Photography – Page 56 – Richard & Caroline's Blog

December 6, 2016December 6, 2016

Sculpting with Light & Order of Editing

This months photo of the month I tried to pull off in camera, but did not quiet get the lighting on the models face right. It was close and I was sure that a bit of photoshop could bring it back.

I did the majority of the editing in Lightroom, then applied some skin softening via negative clarity; then I took it into Photoshop to sculpt the light. This turned out to be a mistake.

Red Dress Sculpting after skin softening

Its not a bad image but if you look at the models right arm on the left hand side of the photograph the transition from light to shadow just looks wrong and broken.

I was fairly sure it was because I softened the skin in the wrong order so I needed to process the image again. Lucky I had preserved the layers and it was a lot easier then I expected.

First I took the processed Lightroom image and cloned it, then found the skin softening control point and deleted it, this left all the other Lightroom processing but removed the skin softening. I then opened this into Photoshop and also opened the previous Photoshop image which still had the skin softening and looked broken.

It was fairly easy to duplicate my work, you can Command-Click on the selection layer and copy the selection over to the other document. You can also drag and drop the Curves layer and the masks, thus with just a few clicks I had recreated my Photoshop document but without the skin softening.

Saved then back to Lightroom for a touch of skin softening and a little sharpening plus vignette and you have the picture below and the picture of the month.

December 1, 2016December 2, 2016

Leica M 28mm f/5.6 Reviews Starting to appear

The Leica M 28mm f/5.6 is now out and while its a beautiful lens if your after just one 28mm lens the f/2.8 is possibly the one to pick, the f/2 is faster but also a challenging lens and it does not play nice on none M cameras. If your interested in this as a second 28mm, or if 28mm is not a lens you usually use but fancy something a bit different then it may be worth considering.

The lens does not just vignette but the resolution changes giving an interesting feel to the images. A fun lens and I can see why people like it.

November 29, 2016December 31, 2016

Photo of the Month – November

Nikon D800
Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8
70mm, 1/100 Sec at f/9, ISO100
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom CC2015.7 & Photoshop CC
On a Mac Pro, OS-X 10.12.1

November 25, 2016November 28, 2016

Lightwork Laptops

If you can only afford one computer and you want a portable for Photography, its hard not to recommend the best MacBook Pro you can afford. For those of use lucky enough to have several Mac laptops and desktops around the building to use, then for heavy Photoshop its the MacPro and for lighter work my old eight year old MacBook Pro. The little MacBook most people including me dismiss and look more towards the Air for light work, but I was looking at the Geekbench scores and its amazing how computers have progressed. That little underpowered laptop is nearly twice the power of my old laptop so if your just after something for occasional work it is an option but remember that USB-C hub.

November 24, 2016November 25, 2016

Lunch time walk

While taking a quick a break from the office, I walked through town to visit my faviorate coffee shop.

Camera in hand I took a few snaps.

Once back at my desk I quickly imported them into Lightroom Mobile on the iPad but then did nothing with them. Later I grabbed my laptop and opened up Lightroom on the web, and did a quick edit. I later returned to the image but this time wanted to work a little more on the image so this time I opened up my master Lightroom catalogue held in my dropbox folder.

The photographs downloaded themselves quickly with my edits and I continued to work on them. I have not yet fired up my master catalogue on my desktop yet, it will be interesting to see where the photographs are there!

November 21, 2016November 25, 2016

Christmas RED

If you have far too much money and want a unique lens then this 50mm Leica M lens could be for you in stunning red.

November 18, 2016November 19, 2016

Lightroom and Dropbox

I keep experimenting with different ways of working with Lightroom. The problem I have is that I always want to use the computer/iPad thats to hand to work on my photographs.

Having been using Lightroom since it was released, there are about 70,000 shots in my main catalogue which lives on my desktop computer. The catalogue on the internal SSD and the photographic files on two large external Thunderbolt2 drives.

Lightroom Mobile now means I can sync my work and use the web version and the iPad and some of the remote tools now available make the iPad very useful if you have the Pro version and Apple pencil, but sometimes you want to use your laptop.

