Photo Retouching

Leafing through the July Issue of Shutterbug Magazine I found an advertisement for a software program that does “portrait enhancement”. The ad has a face with a before and after comparison. The before shows the face with regular skin tone and small zits and imperfections. The after shows a mannequin. No imperfections and a skin tone that reminds me of CSI face reconstructions.

Juxtapose this ad with an ad a few pages before that for fine art paper. It’s a Black and White portrait of a man holding a chicken. If the photographer did any retouching it wasn’t on his face. This is a real guy reflecting how he’s weathered real life.

This is not to knock the software. The before/after is a way to show how effective the software is. It’s just an observation on the idea that less is more. Not all imperfections are distractions. Subtlety is the enhancement.

Shooting in RAW

Listening to a recent podcast of the Pro Photography Roundtable. One of the guys software pick was called PhotoME. If you like to shoot in the RAW (and who doesn’t?) instead of dressed in JPEG you might want to consider this free program.

PhotoME is a powerful tool to show and edit the meta data of image files. Thanks to the well organised layout and intuitive handling, it’s possible to analyse and modify Exif and IPTC-NAA data as well as analyse ICC profiles - and it’s completely FREE!

After I got my Maxxum 7D I found that ACR read the MRW files just fine but for some reason it wouldn’t show what lens I used. Fortunately I found ExifTool by Phil Harvey. A command line utility that does a whole lot of good stuff for those of us who want to extract info from image files. For me it meant I could create XMP sidecar files with the lens info. I’ve been a happy camper ever since.

While ExifTool is a command line utility. PhotoMe present the information in a nice tabbed GUI layout. After I found ExifTool I didn’t bother to see if there was another Da Kine. It’s nice to see other good programmers are out there creating tools for the rest of us! If you know about other similar tools out there leave a comment.