REVIEW: Wacom Cintiq 13HD

Cintiq 13HD 13.3" Interactive Pen Display

For the past month I’ve been using a Cintiq 13HD 13.3" Interactive Pen Display. Previously I had been using the Wacom Intuos 4, and I was a Intuos 3 user before that.

Like many, I was excited about the idea of having a display built into the tablet because I thought it would be great for editing images. It seemed like a brilliant idea, so I was excited when my review unit arrived.

During my testing I tried it both with a MacBook Pro (pre-ThunderBolt) and my Windows 7 based Alienware Aurora systems. I started off by doing a calibration as the default picture quality on the display was terrible.

Overall I found the setup and ease of use on the Mac to be very good. Things just worked for the most part, but on Windows the drivers didn’t seem to be very good. Despite downloading the latest driver off the web, my Drobo Pro connected via iSCSI stopped working when I installed the tablet driver. Over a month later I haven’t been able to figure out what it did, so I’ve had to resort to using my Drobo in the very slow USB mode.

I eventually got it working on my PC, but it certainly was less stable than my Intuos 4 (in USB mode).

Overall Impressions

It’s times like this that I’m glad that I can review products because this is one that I found to be very disappointing. Perhaps it is because I use a Asus Zenbook with a touch screen as my daily work laptop, but I found the display both lacking in color depth and the touch performance to be mediocre. The pictures always show vivid images, but the viewing angle of this device isn’t very good so you have to be looking at it fairly head on to get the best picture quality.

Another practical oddity that you never think about until you own one these is that you can’t just drag your pen to objects on your other displays. You must first tap a display toggle button, otherwise your pen is locked to the Cintiq or your other displays. While this logically makes sense, in practice I found it hard to get used to.

Ironically I found that I didn’t really like running Photoshop on the Cintq because on the Mac the toolbar would default to the non Citique display so I kept having to toggle back and forth between displays to use the menu. While I could move the Mac’s menu to the Cintiq, that isn’t where I wanted it for all of my other apps.

Windows applications are self contained so they worked much better with the Cintq, but the tiny display was too small to host all of Photoshop. As a result, I found myself leaving the main app on one display and dragging just the window to the Cintq. This lead me with the Mac problem where I had to toggle to switch my cursor back and forth between the Citniq and my other displays. This was too cumbersome and annoying.

Perhaps the most shocking discovery was that for precise photo editing, the small display was challenging to use and my hands kept getting in the way. Sure, I could do nice demos of how things work but in practice I hated editing photos directly on the Citniq display. This lead me to use the Cintiq as a regular tablet, rather than something I can edit with.

Conclusion

Due to the previously obscene prices of the Cintiq’s, I never bothered to buy one and I couldn’t get one to review. After being used to Retina iPad’s, iPhone’s, and Windows 8 touch devices my bar about what I expect from a color display and touch screen is high. The Cintiq display failed to meet those expectations. It felt a bit like an outdated display with only pen technology to control it when my fingers were expecting to be able to do both touch and pen (like a Samsung Note or Windows Surface Pro).

I’m sure there will be fan boys who scream bloody murder at my review, and there’s probably sketch artist who will appreciate the Cintiq’s more than me. However, I ended up either not using it, or using it only as a tablet during a portion of my review period.

My advice is to save your money and get a Wacom Intuos 5. You’ll get pen performance that is roughly the same as the Cintiq, but you’ll have money to buy a good display like the NEC PA Series. This is basically what I’m doing now, but I anxiously await the near future when all my displays have capacitive touch support so the Cintiq won’t make any sense. Even today, a device like the Lenovo ThinkPad Helix gives you a touch display that is better than a Cintiq with a tablet & laptop included for only a few hundred dollars more.

Where to order

Click here to order the Cintiq 13HD 13.3" Interactive Pen Display at B&H web site, or go for the Wacom Intuos 5 instead.

Other articles you may enjoy

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

• Wacom Intuos 4 Review
• Choosing The Right Display Calibration Device
• NEC PA Series Monitors
• NEC PA242W

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 provided with a loaner tablet which I returned after publishing this article.

