CPT# 39: Holiday Gift Guide Warm Up!

This is Cool Photo Tools podcast episode number 39 November 2, 2015. Today’s podcast is sponsored by audible.com who has more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken word audio products. Get a free audiobook of your choice at www.audibletrial.com/coolphototools. Welcome to Monday morning on this chilly November day, 2015.  You all know what that means, it means that the holidays are just right around the corner and next week we will be rolling out our holiday gift guide, it is going to be on the website coolphototools.com/gifts. If you are thinking that you sure would like to find out what is in there, just go ahead and get the jump on the holidays by going to that site and seeing the very cool stuff that Rhonda and I personally handpicked for our listeners.

RHONDA: These are items for our own wish list as well.

JAY: Good morning to you Rhonda Spencer

RHONDA: Good morning, I was thinking about while you were talking, an item on my personal wish list is an 800mm Canon.

JAY: Really, do they make an 800?

RHONDA: Yah they do.

JAY: I know they make a 600, does the 800 cost more than the 600?

RHONDA: Oh yes, and if any of our listeners might want to hint for one I think they go for around $15,000. I figure I can wish and if Santa is out there listening and wants to see what Rhonda really needs, that would be it.

JAY: I will make sure to add that to our holiday gift guide. We do have a section on there for dream gifts, and also some for gifts under $10 and on up to the sky’s the limit. That is for next week’s podcast, so this was just a teaser and we are not going to talk about it anymore unless we run short of gab. Which I doubt, did you see that Photoshop Elements 14 is released?

RHONDA: No I didn’t.

JAY: This is for those people that don’t want to use the full version of Photoshop CC, and they like software. Back in the day you know the full version of Photoshop was like 600 bucks for the professional version.

RHONDA: You know every year you could do the upgrade for couple hundred bucks.

JAY: Yes, and then a couple years ago Adobe said we are not going to do that anymore, instead we will just have a subscription only formula, so if you want to use Photoshop’s CC the latest and greatest version with all our updates, it’s now going to be 10 bucks a month and we will throw in Light room CC at the same time.

RHONDA: My feeling about this is just like Jay thinks you have to have a viewfinder on your camera, I want to have software in my hand. I can’t stand that they turned it into a subscription only. Adobe if you are listening to me, you lost me. I’m running CS 6 and will probably be my last because I don’t want to have subscription only software. I object to it because I have to keep paying for it when I may not need to upgrade every year.

JAY:  I know we have talked about this before, but that doesn’t stop us from talking about it again. Tragically as I get older I find myself talking about things over and over again.

RHONDA: (Laughing) I only do it on issues that I am passionate about.

JAY: I am just speculating on this, but I think that every 14 months was the upgrade cycle for the big version of Photoshop and they would call in all their software designers and coders and say we need a blockbuster upgrade feature on this software. It’s got to be something really whizzbang new or nobody is going upgrade, and that is pretty hard to do after you’ve done everything you can think of, and there’s not that many new features left. I think a lot of people were doing an every other year upgrade cycle, so maybe not this year but next year. This probably left Adobe in a position where they felt like they were not getting as much revenue as they needed, so this was a way to make the company more profitable, or to continue their profit by going to the subscription model. I think that they have probably done alright with that, however every September they come out with a new version of Photoshop Elements. Photoshop elements is just like Photoshop with some important features missing, however they usually will add the latest whizzbang feature that they have in the full version of Photoshop CC about a year later. They will give you the latest and greatest stuff but it’s the stuff that you might need to do business with like type manipulation tools, and how to do fonts and kerning or spacing that is not on there. They also don’t support CMYK format and the older version sometimes doesn’t support the new raw formats that Canon has come out with. They know that it’s crippled and they do that on purpose because they really want you to get Photoshop CC and subscribe to that every month for $9.99 and they will throw in Light room. Light room is under $150 bucks on its own, so it’s not that it’s a bad deal, particularly if you do upgrade every year anyway, like I do, you might as well just go get the full versions of stuff. In Rhonda’s case, she has CS6, and they don’t sell that anymore, but here is another solution for you. You can pick up Photoshop elements 14 which is about 100 bucks and there is a plug-in for Photoshop Elements 14 is called elements XXL and it adds a ton of functionality into Photoshop Elements that it doesn’t normally have. The way they figured this out is because Adobe often leaves hooks into the program, they start with the Photoshop CC and they start trimming things away by just turning off the buttons, the features are in the program but it won’t let you access them. Elements XXL claims that they have over 200 features that they have added back in.

RHONDA: Is XXL through Adobe?

JAY: No, this is an independent developer.

