Review: ZaZa Gallery Stretched Canvas

Recently, whilst twittering on Twitter, I met up with a fellow that goes by the moniker @photocanvas who has gotten into the business of producing gallery wraps. When I checked out his site, ZaZa Gallery, I was blown away at the prices I found listed. 8x10 canvas-wraps for $25 and 20x30 for $99. I was curious, but a bit set off by the low price.

In my experience, I have found that while inexpensive is great, there is usually a discernible lowering of quality. With this in mind, I still wanted to give ZaZa Gallery a go, as I have been wanted a canvas wrap for my wall, and I have always been too cheap to get one.

So I chose a picture of my wife and son, chosen so this could double as a Valentine's present. The shot was taken with my Canon XTi and I uprezzed the converted RAW with Genuine Fractals 5 (a step behind, as always). When I was processing the image in Lightroom I hit it with my Kodak Portra 160NC preset from my Cold Storage Collection. I wanted to see how the more subtle colors would come across on canvas, as most prints I have seen tend to be rather saturated. So after I got the image done, I uploaded to ZaZa Gallery.

Within a week I recieved my canvas via FedEx Ground, and upon opening the box was promptly blown away with the quality, especially when I factor in the price.


Immediately I saw that my Kodak-inspired colors were dead-on. I did not ask for any special handling of the image, so it was great to see that Hugh (the real name of @photocanvas) knew what I was wanting from the original image and did nothing to alter the colors of my image. Next, I noticed the wrap itself, where he had perfectly mirrored the border of my image, and stretched the canvas right on that mirrored border. Finished it off with nice, tight corners. I was truly impressed. ZaZA Gallery's production quality is great, and the Epson inks brought out true color on the nice, white canvas.

Speaking of the Epson inks, the printer used produces great, sharp, detailed images. I was expecting to see a lesser DPI utilized for my 11x14 canvas, as I have seen done with other enlargements. It was not so. The level of detail retained was amazing, especially whe I peered deeper into the reflection on my wife's sunglasses...I realized that I was in the portrait myself.

I was surprised to find myself printed in fairly good detail, with indidual twigs on the trees around me still visible. To an extend that is a testimony to modern digital cameras, but again, this is a lot of detail for a heavily textured surface. It was great.

Needless to say I am impressed with the quality of ZaZa Gallery's work, and look forward to utilizing them again when I get ready to order my next canvas wrap. They utilize archival inks and coatings, to ensure a long image life...I can't quite test that, but I'll let you know in 90 years or so.

The only thing I found lacking about their service is a minor pittance. A backing and hanging wire would have been a great addtition, but for what they charge it is no big deal to drive down to my local framing shop to do it myself.

So next time you are looking to get some gallery wraps made, drop by their site and check them out. If you have any questions all their contact info is on the site, or you can simply follow Hugh on Twitter @photocanvas. If you do order, let him know you found him through LifeInDigitalFilm.


While on this topic, I mentioned earlier that I had uprezzed this image utilizing onOne Software's Genuine Fractals 5. Yesterday, Dennis Hayes (of Photo News Today) had a guest spot on X-Equals blog, in which he went in-depth with Genuine Fractals 6. Drop by and give it a read if you like to go big with your images....remember, at 300 dpi 11x14 is as big as it gets at 10 megapixels. Genuine Fractals lets you go big and make new pixels that look real, as if you shot your image with a 20 megapixel camera with no noticeable loss of quality. Check it out over at Brandon Oelling's X-Equals blog.

Well that is all for today, back tomorrow with something else.

Until then,

Michael

LR/ACR Preset: Rollei R3

LR/ACR Preset: Rollei R3, originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

Now for my next free preset. Tonight we bring to you a German gift. By way of MACO Photographic's Rollei R3. Distributed by Rollei, the film comes in all formats, and uses a classic cubic silver halide emulsion. Depending on the developer used the manufacture claims an ISO latitude from ISO 32 to ISO 32,000. The film has moderate resolution and good tonality. Grain is similar to that of Ilford HP5+.

Preset developed using Rollei R3 film shot at ISO 200 and developed in regular D-76 soup. Will retry this film again using the recommended developer when money allows.

On another note, I would like to point out a great group on Flickr. I have spend some time there discussing Lightroom presets and sharing my work. Presetting Lightroom is a community of preset users and developers that share their work and help each other out. We have a compilation of over 180 presets free for download made by many of our members, see the download banner off to the left sidebar to jump right to that.

Currently at Presetting Lightroom we have started a photography contest for the coming month of February. Look for it in the thread and submit an image...just make sure you used a preset. Currently we have three prizes up for grabs, 3 copies of my Cold Storage Presets Collection for Lightroom and ACR. Please come join us over at Flickr's Presetting Lightroom group.

On the note of my Cold Storage Preset Collection, please consider purchasing it if you enjoy my presets. You will get 12 exclusive presets that you can only get in the Cold Storage package, and you get to help me continue to develop the film emulating presets you love.

