Photoblog

I am writing this review having in mind that Topaz is offering a half price discount for one of their best products: Topaz Denoise. You can downloaded as a free trial for 30 days from Topaz Labs page:  Topaz Denoise . The product is now 39.99$ instead of 79.99$ with the coupon code “mardenoise” (type it without quotes), until the end of March. I would mention that I really appreciate that Topaz guys do not have differentiated prices for European and US customers like other vendors (making European customers paying about 40% more for the same stuff). So, what is Topaz Denoise? It is a plugin for Photoshop CS, Elements, Lightroom, Aperture, IrfanView (and I even managed to use it within Gimp with some emulator couple of years ago before entering into Photoshop world). It is the first noise removal plugin that I use and the only one that is part of my workflow at the moment and that has been constantly part of it in the last 2 years). Despite some attempts to try other si...

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...