Steve Harris

Both photography labs are based in the UK and Europe, PhotoBox is aimed more at the consumer market and has a lot of products on offer, whereas One Vision Imaging is a professional lab used mainly by amateur and professional photographers.

I should point out that I am not affiliated with either company, I signed up for a Zenfolio trial and thought I would compare the results of both before recommending them to clients. This is not a detailed scientific comparison of prints, its 5 minutes with a scanner.

It is difficult to compare physical prints online, but before I gave the prints out I quickly scanned them using a Canon MP560 scanner/printer, zipped them through Adobe Lightroom to match the crops as closely as possible and exported them below. Apologies for the poor crop, I scanned them so quickly I used the same automatic settings on each and for some reason the software took an inch off either side.

The left most picture is the original from Adobe Lightroom which was colour matched using a Colour Checker Passport, the middle picture is from One Vision Imaging, and the right most picture is from PhotoBox.

Remember the same automatic settings were used on each of the two scans, apart from differences in brightness the scanned images do reflect the physical prints well and do demonstrate difference between the physical prints.

As you can see, the colour of the child’s truck in the PhotoBox image does not match that of the original, and the skin tone is also off on the PhotoBox photograph. The One Vision Imaging photograph is far closer in terms of the trucks colour and the skin tone.

Physically the One Vision Imaging print is as accurate as you can imagine a print to be in terms of the truck, skin tone and colour of the child’s T-Shirt. The PhotoBox is not without merit though as it does have a vibrance about it, but for me the vibrance should not mean sacrificing the colour accuracy to this degree.

I still intend on offering both on Zenfolio, PhotoBox provides a surprising variety of products and are cheaper than One Vision Imaging, but it does prove that you get what you pay for so I will be recommending One Vision Imaging for those must have prints.

We recently celebrated our sons birthday with a big party, as with most events like this hundreds of images were taken and once collated I faced the daunting task of selecting a small percentage for a short slideshow.

I usually do this by rating images in Apple Aperture, first going through and giving anything worth a second look two stars, these I review and tidy up before rating them with three stars or higher if the image is ‘exceptional’.

At this point I like input from my wife, but sitting a Windows 7 user down in front of a Mac where the mouse is funny and maximise does not maximise things is more hassle than its worth. So I searched the iPad app store and found one of those perfect IPad apps – Pixelsync.

In short its a small app on your iPad and a helper application on your Mac which allows for projects in your Aperture library or iPhoto to be viewed, rated and flagged on your iPad. There does appear to be a restriction that like iTunes and the iPad or iPhone sync the library must be open in Aperture although Aperture does not need to be running at the time. It would be nice if this restriction could be resolved in both iTunes and Pixelsync but that is probably an Aperture restriction so outside of the control of the author of Pixelsync.

With the helper application on your Mac configured to open your library from the iPad you can select which projects within that Library will be synchronised to your iPad. Once synchronised you can rate and flag your images before synchronising back to Aperture.

The application works perfectly and my wife enjoyed rating the images while sitting on the sofa drinking a cup of tea far more than sitting in front of my Mac using a funny mouse.

I believe Pixelsync has been available for a while, and I meant to write this a while back. The appearance of Photosmith for the iPad which appears to be a similar app but for Adobe Lightroom reminded me to put finger to key and post this.

Pixelsync can be purchased on the app store and more information along with the helper application can be downloaded from http://www.pixelsyncapp.com/.

Taken using a Canon Powershot S90 with 3 exposures.

Click through to my HDR set on Flickr for more HDR images.

Taken using a Canon Powershot S90 with 3 exposures.

Click through to my HDR set on Flickr for more HDR images.

If you are routinely dragged around the shops by your partner Swindon just off the M4 may have something for you in addition to the usual coffee shops with comfortable sofas and free WiFi. The Swindon outlet centre is housed in converted halls once used to build GWR steam engines. The history is a long and successful one, by the 1930s it was the largest manufacturer of steam locomotives in the world.

These days even the food hall has a steam locomotive alongside the tables and chairs filling the air with the smell of oil, which for some at least a welcome alternative to the smell of fast food.

Next to the outlet centre you will find a Steam Museum which houses a couple of examples of locomotives built at the factory including the Evening Star which was the last locomotive to roll out of the sheds in 1960 and was I think marked for conservation even before it was finished.

It offered the opportunity for a B&W HDR picture or two.

Taken using a Canon 50D, a Joby tripod and 3 exposures.

Click through to my HDR set on Flickr for more HDR images.

Taking input from a couple of sources used to improve eyes in lightroom I have applied a similar method to aperture. I have not found notes elsewhere on the web so have made my own.

Disclaimer: I’m not expert as I have been using adobe lightroom for a year or so to organise and tweak my photographs and have exported the finish products to iphoto to geotag and add faces to each. With the release of aperture 3 I thought I would see whether it could replace lightroom for me. Initial thoughts were no, despite places, faces and a nice project organisation I think the editing/developing is behind that of adobe lightroom. There is a benefit of keeping everything in once place though rather than export the finished product to iphoto and effectively duplicating data so I am sticking with it for a while longer.

With that in mind here are notes on improving eyes using aperture standard controls.

Improve white of eyes

Two ways of doing this with pretty much the same results, first method:-

• select the saturation quick brush;
• zoom in to the eyes using cmd +;
• drop to a small brush with a small softness of about .5, tick detect edges;
• brush over the whites of both eyes;
• back to the adjustment panel and lower the saturation until the whites turn more white and less blood shot;
• select the dodge quick brush (optional);
• brush over the whites of the eyes (optional);
• back to the adjustment panel and raise amount a little bit e.g. no more than .5, do not go crazy (optional)

Second method:-

• select the definition quick brush;
• zoom in to the eyes using cmd +;
• drop to a small brush with a small softness of about .5, tick detect edges;
• brush over the whites of both eyes;
• back to the adjustment panel and lower the saturation until the whites turn more white and less blood shot;
• select the dodge quick brush (optional);
• brush over the whites of the eyes (optional);
• back to the adjustment panel and raise amount a little bit e.g. no more than .5, do not go crazy (optional)

Improve iris

In lightroom you could improve the colour and clarity of the iris, in aperture I have not found a way of improving the colour however brightening the iris does help:-

• select a new dodge quick brush (if you dodged the whites of the eyes make sure this is a new dodge adjustment not the same one);
• brush over the coloured portion of the iris making sure to avoid the pupil and dark rim of the iris which runs around the iris separating it from the white;
• back to the adjustment panel set the dodge amount to taste.

Darken pupil and rim of iris

Final tweak:-

• select a new burn quick brush;
• brush over the pupil of the eye;
• reduce the size of the brush and cover the black rim of the iris;
• back in the adjustment panel set the amount to taste

Other possible improvements

At this point the eye brows and lashes could be improved using another quick brush to sharpen the detail. However by now my ten minute playing about with a single picture rule would be up!