DISCOUNT: Fisheye-Hemi, AutoMatting, SensorKleen and more

The response to my guest blog article for Fisheye-Hemi was tremendous, and of course my readers are used to a deal at the end of the article. Sadly, I was on vacation and couldn’t make this happen then but I have now.

You can now get 10% off any Image Trends product when you enter the coupon code RONMARTBLOG as shown above. This also includes offers for the following in Windows & Mac Editions (as well as plug-in only versions):

AutoMatting – AutoMatting™ automatically creates a unique mat for each image which is designed to make the photographer's work more attractive and appealing to the customer in a slideshow or viewing mode.  

DustKleen – The DustKleen™ stand alone application is optimized to be an automatic dirt and dust removal program with an added manual touch up mode for those difficult situations. DustKleen cleans images from any scanner using any media - negatives, slides, and prints. This patent pending technology identifies defects that are not part of the image content and removes them without harming the image.

PearlyWhites – PearlyWhites™ is an Adobe Photoshop compatible Plug-In filter that automatically whitens and brightens teeth. Digital cameras are known to add a yellow cast to teeth. PearlyWhites automatically restores teeth to gleaming white.

SensorKleen – SensorKleen™ Pro allows the user to automatically erase the dust and debris in a set of DSLR camera images. These image defects are caused by artifacts on the camera sensor cover. SensorKleen Pro processes a folder or set of images, calculates the dust locations, and corrects the entire set.

ShineOff – ShineOff™ is an Adobe Photoshop compatible Plug-In filter that automatically removes the shine from skin. The ShineOff Plug-In improves skin tones by eliminating the overly reflective effect of the flash!

Other articles you may enjoy

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy these:

• GUEST BLOG: Fisheye-Hemi by Clifford Pickett
• Discount Coupon Code – More great offers

Disclosure

If you make a purchase using links found in this article, I may make a commission. It doesn’t cost you a penny more, but it does help to support future articles like this.

GUEST BLOG: Fisheye-Hemi by Clifford Pickett

Corrected with Fisheye-Hemi – read the article to learn more…

Fisheye-Hemi is a plugin created by Image trends that offers a unique solution to a “problem” caused by the massive distortion inherent in Fisheye lenses.  “Problem” being in quotes because in certain circumstances, this distortion can and is used for creative effect.  This quickly gets old however, much like the tilt-shift effect, and for many of us, you’ll go through your “fisheye phase” where you’ll shoot everything with this lens, and then you’ll move on, never to use it again.   

I guarantee you, once you realize what can be done with this program (and proper technique and basic Photoshop) your fisheye will stop collecting dust.  So, the case for the fisheye. The first reason, distortion, is a given.  If you want it, you got it.  If you don't have it, check the label, it’s not a fisheye.  The second reason, massive field of view (180 degrees in some cases), if you have a fisheye, you’ve got that too.  And you want to keep it. What if you want the field of view but don’t want the distortion?  This is the most common problem facing this quirky type of lens and this program solves it in a unique way. 

Do a quick search on Google for “defishing”, scroll past the activists, and you’ll find a few programs offering solutions.  All of which attempt to remap the distortion of the lens back to being rectilinear (read flat).  Sounds like a great idea?  Try it.  Most of these programs have a free trial.  You’ll quickly realize that at any size other than the smallest thumbnail for web, the image will be remarkably soft in the corners, the image size ratio will be changed and most importantly, things will look funny.  Especially know sizes and shapes, like say, peoples faces.  Not good. 

Fisheye-Hemi offers a unique solution to this.  It’s a simple, plugin that offers virtually no user input other than to choose which type of lens/sensor you have (circular, full frame, cropped sensor).  You click once and it spits out a corrected image.  Here’s why it’s unique, it only corrects for vertical distortion.  This means a lamp post, a door, a persons head, will look normal.  Horizontal distortion is kept in place however, preventing the entire remapping of the image and the loss of composition and sharpness that comes with it.  With one click, you ditch the bad distortion and keep the good/necessary distortion that makes this lens unique. Great, so what the hell does that mean? 

Examples

Here’s an example of people:

This alone is a significant reason to buy this program.  Now, a brief disclaimer, I do not recommend shooting people with a fisheye in general but in certain situations where you need to cover a large area and panoramic is not feasible, it’s nice to know you can use this program to get the shot you want and avoid people (women) hating you later. 

