Our good friend, Whitey Bluestein, is an avid photographer, shooting (up until recently anyway) with a Nikon D300 D-SLR, a Canon G10, a Blackberry and an iPhone. He is also a well-regarded strategic advisor to companies in the mobile application and services area and blogger on the mobile space. You can check out his blog and learn more about Whitey here. We hope he will grace us with some of his insights on the mobile arena and issues affecting the iPhone.
He sent us this iPhone picture he shot of the Sausalito marina at sunset. I figured I would use our sponsor’s software, Aurora, to try and do some quick edits. It literally took me less than 2 minutes to apply some edits to the contrast, lighting, color richness and exposure to get the ‘after’ image. I think you’ll agree that these edits make the picture even better.
Original Image:
And here’s the image after the quick touch-up in Aurora:
One reason why I’m excited to have LightCrafts as our sponsor (see also our on-going contest!) for this month: I’ve been using LightZone in my own workflow for almost two years, often to relight my panorama images.
Just look at the panorama below: Sunrise in Bothin Marsh in December 2008. While setting up, there was a guy riding his bike on the bike path. I love to have some action in my panos, so I did not want to miss the opportunity. I snapped out a quick pano with the guy being in the first frame. Unfortunately, since the setup was not finished, I ended up with the image sequence being underexposed. What to do?
Rather than trying to fix this in Adobe Camera Raw one image at a time, I stitched the pano and used LightZone to relight the image, with very good results. That’s why I keep using it!
Fixing an underexposed panorama in LightZone via its Relight function is very easy. Right image is after stitching the panorama in Photoshop. Left image is after relighting in LightZone without any other adjustments.
We are very excited to announce that LightCrafts is sponsoring iPhonePhotoVideo.com during the month of August!
Why are we excited? I have been using LightZone, their photo editor for professional and serious hobby photographers, as part of my workflow for almost 2 years. While it has not replaced Photoshop as my everyday editor, I use it frequently for its excellent relighting capability on many of my images. Often, I also use Styles for applying certain image effects, such as high contrast or black&white.
Great News! Lightzone is now 20% off - see above for the discount code
If you are a more consumer-oriented photographer, you don’t need to feel left out. We have been a fan of LightCraft’s Aurora consumer photo editor ever since we first got our hands on it during its beta test. So give it a try!
20% off on Aurora, too - see above for the discount code
All discount codes are good through the end of August. So download your eval copy of Aurora or LightZone today!
Friends often ask me about what tools they should use for editing and managing their iPhone and point&shoot photos on Windows. Here’s what I typically tell them:
If you try out just one free tool, this is the one. Irfanview is the best free image viewing tool on Windows. Viewing images, printing, converting them between different formats, slide shows, minor adjustments, thumbnails, image organizing, screen grabs – all of these can be done fast and easily. There’s hardly an image format that is not supported by Irfanview. Available in many languages. It’s not an image editor, though. For that, you should check out…
I’ve been a fan of Light Crafts’ high-end LightZone editor due to its best-in-class relight tool. Aurora is their consumer photo editor which features relighting and much more in a very intuitive user interface. Rather than using sliders, curves or brushes, Aurora simply offers you to pick the best looking image from a series of 5 images that have the desired effect applied at various strengths. I like the approach for its elegant and very fast photo adjustments. In addition, Aurora handles everything from importing images to organizing, printing and uploading them to popular social networks. If I were to use a consumer photo editor, Aurora would be it. It’s a bargain at $19.95.
Simply pick whichever of the 5 images on the top you like best to apply the desired effect
Do you need more than Aurora offers? Not ready to shell out hundreds of dollars for Adobe Photoshop, but want Photoshop-like functionality, so you are able to mask and do pin-point adjustments even on a per-pixel basis? Try GIMP, an open-source image editor. While its functionality is short of Photoshop’s, it is the best free Photoshop-style editor I’ve encountered so far. Plus, it’s available not only on Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix. It would be my image editor of choice, if I would go the free route!
Editing in Gimp almost feels like editing in Photoshop
What other Windows photo editors, viewers and management tools do you use and recommend?
