CaptureOne 4 Beta - First Impressions
With CaptureOne 4 Beta 1 PhaseOne announced the successor for the current light version of CaptureOne, which was available as CaptureOne LE till now. PhaseOne has given a face-lifting to the popular RAW converter for professional photographers following the trend of dark user interfaces for photography tools. But the changes include more than the interface. With this new version PhaseOne not only keeps up with the current trends and competitors, but also includes some neat new features - particular in the color adjustments section. In comparison to the former LE version, PhaseOne has added more functionality in their entry-level product. Now not only exposure correction is available, but also contrast, brightness and saturation corrections. In general it is noticable that PhaseOne and CaptureOne 4 are focussed and built for professional studio photographers, as the workflow is highly optimized for studio photography. But I found that the new version goes beyond that by stepping aside from the studio workflow and now becoming more open and customizable for other types of photography and photography level. The beta version is not totally bug free and 100% stable, but I had only one crash so far and only one bug that seems to be related to that crash.
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Digideep Red Sea DigiJam
From July 19th till August 2nd I spent two great weeks at the Red Sea (Sharm el Sheikh, Sinai, Egypt). It was a liveaboard tour on the King Snefro 5 and 6, which has now become a regular event for the Digideep community each year. In the second week of this year's trip we even had two boats full with underwater photography geeks. We had very good conditions in both weeks allowing us to go to Sha'ab Abu Nuhas twice for extensive wreck diving and to our surprise a couple of dolphin dives and snorkel experiences.
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“Sharkwater” - A must see movie!
At the evening of our first day at the Curacao Dive Festival there was a screening of a documentary movie, that just hit me. I haven't heard about it before unfortunately. It's not only visually stunning - known at best from the BBC planet series - but also tells a fascinating story.
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Spring in St. Gallen
Spring has arrived in St. Gallen. Everything is blooming and the streets are filled with people enjoying the sun and trinking coffee. I just wandered around a bit and tried how to get some decent images with the fisheye. Enjoy!
Microsoft Photo Info Tool
Microsoft has just released a new tool for easy EXIF/IPTC metadata handling. It integrates nicely in the Windows Explorer with a menu item in the right mouse click context menu. You can even add new colums in detail mode of the directory view. This way you can easily sort the images by some of the EXIF information available in the images.
This is another example of how much more important metadata will become in the future to keep an overview of all our digital assets we will gather. MP3 with its ID3 tags
shows how good that can work and now EXIF and IPTC will become more manageable for the mainstream. Ok i'm drifting away from the current topic (Maybe I write something later on this).
I will try to adapt my workflow for editing the EXIF/IPTC data to the new tool and will see how it works.
Microsoft Photo Tool