RHONDA: If it is around $50 it would be easily worth that.

JAY: I will put a link in the show notes so you can buy this. They have added stuff in like support for smart objects and I think they just added in the support for CMYK and different color spaces of 16-bit files, just a whole bunch of stuff. It looks pretty slick and it’s been around for a while this isn’t brand-new, but they have just upgraded so that it does take advantage of the latest version of Photoshop Elements.

RHONDA: I wonder how they get around that with Adobe.

JAY: Anybody can make a plug in for Adobe, so there is no problem there.

RHONDA: Wow, now since you’re talking about software, why don’t we talk about the Polarr Photo Editor III.  If any of you guys know how to pronounce this, let us know please, go to coolphototools.com and click on the contact tab can send us an email and let us know how you’d like to hear us pronounce it. The Polarr Photo Editor III is a lightning fast photo editor that is 100 percent free online, and they do have the software that you can buy for $14.99.

JAY: Some of it is free but there’s probably some features that are holding back for 15 bucks which you know you could buy six weeks of light room for $15, and they would throw in Photoshop CC.

RHONDA: I like anything that is free, if it is free go ahead and try it, it is worth a shot.

JAY: Folks if you have anything free send it to Rhonda.

RHONDA: (Laughing) Not everything Jay, but I do try free software, what could it hurt? Then you can decide if you need to spend the $15 or not.

JAY: We did have this on the blog a few months ago and I did try the online version and I thought it was Light Room like, so if you know to work light room you will know how to do this. I tried a raw file and it worked, that was pretty cool. They also have the iOS and Android version as well so if you have and android phone or a smart phone then this is right down your alley. My wife has one of those Samsung Galaxy S2’s it is a camera with a zoom lens on it, with an Android phone mechanism, so you can take pictures with that and then edit them right on the view screen on the back. I’ll have to get Polarr and try that out.

RHONDA: Since we’re talking about Light Room, what do you think about Light Room being dinged for being so slow?

JAY: Oh Adobe, Adobe, Adobe, we can’t really pass this up, I have to give credit to Jim Harmer, who has the improved photography podcast, because I think he’s the one that certainly ran this up the flagpole first. He noticed that looking on Adobe’s forums after Adobe released their version of their online Light Room CC which they just push out to you if you are a subscriber, that a lot of people were complaining bitterly. They were complaining about the way that the import module worked, so if you use light room and you put your SD card or your memory card into a card reader and then you let light room pull it into your computer it says, there is a memory card detected, do you want me to import these and delete your card afterwards and other things on a list, which light room can do, well they changed some of these. They changed or deleted something that a lot of people used, and people got really hot over this and plus it was kind of an unstable release and it crashed a lot, so those two things really upset working photographers.

RHONDA: Here is the figure, it was 600 times slower than its competitors.

JAY: Okay so this is the other part of that where they compared it to DXO capture or Aperture Light Room.

RHONDA: Apples Aperture was the fastest at 9 seconds to import, and Photo Mechanic wasn’t far behind it took it 12 seconds, Capture One was a little bit slower at 27 seconds and finally Light Room took 190 seconds.

JAY: If you are a pro shooter and you know your time is worth money, you definitely would be wanting a faster speed. I do have Light Room CC and I did download the update and I don’t use the import module because I’ve been burned before, but I don’t trust anybody on software anymore, I may use it, but I’m not trusting it. I just move my files to Windows Explorer and put them in folders and label them. I synchronize them in Light Room, but I don’t let it move the files or let it do that heavy work. There was a company a couple of years ago, back in the day, that made a product called the photo CD, and they made photo CDs, then you had a special player that you could hook up to your TV set and you could look at your photos on TV. This was revolutionary at the time, and that company was Kodak, that no longer makes those products anymore. If you have photo CDs and you didn’t transfer them when you had the opportunity, there is no way to look at those now. They really left you hanging, and Adobe did this with people that used or relied upon the import module to bring their pictures into Light Room. They changed the import module and dumbed it down because they thought no one used the features anyway. Apparently there were people using the features.

RHONDA: I use Bridge, and have never had a problem with Bridge importing.

JAY: Once you tried Light Room you would probably be swayed.

RHOPNDA: You think?

JAY: The president of Adobe has come out with an apology and said that they will fix it. Is your contract about due for a new smart phone? Is this a time year when you a new phone every two years?

RHONDA: I don’t think like normal people.

JAY:  I am just going to let that comment slide and not even go there.

RHONDA: Verizon don’t listen to me right now as I’m not saying this out loud. I have one of the old Verizon contracts that I have unlimited data usage, unlimited unlimited.

