oVan's View

Another sloop – probably lost
On the acid lakes
Of life and success

That little dinghy
Long gone – from my mind
I have to confess

The surface is clear
All wrinkles are gone
But in my head – it's still a mess

Copyright © Olivier Vanbiervliet
90714.0522
@Boka3

Wow! What can we say... If you've been using an Intuos3 tablet from Wacom, you'd probably wonder how they can improve on that. Wonder no more, because Intuos' 4th generation tablet is here.

Some of the highlights of the new Wacom Intuos4 tablets:

• Comes in 4 sizes: Intuos4 Small (PTK-440), Intuos4 Medium (PTK-640), Intuos4 Large (PTK-840), Intuos4 XL (PTK-1240).
  
• New Wacom Tip Sensor with near-zero starting pressure (only 1 gram of pressure needed).
• Due to the improved tip sensor, Intuos4 has now 2048 Levels of pressure sensitivity (twice that of Intuos3). Additionally, the tip is more reliable for long usage under constant pressure.
• Fantastic new ExpressKeys located at one side of the tablet. You can rotate the tablet 180°, making it really an ambidextrous device. The Intuos4 Small has 6 ExpressKeys, and the Medium, Large, and XL sizes have 8 ExpressKeys with an illuminated display indicating the current function, so you don't need to guess anymore.
• There's finally an improvement to the slider strip: a whole new Speed Ring allows you to zoom, scroll, change brush size, rotate the canvas and more. Both the ExpressKeys and the SpeedRing have application specific configuration.
• As with every new Intuos line, there is a new 5 button mouse that tracks motion both by direction and orientation of the mouse for ultra-smooth movement of the cursor.
• And finally, the new pen stand can be opened and holds all your favorite brush tips!

Discover all this on the Wacom site, like bonus software, special upgrades, and accessories. There's also a Wacom micro-site dedicated to the new Intuos4: http://intuos.wacom.com/

Datacolor, known for the Spyder monitor and projector calibration devices, has created SpyderCube, a revolutionary white balance tool. From what I see, this is so much more than your typical white balance grey card like WhiBal. At a suggest list price of $59, this looks like a real winner to me!

Here's a demonstration video on using the interesting new Datacolor SpyderCube in Lightroom and Photoshop.

You can find detailed info on the SpyderCube here.

What a great post Zack Arias made! Every wednesday it's "Guest Blog Wednesday" on Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider Blog. Instead of typical "top 10 photoshop tips" and similar posts, Zack posted a video.

Here's the link: It’s “Guest Blog Wednesday” featuring Zack Arias!

Measuring by the truckload of comments posted, people really appreciated the message in the video. I sure did, and I hope you do too.

Here's another link to a post by Zack himself, about this video:
Transform :: A short film for ScottKelby.com

Enjoy!

It goes quick nowadays. We've only settled on Lightroom version 2.1 recently, and now Photoshop Lightroom 2.2 and Camera Raw 5.2 are already available on the Adobe website. (Download: Mac, Win) 

New camera support:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark II
• Canon PowerShot G10
• Panasonic DMC-G1**
• Panasonic DMC-FX150**
• Panasonic DMC-FZ28**
• Panasonic DMC-LX3**
• Leica D-LUX 4**

Fixed bugs in Lightroom 2.2:

• Images rendered from the Slideshow export process produced a jagged effect on hard edges relative to the quality of normal JPEG export
• Increased the number of characters allowed in Web gallery labels beyond 150 characters
• Catalogs with hundreds of root (top level) folders caused very slow launch times
• Drag and drop to move a subfolder to a different folder showed the incorrect photos in the grid
• Print Sharpening produced edge artifacts in certain conditions
• Density defaulted to 100 percent for initial stroke regardless of position of slider
• The  Adjustment brush created blocky, straight edges to brush strokes under certain conditions
• Lightroom could become unresponsive when using the graduated filter under certain conditions
• It was possible to lose the ability to edit an adjustment brush setting after applying a graduated filter with hidden pins
• Turning auto-mask on produced a lag in Lightroom performance in when applying the adjustment brush
• Print to JPEG functionality produced a low resolution image when printing photos with panorama aspect ratios
• Extended characters in a folder name caused Edit in Photoshop functionality to fail
• Smart collection did not respond to changes in custom metadata
• Enabling auto-mask produced a lag in performance in when applying the local adjustment brush

Enhancements in Lightroom 2.2:

• Camera profiles are now available in the Calibration panel in the Develop module.  These profiles are designed to provide different interpretations of raw capture.

