for correcting out the sensor dust spots, I noticed that the tool seemed broken in the Mac version of CC 2015. Carmen was complaining too on her Windows version. I was in the situation to keep a CC 2014 as well on a different OS on my machine and use it for dust spots. After many complains especially from retouches who are highly dependent on this tool, Adobe released an update. However the update is not working automatically but required a small trick, described in 5 simple steps on https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/enable-non-realtime-healing-brush.html  Install the Photoshop CC 2015.0.1 update. Use Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac OS) to create a plain text file. Type the text LegacyHealingBrush 1 into the text file. Save the file as PSUserConfig.txt to your Photoshop settings folder: Windows: [...

This week I had a lecture at Downstairs photo club here in Copenhagen. In front of about 30 people, I shown my work and I presented my ideas about long exposure technique and black and white photography. One of the parts that people seemed to be very interested about was the slide containing the tips for long exposure. All the issues that I am presenting here are real, and I was facing them during almost 2 years of using this technique; the solutions are the ones that I am currently using in order to avoid those problems. • focus is impossible with extreme ND filters on the lens. This one is rather obvious: when you place a 10 stops ND filter on the lens, the amount of light that is hitting the sensor is about 1000 times less than without the filter; this light is not enough for getting proper focus, neither automatic, nor manually. Focus, lock the focus, place the filters, shoot – this is the correct sequence that always works. For locking the focus, I half press the shooter...