Silver gelatin digital prints

It was just a year ago I was writing about the future for digital black-and-white prints being the new printing paper developed by Harman technology (Ilford) for exposure in digital printers like the Lightjet or Durst Lambda, then processed in conventional wet darkroom chemistry. The fututre has got here much faster than I anticipated. Last week Ilford launched its online service to supply conventional darkroom silver gelatin prints from digital black-and-white files (and of course film if you want to order on line, not upload). The samples I took away from Focus on Imaging were clean and crisp, just like quality darkroom prints on RC paper. There is not yet the option for printing to the heavyweight baryta ‘fine print’ papers but I can see that’s going to come. I’m off to upload some images – I’ll let you know how I get on.

Photoshopped

Received a mailing today from PhotoWorkshop.com (no relation) about their photography and Digital Imaging competition – the header image by Wendell Penedo (a former first prize winner in their Photo Illustration category) is a striking surrealist image of raining umbrellas. (I won’t reproduce the image here in respect of copyright.) Well I say umbrellas but it doesn’t take a moment to notice that it is the same cloned and flipped singular umbrella. Very lazy composite imaging as you have shadows and highlights in direct contradiction on the flipped umbrellas – something I would have criticised any undergraduate student of mine for. What I found surprising is that Wendell Pendeo’s other work in his short portfolio is exquisitely put together – so how did this win first prize and go unnoticed by the judges? Perhaps it’s a planet with two suns, perhaps people are forgetting to use a photographer’s eyes when producing photorealistic fantasy imagery.

Polaroid film going…

Just checked on the Polaroid online shop for the current price of Type 59 film for 5×4 colour transfers only to find the film has disappeared - only Type 79 is currently listed as a UK available product while the US shop lists NO colour 5×4 materials at all. Is that then end of Polaroid transfers in 5×4? Why was death so quick and why so silent?

ACR 4.3.1 and Lightroom 1.3.1

These new releases solved the problems with compressed NEF files from the D100 – all back to normal!

Unsorted

Barely a week after saying how good it was to have the updates to Lightroom and Camera Raw — trouble. Though ACR 4.3 offers Canon G9 compatibility it has lost compatibility with legacy NEF files in Compressed RAW format from the Nikon D100. I watched with alarm as random files turned muddy magenta as their previews were redrawn – it only slowly dawned on me  that ACR 4.3 was targeting Compressed NEF files. Adobe is aware and a cure will be offered.

Sorted…

Camera Raw 4.3 and Lightroom 1.3 released yesterday as updates by Adobe finally recognise the As Shot white balance in files from the Canon G9. What a delight to be able to use familiar software with the pictures from this little camera.

Depth of field calculator widget

New version of the Depth of Field calculator (Mac widget) is available for download at: Redex.

There is also a web version of the calculator available – a complete camera/lens database included with the appropriate digital crop factor. So if you never need calculate depth of field for a given lens and aperture, or have no interest in the hyperfocal focusing distance, you can at least see what equivalent focal length lens you have on your digital SLR. 

Over-elaborate but fun

Most impressed with the refurbished Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow – this is a Photoshop Photomerge of three image shot in RAW on my little Olympus SP-350. The Raw files were white balanced and tonally adjusted before the lens distortion was corrected. The three corrected images were merged and the final 16-bit file then very gently tone mapped to adjusted the appearance of the big globe lights. The image is rather large for the blog page so just right click to open it in a new window.

Composition frames

Anyone who has read my book Composition will realise I don’t put great faith in geometric compositional aids. That said, it is informative to see you own pictures analysed using the classic tools like the Golden Ratio. A neat piece of Mac software arrives – FrameAway 1.0 that lets you drop a transparent grid over your images to see how they are composed. It is nothing more than a visualisation tool and does no cropping but it very elegant. Tiny download at http://frameaway.dv8.ro/index.html  

Email by Lightroom

I was bemoaning the fact I could no longer email images as conveniently as I did with iView Media Pro. Bit of research solved the issue. Put an alias of Apple Mail in the Export Actions folder – then Export on a Preset (sRGB, 72dpi max 640px) having checked the What to Do after Export pop-up as Mail Alias.  Works like a treat opening a new mail document with the resized and profiled image from Lightroom.