This works great for architectural/indoor shots too.  Here’s a few examples. 

Take a look at the scaffolding on the sides, they’re rendering perfectly straight while retaining the composition of the original photograph

These are from a series of pictures taken recently in the Rockaways and Breezy Point in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.  The fisheye works well here as the goal was to take an environmental portrait of sorts of an entire house in it’s surroundings.  I was using a Sigma 15mm 2.8 full frame fisheye on a Canon 5D mark III.  Pay attention to the lines along the edges.  All of the lines that we know are supposed to be straight, i.e. wood, steel,brick etc., are rendered straight. 

It works on verticals too. Take a look at the circle on the bottom.

This program also allows you to create super simple panoramic.  Most cameras these days have way more pictures than we need.  Most of the time.  Using a fisheye and cropping into a panoramic format allows us to take advantage of those pixels.

So there are a few tricks to keep in mind.  First, always keep your horizon in the middle.  Yes, everyone knows from day 1 we are taught NOT to do this but when shooting with an ultra wide angle lens, Keystoning (when a building looks like it’s leaning backward) is big problem.  This is exaggerated even more with a fisheye.  The trick is to compose loosely, keep the horizon in the middle and “compose” by cropping in post.  Yes it’s cheating, but it beats stitching panos and hoping people won’t move or the wind won’t blow from shot to shot.  High pixel DSLR allow us to do this without worrying about picture quality now and if it helps, know you’ll be cropping into the part of the picture that is the sharpest.  The second trick is to try and keep your key subjects closer to the middle of the lens, yes, similar to first, compose loosely, but this focuses on the idea that the distortion gets significantly worse as it approaches the edge of the frame, don’t put any heads there if you can avoid it.  Third trick, shot at 2.8.  Don’t bother bumping up your ISO and shooting at F16, you’ll get plenty of depth of field at 2.8 or F4, you won’t notice the difference.  The slight gain in sharpness from stopping down will be offset by the ISO increase if shooting at dusk. 

Just remember to use this lens with the end goal in mind, keep the distortion if you want it, lose it if you don’t.  Use these techniques along with this plugin to achieve truly dramatic images.  

A Word from Ron

Wow, I’d like to thank Cliff for putting together such a cool article. Cliff is like a brother to me, so he’s a guy I really trust. He’s has been telling me for a while that I’ve got to check this product out, but like we do with our brothers – I ignored him because I haven’t had time. He finally proved to me that he’s right (again) and that I should check this out – which I will in a future article.

Check out Cliff’s amazing work at http://www.cliffordpickett.com/

Special Offer

**** CLICK HERE FOR SPECIAL DISCOUNT OFFER ****

Fisheye Lens Links

Wanna buy a fisheye now? Me too! I was just looking at these links so I thought I’d share them in case you wanted to look too…

• Canon Fisheye Lenses at B&H
• Nikon Fisheye Lenses at B&H
• Sigma Fisheye Lenses

Other articles you may enjoy…

• Canon 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye Zoom <<--- I LOVE THIS LENS!!!!
• 8mm Fisheye for Canon, Nikon, Sony & Pentax - only $229!
• Which camera should I buy?
• Which lens should I buy?
• Which books should I read?
• Tripod Recommendations 
• What plug-ins should I buy? (for Photoshop & Lightroom)

Disclosure

If you make a purchase from select links in this article, I may make a commission.

UPDATE REVIEW: HDRSoft Photomatix 4.1

**** Don’t forget to get your 15% discount when you use the coupon code at the end of this article! ****

A while back I reviewed Photomatix 3.1 Pro Plus, and I must confess that at the time I didn’t really do much HDR or Tone Mapping work . Although that has changed over the last year as there’s exciting stuff happening in the HDR world including the release of Photomatix 4.1 – the industry leading solution in HDR processing!  or existing owners of Photomatix, this is a no brainer upgrade, and for those who have used the trial version forever, it’s time to pony up and get those watermarks off your HDR images!

Sample Image

Here’s one of those wild HDR images created with my new Canon 8-15mm Fisheye Zoom (review)

Using the latest build of Photomatix I processed this image on August 17th. At first I had the natural look and then I couldn’t help but go wild with it as this image needed some oomph. You can click the image to see my mini-review of this lens or click here to purchase it from B&H.

