My Patreon Members Website: http://bit.ly/2SwaSZ6 My Gear Recommendations: https://bit.ly/3bLmdfP i1Studio Review – Monitor Calibration Test Results, Contrast Ratios & Black Point. Today we look at the i1 Studio from X-Rite – how it performs as a screen calibrator and as a custom print profiler. I also have a ‘rant’ about excessive contrast and setting black and white points, and I give X-Rite a telling off!
It doesn’t take long to appreciate that Iceland’s creation is not yet complete. A few miles from the International Airport at Keflavik, the earth boils and gurgles in a cauldron of thick grey-ooze. The landscape, a palette of pastel hues, where great plumes of steam rise from earth’s unstable crust and the air saturated with the pungent odour of rotten-eggs. Raw energy of such immense magnitude to cause the ground to tremble beneath your feet. All evidence, if any was needed, that not far below more wondrous beauty is waiting to be unleashed; new mountains, lava fields, ash deserts and perhaps a new island to be formed.
In geological terms Iceland is quite young, the earliest rocks less than 14 million years old; the realm of the dinosaur had long passed before Iceland emerged from the depths of the mid-Atlantic Ridge. Volcanoes like Hekla, Katla, and the infamous Eyjafjallajökull; that caused havoc with air-flight throughout Europe in 2010, are still very much active, occasionally spewing mouton lava extending the land southwards. To the north, Landmannalaugar’s landscape is a manifestation of violent eruptions; an unbelievable range of colourful Rhyolite mountains. Water courses, heavily charged with fluvial-glacial silt, cut deep paths between the Highlands and the sea; impressive canyons that reveal multiple layers of geological history.
Here, In the south-eastern region of Iceland geology renders you speechless. Mountains with teeth, lush fertile pastures and fine black sandy beaches. Rivers cascade from the clouds at Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss. Waterfalls are hidden in huge caves and vast expanses of sand deserts 80km wide. Beyond, the inspirational beauty of the Oræfi where landscape contrasts are sharply defined, it is impossible to appreciate the full extent of the Vatnajokull National Park, an area the size of Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales combined. Glaciers hang from the sky and discharge millions of tons of crumbling ice that created the spectacular Jökulsárlon lagoon. Mirror-calm images of cathedral enormity, blue icebergs slowly drifting to their eternal destiny; ebony beaches strewn with ice-diamonds, all that remains of those once impressive ice-sculptures.
To the east, long fjords penetrate far inland, overlooked by magnificent mountain ranges like Estrahorn and Vestrahorn. Iceland’s beauty is not just skin-deep, it extends to the centre of the earth.
The dynamic force of ‘Wildlife in Pixels’ and ‘NatureFramed’ have combined to bring all these experiences together on a Landscape Photography journey of a life-time. Should you like to participate there is one last place available.
Following on from my last video I want to show you a nice easy way to ‘burning’ using the same technique.
Again I’m using the Lumenzia masking plugin for Photoshop, but this time we’ll refine the mask from the outset by forcing Lumenzia to concentrate on just one color.
Dodging and burning is the one technique you’ll use to make your pictures stand out from the crowd by adding perceptual depth and leading the viewers eye.
If you don’t have Lumenzia yet just click the image above.
In this video I introduce you to a really simple and highly effective way of controlled dodging of colour and brightness which you’ll find useful on any style of image.
In this video (26 minutes long!) I look at the problems of image and processing “perception” that can be caused by using WHITE as your background colour in Lightroom, Photoshop or any other image processing software.
Viewing your image against a white background will invariably make you PERCEIVE it to be lower in contrast and somewhat ‘less bright’ and saturated in colour than it really is.
This in turn will lead you to add contrast and perhaps brightness – when in reality you do not need to.
I might drone on a bit in this video but please check out the perceived differences in all the images I show as you’ll be surprised!
If you like this video then consider subscribing to my YouTube Channel.
Many thanks to my supporters over on Patreon as it’s their donations that help me provide this FREE video content
In this video I show you why I invariably turn to Manual Exposure with Auto ISO for the majority of my high speed action bird photography.
**Please forgive the SHOUT at 3mins 30secs – I mistakenly had the mic between me and the GoPro and it came out very very loud!! The mic is usually the other side of me and so is normally MUCH quieter -apologies in profusion**
Is ISO invariance really important, should I worry about it or should I buy a new  camera that has it because my current one isn’t ISO invariant? Â
I get asked these questions A LOT because there’s a lot of talk about  new camera sensors and ISO invariance on the bigger YouTube photography  channels. Â
If your camera is NOT ISO invariant is it therefore an inferior camera – OF COURSE Â IT ISN”T!
