Tuesday News Quickies
Sep. 2
6:02 am
Here’s a couple of quick news morsels:
- I mentioned last week that the amazing Joe McNally (above) was out in Santa Fe, New Mexico doing an on-location online class for Kelby Training. Well, Joe wrote a post, and shows some of the images he made during that class over at his blog (here’s the link). Very cool stuff!
- National Geographic has put out their “Call for Entries” for their annual “World in Focus” competition. If you win that one, I think you might have some serious bragging rights, eh? You can find the details right here.
- Some new stuff I’m working with:
- The new Firewire 800 version of my beloved Drobo. I just made the switch this week (it was totally painless—it took all of 60 seconds).
- Nik Software’s new Silver Efex Pro Black & White plug-in for Photoshop. I haven’t had enough experience with it do a full-blown review yet, but OMG it kicks butt!!! I’ve never seen anything better for creating Black & White conversions. Scary stuff! More once I’ve had more time to play.
Well, that’s it for today. Don’t forget to stop by for tomorrow’s guest blog, and some live reports from Photoshop World later in the week. Have a good one!
You have a bad link to Joe McNally’s blog.
Entering the Nat Geo contest costs a bit, and you don’t find that until after you “register”. I wish there was more information on the different Contests out there, the reputable ones (Nikon), the bogus ones, (that nag you constantly about your picture being a winner, etc, just to get you to buy a contrived “artist of year” book). It would nice to know which are worthwhile, and which are “scammy”. I know Nat Geo is probably fairly reputable, but I think the info grab BEFORE the facts is a nasty and dishonest trick. Same as always, no free lunch.
Doug
Ahh yes, Silver Efex Pro really does pack some B/W converting power! I used it on my latest post at my photoblog. Really impressed so far.
Use the link below for Joe McNally & you’ll find the Kelby post there at the top of Joes blog page.
http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/
Silver Efex Pro looks like a really good. I noticed that in addition to Photoshop, it can also be used with Elements and Aperture. I haven’t used Aperture in quite some time, but I wish they could make it work for Lightroom too.
Speaking of Lightroom, on quick reading, Silver Efex Pro looks similar to Lightroom’s B&W conversion capabilities. With so many techniques vying for B&W conversion, I’m wondering how they compare.
It’s neat your liking silver effects Scott. I have a copy sitting on my pile waiting to be tried that I’ve not gotten into. I’m gonna have to get with it and give it a go I guess.
IO too like doing most my B&W conversion in LR though. We’ll see how it goes.
Gav
seimeffects.com
>Silver Efex Pro looks like a really good. I noticed that in addition to Photoshop, it can also be used with Elements and Aperture. I haven’t used Aperture in quite some time, but I wish they could make it work for Lightroom too.
The reason they work in Aperture and not LR is because what Aperture does is fully render the image to pixels when applying any of these kinds of plug-in’s. So its really no different than using LR and exporting to Photoshop and then using Photoshop with a 3rd party plug-in. Well in the case of Aperture, you don’t “need” Photoshop to do this, but the final results are the same. IOW, its NOT applying this work on the Raw data or in the Raw processing pipeline. Neither Aperture nor LR have opened the actual processing Raw pipeline to plug-in’s (unlike say Bibble which does apply Noise Ninja directly in the Raw processing pipeline).
>Speaking of Lightroom, on quick reading, Silver Efex Pro looks similar to Lightroom’s B&W conversion capabilities. With so many techniques vying for B&W conversion, I’m wondering how they compare.
One difference is that in LR, the edits if you will ARE happening on the Raw data in the Raw pipeline, making this truly non destructive. And to get geeky, there are advantages to applying these edits on high bit, linear encoded data as LR operates on its data in the Develop module.
There’s metadata editing of Raw processing commands and there’s a plug-in altering rendered pixels. That’s a pretty significant differences in terms of processing, speed and all things being equal, quality.
Andrew, thanks for your note. It sounds like you would recommend doing B&W conversion in LR rather than in Silver Efex, particularly for raw images. At least, that Silver Efex has some technical disadvantages to overcome.
I forgot to mention at the time, but I really appreciated the pointer to your white paper on color spaces last week.
What’s up with the “World In Focus” competition being prohibited for residents of Arizona, New Jersey, and Vermont? Are they afraid that we’ll win all the prizes?
I would have to agree with Doug “Same as always, no free lunch.”. I would never enter any contest that required fee for entry, and very very & rarely enter any contest. Period.
I have been using the trial version of Silver Efex for the last week or so and I have to say it is really excellent. However I also downloaded a trial of TrueGrain and I have noticed in comparisons that the grain rendering is slightly different (when using the film presets). Sure, the grain can be tweaked in both programmes, but to me the pre-set grain in TrueGrain looks more natural for the film type being emulated. With Silver Efex I have to increase the level of grain rendered.
Both programmes are pretty expensive so I’ll have to spend a bit more time evaluating them before I make a decision which to purchase.
I would be interested to read anyone else’s opinions of the two. Perhaps Scott will do a comparison.
Any “contest” requiring a fee is pretty much money making scam and should be treated as such. This is further cemented by this nice little snippet from their terms:
***Entries become the property of Sponsors and will not be returned or acknowledged***. An additional fee of $10 is required for each entry received between 12:00 am PDT on August 22, 2008, and 11:59 pm PDT on September 8, 2008.
Not only you get the privilege of paying to enter, you also wave all rights to your image. I don’t care who runs this, in a normal world this would be a scam.
>It sounds like you would recommend doing B&W conversion in LR rather than in Silver Efex, particularly for raw images.
Not necessarily. Its important to understand the vast differences in processing here and how a plug-in like this isn’t necessarily any different in terms of using it (currently) in Aperture or doing the work in Photoshop. IF you prefer the results using this product in Photoshop, enough said. But its not like you’re doing this in the Raw pipeline. And yes, there are advantages to that.
$12 an entry. How does one know if they are ready to submit to contests like these? Maybe I’m lacking confidence, but I never feel like I would know what to submit to these high profile contests.
So.. prepare for the irony….
These images were processed in Aperture using Silver Efex (wicked fast and great controls). Like it much better than anything else I’ve tried (especially ability to emulate film stocks and save my own presets).
Then… published using Photoshop Express.
Here is the link – http://www.photoshop.com/user/rastervector/?galleryid=b4995b059e794b87ab7dadbaf94adc6a&wf=share&trackingid=BTAGC
Here it is embedded (I hope)
I loved your book The Digital Photography. I was going the #2 book. My book started falling apart, the pages came apart the glue was bad.
Rick
I ordered your new book for Lightroom 2 on July 29 from Amazon. I understood there would be a wait, but they still are not shipping and it is Sept.9. What gives?
Thanks for any help,
Larry