AfterCapture is a magazine that is freely distributed to commercial photographers. This tends to generate an ad-centric magazine, and I frequently question the merit of their equipment/software reviews, but greatly enjoy the articles on other photographers, the educational material, and the lessons in advertising (marketing material directed at people in the advertising industry tends to be extremely well designed).

After discovering the AC Blog, it’s almost not worth my time to read the printed material anymore. For instance, check out this article on Learning Strategies for Video Tutorials.

The kind people at uCertify have put up a link to my review of their Photoshop ACE Prep kit, and are offering a 10% discount to my readers on the uCertify PrepKit of their choice.

If you’re interested in checking them out, please use the following Discount code: “AKUMAR”

A few weeks ago, I posted about the new study aids I’d found for the Adobe Certified Expert Exam in CS2. I didn’t want to take a course, which would spend 90% of the time covering the things I already new, and I didn’t want a book for the same reason.

The test-based preparatory software seemed like an ideal solution for me. I didn’t need a refresher course on everything I knew, I needed to isolate what parts of my knowledge were insufficient, and aggressively target that knowledge. What better way to do that then to practice with questions that cover the exam objectives with questions in the same style as the test?

Between the two study aids of this type that I’d found, I decided to go with uCertify for three reasons: ExamAids is listed in British pounds and I worried that there may be differences between the British and American versions of the test, uCertify offered a pre-purchase option on the CS3 exam (at a discount, no less), and then, to my delight, they also offered a “bulk” purchase discount when buying more than one program at once. End result? For less than half the price of one test, I could buy prep material for both the CS2 test and the CS3 recertification test. (note: the CS3 version has now shipped, so that discount is no longer available)

And here’s a bit of full disclosure: shortly after making my purchase decision, someone from the uCertify PR team found the above-mentioned blog post where I debated between those two options, and emailed me, offering to let me try the software for free in exchange for a review. As I’d already placed the order with them, I agreed, but warned them that I’d give an honest review — so while I am writing this with that in mind, I am trying to be unbiased, if not downright antagonistic.

And as I said, I’d already made the decision to buy their software before they offered.

The first thing I noticed was that the interface was very clean and mostly intuitive — I had a few seconds difficulty locating the Next Question button during the actual tests, but only because it’s slightly different from the actual exam, and I didn’t have any difficulty locating anything else in the interface.

Speaking of which, I should offer background information on my experience with the ACE Exam. When I first found out about it, I reviewed the Exam Objectives on the Adobe website and aced the practice test they offered, so I felt that I was familiar enough with the material that the cost of any of the study materials available simply wasn’t worth it. So, without any preparation, I took the test and failed by two questions. These were my initial results:

By my calculations, instead of failing by 2 questions, I should have passed by 10%, meaning there were questions which I’d answered wrong but thought were correct, in addition to the ones I knew I’d answered wrong. This is why I went looking for preparation aids which could let me explore my knowledge more fully.

I loaded up the uCertify program and took the Diagnostic Test, which tests basic knowledge of 8 of the 14 exam objectives in 30 minutes. These questions, and all of the questions that I’ve tested so far, are very similar to the actual exam questions, which really probe the extent of your knowledge. You need to know exactly where every menu item is, and fully grasp the nuances of the terminology used to define and describe everything you can do in Photoshop — while you’re safe if you’ve remapped the keyboard shortcuts (better, actually, because you’re familiar with that command), I found that my Wacom Intuos tablet keys negatively impacted my test results, because I’d forgotten which keys the tablet hotkeys are mapped to.

Also like the actual test, this means that using the uCertify software when you’re not 100% attentive will severely degrade your results. This might be useful if you’re interested in seeing how deeply ingrained your knowledge of Photoshop really is. To keep you on your toes, the uCertify test includes several subtle variants of the same basic question, and does not keep the answers in the same order — don’t just answer “D” because that was what it was the last time you answered this question. It might not be the same question, and the correct answer is definitely not in the same place it was before.

Either during or after the test, depending on the options selected, you can review your answers with notes that explain why each answer is correct or incorrect. This is particularly helpful, and there’s even a feedback option if you disagree. The only time I’ve tried using the feedback option, I realized that I’d missed the double-negative in the question — exactly the sort of dirty deviousness that I found in the actual exam. Therefore, I can’t guarantee how the Feedback system works exactly, but it’s simple enough to use.

