In April Christine Hauber and I had the opportunity (Thanks Kathy!!) to photograph on a private ranch in the heart of the Texas Hill Country for a couple hours and that is where I photographed my newest release titled, "Lassos Paired".

"Lassos Paired"

Texas Hill Country
(Click on photo to view larger and to purchase prints)
 

We arrived in the dark a little before sunrise and the weather was not being very cooperative as it was windy and raining. So we waited a while in the barn as the sky lightened from sunrise and we looked at the radar on my iPad to confirm that the morning's shoot was going to be a washout. 

When the weather isn't cooperating, trips like these basically end up as scouting trips to plan for something in the future. Before we headed out scouting the property I paused to photograph this pair of lassos hanging on horseshoe hooks inside the barn.

The only light I had was a little bit of ambient light coming in from outside the barn as well as light from one lightbulb inside the barn. I put my camera on my tripod and started taking exposure readings. This was photographed at ISO 200 at f10 with a shutter speed of 8 seconds.

In the photo above we are looking at the RAW file as-is with no adjustments made inside of Capture One Pro (what I replaced Lightroom with). This is exactly how the camera captured it, but far from the vision I had with this image. This was going to need quite a bit of work to get the look I was after.

If you look closely you can notice the top of the photo is a little warmer due to the light from the overhead lightbulb. You can also see the outside ambiant light filtering in from the lower right hand side. I am not concerned about this as I will be converting it soon to sepia and we won't notice the different light sources any more.

The photo above shows some of the adjustments I made to the RAW file inside of Capture One. It was converted into a slightly toned black and white image. The photo was cropped and then exported just like this from Capture One. On to the next step.

I next brought the image into Silver Efex Pro 2 where I converted the image into a warm sepia color. This gave me the foundation I needed to start completing the look for this image.

Next up was a stop in onOne's Perfect Photo Suite to start bringing this image to life and give it some energy. Using a combination of a few different effects in Perfect Effects brought me to just about where I needed to be with this image. (Note there is a FREE, basic version of Perfect Effects you can download and use that comes with over 70 effects.)

I finished the image with a layers adjustment and some dodging and burning in Photoshop - something that I also could have accomplished in Perfect Photo Suite.

After all of those steps I arrived at the photo I had in mind when I first photographed it. Scroll back up this post to the original and final versions again to view the big difference between how the camera captured the image and what I had in mind for it. A perfect example of how boring a straight out-of-camera, non-enhanced photo can look compared to a fully enhanced one.

Try onOne's Perfect Photo Suite 7.5 FREE for 30 days!! They make great photo enhancing software that I personally use in my fine art photography.

Yesterday OnOne Software released the 7.5 update to their Perfect Photo Suite. The update is free for all Suite 7.x owners including the Premium Edition, the Lightroom & Aperture Edition, as well as their Standard Edition.

The 7.5 update includes a new Quick View Browser, refinements to the Perfect Brush, and compatibility for Lightroom 5.

The Quick View Browser is a welcome addition. With it we can now browse photos and effects in a full-screen gallery view. No more looking at tiny thumbnail images when looking for photos on the harddrive or seeing what effects look like before applying them.

The new browser while viewing in the Perfect Layers module.

While in the Perfect Effects module, click on the new icon to the right of the effect you want to see to view effects in a full-screen gallery view as seen below using an example from the Vintage effects. 

In addition to the new Browser, refinements to the Perfect Brush make this tool even more impressive. For starters the brush size of Perfect Brush was increased from 500 pixels to 2500 pixels.

But the most impressive feature of Perfect Brush is that it can now automatically detect and protect edges using color sampling. This makes quick work out of replacing, say, the sky in a background.

To explain how this works better, lets take a look at a photograph of an old truck in Wyoming photographed with a boring clear blue sky.

When I photographed this I did not have the good fortune of having an interesting sky. I like the composition of the truck and barn, but this photo needs something in the sky to give more interest.

What I would like to do is add some clouds to the background. While working in the Layers module I selected "Extras" and then looked for an appropriate cloud pattern from the Background choices I had in the Extras folder.

Clicking on a cloud photo I liked added it to a new layer. I quickly resized the cloud layer to overlap the sky in my original photo.

Once I had the placement correct I then moved the cloud layer below the original photo layer. This will allow me to paint in the clouds to the original photo.

Using the Masking Brush tool I then started painting in the cloud layer, staying clear of the trees, the horizon, and the barn. I stopped short of the barn and trees because if I didn't, the cloud layer would erase the tree. What I need to do now is use the Perfect Brush to complete the addition of the cloud background.

