Black Diamond Productions

That’s the rule I have been trying to live by lately…

And you get to take photos of the reason you sat in traffic for an hour..

How a person can do this in stop and go traffic is beyond me…

Link to Full Size

From Beginning to End:

Well it’s time to go back to real work it seems – Photography will stand aside for the job that pays the larger bills..

I guess the picture fits the general mood… News will get posted over the next few weeks and big info about our upcoming podcast…

So while chatting with a fellow photographer today and I give him full credit for the idea for this post, I was showing him the latest  feature Adobe will be releasing in CS5 – Content Aware Fill. Go to 2:40 and watch that demo:

There sure were allot of oooo’s  and ah’s in the audience – I assume none of them were thinking about the possible consequences.

So how does this help photographers – Well it helps greatly by allowing us to fix massive mistakes & possibly save huge jobs. But the real question is what happens when Adobe empowers editors with the ability to remove anything easily from an image? It is really a problem we have daily and that is how to mark or watermark your images to hopefully maintain some kind of control over the images and the content you created. This incredible tool like many things great in our world can easily be used for evil.

I believe we all know that we as photographers should not impede the creation of such great time saving tools but on the flip side i ask Adobe: Can we please have a good way to secure our content when tools like this are released?

Adobe has very smart people working for them, they have and to this day create great products, now its time to make a reliable, secure way for photographers to lock down their images. We have asked for it for years and with the introduction of  Content Aware Fill it’s time to see some better options.

In diving a bit deeper into this topic it does seems Adobe is working on solutions as I could only image they would be, this article: http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/phscs2ip_digintegr.pdf and a few others show the high level of concern we all have but in the end we still have no real tools available to secure images.

Will any of these unknown security tools solve the problem, doubtful. But just like with “The Club” on your car steering wheel the harder we can make it the better.

The Fractalius plugin creates unusual, eccentric artworks in a single step. The effects are based on extraction of so-called hidden fractal texture of an image. You can also simulate various types of exotic lightings and high realistic pencil sketches.

This is definitely one of the more fun plugins for photoshop – and I even paid for it because the results can be so cool and fun to play with… Sometimes a plugin should just really mess with pixels and this one does just that.

No details of what has changed yet – but there seems to have been a few fixes lately:

Version 2.12, July 2009

• No Changes listed yet

Version 2.11, 4th July 2009

• The export was being disabled unnecessarily when the watermark height field was empty, even though watermark resizing option was not turned on.

Version 2.00, 2th July 2009

• New JPEG compression option will compress JPEGs to the highest quality that’ll be smaller than the requested file size.
• Text annotations can now include accented characters and other such things.
• Unnecessary punctuation resulting from empty tokens in a text annotation is now removed.
• Text can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so that it’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Watermarks can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so they’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Estoteric errors that resulted from leaving width and height fields blank are now trapped.

For those that use lightroom here are the details of this great export plugin – actually something worth donating money to the author for:

LR2/Mogrify is a Lightroom 2 post-process plug-in that can embellish your images as they are exported from Lightroom. It’s flexible interface allows you to add borders, watermarks and text annotations to your images.

It’s also capable of exporting optimum JPEG images that are no larger than your requested size; great for uploading to web sites that limit the file size.

LR2/Mogrify uses ImageMagick to process the images. ImageMagick is a collection of powerful, freeware command line utilities for processing images.

In contrast to the original LR/Mogrify for Lightroom 1.3 and above, LR2/Mogrify is implemented as a "post-process" plug-in (new to Lightroom 2.0), allowing it to work in tandem with any export plug-in. This allows you to process your images using LR2/Mogrify and still have them sent to your final destination using the export plug-in of your choice.

LR/Mogrify and LR2/Mogrify are donationware plug-ins and are distributed via the Photograper’s Toolbox. The trial version limits the number of images that can be exported in one go to ten. Donating towards one of the projects removes this restriction and will give you a serial number that works with both.

You may also be interested in my LR/Enfuse plug-in to blend multiple exposures together.