Want to save a small fortune? - buy your mags at Zinio.com - a year's sub to Amateur Photographer the newsstand would cost 51 x £2.24 (£114) but if you get the digital edition is costs just £25.39. Then submit this as a professional subscription on your next tax return and get IR to offset this against your tax.
Mike Otley has kindly added a review of the Enfuse plugin for Lightroom 2. This plugin allows the user to blend multiple exposures (similar to tonemapped HDR images). Read Mike's article ..... it could save you money and time.
29th July 2008 Adobe has launched the final release of Lightroom 2 - available now for £175 or £69 as an upgrade. The changes from the beta 2 release are extensive - too many to be listed here. For a full and detailed list of changes please visit The Lightroom Queen site. Meanwhile Safari Rough Cuts have started work on Adobe Classroom in a Book - Lightroom 2 beta. You purchase the book (PDF) as it is being written. I have subscribed to this download, and the book is in very early stages of completion (anticipated sometime in August). For further details and prices follow this link. Another Safari book on LR2beta is Adobe PS Lightroom 2 beta How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques - links & critiques in the subscriber zone.
Probably the best book on the subject will be The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Martin Evening who (it is assumed) had advanced releases from Adobe - his Lightroom 1.x book was outstanding. The book has now been released (about £20 from www.bookfellas.co.uk - slightly cheaper than Amazon, with free PP)
Compact Flash update = CFast is around the corner - a CF Card with SATA interface - providing a transfer rate of 3Gb/sec rather than the poorer 133Mb/sec of standard cards. This will impact on both high end digital still cameras and hybrids such as RED One/Scarlet Pro cameras. As always, John Nuttall will be an early adoptor of new technology - we will be opting for the RED Scarlet which serves as a Professional (not prosumer) video camera and has the potential for a very substantial stills camera - a tapeless system with better specs than HD and RAW facilities - all around $3000.
We have already reviewed the excellent 123di package - a treasure chest of digital imaging interactive information and an essential tool for every teacher and student of digital photography. The author has very kindly offered a massive thirty percent discount for educational users, plus a further discount of 10% for my Hurtwood students (a total discount of 40%). In order to claim the extra discount, you need to contact your tutor personally for the correct discount key. For further information and a demo, please visit www.123di.com
Photographer and blogger Joe Barrett is offering a free ebook entitled 'Lightroom Tips and Tricks' (Acrobat PDF) containing over thirty tips and available here.
When I showed the Hurtwood students some of the light sculpture photographs taken by Michael Bosanko, their immediate reaction was one of overwhelming enthusiasm to try it themselves - and they have now been given it as an assignment. Michael has a 'how to' feature in the March 2008 issue (70) of Digital Camera Magazine - six pages of practical tips with illustrations. Rush out and buy it now - the information will provide you with hours of creative energy!
Michael writes; 'Always curious enough to try new things, one evening I turned my attention to the moon and crudely discovered that by moving the camera, I could use the moon's own light to create shapes and words. This was short lived as the process was often unpredictable with results. In the same year I was fortunate enough to photograph people practicing fire poi, or fire juggling. The fire trails were beautifully caught in the final image, and it seemed like a natural step to replicate this using torches, then eventually to creating light sculpture itself.
I continue to create light sculptures with surprisingly large global interest. My work has been featured on many websites and magazines, often with rave review.
My latest interest has come from a rock band keen to have me incorporate my work into location shoots.
Light Graffiti/Light Sculptures can provide enormous fun as it places you the photographer into the picture; you become part of the art. Beginners to this technique should be brave enough to switch to manual mode on their camera, choose locations with a little ambient light and use moderately bright torchlight'.
Photo (c) Michael Bosanko and reproduced by kind permission.
What's this? Possibly the first UK site to notice the beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS4 codenamed Stonehenge. No further details at the moment - more to follow. Guess what might be included (it is a guess).
The JAlbum photo gallery is now up and running - see my pictures.
Adobe Camera RAW plugin has now reached version 4.5 (free download).
Adobe - Did you know that Adobe products in Europe cost up to 190% more than in the USA? And that is before tax! Europe and in particular the UK are an absolute rip-off when it comes to pricing, encouraging piracy. If you are sick to death of being over-charged for software, then sign the online petition and force companies like Adobe to rethink their (probably illegal) pricing policies.
Adobe Lightroom is a first-rate program for handling and developing RAW files and managing your portfolio. It is significantly different to Adobe Bridge in many respects and quite unlike anything else on the market. It has now reached release 1.4 and is available from Adobe. At the same time, Martin Evening's excellent book 'Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book - A Complete Guide for Photographers' which has been available for several months as a developing ebook, is now available in print (£17.99 inc free postage from Amazon). Scott Kelby's 'The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book' from New Riders is also now published. Scott has updated his content to reflect the important changes in 1.1 and the PDF is now available from the Peachpit web site (you need to register the book first). John has demonstrated the beta of Lightroom to the Hurtwood students. You can follow all the talk at the Adobe Lightroom forum (you may need to register/log-on). The Editor recently attended a symposium in Oxford given by two distinguished beta testers. Students of the Enigma Digital Photography Course will benefit from an early look at this critically essential software, plus John's daily use as part of his digital workflow.
It is very difficult to understand what NAPP is up to - a chance to offer Photoshop User to the non-American market for a fraction of the $149 they want to actually post it. Did they ever hear of Acrobat? If they had the slightest clue about marketing, they could offer it as a digital subscription, complete with files, for say $70. No such luck, and if you work in an academic institute outside the USA, then you don't qualify for an educational discount. I give up! (Below, the much touted Darkroom magazine from NAPP, which never saw the light!)
As from 17th November, the Advanced Enigma students now have access to the infrared RAW files and John's notes for processing them in Photoshop. We have also experimented with converting them into duotones and quadtones. The original files and PDF notes are published in the subscriber area.
The News page of Digiphoto is formatted to be viewed on a PDA without horizontal scrolling! Stay in touch wherever you are in the world, or send comments in to webmasterATdigiphoto.org.uk - replace AT with @