REVIEW: Arcsoft Portrait+ (Discount Offer)

Arcsoft Portrait+ Makes Image Editing Easy

One of my favorite books is Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers using Photoshop because I think it does a great job demystifying the subject of portrait editing. With that said, there’s still lots of grunt work involved so I can easily spend 5+ hours editing a single photo. This of course begs the question, what if there were a product that could simplify that process?

Portrait Professional is probably the product most people are familiar with due to their extensive advertising, but when I used it I felt very disappointed. onOne tried to tackle the problem with Perfect Portrait, and they got closer to my desire to have “automatic” enhancements that didn’t look cheesy. There’s also Portraiture and Nik’s Dynamic Skin Softener that can be used with more grunt work to get results that more closely align with my preferences, but both are going to be too tedious to use for an entire face, eye, teeth and lips edit of the average face. This is exactly why ArcSoft created Portrait+ to make auto retouching faces much easier and more  comprehensive in very little time.

Features

Plenty Sliders are available

Overall, I found the user interface to be clean and straightforward. It features some test images you can use when you first start, or you can use your own image. It features automatic face detection, but like most implementation of this technique – it often requires some user adjustments to the default wireframe.

Above average facial part recognition and a wealth of presets are some of the strengths

Once the face has been detected, you simply use the presets or sliders to get your desired look. Simple retouch brushes are included as well.

Bulk Edits with manual settings and presets are first class features

One of the highlights of this product is its excellent batch editing support. If you do lots of editing of similar types of images, this can be a huge time saver.

Conclusion

While I like this product better than some that I’ve used in the past, I’m still a hard core do-it-yourself portrait retoucher who prefers to use Portraiture. I’d place this product ahead of the results I’ve obtained using the latest version of Portrait Pro 11, but similar to what I’m used to getting from Perfect Portrait.  This product seems to offer better bulk/batch editing of a large number of photos, but I can’t edit faces that way so I didn’t really test that feature.

Where to order

Click here to learn more or order and use my 15% off coupon code, RMARC , on any ArcSoft product. You can also save 25% off Portrait+ for a limited time when you use the coupon code RMARCPP. Here’s an example that shows how your cart should look (please note, codes and discount amounts may change from what appears in this image):

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• Imagenomic Noiseware 4.1.1 Professional (Latest Version)
• Imagenomic Portraiture 2.x (Latest Version Tutorial)
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• What Photoshop books should I read?
• Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers using Photoshop

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 provided a copy of this product to review.

Getting Great 4x6 Prints Without Any Hassle–Part II of II

This is the continuation of my previous article entitled, Getting Great 4x6 Prints Without Any Hassle–Part I of II. If you haven’t read that already, I encourage you to do so before proceeding any further.

Lightroom Tip

In Lightroom you always start with the Page Setup button on the bottom right side of the print module that looks like this:

Canon PRO-1

Setting the Printer Driver – Windows

When you click it you will set the paper size to 4x6 and click the Properties button to set additional settings:

Printer Driver – Quick Setup Page

After you are done with the steps listed here you might want to Save a new “Commonly Used Setting” so you don’t have to check all of this every time you print.

On this page you start with Photo Printing as a default until you have your own custom commonly used setting created. From there you have to set Borderless Printing, the Media Type to Photo  Paper Plus Gloss II, the Printer Paper Size to 4”x6” and Print Quality to High as shown here:

I just use Portrait orientation for Lightroom because it sorts things out so that everything just works. If printing from Photoshop you must choose the correct orientation of your image OR rotate your image to the Portrait orientation to ensure your image is positioned properly on the final output print.

Printer Driver – Main Page

The media type should still be correct based on your first page settings, so the only big change here is that you MUST choose a Manual Color/Intensity and click the Set button:

After clicking Set you’ll see the Manual Color Adjustment dialog where you’ll switch to the Matching page and choose None to turn color management OFF on your printer driver. If you fail to do this then you’ll get double color managed prints that will look horrible.

Printer Driver – Page Setup

For this page you shouldn’t need to do anything based on the settings already specified, but you should always double check.

