Review
Time to look at another great photography gift, the Spyder Cube. This handy cube will help you set black and white points in your image as well as accurate colour by providing 18% grey white balance targets. In the video I explain how it works and how to use it with an image in Lightroom.
Monitor calibration is critical to a good photography workflow so in today's video review we take a look at the Spyder 4 Pro monitor calibration tool from DataColor.
You know those clear plastic wrappers Apple use on their products that are so fantastically fun to open? Apple are masters of turning a simple unboxing into a special event. It seems Moo are reading from the same playbook. They've always taken great care over the presentation of their products but never more so than with their new Luxe business cards. The cards themselves come in an elegant little box with magnetic closures. That's wrapped in a purple ribbon fastened by what looks like a stamped wax seal. All of this is enclosed in a card wrapping designed to present a neat "lid" as you open the posting box. This attention to detail is what raises Moo above the competition. Moo understands that you're excited about getting your new cards, especially if they've got your photographs printed on them. Their presentation makes that little moment of unboxing even more enjoyable - so much so that you find yourself unwilling to actually give the cards away for fear of spoiling this pristine little shrine to your new cards.
In fact the genius of Moo is not just in the presentation of their product. This is the company that started out offering just minicards which were a strange shape and on fairly thin card but with the ability to put a different image on the front of each one. They weren't business cards and they weren't prints. It's hard to say what they actually were besides insanely desirable. What Moo do best of all is design *great* products. Their product range has always been limited but with each piece carefully chosen for paper quality, print process, lamination and presentation. They don't try to make everything but what they do make is *good*. Reading from the Apple playbook again then.
Buying from Moo is a pleasant experience from beginning to end - enough to make up for the fact that they're actually quite expensive. And Luxe cards are at the ouch end of even that curve. What you get are business cards printed on a fascinating new triple layer paper with a stripe of colour sandwiched between two white layers. This new paper is very stiff and has a matte finish which is much easier to write on than Moo's usual laminated cards. The matte finish does mean that blacks don't print very dark, though. My own black and white designs have very strong contrasts but came out looking lighter than I would have liked - a common problem with matte printing.
Moo Luxe business cards edge view
Overall, though, the quality of Luxe cards is absolutely up there with what I've come to expect from Moo. Where Moo's minicards or business cards are a great opportunity to show off your photography, Luxe cards are better suited to being actual business cards, especially if you want to wow people with quality.
Moo Luxe business cards are £23.99 or $34.99 for 50 cards and you can find out more at moo.com.
Today we look at Snapheal for the Mac, a brand new app by Macphun software for editing your photos and in particular for tidying or removing distracting elements. Snapheal reproduces and improves on the content aware fill feature of Photoshop and also has clone stamp, exposure, cropping and selective adjustment features. It's very affordable at its launch price of $9.99 through the Mac app store.
Today we've got another free video tutorial featuring Color Efex Pro 4 from Nik Software. This multi-part tutorial will cover a variety of filters, old and new show and ways to use them creatively to take an image from the original camera RAW to a finished version ready to print.
View all 6 chapters of this free tutorial here
In this first chapter we look at Color Efex Pro 4's integration with Lightroom and examine the user interface before using the Skin Softener filter. This is the first chapter of a multi-part tutorial. Find all the chapters and loads more free video tutorials on Photoshop and Lightroom at www.photowalkthrough.com
Colour Splash Studio is one of an emerging breed of photography applications that aim to do one task well and that are priced very affordably. Colour Splash Studio is for photographers wanting to make black and white photos with selective colour elements in the style of the movie Pleasantville.
When you first open an image with Colour Splash Studio it'll immediately turn your image black and white. You can now use the brush tool to paint back areas that you want in colour. The brush is edge detecting, which makes the process easier and faster and you've got control over the size, softness and opacity of the brush which combined with zooming the image to full size means it's pretty easy to paint in a good selection quickly. Once you've painted in your selection you can tweak the colour and greyscale areas separately with brightness, contrast and blur controls. Sadly there's no local contrast control but on the colour layer you can also tweak saturation, hue and exposure. I found these sliders a little harsh in their operation - fine tweaks were not at all easy and of course they apply to the whole image so there's no opportunity for tweaking just a portion of the image. There are also no controls for crop or rotation and very few options for getting more creative with colour (cross processing or split toning, for example) or black and white (dodging and burning, for example). I was very pleased to see support for my Wacom tablet. Pressure can be used to control brush size. I would have preferred it to control opacity but this is a good start. I was also very pleased to see standard Photoshop keyboard shortcuts working such as [ and ] for brush size and spacebar for dragging around the image while zoomed in.
