19 December 2016

Behemoth site update



I finally got the nerve to dump Dreamweaver and bought Sparkle, which I wrote about earlier this year. I don't do much internet design anymore so it's mostly just my own site and a couple others I maintain. I thought it would take weeks to months to get it right, like a Dreamweaver reboot would have but it honestly only took a day to work out most of it. After a few weeks I went back and changed a few things after thinking harder about some of the features.

Also, I added my dew doc, Village Gai, my new animation Cool Air and a couple of the science shorts I do for Dr. Christopher labor at Mouton No More. I updated my CVs too so its all up to date for 2017.

08 December 2016

Affinity Photo 1.5

As promised, Affinity has released a HUGE update to their photo app and it's pretty amazing over all.  Already giving Photoshop a run for it's money, this version fills in many gaps and requests from users and really puts it level with and in some cases above Photoshop now in terms of usability and useful features.

Is it perfect? No at all. What it is is a robust, professional photo editing app that has most of what any pro might need. I really like the new stacking features and the focus stacking outshines Photoshop in my opinion  easily. Where it needs work is the HDR persona. I am an avid user of the NIK?Google suite of plugins, especially HDR Pro and that is still king for my work in HDR. It's hard to even get similar looks for comparing the two with the same images. One feature all the NIK/Google plugins have is the pin selection tool which is put genius for selecting areas to affect changes to. I don't know why no one else has taken this approach because I would use it for just about everything. The pugs for the most work well in Affinity Photo, the improvement being part of this update so I was hoping i could import an HDR and then tone it using HDR Pro... didn't really work well. It looked fine in HDR Pro but didn't import back into Affinity photo. Maybe this is something that will be addressed in  the next update (which come fairly often).

Right now the price is lower so I would say buy it if you don't have it already. Updates are free until they get to version 2.0 I think and with Adobe's monthly rip off scam and price, getting this now is a no brainer.

A 4 image focus merge taken with natural light:



HDR with Affinity Photo:



Similar shot, taken minutes apart with HDR Pro.
I really couldn't get them much closer. I had better luck using HDR pro in Affinity Photo with just one RAW file.




03 December 2016

Cool Air


Cool Air from Vincent-louis Apruzzese on Vimeo.

My third and maybe last Lovecraft animation, at least for a while unless I start getting paid to do them. I want to do something funny next!

Final Cut Pro 10.3.1, Motion 5/3, Affinity Designer 1.5

I am still waiting for some software to come out (Affinity Photo 1.5, Obduction, X-particles potential update) but that doesn’t mean nothing has been updated. 













Apple did a huge update to Final Cut X that as full of good stuff overall. The autoscrolling timeline still isn’t  there… I don’t get it it’s in all their other software even iMovie. The new layout is confusing at first but as I get used to it it’s makes more sense. I like the preset layouts especially over two monitors. I have found it more stable and faster on my system at least. The new audio tools were really needed but finding my sound effects from external files is little screwy now and needs to be sorted out. 



Motion also got an update. Well as much an update as it ever gets. It’s a good software that merits a lot more love than Apple gives it. Basically it works better and looks like the new Final Cut X. It is in desperate need of new features, basic ones. I personally could use a vector motion blur and Z depth filter for my 3D work but I will have to wait for a Boris plugin update to get those at 200$ which is a lot to add on to a 50$ program as a plugin. 



Affinity Designer 1.5 got a large update and it’s pretty sweet. I don’t do much internet layout in it but the flexible layouts is a big improvement for that. I have been using it over Illustrator more and more for my professional design work and I'm not sorry about that in the least. I can’t recommend the Affinity products enough these days. The company is responsive, quick to fix things and open about their development. The two products released are reasonably priced, well featured and always improving.