Light Painter Photography Learning Blog » Photo Editting

Hampton Beach Walk

admin — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:23:32 +0000

It’s been a while since I did my last photo hunting session. However, the sun was finally up that day and so myself and a friend decided to go to Hampton beach and walk along the beach to Middle Brighton, snapping possible objects and sceneries along the way. It was quite a bit of walk, but the weather was very nice and photography is always a fun thing for me. I’m glad to say that there are quite a few good shots that I can add to my gallery today.

The gear that I brought with me was my Nikon D300s, 90mm macro lens, 70-300mm telephoto lens and my trusty 18-50mm lens. Along with all the gear I also brought my Holga, but obviously it’ll take a while to develop the negative since no one seems to to 1 hour development anymore these days. There were a lot of things that can be taken on that day, the weather was very nice that it was perfect to snap pictures. The light wasn’t too harsh but not dark either, it’s like having a giant softbox illuminating all the objects.

This resulted in great lighting condition to take macro photos such as the one on the left (click on the image to show larger size), there is not a hint of harsh light which I really dislike in macros. The photo was taken using the 90mm macro lens, handheld with manual focusing. The original flower was quite small, however as with any macro photography, it always pays to have a closer look at the things around you. Such as the dried (seed pods?) in the gallery below or the photo of seeds which is my personal favorite in this gallery.

When walking around places like the beach and taking photos of the scenery, it always pay to have both wide angle lens and telephoto lens. Most of the sailing boats photos were taken using the wide angle lens, however the boat with the orange sail in the gallery below were taken using the 300mm lens. The photo of the dog was also taken using the telephoto lens, obviously there was no way to come closer without drenching the equipments. I had to actually switch the telephoto lens to manual focus mode in order to shoot the dog properly since the focusing system was not fast enough (it’s an older lens).

The Processing Tools

This is an interesting portion of the post that I wanted to discuss. I have recently migrate my desktop into a Linux system since I’m a software engineer and it’s really so much easier to develop on it. However, image editing in Linux is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea, even for me. I remember a few years ago, opening RAW images and processing it with the available open source programs was really difficult.

As it turned out, there are really good software these days that one can use under the Linux environment to organize RAW files and edit them. All the images in this post’s gallery are edited under a Linux system. The setup that I have are: Ubuntu 10.10, RawTherapee 3.0 alpha for RAW files processing and Gimp 2.7. Granted both of the image processing software are on it’s development stage and by no means stable, however I have no issues whatsoever editing all of these images today. I think when the two software matures, they will be great. RawTherapee is very intuitive, reminds me a lot of Adobe Lightroom and it’s very efficient and quick. Gimp 2.7 although not available through the normal download has a lot of user interface improvements, the one that I love most is the single window mode, no more 3 separate windows open together (you’ll have this “issue” on Gimp 2.6).

If anyone is interested to get the tools, here are the ways, again, the software versions that I listed are on development, so proceed with caution:

RawTherapee: available via software center

Gimp 2.7: You will have to add the development repository first, then run the install command

remove any other versions of gimp

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gimp

The Gallery

Bit of photography with iPhone

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:41:15 +0000

In my opinion, our photography shouldn’t be limited only to our digital cameras and SLRs. Lately with so much apps available for iPhone, there has been quite a lot of quality software which we can use to take interesting photos as well as editting it on the spot using the iPhone. I’d like to share a few of my favourite apps that I use frequently on my iPhone. Obviously for serious photography stuff the SLR is still my choice, but there’s nothing wrong with taking fun pics; which most of the times turned out to be interesting

1. The default camera app, love the touch focus

2. PhotoForge, this is a very powerful image editting software. Feels like having desktop photoshop on my iPhone

3. Pano, great photostitching software!

4. Photoshop mobile, this is much less powerfull than PhotoForge but is handy for quick editting and adding borders.

5. Last but not least, Hipstamatic, amazing software that gives all of the photos taken that retro touch! You’ll be amazed how creative you can be with this

The trick is as always, to not only use one app at all times. Instead, try different combinations. Shoot with one app and edit with other apps. You’ll get interesting results.

Cheap Digital Editing Tools

arvy — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:29:08 +0000

Well, it’s been a while since my last post indeed, things has been quite busy lately with a whole lot of projects to complete. Anyway, busy is always good!

Now, on to the topic. Many people ask me what kind of photo editting software that we need to get quality post-processing materials and if they need to spend a lot of money for those tools. So today I’m going to go through some of the low-cost softwares that I have used personally this past few years.

