Topaz Detail variations.

Here are a couple more shot's given the Topaz Detail treatment, what I have done here is try to show the variation of different effects that can be obtained, from a soft almost painted effect to a much harsher almost engraved look. Wayne

Tiger Woods.

Just what happened to Tiger Woods on Friday night is a question on lots of peoples lips, including the Orlando police who are still waiting to speak to woods and have been waiting for 3 days, as well as a disappearing act good enough for a magic show he's now dropped out of his own golf tournament claiming injuries received in the accident have made him unable to play.
The official story claims as he was leaving his house his car hit a hydrant and tree, his wife Elin Nordegren then broke a window with a golf club to release him. Why he would want to avoid talking to police about this raises more questions than it answers.

Topaz Detail (the return)

Topaz Detail is designed as a plug-in for Photoshop, it has several uses including sharpening (claimed halo free) it also does a sort of HDR/tonemapped effect, or as I have used here a sort of illustrated look.

Some recent black and white.

Here are a couple of the pics for the weekend, I took these recently at a shoot, and thought they'd work well as black and white shots.

Both shots are taken to give shallow depth of field, one on a longer lens at 135mm (the single lady) this was also fairly high iso 800.

The otherwas shot on a 50mm but wide open at F1.8 on a full frame camera (the group)

Enjoy. Wayne

Adobe DNG format

Adobe DNG format was hailed as the "new" RAW when launched, it's claimed to be the archival format, you never need worry about whether you'll still be able to convert your RAW images 20 years down the line.
Personally I have always had my doubts first off there's not a huge support for DNG and I suspect if Adobe ever go bust what support there is will soon disappear. Secondly There's different versions of the DNG format it appears, some software saves to DNG with differing parameters, not storing all the information in it. Thirdly it's well known that some RAW formats carry data specific to their own software, Adobe leaves this out in some cases so you may loose things like lens correction that you'd get with the makers own software..
Lastly and of bigger concern it turns out that Adobes DNG doesn't carry all the RAW data, apparently data from the edges of the frames are left out with some cameras, this means your loosing important data, just what you don't need in archival software.

By all means convert to DNG, it'll be handy if your older version of photoshop doesn't support your brand new D3x or whatever, it means you can still use CS instead of forking out £500 for CS4 (CS5 next April-ish) and it means you do have another back-up just in case your old RAW isn't recognised by the latest version of whatever software you use, but DO keep your original RAW images, don't rely totally on DNG, you don't know what your chucking away!

HDR Darkroom launched

HDR Darkroom have launched the software properly after the beta testing period (which I took part in)

The software which is designed for the HDR (high dynamic range) enthusiast has the advantages of being simple and remarkably quick to use, taking just over 10 seconds on my computer to render this HDR from a raw image. It works from a single jpeg through to multiply raw images, and even from DNG, should you be a user of Adobes tame RAW format (more on this in a later post!)

The software itself is a small quick and simple install, with a pleasant dark grey interface, the sliders are simple and unlike some other HDR software make sense and are intuitive (anyone who's used Photomatix will know what I mean there) this makes it easy to get a good result. You can buy the software from http://hdrdarkroom.com/hdr-tutorial.htm It costs $49 or about £30 at the current exchange rate.

Shown here is a pic of Neath abbey and the HDRD interface. Wayne

Star Trek film review

Star Trek 2009. This film is basically a prequel to the old TV series it's shows how Kirk, Spock and the rest meet up and their first mission on the Enterprise.
The film has excellent special effects (as we expect these days) with the fight on the tower giving real "edge of the seat" action.
While Chris Pine (Kirk) isn't exactly a look-alike for good old Bill Shatner, Carl Urban is brilliant as Dr McCoy, he's got him off to a tee! And John Cho and Anton Yelchin (Sulu and Checkov) are pretty good, Simon Pegg sadly hasn't get the accent for Scotty, he's about as convincing as a Scotsman as I am as the next Pope.
The film is good entertainment and action packed, worth a watch.