Mike Wong is the VP of Marketing at onOne Software, located in Portland, Oregon.
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I just saw that Dave Cross has posted a review of PhotoTools Professional Edition over at his blog.
You can watch the video below (it's cool that Google let's you grab the video playback code with the click of a mouse!), but I would also highly recommend heading over to Dave's blog for other videos, photos and in general good stuff.
Going through some old photos from 2003 when I was in Paris for a couple of weeks and found this shot. I was there for business and my wife Chris came out for a week. I had to go back to Notre Dame after she flew home and hike up to the top of Notre Dame to get this because she wouldn't go up there with me. I was glad I went back and hope to go back sometime in the next couple of years.
Okay, so my wife got a little upset that my daughter was getting all the attention on my blog lately so here's a shot of my son from the same beach that I took the last few photos on.
After running it through PhotoTools Professional Edition, I applied one of my favorite Subtle Emulsion (actually it's Emulsion_Subtle) frames from PhotoFrame 3.1.
When it comes to black and white conversions, I think Jack Davis is one of the best at coming up with a variety of presets and settings that give you a very compelling black and white conversion.
Here's the black and white version of the color photo I just posted. I used Jack's Black and White Filter Conversion and used the Blue Filter option. It gave me the best contrast and the look that I wanted. The only thing I did after that was added a curves adjustment layer to very gently open up the brightness around Devyn's eyes.
My daughter Devyn doesn't really like me taking her picture very much right now. I distracted her to look away while I got my camera ready and then called her name. This was the look she gave me when she saw I had the camera pointed her way. It seemed her eyes were changing color everyday between blue, grey and this beautiful shade of green.
I enhanced the photo with PhotoTools Professional Edition using a combo of effects including the Kubota Daily Multi Vitamin, the onOne Skin smoother and the Jack Davis global contrast boost. Here's the preset that you can use with PhotoTools Professional Edition.
Here's another shot from my recent vacation. My son Nathan is crawling over some lava rocks while my daughter Devyn is patiently waiting to see if a pod of dolphins or a whale will pass by.
I used PhotoTools Professional Edition to enhance the photo combined with some masking in Photoshop to target the enhancement to specific locations but I forgot to save the preset so I can't provide it unfortunately. It probably wouldn't have done much good because I didn't just pick 3 or 4 effects and then leave them all at 100 percent coverage. For example, I used a few of the Jack Davis presets to boost the contrast in the sky and the rocks but not on the kids so I had to mask them out of the effect.
Keep that in mind when you're using PhotoTools (either Edition) that you can apply an effect and then have PhotoTools give you a layer mask that you can paint on to selectively show or hide the effect.
I love this picture of my daughter. That little smirk is just the best. I was on the beach with the rest of my family and she came running over. I grabbed my Canon G9 and snapped this. I took the photo into PhotoTools Professional Edition and applied the Kubota Daily Multi Vitamin and then the Kubota Anime effect but reduced the strength significantly to only about 15 percent. Then I used a Jack Davis black and white conversion (Jack does some great Black and White actions and presets) and finished it off with just a little more contrast. I'll dig up the preset (I saved this one) and post it (it's on a different computer at the moment).
I'm pleased to inform you today that after a bit of a delay, we have posted the first drop of the Liquid Resize Product Preview for you to download and start playing with. Head over to the Liquid Resize Product Preview page for details and the link to request the download.
Please note, that this first build is an early release and is not necessarily indicative of what you'll see in the final release. Specifically, the product has not yet undergone any significant speed enhancements since we originally acquired the code in January 2008. We have plans to do that before the final release, but haven't gotten there yet.
Also, the user interface is largely unchanged since we acquired the code but when we do ship the final version, there will be significant changes to the user interface. One of my biggest complaints about the current build you'll see is that for the protect and delete brushes, red is used to signify an area to protect and green is used to signify areas to delete. Seems backwards to me, but maybe it's just me - though I think it will at the very least get reversed in an upcoming build.
The application is currently a stand alone app but will be converted into a Photoshop plug-in when we're all done.
We've also included a sample image for you to play with and it gets loaded automatically when you launch the app (either Mac OS X or Windows). Here's a short QuickTime movie where you can see it in action.
Well, after my longest vacation ever, I'm back in the office. I wish I were in Orlando for Photoshop World, but it just wasn't meant to be for me this year. There's always the Las Vegas show in September...
Anyway, I wanted to share one of my favorite shots from my vacation with everybody. I took this on my second to last night in Kauai. This is the view of the sunset from the beach across the street from where I was staying. I used my Canon 20D with my 70-200 f/4 L lens sitting on my brand new Gitzo 1540 tripod that I just got - which I love by the way.
I stuck around for about 10 minutes after the sun had just passed the horizon and everybody else (including my familiy) had gone in because the sunset was "over". I learned my lesson the hard way in Bali, Indonesia about 10 years ago that you should always stick around and see what kind of light you'll get AFTER the sun passes the horizon.
I've got a lot more photos to go through so I'll post some more here in the next week or so.