I have been trying to work using a small temp catalogue for that months data but then it does not get synced to Lightroom mobile, and then there is importing it into your main library and remembering which version is the current version.

To make life a little easier I have been keeping this temp catalogue in my dropbox and it seems to work well and not corrupt.

So that made me think, what about keeping my main catalogue in Dropbox; well that would be good but with one major problem, on my main machine my Dropbox is on an external old 1 TB FireWire800 drive connected into the back of my MacPro. That way all the files I want handy are not cluttering up the main internal SSD.

If your used to Microsoft Windows then you are used to shortcuts, these come from a UNIX idea of symbolic links. You create a soft link and the shortcut acts as the real file, very useful. Well in UNIX and MacOS is just UNIX with a pretty GUI front end, you not only have soft symbolic links but something called hard links. This tricks applications in thinking its the real deal and not just a ‘shortcut’. So what I did was create a hard symbolic link on my dropbox folder, and low and behold the catalogue synced across.

So far it seems to be working well but I’ll keep on top of my regular backups just in case.

November 17, 2016

Hasselblad X1D-50c with USB-C

I was looking over the spec of the new Hasselblad and happened to notice they have put a USB-C port on it, looks like USB-C maybe coming faster then I thought.

November 15, 2016November 17, 2016

Computer Ports for Photographers

So how many ports does a photographer need on his computer?

The new MacBooks, like anytime a new Mac comes out with a redesign and new technology, are causing a lot of complaints.

I see a lot of people complaining about the loss of the SD card slot, while my wife’s retina laptop has this, none of my computers ever have and all my camera with the exception of my Leica and Nikon V1 which I use as a compact use compact flash, and while my Nikon D800 can use SD I still use CF and either have the SD card set to roll over, or backup.

Ignoring things like port types I had a thought about the two types of usage I make, tethered shooting in the studio and mobile import and editing and backup.

Studio Tethering

So what ports do we need:

Power
USB Tether
External HD for backup
Optional but for some HDMI or some other type of monitor output

So depending out how you like to work thats three or four ports, something the older 15 inch MacBooks handled with ease. Now the new machines have four TB3 connectors so a new tethering cable would be needed for say my Nikon D800 but USB3 to USB-C are now available, I do not think I would trust using a hub for tethering.

Remote Editing

Power
USB/CF/XQD Card reader
External HD for Backup
Optional External HD for Lightroom Catalogue Photographs

What about users who max out there laptops and use them as desktop replacements

Home/Office Use

Power
USB/CF/XQD Card reader
External HD for Backup
Optional External HD for Lightroom Catalogue Photographs
External HD for Time Machine Backup
External HD for iTunes
Scanner
Printer
Monitor

So by buying the appropriate cables remote working and tethering is fine, for me home use, well I have a desktop, but one of those new LG 5K monitors with built in hub would be tempting.

I would try and buy a decent quality mobile and desktop hub, and where possible have dedicated cables but I have to admit its a shame they don’t have one USB3 port, it would have made life a lot easier.

November 14, 2016November 14, 2016

Leica M10?

Leica and naming conventions have always been a little odd.

The first legendary M series camera was the Leica M3. The M3 was followed by the M2 then the M1 which never had the following of the original M3. They then went back to their roots and released the film Leica M I own, the M4.

The M8 was the first digital M and many consider it a prototype, with a smaller then full frame 35mm sensor with a crop factor of 1.3 it was never really accepted, it also had two issues, excessive infra-red sensitivity and a very noisy and rough shutter.

The shutter was fixed with the M8.2 was then replaced by the M9 with the same shutter, no infra-red issues and finally full frame.

The M9 became the M typ 240 and its various iterations, and Leica changed their numbering scheme again, just M with a type number, but they also followed this up with the monochrom and the M-E and M-P and now M-D; confused yet?

The M type 240 is now over three years old and we are all expecting the new version soon as is my credit card! Well the latest rumours are that Leica are going back to the old numbering scheme and the new Leica M will be the M10. So far all we have is that it will be slimmer then the Leica M typ 240 and have a dedicated ISO dial. A picture was leaked this week but unfortunately you cannot see much.

Heres hoping we will not be waiting too long.