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It’s sad to see such horrible things happening, and it does not matter in which country it was. It’s sad everywhere.. :(
As I mentioned yesterday, November is really the time of releases. And so yesterday, my friends from guessWare released their new game Ozaiko, into the Apple app store.
First things first. I have here for you 5 codes to activate Ozaiko on your tablet, so if you would like one, just leave a comment and in a few days I will randomly choose 5 and send them the code :)
Ozaiko is a different kind of puzzle game, where you put together scrambled photos, but this time in circles :). And if you look closely, some of the photos may seem familiar. The reason is, that there are some of my photos used in the game (together with photos from other talented photographers).
And as you can also see, you can make the difficulty quite higher, by using more concentric circles and more image parts, and you can even play split-screen with another person on the same device. Here you can see a short trailer for the game:
For more info, please visit the Ozaiko webpage, or the game in the Apple app store here.
And for the daily photo, a shot from Austria. It so crazy to stand over the clouds, and seeing as they move around around you. And it’s even crazier than you can drive to this place in the Alps with car. You have to pay for the entrance, but it really is worth it :)
This is a 5 shots panorama, combined in PTgui, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.
November is really the month of releases. So many great new games (Fallout 4 is so addictive :)) and of course also new software. And one of those is the new HDR program from Macphun and Trey Ratcliff, Aurora HDR. Right now I started playing around with it, and hopefully I put together a review with my thoughts on it soon.
For now, if you want to get more info on Aurora HDR, check out the official website under www.aurorahdr.com. Please note, Aurora HDR is available only for MacOS.
For some reason, I visit this spot everytime I’m in Prague. I just love this view. And from the number of photographers and tourists that are there all the time, I think I’m not the only one :)
This is a HDR from 3 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.
The company behind the Radian time lapse device just started a new Kickstarter project and I think this might be interesting to some of you. This time it’s a attachment to your camera, that allows for a remote control using an app on your phone. It may be really useful to those of you, who need to remotely control your DSLRs. Check out their Kickstarte page for more informations on the product.
People probably thought I was crazy, while I was running around, taking photos by every puddle in front of the Eiffel tower. But I just can’t resist a nice reflection :)
This is a HDR from 3 exposures, done twice. Used the second HDR to remove few people from the shot. Combined in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.
I mentioned quite a few plugins from Topaz before and today they are introducing a new one Topaz Texture Effects. And since I had the opportunity to already try it, today I will show you what it is about, and what I think about it.
As the name already suggest, this plugin is mostly about adding textures overlays to your photos. But you would be mistaken to think that all it’s about. In a way it’s similar to Nik Analog Efex, but without the focus on trying to emulate vintage cameras. Topaz Texture Efex comes with a set of tools (which I will get to in a moment) and a huge collection of over 275 textures, all over 5000x5000px in size. Of course this makes the installation file a little bigger (1.5Gb+), but that’s to be expected.
When you open Texture Effects you are greeted with a set of default presets. These are quite diverse and use all of the available tools the plugin provides.
Still, if you want to tweak any of them, replace the texture or any other adjustment, you can easily edit the presets and save new ones.
Additionally, you can download more presets from Topaz website, and if you register, also upload your, for other users to use. From what I seen, no registration is needed to be able to download presets.
Before I get to adjustments, a little about performance. On my work PC (i7, 16gb Ram, SSD driver, gtx660) the plugin was very snappy, with most of the adjustments taking effect almost instantly. The only time you will experience a big slowdown, is when you try browse the pressets gallery, when between downloading and creating previews, it get really slow.
In the first group of adjustments, you will find some very standard ones, well known from other editing programs. Adjustments like basick adjustments (brightness, shadows…), diffusion, film grain, posterize, split tone and vignette are well known. Two more different that it also provides is Edge blur, which allows you to soften the borders of your image and Edge exposure, which allows you to change the exposure and color of the edges. One very nice touch here is, that you can edit every edge separately, so you can create light leak effects very easily.
Another nice feature is, that you can apply the same adjustment as many times as you want, and each adjustment has it’s own opacity slider. Like this you can easily layer as many as you need.
The second group of adjustments is all about included textures. You can add borders, color overlay, dust/scratches, light leaks and textures. Additionally, you can do double exposures, by blending two different photos.
All this adjustments offer the same flexibility as the standard ones, so you can use the multiple times and change the opacity as you want (among other tweaks). For each of those, you also have the ability to import your own textures or just stick to the ones provided.
You also get all the classic blending modes for all the texture effects, so you can choose how it’s overlayed over your photo.
Overall, this is a quite nice plugin. It gives a huge amount of options and you even get a good texture library with it. I like to split the plugins based on who are they better for. It’s either for those who want more realistic photo edits, or for those who want a more artistic result. This one is really more for the second group. Texture effects creates a very artistic and vintage camera looking results.
So if this is what you are looking for, you should give it a try. You can find more info on the Topaz Labs website. Also, since it’s a new product, Topaz is giving a big discount for the next 10 days for both, the PC and MAC versions.
