http://www.it-enquirer.com/ Sound editing, video editing, image editing, photography en erik@it-enquirer.com Copyright 2009 2009-11-05T13:03:18+00:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/colorchecker_passport/ Do you need a ColorChecker card? The answer is: it depends. If you are a fashion or commercial photographer you will want full control over how your camera sensor interprets colours. A ColorChecker card is the only way to create a profile of the sensor’s interpretation of colour across the entire gamut it sees. It is obvious that Camera RAW files differ in colour representation according to the sensor’s colour interpretation. Profiling the camera therefore is a useful undertaking—at least, if you must have the most accurate colour representation for your camera. A ColorChecker card doesn’t calibrate your camera. Calibrating your camera in most dSLR and medium-format models simply means setting an in-camera white balance. If you have one of the mainstream Camera RAW conversion and cataloguing programs available today (Bibble, Capture One, Aperture, Lightroom…) the in-camera white balance sets the camera to a known standard. The software itself interprets your camera’s colours using a standard profile that is built-in for each supported model camera and which use a standard illuminant. The resulting colour rendition is on average what your camera “sees”, but some colours as seen by your specific camera may actually be way off. desktop level 2009-11-05T06:03:18-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/jobo-33in1-card-reader/ Nevertheless, I didn’t want to skip Jobo’s reader for the simple reason that it’s the fastest and least stubborn of all—given its USB 2.0 performance limitations, of course. Almost all card readers are stubborn: once you insert a CompactFlash card, for example, it is hard to get it to unmount. It’s unclear to me why this happens, but I have had it happen too often for no obvious reason not to be frustrated by it. The Jobo, strangely enough, does not have this quirk. As soon as you drag the card to the Trash, it unmounts without ever complaining. The Jobo 33in1 Card Reader looks good. It has a shiny grey surface and one green LED that only lights up when a card is inserted. The reader can handle over 30 formats—I tested it with a large collection of cards, including some very old ones, but also the newest SanDisk video SD cards, and the Jobo not once got the hiccups. The Jobo 33in1 Card Reader comes with a USB 2.0 cable. It’s small and slim enough to be carried in your shirt pocket if necessary. For such a simple device, it still outperforms most of the competition. desktop level 2009-11-03T04:35:28-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/screenflow-2-review/ After having played with ScreenFlow 2 for about a week, I do believe ScreenFlow 2 has everything a professional online educator or presentator will need in a package that is extremely well designed and user friendly. That’s not to say ScreenFlow 2 is an all-in-one package; all-in-one packages often do a lot of things well on average but few things excellently. ScreenFlow 2 is excellent at recording screen motion and events. It can even add sophisticated effects, but if perfection and the integration of a screen recording with Keynote presentations, etc. is what you’re after, you’ll still want to use the most appropriate tools for those jobs—Final Cut, SoundTrack, Logic, etc. desktop level 2009-11-02T06:01:08-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/digieffects-falloff-lighting-review/ There’s not much to the Falloff Lighting plug-in, to be honest. You drag it to an object in the scene and you control the effect with no more than two parameters which you can set dragging a slider or entering a number. The most important slider in Falloff Lighting obviously is “Distance Scale”. This slider controls the distance between the light and the object. In order to set the distance accurately, you can choose to show the distance values of the corners of the object you apply the effect to. For example, on a flat object (all layers should be converted to 3D) that has four corners, setting the Distance Scale to the number displayed in the corner the farthest from the light source will have the light spread all the way to that corner. If the light source then happens to be a spot light there will be a splash of harsh light on the object closest to the light source, which will very gradually fade out to a weak light effect in that corner. desktop level 2009-11-02T05:20:35-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/preview_nuqleo_v6/ However, the front-end and everything around it have been changed, improved and updated to a state that I can only describe as dynamic publishing of the future. NUQLEO V6 is what others are promising but not delivering. The key concepts of NUQLEO V6 are layout and image editing application agnosticism, ease-of-use and automation capabilities pushed to the limit, and a workflow paradigm that comes close to how users work on a home PC or an iMac. enterprise level, topstory 2009-11-02T02:30:54-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/strata-foto-3d-cx/ Instead of painstakingly creating a complex object in Cinema 4D or Maya, just take a couple of photos of a similar object and turn that into 3D, and you’re done. That is in a nutshell what Strata Foto 3D CX promises you. Strata delivers on that promise, but it still isn’t a job that you’ll take on you without some careful thought. Here’s what I found out. Strata Foto 3D CX has a very simple interface. You can use this application as a stand-alone program or as a plug-in to Photoshop CS4. I had a very brief look at the Photoshop plug-in, only to decide that I’d be doing my review in the stand-alone application. The reason for this decision is that the basics are the same in both plug-in and stand-alone application, and they’re both equally easy to use. That’s right: Strata Foto 3D CX is incredibly easy to use. I’d even go as far as say there isn’t much you will be doing in the program except for masking, creating the wireframe and exporting. Additionally, most of these tasks are automated and you need only intervene or tweak to improve on a bad series of images or on the way the program handles the differences between the images, the masks, holes in the object, structure, and lighting differences. desktop level 2009-10-29T11:00:08-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/review_of_the_alien_skin_photo_bundle/ The Alien Skin Photo bundle includes the Bokeh, Blow Up, Exposure and Image Doctor Filters. If you are looking for a way to adjust photos the traditional way, the Alien Skin Photo bundle probably offers too much creative choice. However, if your objective is to go beyond simple adjustments and corrections, the Alien Skin Photo bundle could be all you crave for. The working image To see how the Alien Skin Photo bundle filters stack up against some of Nik Software’s, Imagenomics’ and DxO’s filters, I used one image shot of two (what I thought were) architecturally interesting air vents in front of a public building. The camera used to shoot the scene was a Sony Alpha 700 with