Road Trip! Springfield to Chicago

After the disappointing dinner and visit to the closed mosque, Hana and I took our time waking up.

Sunrise over downtown Springfield made for some kinda nice pictures, maybe.

So I took advantage and shot with almost everything I had. Above, the D7000 and 24mm f/2.8 ai, with a circular polarizer  that I didn’t really know what to do with on the front.

Here, the iPhone 5 and Hipstamatic, with Jane lens and GS-0 film.

 

And here, the FG and 50mm 1.8 E Series and Kenmore 100 film.

Continue reading “Road Trip! Springfield to Chicago”

Road Trip!: Eureka to Springfield

After the easy trip to Arkansas and pleasant visit with Mom and other family, Hana and I headed out to Springfield, IL to visit an old friend and former professor and check out where I did my undergraduate work. Continue reading “Road Trip!: Eureka to Springfield”

Road Trip! – Dallas to Eureka

August 29 marked 2 years since the darling, adorable Hanabibti and I married, and to celebrate, we took a road trip: Dallas to Eureka Springs, AR, where we stayed the night at Mom’s; Eureka Springs to Springfield, IL to meet up with an old friend and professor; Springfield to Chicago for 3 nights to see some sights and meet up with another old friend; Chicago to Memphis for a night; then Memphis back to Dallas. It was a load of driving, but loads of good times too, Alhamdulillah.

I took way too many pictures, and didn’t spend any time on the computer, so it’s taken me awhile to get through them all. And in true James fashion, I plan to share pictures one day at a time. Today, it’s all about getting from Dallas to Eureka Springs. Continue reading “Road Trip! – Dallas to Eureka”

Digital Darkroom Software Review: Review

Before I get started, a disclaimer:

NO piece of software is going to make you a better photographer.

Practice might. But software will not.

Go out there and shoot. You can read this later.

ProgramLightZoneAfterShot Pro 2RawTherapeedarktableLightroom CC (and Mobile), Capture One Pro, RPP, DxO Optics Pro
Platforms Available Tested: (Linux), Mac, Windows
Prices: most free, some paid
Installation: variable

And… done.

After 4 months (or is it 5 now?) of not shooting much, processing the same 30 or so pictures over and over again, and cursing at computers more than I like, I found an answer. Not the answer, perhaps, but a good answer, and one that I didn’t really expect.

So what’s the answer? Well, let’s first have a look at Ripped, Drop the main comparison image, and compare/contrast the output from the various players.

Actually, before we get too much into that, what’s the question, even?

Continue reading “Digital Darkroom Software Review: Review”

Digital Darkroom Software Review: DxO Optics Pro

Program: DxO Optics Pro (In 2017, with version 12, the name was changed to DXO PhotoLab.)
Platforms Available Tested: Mac, Windows
Prices: Essential: $129; Elite $199; add $79 for the View Point plugin to add the geometric corrections that DxO is known for; add an additional $129 for the DxO film pack… A suite of all three is available for $289 for the Elite or $189 for the Essential. Whew. (See here for differences between additions.)
Installation: usual dmg & drag to applications folder.

Much thanks to Franz Metcalf for his comment on the Capture One review and encouragement to test out DxO. Much like C1P, I had no intention to test DxO, and much like C1P, I’m glad I did.

I’ll give you my first thoughts right up front: 1) DxO is capable of rendering fine details in ways that other programs simply can’t* and 2) the omission of a flip option renders it useless to me, given that I scan film from the emulsion side and therefore require a flip to get things back right again.

If you’d like to see a bit more, including a 2 hour shoot-out between DxO and C1P, read on… Continue reading “Digital Darkroom Software Review: DxO Optics Pro”

Degradr review

Degradr is a newish was a not particularly well publicized app for iPhone by Pavel Kosenko that I ran across on his website while reading around during the RPP review.

It’s a one trick pony, to be sure, but it does a fairly nice job at its trick.