FIrst click on the Perfect Brush checkbox to select it.

Then, start painting near your edge and hold the Command key on a Mac or Control key on a Windows and continue painting up to the edges of the barn, the trees, etc. The Perfect Brush works by sampling the color underneath the center of it. While holding down the Command/Control key while painting, the Perfect Brush uses the color sample from the moment you hold the Command/Control key, allowing you to paint in the cloud background right up to the edges of the barn, the horizon, in addition to in-between branches and leaves of the tree.

The Perfect Brush in action, keeping the edges of the barn clean.

The Perfect Brush takes care of complicated layer masks and does this for you automatically and extremely accurately, assuming that the color you are sampling from is different enough from the edges you wish to protect.

Here is a view of the layer mask that Perfect Brush created - pretty impressive especially with the tree.

Once I was happy with the addition of the cloud background I then used Perfect Effects for some further enhancing and Perfect Resize to increase the size of the image.

"Wyoming Truck & Clouds"
A Suess Original One-of-a-Kind Print

OnOne's Perfect Photo Suite comes in three versions depending on your workflow, and as of right now for a limited time if you own any Nik Software plugin you can purchase the entire Suite for the half-off price of $149.95.

Try onOne's Perfect Photo Suite 7.5 FREE for 30 days!! They make great photo enhancing software that I personally use in my fine art photography.

On the heals of Adobe's announcement that they are moving all of their CS programs including Photoshop to CC versions that require a monthly subscription to be paid to continue to run the software and angering most photographers at the same time, other less known photo companies are starting to see the light and are trying to get noticed and let photographers know there is life without Adobe.

Adobe is still maintaining a stance that subscriptions are the only way they are moving forward despite polls and petitions wishing they would reconsider, yet they did try to reassure photographers who use Lightroom that it will continue as a stand-alone non-subscription program. According to Adobe Product Manager Tom Hogarty during a google+ hangout, "Basically we have no plans to make Lightroom subscription-only at any point in the future. We have plans to make Lightroom available in its current form pretty much indefinitely...we don't plan on adding any Creative Cloud specific features that you would only get if you were a subscriber to Creative Cloud."

This does go against what Adobe VP of Creative Solutions WInston Hendrickson said in an interview last week where he said, "We don't have plans to make Lightroom a subscription-only option but we do envision added functionality for CC members using Lightroom." Depending on whom you believe at Adobe there will either not be any CC specific features for Lightroom, or there will be added functionally for Lightroom for those using CC.

Adobe has taken some serious hits to its credibility in the last 10 days and many photographers, including myself, do not have the same level of trust or comfort with the company and are looking at alternatives.

Other photo software companies are starting to make it known that they offer great photo enhancement packages without subscription-only offerings.

Corel offers their professional-level graphics package CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6 as a box purchase, electronic download, through volume license or by subscription in addition to other upgrade offerings. Unfortunately they are Windows only and are only now possibly contemplating a Mac version.

(photo credit Corel)

In fact, Corel has just announced a great offer trying to lure Adobe customers. According to Gerard Metrailer, the Sr. Director, Product Management, Graphics for Corel Corporation, "I’m happy to announce a special offer for CS4, CS5 and CS6 customers around the world (some restrictions apply). From now until August 30th, 2013, owners of eligible Adobe products can purchase a wide range of Corel products at the upgrade price, including CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6, Painter 12, PaintShop Pro X5, PaintShop Pro Ultimate X5, Photo & Video Suite X5, VideoStudio Pro X6, VideoStudio Ultimate X6 and AfterShot Pro." Here is the entire announcement. 

OnOne Software, makers of Photo Suite 7 which works as a plugin inside Photoshop and Elements AND works as a stand-alone program as well without the need for Photoshop and Lightroom, has said they, "Will never require you to rent your software, and you can rest assured that, when you buy onOne Software products, you own them forever."

And Phase One, which makes the excellent RAW converter and image management program Capture One, has mentioned on twitter, "Come for the transparent price model, stay for the raw conversion and image quality!"

Capture One is a program I was using to process my RAW files from the early 2000's till around 2007 when Lightroom 1.0 appeared on the scene. The benefit at the time for Lightroom and why I switched to it was the ability to easily manage and organize all of one's photographs. With Capture One Pro 7 Phase One has included the biggest missing part of their software and now features a database feature to store, organize, and process all of your images. 

The quality of RAW conversions from Capture One has always been stellar and I am now moving my Lightroom database over to Capture One. Expect more articles soon on how to switch from Lightroom as well as benefits and any drawbacks too.