Saturday, February 25, 2017

Changes....complete, or almost.

It's done! My newly created, newly redesigned website is live and hosted by Wix.com; no more trying to make do with a GoDaddy website.

The differences in building a website with each host is like night and day. While I always struggled to make things look good on GoDaddy, Wix made everything simple and easy to do. They even automatically created a mobile version of my site. Now, admittedly I don't have everything complete; images need captioning, SEO needs setting up, and likely several other different little tweaks will get made; but the main thing is the site is now live and much improved.

One other thing that I am pondering is how best to proceed with this blog. Currently it is still being hosted on Blogger and is "mirrored" on my website via the use of a Blogger app. But the thing is, the app doesn't look that great. If I can't give it a more polished look I may look into setting up my custom domain in the Blogger settings and hosting the blog from my website.

Whatever I choose to do next, I hope you stay tuned and join me as I push forward with my new and improved web presence. I also have plans to offer a storefront to allow the easy purchase of prints. The future is definitely looking better, in many ways.

Monday, February 13, 2017

Change, change, change

I can never make my mind up as to whether change is a good or bad thing. This is not helped any by there seeming to be so many (albeit small) changes I've needed to address lately.

Chief among them is that I have recently overhauled my image editing processes. This has been a somewhat, drawn out process but I'm glad to move on from doing everything in Lightroom. I'd have to say a big contributor to this has been my acquisition of the Nik Collection; and my getting around to fully exploring it. Now instead of making a lot of edits directly in Lightroom, I am using Dfine for noise reduction and Sharpening Pro (output) for final sharpening. These two tools are miles ahead of the adjustments within Lightroom and the resulting images are much improved. And on the subject of Lightroom; it has a weird habit of skewing the colors when importing NEF RAW files from my cameras. Testing out the different Camera Calibration settings certainly pays off and using the Camera Standard setting gives my more vibrant (and red) reds. No more orange tinted reds!

Oh, and while on the subject of the Nik Collection, I have to mention Silver Efex Pro! I am loving the B/W conversions I can do with the software. I've even created my own custom preset so I can quickly replicate the look across any image. In my opinion it is the best B/W convertor available.

The other big change is concerning my online presence, as GoDaddy has completely changed their website building software and "obsoleted" my website. Now I know that I need to redesign and update my website but I do not like their new software, which is clunky and not the most intuitive. Of course, I already have a sore spot where they're concerned and their poor Mac support; hence why this blog is no longer hosted on their domain. So, I'm now looking into alternate hosts and platforms to start fresh and bring my website and blog back together. I'm also no longer considering a free solution as, unsurprisingly, you do get what you pay for.

I can't really talk about image editing and workflow changes without providing some samples, so here are a couple of images from my recent trip to Pikes Peak in Colorado. Regular visitors to my blog will recognize them, as I did post the color image previously; albeit with my "old" image editing workflow settings. Hopefully you can see the changes in the finished image.

train in color

And here 's the same image after running it through Silver Efex Pro and my custom preset.

train in b/w