Exposure 5 Improves an Already Great Photo Tool

A digital sensor is a digital sensor and all of them handle color in pretty much the same way, but film was different. Each brand and type of film had a certain "look". I have no desire to return to the days when film was the only game in town and there are only 2 film cameras in the house (a 45-year-old Nikkormat that no longer works after taking one too many tumbles and a Fuji point-and-shoot camera that I bought during a business trip to New York City in the early 1980s). It's been digital photography for me since about 1999, but still I would welcome the ability to replicate that old film look with some of my new images. And I can!

Alien Skin's Exposure 5 is the tool you need to achieve the film-like result. It's a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop but because not everyone is happy about Adobe's new software-for-rent business model, Alien Skin is in the process of converting all of its applications to work without Photoshop. It also works with Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, and Aperture.

Although the standalone version works well, I think that it's better when used in conjunction with Photoshop.

Some Photoshop users question the value of add-ons such as those from Alien Skin. The usual claim is that anything a filter such as Exposure 5 can do can also be done by someone who knows how to use all of Photoshop's features. This is true to some extent, but I've never encountered anyone who knows how to use all of Photoshop's features. Not even at Adobe. Beyond that, Alien Skin brings several useful features to the party that could be created only with a lot of additional manual work.

I view it this way: With enough knowledge, tools, and hard work, I could build my own automobile, but it would take far longer and the result would be inferior to what I can buy from an auto dealer. Exposure 5 and other similar filters combine all the various steps needed to create a specific result using an interface that is designed to simplify the image modifications that the application specializes in.

Anyone who feels that Exposure 5 offers only a limited set of cookie-cutter effects hasn't bothered to examine all of the options in the right panel. Yes, you can start with a cookie-cutter effect, but that's just the start. One of the defaults may get you halfway to where you want the image to go, or 80% of the way there. Or even 95% of the way. It's up to you to advance the image from 50% or 85% to 100% and that's where the numerous controls come into the picture (so to speak).

Photoshop tends to describe functions in technical terms while Alien Skin uses terms that photographers will understand.

Exposure 5 as a Photoshop Plug-in

I started with an image from the Franklin Park Conservatory, which is one of the more delightful locations in the area.

The first stop is Adobe Bridge, where I selected the image that I wanted to use for this exercise.

It's a raw file, so I opened it in Adobe Camera Raw and made some minor corrections such as increasing the exposure and contrast, lowering the brightness in the shadow areas, and boosting the clarity.

After opening the image in Photoshop, I selected Exposure 5 from the Alien Skin menu under the Filter section.

On the left, I found the general presets. Most of the filters that deal with black-and-white images are at the top and most of those that deal with color images are at the bottom.

The presets select general settings that you can modify by using the many controls in the panel at the right.

The process is easy: Start with one of the presets on the left (1) and use the many options on the right (2) to fine-tune the modifications.

Click the Before (3) button (or press the space bar) to compare the before and after versions of the image.

If you open each of those sections on the right, you'll realize just how flexible Exposure is.

I decided to add a slide mask to the image and then returned to Photoshop.

One of the primary advantages of using Exposure 5 within Photoshop is that the revised image is returned as a new layer. The original image is still there. This makes it possible to try several Exposure 5 options on the same image and retain all of them separately along with the original.

A single modification might not be all you want to try.

Maybe you'd like to try a grunge/lomo look. Here I've added a light leak that might have occurred in an inexpensive film camera. It's too strong and it covers the main subject ...

... so I changed the light-leak effect and moved it to the other side. I've also added a frame effect and a vignette.

Versatility is apparently an important consideration at Alien Skin.

Exposure 5 as a Standalone Application

For the standalone test, I chose a photograph of Percy (Perseus or Percival, take your pick). As a standalone application, Exposure 5 cannot open a raw file, so you'll first need to convert raw files to tiff in your camera's photo application or shoot only jpg images.

Here's Percy as the original image (left) and as a Technicolor image (right). I looked through several of the presets ...

... and decided that the Wizard of Oz preset was what I was looking for. I then used the infrared section to increase both the halation opacity and the halation spread.

Isn't he gorgeous this way?

When you finish with an image in standalone mode, you need to save it. To avoid overwriting the original image, Exposure 5 will suggest adding "-Exposure" to the name of the file.

Here's the result after I added a frame effect.

As much as I like Exposure 5 as a standalone application, I think that it's better with Photoshop. But either way it's an application that any professional or serious amateur photographer will appreciate.

Alien Skin provides many high-quality instructional videos that are designed to help both new and experienced users get the most out of Exposure. Here's an example of one that discusses some of the color options.

Quick Access to Traditional Film Looks

Because it allows digital photographers to create quickly the exact treatment that precisely fits the vision they have for images, Exposure 5 can be an essential part of the workflow for professionals and serious amateurs. Exposure is one of several applications from Alien Skin. Additional details and all of the training videos are available on the Alien Skin website.

A New Twist on the Old Wedding Fraud

In the old days, thieves would send fake wedding invitations to people knowing that some of them would attend the "wedding" even if they didn't recognize the names. Then, knowing the people would be away from home for a while at the time of the "wedding", they would burglarize the place. Today's thieves just want access to your computer.