Setting the Printer Driver – OS X

Coming soon…

Lightroom Settings for Mac & Windows

After closing this dialog and returning to Lightroom you are ready to work in the print module. You start by either creating a new template or modifying an existing one. I usually start with the “(1) 4x6 template”.

All you need to do here is reset all of your margins to 0. If you can’t do this then it means you didn’t set borderless printing in your printer driver, so repeat the steps above and try again.

Once you have 0 margins you can make the cell size 6.00in by 4.00in as highlighted below:

Use 300 ppi & “Canon PRO-1 <GL><PP> 3 Photo Plus Paper Glossy” profile
with zero margins and a 4x6 cell size

Your final steps are to simply change the print resolution to 300ppi and choose your printer profile. Your profile should be Canon PRO-1 <GL><PP> 3 Photo Plus Paper Glossy for gloss, and for Semi-Gloss paper you’d choose Canon PRO-1 <SG> 3 Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss.

Photoshop CS6 Settings for Windows and Mac

Photoshop works much like Lightroom in that most of the work is done in the printer dialog, but there are a few things you need to make sure you do right in Photoshop.

I generally resize my images in advance using onOne Perfect Resize 7.5 or greater, then I sharpen my images as a last step before printing. If you’ve done this step properly you’ll be able to have a “Scaled Print Size” that has a scale of 100%. If you don’t do this then you’ll need to use Scale to Fit Media which does a good job, but will stretch your image so some image quality is lost.

With those disclaimers, here’s what you need to do with a properly resized image:

1. Choose your printer and then make sure your printer settings are correct EVERY TIME
1. Make sure Photoshop’s Layout setting matches Canon’s Orientation setting
2. Be sure to set your Color Handling to Photoshop Manages Colors
3. Make sure you check Black Point Compensation and Center Position.

Epson Stylus Photo R3000

Setting the Printer Driver – Windows

When you click it you will set the paper size to 4x6 and click the Properties button to set additional settings:

Printer Driver – Main Page

This is your most important step in getting a correct print because you need to make sure you are using:

1. Photo Black Ink
2. Premium Photo Paper Glossy Media Type
3. Max Quality Print Quality
4. Your Mode setting should be Off (No Color Adjustment) to avoid double color management
5. Your paper settings are 4 x 6 in Sheet Borderless with default expansion settings

Here’s what it should all look like:

Setting the Printer Driver – Page Layout

Here’s how I set my Page Layout page by default, but sometimes I’ll check Reduce/Enlarge:

In Photoshop you must ALWAYS set the orientation correctly in this dialog.

Printer Driver – Current Settings

Your current settings window should have a summary that looks roughly like this:

Setting the Printer Driver – OS X

Coming soon…

Lightroom Settings for Mac & Windows

After closing this dialog and returning to Lightroom you are ready to work in the print module. You start by either creating a new template or modifying an existing one. I usually start with the “(1) 4x6 template”.

All you need to do here is reset all of your margins to 0. If you can’t do this then it means you didn’t set borderless printing in your printer driver, so repeat the steps above and try again.

Once you have 0 margins you can make the cell size 6.00in by 4.00in as highlighted below:

Use 360 ppi & “SPR300 Premium Glossy” profile with zero margins and a 4x6 cell size

Your final steps are to simply change the print resolution to 360ppi and choose your printer profile. Your profile should be SPR300 Premium Glossy for gloss, and for Semi-Gloss paper you’d choose SPR 3000 Premium Semigloss.

Photoshop CS6 Settings for Windows and Mac

Photoshop works much like Lightroom in that most of the work is done in the printer dialog, but there are a few things you need to make sure you do right in Photoshop.

I generally resize my images in advance using onOne Perfect Resize 7.5 or greater, then I sharpen my images as a last step before printing. If you’ve done this step properly you’ll be able to have a “Scaled Print Size” that has a scale of 100%. If you don’t do this then you’ll need to use Scale to Fit Media which does a good job, but will stretch your image so some image quality is lost.