JAY: Have you looked at your stats and what you really use exactly?

RHONDA: I like having an unlimited because if you’re talking about what I really use it is nothing compared to what my son uses, and he is on my contract.

JAY: Do you know what it really is that he uses? They are going to give you a gigabyte.

RHONDA: He uses way over a gigabyte he watches movies he does all of his stuff on his smart phone, but with that I have an old but really great plan with Verizon, friends and family and all that. When I upgrade, I upgrade by buying my phone out and having them put in another sim card.

JAY:  Which is what they have all kind of switched to anyway like we will finance the phone for you, but you can just go buy it and it doesn’t touch your contract. So, are you going to buy a new phone and how old is your current phone?

RHONDA: I don’t know, my current phone is only about a year old and it’s a Motorola smart phone. Jay is making fun of my old phone, it was a Motorola Droid that you slid up and had a key board and I loved it and didn’t get rid of it for a long time.

JAY: The reason I ask is because there are some new phones out that are like the Samsung Galaxy S6, the Galaxy Note 5 and LG has one coming out. Now these phones have the capability that you can shoot in the raw format from their cameras.

RHONDA: That does interest me, but how big is the sensor in this phone?

JAY: Well it’s little, but still you got a 16 megapixel image which is as usable as a point-and-shoot camera. Some point and shoots only have a 12 megapixel, and even with that you can make a good 8X10 or 11X14, I’ve got a 20 x 30 on the wall over there that I made from my Canon G9 which had 12 megapixels so I don’t think that is really a factor. To me the ability to process raw photos taken with your camera phone that’s huge and all of a sudden you have control of the tonal range. For those of us that use Photoshop and Light Room and know our way around, that’s definitely going to be a big consideration for me. I really want a phone that does raw format. It is a .DNG, Adobe finally found a way to use the .D GE format, yay, and at least it’s going to be doable in raw and I think that’s awesome, just huge.

RHONDA: You had better explain what .DNG is for those that don’t know.

JAY: D and N stand for digital negative, and I do not know what the G stands for.

RHONDA: What they were trying to do at the time was make one format that went across all cameras one format to rule them all, so raw file could be standard.

JAY: If you had a camera that shot in a DNG format you wouldn’t have to upgrade your software every time because the .DNG would be standard. It would be such a standard that if you burned those files to a Kodak CD and then trying to retrieve them in the year 2090 you’d still be able to because the format was still supported.

RHONDA: No matter if you had a Sony or a Nikon, it would be the standard.

JAY: It was such a good idea, and the camera manufacturers took a look at it and said, we don’t think so, we are all going to make our own separate versions, Adobe, we are not doing it. Here that the phone manufacturers have a little less bravado and are like okay this is good this could be cool. Certainly some of the new phones have some of the best cameras that has ever been produced showing really amazing results.

RHONDA: I had a friend showing me some of the photography he did this last weekend with his phone and it was stunning.

JAY:  Speaking of stunning, I am going to talk about Audible because for our Cool Photo Tools listeners they are offering a free audiobook of their choice.

RHONDA: Free is always good.

JAY: Actually it is a free 30-day trial membership which is even better, and you just go to audibletrial.com/coolphototools to start and you can choose from over 180,000 audio programs so if they don’t have something you want, it probably doesn’t exist. Download a title free and start listening it is that easy, go to audibletrial.com/coolphototools and get started today. Rhonda and I appreciate that so much because making podcasts isn’t easy. We are over here saddled with debt and sweating over these to make them interesting and engaging, and if you would support our sponsors we would appreciate that you so very much. There is a link on the coolphototools.com site for the audible trial and also if you if you look at the podcast notes there are some links for Amazon.com, which if you click on one of our links and buy something, say that Sony RX 247 362 camera for $3000 or even something you really need like a case of Smuckers sugar free syrup and you order that and if you click on one of our links to Amazon.com we still get credit even if it is not camera related. That syrup is killer good by the way, and Ronda and I will earn enough to actually buy a cup of coffee. If you wouldn’t mind and you do shop with Amazon, go to our site first and click on one of our Amazon links to buy what you want, and it does not raise your price one penny. We will be able to afford more cool photo tools and be able to talk with more authority because we can own more of the toys we like the looks of.

RHONDA: It just sounds like Jay wants more toys to me.

