This week started with the release of the latest video in the "Photos for OS X Basic Training" series, titled "#30 Extensions Featuring Macphun", which I was excited to announced I've included for free for current customers. These Macphun apps were the first to offer Extensions support in Photos for OS X (El Capitan), and that's really cool.
I also spent a lot of time writing and talking… planning the next lynda.com course, which will mostly likely shoot sometime early next year, and of course scripting and reviewing the DxO video that will shoot on Monday. Originally I was going to shoot at the end of this week, but the new studio setup wasn't quite ready (see below).
The most exciting development this week though was seeing a test print of the "Beauty After Breast Cancer" book that we've been working on for a long, long time. The book looks gorgeous… some color adjustments to make for print of course, but overall I'm super happy with it. The layout looks fantastic and it's wonderful to see all these photos in print instead of on screen.
Two+ years of work and we're nearly there. The first test print came off the press, and it's amazing. I can't believe the #BeautyAfterBreastCancer book is almost done… wow #tw #fbpj
Posted by Joseph Linaschke on Monday, October 12, 2015
A big part of this week was trying to get the mini recording studio up and running, which will be used for Live Training (including my upcoming "Lightroom for Aperture Users" course), podcasting on the TWiP network, and third-party training videos. As you saw last week, we've painted one of the walls green for green screen work, which works great, but introduced a whole new challenge.
The room is so small that the green reflects off the desk and even the computer in a bad way; as you can see, the green screen removal in this early test pulled out a chunk of the desk with it.
There simply isn't room to put distance between the desk and the wall, so one of the solutions we came up with was to cover the desk with a less reflective surface. In the test below, you can see that the pale wood "door skin" did a much better job. It's not perfect but we're closer.
Part of what I'm prepping that studio for is shooting the next DxO video, for which I headed out early Saturday morning to get some new shots with the DxO ONE. A little morning drizzle is OK on this hardware, right?! The morning haze should work out nicely for what I need on the demo video. It's pretty cool how you can shoot with the iPhone at an angle, making low-down shots like this one a bit less back-breaking.
Every other Friday, a new video from "The DIY Photographer" series on lynda.com is released for free. That video is available to watch for two weeks before moving behind the paywall, at which point the next video will come out. As you may have seen I was down at the lynda.com studios a couple of weeks ago, shooting another round for this series, so it'll keep on going for another dozen videos even after this round is done!
The latest video in "The DIY Photographer" series is live on lynda.com
This coming week is Photo Plus Expo in NYC. If you're there, look for me on the Panasonic and the DxO booths! I'll be there all day Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Tweet me @PhotoJoseph if you'll be around!