$ 140 Or So Getsya

It gets ya either :

a. 12 months prepaid Lightroom and Photoshop on the Creative Cloud system. Good deal when you have internet access and want to do the more extensive image editing that PS is known for. You'll need to do a little more study and practise with PS than with PSE but the results acan be more controllable for some people. Of course Lightroom may be all you need for 95% of the images that you take - if you don't need to get out the electronic scissors and paste pot them LR is the go.

b. One-time for always purchase of Photoshop Elements 14. A slightly less complex version of Photoshop with enough processing power for most amateur and enthusiast users. capable of exhibition or self-publishing standards, though. This blog and many others depends upon PSE processing.

These products, like so many others these days, are available via internet downloading with the appropriate licensing numbers. We sell the cards for this, and for a number of other Adobe products, at the front counter. Some of the other things are quite extensive - ask our experts for advice about your level of processing.

" How Did You Spend Your Weekend? "

" Recreating the St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

"...Well I just asked a sensible question! There's no need to give that sort of answer! "

" No, no, really. Come back. Don't go away mad. I'm telling the absolute truth..."

I had done a publicity shoot for a group of dancers a couple of weeks ago in a rather bare dance studio. Simple stuff, with a pretty bare backdrop and basic umbrella lighting. Really only record shots of their costuming - it was a practice session for a big show that saw them dressed as 1920's flappers. At the end of the evening I had them line up against the white wall and pretend to be terrified.

Note: dancers are good value as far as subjects go. They know how to pose and by the time they get to the stage-ready stage they have lost a lot of inhibitions. You can get theatre out of them with a cup of coffee and a strong light...

Into the studio - a flat bare tabletop with a dirty green cloth on it. Strong even light on a paper backdrop bouncing back into the camera. Two 1:18 car models - a Model A Ford and a Model B Ford. Posed them on either side of the frame in semi-silhouette and shot off a series of images.

Back in the dimroom, extracted the sillhouettes and layered them up. Extracted the dancers from the best image and layered that up - that was the longest part of the job. Photoshop Elements made it reasonably easy as I used about 4 different tools in various areas of the image.

I needed a dirty brick wall behind the girls and fortunately I had a disc of just such on file. The tiling and copying facility of Photoshop Elements was used to extend the wall wide enough to cover the entire frame. In retrospect I should have added some bullet holes but as the whole image is still in a psd form I can revise it later.

Making the splash of light from the car headlamps was simple - one bright layer of brick under one dark layer of brick and then erase part of the top with a fuzzy round eraser.

Making the reflected shadow from the dancers was also simple. Duplicated their layer, selected them, blacked them out, flipped that image vertically, spread it at their feet with perspective distortion, applied some gaussian blur, and reduced the opacity of the layer to match the shadows that the toy model cars were casting. If it sounds tough it wasn't

Blending all the layers was the trick - and the trick I used was to go round the edges of each image on a layer with the small blur tool set to 10 px and 50%. Just smoothed them enough.

Final touch was a suitable text underneath. Photoshop has a lot of fonts but there are far more out there in graphic design books. I got a one in Melbourne in January called " Retro Fonts" that has a CD in the back containing a vast number of authentic styles from all modern eras. You just select one, open it in the HD and assign it to Photoshop Elements and away you go. I picked Empire Deco as being exactly right for the period.

Fun? Darned right it was fun. And it made a good title image for the entire job. Two shots and a morning of computer work. Murder in Chicago was never this easy...or maybe it was...

Losing It - Exporting To Nowhere

Novice computer users have it good. They do not know what they are doing and anything that works is a victory - even if it is occasionally a pyrrhic one. As long as the screen does not go solid blue all is good.

Further on, when we get to our digital adolescence and the html hormones start to surge, we get more adventurous. We load our computers with a bazillion files and then try to save them, export them, or back them up somewhere. We would, in many cases, be better backing up an articulated bus through the back streets of Balga. At least when it all went pear-shaped the bus would be wedged into someone's lounge room - not vanished into the aether...never to be found.

I still do this - the files, not the bus. While the makers of the computer and the various programs are experts and provide clear questions and instructions about where the files will be going to...sometimes they use words differently than I do, and I fail to understand what they mean. Sometimes I also fail to see some part of the specifications and it results in me launching a file to nowhere. I can only assume it reaches this destination, because I never find it again.

