Product reviews, tips and more for photographers and Youtube producers
Affinity Designer for iPad is the much anticipated competitor of Adobe Illustrator on the iPad. It’s a well-designed port from Designer on the Mac in terms of power and capabilities, and of integration with the iOS environment.
Codex creates digital production workflow tools for independent films, motion pictures, commercials, and TV productions. Within some 30 days after NAB, it will be shipping ColorSynth, a layered colour grading plug-in the Indie market can afford, and Keys, a control surface priced equally affordable.
Luminar 2018 has new correction filters powered by artificial intelligence, it's faster than the previous version, it has a dedicated RAW development module and in 2018 Macphun (soon to be renamed to Skylum Software) plans to release a full-blown digital asset management (DAM) platform. Of course, there are also new features, such as the intelligent …
DxO, the well known French developer of DxO Optics Pro and the force behind DxOMark, plans to continue development of the Nik Collection, with the current version to remain available for free on DxO’s dedicated website, while a new version is planned for mid-2018. The first results of the acquisition are the inclusion of Nik’s U Point local adjustments solution, in addition to a new Repair tool and improved DxO Lens Sharpness technology. As a result, DxO Optics Pro also gets a new name — DxO PhotoLab — and is expected to be setting a new standard in RAW processing for pro and enthusiast photographers.
Turning Final Cut Pro X into a grading application a la Da Vinci Resolve is what Chromatic, CoreMelt's latest plugin sets out to do. It succeeds pretty well by cramming a lot of functionality into this full-blown colour grading solution. It's the only plugin that delivers the ability to select colour ranges right in the clip viewer, but to appreciate its power to the fullest, a lowly iMac such as mine won’t do.
Europe is home to some pretty innovative developers. In Slovenia, Lumulabs is a small operation that developed the Lumu Power light meter, a Kickstarter success that started well over a year ago and which successfully ended in June with the first shipment of the finished devices. The Lumu Power light meter is a hardware sensor combined with an iOS app. It has both a fast-response silicon photo diode and true colour sensor in a package the size of a big marble.
Another year, another release of Corel Painter. The new version is packed with new features that guarantee jaw dropping awesomeness. There just seems no limit to Corel’s ambition to develop an application that is meant to create digital art that looks like the real thing. Combined with the newest Wacom Intuos Pro and its amazing natural feel, Painter 2018 is for digital artists to drool over.
Most users in the creative industry know they should regularly calibrate and profile their monitor for colour-critical work, but there’s more to colour accuracy than keeping your monitor in shape colour-wise. If you’re going to be printing or projecting your photos, art or videos, you’d better calibrate the output equipment as well. In fact, if you want to be absolutely certain colours will be accurately rendered from input to output, you will need to calibrate — or at least profile — cameras, scanners, monitors, printers and projectors. There’s only one affordable option that is accurate enough: the Red Dot Award winning X-Rite i1Pro 2 and I had the chance to test the Photo version.
Light meters are expensive but you’re bound to have an iPhone or iPad. What has one to do with the other? Simply this: some people develop cheap light meter apps and the nec plus ultra of those apps must be Cine Meter II by Adam Wilt. I’ve tested Cine Meter II as a reflective and an incident meter.
Palette, a smal Australian company of enthusiasts, develops the Cube Portable Color Digitizer, a small, white cube-shaped scanner that stores up to 20 colours in its internal memory and helps designers and artists find matching colours. A smartphone/tablet app and/or macOS/Windows desktop app complete the offering.