a 16-105 mm lens. It was overcast that day, so there’s little to no detail in the sky. desktop level 2009-10-25T01:35:19-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/publish_into_the_conversation/ Today’s great minds are teaching us that technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and even the old weblog, are not publishing tools but tools of conversation. That term is all over the web—it makes your ears ring. My opinion has always been not to accept anything from anyone without first thoroughly thinking over the merits of the other’s opinion. Let’s apply that ground rule to the conversation everybody says is happening. And let’s then see what we can conclude with respect to publishers and their markets. In order to make a proper judgement of what publishers are facing, we must first define the word conversation. Defining words is extremely important on the Internet because they tend to be abused by marketeers to push their visions. Conversation is communication; Oxford Shorter states it is an informal exchange of ideas and information. The crucial word here is “exchange”. A monologue cannot be equalled to a conversation. A good conversation implies an interest in a subject or a person; preferably the latter. An integral part of a conversation is listening and reacting to what others have said (The Art of Conversation, Milton Wright, 1936). enterprise level, topstory 2009-10-19T03:32:35-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/magic_bullet_mojo/ Magic Bullet Mojo provides a simple way to make your footage look like an action movie, works together with primary colour correction tools like Magic Bullet Colorista, and is more simple and cheaper than Magic Bullet Looks. The tools and controls have been designed by director Stu Maschwitz for his work, so Mojo should get good results. I tried Mojo on a full range of short video clips and images, and yes, it works well if you want to focus on someone’s skin, or give a scene a specific atmosphere. Magic Bullet Mojo works in Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Avid systems with a few common action film pre-sets for all hosts. I tested the After Effects plug-in. First observation: the plug-in may have been tuned to deliver fast render times on any system—no GPU required—on my old Power Mac I had to be patient. desktop level 2009-10-13T09:58:49-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/release_ifra_microsoft_quark/ Undoubtedly, the new features of QPS will make Quark’s core publishing system more attractive to smaller corporations. The first new functionality Quark is adding is squarely aimed at automating XML workflows—especially important in book and corporate publishing environments. Instead of just integrating an XML exporting module or a third party product like Scriba XML into QPS, Quark developed its own alternate technology based on Altova MapForce. The result is that QPS users will be able to set up an XML workflow without the need for scripting or programming. QPS’ new XML capabilities are fully GUI driven, with a large number of pre-configured XML mappings already built-in. It’s a relief to see a once traditional publishing system vendor finally going all the way in the XML workflow automation area and thus enabling the utmost in publishing flexibility. Contrary to its competitors who are only integrating with XML products or modules as part of the output stage —and therefore not enabling a fully automatic EPUB publishing capability, for example—Quark is aware that corporate and book publishers need flexibility and ease-of-use. They’re finally getting it with QPS’ new functionality. enterprise level, topstory 2009-10-11T08:38:45-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/silverfast_hdri_and_isrd/ Users of prosumer and professional dSLR cameras can choose to save their images in the camera’s internal “RAW” format, a file format which has been called the equivalent of an analogue photo negative. Camera RAW as it is called has many benefits: you can generate multiple creative versions of it in software like Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom, and you can convert RAW files to very large resolution TIFFs without noticeable quality loss—e.g. a 300 dpi A2 print can be generated off a 12 megapixel Camera RAW file, depending on the resolution of the lens used to shoot the image. Doing the same with a scanned photo from a film negative or a colour slide has been challenging to say the least. Scanner software was not capable to use the analogue medium’s full dynamic range (flatbed scanners often have an optical density of only 3.0 Dmax, whereas to include the complete dynamic range of a negative or slide, you need at least 4.0 Dmax), dust could be removed using a technology that only was present on more expensive scanners (ICE) and which took forever to finish, and the resulting image often had some automatic software correction applied to it which rendered the result useless for archival purposes. desktop level 2009-10-08T23:57:57-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/report_on_k4_6.1/ K4 6.1 is now a true cross-media publishing system, with capabilities that are unique, such as the ultimate in flexibility when it comes to publishing terminology (map publication” to anything you want). Its workflow engine is task-based. Users don’t have to know about statuses unless they need to. Publishing to multiple channels with K4 6.1 can be done faster than before due to the parallelism allowed for by the workflow engine. Besides working in different channels, users can perform parallel tasks — for example, one user can be working on metadata of an image, while another one is still editing the same image. K4 6.1 also makes publishing less prone to errors and time loss. With its rewind feature, a workflow gone awry can even be taken back in time —allowing users to start over again and do it better the second time around. enterprise level, topstory 2009-10-07T09:08:26-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/rockynook_architectural_photography/ It seems that no book on digital or some form of specialised photography is complete with a section on photography in general. Architectural Photography makes no exception and the first chapter—some 40 pages—are dedicated to a brief history of photography with a nice focus on the equipment. Schulz starts the real thing on page 41 covering shooting techniques. Immediately Schulz draws the reader’s attention to the divergence in view that exists between architects and photographers: the former ask for photographs that show the building as is with as much visual information as possible, while the latter adds his/her artistic interpretation of the building to the image. desktop level 2009-10-07T06:15:19-08:00 http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/unified_communications/ How do people in office environments communicate? They use a whole range of communications devices and methods. They’ll shout at each other from across the room, they’ll call using a landline, VoIP or a cell phone, they’ll e-mail, chat, video conference. The rest of this article is Premium Content. Please log in to read further.