The iMac computer at home does have one little section that seems to find things. I can ask the hard drive where a file is and eventually it will report a location. The macBook Pro here at work may have this facility as well, but I haven't found it yet. As a result, when I lose a bit of work that I have just saved, I resort to the trick of making another one of the same sort and then watching it step-by-step as it is exported. Frequently I can find where the first stray has gone - and almost always it is because I failed to specify the right target before I pulled the first trigger.

Please note: If things go wrong for you, it is sometimes because your computer has mutated all on its own in the night. The simple pathway you learned to take when you did your first work has been changed by secret command from the computer manufacturer or the software company. They do this after you have gone to bed at night. It's best to unplug you computer entirely after use and put a tinfoil hat over it to prevent alien cosmic space commands from doing this. Also wear one yourself. I favour a metallic pie plate strapped to my head in summer...

Uncle Dick

Save Everything - Whales, The World, Old Soap Wrappers, Jpeg's

Everything.

Save it on your computer drive, back it up to your Time Machine hard drive, then back this up to your Drobo, then burn CD's of the files, then print them out on an Epson printer, then rephotograph the prints with a 35mm copy camera and archivally process the film. Then store it in acid-free sleeves in a fireproof contaner.

Then take the discs and the film and the prints and any spare pixels that have fallen out of the back of the machine and put them in a safe deposit box down at the Bank of New South Wales.

You may want to ask the bank to sandbag the St. George's Terrace entrance and post guards armed with Stirling SMG's there - better safe than sorry.

After you have done this, go back and look at the images you started with. Are they really all that good? Is your student portfolio of 365 daily images of a banana on a plate really the stuff of your dreams? Have you advanced? Would it be a good idea to keep one picture of the banana and clean the rest out of the drive?

Just this thought occurred to me some time ago when I noted that the content level indicator on the Drobo drive I use got past half-full. Now the Drobo is a wonderful device for keeping things safe, as long as you keep it safe. I can re-disc it to far more capacity than it bears now...I'll do that eventually, but decided to look into the thing at present to discover what was in there.

Well, I didn't find the missing sock but I did find damn near everything else that I had dumped into it. Including jobs that had a set of RAW files, jpeg finder files, working psd files, and finished jpeg output files. Plus a few tiff's and something that looks suspiciously like a tram ticket. It was like an overgrown garden of pixels.

I set aside my ruth and weeded relentlessly - gaining back valuable disc space and concentrating each division into work that I am happy with. I did allow some wiggle room with RAW files that I may re-work...but even there I have been realistic with what was actually worth re-working. Let's face it folks, we usually get better as we go along, and it is retrograde to go back and try to make silk purses out of our sow's ears. They are never good and it annoys the sows.

Spring cleaning is not just for the carpet - try it and see.

Hold High The Multiple Standards, They Must Not Suffer Loss...

I am always amazed when I note that the manufacturers of regular flash-light batteries  managed to make AAA, AA, C, and D cells and by and large the products of any particular maker are fairly similar to the same class from another factory. Of course there can be a variation in the supplies - some have lots of electricity and some don't - also some leak and some don't. But generally an AA cell will fit in an AA holder no matter who made it.

Not so for Li-ion batteries. Each maker seems to have a different shape or size, and not just different from other firms - different from themslves. It is a rare and welcome thing for the developing line of new cameras to contain the same battery three years in a row.

A nightmare for the user? For the stockist? Wait until you consider what those batteries do inside the cameras...

The jpeg is pretty universal for most cameras. Take a jpeg and everything can read it from the storage device and show it on a screen. But there are limitations - even with the best jpeg cameras in the world, you can sometimes exceed the capabilities. RAW files are what you need. And then away you go on the chicken chase again as you try to get your new camera's files to open in your old computer program. Or find an update. Or find a new program. Or take to drink.

Some manufacturers have tried to institute a DNG file that will be universal but then lots of their competitors have not taken them up on it. Indeed sometimes there are computer crashes and problems but then that is one of the  mysteries of the occident.

Occidents will happen...

Which Colour Space Should You Use?

Here's a question to fill those long lonely nights at the camera club as you sit around the flames of the  blazing digital projector and reminisce about cocking a shutter.

Which digital colour space do you need? The old days ( Elvis, dinosaurs, 50¢ hot dogs...) were easy because you got the colour space the manufacturer handed you and were darned grateful for it. If you loaded Kodachrome you got Hollywood colour and paid a premium - if you shot Afga you got European art colour and watched it turn magenta - and if you purchased Ferrania you wondered where the strange smell was coming from.

