Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Radiant Photo Black Friday Deal (until Nov 30 2022)

I needed to edit some photos in a hurry for my holiday cards, so I was pretty jazzed when one of my friends who used to work at Nik Software reached out to me to tell me about this cool new product that has some very good AI for auto fixing photos (think Perfectly Clear only better).

Check out later in this post for my first thoughts, but here’s a sweet deal they have on it right now if you are taking advantage of Black Friday sales:

Initial Thoughts

While the UX is a little clunky on Windows, many photos will benefit from the auto edits or use of simple presets as shown here:


Radiant Photo

Like I often did with Perfectly Clear, I see this as a product for those photos you care about but you don't want to spend any time editing. It's also useful for final touches on photos you edited, but maybe went overboard in some ways.

I find myself using it like an app where I just load photos and see what it does. If I like it, I save them (or apply changes to new layer when integrating with Photoshop). If not, then no harm done. However, I'm used to advance photo editing directly in Photoshop, so those of you who aren't might find it useful to spend a little more time experimenting in the UX. The online manual is comprehensive, so if you want to go that route you'll be rewarded with documentation which seems rare these days.

Conclusion

Is it worth? Well given gas prices these days, I'd say yeah considering it's something that can turn 30 minutes of photo editing into seconds. I think this product needs some work on the user interface when running on Windows, but it didn't crash during my testing. It definitely saved me some time, so I'll be keeping an eye on it and looking to see what improvements lie ahead.

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If you enjoyed this article, please support future articles like this by making a donation or saving money by using my discount coupon codes. Either way, your support is greatly appreciated!

This blog is intended for freelance writing and sharing of opinions and is not a representative of any of the companies whose links are provided on this site.

The opinions provided are of Ron Martinsen alone and do not reflect the view of any other entity

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

The Best Wireless Personal Video Conferencing Light I’ve Ever Used


Raya Bi-Color Round LED Panel Light (9")

Sometimes a product is so good that people who use it become instant fans and they are eager to tell everyone they know about it. Great examples include game consoles, the iPhone, Netflix, etc..

As you’ve probably noticed, I’m not reviewing much lately because my personal life has been dedicated to my family and my work life has been quite busy. However, when I tried this product out, I loved it so much that I knew it was time to get another article out as quickly as possible.

I think what won me over so quickly on this one was that my friends at B&H sent me a review unit that included a great support stand (which consists of several parts sold separately) and a battery pack with charger that makes this entire unit wireless. What you see in the picture is all you need and you can take it anywhere, set it down, turn it on, and voila you’ve got great light. What’s more, you can adjust the light temperature and brightness to give you subtle lighting improvements that are hardly noticeable or you can crank it up if you really want to bring your eye color out to the max!

Examples

My bedroom chair is one of my favorite places to have video conference calls when working from home or talking with friends, but I almost never turn my camera on because the light is just blah as shown here:

To be fair, this was actually a rare sunny day in the Pacific Northwest and the light is much better than normal but the challenge is the back lighting and the harsh side lighting. If I was taking a professional photo I’d use an reflector and be in good shape, but this is live video so that isn’t especially practical. However, with my Raya 9” light, I can give new life to my Herman Munster-like dark inset eyes as shown here:

Yes, I may have overdone it a bit with the brightness and the warmth, but you get the idea. I now have nice catchlights that bring out the color of my eyes better and improve the experience quite a bit.

Now, I know some of you are probably saying – heck, that before is way better than the lighting I have at my office, I’d take that any day so I don’t see the value here. Ok, that’s fair, so how about a more common problem of overhead light that casts shadows over your face like this:

versus something more evenly lit across the face like this?

Now, imagine I get that light up higher (to address the camera left eye shadow) and possibly throw a handkerchief or other softening material over the light to make it light without the harsh highlights? You get the idea, that it can make a big difference without much effort but if you do put some effort into it then it can be as professional as you want it to look – for not that much expense.

Even outdoors, where light isn’t splashing all over shiny countertops and stainless refrigerator doors I was able to take an acceptable lighting scenario like this:

into a subtle, but improved lighting on my eyes with catchlights like this:

This sunny day sitting under the deck umbrella just got a whole lot better with this portable light – without any wires cluttering up the space. I didn’t need to worry about wires that the dog would chew on or trip on to bring my light down at the worst possible time. It just worked as easy as it was to bring my phone (in this case) or laptop to a outdoor environment to enjoy a online meeting with friends.