For those who have purchased my collection, THANK YOU!!! For those thinking about it, and even those who are not, ask yourself if you get good results from my presets. If so, consider that most software that does a similar service costs well over ten times the price I ask. And they won't do custom emulations if you have a film/developer combo you desire and don't keep giving you more free presets to discover more classic film stocks. So think about it a bit.

Cart It


Buy It



Thanks,
Michael

LR/ACR Preset: Ilford SFX

LR/ACR Preset: Ilford SFX, originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

Today I complete my run of Ilford films for the time being. Today I bring you Iford's SFX, one of the few remaining IR films. This film was actually discontinued, however Ilford is not making Limited productions of it, one batch a year.

As always, my emulation of IR films is designed to be used on regular raw files. I have not tested this preset with a IR raw file, as much I I would like to, I just don't have any IR RAW files. I have a few IR JPGS, and the results were alright with them, however, I don't preset on JPGS often and I was not overly impressed with the results.

On another note, I will be taking a few days off from the blog, hoping to expedite my migration over to WordPress. There will be no presets during that time, maybe an article or two, but no big releases. When I resume, I plan on releasing two presets a week, with other content on non release days. This really does not change the frequency too much, I have release 33 releases in 13 weeks, which is about 2-3 a week. I plan on new presets coming out on Tuesdays and Fridays (make note: I am in USA). Hopefully I will have my new preset out on this coming Tuesday, but if not, watch for it on Friday.

I hope this year brings much more content to LifeInDigitalFilm, and I really hope the upcoming switch to WordPress improves the quality of the site. I look forward to being here doing this for a while.

Michael

LR/ACR Preset: Ilford XPS 2

LR/ACR Preset: Ilford XPS 2, originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

Next stop on the Ilford train is XP2 Super. Ilford color processing black and white. Designed to be developed in regular C-41 chemicals at any mini lab. A decent film, much like Kodak's BW CN in many ways. Not exactly my cup of tea, but a good film for B&W shots when you don't have your chemical lab running.

Enjoy,
Michael

LR/ACR Preset: Ilford Ortho+

LR/ACR Preset: Ilford Ortho+, originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

Next in my Ilford series is Ilford's orthochromatic, continuous tone copy film, Ilford Ortho+. Emulation made possible by my friend Jason Dhenning by capturing my Color Check card on a sheet of Ortho+ with his 8x10 camera.

Suffering from a migraine currently so I am not going to expand any further, save to say one thing. When using this, or my Kodak Copy Film preset, you can really manipulate the channel mixer. Normally I only recommend adjusting the Orange channel is skin looks bad, but on this preset you can go about +/- 10 units without completely blowing the emulation. I try to keep my total amount of adjustment to 15 cumulative units or less (does that make sense?) and I feel the emulation holds up.

Get it HERE.

Until next time,
Michael

LR/ACR Presets: Polaroid 54 & 55

LR/ACR Presets: Polaroid 54 & 55, originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

Another collection of presets for you all to enjoy tonight. Mixing two worlds of photography up, with Polaroid 54 and 55. They are both instant and black and white films. Polaroid 54 was an ISO 100 pull-apart film, whilst 55 was an ISO 50 pull-apart print with a ISO 35 pull-apart negative, which happened to be reusable.

Both films have went the way of Polaroid...dead.

Get them below-

Polaroid 54 is HERE
Polaroid 55 is HERE

I hope you enjoy them. Project Ilford will start soon. 3 presets in a row.

Until next time,
Michael

LR/ACR Preset: Kodak Kodachrome 25

LR/ACR Preset: Kodak Kodachrome 25, originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

Sorry for the few day delay in updates, got more than a few projects in the fire at the moment. I have had this preset complete for quite sometime now, as observant presetters may notice. Tonight is Kodak Kodachrome 25, which I used in my 100 style preset last week as the Koda preset.

It is an emulation of Kodachrome 25, which, in almost every sample I had possesses a very different color curve than its ISO 64 counterpart. That is not a bad thing, as it gives me more to preset. It tends to pound greens a tad harder, while taking it easy on the blues.

Get it HERE.

Also I would like to let you know that my Convert LR preset to ACR article has been published by Brandon over at x=blog. I completely rewrote the article and even made screenshots [which I never do here :^P (I never use emoticons either { ...or nested comments })]. I feel the post at x= is far superior to my roughly written process I posted a few days ago. Please check it out HERE.

If you have not seen the x=blog, please do so. It is a veritable treasure trove of great photography, processing, computer, and business tips.

Tutorial: How to convert LR presets to ACR

[This article has been rewritten and published at x=blog 01192009]

I recently stumbled upon a method by which you can import Lightroom develop presets into Adobe Camera RAW for use with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. I’m sure someone has written this up before, but I have never seen it, as I discovered this by chance. In retrospect this seems overly obvious and many of you may know how to do this already, but if not read on.

As a die-hard Lightroom addict I personally never had the need to deal with Adobe Camera RAW. All my trips into Photoshop were initiated from the context menu inside Lightroom. However, I recently finished touching up a RAW file for a colleague and I wanted to have my edits saved with the file. Knowing she does not use Lightroom, as she is an Apple fan running Aperture, I needed to save the Lightroom edits to be rendered in Photoshop. I exported my edited file as a DNG she could open in ACR, then I hopped into Photoshop and opened said file. As I suspected all my edits were intact, they should be as ACR and Lightroom use the same RAW engine. Life was good.