Now we are generally given the choice of Adobe RGB or sRGB in our camera menu. The first for printing, the second for computer display, is the general tenor of the advice. Follow it if you like, but we earnestly suggest you investigate other alternatives:

1. FinalYEARstudentRGB

This is a colour space that is so dark and grungy that it feels like reading Kafka on a wet night in Pittsburg. The white portion of the spectrum never gets above the luminance level of a boarding house sheet at the end of the month.

2. CAMeraclubRGB

On the other end of the scale is this colour space that constantly bangs the saturation meter needle off the stops like a machine gun. You wondered why the digital projector started smoking? This is the reason. It comes pre-loaded with a sharpening algorithm that actually hurts the eyes to see.

3. Ilford CIBA RGB

This was first announced in the 1956 British Workingman's Socialist Camera Society Annual and will be ready for final release in about 4 months. From Pentonville.

4. FlapoRGB

Distinctive to the Flapoflex range of cameras, this colour space will not work with anything else. If you offend the clerk who sells it to you, it will not work at all. Mind your tongue.

5. soBRG

The sort of colour space that does everything backwards just to spite you. Slide the controls at your peril.

6. WellnessRGB

As a complete contrast, this is a kind and gentle colour space that lends itself to pastels, soft flowers and fluffy kittens. Actually it has no contrast at all - everything looks as if it was shot through waxed paper. A soothing choice if you can stay awake.

7. The New Colour Space

This is the setting that appears on your camera menu a month after you have set up all the criteria and just started to get used to it. It appears overnight with no indication of what it does - the David Carradine of computer programs. If you select it, it will disappear from the menu again.

There, that was easy. Now we can get on to calibrating your memory card for the northern or southern hemisphere. Complete instructions in the next blog post.

Tell Me The Truth - Does This Colour Make My Monitor Look Fat? Spyder...

Still looking at the same screen, are we? The one we bought from Harvey Norman three years ago? The one that has never been calibrated or colour corrected in all that time?

Well, congratulations - you are an adventurer. Boldly going where most of us would never venture. I'll bet you eat meat pies from roadside stalls in tropical countries. I'll bet you pet strange dogs in back alleys. I'll bet you contract marriage in cocktail bars and buy gold bricks wrapped in newspaper.

The rest of us are cowards. We know that the colours in the screens of our computers are a variable feast  - and that leaving the thing unattended for three years is like leaving yoghurt open on the table for the same length of time. Most of us have chickened out and bought screen calibrators.

I chose the Spyder 4 Express since my computer is a stand-alone model and sits in a uniformly dim room - no changing lights. I fire it up every two months and it returns the screen to a fixed normality. Sometimes there is very little correction needed over the period - sometimes considerably more. The program that runs the calibrator shows me a before and after image for each cycle it goes through.

If I was running a series of computers or had weird lighting or strange desires* I would select the Spyder 4 Pro or Elite models. They do more but you have to know what you want.

Watch in the next little bit as we feature these Spyder 4 models at bargain prices. In the meantime, if you STILL have not calibrated your screen, it might be safest to convert everything to monochrome and grow a hipster beard. Then no-one can look at you funny.

* Don't ask. I might tell you.

Experimental Weekend - A Note Of Caution

This has been a weekend of quiet experimentation in the dark room. Not the darkroom -  chemical work was laid aside some years ago and has not been picked up. The dark room that used to be the darkroom, but is now a not-so-dark room. I hesitate to say a light room for fear of Adobe's branding lawyers...

Right - level of illumination aside, it was a weekend of careful photo manipulation and posting on several websites. During which I gained an insight into what several of our customers have been saying - they don't want anything to do with photo manipulation and storage if it involves the cloud system.

I heard them say this but was ignorant as to the whole affair - a little questioning of other staff and of family members helped, but I still thought that the customers might have been making too much of a fuss about nothing - after all, the internet works flawlessly and all those servers and computers and experts would make sure that it all went perfectly...no?

Well, no. Not for me this weekend. Starting with an attempted hack from overseas, a reset password for Facebook, then hours spent trying to re-connect the Wordpress blogs that I write to a Facebook page, then watching selected posts drop out of FB, then drop back in again, then lose their photos, then regain them...

It was interesting work resetting and reconnecting things but it used up hours of reading, clicking, retracing, etc. Had I experienced the same misery with Photoshop manipulation or the localised resizing and reformatting of photos that is be done with Aperture or Silkypix I would tempted to unplug the entire electronic web and get out the developing tank and trays...

The day was as slow as the internet was slow and as scattered as the various places that needed to be contacted. I suspect that cloud storage and accessing would have been impossible yesterday. which leads me to the point of this post: there are still a few programs available that are not cloud-based.

