One onOne with Mike Wong

Okay, so I'm from the West Coast. Oregon to be precise. Portland to be even more precise and let's be honest, Portland is a relatively small city in the grand scheme of cities in the U.S.A. Growing up here, life has always moved along at a relatively easy pace. Not too fast, not too slow.

Now, I've been to New York many times over the years, but it never seems to fail that at least for the first day or two that I'm here, everything seems to move at a very fast pace, faster than I'm used to anyway especially when it comes to crossing streets and watching out for the crazy cab drivers who drive from one intersection to the next as if they are in a qualifying event for the Indy 500 or some other speed event.

So I thought I would try to capture that feeling in the first day or two before it wears off - usually just in time for me to fly home, get in my car and drive home from the airport like a NYC cabbie only to realize that...I'm not a cabbie, I have no fare and I'm definitely not in NYC anymore. Sorry. Here's the photo.

Canon 20D, 24-105 mm f/4 L IS at 1/2 second at f/9, ISO 200

Posted by Mike Wong at 8:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Day 2 and the final day of the Adobe CS3 Creative License Conference here in NYC. After another great day of talking with many attendees and running into some friends unexpectedly, I sat in on a couple of the Pro Photo sessions this afternoon. One of the best things about coming to these conferences is the chance to see some great presentations and today was no exception.

I caught the end of Bryan O'Neill Hughes' Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 201 session. I sat in on a couple of web seminars but this is the first time I've seen Bryan demo in person and was very impressed.

Next up was Adam Pratt. I've known Adam for years and always enjoy his presentation style which is always filled with great enthusiasm and humor to keep the audience engaged. Adam's first preso was about how photographers can use Adobe Acrobat 8 to show photos for client review and in the process I learned about 10 new things that I didn't know before. Way too much for me to even try to touch in this post. But if you ever get a chance to see one of his demos or a web based seminar, be sure to catch it.

The next demo he did involved some newer Adobe apps, specifically Encore CS3 and Soundbooth CS3. I thought Encore was just a DVD authoring app, which it is, but it is also so much more. Not only can you author DVDs including Blu-Ray DVDs (which lends even more evidence that I think Blu-Ray will win out over HD DVD, but I digress) but you can also export your "DVD" out to a Flash movie. You'll get all of the necessary output files including the html and any necessary scripts all packaged up nice and neat in a very lightweight file size. I've used Apple's DVD Studio Pro before, but this looks so much easier and more intuitive. Granted I haven't used it yet, but it looked every bit as powerful as DVDSP but easier. Even easier than iDVD. We'll see. I'll have to get myself a copy asap.

Posted by Mike Wong at 7:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's a sweltering Day 2 at the Adobe CS3 Creative License tour here in New York. Forecast is for a sauna-like 92 degrees with high humidity. Portland on the other hand is in for a beautiful 84 degree day. But enough about the weather.

I sat in on the Cut & Paste competition last night at the end of the conference. Two teams of two designers are put on the clock using Photoshop and a Wacom Cintiq and are challenged to come up with their best design. The whole time, there is a live DJ serving up club-like music and an MC walking the floor soliciting feedback from the audience. It was pretty cool and it was really amazing to see how talented the designers were and what they were able to come up with in such a short amount of time.

Here's a picture of the Waldorf=Astoria hotel where the event is taking place, though at times I think I'm in Versailles.

Canon 20D, 24-105 mm f/4 L IS, 1/6 sec at f / 4.0, ISO 200

Posted by Mike Wong at 4:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We're both honored and excited to have found out recently that the onOne Plug-In Suite 3 was recently named an American Photo Editors' Choice for 2007 in the category of Top Imaging Software.

This makes two American Photo Editors' Choice awards in a row for onOne. Last year Genuine Fractals received the award!

Posted by Mike Wong at 5:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps one of the coolest new features in Genuine Fractals 5 is that now, for the first time ever, you now have access to some of the key variables in the Genuine Fractals scaling/enlarging algorithm.

The two algorithm variables that may be adjusted are called Amount and Threshold. The default settings are 3 and 25 respectively and will give you results equivalent to what you would have seen in Genuine Fractals 4.1.

However, in Genuine Fractals 5, adjusting these variables can provide improved detail in non edge regions as well as control edge sharpness. Below is a description of each control and recommendations of how to use them.