It's clear that Colour Splash Studio is trying to do just this one thing well and I can respect that but for an app that concerns itself *only* with turning your image black and white there is one glaring omission - the lack of ability to control the black and white mix. Any photographer that is serious about wanting their image to look just a certain way is going to expect to have much tighter control over the black and white conversion process by being able to dial in brightness values for red, green and blue or at least by choosing from a selection of black and white filter presets.
As it stands right now this is a fine app for one simple task that does an awful lot right. I believe they've gone a little too far with simplifying by not including a black and white mix option and they should look at making fine control of those sliders easier. In a perfect world I'd like to see some dodge and burn options to further improve the black and white control. The quality of the application's results is excellent, however, and if you only want that simplified, limited set of options then Colour Splash Studio might be just the app for you.
Today I take a look at two of the best glide straps on the market from existing market leader BlackRapid and newcomer Custom SLR. I'll show you how they work, how they compare and then I'll give you my verdict on which on I think you should buy.
Yay, my iPhone SLR mount from Photojojo arrived today and I've been busily playing with it all morning. This wacky device lets me connect my SLR Canon lenses to my iPhone. I know - crazy right? My first instinct was to try using the 100mm macro with it so I hooked it up and headed for the garden. You can see the best of the resulting shots here.
So what do I think? Well first of all, yes this thing is real. it works. You can attach any Canon EF mount lens to it (Nikon version available too) and yes you really can get shallow depth of field pictures using this system. The first thing you'll notice, though, is that the pictures are upside down, which makes aiming the lens very tricky indeed and you'll need to rotate the images in post processing. There's also a big problem with dust spots because it uses a focusing screen to project the image from your lens onto and then the iPhone shoots a picture of the focusing screen. The screen picks up dust very easily and is very fragile so cleaning it is best done very gently with a lens cloth or using compressed air.
The other problem with the focusing screen is that you can see the ridges on the screen in the pictures. Check out the large versions of my pictures to see what I mean. In some cases I reduced the effect and in others I emphasised it. But in all cases it was there and quite easily visible at full size.
The device comes in 2 main parts, the jacket that fits onto the phone and then the DOF unit that screws onto the jacket with a 37mm thread close-up lens in between. The whole system is designed for 37mm threads so you can take the DOF unit off and add your own 37mm lenses if you wish.
Overall I found this a fun little device. With pro lenses on it's ridiculous looking, of course, and if you're going to carry big lenses anyway why wouldn't you just use your SLR? Valid points for sure but if you're just looking for something that's a bit of fun and you have $250 (ouch!) to spare then go ahead and get one. Personally I'll be getting a wide angle 37mm lens to attach to mine and using it for video, a bit like an OWLE.
Today we've got a video review of Snapseed, an iPad app by Nik Software. This is our first ever iPad app review on PhotoWalkthrough and that's because until now I've not thought anything was good enough to be useful to pro and semi-pro photographers. But surely if anyone can make a quality photo editing app on the iPad then Nik Software can? Join me to find out what it can do, how it works and whether you should give Nik your hard earned money!
Today we have video review of the brand new Flare app available on the Mac app store. It brings hipstamatic or Instagram style creative effects to your photos through a desktop app that gives much more creative control. I'll show you how it works and give my verdict on whether or not this is a must buy. (Update 21 June 2011 - I've added a download link below the video where you can download my Flare presets. Find more downloadable presets on the Flare Presets page)
Today's show is a video review of the Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless tablet. It features 8 express keys with configurable OLED displays and a touch wheel. It connects by bluetooth and is pressure and tilt sensitive. We discuss it's price, features and how useful it is to a digital photographer.
Find more photography video reviews on the PhotoWalkthrough site plus tons of free lightroom and photoshop video tutorials. Find out more about Wacom tablets at www.wacom.com.