User Interface

 
New Workflow Shortcuts & the renamed Preprocessing Options dialog are your entry points

Getting started in Photomatix is the effectively same, but simple & effective user-interface. The 3.x Workflow Shortcuts window gets new terminology and features, but the 3.x Generate HDR – Options dialog is simplified and renamed to Preprocessing Options.

Visual presets are a big bonus as are both 64 & 32-bit support

The big improvements in 4.1+ come with the long-overdue visual preset thumbnails, and there are plenty of them! The rest of the UI is similar, but more logical so I find it to be a more simplified way of processing your images. Many will find that their new workflow will be to pick the preset that gets them closest to their artistic intent, and then tweak those values as needed in the Adjustments window. Gone are the days of being dumped off with a bunch of complex sliders and no clue as to how to get started - woohoo!

Performance Improvements

I’ve enjoyed Trey Ratcliff’s HDR Workshop DVD’s, and in it he still recommends converting your images to JPEG when processing in Photomatix because it is believed that this is what Photomatix does with your RAW files anyway, and its raw conversion isn’t very good – I agree. As a result of this recommendation from the king of HDR, I decided that I’d give up my obsession with passing in the fat RAW files and get with the times. As you can see from the dialog above of the files I passed in, the files still aren’t exactly tiny but both the 32 & 64-bit versions of Photomatix 4.0 only took 42 seconds to process all 5 shots into an HDR image, and 4.1.1 is even faster! 

After I was done making changes, I clicked the process button which generated the final tone mapped image in only 22 seconds which saved out to 88.9 MB TIFF file when I chose Save Image (again faster in 4.1.1). Overall this felt like a huge improvement over what I was seeing with the previous version, where I’d go do some chores, eat dinner, etc… while it churned on 5 big  jpeg files.

I did see the performance slow down to 2 minutes and 10 seconds when I chose all the Preprocessing Options, so you’ll benefit by having noise reduction done by your RAW processor before bringing your files to Photomatix.  I strongly recommend Canon users with cameras new for 2010 or later export their images as JPEG from Digital Photo Professional (DPP – the software on your camera CD that you never installed), or use in-camera JPEG’s, for the best results. Lightroom does a decent job of reverse engineering Canon’s file format to do decent raw processing, but DPP is still the best Canon raw processor (despite its horrible user-interface and uselessness after that).

I was using a 3 year old Dell XPS 420 Quad Proc system with 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate system and 8GB of RAM for my testing. For those who are interested, the Experience Index numbers on my system are Proc 7.1, RAM 7.1, Graphics 6.5, and Hard Disk 5.9, so it is an old system with the disk I/O being the bottleneck, so this file processing performance will only improve on faster disk I//O systems. I’ve also tested it with my MacBook Pro (pre-Lion) and the performance there was equally good.

Other Improvements (UPDATE)

One of my readers from my photography club who is a more experienced Photomatix user than me, was kind enough to share some additional improvements that he has discovered in his more extensive use of this new version:

• Improved ghosting support
• Halos are much less pronounced.  Joseph Calev reports that he recently ran some photos through Photomatix 4 that he had previously run through 3 and the halos were much better.
• Presets can also be used when running batch processes – which is huge for those with a fine tuned workflow.
• 4.1.1 has numerous enhancements, so be sure to stay up to date on the latest version of Photomatix for improvements and bug fixes.

What about Photoshop CS5 & Nik HDR Efex Pro?

I have reviewed HDR Efex Pro 1.1 (discount) and while it has some nice features, I much prefer the performance and results I get from Photomatix 4. 

Upgrade Info

Your version 3 license key does not work to register version 4.0, so you will need a new license key. Pro Plus license users can upgrade free of charge and get a new license key by filling out the following here. Additional details are available at that link as well.

Special Offer Promo Code

HDRSoft, the makers of Photomatix HDR tone mapping software have extended an offer to readers of this blog for a 15% discount when you use the coupon code RonMartBlog when you checkout on their web site (see picture above). Don’t forget to click the recalculate button after you enter the code to get the discount.

Additional Useful HDR Information

If you are struggling to get HDR results that aren’t cheesy, check out my review of Trey Ratcliff’s HDR DVD Workshop and his eBook, Top 10 Mistakes in HDR Processing and How to Fix Them as well as his best-selling book A World in HDR.

Check out Trey's other courses and eBooks  here.

Conclusion

Photomatix 4 – A great starting point in only 10 minutes!

