T-Shirts for Springs of Hope

Today is the last day to get your "Official WWPW Apparel" with TJP's $5 matching donation. That brings the total donation for each item to $10 supporting the Springs of Hope Orphanage in Kenya, Africa. We hope you take the opportunity to grab a great shirt and support and even greater cause.

On Assignment: Teaser Deadline

Remember...

Your teaser photo is due by tonight at 11:59 EDT. You should have received an email with instructions on how to submit - if you have any questions or concerns please email me.

On Assignment with Towner Jones Photography is brought to you with the support of:

Software Review: onOne Genuine Fractals

Hello all. Thanks for checking out this week's software review of one of best tools available from onOne Software, Genuine Fractals.

So here's the deal. Of all the onOne tools, this one has had the most effect on the output quality of my printed images, and that is exciting. This is one of those tools that is extremely specific to accomplishing a certain task - namely, big high-detail enlargements. If you don't print things big, you probably don't need to mess with it. 

But if you do like to print stuff large, and I can speak from experience - nothing works better at enlarging images for print than Genuine Fractals - you'll just have to trust me, try it out, and see for yourself. 

With that said, I could end the review, but I would like to mention the other nice thing about GF, it's incredibly easy to use. If you're familiar with resizing images in photoshop, using the basic functions in GF is as easy if not easier.

Like everything else in the Plug-In Suite, you can find Genuine Fractals under the onOne menu in Photoshop. For this discussion, we'll look at the interface for regular and express mode. GF also has a powerful batch processing component, but we'll save that for another day.

Here we see the full version of the tool. For simplicity, I've minimized most of the menus on the right sidebar of the screen. I've left open the screen and print size controls so you can see just how similar they are to what you'll find in Photoshop. On top of these simple controls, when you start to play with things like textures, sharpening, film grain, etc. the folks at onOne have built an extremely efficient WYSIWYG display which updates with a preview of your tweaks in almost real-time.

So you just want to resize without messing with all the other stuff? Fire up the "express" version of GF and you get a very familiar control box (straight from the full version, and much like photoshop's native tool).

I really provided my summary at the beginning of this post. Until I tried Genuine Fractals, I had always thought that photoshop's bicubic smoother did just fine. But I suggest you do the same experiment I did. If you're willing, download the free trial of GF, and print a 12MP image at say, 20x30, upsized with GF. You WILL see a difference in sharpness, and you won't go back to what your were using before.

Make sure you check back next Wednesday when we review, PhotoFrame 4 Professional Edition.

If this, or any of onOne's software interests you, the folks at onOne have generously provided a 20% discount to all of my readers. Simply click on the link below to go the onOne store, and enter coupon code "TJP10" at checkout to receive your discount.

Saturday AM at Great Falls

This past Saturday I woke up early and snuck off to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Nation Historic Park, known to many folks as Great Falls from the Maryland side. Marc Benton, blogger and organizer of Photoblogging DC, along with his wife, Sheri, put together a photowalk through the park in the early morning hours. There was a great turnout, and the weather was just right for being outdoors. 

I ended up spending most of the morning with Mike Palmer, who told me about the Billy Goat trail going through some of the more difficult terrain in the park. It didn't take much discussion for us to convince each other to go check out the trail. (FYI, check out Mike's great shot from that morning, here.)

The following HDR was one of only a few shots I took Saturday morning. (Photowalks are really about socializing with other photographers, don't let anyone convince you otherwise!) It is a pano of six, three-shot hand-held bracketed bursts (aka the Palmer method). I really like the technique - maybe next time I can frame my picture a little better as to avoid chopping off tree tops! 

The image was made with a Nikon D3, 24-70mm lens, 1-stop increments for the bracketing, 3-shot bursts. The six, three-shot bursts (18 images in all) were batch processed in HDRSoft's Photomatix, and then the output HDRs were stitched together in Photoshop using "Merge to Pano".

To me, what's amazing about this park and this location was how easy it was to forget that you're just a few miles upstream of Washington DC. Thanks for the tour Mike, I enjoyed getting to hang out. And thanks to Marc and Sheri for putting it all together... I look forward to shooting with everyone again soon. 

On Assignment: Friendly Reminder

Just a friendly reminder to all our "On Assignment" participants...

Your teaser photo is due by this Friday, July 31st. You should have received an email with instructions on how to submit - if you have any questions or concerns please email me.

I will be selecting 10 teaser photos (at random) to be displayed on the blog to highlight some of the great work you all are doing to the rest of the photography community. Thanks for participating, and I look forward to seeing your great work!

On Assignment with Towner Jones Photography is brought to you with the support of: