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Adobe Photoshop CC now available

June 18, 2013 by Jason Savage Leave a Comment

Photoshop CC

Adobe’s controversial subscription based service now has Photoshop CC available, with a subscription of course. I’m on the fence with the whole subscription deal. For single app users, I feel it’s not necessarily the most affordable or best deal. For multi app users, it has much more value. As a multi app user, I am trying out the service this year and will see how it fits into my workflow and whether it’s worth the annual commitment to Adobe.

I’ll have a follow up here soon on Photoshop CC after putting it to use this week. You can visit Adobe’s page here.

Adobe’s Creative Cloud

May 15, 2013 by Jason Savage 3 Comments

Creative Cloud Adobe
So I’m sure anybody in the photo industry or similar has heard the news from last week that Adobe announced their “Creative Cloud”. It’s surely been one of the most heated forum discussions I think I’ve ever seen across almost all the photography forums. Adobe’s news is also a major game changer (for better or worse) for how media professionals and consumers adjust to this new workflow in today’s ever changing world of media technology and software.

For those who aren’t up to speed on what the big deal is here and why there is so much chatter going on, let me give you a brief rundown. Basically Adobe is going to a subscription based service for all of their software excluding Adobe Photoshop Elements and Lightroom. Everything else goes to either a $20 a month for one program or $50 a month for access to all their software, including Lightroom in that. Both prices are for annual subscriptions respectively. Now Adobe is offering some deals. For all users of Photoshop CS3-CS6 you can subscribe for the first year for $9.99 for just Photoshop.

Now initially when I heard this I got out my pitchfork and torch and was ready to signup and join the masses. However I decided to let the jets cool, give it some time and check out what some of the folks in the industry were saying. Adobe’s Tom Hogarty had some interesting things to say and Scott Kelby spent an entire hour trying to defend himself from crazy ranting photographers accusing him of coconspiring with Adobe or something to that effect. Lots of fun discussions anyhow.

So after all this, here’s my take on it. If you’re just a Photoshop user, you should be rightly upset. With their Creative Cloud Photoshop goes from being $199 every couple of years or so for your upgrade, to $440. Not the best deal. And certainly not for a lot of users or for folks on a budget. Adobe’s argument on this is that you won’t have to wait for updates, they will be streamlined and released whenever Adobe wants. Don’t know if I get too excited about this argument.

Now on the flip-side of this, if you’re a design or media firm or use multiple programs, this actually turns out to be a pretty good deal. You now have access to everything Adobe puts out such as Photoshop, Premiere, Dreamweaver, InDesign,etc. and all for $50 a month. Also Adobe is including Lightroom with this even though it’s still allowing non-subscription purchases of it.

Photographers are passionate about their software and Photoshop by itself has been around a very long time and is engrained in a lot of people’s workflow. Adobe’s move on this one hasn’t been very graceful especially in regards to the photo community and this particular program. I really think they may have to do some sort of bundle or arrangement with this as the backlash has been pretty huge.

My own experience with Adobe has been both negative and positive over the years. I think their software is brilliant and they have some incredibly talented people working for them. I use both Lightroom 4 & Photoshop CS6 for my workflow and love both programs.
However my experience with their customer service has been, well let’s just say not very rosy over the years. That part of things could use some work.

How we do business, consume media and even edit our images continues to change and evolve rapidly. Even the old fashioned holding of the disc in our hand of the software we purchased is now history.

To find out all the rest of the nitty-gritty details visit:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html?promoid=JQPEQ

Glacier National Park Photography

January 31, 2012 by Jason Savage 1 Comment

Montana Photography Workshop

Little Matterhorn, Glacier National Park. Canon 5dMkII  100-400mm 4.5-5.6L IS.   ISO100  f8.0  1/20 sec

I was editing images this evening and kind of liked this one. It’s of the Little Matterhorn in Glacier National Park taken last September in the late evening. The image was taken at a longer focal length around 400mm and processed in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

Lightroom 4 Beta

January 11, 2012 by Jason Savage Leave a Comment

Photoshop Lightroom

More exciting news this week, Lightroom4 Beta has finally arrived and it’s loaded with some great new features and refinements.  You can download this for free and it’s available until March. Of course being a Beta, Adobe would like any feedback with bugs, etc. You can download it at Adobelabs.com

So far I really like some of the new tools and develop adjustments they’ve added. One set in particular is the Highlights & Shadows sliders in the Develop Module. These replace the Recovery & Fill Light sliders and the control they give you is just amazing….

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Really Right Stuff Panoramic Head

November 13, 2010 by Jason Savage 9 Comments

One of the many great things that digital photography has added to our arsenal as photographers, is the ability to construct images in many new ways that open the doors for depth and detail never before possible.

Earlier this year I was reading an article about photographer Jack Dykinga taking multiple images with a tilt-shift lens and merging those images together to create a photo that was more akin to large format photography. The image that caught my attention was featured a few months back in National Geographic and was of a field with mountains in the distance that had this amazing look to it. It certainly caught my eye, and at first I couldn’t figure out exactly what was so different about it. The image had amazing depth to it and after reading the caption on how it was put together, it made sense.

As the quality and resolution continue to evolve with Digital SLRs, it’s allowed for new methods of creation and we are certainly approaching new frontiers with 35mm cameras. We have a ton of data.

I was inspired by Mr. Dykinga’s photograph and decided to try a little different approach to see if I could achieve similar results. I don’t own a tilt-shift lens and debated about picking one up, but I also had been toying with idea of messing around with panoramic images for a while and decided to try a different route and pick up a dedicated panoramic head that would not only let me do panoramic images, but also take muti-row shots with similar aspects to Mr. Dykinga’s method.

