Greetings from Moab, Utah

Hi Gang: This week I’ve been out in Moab, Utah leading a hands-on workshop with landscape photography legend Bill Fortney, along with a team of top notch instructors and 35 or so very fun, totally energized participants, and we’re havin’ a ball out here shootin’ and working with Lightroom and CS5.

An HDR Love Fest
I got special permission yesterday from Nik Software to show my class Nik’s new HDR Efex Pro plug-in for Photoshop and Lightroom and it was a big hit with the workshop participants (and most of our participants at the workshop are seriously into HDR). I had a pre-release copy already so I knew it was going to be a hit, but now that I’ve shown it to a crowd, it’s going to be even bigger than I thought.

The area is pretty socked in with clouds, so we haven’t had a lot of shooting opportunities yet. I got just a couple of shots off at sunset (that’s us shooting sunset above), and a handful at dawn yesterday, but I surely haven’t set the landscape world on fire so far. I haven’t had a chance to really go through my images yet, but I hope to have some to post for you guys on Monday.

The Missing Video
I had planned to run a video interview today with a special guest, but I guess it got bogged down in the video dept., so I’ll have to run that next week as well. In the meantime, here’s wishing you all a fantastic weekend, and we’ll see you back here next week.

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17 comments
  1. Scott:

    How was anybody that wasn’t in the front row getting any kind of shot at all? Were you all in a somewhat straight line? Looks like there was 40 people in a 10 x 10 area all jockeying for position to get the sunset! Maybe it was the lens compression effect! :D

    Hope you got some great shots, though!!

    –John

  2. Wow, a pre-release version of the Nik software? They must really like you at Nik. They actually gave you permission to show it on the same day that they shipped it out to the thousands of us who had placed pre-release orders? I started using my version yesterday too. Hey, wait a second, does that mean that Nik really likes me as much as they like Scott Kelby? Oh my God, I have arrived in nirvana.

  3. The good news is that Nik released HDR Efex for sale on its website. The bad news is that I haven’t received anything from my order of the product at Photoshop World. If anyone from Nik is reading this, please process my order.

    1. Hi William – The product is actually only for sale now to NAPP members and the pre-order folks. We’re extremely busy processing all the pre-orders (electronic & boxed) today and tomorrow. Definitely moving as quickly as we can.

      hasifleur – LOL. ;-) Gotta love “Internet time!”

      Best,
      Kevin (from NIK)

  4. Reg price on Nik Hdr Efex Pro is $160. If you are going to buy it and are a NAPP member there is a $30 discount (until 10/25), so see the NAPP site. Just passing it on, not their salesman.

  5. I actually picked up the Nik HDR Efx Pro this morning (thanks much for the discount!). I’ve been working with it and comparing against the Photoshop CS5 HDR Pro. So far the Nik software works great, except in one area.

    I don’t have quite as much granular control over ghosting as with HDR Efx Pro as I do in HDR Pro. With HDR Pro, I can easily select which frame to use as the reference image to resolve ghosting issues. With HDR Efx Pro, the only controls I’ve seen so far (and again, I’ve only been working with it a few hours), are to choose global or adaptive ghosting and control the strength. I’ve fooled around with each of the settings, and it just doesn’t compare the Photoshop’s HDR Pro to resolve the ghosting problem.

    If anyone can point out some area I’m missing I’m all ears. But bottom line, Nik needs to resolve this in order for me to give up HDR Pro completely. Otherwise, its very easy to use and offers quite a number of settings for various effects.

  6. Ah so it was you who brought in all the clouds this week…Well thanks for the moisture it’s been bone dry all summer and extremely warm until this week! That’s Utah for ya!

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