And the latest iteration of Lightroom - version 3 - is now ready for purchase.

Take a look at this - frankly - amazing preview of Photoshop CS5's content aware touch up tool. The intelligence of it is pretty unbelievable. Yes, I've spent many hours making huge macro edits like that and felt justifiably proud of the result but also paid for that effort with a bunged up mouse hand. Wow.

Thanks both Mikes for sending me this.

Now here's an interesting iPhone app for location scouting. It's an iPhone app that lets you preview framing with your iPhone but with crop marks for the various lens and back configurations you might have.

From The Luminous Landscape.

Today, I will be evaluating more scanner software in order to see if I can get more out of my Canoscan 8400F. I'll begin by installing and trying Hamrick Software's Vuescan.

Well, that was easy. Vuescan didn't detect my scanner.

Next: Silverfast.

Foiled again: No XP64 compatible version.

Oh well, time to install Win7.

YVR with Urban Acid Photoshop Action
Taken with the Canon 100-400mm L

I came across a neat Photoshop action that allows you to tweak your image so that it has a cross-processed and somewhat faded look. The Urban Acid action has a small community of people who use it -- it's useful for editorial, funky party shots and some extraordinary street portraits. Since I converted to Lightroom I haven't done a lot of Photoshop work. Lightroom is just too easy. Nevertheless, for some heavy duty tweaking Photoshop is still the king. Today the maker of Urban Acid produced a Lightroom preset that attempts to match the action. It's nice but it really doesn't give you the same amount of control. The photo at the top was done with the action. What I like about the action is that it gives you an additional layer to mute the colors, which I thought was the special feature of Urban Acid. Lightroom just doesn't have that control.

Pacific Spirit 3: Taken in the UBC Endowment Lands

copyright © 2007 Keith Loh

Today at work I was asked to use one of my nature photos for a personal card to a company contact. I was happy to do this, however, the one they wanted was in the 'original size' stored on Flickr. This is not the true original size, it is 853 x 1280 pixels versus 2236x3504 of the output jpeg coming straight from Adobe Lightroom, a file that sits on a hard drive on my home computer too far away for me to get.