The first ever Comment Contest!

After a short (and unexpected) break from blogging yesterday, here’s a Friday Free-For-All for you!

Here’s where reader input is going to be what makes or breaks the content – that’s right, I am putting it all on the reading audience.  You can link to your own site in the comments, and the “Comment Luv” plugin will show the most recent post for fellow bloggers too.  Here’s what the content topics are to chose from (you can pick one, two, three, or all of the topics to address in your comment):

  1. What are your favorite iPhone/iTouch applications (for photography)?
  2. Who would you like to see guest-write here on the blog (you can include yourself too)?
  3. If Canon Blogger were to start a monthly newsletter, what would you like to see in said newsletter?
  4. If Canon Blogger were to start publishing eBooks for download, what topics would you like to see addressed?
  5. What one photo tip would you share with others above all else to help improve their photography (and “Take off the lenscap” is not allowed! LOL)

The best part of this?  Some lucky commenter will win a $25 gift card to B&H Photo from yours truly!  Yup, no sponsors, no tricks, no gimmicks, no nothin’ but free moolah to the best photo store on the planet!  All out of my pocket!  What am I looking for?  Useful content and ideas that will help me generate more resources to share with everyone.  So, get your thinking caps on and get to commenting.  If you post a comment and think of something later, feel free to add it – but your name can only be “entered” in the Comment Contest once!

When does it end?  Midnight Sunday!  (August 30, 2009 – so if you are reading through archives and this is like March 15th, 2035, sorry, the contest is over…)

And speaking of contests, you also only have three days left to get your shots into the Flickr thread for the “Win a Wacom” contest!  The contest pool of entries has increased a tad bit, but you can’t win if you don’t play, so get a shot or two in over the weekend – as they say at the Lotto – “Hey, ya never know!”

Finally, on this last Friday of August, I’d like to share yet again, an absolutely hysterical strip from What The Duck (I shared it earlier this week), but this  just floored me, so had to give another shout out for those that haven’t picked up WTD in your readers yet (and you should!).  So, have a laugh, then have some fun and share your thoughts – the sky is the limit.  Have a great weekend everyone and we’ll see you back here on Monday!

Exposure Denver Presentation

Tomorrow I will be speaking at a local photo club’s monthly meeting – Exposure Denver.  It’s quite an honor and my first time presenting in any way so we’ll see how it goes.  I’m sure the photogs there will have tons of questions I have absolutely no clue on what the answers are, but I am going to try to talk a bit about work flow – from capture to print.

I’ll be sharing the process I use to import my photos from the camera to the computer and then my file management system, both for redundancy and output to various outlets including web galleries and to print.  Talking points will include:

* Card Readers
* File/Asset management
* Lightroom
* Web Galleries
* Blogging and sharing images online

Anyone in the area is welcome to stop by and meet the the group.  Exposure Denver can be found online at http://www.blog.exposuredenver.com

The meeting starts at 7pm at the Breckenridge Brewery located at: 471 Kalamath Street | Denver, CO 80204  Hope to see you there!

In contest news, the finalists for the OnOne Software giveaway should be announced in a few days – judging begins today.  The August contest kicks off today – with the prize at the end of the tunnel to be the Wacom Bamboo Fun (small)!  Thanks to the good folks at Wacom for donating this great tablet for a lucky reader.

As always, post your images to the Flickr thread, and make sure your image is sized between 800 and 600px on the longest side.  The theme:  FUN!

Here’s the link to the Flickr Thread:  Bamboo Fun Giveaway

That should be enough news for one day, so happy shooting all!  We’ll see you back here tomorrow!

Grab the Feed

Mask Pro 4.1

Okay, I know the folks from onOne have been very generous with their contribution of a copy of the OnOne Plugin Suite for the latest giveaway here at Canon Blogger/Learning Digital Photography, but I have to say that I am literally blown away by this offer even more.  As I delve into each tool more and more, I am totally amazed at the functionality and how easily it really makes things.  For those of you that watch Photoshop User TV, you’ve seen what I’ve seen – ads from OnOne claiming that masking is made so super easy that you can swap backgrounds and composite images together in a snap – it’s a breeze, right?

Well, we all know that ads only show you the quick and flashy parts of things, not the nitty gritty.  Let me tell you here and now – the Mask Pro really has no nitty gritty – it really is that easy.  Take a look at these sequences:

First off, an image I merged together during a trip to SC last summer.  It looked like it could make for a nice HDR, so I did some tone mapping and got this result:

originalhdr

Needless to say, it didn’t really have the “wow” factor I was looking for.  (I should also throw a mention in for the folks at HDRsoft that produce Photomatix, the HDR software utility that I was testing at the time I originally put this HDR together – still working on a review of that – I lost the trial version after re-installing XP, but will get that back shortly.)  Anyway,  given the success I’d had with some other images in HDR and the background I tried, figured it was worth the effort to blend in a different background.  Here’s the results.

hackjob

Keep in mind, this was after literally hours and hours of painstakingly selecting branches, twigs, and  what not literally zoomed in to almost the pixel level.  Still, not that flattering a result and clearly a less than “stellar” job.  I relegated that to the “learn from your mistakes” folder and had not really touched it since.

So, this was my test for the Mask pro – could it do what I couldn’t after at least ten hours of agonizing masking selections and duping to repeated layers to start up the following day?  Well, let’s see, here’s what happened.

