Sunday 26 April 2015

Canon 100mm f2.8 USM Marco with Canon 5D2

My wife bought some Tulips yesterday and I noticed they were starting to open and being caught in the afternoon light.
I quickly grabbed my Canon 5D2 and attached the 100mm f2.8 USM Macro and grabbed a few shots before the light vanished.

Processed in Lr CC, Analog EFX Pro2, Colour EFX Pro and Silver EFX. I really like this Canon 100mm Macro, its a lovely lens.


Canon 5D2, Canon 100mm f2.8 USM Macro, 
Analog EFX Pro2

Canon 5D2, Canon 100mm f2.8 USM Macro, 
Colour EFX Pro2

Canon 5D2, Canon 100mm f2.8 USM Macro, 
Silver EFX Pro2


Tuesday 21 April 2015

La vie en gris Lightroom presets

I updated to Lr CC this evening. Adobe have added a Panorama function, a Grad Filter brush and HDR functions, which might be handy occasionally. They also added face detection, which I doubt I'll ever use.

Lr also now uses the GPU (the hardware that provides the computing power for the display on your computer) to do some of the heavy lifting, Adobe claiming great increases in speed for Lr functions.

My MacBookPro is pretty fast anyway, and so far I've not noticed any difference.

Whilst I was in Lr I installed a set of presets I found here they attempt to replicate the B+W style of some well known photographers. I'm not sure how accurate any presets of this type are as I'm of the opinion that there are far too many variables to get a really accurate replication, but I do like these.

They look good on first click, and of course you can fine tune them to taste. 

Daido Moriyama preset

Daido Moriyama preset

Michael Kenna preset

Nick Brandt preset




Saturday 4 April 2015

Fuji X-Trans RAW

I've been playing around with Fuji X-Trans RAW developing.

I downloaded RAW Therapee (RT) the other day and gave that a go and was sufficiently impressed to test it further.

The weather was dry today, if a little overcast, so I went out for an hour to take a few snaps to give RT another go.

As before I used RT to Demosaic the Fuji RAW files, save them as TIFF and then process in Lr.

The settings in RT were Demosaic as X-Trans, default RL Deconvolution sharpening, Micro Contrast and Edge sharpening.

Fuji X-Pro 1, Fujinon XF18-55mm

Fuji X-Pro 1, Fujinon XF18-55mm

Fuji X-Pro 1, Fujinon XF18-55mm
I'm pleased enough with the results to keep using this workflow for a bit, RT does seem to do a very good job of Demosaicing the X-Trans RAW files.