Amount: This controls the amount of detail in flat, non-edge areas of an image. If your image contains lots of minute detail that does not have defined edges (many organic patterns like leaves, rock, bark; or man made pattens like fabric) it may be good to increase the Gain to a setting of 4 or 5. Settings beyond 5 will often introduce a bumpy noise pattern which may be undesirable unless your original image was from scanned film. Settings lower than the default setting of 3 are useful for images with large areas of continuous tone that have no appreciable detail (sand, snow, sky) but have hard edged foreground subjects such as landscape images, architecture or portraiture.

Threshold: This controls the amount of hard edge detail that is enhanced. The default setting is 25. Decreasing the threshold will focus the algorithms only on edge information. This may be useful for portraiture or for reducing noise in your image. Settings higher than 25 will increase the amount of small detail in flatter areas of the image. Settings as high as 100 are useful for highly detailed images such as hair or feathers.

Please note, this is an update of an earlier post. I wanted to update it because we've changed the names of the controls and wanted to avoid any confusion if someone read the earlier post.

Posted by Mike Wong at 1:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

For those of you who know me, you know that I love cappuccinos and am always in search of the best one.

I'm down in Los Angeles for some meetings for a couple of days so when I finished up early on Monday, I called Vincent Versace (because I owed him the latest copy of Genuine Fractals and he's fun to hang out with). After about 5 seconds of trying to think of a coffee shop that was close to where I was and where his studio is, we ended up meeting in Beverly Hills at Il Fornaio. If you're ever in that area and are in need of a cappuccino, look no further. It was probably one of the best cappuccinos I've ever had - though I still think the best one I had was back in 1999 at Trovata in East Sydney.

Anyway, over about 5 cappuccinos and 3 hours we talked about all kinds of things from Genuine Fractals to DSLRs, lenses, Lightroom, Photoshop CS3, Aperture and Capture NX. Vincent was also kind enough to give me some great photography advice as well.

But what I wanted to share with you was one of the strangest things I've ever witnessed. Vincent and I were sitting in the restaurant drinking our coffee and his back is to the door and I'm facing the front of the building and even with that, I can't see out really because of the placement of the windows, plants, etc. (this is important later).

In the middle of a sentence, Vincent stands up with a concerned look on his face, does a 180 to look behind him and says, "I'll be back in a second" as he hurries out the door. He comes back in about 5 minutes later to grab his wallet, phone and his motorcycle insurance and says "Sorry, they're about to impound my motorcycle, be right back." About 15 minutes later he comes back with a look of relief on his face and he tells me that he's managed to explain everything to the police officer's satisfaction and has avoided any tickets and getting impounded. But what threw me for a loop was that the whole time this went on, I didn't see the police pickup truck until it was about to leave and had moved forward. So if I'm facing the window and Vincent had his back to the door, how did he, how could he have known his bike was the subject of interest to Beverly Hills' Finest?

So of course, I asked him how he knew...

Vincent: "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
Me: "Try me. I just saw it with my own eyes."

Then he told me the best way he could describe it in a way I might understand was that he felt a disturbance in the force around his bike. Well, growing up on Star Wars, I immediately understand the reference and I did see the whole thing happen and believe me, there was NO WAY he could have seen what was happening outside. Crazy. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it.

Posted by Mike Wong at 7:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

James Dempsey over at Macworld.com did a nice write up today (or was it yesterday - why am I up so late?) about plug-in updates for the Adobe CS3 apps.

James mentions a handful of plug-ins and their CS3 savvy status for InDesign CS3, Illustrator CS3 and of course, Photoshop CS3. He also mentions the status of some font management apps including Extensis' Suitcase.

Being from onOne, I was especially happy to read James' comments on our plug-ins.

"I consider all four of OnOne’s Photoshop plug-ins to be the best on the market for what they do."

Thanks James! It's always nice to hear those kind of words. We work hard to deliver great products to users and we appreciate the mention!

Posted by Mike Wong at 12:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Congratulations go out to Laurie Excell as she has been added to the list of fantastic Photoshop World instructors at the upcoming Photoshop World Las Vegas in September. Laurie is such a nice person and I'm very happy to hear that she'll have her own Pre-Con class this year.

Also, check out her blog where she's got some fantastic photos.

