The Best Laid Plans...

The weather in Wales last weekend was wonderful; pity I had a minor technical problem with my big kit! I missed a couple of good sunsets and a stunning dawn. So... I used my iPhone to take a few street images.


There's been a lot in the photo press recently extolling the virtues of the iPhone and its various apps. Lee Frost has written and illustrated a couple of very good articles in Black & White Photography magazine while Daniel Lezano in Digital SLR Photography did pretty much the same. The photographs below were downloaded into Adobe Bridge then tweaked slightly and cropped in Elements 9 before getting a monochrome makeover with my product of the year, Silver Efex Pro 2, which continues to amaze me - the effects this software applied to the original images is quite remarkable and improved every aspect of them.


I selected a custom preset (landscape) then added the film emulsion for Kodak ISO32 Panatomic X before a little tweaking of the contrast settings to bring out some detail. That might sound an awful lot of work for iPhone images but each one took less than five minutes to process. I think the monochrome conversion has really improved the images. It would be interesting to see comments from you, dear reader. Anyway, here's the pictures:

A Dog Named Boo

UPDATE 11 NOVEMBER 2011: I submitted "A Dog Named Boo" to my Fotoblur account and I'm both thrilled and pleased to report that it was a Featured Image in their Street Performance category.

Music to Watch Girls By

The Pirates Den

Asleep at the Wheel
Click on any image for the bigger picture

The two musician images were taken in Bangor city centre, the ramshackle garage was found in Menai Bridge and the sleeping man was in Beaumaris.

Adobe Camera RAW

For a while now I've felt rather hamstrung when editing RAW files by the fact that the Adobe Camera RAW 5 (ACR) editor in Photoshop Elements is a cut down version of the program found in the full Photoshop package. I suppose that one shouldn't complain too much given the price differential in the two packages but with just about every digital photography book and magazine encouraging the use of RAW for digital capture you'd think that Adobe would be kind enough to give all their users the full ACR hit. 


There's some useful functions in the full version of ACR not least of which is the spot removal tool; the ability to have a fully cleaned up image (i.e. all dust spots removed) at the RAW processing stage is a real boon and reduces the need for additional layers once inside Elements.


What I'm about to say next may well be common knowledge but I can't recall having read it anywhere or heard mention of this little trick: you can access the FULL version or ACR through Adobe Bridge! Deep joy! Bridge is used as the library function in the Mac version of Elements as opposed to the Organize program, which is used in Windows versions. 


It's simple to access, too. When you're organising your library in Bridge simply select the RAW image you want to process and click on the icon on the toolbar (top row of icons) that looks like a lens diaphragm, which is second from the right, and the full version of ACR 5 will open. You can also open JPEGs, TIFFs and other supported file formats in ACR 5 in this way.


So, if you're a Mac user and running Elements 8 with Bridge you get the real bonus of the full ACR program. Hurrah!


Just another great benefit of being a Mac zealot...