Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
Muscle memory is already starting to kick in while I am working my way around photoshop. I was really happy to have the chance to play around with a plugin I haven’t been able to use in a long time; Tonality by MacPhun (now called Skylum Software). I know their Luminar product is supposed to have similar options as the old Creative Kit, but I really liked the speed I could fulfill my vision using the Tonality plugin, and today was no different.
Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.
A few years ago I moved away from Adobe editing products, and started using On1 Photo Raw as my main tool for organizing and editing photos. At the time it felt like a good idea to try something different, and I was able to use the tools I wanted in a fairly efficient manner.
Fast forward to today, and I have made the choice to move back to Lightroom and Photoshop. I have been having a few issues with On1, especially strange instances of the program getting stuck searching when filters are turned on, sometimes for a half hour or more. Which granted isn’t that much time, but I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to editing, so having my flow interrupted was irritating. Mostly though, as various companies make changes to their software to have it run as a standalone option, I was missing having Photoshop as an efficient go-between. My workflow over the last 6 months or so has definitely lacked the flow aspect, so now, I begin the process of relearning Lightroom and Photoshop.
I’m looking forward to the opportunity to start revisiting different tools and plugins that I haven’t had an efficient way to use in months. From a cost aspect, I don’t see that being back in the Adobe subscription model will have me financially any worse off either. I ended up purchasing each new version of On1 as it was released, since they promised great improvements, etc. etc, so in the end my annual software costs should be about the same.
I enjoy the opportunity to mix things up and learn new things, so in another year or two I may decide to change again. Only time will tell.
For images this week, I was drawn to work on a few pictures I took along the panorama route in South Africa.
Spotlights can add a strange colour cast to images, and rather than tinkering for ages with colour correction, I moved this to black and white to see how it would look, and loved the result.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week!
I wasn’t at all anticipating seeing a cheetah during my last trip to South Africa; we were spending the majority of the time in the Sabi Sands, which is far more known as a destination to see leopard than cheetah. But this beautiful female was spotted about 15 minutes or so into our afternoon drive, and we had the opportunity to watch her on a failed hunting attempt, which was quite something. The wind wasn’t in her favour and the impala spotted her before she was even remotely close to them.
Despite a long weekend, this image pretty much sums up how I am feeling at the moment.
Wishing everyone a positive week ahead.
Today I felt drawn to play around and create some of my artistic impression images. There wasn’t any real rhyme or reason to the images I selected; just ones that caught my eye, and that seemed as good a reason as any.
I hope everyone is staying safe and keeping well.
I’m working on a guest post for a friend doing an Armchair safari series, and thought I would share the images here as well. I decided that the theme of my post would be sunrise to sunset on safari; showcasing images from dawn till dusk while out in the bush. These are all shot during my last trip to South Africa and were from all of the camps that I stayed at. I would have to plan a lot more in advance while out in the field to have a sunrise to sunset images from a single day (note to self, do that next trip!).
Rather than a highlight reel of amazing sightings, these are just a collection of moments out in the bush.
I hope you enjoy.