ISO invariance is becoming something of a ‘buzz-term’ touted by the bigger photography influencers as if it’s the Holy Grail of camera sensor performance, and this is something I find somewhat annoying.Â
Why?
Because there are plenty of other sensor attributes that are FAR MORE important, such as dynamic range for instance!
The only real advantage of a true ISO invariant sensor is that it would give you a ‘get out of jail free’ card if you screw up your shot by massively under exposing it.
But the necessity for it is easily avoided if only folk would learn how to use their equipment properly in the first place.
Correct exposure is everything in photography, and ISO invariance – for the most part – is just a way of circumventing it!
Lightroom Update February 2019 – The Lightroom Enhance Details Feature & More Dropped OS Support from Adobe
So the February 12th 2019 update has seen a new trick in Lightroom – the Enhanced Details feature under the Photo menu.
We’ve only recently been forced to update our OS to cope with Photoshop, now we have another operating system version redundancy forced on us by this new feature.
And it this Lightroom Enhanced Details feature worth it?
Well, after spending a few hours with it all I can say is “Thanks Adobe for answering a question no one was asking”. Â
I struggle to see any advantage to using this new feature, apart from choking your GPU if that’s what floats your boat 😂Â
As you will see in the video there IS a difference – but you can only see it with a bit of Photoshop trickery.
***I forgot to mention in the video – the DNG produced by Enhance Details ended up at a grand size of 208.6MB – a lot larger than the original raw file but 10MB smaller than the TIFF from that raw file***
The Lightroom Enhance Details feature – could it be a bit like the Emperors New Clothes, or a portent of Adobe making us all switch to Mojave so they can save a small fortune in development OS compatibility?
Frank asked me last week about the Topaz JPEG to RAW AI plugin and if it was any good.
Well, my response after downloading the free trial and messing about with it is this – it’s CRAP!
All it does is create a DNG file or 16 bit TIFF (you pick) from an 8 bit jpeg.
Should you opt for DNG then the DNG is NOT a raw file, it’s just a DNG with 8 bits per channel worth of information rattling around inside it. And if you opt for 16 bit TIFF then you end up with and 8 bit jpeg sitting inside a 16 bit TIFF container.
For the love of God, how the hell does the marketing department at Topaz think they can get away with this total bullshit – Ai learning my arse………….!
Are they trying to make the inexperienced and unknowledgeable actually believe that this expensive bit of garbage can re-engineer 32,000+ bits per channel from a poxy 8 bits per channel?
If you believe that then all I’ll say is that ‘a fool and their money are easily parted’………
Click image to view LARGE in new window
Click the image above and it will open in a new window. We are looking at 200% magnification of an are of the original raw file (right), a full resolution jpeg created from that raw file (middle), and a shitty DNG created by this abomination from Topaz on the left.
Notice something about the Topaz image – it’s got more artifacts in it than the original jpeg (middle) because there has been some form of sharpening applied to it by the Topaz software – and yet there are NO controls for any application of sharpening in the Topaz UI.
Let’s take something different – a jpeg of a Clouded Ermine.
Click the image to see what the original jpeg looks like.
One of the most stunningly beautiful moths in the UK, this Clouded Ermine is resting on tree bark.
Now let’s feed that jpeg into the Topaz JPEG to RAW AI GUI
And now let’s look at a sectional 400% magnification comparison shall we
Sharpening artifacts again and noise that wasn’t there to begin with.
Seriously, you’d be better off tweaking your jpegs in Lightroom!
I do NOT recommend anyone purchase this Topaz product because it’s rubbish. But what concerns me is the manner in which it is being marketed; I see the marketing as just plain misleading.
I’m not dismissing all Topaz software – DeNoise is brilliant for certain tasks.
But Topaz JPEG to RAW AI is nothing short of misleading junk with a huge price tag – Christ, you could buy 12 months subscription to my Patreon Chanel for less!
Like it or not this video compares the real usable dynamic range of Nikons’ three most used cameras for landscape photography. Everyone bangs on endlessly about dynamic range when in fact most of them have no clue what they’re talking about. If you want to see the truth about dynamic range improvements since 2012 then the results of this video may well come as a shock!
If you want to see the tonal response curves of the three Nikon models AND the Canon 5DMk3 then click the image below to view at full size:
As you can see, there is very little difference between the three Nikon cameras in the highlight to midtone zone, and the biggest difference between all 4 cameras comes on the left side of the chart, the shadows and lower midtones.
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