Major new software for photographers: free trial of Photoshop CS5

Photoshop is releasing its CS5 version, and offers a 30-day free trial on its own website. Please let me (and the rest of the web-community!) know in a reaction what you think of it. Maybe I'll give it a try too, then ;-)

Colouring truth--before Photoshop

'Kapuscinski - non-fiction' is the title of the recently-published biography of travel journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007). Author Artur Domoslawski calls Kapuscinski his 'mentor', but he did not turn a blind eye on his mentor's shortcomings. For he uncovered that Kapuscinski sometimes 'gave reality a bit more colour' by inventing things that had not happened.

How like the Photoshop discussion is that! There is no problem at all if a writer of fiction invents stories, invents even an whole world, just like 'art' photographers and Photoshop-buffs may do. But journalists (and that is how Kapuscinski presented himself!) to me must abide by the same rules that govern photo journalists: no fiddling with reality!

I have a couple of books by Kapuscinski and loved to read them, but mostly because I thought I could learn something about the problems of Africa, about the horrors of Russia. It was a good read and I admired his ability to give style to reality. But now it appears I basically was reading fiction (more style than reality) and I feel betrayed. IFFFFF Domoslawski wrote truth--whose writing can we trust more?

(Domoslawski's book is not yet available on Amazon; does it exist at all, then?)

Happy birthday, Photoshop! Real life wins!

It was 20 years today, Photoshop taught the band to play...

Photoshop really was first marketed in February 1990. The Sgt.'s Pepper in those days were brothers Thomas and John Knoll. Thomas remained among the Photoshop developers until the current version, CS4. John moved into graphic effects in the movie industry, says Wikipedia.

Whatever advantages Potoshop has given us, even Lars van den Brink, a photographer who likes to play with Photoshop to tell his stories ("Sometimes, it's like I summarise an hour in a single picture"), and who was interviewed for the NRC's Cultural supplement last Friday, admits in the end: "Real life is so surprising; you cannot beat that with Photoshop."

That's a quote I like!

Photos, photoshop and reality

'Between all the plastic surgery and Photoshop, who knows what celebrities really look like anymore?' Something I just stumbled upon here.
Just for fun ;-)

Elementary, my dear Watson: is Photoshop Elements what photographers like me need?

We used to look down on Photoshop Elements: it did not give the tools and controls serious amateur photographers needed. I got an early version with my first digital photo apparatus and uninstalled it as soon as I could, as far as I remember. The choices in the old days were between simple browsing tools which had some editing options if you were lucky, like Irfanview or Picasa, or find a copy of the full-sized Photoshop that had mysteriously lost its hefty price tag. In the meantime, open source solution The Gimp has become an alternative to Photoshop in many respects, though even in version 2.6 (the most recent one I found) it still looks a bit like a collection of loose menus floating all over your desktop and it still cannot handle 16-bit colours, taking away my 'happiness of the smooth histogram'.

All the time, I forgot to look at Photoshop Elements, yet that programme has been extended in versions 6 and 7 to incorporate all kinds of tools that I and many other amateur photographers would look for, without getting as expensive as the big brother—it is available for € 90 or less, while Photoshop CS4 sells for € 600-800 or more (the higher prices are for the translated, Dutch version). Of course I do not hesitate to pay a sum like that for a new camera or a lens, but then I hope to enjoy that thing for many years without hearing about newer versions in a year or two—and to use all its options rather than feel that most of the menu options remain closed books.

Photoshop Elements lets you work with selection 'magic wands', layers and masks in the Full Edit mode, but has simpler ways of working if you just want the automated Quick Fix mode, or if you feel you are a novice (Guided Edit mode). It has a bit of the look & feel of Lightroom; I don't know yet to what extent the two integrate or are duplicating each other. For instance, Elements has its own cataloguing tools, but I do not want to give up my Lightroom catalogue that has been building up over a couple of years. Reviews on the web (just google for 'photoshop elements review') are fairly positive about Elements. The one thing I'd probably never use is online backup: I want to keep control of my own backups; they remain off line, no one else can see or (ab)use them.

Clearly, I need to find out a bit more about Elements to be as certain as a Sherlock Holmes about the choice for or against this package, but I sure would like to investigate if this is what I need. Any help you readers can give, is highly appreciated! Why don't you write a little comment?

Work and pleasure

Last week I was out of the country, presenting my (and my colleagues') work at two conferences. Not a minute for serious photography, only the joy of having morning coffee in a medieval Italian monastery, now the Faculty of Economics of the University of Pavia--in dire need of restauration (it's Italy, after all), but still: that is the original environment for European universities!



The joy of photogaphy came with the occasion to experiment with the A700's highest sensitivity settings: ISO 6400 and 3200, respectively (reduced jpegs of the otherwise unchanged RAW photo's). Especially ISO 6400 is close to useless; ISO 3200 is not bad for the purpose of documenting a late-evening tour of a vinyard.




And then there was the visit to the Certosa di Pavia. "ABC" in kids' jargon: Another Beautiful Church. Very beautiful, but not a place for very interesting photos. What can you add to all the beauty of the craftsmen of the 14th-16th centuries? I was reasonably satisfied with only two photos, and that for technical reasons mostly: I more or less mastered some challenges--next time I want to make some real nice pictures with that technical knowledge...

In the first, I wanted to make the craftsmen's beauty visible in a picture of a detail of a pillar plus the painted vault. To show both, I used the built-in flash of the camera with slow sync (otherwise the vault would have remained dark). The amount of light in the background satisfied me quite a lot. Of course, as a tourist on a conference, I did not come with a tripod, so the result is not quite sharp, but for a 0.7" picture it's not bad. And Lightroom 2 (great new options in this version--a must-have!) helped to sharpen it a little.
The other one, the church's facade, needed Photoshop to readjust the falling lines of the 16-mm perspective: I wanted to capture a lot of clouds above the church so in the fleeting moment when the light was right, I just had to shoot a bit upwards. When that was done, Lightroom 2 was used to make up for my lack of a gradual neutral-density filter; one of Lr2's new options is the 'graduated filter' and that helped to bring the picture back to the impression that the situation had made in reality.