However, looking at my fully edited file in ACR I realized that I could save these develop settings as a preset in ACR, opening the presets I design to a whole new audience. If you follow the steps below, you too will be able to convert any preset you use into an ACR preset.


1. Open Lightroom, and edit any RAW file in your catalog by applying the preset that you wish to convert over to ACR.

2. Once image is satisfactory, right-click (Windows) to bring up the context menu. Choose “Export” in the menu and then the “Export…” option. This brings up the export menu. Setup the export for “Files on Disk”. Choose your export location, set naming for custom name and give the file the name of the preset you are exporting. Most importantly, in the File Setting section, change the format to DNG. This will rewrap your RAW file into DNG and include any modifications currently done to the image (the applied preset).

3. You can now close Lightroom. Open up Photoshop (or Elements), and open the DNG file you just made. ACR will pop up showing your exported file with all edits intact. Take this time to run through ACR’s options and make sure everything looks right. If so, move on to the next step.

4. Now look at the ACR window. To the right, just under the histogram is the buttons controlling ACR adjustment features. Look for the one on the far right with the three sliders depicted on it. Clicking this leads to the Presets menu. Now simply click the small icon in the right corner of that window, it has 3 lines and a small arrow. It opens a menu, in which you will choose “Save Settings”.

5. This will open a dialog with all the controllable options for the preset, and is much like what you see in Lightroom when making or editing presets. Place a check by every option you want the preset to adjust. Uncheck any boxes you want the preset to leave alone. If you check “Apply auto tone adjustments” or “Apply auto grayscale mix” then the preset will override any of your Lightroom edits in those areas. I would not use it unless you know what you are doing.

6. Once done, click on “Save”. Then you are offered a Save dialog box with the filename of the DNG in the window. If you named your DNG for your preset, just click “Save”, if not change the filename and click save. Your preset is saved to the presets dialog in ACR. Open another RAW file and test it.
Now you can use your favorite Lightroom presets inside of Photoshop, or make a preset for a friend with Photoshop but no Lightroom. Let them see what they are missing.


Another benefit I have found to exporting my Lightroom preset to ACR is that I can store them on a USB drive and use them on anyone’s machine. You can copy your ACR .xmp files from this path:

C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings

Copy the .xmp files to your USB drive. You can them manually apply any preset off the drive. Just click on the menu icon in the presets tab, choose “Load settings…” and point the file browser to your usb drive. Click and go.

I hope this helps anyone who was curious as to how to carry out this process. Hope it helps you and your workflow.

Until next time,
Michael

Adobe Camera RAW Presets!

Today I released my Ilford HP4+ preset, and the download contained both presets for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop Camera RAW plug-in. This evening I went through every download on this site, with few exceptions, and added my new ACR presets to every download.

The only downloads not updated are MikeyG!s Color Slide Film Vol. 1, MikeyG!s Color Print Film Vol. 1, and MikeyG!s B&W film Vol. 1. I chose not to update those packages as of now due to the size of each package, and the fact that the methods I used for emulation then has changed so drastically. If I have spare time, I will update those 3 with Curve presets and ACR presets, but for now I am leaving them be.

Every other download on this site is now updated. You can tell for sure, look at the post header. If it say LR/ACR then the download has both inside.

I hope that this change opens more people up to my presets. Many more people have Photoshop than Lightroom, and many others have Photoshop and Aperture. This change now opens these presets to Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

Until Next Time,
Michael

LR/ACR Preset: Ilford FP4+

LR/ACR Preset Ilford FP4+ , originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

And now for something moderately different:

Today I am presenting my version of Ilford's mid-speed B&W film FP4+. What is different today is that it is not just a Lightroom preset. Inside the zip file is a folder called "ACR Presets" containing .xmp files for Adobe Camera RAW.

To install .xmp presets simply drop them into the following folder in Windows...(no clue with Mac)

[C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings]

When you open a file with ACR, look on the right side of screen. Below the histogram and above the slider are icons for different RAW controls. The furthest button to the right shows 3 sliders as its icon. Click it to reveal the list of presets installed. Then simply click the preset of choice to apply it. Then teak the image in ACR before you open it into Photoshop.

From now on I will be including an ACR preset with my Lightroom presets. On slow days where I have no new presets, I will update the old releases with their ACR counterparts.

I hope this adds more value to your download and opens up my film emulations to a wider audience. My preset will now be usable on Lightroom and Photoshop [I believe PS Elements also uses ACR, if so it will work on it too...let me know.]

Anyway, FP4+ is a very good, mid-speed film produced by Ilford. I really like it a lot for portraiture, I feel it gives very good skin tones on a variety of skin. I use it quite a bit, and for a 100 ISO range film (125), it is quite good (not quite Fuji Neopan 100 Arcos).

Get it HERE.

Until next time,
Michael