After installing Mask Pro, I loaded the tone-mapped HDR image into Photoshop.  Then, rather than taking any time to tweak, I went straight to Mask Pro (after all, it should do the work for me, right?).  After a short 7-slide presentation on the tools, my first screen looked like this:

maskpro1a

Before I go on, let me explain how the tools on the right ended up how they were.  You see, Mask pro gives you eye dropper tools to select the colors you want to keep and the ones you want to subtract.    So, I went and selected the green eye dropper to define the colors to keep.  I clicked a few parts of the branches and signage, which took the better part of 5 seconds.  The end result was this color set:

keep

Then I switched to the red eye dropper to define the colors to drop.  I clicked a few parts of the sky.  This took another 5 seconds or so.    The end result was this color set:

drop Lastly, I clicked the Magic Brush tool, from the Mask Pro tool panel maskpro_palette

and just started painting around the sky.  I certainly did not take my time, as I was running on my Windows desktop which has a single core 2.3 Ghz celeron processor (it chugs when I load my browser fer Pete’s sake).  So, I dealt with about 5 minutes of a magic brush tool as it calculated the mask to apply as I painted impatiently across the image.  (After all, I wrote these blog posts after dinner, so time = sleep here.)

So, after about 5 minutes and 10 seconds, I have a mask that looks like this:

maskpro2

Yes, that was after 5 minutes!  I could already tell this was a wickedly intuitive and powerful tool (and I mean that in the best of ways), so I just stopped there and decided to take it back to PS for final cleanup and adding the new background.  To do that, I simply clicked the File menu, then “Save/apply” (another 2 seconds)…

Now back in Photoshop with the original image.  It looks the same, but take a look at the layers palette:

layers2

I know the low-res and smallness of captures for the blog make this hard to tell, but at this point I am pretty much ready to bring in the new background.  My only last step in PS is to duplicate the layer I just created from mask Pro to clean up the big blotch in the upper right, and a few specks in the rest of the sky on the third layer.   So, now I am ready to bring in my starry background again.  I place the object in the PS document to get this (for the record, I went with a different starry background to go for a more realistic effect rather than the Harry potter look of my swimming pool shots):

layers3

Finally, I just pulled the stars layer to sit below the Mask Pro layer and here’s the resulting layout in Photoshop:

layers4

The last bit took all of another minute, tops (remember, I am working off a slow processor.  The final result, which took literally less than 10 minutes (the first took over 10 hours):

finalhdr

Such is the power of the OnOne mask Pro – just one of the multiple plugins that are available in this Suite.  If you want this kind of power and malleability in minutes, then enter the giveaway today.  it can literally save you hours, if not days, of post processing!  Here’s the Flickr page for photo entries and here’s the link to the rules.

What can I say – OnOne rocks!  Just to give you a true frame of reference – it took me about an hour and a half to write this post – and that includes getting the screen captures, then sizing them for the blog.  I also interspersed some Twitter time and surf time as well, so it’s not like I was really in any kind of “zone” or anything.  It was just another task in an evening of multi-tasking.  The original one took me over ten hours of processing and that was with no other apps running, seriously.  I was restarting the computer just to free up the RAM for usage only by PS every evening.

This feature alone can save you days of time in the digital darkroom.  Don’t delay and enter to win today! Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow.

Grab the Feed

Coulda beena contenduh

Actually, all 53 of the images that were submitted to the Lightroom Giveaway I’ve been taking entries for on the blog were contenders.   Truly some great images were submitted to the Flickr Thread for the giveaway I’ve been hosting for the past month.  Some really great images.

The rules were simple:  Take any two pictures you like in May, share them on Flickr thread (& be family/work-safe) and you are eligible to win a copy of Adobe Lightroom – courtesy of the good folks over at Adobe (especially Tom Hogarty who was kind enough to make an appearance on the podcast to talk about the product and to take so many listener questions!

Anyway, I said that after the close date (end of May), I would pick the ten images I thought were best and forward those on to him for a grand prize winner decision (not that there’s a 2nd place, runner-up, or anything like that).  well, in perusing the images Monday and Tuesday, I really couldn’t decide on ten.  There were just too many images that I felt deserving.  Such is the case of contests and giveaways though – and the role of judge is a lot harder than I thought it would be.  But, I did winnow the entries down though – just couldn’t go lower than 14.  So, without further ado, here are the 14 finalists!

Lightroom Giveaway Finalists

Naturally, rather than display the images in the blog, I figured it’d be appropriate to do so in a web gallery, created at the hands of Adobe Lightroom!  Hopefully, this will also give people a little more insight into not only Lightroom, but into critiquing your own work and prepping contest submissions.

That’s it for today – congrats to all the finalists, ant thanks to everyone who participated – it was a lot of fun to see everything.  We’ll see you back here again tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll hear from Tom soon on who the lucky winner is for the free copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom!  Keep on shooting, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

Grab the feed

Photo Contest – Win Adobe Lightroom

Happy Saturday all.  It’s a rare weekend post here – since Friday was silent.  Two things – first off, Happy Mothers Day to all the mothers out there!  Second, as the podcast on Tuesday announced, don’t forget the first ever Learning Digital Photography Contest is under way – all during the month of May, submit your shots to the Flickr group (2 entries per person) for your chance to win a copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0!  Not only is it a great chance to win this wonderful program, but a great way to get increased visibility of your work and to network with others.

Information is available in the podcast, but you are welcome to just submit your entries directly to the Flickr group.  This is a prize package worth $300 retail, so definitely one worth entering!  Good luck and happy shooting!

Podcast

Flickr Pool