iPad Photo Apps TouchUp & Filter Storm

After watching iPad Today Podcast (TWIT TV) I bought the TouchUP photo app they had featured especially as it claimed to use masks. Cost £1.19 but you have to pay extra if you want some additional features.

It did have the ability to apply changes to parts of the photo, but it was nowhere near as good as my old favourite FilterStorm which does the same and more better.

The other photo app I use a lot is PhotoGene.


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Epson Perfection V330 LED Photo Scanner (4800dpi) Great.

I am very pleased with scanner. Main requirement for me was scanning 35mm film negs and slides. Previously I had used a much more expensive Canon 9900F buth this has no Vista or Winow 7 drivers. The scans by this much cheaper Epson are a much higher quality. The Canon was more versatile with XP as it could scan 24 negs or 16 slides in one go and also large negs up to 5x4 inches but this is academic if it does not work on modern OS. The V330 can scan a strip of 6 negs or 4 slides. But I stress the scans quality much bettr on Epson.




I had been copying slides and negs off cheap light box with my Nikon D90 with Sigma EX 105mm macro lens, but these were much poorer than the scans with Epson.

I put the neg/slides in, let it use all defaults with a small amount of sharpening and close the lid and let it roll. At 2400 dpi it takes about 10 minutes, so I do this as a background task while I do something else.

Strange over the years I have switched from Canon scanners to Epson whereas for printers I have done the reverse.

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Epson Perfection scanner V330

Just bought this from Amazon for just under £79 including delivery. You can see it at Epson V330 Scanner at Amazon.

My expensive Canon 9900F will be put onto eBay after Christmas. Although this could scan 4 x 6 355mm negs in one go, albeit a long go, it does not work in Windows 7 and Canon are not updating drivers.




I will review how it performs, I mainly want to scan negs and slides and I have been looking on eBay for a cheap solution so that I can check scanners out in March at The Focus On Imaging Exhibition but eBay options almost as expensive.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

how to process negative images using tone curves in lightroom

Recently I have been taking photos with film cameras using mono film and processing at home. Maybe it is just nostalgia or perhaps a desire to make the photo the experience rather than being seduced by the modern miracles of digital SLR.

Anyway after developing I copied all the negatives with my Nikon D90, Sigma 105mm Macro and light box. I use Lightroom 3 to process all my photos, together with Picasa to act as an easy front end for retrieval and searches. I was surprised to discover that neither has a standard command to simply convert negatives to positives. But this can be easily achieved in Lightroom and even applied in batch mode by making a simple preset.

Here you can see some positive and negative imges in Lightroom.

From WebImages

Select a negative and choose Develop mode, and then select the Tone Curve, which you simply reverse so that instead of a straight line from bottom left to top right it is a straight line from top left to bottom right. THis causes black to become white, white black and all shades to be progressively reversed with mid grey remaining mid grey.

From WebImages

From WebImages

To do this just click on each end point and drag either to top or bottom.

From WebImages

From WebImages

The positive result is shown below.

From WebImages

I then saved these setting in a Lightroom Preset.

From WebImages

I used the following settings when saving the preset. Note I had turned on 'Auto Tune' which had a dramatic effect on the output of what otherwise were quite flat negatives. I called the Preset 'Negative'

From WebImages

Now in the Grid you can select all of the negatives, and then apply this Negative preset to all of them in a single batch. The Negative preset was at the bottom of a long list of supplied presets.

From WebImages

And here is the result.

From WebImages

Note

Because the Tone Curve created above inverts the luminosity then other commands effecting luminosity will also be reversed. For example increasing the blackness will in fact increase highlights, increasiung brightness will darken.

Picasa database broken - How to fix

Tried to look for photo for Christmas Card, but Picasa had corrupted it's database, so I had to un-install and re-install.

Did this twice as first time I had taken the option not to delete database, hoping it may fix without losing any of my previous settings. It did not. On restart Picasa found all my photos and rebuilt database OK but I did lose Albums which is just a logical collection of photos.

The keywords were all OK. This is because the keywords are written to the meta data of each photo. Picasa edit commands are kept in each folder in the Picasa.ini file so these are OK but I always export final photos to consolidate edits into normal jpg.

Note. If like me you use Photoshop Elements and/or Lightroom to do your key wording make sure you write these to photos. There are options in both products to do this, but it is easy to forget I would like to know if you can make this a default anywhere. If you use Picasa to add keywords these are automatically added to photo metadata.

Test to see if I can embed one of my flickr photos in Blogger with iPad

I know I can embed Picasa photos, so this is an attempt to embed flickr photo. The following should be a photo of a Parasol Mushroom.



Hey presto I can!