For those of you who are new to panoramic photography, it’s easy enough to snap a handful of images from left to right and stitch them together in many of the different editing programs out there and get a fairly decent image. If you want to get more precise, you get a tripod, level both the tripod and tripod head, use a longer focal length lens, shoot the photos vertically, and overlap them 20%-30%. That will get you some nice pano shots and can make for some great compositions.

If you want to up your panoramic game you can step it up and start doing some multi-row shots. This is where you take a series of shots from left to right on the top row and right to left on the bottom, and splice them together in Photoshop or like program. You end up with multiple rows stitched together seamlessly. Of course there are a lot of other factors you have to take into consideration when shooting not only single-row panoramas, but multi-row panoramas as well. Like shooting in manual mode only, not using a polarizing filter, no auto white balance, etc.

So I thought, why not try a multi-row panoramic approach similar in concept to what can be done with the tilt-shift lens. I figured using the Canon 5d mkII (21mp) that I am using, it certainly has the upper end of the resolution and with a 6-8 image multi-row shot, I could essentially create a really frickin big image!

But my whole goal was really to gain some depth and detail. So it took some experimenting. The first thing I needed was a panoramic head that would allow me to take multi-row shots with precision. Really Right Stuff had all the reviews going for them and after doing some research it looked they were the ones to go with. Now with anything Really Right Stuff makes, it ain’t exactly cheap, but it’s no doubt some of the highest quality equipment around. Their machined parts are matched with precision and durability and I have to say, I love their stuff.

The panoramic head I went with is the Ultimate-Pro Omni-Pivot Package. This gives you everything; you can do both single and multi-row panoramas with complete accuracy. The leveling base that attaches to your tripod head allows you to level the panoramic head within seconds compared to the frustrating and agonizing minutes that are usually experienced trying get the tripod legs and head where they should be with conventional levels. This makes things quick and simple. The rest is figuring out your nodal point of your lens, which the RRS tutorial on panoramas explains very well. Matter of fact for anyone interested in learning more about how to take panoramic images, the RRS tutorial is fantastic.

The rest is experimenting with your compositions and finding what works for you. I am still playing around with my new toy, but it’s now one piece of equipment I usually don’t leave home without. In addition it has also opened up new doors to the creativity of composition, resolution, and the overall “feel” of the image.

Oh also, file size-they’re huge! This one of St. Mary Lake was a 10 image multi-row. My PSD file is 1.65gb. Yikes! So if you’re running that old dog of a computer, you may opt to upgrade your ram and hard drive if you start processing a lot of these files. A couple months back I took a 24 image multi-row image and it took my Mac Pro Dual Quad Core machine over an hour to process and stitch the image!

So the Really Right Stuff Ultimate-Pro Omni-Pivot Package is worth every penny (approx. 80,000 of them) and I rarely leave home without it now. Hope that’s helpful to anyone deciding on which panoramic head to go with and for those looking to experiment with mimicking larger format photography.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classes

November 2, 2010 by Jason Savage 1 Comment

I am putting together my 2011 photography classes and workshops and thought I would check and see what the interest  was for an Adobe Photoshop Lightroom class here  in Montana. I have been getting more and more requests lately for specific Lightroom classes and  I was curious how many out there are using Lightroom?

I started using Lightroom when it first came out, seeing if I could incorporate it into my Photoshop workflow. At the time Lightroom was terribly slow and just not very polished. Fast forward a few years, and I now use Lightroom for almost all of my photo archive management and editing. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Photoshop and still use it heavily for more complex editing and doing certain tasks that Lightroom leaves out, but for a majority of basic editing, Lightroom is my go-to.

In fact, the workflow is so organized and transitions from your Photo Library to Edit, so fast, that it has cut my editing times down dramatically. On any given assignment in the past using Bridge & Photoshop, I might have spent a day or two hunched over the computer, with Lightroom, maybe now half that time. It’s just really streamlined things.

Now that’s just my experience, I still know other Photographers who are only using Bridge & Photoshop or other editing programs and everyone has their own system. However, there is no denying that things continue to improve with Lightroom. More and more amateurs & professionals are utilizing it’s awesome features, especially with some of it’s new RAW editing tools.

So if you’re in Montana and interested in having some Lightroom classes, drop me a line, let me know. I would be glad at looking at hosting some around the state or look at adding it to the classes I teach at the University of Montana College of Technology here in Helena.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

July 29, 2008 by Jason Savage Leave a Comment

Adobe announced the release of it’s newest version of Lightroom yesterday, and I assume there may be a few excited people about this one……

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

July 25, 2008 by Jason Savage 1 Comment

I thought I would post a quick deal on Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom. If you’re not using it or haven’t checked it out yet, where have you been?…

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Color Management

March 7, 2008 by Jason Savage 1 Comment

Montana Photo Tutorial

Confused about the whole color management issue? Ready to pull your hair out because your prints look about as far off as they can from what you see on your monitor……

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Sharpening 101

February 12, 2008 by Jason Savage Leave a Comment

Montana Photo Tutorial

What the hell is this Unsharp Mask thingy?…

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About

Based in Montana, Jason works as a freelance and commercial photographer, specializing in travel and outdoor photography.

His work has been featured in National Geographic Traveler, Time, Outside, Audubon, Outdoor Photographer,The Nature Conservancy and many others.
His images have also been featured in numerous advertising campaigns, books, and calendars around the world.

Contact

Jason Savage Photography
546 Fox Meadow Ln.
Hamilton, MT 59840
jason@jasonsavagephoto.com
406-202-0709

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