With those disclaimers, here’s what you need to do with a properly resized image:

1. Choose your printer and then make sure your printer settings are correct EVERY TIME
1. Make sure Photoshop’s Layout setting matches Epson’s Orientation setting
2. Be sure to set your Color Handling to Photoshop Manages Colors
3. Make sure you check Black Point Compensation and Center Position.

Conclusion

Hopefully you will find this helpful in solving the frustration of making small prints for loved ones of your favorite photos. If so, please do me a favor and share a link to this article with your friends on your favorite social media sites and web forums. I’d also appreciate if you could consider making a donation or making purchases using links found in my articles and discount coupon codes.

NOTE: I ran out of time tonight so I wasn’t able to include the Mac screen shots, but I’ll try to do that soon. Thanks for your patience!

Where to order

Here’s links to where you can get 4x6 paper for Canon and Epson in Glossy and Semi-Gloss formats:

• Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II (4 x 6") 100 Sheets
• Canon SG-201 Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss - 4x6" - 50 Sheets
• Epson Ultra Premium Glossy Photo Paper - 4x6" - 100 Sheets
• Epson Premium Semi-Gloss Photo Paper for Inkjet 4x6" - 40 Sheets

Other articles you may enjoy

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

• Getting Great 4x6 Prints Without Any Hassle–Part I of II
• Printing Series
• onOne Perfect Resize 7.5 – for the best resizing results
• Red River Paper vs Epson Papers – Less expensive papers for Canon and Epson printers with good ICC profiles
• AutoPrint – ImagePrint’s best kept secret? – if you need your staff/family to easily get 4x6 prints with just drag and drop, this is the way to go!
• Which Printer Should I Buy? Epson or Canon?
• Choosing The Right Display Calibration Device – so what you see on the screen matches what you see on the print

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 also provided with samples of 4x6 paper at my request by Canon and Epson under no obligation.

REVIEW: FotoMagico 4.2 Demo & Discount – A Wedding Photographers Must Own App!

About four months ago I got contacted to see if I wanted to review a product called FotoMagico. I get lots of these offers, but my to-do list is so long that I turn most of them down. I quickly checked out the web site to see what this product was about and was immediately intrigued. Fast forward to today when I finally got time to review this product and I’m now kicking myself for not doing it out sooner!

In short, FotoMagico is a very inexpensive, yet easy and fun to use app for generating videos of your photos and videos with great transitions, music and more. Sure, you’ve seen lots of apps like this, but if you are like me most have failed to meet your expectations. Of course web sites like Animoto showed great promise and were super popular, but it was absurdly priced so why bother right?

WARNING: This is a Mac OS X product only. It will not run on Windows! (Don’t feel bad Windows users, QImage doesn’t run on OS X – much to the frustration of Mac users <g>).

User Interface Tour

The user interface is clean and simple with nice integration with both the files on your drive as well as your libraries in iPhoto, Lightroom and Aperture. You just select your images and drag and drop them onto the storyboard.

Once you have your files dropped you can create an instant slideshow and be done – zero work on your part – or you can use the storyboard or timeline to customize your presentation.

The Timeline is powerful so you can perform advanced customizations with text that appears on demand.

You can even add videos as well as photos, and you can choose for auto advancement of your slides or click to navigate (on supported platforms).

You can even have teleprompter notes to display on a second display or beamer to provide your own words during a live presentation.

New for 4.2 - Masks and Opacity Control!

FotoMagico Demo

Here’s a demo that the folks at Boinx wanted me to show you so you can see what’s possible after you master this product:

and here’s my first video (rated PG) that I created using low res images off my people portfolio (NSFW) with very little effort:

I did this without reading any manuals or any help, and now that I've done it once I could easily recreate a video like this with new content in less than 10 minutes. There is an error at the end with the audio that could have been prevented with a feature that exists in FotoMagico to adjust the slide timing based on the length of the audio, but I forgot to use that before publishing my video.

What’s New in 4.2

If you’ve already been using this cool product, then you might be curious to know what’s new in version 4. Here’s a little video that tells you all about it (which new users might find useful as well):

Here’s also what’s new in 4.2:

Click here to see more videos on some of the new enhancements like the splitscreen effect, picture in picture, the spotlight effect and more.

