RF-Photography

I’ve had an interest in HDR photography for several years. It’s a wonderful innovation for the art of photography but I’ve felt that it could have some terrific application in commercial photography. And it has. An increasing number of photographers have been adding HDR to their arsenal; particularly in the architectural/real estate area. Practical HDRI Review, con't >

I had several questions during the workshop I taught last fall about organising photos. Not surprisingly, some of the attendees were having trouble finding particular images or in developing a good organisational structure for their photos. Some who’d been shooting only in low rez JPEG at the time had never moved their images off the memory card. They had literally hundreds of images sitting on the card. Organizing Photos, con't >

It’s that time of year. The time of snow and presents under the tree. A lump of coal for some of the more naughty. Christmas is the time for wishes. When we were kids, it seemed that magic happened on Christmas day and most of our wishes came true. The big ones at least. Now that we’re adults the wishes are different and more difficult to fulfill. But we wish nonetheless.

So here, in this little piece of the blogoshphere is my Christmas Wishlist for Adobe. I’m only going to cover the two products I use – Photoshop and Lightroom. But if you use others in the Adobe product family, toss your wishes into the comments.  Yes, there’s a lot of HDR stuff in here but, hey, I do HDR and the rest of Photoshop is pretty damn good after 20 years. Christmas Wish List, con't >

After completing the review series on various HDR software programs and talking about how well each could create realistic and grunge/surrealistic results, I figured it might be appropriate to put together a more in depth tutorial on how the results were obtained as well as some of my own, personal, approaches to shooting and editing for HDR.

The tutorial will concentrate on using Photomatix from HDRSoft but the techniques discussed for using PM apply to other HDR software programs as well. The names of the individual tonemapping operators may be different but the functionalities are much the same. HDR Tutorial, con't >

This is the last instalment in the series of HDR software reviews. If a new application comes along in the future, I may add it to the set and I’m in the process of looking at some new beta versions of a couple previous applications so will likely update those reviews in the future with new information; but for all intents and purposes this is it. What started out as a list of about 5 applications has grown to a 10 part series. From a purely personal standpoint, if I never see the images that have been used in all these reviews again it’ll be too soon. I hope the thoughts I’ve laid out have been useful for some people and perhaps given some insight from the standpoint of a casual user.

This last instalment will look at Picturenaut. I was initially reluctant to include it because unlike all the other applications in the series, Picturenaut isn’t a commercial product. My feeling is that if someone’s offering a piece of software for sale, it’s open to be reviewed and critiqued but if someone’s offering up a piece of software for free it’s a different matter.

Picturenaut can be downloaded from the HDRLabs website which, as many of you probably know, is owned and maintained by Christian Bloch. Christian is well known in HDR circles and is the author of The HDRI Handbook which is highly recommended as one of the two seminal reads for users of HDR both new and advanced along with Practical HDRI. Picturenaut Review, con't >

I received an email from the folks behind Photo Engine a few weeks ago telling me they were going to be launching a new software package that did HDR and a whole lot more and asking if I’d be interested in being part of the beta group. Sure, I said.

I’ve been playing with the software now for a couple weeks. What follows is essentially a review like others in the series but keep in mind that things could change since this is only the first beta of the program.

I’ll say upfront that Photo Engine is a very complex piece of software. It takes a bit of time to get a feel for it. There’s some terrifically complex coding in the background related to the HDR Relight feature to be sure. In general, while what I’ve seen so far is looking like it’s going to be a very good program, there some complexities and features that are superfluous and attention could have been paid elsewhere. More on that as we progress.  I also think that some of what’s in this software is geared toward CG artists and may not be a lot of use to photographers.

There’s a particular feature of Photo Engine that I haven’t tried yet and that won’t be covered in this preview.  It’s the HDR Relight feature.  I’ll state upfront that I’m a bit skeptical as to the applicability of this for photographers – it may be one of those aspects of the software that CG artists will use more – but will keep an open mind and reserve final judgement till I’ve had the chance to try it out. Oloneo Preview, con't >