Tidal Flow Monochrome Series and DxO optics

Tidal Flow Series

I've been doing a lot of coastal shoots at dawn over the past few weeks, capturing water movement and doing monochrome conversions, and I've enjoyed capturing and working on these so much that I've decided to do a whole series of these images!

Capturing these types of shots can be quite difficult and does require a degree of patience. Finding strong focal points among similar rocks can be difficult, along with the fact that the tide dictates where you can shoot from to capture its
movement.



The beach can also be a dangerous place! My camera and myself have been hit and soaked by waves several times as I'm stubborn and don't want to move when I'm in a prime position! Although so far my camera and lenses have remained unscathed! I think my tripod is (literally!) on its last legs. All that salt water has been eating its way through the lower leg locks!

DxO Optics 6

Up until now I've always used Adobe Camera RAW in Bridge then done my final editing in Photoshop CS3. Now that I have discovered DxO Optics however, I'll be changing my workflow somewhat to accommodate this amazing RAW converter!

My favourite feature of this RAW converter is the lens distortion module. The makers of this program have profiled all the commonly used lenses for lens distortion, lens softness etc, and apply this correcting profile as part of the converting process. This feature is amazing for wide angle lenses where you get a curved horizon. Normally I would use the lens distortion filter in Photoshop. This does a good job but you also loose pixels due to essential cropping after its use.

DxO doesn't lose any pixels and does the correction automatically too.

The DxO lighting feature is also a favourite module, this works like Adobe RAW highlight recovery and fill light tools to even out the exposure, but again this does an excellent job automatically with very little input required from the user.

The downside? well there are a few. The program is slow, particularly if you have Bridge or Photoshop open. It only allows basic metadata edting so you will still need Bridge or whatever you use. It won't read in Adobe DNG files. I used to use Lightroom when it first came out and I converted a lot of my images to DNG. Unless you use the embedded option when saving to DNG you CANNOT convert them back. It doesn't output to PSD format. Not really a big issue but I save all my master files as PSD as TIFF's require a lot more space.

Is it worth it? definitely! Considering at the moment it only costs £69.00 it's worth that alone for the distortion correction feature, throw in all the other features too and it's an absolute bargain!

Try it for yourself. You can download a 30 day demo here that's completely unrestricted.