Conclusion

I hate video because it’s too time consuming and a pain in ass to edit, but this changes my view a little bit. FotoMagico was super easy and fun to use so I quickly became addicted to video experimentations! I was very satisfied with the results that didn’t take me long to build (excluding time wasted experimenting just for fun). It was also super easy to build output videos for YouTube, Vimeo, DVD, and iOS devices with a click of a button. In short, all software should be this be fun and simple.

Oh, and in case you are wondering – in the two hours I played around with FotoMagico on my 3 year old MacBook Pro, it didn’t crash or hang once. 8GB was plenty and the performance on newer systems should be even better!

Now you are no longer limited to the crappy slideshows that Lightroom creates nor do you have a reason (if you have a Mac) to not make videos of your work. This is a really cool app that I’m very excited about and highly recommend it! If you are a wedding or event photographer, then you'll really love it as its so much easier and faster than anything I’ve used!

To learn more or get A 5 day free trial visit boinx.com here. Don’t forget to come back here to get a discount on your order using the link below!

Special Offer – Save 10%

Click here to get your 10% discount (it should appear something like what you see below):

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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 also was provided a copy of this product to review for the purpose of bringing this article to you.

Apple OS X–Lion Compatibility Info

As of the time I’m writing this, it is rumored that Apple’s next major operating system upgrade of OS X (10.7 – code name Lion) is due to be released very soon. As a result, the burning question will be – should I upgrade? Here’s some things to consider if you use these products…

Nik Software

Here’s what Nik Software has to say about Lion:

Apple is expected to release the latest version of Mac OS X, version 10.7 Lion, sometime this month. We've been working with developer release versions and want to notify you that we've found an issue installing some of our plug-ins into Photoshop CS5 after you've updated to Lion.

If you have already installed your Nik Software plug-ins into Photoshop CS5 prior to updating to Lion, the plug-ins will continue to work without issue. There are also no issues installing our plug-ins into Lightroom or Aperture on a Mac running OS 10.7 Lion and no issues installing HDR Efex Pro into any host application.

However, the current installers for Dfine 2.0, Viveza 2, Color Efex Pro 3.0, Silver Efex Pro 2, and Sharpener Pro 3.0 are not able to install into Photoshop CS5 on a Mac running OS 10.7 Lion. This issue will affect both new and re-installations of these plug-ins.

Our engineers have already begun working on a fix for the installers and we intend to start releasing these free updates this month. Each update will be released in succession, starting with Silver Efex Pro 2 and we will notify registered owners via email.

If you do find yourself needing assistance, please don't hesitate to contact our support team. Thank you for your continued support!

The Nik Team

onOne Software 

All onOne Software products must be deactivated before installing Lion and PhotoTools will not work until an update becomes available. PhotoFrame will only work in stand-alone mode. I would encourage ALL onOne Software users who want to use Lion to read this statement.

Alien Skin Software

Only minor issues exist and updates are available. Read here to learn more.

X-Rite

Of all the products I know of so far, the worst impacted seems to be X-Rite (especially those running Monaco, ProfileMaker, and i1Match software. ALL X-Rite users should read this page and DO NOT upgrade until you understand the ramifications.

What About Others Like Photoshop, Lightroom, etc…?

I’ll report back as I hear more from other companies, but in the meantime here’s a good Wiki that has a lot of other apps with reports of their status on Lion.

UPDATE: Here’s another great wiki specific to Photographers with compat info from my friends at Chromix.

Ron’s Advice

I’m going to hold off for a bit to see how things shake out before I upgrade. While I’m sure Lion will be a nice upgrade, Apple has gotten a large enough installed base and application support now to feel the pain that Microsoft goes through when upgrading Windows. This means you don’t know what you don’t know, but when it hits the streets some nasty bugs are sure to be discovered. Once things settle down I’ll upgrade my Mac’s, but until then I’m going to let it bake for a while longer.

I suggest that you consider a similar strategy and wait until your apps are confirmed to work or be updated before taking the plunge.