While a few years ago everyone was trying to copy Flickr now each company has its own vision of what a photo sharing site should be and their implementation are quite different. I am really please to see such creativity and hope to see more!

What is ZapLife?

Their tag line is:

Zaplife aims to be an easy to use photo blogging solution with a social twist

What is photo blogging? It is like a blog but instead of writing articles, you post pictures. It is a very healthy way to get out, shoot, share and get feedback from others. To make the whole process even easier, they created a free iPhone app that you can use to shoot/share your picture with. It is a bit like tumblr but you can only share pictures.

What I like

First, pictures are grouped by day, showing only a single picture per day and you have to click on the picture to browse the collection. It makes browsing multiple collection dead simple. As long as the photoblogger daily pictures are all part of the same collection.

As with 500px, the discover page is the best, showcasing the most popular pictures but I think they may have gone a bit too far with the tag clouds.

What I dont like

Like Flickr and contrary to 500px.com, there is a lot of crap pictures. And it is ok, the site does not aim to be a portfolio, it is a place for anyone (owning a camera does not make you a photographer!) to share pictures with others.

The layout needs some refinements but it is still a young site so I expect it to improve with each update.

Should you give this a try?

If Flickr is not your cup of tea, you may want to give Zaplife a try. The feeling is totally different yet you wont get lost in the feature set. They are doing heavy development and features are added regularly so keep your eye on it!

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Well, this is a problem of the past because On One Software just announced their public beta of Perfect Layers. It is a free download but require a #$%#$% registration (name, email and phone number???) and be warned: they will send you weekly email about special offers. The beta app expires on June 30 which is probably their target release date since they said it will be launched mid 2011.

Before reading further

All the content below this point is based on what I saw on the On One Software website because I did not manage to make the plugin work. It is installed but I dont see the menu option in LightRoom. Anyone having this issue?

How it works

At first I thought it was a real plugin in the sense that it was used within Lightroom. Actually, it seems like the plugin exports the selected pictures to an external editor, Perfect Layers, which is a tool specialized in layer editing. Basically, this looks like a trimmed down version of Photoshop with only layer related feature (masking & blend modes) available.

I still have to figure out what is the picture format when it is getting edited but this is not really important (as long as it is a lossless format!) since the returned image is a PSD file.

Verdict

I know Photoshop quite well, at least as long as picture editing is concerned, so Perfect Layers has nothing to offer me on the feature side. On the workflow side, I think it could have its uses, but I need to make it work first!

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If you have ever tried to build your own ring flash, you know how time consuming it can be to get the perfect light. And if you value your time at anything over 5$/hour it should be clear how good this deal is at under 25$! He even made a video to show how easy it is to build:

Udi did not only released the DIY ring flash, he also announced a double flash bracket which look quite cool. Go over and take a look.

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So we got some basic makeup on, spilled some fake blood and took a few pictures. Here is a sample of what we go. The picture on the left is with the LR Fashion-Zombie preset and on the right is the same picture after post-processing in PS to add a few layers of texture (something I wish we could do in LR!).

Click on the picture to see a higher resolution version. More pictures in the post…

So my question is? How do you like the PS work? At first I really like the style but the more I look at it, the least I like it. I will have to print a few of these to see how it turns out on paper but I wanted to see if any of you had some ideas.

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To reach this goal, the book is divided in three sections: Intent, Style and Process.

Intent

This section is all about what makes a photo looks good, why it looks good and in which context. It reviews the various aspects of beauty, from the perfectly symmetrical face of a model to the cliche and sublime subjects.

Style

This section follows up where the Photographer’s Eye left us: going deeper into the ways to compose your framing. If you want to improve your composition skills, you should get the book for this section alone. It is well made and the author decompose a lot of his pictures to show his choice of framing and explain their dynamics.

Process

Here the author talks about the process involved in taking the picture, not how to apply the post process. There are a few pages about post processing but it is just part of the over all process. Other parts are about having a memory bank of various image template (so you can quickly pick the best one for a give situation), interactive composition, selecting a look, etc… This is the shortest section of the book (around 40 pages) and I think it could have been a book by itself, being such a wide topic.

What I like

This book is very much like The Photographer’s Eye in its format, layout and presentation. So everything I liked about it is still valid for this one. What I like even more in this case is how the explanations are a more down to earth (thanks to a lot of case studies) and how the various examples show how to be creative even when you are stuck with a very mundane subject.

A few other things to like:

• Very good example & illustrations taken from the author huge collection of travel/commercial pictures.
• Lots of reference, both online and in other books. The author always point us toward other sources of information on each topic.
• A lot of page inserts with tips and pointers.

What I did not like

No matter how much I look at the book, I could not find something to fill this section. If I had to be really picky, I would say the third section could have been refined. Then again, as I said, I think it could have deserved its own book.

What if I am a videographer?

There are not reasons for someone who is into video to not like this book. Nearly every concept covered can be applied to video, especially the topics from the Style section.

Should you get it?

Yes! This is the kind of book that makes you grow as a visual artist. You don’t have to remember or understand everything, even a subset will be enough to make it worth it.

Get it now on Amazon.