If you are new to Photomatix, then please read my old Photomatix review here. What I am seeing in this release are great performance and usability improvements which make it worth the upgrade, but I’m not seeing much beyond the Fusion feature that wasn’t possible in the previous release. As a result, I think my old review is still fairly accurate which is why this is a “update review”, instead of a full review.

I do think that this is the best version of HDRSoft’s Photomatix to date and the changes are significant enough to warrant an upgrade (which fortunately for many will be free or limited cost). I found this version to be much more enjoyable and user-friendly, so that I was actually able to get pretty solid HDR results in about 10 minutes. The image had some flaws that needed to be worked out, but far fewer than in previous releases. As you can see above that without any additional work whatsoever, it’s a decent place to start on what is an impossible single-exposure of Times Square in New York City.

Disclaimer

I was provided a copy of this product to review. I may also get a commission if you make a purchase the links in this article. Thanks for supporting the blog by coming back here to make your purchase!

Mini-Review: Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L USM Fisheye Ultra-Wide Zoom Lens

Copyright 2010 – Canon USA

I’ve been lusting for this lens since I first got my hands on it in September of 2010, so when I found on Monday I could get one in this article (still available) I was all over it. Mine arrived from B&H today so despite bad weather and not much time sunlight after work, I got out and played with it a bit.

Creativity Blooms

Oh when you get a shot with this lens like the one above you just think – wow, I’m really going to love this lens! It definitely opens up the creative door and clears off the cob webs. I just love this shot of what normally would be a very boring photo.

Focus can be tricky at 8mm

 

To get a shot that doesn’t include your feet or head, you need to get into some interesting positions. Unless you have a Canon Right Angle Finder and use it, it’s easy to miss your focus target as in this case.

When it nails the focus, it can be sharp – and fun

It was really fun when just screwing around yielded something fun like the shot above.

The blue fringing was present on all of my 8mm shots from a Canon 5D Mark II. In addition, it’s hard to tell here – but the full frame is black so click the image to see a larger frame on your browsers default background color.

You can do some interesting things including whacky HDR 

Clouds are really cool in fisheye shots so this cloudy day shot got a little more interesting. This was just a 5 minute edit and it’s a tad on the cheesy side with the colors, but you can see with some time and patience that Photomatix can be a good start to an interesting image.

In this shot the three exposures combined to create the noise in the outer part of the frame. The blown sky is because I merged the JPEG’s instead of corrected RAW’s or doing a fix in Photoshop using a good layer. I’d do that if I had the time, but in this case I didn’t.

Sometimes 15mm is better than 8mm

Despite this being a zoom lens, it’s easy to treat it like a prime and get stuck at 8mm. After all, that’s the fun of this lens. However, going up to 15mm sometimes create just as interesting shots as shown above (hover over to see 8mm). This of course begs the question, would the 16-35mm be just as good?

Notice the hood in the 8mm shot – it’s scary not to use it because the lens sticks out, but you need to remember to remove it at 8mm. I frequently I forgot and ruined plenty of shots.

But Honey, it’s for the baby!

Most of us are never going to be able to justify this lens, so you need to think of how you can sell this to the spouse. Take a few shots of junior in ways that you don’t normally see and that might be just enough to get a “that’s neat” and you are home free.

Conclusion

Money doesn’t grow on trees around my house either, so I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to keep it or just rent it from one of the companies in my Lens Rental Series (discounts) like LensProToGo.com and LensRentals.com. If I could only use it when I rented then I’d probably never rent it. Even if I did rent it, I’d probably not have it with me when I was inspired to say “this is a great application for a fisheye”.

However,  I ask myself – if I were to own this lens, I’d use it and probably get some creative shots I’ve never imagined before? This lens is small enough to fit in my bag, so I could just take it everywhere.

However, it’s so expensive for a niche shot, would it make a good investment? Then again I think I could eventually probably get one good shot along the way that sells well in which case with three 16x24 print sales it could easily pay for itself.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. At least B&H gives me 30 days to decide, and I’d rather have it in my hands while I think than do with out. Worst case I can probably sell it to a friend at full price as these aren’t going to be in stock much longer, and this is a desirable enough lens that it is certain to hold its value well.

Click here to purchase yours from B&H today.

Disclaimer

I purchased this lens with my own money from B&H using its Bill Me Later feature so I can get more time to pay for this bad boy. If you make a purchase using the links provided in the article it helps to support this blog as I may get a commission. If you are going to buy this lens anyway then please use my links.