I see we have some Photoshop Elements 13, some DxO programs, and some of the Lightroom ones that can stand alone on your computer. I would encourage anyone who is at the same level of computer knowledge as me ( The I is on and the O is off, do not lick the monitor screen...) to think about keeping the photo manipulation in-box as it were rather than depending upon Telstra, Berkeley, and state of the atmosphere to make it possible.

Software Sale - Things In Boxes

Software is a hard subject to cover in small blog - particularly when it is constantly changing.

 By the time you finish reading this page someone in Silicon Valley or Mumbai will have written two generations on in whatever image-editing program you use and someone in Khazaksan will be frantically pirating it. If you pop out to the newsagent tomorrow you can get a free copy in a plastic baggy stapled to the front cover of  " Knitters And Crocheters Weekly ".

Nevertheless, if you are immune from the dizzying pace, we do have a number of boxed editions of useful Adobe and DxO material that may be what your system needs to succeed. We'll be doing half price on boxes of :

LR3 upgrade to LR4
Photoshop Elements 13
Premiere Elements 13
DxO Viewpoint 2
DxO Filmpack 4
DxO Optics Pro 9 Elite and Standard

Make sure your computer system is new enough to make use of these and then go for it. I use the Photoshop Elements program and find it excellent for screen work and printing.

Branding And SEO In The Nieuw Werrldde Orddrurre

" Hello? Hello? Is this the executive director of Google? This is Crispian van Astralle - Pleine of Nieuw Werrldde Phautaugrafickts Studieaux. I wish to complain about your search engine.

Neither of my clients can find me on their computer. I have told them my name several times on my mobile phone and you still do not display me at the top of the list of professional photographic legends. We have been established for jus months and this sort of thing is holding back what might be a multi-billion dollar business. It's just not good enough.

Unless this changes before lunch I am going to take it to the highest authorities. We do all we can to  make it easy for you people and we expect you to do the rest. "

And that, folks is that. We all want to be us. We all want to be unique. Identically unique in some cases - like teenagers...

We want to have our business seen as unique - fair enough in a difficult market - but we need to remember that to be seen, we need to be found. Laboured spellings based upon trendy phonics are fine for band posters in summer concerts. The cleverness is no more wasted than the readers...but it is different if you are trying to sell a studio.

Lots of names are already taken. You won't be allowed to register yourself as Kodak or Leica or The Royal Australian Regiment. Calling yourself the Caltex Studio because there are all those signs on the petrol stations around town already will not succeed - Caltex has more lawyers on speed dial that you have had hot dinners.

Try to think up your new business name in the morning, when you have had coffee. Leaving it until after Happy Hour risks the sort of flights of fancy that end up never being heard of again - names that are so impossibly clever that no-one succeeds in finding them. Make no mistake - people are impatient. Three pages into Google and they couldn't give a damn - they'll hire another photographer.

If in doubt - use your own name with the appellation " Photographer" added. Even if you aren't now you might be one day. But it is no fair using someone else's photo on your card...

The Iconic Image - Camera Electronic On Your PC!

As we get older we discover an amazing phenomenon - young people do not know as much as we do.

Young people who wish to take exception to this may protest as much as they like - the replies section on Facebook is open all the time. They can type on their laptops, tablets, or mobile phones with the assurance that it will be read. Full sentences in English are preferred though if you must txt we hav ppl her who cn trnslat.

But how many of you know " Howdy Customers"...and who said it.

Never mind - the real point of this $ 11 is the fact that Camera Electronic has scored an advertising coup in the world of the PC. Many of our readers use PC's as opposed to Mac computers and have become familiar with the icon symbols that the PC uses to indicate various functions - things like "print", "open", "format", and..."save".

Especially "save". Look closely at "save".

Young people who have never used the older computers really don't know what that is. We do. It is really a tiny little representation in symbol form of the front appearance of the Camera Electronic store. There's the front windows, the door, and the workshop windows above it. Note that the symbol was drawn before we got the workshop air conditioners, but that was a long time ago...

Go on. Look at the top of the Windows page. Now stand outside in Stirling Street and look up at the front of our shop.

There you go. Advertising coup of two centuries...every time you save your work - you save our workplace.

You'll NEVER guess who works in the "print" icon building...

The Persian Rug

Persians, so I am informed, weave deliberate mistakes into their rugs. The rugs themselves are quite sturdy and sometimes very colourful. They can be seen in buildings all over the country - nearly every major city has at least one carpet shop closing down and selling these rugs at below cost price. Indeed, some of these shops have been going out of business for years - I suppose it is the sort of failure that you pass down from father to son...

