Good Advice

Here is some good advice. Some other advice I came across recently and have put into practice is this: use filters only when absolutely necessary and never stack them.

My eternal quest to make my photos sharper benefited from this helpful tidbit I read somewhere on the internet, I can't remember where. I had been keeping a UV filter on the front of my lens to protect it and would then stack a polarizing filter or ND filter on top of it. I immediately took the UV filter off and use a polarizer or ND filter only when the situation dictates. Hopefully the results will be noticeable.

iPad and more

My apologies again, dear reader, for my prolonged absence from blogging. I thought that finishing school would give me much more time to search out photo info and blog, but I was wrong. My access to the web is far more limited now that I am not at school all day.

Also, I purchased an iPad and have been spending a lot of time fooling with it. I have to say that it is a fantastic way to read the news and books; it is the best way to read the Wall Street Journal. I haven’t, however, spent much time exploring its abilities for photography. I use several photo apps on my iPhone, mostly Adobe’s Photoshop mobile app and Photoforge. Both of these are able to do a great job on certain projects, but are obviously limited. I know that Photogene and Photoforge have iPad specific apps that I imagine are more robust than their iPhone counterparts, but that still don’t measure up to what is possible on a true computer.

What would really be nice is an Adobe iPad version of Photoshop CS5. Some features would have to be dropped, but I would imagine that they could put together a pretty sweet package. Editing on a tablet without a pressure sensitive stylus may not be ideal, but it could still work.

Truthfully, making the iPad into a Wacom-style tablet for a computer is, I think, the most exciting possibility for the device. Tethering it to a computer to do edits through PS would allow photographers to buy one gadget that would perform multiple roles. Again, developing a pressure sensitive stylus like those used with Wacom tablets might not be feasible, which would create some issues. Maybe it is possible. Who knows?

Also, some app makers out there need to get with the program and optimize their apps for the iPad or make new one altogether. I am thinking specifically of flickr, whose iPhone app is great, but doesn’t quite measure up when used on the iPad.

Adobe Photoshop CS 5

I got my hands on the new Photoshop at the end of last week and have been playing with it over the long weekend. I have to say that I am quite impressed. I am a fairly unsophisticated user of Photoshop, but I have been using it for several years and got to know CS 4 pretty well. CS 5 blows me away. Several of the new features justify in my mind paying the $200 to upgrade from CS 4. Content aware fill is incredible. I'm not sure about the ethical implications of using it in landscape photography, but I am amazed by its power and the possible applications for it. The new HDR Pro and HDR Toning features are equally amazing. In a past post I dissed CS 4's HDR tool. HDR Pro is vastly improved and in my mind as good as Photomatix. Check out Terry White's review of the best new features here. For an even more thorough review of new features, see Deke McClelland's Lynda set "Photoshop Top 5" at Lynda.com.