This invitation arrived a few days ago.

It looks legitimate, doesn't it? The message says it's from Lucas Deleon and the e-mail address matches his name, but who sends out fancy invitations and plans a big wedding for 4pm on Tuesday? The letters "s.r.o." following the name of the agency indicate that this is a limited company, probably in the Czech Republic or Slovakia.

Hovering the mouse over "Legal Disclaimer" shows that no legal disclaimer exists. A real agency would have a working link here.

Below the link that says it will allow me to read "the full text of the invitation", there's a reminder: "If the link are not working, please move the message to "inbox" folder." So we have a subject-verb mismatch and a missing article (the) before "inbox". Slavic languages do not have equivalents of articles in English, so Slavic speakers often omit them in English. Everything is consistent with this being a message from Europe, which makes it even less likely to be legitimate for a wedding somewhere in the United States.

Click any of the smaller images for a full-size view. Press Esc to dismiss the large image.

Where did the message come from? The reported address is tannheimer.biz. It's registered in Germany to a company in Austria and the message was handled by wwwsrv.eu. EU is the top level domain indicator for the European Union.

Because the link to see the invitation would probably take me to a site that would attempt to install malware, I opted to read the site with Sam Spade, an aging but still useful utility that can return the contents of a Web page without danger.

The page was reported to be blank.

To confirm that this was actually the case, I then used AnyBrowser.com to view the site. This is a service that's designed to allow website developers to view their sites in any number of browsers.

After filling in the URL, I clicked the Submit button ...

... and got a blank page.

So apparently the site has already been taken down. That's good news, but I wonder how many people were victimized while it was still operational.

And as for tannheimer.biz, when I pointed AnyBrowser at it, all I got was an error message:

What's All the Fuss about Evernote?

I've tried to use Evernote several times and, although I keep hearing how good it is, I've never been able to realize its potential. On the other hand, I couldn't live without Microsoft's OneNote. A new version of Evernote was released in early September and I've seen OneNote crash on open when it tries to access my SkyDrive account. So it was time to look once again at Evernote.

I wanted to give Evernote a fair trial, so I spent a lot of time reading articles on Lifehacker, PC World, and various independent sites. I bought a couple of e-books that describe how to use Evernote. And I visited Evernote's site frequently to view the many available training videos.

The slogan Evernote uses is "remember everything" and Lifehacker gave me a clue about why my previous attempts to use Evernote have failed. It boiled down to: Use Evernote for everything; if you try to use it for just a few things, you won't like it.

Crushing Defeat Follows Early Enthusiasm

What turns out to be a deal killer for me right out of the box is Evernote's presentation capabilities or, more accurately, lack of presentation capabilities. I use a table in OneNote to track the progress of reports for TechByter and OneNote has a tagging system that color-codes articles depending on whether I've started work on them, have open questions to resolve or have completed the account.

Evernote offers only a check box. I decided that I could live with that. But Evernote has no way for the user to control the size of the text columns, the cell outlines are hideously ugly, and the largest table the program can create has just 29 rows. This is a problem because years contain 52 weeks. After creating the table, it's possible (but not particularly easy) to add rows.

Evernote has several features that I'd like to see in OneNote. The ability to write a note in an e-mail and send it to Evernote, for example. And Evernote's add-on website clipping function is far superior to what OneNote has to offer.

Even though I've tried to like Evernote, I just can't get past its clunky interface and its many limitations when compared to OneNote, at least for my needs. Evernote is available on more platforms and its synchronization process seems to work better than OneNote's. OneNote has an Android viewer, so I can see my notes on all of my desktop and notebook computers and all of my Android devices. Microsoft even has a OneNote viewer for Apple's IOS devices, not that I plan to buy one anytime soon.

Evernote runs on Mac computers and Blackberry devices, which is something OneNote can't do.

There are add-ons for Evernote that help it to perform some of the tasks that OneNote does natively and to extend its capabilities beyond what OneNote can do. KustomNote is an example of this, but KustomNote is available only as a Web service or on an IOS or Android device, not on a Windows or Mac computer.

An Information Manager That's Either Great or Horrible

I'm not going to rate Evernote. For my purposes, the rating would be 2 cats but for many people the rating would be 5 cats. I now understand why some people like Evernote so much and I understand why it will probably never be an acceptable alternative to OneNote for me. If you're looking for an application that will help you keep track of everything, be sure to check out Evernote, OneNote, and Google Keep. One of them will be right for you.

Short Circuits

Apple Unveils Faster, Cheaper Iphone

Unfortunately, it's 2 phones. One is faster and the other is cheaper. That's not to say "cheap", but somewhat less expensive. Unless you've been in a cave for the past couple of weeks, you know about Apple's big event this week. Now we have the Iphone 5S, which can read a fingerprint (and might be popular with the NSA) and the lower-priced 5C.