How it works

So the “trick” here is two big batteries that look like what some of us might recognize from camcorders in the 90’s. They are those two big rectangles in the middle of the light that hold a lot of power but also add weight to help stabilize the light so that it’s not falling over with the lightest breeze outdoors.

The two orange knobs control light temperature and brightness. If you aren’t going to be moving it around then you can skip the batteries and go for the power cord that comes with the light and never have to worry about charging anything, but for me the batteries make it so mobile that I want to use it everywhere around my house.

Here’s everything you need based on the picture above:


Impact Large Magnet Grip Mount with 50mm Stud and 6" Baby Pin Adapter Kit

Oh, did you notice something cool in that title? Yes, the base is a big magnet so if you have something metal to set it on then it’s rock solid. I stuck it on my refrigerator, but my wife didn’t like that too much (but hey, it worked!).

You’ll also need TWO Watson NP-F770 Lithium-Ion Battery Pack (7.4V, 4400mAh) batteries (7800mAh and 10,050mAh versions are also available for even longer battery life). To charge them you’ll need a Watson Compact AC/DC Charger for L & M Series Batteries.

Don’t need it to be portable?

If you just want to mount it to your desk and forget it, then ignore all of that above and just get this and use the power cord that comes with the light:

Yeah, but how does it work with video?

I hate video editing, so here’s a video I did using just my iPhone and the Raya light outdoors on my deck. Please forgive the poor reduction in video quality and horrible color after YouTube’s terrible video compression when viewing on a PC, but it’s less terrible on iPhones:

Night time iPhone Video

Day time iPhone Video

If you are a content-creator, you might be interested in the full Livestreaming Kit.

Why should you care what I think?

Many of you who have followed this blog may not realize that my primary job has always been in high tech at a company you’ve definitely heard of. With 6 years of experience in building cutting edge video conferencing solutions for the biggest companies on the planet, I know a thing or two about the challenges many users face when collaborating with others over video.

Typically, my photography life outside of work doesn’t directly cross paths with my day job, but when B&H contacted me to say they had a cool personal light for photography and video conferencing, I couldn’t pass up the chance to check it out. What I didn’t expect is that it would be a wireless solution that would allow me to have great light wherever I landed with my laptop or even phone to have a meeting!

I am not allowed to endorse items for work, so I can’t mention who I work for or what I work on (but it’s easy to figure out). As such, this is my personal opinion formed outside of work using personal products for personal meetings with friends and relatives, but after this is done I do plan to show my friends at work and use it to enhance my personal meeting experiences.

Where to Buy?

CLICK HERE to learn more or buy today.

Other articles you may enjoy

Enjoy more reviews on the Reviews tab.

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. I was not paid to do this review, but I was allowed to keep my review unit.

NOTE: This site requires cookies and uses affiliate linking to sites that use cookies.

If you enjoyed this article, please support future articles like this by making a donation or saving money by using my discount coupon codes. Either way, your support is greatly appreciated!

This blog is intended for freelance writing and sharing of opinions and is not a representative of any of the companies whose links are provided on this site.

The opinions provided are of Ron Martinsen alone and do not reflect the view of any other entity

Monday, April 4, 2022

Imagenomic Portraiture 3 ai Discount and Video Review - 2022 Edition


Check out the latest tutorial using this image and more

Video Tutorial

Check out my latest video tutorial on Imagenomic Portraiture 3 ai:

Before and After Images


Click to view the full original unedited image


Click to view the full image after Portraiture 3 ai editing

Conclusion

I've been using this product since it first came out and still to this date there's nothing I like more. Check out the free demo for Photoshop and Lightroom to see for yourself - it really makes skin enhancements a simple one minute step in your photo editing workflow.

Where to Buy?

CLICK HERE to learn more or buy today.

Enter the code and click update to apply the discount
Enter the code and click update to apply the discount

Enjoy these and more on the Reviews tab as well as Ron's Recommendations.

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.

NOTE: This site requires cookies and uses affiliate linking to sites that use cookies.

If you enjoyed this article, please support future articles like this by making a donation or saving money by using my discount coupon codes. Either way, your support is greatly appreciated!

This blog is intended for freelance writing and sharing of opinions and is not a representative of any of the companies whose links are provided on this site.

