12 Jan 09 Alien Skin - Bokeh

Hi

After a long time working on our main site we are back with review. Alien Skin has provided us with their collection of professional photoshop plugins and we will start reviewing them in the next few week. It takes that long we they have a lot and are very, very good so we want to grill them

I have started to have a first look at Bokeh which I wanted to use for one of my own photos. The photo “Life Goes By” is a nice photo (see below) but the man isn’t really standing out due to the big depth-of-field and That is what Bokeh does best.

Having never worked with the plug-in before I had first a look at the videos on the Alien Skin website and saw how easy it is altering an image with this software. The steps I took where:

1. Selecting the man with the “quick selecting” tool in Photoshop
2. Create a channel mask of the selection
3. Used a Gaussian blur for the edges of the selection
4. Opened the Bokeh plug-in
5. Selected a 20% Nikon 105mm 2.8 prefix
6. Selected Bokeh - selection - plane
7. and altered the top part of the images
8. Save the work the plug-in had done
9. Opened the plug-in again and repeated step 6
10. but now altered the bottom part of the images
11. saved my work

This all was around 15 minutes work and I hope you agree that it has improved the image a lot.

Our first impression: This plugin is its money worth

The Team

Tags: Alien Skin, Bokeh, Photoshop, Plugin

03 Oct 08 The legal side of photography

As a photographer you will need to have some knowledge about the legal side of photography, copyrights, model releases, tax you named it. Searching on this through the Internet I came across a little gem on this. a book written by Carolyn Wright, the Photo Attorny. It is US based but very useful for the rest of the world as well. You can read more on the Photo Attorny page of the photo student website.

Happy shooting

Tags: carolyn wright, freelance photography, law, legal, photo attorny, The Photo Student

01 Oct 08 Studio Lights

There is a new page on the photo student website where we have some information about the Studio Light Kits from Kenro The address is:

http://www.thephotostudent.com/kenrostudio.html

These kit are professional kit for a very reasonable price and worth looking at if you are in need of some Studio lights for your portrait or product photography.

Happy shooting

Tags: BFP, flash, portrait, portrait photography, product, product photography, studio lights, The Photo Student

26 Sep 08 Colour management

One of the biggest challenges digital photographers faces is colour calibration between screen and printer. Even if you bring your photos to a professional printer you need to have the colours right.

There are several systems on the market but we have chosen to have a look at the Spyder3Studio Colour Management from Datacolor. The recommended retail price for the complete monitor and printer system is £376.94 including VAT.

Datacolor provided us with a system to test and we got the Studio in two boxes.

Spyder3Elite is the studio monitor calibration tool for professional users and is the only device in its category which is able to calibrate front projectors.

Installation:

The installation of the software is easy and works through a wizard. It took around 3 minutes to be up and running.

Calibrating your monitor:

After the software was installed we connected the spyder and started the monitor calibration. The Elite has two offers to calibrate; expert mode and through a wizard. For this test we chose the wizard which guided us through the whole calibration. After telling the software which monitor-type you have, controls available on the monitor and setting everything back to default on the monitor the tool was working. It test White, Black, Red, Green, Blue and Grey, creates a profile for your PC and monitor. This profile is loaded every time you start your PC. The whole procedure took 6 minutes and the difference in very noticeable. It was evidentthat I had my monitor settings to blue!

Printer profiling
This is my personal fear! Profiles for paper and printer combinations are scares to get. Yes there are standard profiles available, mostly made by the paper manufactures BUT they are calibrated on their printer nor yours and most of the time under perfect circumstances, which you probably don’t have in your environment. I am using Kodak Professional Paper with my Canon PI8500 printer and the profile provided by Kodak and yes in general the print is OK although mostly a little darker then the screen (this could be because my screen wasnt really calibrated). By using a tool like Spyder3Print you can create profiles for all the paper you are using on your printer.

Installation: Again very easy and quick, took around 4 minutes to be up and running.

Profiling my main paper:
The profiling is done via wizards and after asking you a little about your printer name for the basis the software prints out a colour profile reference card. This is the card you use to read the colours printed and create the profile. The tool is a spectrocolorimeter you use to read, measure, the colour block on your printer reference card.

The wizard shows the card on the screen and which colour you need to read. By putting the meter on the read point of the colour block and click the button on the meter it reads the colour, tells the wizard it has done and goes to the next colour. Depending on the depth you need for your work you have more colours to read. I used the expert mode and had 275 colours to read. The whole procedure took me an 30 minutes and the software had created a profile.

The test, is it better?

I used one of my older photos of a landscape that had always come out a little darker then the screen and printed this with the new profile through Adobe Lightroom 2.0. The result was far better then the Kodak profile and what is more: this time it wasn’t darker then the screen and this is the first time that this happened to me. The photo is exact.

Is this money well spend?

I think that you should calibrate your monitor at all times because if that is wrong everything is wrong and that should be prevented. If you are delivering your own prints to customers then you must profile your printer in the right way and not depend on the standard profiles from manufacturers.

Depending on your needs Datacolor delivers several possibilities for all levels:

For the amateur user Spyder3Express which has a rrp of £67.98 incl VAT
For the enthusiasts and semi-pro users Spyder3Pro with a rrp of £104.90
For professional users Spyder3Elite at a rrp of £174.95 incl VAT

Printer profiles Spyder3Print come at £314.72 incl VAT

But if you are really dedicated to deliver top quality then go for:

Spyder3Studio which will set you back £376.94 (incl vat) but it is money well spend.

Happy shooting

Tags: Colour calibration, Colour management, Datacolor, photo, printer, Printer profiling, printing, Spyder, Spyder3Elite, Spyder3Express, Spyder3Print, Spyder3Pro, Spyder3Studio, The Photo Student