Posted by Mike Wong at 12:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

More on Lightroom today...I was over at the CreativePro.com site today and saw this story by Julieanne Kost on getting the most out of importing your photos into Lightroom. Threre's a 17-minute video you can watch that is hosted by Software Cinema. Here's the direct link to the movie - http://www.workshopsondemand.com/lightroom/s04/

Posted by Mike Wong at 11:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Before Lightroom came out (even as a beta) I started using Aperture on my MacBook Pro (work machine) and my Dual 2Ghz PowerMac G5 (primary home machine) to manage my photos and do any RAW adjustments on the files I shot with my Canon 20D. Before that, I had used iPhoto to manage and organize my photos including ordering 4x6 or 5x7 prints. In fact, my wife loves using iPhoto (and later Aperture) to order prints because as much as I love printing on my Epson R2400 or my Epson 3800, I don't like printing 80 4x6 prints of 50 different pictures. It's just too time consuming not to mention it somehow feels silly to print a 4x6 on a printer that can handle much larger prints.

Anyway, where I'm going with this is that I really liked (and still do) Aperture's organization features, the Light Table feature the way they handle "virtual" copies of files (one for B&W, one for color, etc) but the thing I liked the most was printing books and ordering prints. Again, it came down (like many things in my house) to what my wife (Chris) liked. However, what I didn't like about Aperture was the performance on my Dual 2Ghz G5. It was slow to do any kind of serious adjustments. Making similar adjustments in ACR or Lightroom are much faster (or at least feel that way - I haven't done any formal time tests).

So when Lightroom came out in beta, I started using both. When Lightroom 1.0 shipped, I started to just put my new photos into Lightroom (I don't want to use 2 apps to manage my photos if I can help it) which was great, but I suddenly lost the easy way to order prints and books. But there's a cool thing you can do with Lightroom and Aperture or iPhoto if you're on a Mac OS X computer.

I created a couple of Automator applications for Aperture and iPhoto that will import any files that show up in one of two folders on my Mac and then import them into either application into a project folder (Aperture) or photo album (iPhoto) and then delete the files that were placed into those temp folders. Next, I set up a couple of Export presets in Lightroom that will export selected photos and copy (that's important) those files to one of those two folders and then run one of the two Automator actions. This makes my life easier now because I can do my organizing and photo developing in Lightroom yet still get my selected photos into either Aperture or iPhoto so I can order books or prints or use them in any one of the iLife apps that I use at home (iWeb for example) or Keynote at work.

If you'd like to do this, first download one (or both) of the Automator actions. Download the one for Aperture here and the one for iPhoto here. Put the file(s) you downloaded into the following folder on your Mac.

~username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Export Actions

If you use the Automator files I've provided, be sure to have a project or a photo album called "Lightroom" in your app of choice or edit the Automator action to use the album name you want.

Next, launch Lightroom and create a couple (or just one) new Export Presets. To do this, select a photo or photos and then go to the File menu and choose Export... (or press Cmd-Shift-E). In the dialog box that appears, you'll create a new preset. Choose a folder (any folder) where you want the files to be copied to, adjust your settings to your liking and then at the bottom of the dialog, in the Post-Processing section from the drop down menu choose one of the Automator actions. This tells Lightroom to do that action (whatever it is) once all of the files have been copied and processed to the new location. You can save this export preset as well for easier use in the future.

So there you have it. A great way to get any photos out of Lightroom and into Aperture or iPhoto!

Posted by Mike Wong at 9:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I had the pleasure of being interviewed on The Podcast Network's The Digital Photography Show (check out the podcast) with the host Scott Sherman. Scott is a great guy and very good interviewer as well. The show started off where we realized that we both had kids the same age (6 and 3) and that both of our oldest boys were finishing up Kindergarten. It's always fun talking to other parents who have kids the same age. Anyway, we talked mostly about plug-ins (what are they and why you need them) and then more specifically about Genuine Fractals, Mask Pro, PhotoFrame Pro and Intellihance Pro.

If you haven't already, you should head over to the Digital Photography Show website and check out all of their podcasts. There are lots of great interviews in the archives with people such as Scott Kelby, Kevin Kubota and Rick Sammon.

Posted by Mike Wong at 7:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Two things to mention...first, we've got an online forum setup now so onOne users can share information, tips, tricks, troubleshooting, etc with each other. It should serve as a great resource when you need immediate help or assistance and a good place to share any information that you have that might help others.

The second thing I wanted to mention is that as part of our forums, we've got a board that we're calling the Photo of the Month. The idea is that we want you to share and post your favorite photos each month with the new online community we're building. Each month, we'll pick the best photo and feature it in our monthly eNews and award a cool prize. So head on over and start posting photos. I've posted one to get things started, but I'm really excited to see what you'll post.

Posted by Mike Wong at 10:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)