Saturday, March 24, 2012

Nikon D300, Fuji F11 and Adobe Photoshop CS6

A pretty decent combination.

In looking back through my archives, I remembered my business trip to the UK in September 2008 (a year after the Stonehenge trip), where I tacked on my youngest son’s first trip to the UK for his 18th birthday.

I revisited two images from that trip …

Here, Jon and a working colleague Nick (same name as my eldest, who joined us later from Leeds, where he studied for his third year of English Literature) are wandering around London at night. Something I did a lot of during my 5 trips to the UK.

_DSC3826_jon_nick_night_stroll2D300 + 18-200VR  1600iso  f/4.5  1/50  -1/3ev

I find CS6 with either Neat Image or Topaz Denoise (NI in this case) handles the rather rough high ISO of the D300 with great aplomb. This image is far nicer than the one I originally processed from the raw file.

During that trip, I spent the first three days walking from the Danubius Hotel west of Regent’s Park to the southeast corner of Regent’s Park where the Royal College of Physicians is located. I walked the outer ring road once, but after that I walked through the park and enjoyed some pretty excellent scenery. There were still some beautiful flowers in bloom in September, so I would walk past some of the gardens and shoot certain tall plants that attracted my eye.

DSCF6403_F11_CS6Fuji F11  800iso  f/4  1/340  -1/3ev

That old Fuji F11 could sure take amazing images under the right circumstances. As many have said … have Fuji advanced at all since boosting ISO and inventing EXR technology? Well, I say yes. The bodies are far better, we have stabilization, we have reach and true wide angle, we have pocketable cameras, we have RAW. The new ones are much better … but the old ones sure take a nice image now and again.

As mentioned, Nick joined us later for a few days and we had a grand time. Here, we are doing the obvious uber-touristy thing as the boys climb the Trafalgar Lion and pose for a shot.

_DSC3953_boys_lion2D300 + 18-200VR  640iso  f/9  1/160

The cleanliness and clarity of this shot is down to how much more sophisticated the new processing engine is in CS6. I am very impressed. As good as LR4 is, CS6 is that much better because I can comfortably use all my other tools on layers.

Anyway … it’s been fun tripping down memory lane a bit with CS6 and ACR7 … I am really going to enjoy these two, that is for sure.