The Adaptive Test and Custom test are particularly helpful. If you buy this product, I recommend you use them frequently.

The Readiness Report allows you to not only chart your progress, but take back points you lost by only testing you on your incorrect answers. While this makes a certain amount of sense in terms of completeness, if you’re not used to the Adobe exams, I don’t recommend using it — the ebb and flow of the practice exams are an important part of getting ready for the test.

In stark contrast to the extremely useful left side of the program, I was disappointed with some of the options on the right side: the Exam Objectives, Study notes, Articles, Study Tips and How Tos sections are incredibly generic, as if they’ve been copy/pasted from other resources. If you need any of that information, then you’re probably not prepared enough to even think about taking the ACE Exam (in my humble opinion). I suppose I should be a little more lenient about the Articles section, as I can imagine someone discovering entire sub-menus of Photoshop they previously didn’t know existed. In that case, the Articles section would be a good resource of canned material to jump off from. In fairness, I suppose I would complain if these items weren’t included for completeness.

On the other hand, the Interactive Quiz and Flash Cards are nicely implemented, although neither option was what I expected them to be. I thought Flash Cards would allow you to print out actual flash cards, whereas instead you can write out long-hand answers and then compare them to real answers. Two weeks after picking up the program, and I still haven’t used it, although I keep planning to. The Interactive Quiz, which for some reason I thought would involve web-surfing or some kind of help-menu exploration, is basically a different system to generate Custom Tests (again, one of the most useful aspects of the program). Instead of creating a pool of questions with a time limit, each question in the quiz has its own time limit.

Overall, I’m pleased with the software. The large pool of accurately rendered questions alone are worthwhile, and fully fit my own study habits and needs. The explanations for why each answer is correct or incorrect are verbose, complete, and useful. The summary reports and Readiness Reports graphically highlight your strong and weak points. Those aspects that I dislike might be valuable to someone with different study habits.

It’s funny, but since they asked me to do the review, there’s a strong temptation to over-emphasize the weak points of the software. The thing is, I can’t. It does exactly what I expected it to do, and does it well.

The uCertify software isn’t going to teach you the program unless you’re actually within reaching distance of the test, and it can’t be used as a reference after passing the test any better than the actual Adobe Help files can. But it isn’t meant to do either of those things, anyway. It will help you aggressively target the areas which you need to study in order to pass the test, and that was exactly what I was looking for.

I’ve been long-contemplating the Adobe Certified Expert exam as a way to stand out from the morass of entry-level photo assistants and so-called digital retouchers (many of whom don’t seem to know what a layer is).

I’ve been dawdling for a while, and Adobe has released the CS3 suite while I weighed pros and cons, giving rise to a new set of choices. Should I take the CS2 exam, which I feel I’m ready for, or gear up for the CS3 exam? I’m tempted to do the former, and then work to familiarize myself with CS3, and take their recertification test, particularly after my father bought me Photoshop CS3: Up To Speed.

I’ve found two websites that offer what appear to be useful exam aids for someone already familiar with the program. uCertify offers both a CS2 exam and a discount on pre-orders for the CS3 “Prep Kit.” While Exam Aids offers a very similar seeming product that also appears well-designed.

The uCertify program looks like it’ll be the winner for me, primarily because of the discount I could get on the CS3 aid, doubly important as I want to take both exams.

Edit: They called me back, see below for the end of the story.

I just went several rounds with the folks at Precision Imaging, over the roll of Kodak Ektachrome 64T EPY that I finally sent in from my trip to France over the summer. While the conversation was frustrating, I noticed that the conversation required a fairly deep knowledge of things which I knew nothing about, four or five years ago.

It’s a tungsten-balanced E6 film, but yields a negative image (E6 is a slide-processing formula). Or at least, the 4×5 sheets of it that I shot two summers ago came back as negatives, and they were processed in E6. I’m fairly sure that the roll of 35mm I shot in France is the same stuff. I certainly hope it is, because the 64T EPY has the unusual characteristic of extended reciprocity range (meaning that you can take exposures up to 2 minutes long without unnatural color shift or the additional exposure math required by all other types of film) and I was shooting that stuff in the dark of night in ancient alleyways.

