Surface Dial & Photoshop

I have been trying the Surface Dial in Photoshop recently, as the last update added support for it. And wow, is it disappointing. It’s mostly not even worth mentioning. They only support zoom, history and brush settings. That’s all. No canvas rotation, no size settings for objects, no opacity setting for layers, nothing special. And its not even context sensitive. So if you switch to the zoom tool, it will not magically start zooming in and out. You still have to switch it in the dial selection.

With how many settings in Photoshop are just sliders, this could be used so much more. Just imagine being able to dial in an effect when you are applying it, or dialing in the opacity of a layer.  You can just look at the Sketchable app, and see how it could be. It is really lazy from Adobe to just do it so they can say its there, and not really trying. But to tell the truth, I did not expect that much from Adobe recently. Their updates are really not up to par anymore.

The 5 fingers view

For today’s daily photo, I chosen one taken during this summer at the 5 fingers view in Alps in Austria. The 5 fingers is actually a skywalk platform, that will allow you to go out into this valley and get just such a wonderful view.

And it’s not even so hard to get there, as there is a cable car going completely up to this mountain and you just have to walk about for 30 minutes to get to the view.

This is a two shot vertorama, combined in Lightroom, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. I still struggle a bit with editing purely landscape shots, as I’m so used to cityscapes, but I think I’m getting there.  And as it’s again a quite big detailed photo, I included som detail images in this post, to show you how much you could see from there :)

And here are few details:

Macphun is becoming SKYLUM

This is starting to get spooky. I mentioned yesterday, that just last weekend I talked to a fellow photographer that someone should buy Nik Software. And it was announced yesterday. We talked that the a7R3 should come soon, and it was announced yesterday. And we also discussed that Macphun should change their name, now that they make windows software. And what happened? It was announced yesterday. Now I think that we should have been discussing how to win a million dollars :) Will do that next time :)

But back to Macphun. Yesterday they announced that starting next year they are changing their name to Skylum. I think that this is a very good change for them, as with them doing multiplatform software, the new name would not discourage Windows users to check out their products. I also still have to have a better look at their recent updates, but hopefully now with the weather getting worse, I will have the time.

You can check out all Macphun products on Macphun website here.

Cold morning in Prague

There has been a lot of color and warmth in my latest updates, so for today I chosen a much colder photo. This one is from a very cold morning in Prague, early this year. The weather that day was not the best, but i still got few nice shots :) I left the white balance here also on the colder side, to keep this nice blue color, and to keep the overall feeling of cold.

This is a two shot vertorama. Combined in Lightroom, edited in Lightroom and fininshed in Photoshop.

DxO acquires Nik Collection

Funny thing. Just few days ago I was talking to a fellow photographer about, what would be the best future for Nik Collection plugins. And we both agreed that the best would be for some company that actually makes photography software, to buy them away from Google. We just don’t want loose such a great piece of software (they have not been updated for years and they still are great). And just today, that happened. DxO acquired Nik Collection assets from Google, and even announced plans to continue development on them.

This is definitive great news for all photographers and I can’t wait for the “Nik Collection 2018 Edition” that also been announced for the next year. You can see the official announcement on DxO website here.

Long exposure panorama at the Strbske pleso

I just love taking panoramas recently. They looks just so great and give a different view to normal photos. And with the 21:9 monitor, and now a 18:9 phone, they just look great on my devices. But they don’t look so nice on the blog. And I yet to find a better way how to show them off here. So for now, here is a bigger version of the photo, and you will see also few close ups under the full shot.

This is a 3 shot panorama taken at the Strbske pleso lake in High Tatras in Slovakia. I used a 10 stop ND filter here, to blur the water, to get the nice reflection. The lines in the water were just a nice bonus :) The panorama was combined in Lighroom and finished in Photoshop.

And here are few details:

How to share plotagraphs in a blog post?

Since I’m posting a plotagraph today, I though I would also show you how I include it in the blog posts.

I use the video HTML tag to include the MP4 versions of the plotagraph. Of course if you just export it from Plotagraph, it would be too big, so first I compress it using Hanbrake transcoder (which you can get for free here), where I just use the default settings to recode the file. A file of 1200×800 px then ends up between 0.5 to 1.5 megabytes in size.

Then I use the tag in this form:

‹video poster=”link to image that shows while the video is loading” autoplay=”autoplay” loop=”loop”›
‹source src=”link to the video in mp4 format” type=”video⁄mp4″ ⁄›
Your browser does not support the video tag.
‹⁄video›

You have to fill in the poster, as you need to show some image while the video is loading. Also the image shows when on mobile, as mobile browsers don’t load mp4 videos in pages. Also, if a older browser is used, they will only see the text message that you specify there. The autoplay part is for the video to start automatically on load and the loop will force the video to loop indefinitely.