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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
by alexhaysler
As a long term Adobe user, I eagerly anticipated the introduction of another photo editing software from them, as Photoshop has been a fantastic tool in my academic career and at my general leisure, helping me to achieve A* at GCSE Art Graphics and A* in Photography.
Adobe have listened to their customers, and created a more ... photographic orientated system with less gimmicky items and more professional developing options. Used by photographers such as David Molnar, it has many advantages over rival systems such as Gimp and Aperture on Mac. For starters, the attention to detail is brilliant. There is a spot and red eye removal which is essential if you are using a poor quality digital camera, a crop overlay which allow you edit certain parts of the picture without compromising other parts.
It is extremely easy to use, with many tutorials on the internet to help you if you need them and just a general ease of use, even for the most amateur of computer users.
There is also a graduated filter which, with the addition of the vignette tool allows you to create super vignettes, to give a more authentic feel. However, here there is one downfall with Lightroom's vignette system - it is done only on exposure, whereas other systems, such as Aperture use gamma vignette.
There is then the basic features, which allow you to edit Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light and other such things. There is the Tone Curve, allowing you to edit the shadows and highlights of the photo. The different colour editing tools also help in balancing colours, and the detail tool is fairly self explanatory.
The one thing I feel Lightroom is missing is the ability to photostitch to create panoramas, for people who don't want to constantly switch between the two, as i would much rather use just Lightroom from a photo editing perspective. Also, as with all Adobe products, it is £££ and pushes many people to torrenting to save the £200. However, it is a very good buy for the avid photographer who needs that extra something to complete his photographs and make them 'ready for sale'.
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Imagenomic Noiseware 4.0
by markos9
The 'megapixel' race for digital cameras is resulting in cameras with higher and higher resolution sensors, with manufacturers trying to 'keep up with the Jones' by releasing yet another camera with a tiny sensor packed to the gills with millions of pixels.
This is not a good thing. Small sensors and high pixel density result ... in noise. This can be seen as coloured speckles on the resulting image. The image noise increases as the ISO setting is increased. Many of today's cameras (DSLR's excepted) are incapable of producing noiseless images above the base ISO setting.
Manufacturers try to reduce noise with in-camera noise reduction, but this is often applied with a 'bull in a china shop' approach; the result of which is a less noisy image, but with much of the detail smeared out.
Image manipulation software packages, such as Photoshop, have noise removal filters. Here, the user has more control over the noise reduction process, but again, the filtering results in smearing of detail.
For users who have to use high ISO settings, but want noise free images without loss of detail, there is another alternative. There are dedicated noise removal packages on the market such as Noise Ninja, Neatimage, and the one I use, Noiseware. These packages are designed to remove as much noise as possible, with the minimum effect on detail and are far superior to the camera's settings and to those in the likes of Photoshop.
Noiseware is available as a 'plug-in' for Photoshop, for both Windows and Mac computers. There is also a standalone edition, which is free (being a cheapskate, this is the version I use).
Noiseware can be used in two ways; automatic processing, or by modifying the default settings to 'fine-tune' the noise removal process.
Automatic processing, simply involves loading the image into Noiseware (or Photoshop if the plug-in is used). The software builds a profile of the image and its noise, which takes a few seconds. Once this is completed, the 'Go' button is pressed. The software processes the image then removes the noise. This will take around 10 - 30 seconds (dependant on image size and computer speed).
The processed image is then shown on the screen. To check what the image looked like before processing, the mouse button is pressed and held. In this way, the two images can be compared directly.
Does it work? Well, yes it works brilliantly! I use Noiseware on many of my wildlife photos; I have to use ISO800 on my DSLR which generates some noise. It always removes every trace of noise with no sign of loss of detail.
For the purpose of this review, I took some ISO1600 images, deliberately underexposed by one stop to get images as noisy as possible. The images showed a significant amount of coloured speckles across the whole picture, particularly in dim areas.
Processing them with Noiseware, however, gave fantastic results. The ISO1600 images were processed to remove all of the noise. There was no evidence of loss of detail when looking at the picture on the screen. Zooming in to the pixel level showed a tiny, almost unnoticeable softening of the image, indicating some loss of detail, but it was so slight that I had to look for it.
It's no exaggeration to say that Noiseware made the ISO1600 images as 'clean' as those of my default ISO setting of 400, an amazing achievement.
For noise reduction with slightly more user involvement, the button showing 'default' is pressed. This brings up a menu of alternative noise removal settings. These include 'landscape', 'night scene', 'portrait, as well as stronger and weaker settings. A film grain effect can also be added.
For more advanced users, the level of control over the noise filter is incredible. There are individual sliders for adjusting noise in four frequency groups, as well as sliders for suppression of luminance and colour noise.
The image can also be sharpened, which is often worthwhile, as noise reduction can result in a slight softening of the image. I prefer to use the unsharp mask tool in Photoshop, however.
Once the image has been processed, it must be saved. Noiseware will not allow the user to save over the original file; 'save as' must be used to save a copy. This is a precaution to prevent the original image from being overwritten.
Noiseware is then, a superb piece of software. It is easy to use (just click 'go') for the beginner, but can be fine tuned to an incredible degree by the advanced user, and the final result is amazing. For best results, the camera's internal noise reduction setting should be turned off or minimised.