The problem is that I asked them to give me a contact sheet. First, Cindy called me to tell me that they can’t do contact sheets of slide film. I agreed that I didn’t want contact sheets of positive film, but this film will, I believe, yield negative film. Just process it E6, I told them. If you get negatives, cut me a contact sheet. If they’re positives, just send them back.

Ten minutes later, I get a call back from James, who wanted to explain to me that a contact sheet would require scanning the positives, and that would cost around $60. I spend about 20 minutes again explaining that this film should be processed E6, and I was pretty sure it was going to come out as negatives. I even pulled out the old 4x5s to double check. The conversation got a little heated, and he passed me up to Peter (who I’ve worked with before on some fairly large orders).

At this point, I was pretty confused. I thought James was telling me that no E6-processed film could be contact-printed, short of using cibachrome, which is no longer produced anywhere in the world. This confused me because printing contact sheets is the same process, essentially, as scanning negatives. I know I had scanned those 4x5s, which I was now holding in my hand, and if you can’t make contact sheets off a negative, then you can’t do anything with them at all. But I’m not a printer, and I dislike color chemistry, so it’s possible there was something I didn’t know about.

Peter suggested that maybe they had been cross-processed. I paused at this, because I had been surprised when the 4x5s came back as negatives. Could they check their records to see if they had cross-processed the 4x5s? No, they need not bother, because cross-processing yields a very grainy negative with unpredictable color shifts. The prints I had made were smooth as silk, and Peter LeGrand even called one a “masterful printing job,” which he would never have said about a grainy print (Peter likes to shoot with 16×20 sheets of film, using a camera bigger than my sofa). And while I had needed to do some color correction to remove the harsh yellow colors of sodium-arc lighting from the street lamps, the tungsten-balance of the film had required less color correction, not more: they could not have been cross-processed.

We started from scratch: I’d delivered two rolls of E6 120 film (120 is a type of medium format film, which is used in a variety of cameras to yield images in 6×6, 6×4.5, 6×9 and even 6×12 format, depending on the camera) and one roll of 35mm E6. Did I want all three to be cross-processed and contact-printed? No, the two rolls of 120 were to be processed “normally,” meaning the instructions on the film. These, I assured Peter, would yield color positives, and so contact prints were not desired, needed, or even presumed possible. For that matter, I added, the 35mm was to be processed normally as well.

Peter wondered why, if I knew that, would I ask for contact sheets from the 35mm? I reiterated my experience: two summers ago, on a deadline, I had Precision process a dozen sheets of 4×5 of this film type, and had been very surprised when they gave me negatives, not positives. Was I sure they were negatives? Yes, I was holding them in my hand and they were definitely negatives. Had Precision made contact sheets of them? No, I had assumed they would be slides, since they were processed E6, and so had not ordered contact sheets (a 4-inch by 5-inch slide is a fairly large finished image, and I had planned to display them as they were). Was I sure that this was the same film? We compared information on the 35mm case, the film in my hand, the box of unexposed 4x5s. There were a few discrepancies, but Peter assured me these were the difference between 35mm and 4×5 markings.

Peter was flummoxed. He had never seen a film which required the E6 process but yielded a color negative. I allowed that the discovery had been shocking to me as well, but lacking his experience and knowledge, could not say how uncommon this was (as I mentioned, I’ve worked with Peter many times before, and have never asked him a question he didn’t know the answer to). Peter demurred, he would not call himself an expert in any field, and thought it was possible that there were things he hadn’t seen before.

While this was all very interesting, I suggested that the problem was much simpler than the tangled thread of our conversation led us to believe. What I needed, I explained, was to be able to preview the images before choosing which ones to work on further. Why not process the film and then decide what to do? If they came out as positive transparencies, then they could just send them back to me as is, and I could preview them. If they came out as negatives, then cut the film and print me a contact sheet so I could see what I had to work with. Rather than debating what would or would not happen, when I was not completely certain it was even the same film type (although Peter was), let’s just work with what we get to give me the result I need.

Peter, though, was not completely satisfied. He wanted to know why I would use such a film, why anyone would make it. I explained about the film’s extended reciprocity range, and he agreed that he’d never heard of a film with that characteristic. I did not mention that he clearly had, since his company had processed the original film. He wanted to be certain that the films were the same. He carefully noted all the information I had from the two boxes (the box of 4x5s and the roll of unexposed 35mm which I thought was the same as the roll I’d given Precision), and again reiterated that the 35mm in his hand was the same type as in my hand. He would process the film, and check Kodak’s technical specs, and call me back in a few hours.