The opinions provided are of Ron Martinsen alone and do not reflect the view of any other entity

Thursday, December 23, 2021

Merry Christmas 2021 from Ron Martinsen


Martinsen Family by Corrine Alavekios

Merry Christmas to all my former blog readers who have supported me over the years. I've taken an extended break from blogging, but I wanted to just leave a note that I'm alive and kicking despite the impact that COVID has had on all of us.

You can still contact me for consulting and business matters, but I’m enjoying getting a good night sleep again since I’ve put the blog on pause. You can also follow me on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Thank you for your support!

NOTE: This site requires cookies and uses affiliate linking to sites that use cookies.

If you enjoyed this article, please support future articles like this by making a donation or saving money by using my discount coupon codes. Either way, your support is greatly appreciated!

This blog is intended for freelance writing and sharing of opinions and is not a representative of any of the companies whose links are provided on this site.

The opinions provided are of Ron Martinsen alone and do not reflect the view of any other entity

Friday, August 7, 2020

Printing Your Memories with the EPSON SureLab D870

Click to see the EPSON SureLab D870 at B&H

Want to print a large number of photos blazingly fast at a price that doesn’t break the bank, yet has a professional look and feel? I did, so I wrote this review to see if the EPSON SureLab D870 lived up to its promises and my very high standards as a professional print master, print book author and Senior Program Manager of the Microsoft Windows print team for 3 years.

If you are here just for the review of this printer designed for professional photographers then you can skip the next section. If you are a photography hobbyist or someone with a lot of photos that you wish you had time to print, then you may enjoy the background story below about why I am writing this article.

Background Story

According to my photo library management software, Mylio, I have roughly 450,000 photos saved on my NAS and for my phones I have 100,000+ in Google Photos plus 22,000 in iCloud. Now out of those roughly 572k photos I’ve made about 30k public and shown my family about another 10k or so on top of that. Let’s assume I’m being too conservative though and say that the total number of photos seen by eyes other than mine is really 72,000 photos. That means I have a half million photos that have never been seen by others, and that’s from someone who is internationally known for photography AND printing!!!!

Now I will admit that because I shoot in burst mode, there’s probably plenty of photos that my eyes have only glanced at once or twice. However, this past March I had a lot of time to think as I drove from Seattle to Texas (and back) to bury my Dad. While I was at his place in a rural Texas town I found myself enjoying old family prints from the time before digital photography. It kinda hit me like a ton of bricks that I wasn’t judging these photos for their composition, sharpness, color, etc… – I was just enjoying the walk down memory lane.This reminded me of a common complaint from my wife who tells me “you have all those photos, but they are useless because I can’t even see any of them”.

Now we do enjoy plenty of photos on our Meural digital frames as well as the fantastic photo frame experience of the Google Nest Hub Max, so if you aren’t doing that I still highly recommend that. My wife enjoys printing her cell phone photos with her Epson PictureMate, and I’m a heavy user of my EPSON P800 and P5000 printers for my fine art photography work. However, there’s a decade of digital photos that live on my redundant NAS storage devices that really need to be combed through so I can print those memories to be enjoyed the good old fashioned way – by holding them in a hand – long after me and my NAS devices, digital frames and phones are long gone. More importantly, they need to be enjoyed by my kids and future grandkids (hopefully) as I have enjoyed the print photos my parents and generations before them took.

As I was driving through beautiful places like Moab, Utah during my long drive I got to thinking about how sad it would be if my family couldn’t enjoy the experience of seeing my photos because they got lost due to some digital tragedy after I was gone. Sure I have lots of digital backups, but what if those after me just simply stopped tracking all of that data and ultimately it was lost? What would be left? Just the prints – and most likely just the ones in good old fashion photo albums or printed photo books.

Now my success with this blog has given me a benefit many of you don’t have, so my cost at trying photo print services, printing photo books, archiving photos digitally, making professional prints, etc… is usually $0.00. With the cost excuse out of the way, I still have my wife complaining that she doesn’t know happened for most of the years we were dating and the first 10 years of my sons life outside of what you see on the blog (which is also what’s on our digital frames). Why is that? I have no excuses, right?