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I was really intrigued by the smooth transition between day and night. Looking at the comments on the Vimeo page, I found out about a little device called The Little Bramper. It is a little gizmo used to ramp exposure over a number of shots with great precision.

Guess what? I will order one and tell you about it very soon…

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Looking at the top paid app chart, it seems like I am not the only one thinking this!

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Let me present you a third option: Capture One. While not as popular as the two others, yet it is the one used by most high-end commercial/fashion/portrait photographers. Why? It has incredible color management tools. It is truly leagues ahead of the others in terms of what you can do with the colors. While you have to use a Phase One medium format body to benefit from all its features, there is still a lot of goodies you can use.

My two favorites are the focus mask and focus tool. These two features are priceless when you have to select the best shots out of a 500 pictures photoshoot! Go take a look at the features page to see what else it has to offer.

So, if it is so good, why so few people use it? Some would blame Apple and Adobe marketing, but I think the real reason is that CaptureOne is not good for most photographers. By design the application assumes the image  will be processed in Photoshop to correct imperfections. That is why it does not offer as many non destructive editing tools as the others. When I talked about this to a Capture One guru, he told me that pro photographers should limit their job at taking pictures and sharing their vision. Makeup artist & retoucher should handle the rest. While I dont really agree with this, the guy is making way more money than me with his photography so I guess it is working for him.

So, interested in giving Capture One 5 a try? There is currently a 40% rebate on the Pro version if you use the coupon code 5PRO when checking out. The code is good until the end of the month so hurry up, download the demo and see if you like it or not!

Any Capture One user here?

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This part 2 of Jon Lightroom 3 review. You can see the introduction in is first post and the second part here.

ACR 6.1

The newest incarnation of Lightroom uses the new Adobe Camera Raw 6.1 for it’s RAW conversion. Since this is a review of Lightroom and not ACR, I’m not going to get into the nuances of the newest ACR suffice to say that overall it appears to be an improvement over previous versions. One of the first things new users will notice is an exclamation point icon on the bottom of some images. This message is that LR wants to apply the new ACR default settings to the image. Upon allowing the update, you will notice a slight change in the handling of shadows, color rendition and a few other areas and overall, it looks good. If you’re someone who prefers the camera manufacturers software for RAW conversion, you’re probably still going to prefer those. The color rendition, quality of detail and overall fidelity provided in those programs (Canon Photo Professional, can’t speak for NX2) still has an edge over Adobe’s CR. This should be expected, given that ACR accommodates almost all types of RAW images and therefore isn’t quite as specialized as those from the Camera makers. That said, for those who do prefer ACR for it’s convenience and options will be very pleased with the new engine overall.

The only downside to the new engine is that you need to have ACR 6.1  running on your system, meaning you need to be running Photoshop CS5. If not, than you will need to render RAW images in LR before opening in Photoshop, which means an extra TIF (if that’s your selected preference for external editing) on your drive and more time spent waiting for an editable-image to be created before being re-opened. Of course, LR offers the option of “open anyway” rather then “render using Lightroom” but the results are inconsistent and frankly a bit unreliable for accurate rendition and conversion. So, if you’re not running CS5 be prepared for a little extra leg work to reap the full benefits of Lightroom3’s develop Module.

Noise Reduction Improvement

Adobe is pushing heavily the improved performance of Noise Reduction in LR3, which is no surprise since Noise Reduction is an item of large interest for photographers given the “Noise Wars” being waged between the camera manufacturers to push the high-iso-noise-performance envelop further and further. So the question is, how good is LR’s new noise reduction? The short answer is very good, in fact certainly better than previous versions of Lightroom and Photoshop. Luminance and color noise are handled nicely with details staying largely intact (compared to previous versions) and realistic. To get a sense of the improvement, I’ve set up the comparison below between LR3 and LR2, Aperture3 and noise Photoshop plugins Nik Dfine and Imageonic Noiseware. I’ll be posting the results soon.

Lens Correction Tool

Another crucial addition to the develop module is the inclusion of the Lens Correction tool. The LC too is taken directly from Photoshop, with all of the same parameters with the exception of scale and edge transparency (I would not recommend using the LC tool for scaling anyway). In addition to the default Photoshop parameters, Lightroom has raised the bar by including it’s own camera/lens profiles- similar to DXO software. These profiles, when applied, automatically correct a the image based on the lens and camera preset detected by LR. This is an excellent feature, and works well for most images. I would, as a recommendation use the automatic profiles as a starting point, as different images shot in varying situations will certainly require different levels of correction. Another great feature is the ability to batch lens correct, as the lens correct option has been added to the list of options when syncing develop settings across a number of photographs.  Overall, the LC tool is yet another vital work flow time saver especially when trying to stay solely in Lightroom for image editing.

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This part 2 of Jon Lightroom 3 review. You can see the introduction in is first post.