We’ll see how it goes. I’ve checked several websites and confirmed that the only Kodak 64T on the market is the EPY, and that my assumptions about its performance characteristics are correct. I’ll complete this post when I know how it turns out, and possibly even write several reviews mentioning the E6/negative concern for the benefit of other photographers who might be interested in using it.

A few hours later, Peter calls me back to inform me that the film came out and it was definitely slide film. That was part of the mystery solved. I looked up my information on the original 4x5s and had them look up the original order. It turns out that those images had been processed C41, meaning they’d been cross-processed! Now I’m the one who is completely confused, because I can’t imagine why I would have asked for that series to be done like that, especially since I’ve never seen what the film normally looks like.

Now I have a completely different dilemma, since Rik Brandt has offered to let me borrow his 4×5 camera, expressly to cut off all my excuses for not continuing that project. Do I process the new film in E6 or C41? Will processing the new film the way it was intended to be processed yield results that won’t be in keeping with the original set? I suppose the only way to find out is to try a few sheets processed as “normal,” and view the results. Of course, I’ll have to get them developed by the guys at Precision, whom I’ve just given so much grief to.

Renderosity, an art community for fantasy artists, offers a variety of cheap and sometimes useful tools for your digital artistry. Recently mentioned in an issue of Imagine FX magazine, they highlighted one set of tools which I am happy to share with my friends:

Ron’s Sci-fi Photoshop Brushes are a set of 75 high-detail brushes of bits of circuitry, conduit, metal plates and unidentified bits of technowizardry, offered with no licensing for $10.

Ron Deviney offers a few other tasty bits on this site, including a package of Hi Tech Cityscape Brushes, also for use with Photoshop CS – CS3, for only $8.

These two packages fill me with a delightful glee that I’ll be chattering about all month, as I play with them to my heart’s content.

Also, those devils at Vue6 have finally made me an offer too tempting not to take the bait. The Vue 6 Personal Learning Edition is a full-featured, unlimited trial period version of their popular 3d landscape rendering software. Damn them to hell. Now I’m gonna start spending all my free cash on 3d-R instructional videos…..

After only two weeks as member of the APA, I’ve seen this program referred to half a dozen times.

fotoQuote Pro, the Industry Standard for Pricing Photography

I’m currently asking around about this company’s other program, fotoBiz, which is packaged as a complete office system for freelance photographers.

Article on making your own sound blimp, a tool used by motion movie still photographers to prevent the camera from emitting noise loud enough to be captured on the recording audio.

Dave Buzzards Camera Blimp

Thanks to Brad of High Contrast Studios for this link.

Popular Photography preview of the Pentax K10D

Another total distraction from the work I have yet to begin this afternoon. Pentax is finally getting back up in step with the big boys. The K10D has several features which I’m quite excited by; ISO 100, bulb setting, cable release (as well as remote sensors front and back), but most importantly: 10 MP Raw in DNG! Let’s here it for a company looking to help create a Digital Raw Standard!

Even more things I’m excited about: The camera has a auto-focus format selector switch (you can choose auto-focus priorities with a flick of the finger), and one-touch button to switch between JPEG and RAW formats! This means I can snap informal candids to my heart’s content and if I see a quality shot, I can flip to RAW without breaking stride.

Two dials, one front and back, will also help me make the shots I want without needing to break stride. They’ve tossed out all those amateur shooting modes which have never done what they claimed to do.

Weather-proofed to withstand average weather conditions, and packaged with a sensor-cleaning package that lets you take care of dust issues on the go, it also comes with a larger LCD that is packed with lots of useful information. Fully compatible with all its older, manual lenses, which is another nod to the tradition which first convinced the man I inherited my Pentax legacy from.

The new battery, according to the handful of reviews I’ve seen, trades the convienence of AA batteries for faster, more accurate and intelligent auto-focusing.

Bottom line: I’m very excited by this, and can’t wait for the December release date. Well, my pocketbook can, but every other part of me can’t. I’ll be keeping an eye on this and looking for opportunities to see prints from the K10D in person.

Welcome to optikVerve Labs – Home of virtualPhotographer

Virtual Photographer is a brilliant package of PS plugins, which are sadly PC-only.