Well, it turns out that I still work 60+ hour weeks despite the fact that I’m not blogging like I used to. I’m also the father of 4 children which includes active 11 and 4 year old kids who need to spend time with Dad when he stops his workaholic days, so my free time usually begins around 10:00 PM at night (which was the start of my blogging work day years ago). Weekends end up being family time as well, so I’m lucky to get 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there to do activities that I enjoy – like editing or printing personal photos. With these constraints, I find myself getting deeper in the hole each month as I still shoot photos regularly, but I fail to find to edit or print photos that aren’t for my clients or blog. Simply put, my cherished personal photos don’t get prioritized – sound familiar?

Sure, I occasionally tell myself I’m going to do it and then I find myself falling into the second trap – I end up going through a few dozen photos and then spending all my personal time editing one or two of these photos. At this pace it would take me a few centuries to accomplish my goal of leaving prints that memorialize my wonderful life for generations that come after me.

When I had this discussion with my wife she challenged me – why don’t you just identify the best family photos and JUST PRINT THEM. She insisted – don’t waste your time editing them because its better to leave the memories behind than it is to have them lost because you couldn’t let the professional photographer inside you forgive yourself for not making professional images. She even went so far to remind me about my strict policy of publishing photos on the blog for camera and lens reviews that are 100% unedited (all are in-camera JPEG), so why couldn’t I do the same for my digital memories and “just print the damn things”.

Again, is any of this ringing a bell with you?

Well, its my own love of photo editing and desire to have my important pictures that have been a mental block keeping me from doing what I needed to do, so I made a pact with her and myself that I’d finally address this problem. My objective – to print my collection – but obviously not all 500k+ photos – just the memories through the years.

I started with my 2007 photos collection – the year I got serious about digital photography (after years of “thankfully” being a film photographer with prints – albeit very bad ones). After 3 months of pouring through – just that one years worth of photos – I identified about 460 images that seemed to be worth printing. I took 22,271 photos that year, so roughly 2% were what I’d consider “family classics” that I’d want to hand down to generations after me. They also represent just over an hour of printing by the amazing SureLab D870.

Wow – after the long battle of pouring through all of these photos – and admittedly probably spending too long in Lightroom doing minor tweaks on some of them – it took me 3 months to pinpoint the photos and a little over an hour to have a big stack of 4x6 prints to put in a photo album or at least a shoebox (guess what I actually did :). I didn’t have to then upload them to some service and fight with its UI, I didn’t have to deal with a ROES system for a service built for volume printing, I didn’t have to fight the crappy tools to build photo albums that never preserve my desired aspect ratios so I end up spending weeks to build a simply 20 page “book”.

No, this was much easier – I just dumped all of the files out as Full Size JPEG’s, went to the folder in Windows Explorer, selected all of the photos then did a right-click and Print (which launches the native Windows Photo Print Wizard). 

REVIEW: Epson SureLab D870

EPSON describes this printer as “The fast minilab printer for demanding small-format photo production”, and I’d say that actually hits the nail on the head. This six ink dye-based ink printer is optimized to print 4" x 6" prints in as fast as 8.3 seconds (using 720 x 360 dpi) and up to 430 4" x 6" prints, 275 5" x 7" prints, or 140 8" x 10" prints per hour – that’s screaming fast!!!

This means if you are a school, event or wedding portrait photographer you can print the bulk of your photos on this printer very quickly even if you have a huge amount of photos to print. What’s more, the Epson SureLab Luster Photo Inkjet roll paper and Epson UltraChrome D6r-S Light Ink Cartridges are extremely affordable, so you will not only save time but your cost per print will be peanuts compared to SureColor professional printers – yet they will have that same high-quality professional feel same in the hand to your clients. While its true you will sacrifice the archival and tonal range characteristics of the UltraChrome® inks, it does allow you to have more competitive pricing for the time and money you’ll save with this solution. You can also still use your professional pigment ink printers for the larger prints sold at a premium price.

Simply put, if you print a lot of prints for your business – this is a no-brainer purchase that will quickly yield a return on your investment as you enjoyed with your 70-200 f/2.8 lens! However, I’m not and many of my readers aren’t either.

I decided to review this printer with a slightly different intention – does this printer make sense for the hobbyist to print their collection and can it produce results that are better than the typical low budget print services (e.g., Costco, Walgreens, Shutterfly, etc…).