Apart from the business model, the idea of the deliberate mistake in the rug is to demonstrate that the rug maker is human...not divine. This is a charming  philosophical point, although in practical terms, anyone observing the weavers would be unlikely to fall into quite that mistake....

How does it apply to photography? Well, if you were to believe the marketers of some editing programs designed to retouch portraits, imperfection is something to be ruthlessly weeded out. Skins are to be smoothed, noses are to be trimmed and straightened, eyes are to be evened up, and teeth are to be whitened. Otherwise the person depicted would be...would be...ummm. Help me out here. I'm trying to say that the person depicted would be the person depicted.

Okay, I am not decrying a little eye-bag removal for those who have indulged the night before - also, removing roaring red eyes is a kind act. You can whiten teeth a little, but beware of trying to do the sort of thing that suburban shopping centre peroxide and laser clinics do. They are fake professionals and are used to pressure-cooking incisors. Do not attempt it at home on your PC.

I guess what I am saying is please do not try to make Konrad Adenauer look like a Disney princess. If people want to see computer-generated androids there are plenty of movies out these days that do that. Leave your portrait sitter some semblance of their real face and skin. They will be happy enough with it when the Adenauer wrinkles eventually do arrive.

PE For Smarties

Over the years we have seen any number of yellow-covered books in the bookstore entitled " Whatever For Dummies". The range of topics seems to have ranged from religion and philosophy to storm door repairs. I bought one that dealt with my new computer system and as I progressed through I realised it was telling the absolute truth...anyone who spent money on it was a dummy.

I tried another tack - I invested in the first of my Photoshop Elements editing programs...in this case it was Photoshop Elements 3. I found it surprisingly easy to use, and as my artistic ability was on a level with a preschooler, I was rewarded with bright pop colours. On everything...

Determined to do better I bought the Photoshop Elements 10 and switched to it. A whole new world of elegant image manipulation opened up...and I discovered the layer system as well. All of a sudden I could clean up all my image files as well as making an imaginary world of my own.

Photoshop Elements has since gone to No.11 and No.12 and they have added more features. More of the power of the classic Photoshop program has been added but the difficult learning curve that you might expect with the standard program is not there. PE is really intuitive.

Now, if you'd like to equip yourself with the best introduction to Photoshop Elements, make a booking to attend the February 9th workshop with Nick Melidonis at Shoot Photography. He'll show you how to get the best from it, while creating and managing your images.

Ring Jonathan Cousins at Shoot on 9228-8232 to book a place. Beginner or enthusiast, you can place your reliance on Adobe and their Photoshop Elements program.And you won't be a dummy...

The Annual Leap Of Faith

Spring is here, the grass is riz. I wonder where the annual update to Photoshop Elements is...

Ah, It's on the net. Just announced today in fact. I daresay we'll get some boxed sets of them fairly shortly...but don't ring me up this morning to ask when because I don't know.
Suffice it to say that if you are banging out your work on an older version, this might be a good investment.

I fit into the banging away category - I started my digital adolescence with the Elements 3 version - got free with a scaner. Then I bought Elements 6, and eventually went to Elements 10. Each one was separated far enough in generation to encompass real improvements while retaining most of the useful features of the past.

Note that I said " most " - in between 6 and 10 they ditched some paste-in graphics that they considered tired. In reality they were useful - I am going to go back and capture them and store them for future use. You can never tell when you'll need a Drum Majorette's cap to put onto a bridesmaid...

The new Photoshop Elements 12 seems to have additional features that move items in the picture and then fill in the backdrop behind them. Very useful for street and event photography. There is also an improvement to the straighten tool that settles the horizon and then fills in the little wedge-shaped blank areas at the side with similar content to the main subject.

I am also looking forward to an automatic colour correct that has the capability to learn your preferences and to slap it on at a click. I hope to use other plug-ins to custom craft a look that I can teach to the Photoshop Elements 12 - then I'll just go straight to it for a 50's look. You can do that with the plug-ins now but you are bouncing back and forward to do it. One stop shop is the go.

Is this program prestigious and complex enough for your photographic business? If you need prestige and complexity to sell your services go for the full PS6 Cloud and add a host of special layers and curves and extra operations. The clients will notice, or not, as the case may be...Make sure you tell them about how you spend hours at the computer hand-crafting their images.

Make sure they don't ever get to see what your editing desktop really looks like. Coffee cup rings on your laptop never look good. Especially when they are on the screen...