Silver Efex Pro is the latest addition to Nik's collection of digital photographic filters and effects for Adobe Photoshop. This is a brand new product that is aimed at creating dynamic black and white images by offering the traditional tools of the darkroom while including the flexibility and precision of digital photography.

Not only is Silver Efex Pro a black and white converter, it contains Nik's premier U Point technology that gives you pinpoint control over what you want to do. No longer are you limited to working with global changes and masking to accomplish your goals. Rather, now you can precisely control specific areas of your image with a couple of clicks of your mouse.

What do you need to run Silver Efex Pro? System requirements are Windows 2000 Pro or better, Mac OS 10.4 or better, 512 MB, and Photoshop 7 through CS3 on Windows, CS2 and CS3 on Mac, Photoshop Elements 2.0 or better on Windows, 4.0 and 6.0 on Mac, or any image editing software program that accepts Adobe Photoshop Plug-ins.

Basically, the Silver Efex Pro workflow works like this. Launch Photoshop, open an image, and open Silver Efex Pro from the filter menu, which will open the Silver Efex interface. By default, the Style Browser with sample thumbnails of your image will appear on the left hand side of the interface. On the right side are the enhancement controls.

Once you select the style

Written by T. Michael Testi

Dfine 2.0 is the long awaited update to Dfine 1.0; the Noise Reduction product from Nik Software that is redefining noise reduction for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. That leads to the question "What is Noise?" Noise is the unwanted imperfections created by digital cameras as they try to capture the digital image. The amount of noise that is generated is determined by the quality and type of image sensor that created the image.

Dfine is a plug-in to Adobe Photoshop and other image editing applications; ones that support Photoshop Plug-ins, that can help you reduce noise in your images. Its goal is to reduce noise while still maintaining the detail and sharpness and therefore improving the quality of every image. Dfine will help fix problems due to fast or high ISO speeds as well as low light levels. It even works on JPEG artifacts.

So what is new with Dfine 2.0? Well first we have U Point® Technology; a dynamic and flexible technology that provides photographers a new way for editing digital images with out layers, masks or selections. It does this by using algorithms which consider relationships between color and light. It was first featured in Nikon's Capture NX Software. This allows you to reduce noise only where needed by using U Point Control Points
There is also Selective Functionality. This can be done three ways.

Written by T. Michael Testi

Color Efex Pro 3.0 is the latest update to Nik's collection of digital photographic filters and effects for Adobe Photoshop. Version 3 has been updated for speed, a new interface, and something called U Point technology.

Color Efex Pro 3.0 contains four different types of enhancements; traditional filters, color correction, retouching and creative enhancements. It contains 52 filters that contain over 250 unique effects, and with the fact that you can combine them, it makes the possibilities limitless.

System requirements are Windows 2000 or better, Mac OS 10.4 or better, 256 MB RAM (512 MB Recommended), and Photoshop CS2, CS3, Photoshop Elements 4.0, or any image editing software program that accepts Adobe Photoshop Plug-ins.

Basically, the Color Efex Pro 3.0 workflow goes like this. Launch Photoshop, open an image, and open Color Efex Pro from the filter menu which will open the interface. By default, the filter list will appear on the left hand side of the interface. This is an alphabetical list of the available filters. They are categorized by topics such as portrait, landscapes, etc. Since there are three versions of Color Efex Pro the number of filters may vary. The standard edition contains 15 Filters, the Select Edition contains 35 filters, and the Complete Edition contains 52 filters. You can check out which filters are available from the Nik Website

Once you select your filter, you

Written by T. Michael Testi

Strata Foto 3D 1.5 is the part of the Strata 3D product line that lets users load a series of masked pictures into the Foto 3D interface and generate a real-time 3D object. This object can then be exported VRML, to 3DS, to a layer in Photoshop CS3 Extended, or used in one of Strata's other 3D products. The goal of Foto 3D is to allow a 3D model to be created quickly and inexpensively while requiring few technical skills and no expensive hardware.