How I Printed 495 Photo Print Jobs

I identified the photos I wanted to print in Lightroom and then exported out all of my pics as full-size sRGB JPEG files to the same folder. I would then select all, right click and choose print. This launches the Print Pictures wizard whereby I set the settings as shown above and then then clicked options to modify the printer driver as follows:


Don't forget to change the Color Management setting to ICM for best results!!!!

This gave perfect borderless prints, but the prints were dark. This was easily corrected by changing the Color Management to ICM with no other changes necessary in the Advanced… settings.

Like all borderless printing, if your aspect ratio of your images don’t match the output you are going to lose quite a bit of picture detail. As a result, you may choose to NOT do borderless to avoid that. If you go down that route some 4x6 prints taken from 3:2 aspect ratio source images may have a small white line on one edge of the photo but its not bothersome to me.

Sorry Mac users, I only tested on Windows 10 1909 over USB, so I have no comments about using this printer from a Mac.

I did successfully print to this printer from Lightroom and Photoshop, but this method was by far the fastest and recommended to me by my friends at EPSON. After much experimentation, I agreed and stuck to this method throughout my time with this printer.

Oh and if you are wondering why I had 495 photos – well that was just the limit I gave myself for each year worth of photos.

Actual Observed Performance

When printing 4x6 borderless prints I observed it took an average of 7.2 seconds per print which excludes the nearly 2 minutes it took for the Windows Print Wizard to create the print job and then another 4 minutes it took Windows to spool the 6GB print jobs (495 photos) I would throw at it. I excluded that as my Windows system is getting a little old so a faster performing system might be much quicker.

Conclusion

Pouring through tons of photos to identify the ones you want to print is really the big time sync. I completely underestimated how long this task would take – especially given my crazy busy work schedule. I could have been less picky when pouring through 20,000+ photos per year, but 500 pics creates a pile of photos over 6 inches tall that then need to be dealt with later (e.g., put in a photo album, or even organized in a shoebox). Sadly when printing this any when the photos pile up they don’t end up in a meaningful order, they just get mixed all together out of order. This means I ended up with a huge pile of photos that needed to be sorted once again by hand.

I definitely think the quality of the luster prints I got was very good but obviously not as good as I can get from my SureColor printers with a complete color managed workflow in Lightroom/Photoshop or with Epson Print Layout.

For a consumer who can afford a large format printer or $2000+ lens, I think this is definitely a great investment to print your own 4x6, 5x7, 8x10 or letter size prints at home – especially now during COVID-19. I’d much prefer to do my own than send them off to a service – especially with the hassle of having to upload all of the photos and configure the settings for the photos (or god forbid dealing with horrible ROES systems).

Obviously if you are the budget conscious type or one who thinks Costco / Walgreens / Shutterfly prints are just fine, then go for it. I’m not that type as I’m pretty picky and I don’t like a big pile of prints that don’t look even close to color accurate to me.

If you are a wedding, event, portrait photographer, etc.. – this is a no brainer investment. Yes, you’ll still want a SureColor printer for your large prints and the Bride’s wedding album, but for everything else these prints are going to look very professional and make your clients happy.

The only knocks I really have against this printer is that the lack of pigment means these prints aren’t going to last as long, which I care about for archival purposes. That said, I think they’ll look significant better in 40 years than the prints my parents took of me and had developed at the drug store, so really its more of an academic discussion than anything else. If a photo was so important that it needed a 200+ year archival lifespan then I’d print it on the SureColor anyway – and it won’t be hundreds of prints!

So, if you can afford it – get it. Its a big upfront investment that will pay off quickly thanks to super inexpensive ink and paper. The performance will give you back valuable time and you'll avoid being the most hated family member for sucking all your household bandwidth uploading photos to print services.

Where to Buy?

CLICK HERE to learn more or buy today.

Other articles you may enjoy

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

Enjoy these and more on the Reviews tab as well as Ron's Recommendations.

Sales Tax Reimbursement with Payboo

Don’t forget, with the B&H Payboo card most buyers can get the sales tax reimbursed. Click here to learn more.

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.

NOTE: This site requires cookies and uses affiliate linking to sites that use cookies.

If you enjoyed this article, please support future articles like this by making a donation or saving money by using my discount coupon codes. Either way, your support is greatly appreciated!

This blog is intended for freelance writing and sharing of opinions and is not a representative of any of the companies whose links are provided on this site.

The opinions provided are of Ron Martinsen alone and do not reflect the view of any other entity