Anyone who finds themselves wanting to remove noise from their digital images without heavy handed smearing would be well to look at Noiseware. If you don't mind using an extra piece of software to process for noise, get the free edition. If you want to process in Photoshop, get the plug-in.
The software is manufactured by Imagenomic (www.imagenomic.com).
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Apple iPhoto '09
by f1ndl0w
I have to admit; when it comes to my computer I am a bit of an organisation freak (if you were to look at my desk you'd argue otherwise though). My iTunes library has all music tagged appropriately with Album Artwork, and I like to keep stuff this way, makes it easier to find work that otherwise would be lost in a great mass of ... files.
Up until recently I was a windows user, and my photo library basically consisted of folders for each year, and then within that folders for specific events. This worked fine, but it was lacking in that I couldn't easily search or tag photos - e.g. so that I could mark photo's as favourites. When I first used my Mac it came pre-loaded with iPhoto '08, although I soon upgraded this to the latest '09 version, which had many new features.
Initially I found the layout a bit odd, as there are essentially 2 organisational features - Events & Albums, I'll try to explain these as best as I can, as this is how I use them. To begin with I interpreted each "Event" (Previously called Set/Roll) as an album, for example a Holiday would have it's own album (to keep it separate from all other pic's), although this can soon get confusing and quite clunky. So - here's what makes sense to me, each Event has it's own Event created (I know it sounds a bit daft, but I couldn't get my head around it at the time!), then albums can be made up of anything, for example if you went on a trip around the world you could have an "Event" for each place that you visited, and then an Album could be created collating all Events together. Once you have got your head around this (it took me a few attempts at getting it right) it makes adding new photos a doddle.
iPhoto makes importing photo's simpler than any software I have seen before, with iPhoto open it detects your digital camera and then reads all photo's off it, from there you can tell it to ignore photo's which you have imported previously (to avoid duplicates), you can set the Event name, click import, and then within a matter of minutes all of your new photos will appear in your library.
There are 2 main types of Albums within iPhoto, "normal" albums whereby you drag & drop pics into them (a bit like a playlist in iTunes), and then smart albums (like smart playlists in iTunes). Smart albums are very good as it allows for you to organise all photo's into a single album automatically, for example you could create an album where all pictures with "Birthday" in the title are included within it, to group together only birthdays. There are also more advanced search options - even down to things like weather or not the flash fired on your camera! Albums are great for when you want a group of similar photos/events together, but do not want to physically combine them.
Despite being primarily focused towards being a photo library, iPhoto also has some basic editing features built in, these include things such as red eye removal, cropping, adjusting lighting/brightness/contrast, straightening, and an "Auto Fix" which attempts to do it all for you. Personally I haven't used these much, since I prefer to keep my pics as they were from the camera, but tools such as straighten are useful for correcting photos.
There is, of course, a Slideshow function built into iPhoto, this allows for you to show your photos off along with some fancy transitions. These work very well, to launch a slideshow you simply click the big button (aptly named, slideshow), and then iPhoto will turn into a full screen mode, allowing for you to set a couple of options (Transition type, time etc.) before letting it do it's stuff. The transitions are very smooth, and look excellent when you connect your computer up to a big screen/projector. In addition to the photo's you can also add in a musical backdrop, and also export the slideshow as a video file.
iPhoto '09 brought 2 major new features; Maps and Faces, I'll explain these below.
"Maps" allows for you to "geotag" your images onto a map identical to what you see in Google Earth/Maps. This is a useful feature as you can the have an overall view of where you have travelled to, and pick out photos from specific locations. I really do like this feature, although think that it's implementation could be improved a little. It seems as though iPhoto contains a local database of your locations (plus a lot of US places), and when tagging a photo you choose a location from your database, if it isn't in there you need to add it first. This often adds an additional step in locating your picture, I would much rather just be able to drop a pin on a map for each photo, with no local database/"favourites" involved. But I can see where Apple are coming from with this, as I suppose it makes it easier to use when not connected to the internet.
For me "Faces" was what made the upgrade from '08 to '09 look worthwhile, iPhoto can now scan through your photos looking for faces of people. This can take a while on your existing library, although when importing new lot's of photos it is pretty much instant. Once all face's have been detected you can then go through each picture putting a name to them, and eventually (here is the clever part) iPhoto will begin to learn who these people are, as a result the process becomes a much simple "tick" to confirm iPhoto has it correct (which it does most of the time, but can get confused with families ... and identical twins too I would assume). Naming all of your photo's can be a bit boring, but once it's done you can then easily locate a picture of a specific person, a nice little feature which I haven't seen before.
In addition to all of the "basic" features of iPhoto you can also print your pics directly from within iPhoto, and in addition to standard 6*4's you can also have them printed on a variety of different media, one of them which I like the look of is the "Photo Book", this allows for you to print your pics into a professional looking book, I haven't actually tried any of these yet, although the products do look good and are reasonably priced, so probably will do so in the future.
I'd recommend iPhoto to anyone on a Mac, the best bit is that it comes free with the iLife suite of apps, so every Mac owner should have it installed (if not check your installation disk)!
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