Might as well fire up the grill…

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Dusk at Quincy Market - © John Kivus, 2010

>>>> It was a pretty nice day today in Raleigh, maybe about 5-10 degrees cooler than I’d really like…There were a ton of people out playing golf (which made me really jealous). None of my pictures was particularly impressive, but some are kind of decent…
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I should have gotten out on the course….

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Posted via email from Kivus

I don’t have a lot of time to play with the new version of Topaz Adjust that was released today (Version 4) to be precise, however, I wanted to run at least one image through it. Here is UNC Chapel Hill’s Old Well with the one of Topaz Adjust’s new HDR presets applied to it.

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Posted via email from Kivus

Night Time by the Garden - © John Kivus, 2010

The story of Mike Hipple (previously discussed on this blog) dealt with the “incidental use” of a copyrighted work. An incidental use of a copyrighted work “involves capturing copyrighted works, where the copyrighted work is not the primary focus of the use—for example, capturing music playing over radio when filming a family moment” or in Mike Hipple’s case, capturing a copyrighted sculpture on the edges of a portrait.  Currently, there is no mention of incidental use in the fair use statute, however,Public Knowledge is working to change that. Public Knowledge, a public interest group, recently released the first part of their ideas for the Copyright Reform Act.  This first release included 7 words that should be added to the statute, including, the previously mentioned “incidental use”, “non-consumptive use” (i.e., a use that does not trade on the work’s creative expression) and “personal and noncommercial use”. These three types of use would be added to the preamble of the statute. Though additions to the preamble would not negate the necessity of a full fledged fair use analysis in infringement actions, (for an example of such an analysis, refer to the previous discussion about Mike Hipple and his photography) they would weigh heavily in favor of the alleged infringer on the “character of the use” factor of such an analysis.

The rapid growth of technology has sometimes left existing laws unable to deal with the changing technological and media landscape. If Public Knowledge’s proposed fair use changes were enacted, it would be a small step in the efforts to align the law with way people create and consume media. The only real negative to these changes, is that they are are coming too late to help Mike Hipple in his legal battle.

Hat tip to Ars Technica for their initial reporting on this story.

The biggest selling point of Genuine Fractals is its ability to increase an image size “up to 800%”. Though I have not gone as large as 800% on any of my increases, I have done 400% and 500%, and the results were excellent. One of the prints prominently featured on my wall is a shot of my parents that was just one small piece of a larger scene I photographed. After some major cropping and a trip through Genuine Fractals, I now have a gorgeous and memorable photo.

Though I do use Genuine Fractal’s enlargement capabilities fairly regularly, I don’t use them nearly as much as I use Genuine Fractal’s basic cropping functionality. Unlike cropping in Photoshop, Genuine Fractal’s crop feature is extremely intuitive. It allows you to fix one of the dimensions as you resize the other so that you can quickly and easily crop to your desired dimensions, whether that is 4×6, 8×10, 16×20, etc… Since I started taking pictures, I have always cropped my photos in the way I think frames the shot the best, not taking into account an particular size related issues. This meant that when someone asked for a print of one of my photos, I frequently would have to play around in Photoshop to get some version of my photo into their requested size. Now, however, that process is extremely quick and easy with Genuine Fractals, especially since Genuine Fractals Pro can be launched directly from within Aperture (see NOTE at the end of this post for discussion about Aperture 3).

Could I use Photoshop for everything I do in Genuine Fractals? Of course. Do I think Genuine Fractals was worth the investment to increase my work flow speed and print quality? Without a doubt. Ultimately, Genuine Fractals has resulted in me creating better quality prints, with a workflow that is much faster. I really cannot not ask for more from a piece of software than that..

NOTE: As I write this review, Genuine Fractals is only available as a 32-bit Aperture plugin. This means that if you normally run Aperture 3 in its default 64-bit mode, you’ll have to restart Aperture 3 in 32-bit mode to use Genuine Fractals. Additionally, though I never had a single problem with the round trip from Aperture to Genuine Fractals and back to Aperture with Aperture 2, I’ve had some issues with this round trip in Aperture 3. I hope that issue is corrected when onOne updates their plugins to 32-bit 64-bit