Panorama Series: Wildenburg Here are two totally different infrared panoramas taken in Wildenburg today: 

IR Pano: Flooded Fields

 (Click image to zoom)

IR Pano: Autumn Forest

 (Click image to zoom)

Equipment used: Sony V3 with IR R72 and NDx8 filters, Manfrotto 190x tripod with 322RC2 head - Software: Kolor AP Pro 1..4.2, and Lightroom 2.1.

Adobe has released Photoshop Lightroom 2.1 (Win, Mac), Camera Raw 5.1 (Win, Mac) and an updated DNG converter with ACR included (Win, Mac).

These updates include new RAW support for these cameras:

• Canon 1000D (Digital Rebel XS/EOS Kiss F)
• Canon 50D
• Fuji FinePix IS Pro
• Kodak EasyShare Kodak Z1015 IS
• Leaf AFi II 6
• Leaf AFi II 7
• Leaf Aptus II 6
• Leaf Aptus II 7
• Nikon D700
• Nikon D90
• Nikon Coolpix P6000
• Olympus SP-565 UZ Pentax K2000 (K-m)
• Sigma DP1
• Sony A900

Lightroom 2.1 also includes a number of fixes for issues that were introduced with the Lightroom 2.0 release:

Stability and High Severity Bugs - Fixed

1. Lightroom could crash when switching to or from the web module on Windows Vista 64.
2. Selecting a custom camera profile or using auto-white balance could cause a spinning ball.
3. Preference files pointing to missing catalogs could prevent Lightroom from progressing past the registration dialog.
4. Errors could occur when attempting to create a virtual copy with a computer that has a processor that is not SSE2 enabled. (This is a method of delivering instructions to the processor which was introduced with the Pentium 4 processor. It should not have affected a significant number of modern machines.)
5. Modal dialogs could try to appear on a disabled second monitor, causing Lightroom to appear hung or unresponsive.
6. When a DNG file was selected for export to a derivative TIFF file and it is added to the catalog at export there was a possibility that one of the files could be treated as a sidecar within Lightroom such that deleting one file deletes both.

Performance Bugs - Fixed

1. Attempting to import a large number of images that already exist within the Lightroom catalog could cause significant performance delays.
2. The image counts that appear next to each folder could appear to populate slowly.
3. Lightroom scanned the calibration profile directory excessively when switching collections.
4. The 'three dot' indicator in the grid view persisted longer than necessary.
5. The Mac 64-bit version did not have SSE2 optimization, causing reduced rendering speeds.
6. Memory leaks in the Library and Develop modules decreased Lightroom performance.
7. Applying keywords via presets or on import could greatly decrease import performance.
8. Folder synchronizing could experience significant performance decreases.

Keywords and Metadata - Fixed

1. Keywords from Lightroom 1.4 were not included on image export by default. (Please note that catalogs upgraded from Lightroom 1.4 using Lightroom 2.1 will not have this issue, but catalogs upgraded from 1.4 using 2.0 will still need to use the script posted at our technical support site at: http://www.adobe.com/go/kb405074.) 
2. Lightroom stopped rendering previews prior to completion on files with metadata changes applied by other applications. 
3. The "Any Searchable Field" search option did not find caption text.

Photoshop Interop - Fixed

1. Edit in Photoshop did not work correctly or at all for some customers.
2. Copyright Status and Info URL fields were not transferred when a file was created from Lightroom for use in Photoshop.
3. XMP metadata from the IDimager application was not carried over during an Edit in Photoshop operation.
4. Files with an ampersand in the file name were not added back to the Lightroom Library after an Edit in Photoshop session.
5. Choosing to Edit in Photoshop from a folder with an apostrophe in the name would cause the feature to fail.
6. Certain NEF files were rotated incorrectly when opened into Photoshop from Lightroom.

Miscellaneous Troubling Items - Fixed

1. Re-importing missing photos from an exported catalog could ignore the setting 'preserve old settings as virtual copy.'
2. Choosing to undo a slider adjustment in Lightroom on Windows would cause two undo steps to occur if the slider was still under active mouse selection.
3. Lights Out mode could flicker on Windows when the detail panel was selected in the Develop module.
4. The crop aspect ratio could revert to the last selected ratio even when it had been reset to original.
5. The spot tool might not switch from clone to healing mode upon request if the brush was above a certain size.
6. Certain ORF files were not read by Lightroom.
7. During import and conversion to DNG, file renaming could use the operating system's date stamp rather than the file’s EXIF date.
8. Panoramic images printed with a portrait layout and utilizing the auto layout functionality would cause images to print at a low resolution

Here's my poem Ochtendstorm seen through the eyes of Wordle:

Click image to zoom

Infrared Mill – One of the few working wind mills in Brugge, in a twilight atmosphere. Sony V3, R72 IR and stacked ND4 + ND8 filters. Post-processing done with Lightroom 2.0.