The 5C is positioned as the Iphone economy model and it will cost about half what the 5S will cost in the US under a standard cellular plan -- $100 and $200, respectively. Outside the US, though, most phones are sold separately from service plans so the "economy" model will cost about $550, compared to $650 for the 5S. The price is simply not conducive to volume sales and Wall Street took note of that and Apple's stock dropped a little over 2% following the announcement.

Both models will go on sale in the US, Japan, and China on the 20th of September. And Apple has announced an agreement with NTT Docomo of Japan. Analysts had expected another announcement that would involve China's largest mobile phone company, China Mobile, but that didn't happen.

In bifurcating its line of phones, Apple follows the strategy that it uses for other products and that most manufacturers use -- creating multiple lines with various features and price points. After all, you can buy Ipads in 2 sizes and with differing amounts of memory. The same is true for notebook and desktop computers, automobiles, homes, and portable fans. (Well, maybe fans don't have memory options.)

The "C" in the model number doesn't mean "cheap"; it means "color" and Apple has been careful to make that distinction clear. For its higher price tag, the 5S provides a faster processor, the A7, and a separate processor that works with the device's motion sensors. The sensors will allow the phone to support a variety of health and fitness applications. The 5S comes in colors, too, but not as many as the 5C and they're more upscale colors: Silver, gold, and dark gray.

The 5S has a better camera and, even with the faster processor, Apple says it will have longer battery life: 10 hours of talk time or 250 hours of just lying there. And there's also that fingerprint reader. It's incorporated into the button below the screen. Using the fingerprint reader will allow the user to bypass the standard unlock process.

Apple also announced that an upgrade for IOS, the operating system that runs Iphone and Ipads, will be released on the 18th of September.

See You in Court, Google

The federal appeals court in San Francisco decided this week that a lawsuit in which Google is accused of illegal wiretapping can proceed. This seems to be the summer of privacy discord and it involves some of Google's data collection that occurred in conjunction with its collection of images for the Street View feature of Google Maps.

But Google's Street View vehicles were collecting more than just photographs. They also collected any data that they found in the air when users neglected to encrypt their Wi-Fi routers. E-mail messages, user names and passwords, photographs, and other personal information were among the information swept up by Google's cars.

A 3-judge panel in San Francisco's federal appeals court ruled unanimously that a suit against Google can proceed. In a 35-page decision, the judges largely discounted many of Google's assertions by stating that Google had been inventing new meanings for words. ("When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll)

Google's data harvesting was brought to light in Germany in 2010 and more than 10 countries have investigated Google or currently have active investigations. Legal actions are pending in various locations. In the United States, several suits were filed and these were all combined into a single case that was heard in California.

Google's defense: Wi-Fi communications are readily accessible to the general public and intercepting them does not violate federal wiretapping laws. This contention has now been rejected by the original court and the appeals court.

The judges wrote that Google's definition of "radio communication", which is indeed not covered by the wiretapping law, differs from how "radio communication" is defined by Congress and "virtually everyone else".

So the next step for the plaintiffs will probably to to have the case certified as a class-action suit. The plaintiffs are asking for $10,000 each, with unspecified punitive damages, and if millions of people join the suit, the potential damages could be large enough that even a company with Google's resources would be unable to simply buy its way out of trouble as it has done in the past.

Google blames a "rogue engineer" for what it says was the "inadvertent" access of data, but a investigation by the Federal Communications Commission said that the engineer was simply not well supervised.

A Boost for Netflix in England

Virgin Media UK television has added Netflix streaming media to its cable system. Currently, only about 40 thousand customers will be able to use it via their TiVo systems, but the plan is to roll it out to all 1.7 million subscribers who use TiVo.

This is seen as a big win for Netflix because most cable operators consider Netflix to be more an an enemy than an ally. Virgin Media is apparently smart enough to realize that their prospects might be better if they work with Netflix instead of trying to beat Netflix.

If only the music industry had been this intelligent in the early days of online music sharing.

Virgin Media UK has nearly 4 million customers and nearly half of those use TiVo systems.

This appears to be the first time that Netflix has been added to any cable operator's offerings. The TiVo software allows users search for pay-per-view content, online subscription services, and on-demand sites but most cable operators disable the feature on boxes they provide to their customers.

I Unfriend Thee!

You probably think that "unfriend" is new, an off-shoot of Facebook. If so, you would be wrong. So was I. The term has been around since 1878 and, if you want to consider Old English, for a lot longer.

Nineteenth-century Dorsetshire poet William Barnes felt that if all non-Germanic words could be removed from English, the language would immediately become much more accessible and intelligible.

He looked for Anglo-Saxon replacements for foreign words, resurrected long-dead words from Old English, and (if there was no Old English word) he invented one.

Ornithology became birdlore. Pram (perambulator) became push-wainling. Alienate became unfrienden. Accelerate became onquicken. Arriving and departing became oncoming and offgoing. The whole approach was described in his book An Outline of English Speech-Craft, published in 1878.

Aha! So if on Facebook you "unfriend" someone, you're not doing anything new.

Source: David Crystal, The Story of English in 100 Words, St. Martin's Press. (Kindle Locations 2852-2859)