X-Rite i1Photo Pro 2 calibrates your Mac, PC, tablet, scanner and RGB printer

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.

The Cine Meter II app is a viable light meter replacement

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 Cube Portable Color digitizer

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.

basICColor print 5: automated, high-end profiling

In addition to new profiling algorithms, basICColor’s professional profiling software basICColor print now also directly connects to basICColor catch, the measuring software. In addition, it automatically corrects measurement data, lets you load custom illuminants for spectral profiling and delivers new gamut mapping strategies for perceptual rendering intent.

Rogue Super Soft Silver and White Grid insert make for softer light effects

ExpoImaging’s Rogue brand has just been updated with four new products. The 32in Rogue 2-in-1 collapsible reflector and FlashBender 2 XL Pro Super Soft Silver are aimed at delivering softer light effects. They’re great for portraits. The white grid insert adds a nice halo effect to the light circle your 3-in-1 honeycomb grid creates. Finally, a new battery pouch helps you organise your freshly charged and drained batteries while on the go.

Pro photographer wants Capture One Pro 9 for its metadata, Color Editor and local editing features

It’s almost a tradition. Around this time of the year Phase One releases its new version of Capture One. The newest version adds some important improvements in the realm of metadata and image management. In addition, it has two new processing engines and a whole bunch of new and improved editing tools. I took Capture One Pro 9 for a ride and it remains the top photo editor. Its new cataloguing capabilities are bound to be an extra trump card, although they stay behind those of dedicated apps like Photo Mechanic 5.

Trey Ratcliff and Macphun conspire to make best HDR image processing app for the Mac

I’m sure every photographer knows Trey Ratcliff. He turned HDR photography into an art form. He helped Macphun with the development of Aurora HDR, a brand-new HDR (High Dynamic Range) powerhouse.

Add visual interest to images and video with Tiffen Dfx 4 digital filters

Tiffen is renown for their physical filters and gels, but they also have a nice portfolio of digital products. I tested the complete Tiffen Dfx 4 digital filter suite for video and photo. The complete Dfx 4 package comes as a stand-alone app and plug-in for Adobe, Apple and Avid NLEs, and for Adobe’s image editing apps as well as Apple’s Aperture. It is the only plug-in package that replicates Tiffen optical filtering, Rosco and Gam gobos and gels, and now also hundreds of photographic film stocks. It is a quite complete toolkit for photographers and cinematographers alike.

Do you learn from photography “gurus” on the internet or from real masters?

Who taught you photography? Are you an autodidact? In that case you are vulnerable to a disease that exists only on the digital waves of the Internet. It’s called amateurs teaching amateurs and it leads to photography that is mediocre at best.

Check and correct Auto-Focus errors with LensAlign and FocusTune 4

Are you one hundred percent sure the Auto-Focus of your expensive lens/body is accurate? No improvement possible? I was surprised to find the opposite. Heck, I was surprised to see my expensive Zeiss Variogon 24-70 deviate from 100% sharpness even when I'm manually focussing. I wouldn't have known without the tools I'm reviewing today: LensAlign and FocusTune 4 from Michael Tapes Design. The combination of these tools allows you to check and correct for all types of focus errors. To benefit from it, you'll need a camera that at the very least has a lens you can focus. This includes dSLRs, system cameras, and video cameras capable of still images even.