To use Foto 3D correctly the primary things that you need are a camera that takes JPG or TIFF images, a printer that is capable of printing out the special calibration mats that you need - a decent laserjet or inkjet printer should do fine - a tripod, a solid background that is different from what you are going to model, and an evenly lit space.

The first thing that you will want to do is calibrate your camera lens. Most cameras have some distortion that is not really noticeable when looking at a single image, but when you are trying to isolate, mask, and match up a series of images at different angles, it becomes more important. To calibrate the lens, you print a grid of dots onto a plain white sheet of paper. Secure the paper on a piece of card stock

Have you ever noticed little bits on your photos? Not the little crumbs from a cookie that help make the photo more real looking. But, little indiscernible dots or smudges or blobs that appear, usually if you are shooting something on a solid white background. That’s dust. And, if you are using a dSLR, you probably have some on your sensor.

Here’s a quick way to tell. Close down your aperture as far as you can… probably somewhere around 22. Then take a properly exposed photo of something white. Any dust that is on your sensor is going to show up, and look something like this:

The first image is at 100%. You can see two little light grey spots within the red highlighted area. The second box (below) is that red box zoomed in even further. If you look closely in the first box, right by the right edge, you’ll see another dust bunny… a little squiggly do like thing. These little specks will appear in the same place on every single photo I take. Now how annoying is that?

The good news is that there are many ways to fix this problem. First off, if there are just one or two spots, the clone brush in Photoshop or the spot healer in Lightroom will make quick work of them. The only time they are really noticeable (if they are small and light

I think you all know how big of a fan of Capture One I am. I’ve been using it for a few years, and it makes tethered and remote capture super simple whether it’s batch applying settings or making it braindead simple to convert images from Raw to a whole set of other formats. I usually output TIFF, 2 versions of JPEGs and sometimes thumbnails. Click, click, click, it’s done and I almost never go into Photoshop for editing.

All that came to a screeching halt recently with the addition of a new iMac to my studio and the soon-to-be upgrade to Leopard. It turns out, Capture One Pro won’t work tethered with Canons (not sure about Nikons) on Leopard. I just want to note for the record, that Vista isn’t the only OS with problems on upgrading, even if they don’t have silly cool ads pointing fingers. Leopard is NOT all puppies and sunshine. But, anyway, that’s besides the point.

The real point is that between the lack of Leopard support along with the changes to Capture One 4, it seems I was going to need to be finding some new software. I had already been intent on trying a few new apps… something to manage my ever growing library of images. I’m starting to do some stock photography work with one (and maybe two) of the big rights managed agencies (Stockfood right now, and Jupiter Images’ FoodPix as soon as I can get my act together) and

Fun camera… but not what I actually do my work with…

Wow. It seems like I just posted my Guide to Food Photography gear… but it’s been almost a year, and I have realized a good chunk of my equipment has changed during that time. Since the number one question I get from readers is what gear do you use, I thought I’d give you a new peak into the studio & camera bags.
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I’ve been meaning to start a regular post series featuring some of the emails I get with questions about photography and styling, and what better way to kick it off with a question that I know comes up all the time with folks just getting started into some more advanced digital imaging. A reader writes:

Dear Lara,

I’m really confused about which image editing software to buy. I’m planning to go in for the Canon 40D. I heard you talk about the phase one capture pro on your site. Maybe I will look at it as an option in the future as I don’t want to suffer from information overload!

I need to edit images for publishing in websites and magazines/newspapers. Should I go in for the Photoshop CS3 or CS3 extended? What are your thoughts on the Adobe Lightroom?

I have heard that Mac is better for photographers so i’m switching over to Mac after years of PC use.

Thanks for being helpful.

First, you’ll need to decide what you want to do with editing your photos. Software like Adobe Lightroom and Capture One apply edits to the entire photo, and are great for adjusting things like the exposure or the color for an entire image, working with Raw files, or in the case of LIghtroom, helping you keep all of your images organized, kind of like a beefed up iPhoto. I don’t use Lightroom (yet)… I tried a beta copy quite a while ago and with the number of photos that I