Photography: Mont Sutton Québec

 We decided on a day trip to Mont Sutton to leaf peek on a Friday morning recently. When we got there is was cloudy and the clouds were obscuring most of the mountain. Nevertheless, we walked up the mountain on the ski trails with the pup. The path was covered with leaves and mud and VERY slippery. Honesty, if it had rained we would have be trapped on the mountain. We made it to the top and saw... nothing - you couldn't see anything but fog. I was taking photos along the way up and down and figured I might get a couple of interesting shots I would want to keep. In the end I had a good 70 finished shots! I am very happy with a good number of them as they certainly fall right into my "mysterious/creepy" aesthetic. One thing I did different was to "denoise" the images to take out the grain. Normally foggy shots have a lot of grain and I think over the years that has become the way we process these sort of shots. I realized in real life the dog made things much smoother looking, not grainy and I am very happy with these results! 

Software desires for 2023

 I don’t actually expect much of this list to really happen anytime soon. But it’s good to make lists of things you need and see what happens over time, isn’t it? 

MAC OS

Bugs: Fix the really annoying I cloud terms and conditions bug! It keeps popping up at a warning 100 times a day and agreeing to the terms does nothing to stop that. 

The window to update the stuff on my iPod touch keeps popping up at random times during the day.

Both of these bugs stop my work to a halt when they happen and break my concentration and workflow. 

Bring back: Scheduling! And make it more robust! Let me schedule on a real calendar timetable not just open and close at certain times. Week days, vacations, interruptions and I have to reset the schedule… well when I could schedule! 

Podcasts: Why on planet earth is there no way to make a playlist yet? I use my iPod touch everyday and especially in summer when biking, walking long distances but I can’t make a play list. I have to stop after each podcast and pick another or it randomly picks one I already listened to or isn’t "Online" even though I only keep episodes I have downloaded and haven’t listened to on the device. It’s easy making a playlist for songs so what is going on? Why does the device say something is downloaded but when I get a certain distance from my house it suddenly not available because there is no internet connection? There shouldn’t need to be one! 

iPad IOS

Handle fonts like they are handled on the desktop! Now we can do page layout and professional design on an iPad, we need access to all the fonts we can for making decisions about projects. Allow plugins! Being able to use the NIK or Topaz plugins on Affinity Photo would be a game changer. 

Affinity products:

I haven’t had the crashes and issues I’ve read about online and many of those seem Windows related for now. That doesn’t mean I hope some improvements are not on the way.

Overall: When I hide a program and unhide it, the program opens but no windows do, I have select one from a list and then they all open. This should be automatic and is a known bug, I think. 

Publisher on iPad: I hope it gets all the features the desktop does soon. The Book function is of interest to me but the power duplication and grid feature would be nice as well. 

Designer: The long sought after vector trace feature. A spiral drawing tool would be cool.

Photo: I would love better compatibility with Topaz plugins - mainly to resize images. This is possible on photoshop and the programming in Photo restricts it. Better integration with NIK and DXO plugins would be nice as well. Overall they work great together but I would like the Viewport app/plugin to work in Photo and be able to send a series of bracketed photos directly to HDR Efex Pro. 

Affinity iPad Apps: being able to save export preferences for difference situations. I need different, specialized setups for different printers as an example and I to set them all from scratch when using the iPad. 

A "DAM" from Affinity: This is another long proposed app I would love to see implemented. Most other DAM (digital asset managers) do not show Affinity previews or allow for any actions to be taken like selecting series of bracketed photos and opening them as an HDR in Photo.

Topaz Labs 

An iPad version of Topaz photo AI! It would really make it more possible to do ALL the work on the iPad not have to go to the desktop to finish up when returning from a trip. 

Topaz Photo AI and DXO Photolab 6 (with DXO Viewpoint 4)

 Topaz Labs which makes the apps I use for denoising, sharpening and enlarging photos released a new product which, a nice surprise, was considered included with the apps I already had so I got to download it for free. It's basically a more automatic and less powerful version of the other apps rolled into one. 

I would say it's a great product, it's easy and does pretty much what you need for most photography issues that are not extreme in nature. You can quickly take away pixel noise, sharpen the image and enlarge it in one place instead of three apps. The other software isn 't useless, it's more powerful and when you have a very low light situation or and old photo that is too small to use or too blurry it can make them relevant again for print or other work. If you don't have the other products, this would be a good way to get the basic benefits of Topaz AI without spending a lot of money or taking up space on a laptop. 

DXO Photolab is my "Lightroom" replacement or to be honest, my Adobe Bridge replacement since I never used Lightroom. It's limited compared to the Adobe products in how many formats it can handle... basically just JPG, RAW and Tif and I think this new version has some ability to open video but I haven't looked into that yet. Version 6 sees an update the denoise function which was already maybe the best out there. I also added the DXO Viewpoint add-on which integrates itself  into the normal functions of Photolab and can be opened as a stand alone. The update price, in CAD, was 150$ and money not well spent. 

It's not the the software hasn't improved or that Viewpoint is't great to have integrated directly into the workflow. The problem is the updates are mostly minor and Viewpoint is pretty much identical to the NIK plugin that does the same thing, in the same way but only as a standalone app. I should have know better since the last couple of NIK updates were not worth the price either. 

If you don't have any of the DXO/NIK products I highly recommend them but the updates, while arriving often, are not anything to pay more for. The NIK plug-ins are just updated to the new interface, a fantastic interface, but you are paying for a full upgrade for only a couple of them and then again a year later for a couple more. That should have been done in one paid update to be worthwhile. 

IN USE all this stuff is great.The photo above was taken on my morning ride on my far from great iPod touch phone. I was able to improve it to the point it could have been taken with my DSLR, something ithtthat I do not always have with me on rides.