Exactly, and speaking of which have you ever tried to attach your camera phone to a tripod? Camera phones are getting good and we just talked about how good they are particularly in shooting movies. The movies are really awesome especially from some of the smart phones and they can even shoot 4K which is insane. A little tiny sensor in a smart phone sometimes is a real advantage for a motion picture or a movie because you have huge depth of field. The best way that I have found to attach my smart phone to a tripod is the Reti Cam, and you can get these on Amazon and I will link to this in the show notes. These are made out of metal and there’s two different sizes, regular and XL so if you have the new S Plus iPhone that came out you would need the XL size, and it will hold that with the case on it. You screw this into the tripod socket, then you just lock it down. It’s really a simple design, works beautifully and is rock solid and sells for $25.

RHONDA: Where do you find these things at?

JAY: It’s my job, I have to look for cool photo tools, and sometimes I buy them if I have the funds and they are really cool. I want to buy them all of course, but I would become a bachelor in no time.

RHONDA: Talking about photo phones and such, Manfrotto just launched their new compact Extreme two in one monopod selfie stick, so they are jumping on the bandwagon.

JAY: Do you know there’s more people killed taking selfies than are killed by sharks?

RHONDA: I know I saw that, is that not interesting?

JAY: On the other hand, there is probably not that many people killed by sharks, but when there are it’s big news.

RHONDA: This says by simply moving the ball head from the top of the handgrip to the bottom of the tube, the monopod will turn into a pole.

JAY: Okay now wait a minute, this is a monopod right, which is one third of a tripod, so it has collapsible legs then it has a tripod quarter-inch screw thread socket on the top which is perfect for your Readicam. So aren’t all monopod’s kind of the original selfie stick?

RHONDA: Kind of, but I doubt most people use them as their selfie stick.

JAY: I use my monopod for a selfie stick sometimes using it move my camera to different heights and vantage points to shoot from. I have seen you do that with your tripod too, collapse all the legs and just use one.

RHONDA: This one includes a Go Pro adapter.

JAY: Which are worth about 98 cents at the dollar store, so I am not buying this one Manfrotto. I know you take family group shots once in a while and I used to back in the day and at this time the year, not so much in Arizona, but in a lot of the country, the leaves are turning those bright yellow and red colors, the temperatures dropping and outdoor portraits can really look spectacular. Something that I discovered is there’s a Facebook group that is about Light Room and Photoshop and it has a bunch of members like thousands of members. Once in a while somebody gets on there and talks about a product that I didn’t know existed. One such product was for taking outdoor portraits in the fall, and the company is called Bellevue Avenue.com and they have overlays for use in Photoshop. One of the overlay products that they have is called leaf and branch overlays, and you should go to their website as this is brilliant and a no brainer for a portrait photographer. What you do is you go take your family portrait out in the fall leaves or maybe it’s not fall where you are and maybe the leaves are still green, check out the tutorial on the blog in turning summer into fall. Another thing that happens in the fall is that the leaves get picked up by the wind and swirl around, so this overlay of leaves and branches looks like the leaves are falling off the trees and some of them closer to the camera are out of focus, and some are sharp. It’s really nicely done. You would sell this in a heartbeat if you did one of these pictures and showed it to the family they would have to have a 40 x 60 for the wall. You have to be outside to take the shot that will be your background, and then this adds an element of action to the to the image. It’s overlaying falling leaves at different distances from the camera and even swirling leaves with a little motion blur on them, and then you would mask out any you don’t want, since you would not want a leaf over a person’s face in the portrait.

RHONDA: This does sound cool; how much are they?

JAY: They are $38 per set, and they have different sets, and they have 96 different overlays. You can move stuff around so that your stuff is not going to be cookie cutter and like everyone else’s. They make winter wonderland snow overlays, dreamy bubbles, twinkling Boca overlays etcetera.

RHONDA: What is the name of this company again?

JAY: This is Bellevue–Avenue.com and I am sure all the simple URLs were gone because I am sure they would have rather had overlay.com but alas someone already had it.

RHONDA: Speaking of that, did you know that now you can get something besides .com, you can get .photo?

JAY: I did see that. However if people just hear your URL and don’t actually have it to look at they are going to assume it is .com. so they are not prized like the .coms. Specifically, the prized Cool Photo Tools.com. You know I’ve had people ask if I had to pay for that, but no it was available so I just got lucky. It is time to let these fine people continue on with their day and let them push the button on their radio and listen to something different, besides the Cool Photo Tools podcast because were just out of time.

RHONDA: Sorry, but we will think about lots of new things for the next week’s podcast and in fact we will be revealing our holiday gift ideas, which may take a couple of episodes. We have a really long list of some of the best stuff ever.

JAY:  So don’t spend any money until you listen to that episode because you’re going to want everything, you may have to go take out a loan. Alright everybody, enjoy the nice cool weather and we will resume next week.