Import Dialog

One of the first things you’ll notice about LR3 is the new import Dialog, which is largely different than previous versions. The simple dialog box of old is gone and replaced with a full screen window complete with a large preview area. The preview area is the most significant improvement- you can now preview images and video before importing and can un-check any you don’t want to ingest- a nice feature (and overdue!). However, in exchange for a more sophisticate import dialog we are also given a slightly more complex interface, with essential source and destination information on opposite sides of the screen. This can make a normally simple task of simply importing, renaming, and adding metadata, cataloging and backing up a little more tedious. It also doesn’t help that they’ve now included a few seemingly unimportant options for these tasks, for example the rename images by shoot in addition to custom name. In other words, LR3 will add the words “shoot_whateveryouwant-1”. It would be just as easy to do this with a custom name, and with this option they’ve just made the list unnecessarily longer. Another annoyance of the new import dialog is that you will get it when importing ANY new images, even simply updating a folder. This essentially creates an extra step in the workflow, i.e. importing tiffs or psd back into LR after they’ve been processed in Photoshop. For photogs who require speed and consistency and are used the efficiency of previous versions of Lightroom in this regard may be surprised when they find themselves being slowed up by these little nuances of the new import dialog.

Support for Video

Anyone who followed the beta releases of Lightroom 3 closely knows that video support has been a contentious issue among many Lightroom advocates. On the one hand, you had the Lightroom is for photography only crowd and those who basically wanted as much support as possible for video, the more the merrier. It became quite a hit topic on Adobe’s feedback forum about the beta software.

Whether because of the outcry of the “don’t mix my ham with my eggs” crowd or a strategic reason, Adobe decided to provide limited support for video. You can import, play (albeit by opening in QuickTime), rename, and achieve all of the other tasks that the Library module can provide. You can’t export in any format other than the original, and can’t utilize any feature or tool from the rest of Lightroom. While it’s nice that Lightroom at least provided this pea size amount of support- they really dropped the ball in my opinion by not providing expanded support. While adding editing support features like trim, cut, etc might not make sense for adobe to include (no one expects them to replace Final Cut or Premier anytime soon) it would be really something if the tools from the develop module,  the plug-in, the entire LR arsenal in including web publishing were supported. Add a QuickTime-based export engine to allow for encoding and exporting to a variety of formats and you have a video powerhouse. This is where LR could really fit into the workflow of the videographer, if Adobe chose to do so. Hopefully we will see more of a push in this direction in the future. Until then, don’t expect LR to be an integral part of any video workflow.

New Publish Services

Normally I wouldn’t consider the ability to publish images directly to Flickr an update worthy of mention, but there’s a couple of other additions to the interface that do warrant coverage. Yes, you can now publish images directly to your flickr account and manage those images (updating, erasing, adding, etc) directly from lightroom.  The real hidden gem here though is the local publishing option, which can be an extremely valuable if your managing some other hosting service or product from your hard drive. For example, let’s say your using a plug-in like SlideShowPro for Lightroom or flash (a very cool slideshow generator I’ll be covering in a future review) and you are using an xml file to populate your photo galleries. With the publish to hard rive option; Lightroom will track in real time the updates to your images you’ve put in a specific folder for such a slideshow. This means anytime you want to change the list of images in a destination, Lghtroom will keep track and publish these changes .In addition to Flickr and local hradrive publishing, there are many plugins available online for various phot hosting services like Zenfolio, Snapfish, Photobox and others that can be installed and made available. The best place to find these as well as countless other plugins for Lightroom is at the Adobe Lightroom Exchange.

Tethered Capture

Lr3 largely streamlines the tethered shooting process by including a built in tethered capture option for Nikon and Canon cameras.  This is one of my favorite new features in LR3 because it actually increases the speed and productivity of your workflow rather than getting in the way. In previous versions of LR, the lack of a tethered capture option meant that images had to be captured via the camera makers proprietary capture software (canon photo professional or Nikon Capture) then imported into Lightroom via an automatically updated folder.. The only efficient way to do this was set up LR’s auto update feature to watch the folder being used by the capture software, and automatically import into the library. Not only was this method pretty cumbersome, but took about twice as long from capture to import. It also had the issue of potentially importing and renaming images twice, once through the capture software and then again in Lightroom. This meant there was a chance that if you didn’t set it up correctly; you could end up with two sets of the same images in different locations.

LR3 effectively eliminates these issues with the it’s new tethered capture option. It’s available via the file menu and therefore while using any of the modules. The initial setup provides for renaming, adding metadata, location; the basic LR import MO.  The actual capture interface is a simple, clean and highly streamlined window that gives information of the camera/lens model, and basic shooting settings (aperture, shutter speed, iso, white balance) The main caveat is that you cannot change any camera settings in Lightroom, only pull the shutter. The capture button will initiate auto focus, which is essential if they’re including the option for remote firing. Any changes to camera settings will have to be performed in camera. This is where the LR tethered option differs from the camera maker’s software, where you would have full control over most (if not all) camera settings within the software. However, I personally enjoy the simplicity and straightforwardness of the new tethered option and most importantly- it’s MUCH faster than going from camera software to light room. Again, MUCH faster, I would say probably 50-100% increase here. So, in exchange for not being able to change camera settings in LR (which I wouldn’t have used anyway) we get a much a faster and streamlined interface and get to get rid of the “middleman” camera’s software. In short: I’ll take it

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