What does it do? Well, it takes shiny iPhone pics, runs them through some secret sauce, and spits out something with a more film-like color and contrast.

It’s simple, but the results are pretty good.

Here’s how it works: you use the camera part to frame and shoot a picture in native aspect ratio (4:3), 1:1, 3:2 or 16:9. From there, you go into the Degradr Darkroom, where the picture you just took shows up as a negative. Click on the picture and it goes through the secret sauce… it takes a few seconds on my (unsupported, according to the website) iPhone 5, but it works.

After processing, you can crop again, but only to fixed positions, and you can export to various sharing sites (G+, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and email, plus anything that participates in the Apple api). There’s also an option there to reprocess, but I’m not sure what it does… I saw no difference in my limited testing.

I took a bunch of screenshots, and I’m feeling a bit lazy so I’m just going to dump most of them in a slideshow… Apologies, but the titles are probably more or less self-explanatory.

Here are the originals and edit(s) from the two test shots I took around the house earlier.

And there’s a bit of a bonus: you can import from the camera roll and degradr pictures from there with relative ease. Sadly, I don’t have screenshots of the import process… it’s fairly straightforward: hit the ‘+’ button in the Darkroom, the camera roll opens, you select some pictures, and they show up as negatives in the Darkroom window, all ready to be processed.

So Degradr is a bit of limited in what it does, but I quite like the subtle results. It compresses the shadows a bit, brings down the highlights a bit, and alters the color slightly, and what you get is a picture that, to my eyes anyway, looks a bit more like a picture and a bit less like a digital file.

Degradr is free, but that free comes at a bit of a steep price: images are saved at 1000×750. You can unlock native resolution for one year for $.99, or for as long as the app works and continues being updated for $4.99. I’ll probably end up tossing Pavel (and the team, if there is one) a few bucks if I keep playing with the app and enjoying the output. Time will tell.

I’d like to see some options to change position of the crop and maybe have arbitrary values (like 7:6) and unconstrained crop, and I’d like to see some options for film stocks, maybe, or film styles, or some difference between processed and reprocessed. According to the Degradr blog, a version 2.0 is in the works, so maybe some of that will appear in the future.

Have you tried Did you try Degradr? What did you think of it? Ah, nevermind. It’s abandonware now, sadly.


Apologies for my silence this past week or more. My darling, adorable Hanabibti and I went on a bit of a road trip that I’ll share in a few days, and, while I did take the laptop with my like a good little blogger, and though I did have good internet access everywhere we stopped, I only turned on the computer once, and then just to find an excellent halal burger joint around the corner.

Instead of writing reviews and sharing pics to the blog, I hung out with my wife and enjoyed time with her and the sites we saw together and the experiences we shared.

Rest assured that the Digital Darkroom software reviews are still going strong. I’ll be back with the DxO review someday soon, and trip pictures are in the pipeline too.

Digital Darktroom Software Review: RPP

ProgramRaw Photo Processor (RPP)
Platforms Available Tested: Mac
Prices: free; a $10 or $15 donation gets you a Lightroom Plugin, some extra processing power, and other goodies.
Installation: usual dmg, drag app to Applications folder thing: easy.

RPP is quite limited in its toolset, but that just might be a good thing. It’s not meant to be an all-in-one DAM –> final print system. It’s more akin to a basic darkroom: it takes in RAW files and outs out universally readable file formats (16bit lab color tiffs by default).

Everything is done with numbers: there’s narry a slider in sight, and it encourages keyboard usage. This puts it in a class by itself.

And it’s the only one that can’t be used to flip a tone curve, because there is no tone curve. This also puts it in a class by itself, sorta, and that mean’s I can’t use it to convert negatives, so this is a different sort of review, and I hesitate to even include it in this series.

But as I did discover, download, and start playing with RPP while reviewing raw developers, I’ll go ahead with it.  Continue reading “Digital Darktroom Software Review: RPP”