Blog Post #82

Catching up

It’s been a few weeks now since I posted on my photography blog so I thought it was time for me to catch up with what has been going on. I haven’t been sitting on my thumbs and doing nothing, far from it, but I must admit I haven’t been taking many photos lately. The poor weather we are having here in our UK "Summer” has put me off a bit but as I mentioned in a previous blog, there is a lot more to photography than just taking photos. I remember back in my film and darkroom days I would disappear for hours making prints and developing films. There was also the re-touching and mounting etc. In today’s digital age it is no different and I tend to spend hours at the iMac post-processing both new and older work. I love doing this every bit as much as the hours I spent in the darkroom.

New Book/Zine?

One of the things I have been working on is the idea of producing a new book/zine. If you know my past publications ( apart from the Brexit zine ), all the others contain photos from my back catalogue of black and white negative work. I am now considering doing a book/zine of more contemporary photos that I have taken across Glasgow in recent years. I am also planning to produce this book using colour images as opposed to my usual black and white style.

To date I have identified about 40 images for inclusion in the publication but would like to have about 42 so work continues going over my photo catalogue in Adobe Lightroom. In the past when I have published books I have used a company called Blurb. I have found the quality to be excellent but recently they have become very expensive, especially on postage. I am therefore considering giving CEWE a ago. I spoke with them at the last Photography Show in the NEC and the examples they displayed look every bit as good as Blurb. CEWE are UK based and I believe Blurb are based in the Netherlands so the cost issue may be down to Brexit, I don’t know. When I create a publication I usually get a hard-backed book done for myself and then use Mixam for zine production. I will keep you posted on the blog on how this is progressing over the coming months.

What are Adobe up to?

There has been a lot of chatter on-line about Adobe announcing a change to its Terms of Use (TOU). They recently changed the TOU to include references to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and things soon kicked off with allegations that they were going to use your photos to train their generative AI models for use in applications like Photoshop and Lightroom. People were talking about ditching Adobe, removing all of their work from Adobe cloud servers and other draconian measures to ensure Adobe couldn’t use their images. The conspiracies seemed to flourish as the days went on and Adobe had to come out and clarify their TOU change and confirm no images would be used to train their AI models and that nothing really had changed. People remained suspicious though. I don’t claim to know all of the ins and outs of the situation but it has concerned a lot of people which tells me there is cause for questioning their motives. In the meantime there is a way to stop Adobe accessing your photos. This week Anthony Morganti published a very short YouTube video on the subject of how to block Adobe from accessing your work and it can be found HERE

Topaz Photo AI Upgrade

A couple of years ago I bought a licence for Topaz Labs Photo AI to see how good it was and how I could use it in my digital image post-production workflow. There are a number of AI features now in Photoshop and Lightroom but Photo AI is a product that can be use as stand alone or as a plug-in for Ps and Lr. I was initially impressed and mainly used the sharpen and the de-noise features. I wasn’t impressed with the face recovery feature as it tended to make faces look too filtered and skin tones look too smooth and perfect. I was interested therefore when they launched the Photo AI version 3 recently, how much better would it be? I decided to go for the upgrade and to date I am impressed with its performance. To me it appears to be faster than previous versions and the models and algorithms they use seem to be a lot better.

Take this photo below for example. This is a tight crop on part of a photo I took whilst walking along. On the left is the as-shot image straight out of the camera. As you can see the girl is way out of focus. The one on the right has been processed in Photo AI V3 using the de-noise and sharpen features. The sharpen model selected was lens blur. I know it’s not perfect and needs some refinement but it is a whole lot better than the as shot version.

Many photographers will say they would never use AI, but the thing is, you really can’t avoid it these days if you are using post-processing software. I would never use AI for deceitful manipulation like creating the “photo” or removing/adding people for spite etc. I will continue to use tools like Photo AI to help me but not to replace me in the post-processing activity.

Fujifilm Updates

At the recent Fujikina event where Fuji announce new products etc., they announced a number of new cameras including the X-T50. Normally a new camera announcement would arouse my interest but I felt nothing this time. Maybe it is because I am entirely happy with my X-T5 and don’t need any more pixels or video features? Which reminds me, they just released a range of firmware updates for the X-T5 and some lenses so I need to get on to that and get the updates done.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and thank you for reading it. If you want to comment on this blog post please do so below or you can contact me by using the “Contact Me” facility in the website header.

Pete