The free ones

Picasa
Picasa screenshot	This free software from Google labs is one of the best free photo management and light photo editting software out there. I can genuinely say that this software is the lightest to run, by lightest I mean you don’t need a high end computer to run it. Picasa is great for quick editting of a lot of images, especially with its ability to temporary collect images to be exported or printed. Even better, it handles RAW format from popular camera models. The only drawback is that it doesn’t seem to be able to save a file in full quality, the only thing you can do is save the file as a high quality JPG; which should be enough for normal snapshots. Get picasa from http://picasa.google.com/
GIMP
GIMP screenshot	GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program is a truly free advanced image editting software. It supports various formats including Photoshop’s PSD to some degree. I said to some degree since some of the advanced layering and other Photoshop specific enhancement might not show up. With this GIMP, almost every basic photo retouching that can be done with Photoshop can be done here; such as level, curve, color tone, etc. The other great thing about this software is its portability. Because this is an open source software, it is available in every popular computer platform: Windows, Mac and Linux. There are also a whole bunch of free plugins available in the internet. With the correct plugin, even RAW formats can be opened and processed. The only gripe that I have about this software is its illogical commands. Maybe its illogical for me since I have been using Photoshop for years. Nevertheless, if you want advanced functionalities at no cost, GIMP is your answer. Get GIMP from: http://www.gimp.org/
Paint .NET
Paint .NET Screenshot	This little software is an interesting quality piece of work, which hasn’t been promoted much (I heard about this from a computer magazine long time ago, after that I have never seen it published). It runs very fast even in older machines and it renders well. What I like very much from this software is its clean interface and simple menu structure, making it easy to find the required commands. The functionalities that it provides are just enough for photo post-processing. Namely, you have your level, brightness/contrast, saturation, etc. Paint .NET by no means is a replacement for Photoshop or GIMP. This tool should be used by occational shooter which does not require RAW processing capabilities or advanced functionalities. We can think of this software as the free alternative to Photoshop Element. Get Paint.NET from: http://www.getpaint.net/
iPhoto
iPhoto Screenshot	Now, if you’re a Mac user, with Tiger or Leopard at least, you’ll get this great quality photo management and editting software called iPhoto. You’ll get this for free with a new Mac but you’ll need to pay if there’s another update in the future. I always look at this software as the Mac Version of Picasa. They are very much alike except that iPhoto 08 has the nifty feature of grouping imported photo into events automatically. The editting functionality of iPhoto is a little bit more advanced than Picasa with its ability to modify and fine tune levels, exposure and shadows.
The ones with some cost
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI or X2
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo Screenshot	If you want some serious photo editting features at low-cost (about AUD$130.00), coupled with beginner friendly terminologies then this is your choice. Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI made it so easy for the user to apply different effects such as borders to a photo. For example: emulating a worn-out sephia picture would have taken a few steps in Photoshop while in Paint Shop Pro it would have taken a maximum of 2 steps (click on the menu and effect settings). This software also reads RAW format and processes it faithfully to the original. The drawback of the RAW processing is the lack of fine tuning. Having said that, for advanced photo editting, I would recommend this. The only reason I haven’t use this much these days is because I’m now on a Mac and this Paint Shop Pro is only available in Windows. Checkout Corel here.
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom Screenshot	Now we’re getting to a more expensive tool. This is however the lowest you can get for a decent batch RAW processing software. If you have a huge amount of RAW files to process, then this tool is for you. This software is amazingly efficient at cataloging large amount of files. The workflow is easy to understand and the RAW processing and tuning is very well made. There is another lowe-cost alternative software called Apple Aperture that does similar things. However its processing feels less efficient than that of Lightroom
Adobe Photoshop CS3 or CS4
Adobe Photoshop	Okay, some of you might think “…I thought we are talking about low-cost alternatives…Photoshop is…” But if you have important projects needed to be done in a short time and in high quality manner, then investing in such program is a good idea; especially if your projects would pay off the cost. (…or if you can find a supplier that can give you a bargain price…) Anyway, you just can’t skip Photoshop when recommending photo editting software because of its well known quality and industry standard. One last alternative to consider is Photoshop Element, it is the cut-down version of the famous Photoshop. If you don’t need all of the advanced Photoshop functionalities, then you might consider trying Photoshop element. Both products, Photoshop and Photoshop elements have trial versions in their website.

There are other low-cost alternatives out there in the internet, however the above programs are those that I think most actively developed and can be considered “stable”.

I hope this entry helps some of you out there! Until next time.

Light Painter Photography Learning Blog » Photo Editting

Hampton Beach Walk

The Processing Tools

The Gallery

Bit of photography with iPhone

Cheap Digital Editing Tools

The free ones

Picasa

GIMP

Paint .NET

iPhoto

The ones with some cost

Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI or X2

Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop CS3 or CS4