Autumn Bamboo Forest
A Short Love Affair With a MacBook Pro
I collected a refund for the MacBook I bought last week. I’m back using my trusty, yet noticeably slower, PC.
After experiencing fairly constant crashes, they offered to send it off to the service centre in Seoul. I’ve been in Korea for 3 years now, in total. I know that when there is a complaint, Koreans are often very friendly, but not quick to accept responsibility.
That is why, when I went back to the store a few days later, I wasn’t surprised to hear that they found nothing wrong with the computer. The reason why it kept crashing – the PSD files I used in Photoshop were too large. MacBook is only capable of working with files under 1GB!
I almost fell off my seat when I was told that. I thanked the lady for her help and asked for a refund. She said there’s nothing wrong with the computer so she couldn’t give me one. I opened up a 10mb file in Photoshop, and the system died. She looked disappointed. I also reminded her that computer had crashed many times without Photoshop being open.
Despite seeing it crash in front of here, she wouldn’t be convinced. But since it was a Saturday and head office was closed, she couldn’t offer me a refund anyway. I told her I would return at 2pm today and the only thing I would accept was a full refund. I think she could tell as I walked in the store today that I was serious. I received my money back with no questions asked. I think I’ll wait until I return to the UK before purchasing a Mac, if I still wish to switch.
It was very nice, for the briefest of moments, to see my images on that wonderful retina display 😀
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How I Created The Image – Before/After Post-Processing
The Cool Bits – Technical Info
Processing Time: 10 minutes
Exposure Blending method: N/A
No. of Exposures: 1
EV Range: 0
Aperture: f/8
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 14mm
Lens: Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8
Camera: Nikon D800
Plugins: N/A
Luminosity Masks: N/A
Workflow Explanation – Kyoto Forest
Would you like to learn my post-processing techniques? Feel free to check out my course: The Art of Digital Blending & The Art of Cityscape Photography
I enjoyed being creative with this image. I went to the bamboo forest as more of a tourist than a photographer, because it was a place I wanted to see but never really wanted to shoot. But when I looked at this image last week, I decided to see how creative I could be to get it to a point that I would personally enjoy it.
That point, it turned out, was very different to the original scene.
In terms of processing, I turned the green leaves to autumn colours by using the Autumn Colours button on my Free Easy Panel. To give the forest a dreamy effect, I used the Orton Effect button, also found on the Easy Panel.
I wanted to make the highlights as soft and dreamy as possible, so I created a new layer in Photoshop, used a large, soft white brush, and painted right down the middle on the new layer, where the large space of sky is in the centre of the image. This white line spilled over onto the surrounding trees too. I then changed the Blend mode of this layer to Soft Light and reduced its opacity until it was as soft as I’d hoped for.
I did the exact same thing where the two people are standing, to add a dreamy element in the distance.
If you look on the Before image above, you will see that the wooden fence either side of the path is fairly even in terms of brightness. I decided to brighten up the tips of this fence, to give the illusion of the sun coming through and illuminating the fence. I did this with a few simple passes of the Dodge tool set to Highlights and then Midtones.
I created a vignette that affected only the upper corners of the image, concentrating the eye on the bright sky and then the people at the bottom of the image.
And that was it, a fairly easy process this week.
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This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2015 at 5:50 pm
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Great photo Jimmy ,abou your Mac problem…i am thinking twice now that i also want to switch….i bet Apple Korea is not so happy about you haveing this problem and going public :)) but maybe they learn something from it and they improve their customer service . :)) chears !!!
I hope so 🙂
That is not true. I’ve worked with panos in photoshop that reached over 4 gigs with the layers and channels. with no crashes. My mac has far exceeded my PC counterparts. highdef screens big plus too!
That’s exactly what I suspected!
I think you’re getting the Mac hehe. Why not!
There are very powerful pcs available without having to resort to buying a mac. my current laptop cost less than half the price of the most expensive mac pro (mac pro, not macbook pro) and meets or exceeds all of it’s specs except it’s a quad core and the mac pro is a 6 core. look around at some gaming laptops.
I have had a MBP 15″ for six months now without one crash. It’s a beast and I love it so much for Lr & Ps. All large manufacturing has a lemon or two, look at the auto industry. As for the PC, sure you could buy an F550 with more power than a Lamborghini, but we all want the sports car. If your North American trip takes you near Toronto, I would love to meet up and show you the sights. Have a great day Jimmy! ps Love the Easy Panel.
I have just downloaded your ‘The Easy Panel’ to my Mac but I get and error from my Archive Utility:
*Unable to expand “The Easy Panel by Jimmy McIntyre.zip into Downloads”.
(Error 2 – No such file or directory.)*
Are you able to assist me in this regard, please?
Kind regards
My PC had no problems with that file….
Love the tutorial Jimmy! For the mac problem. Even my 2010 MBP handled 2gb PSDs no problem. Recently got a 13″ MBPr and works like a charm! No crashes. You should give apple another chance
Lovely pic! Fantastic perspective and the two people in the centre makes a perfect focal point.
There fast PCs, too Jimmy! Some even faster than Macs, in fact.
I have one no mac can keep up with.
I would love to know the configuration. I have a Mac mini that OK in performance. i have a dual core with 16GB RAM. It handles more than 1GB files without a problem but I do not want to remain a slave to the Apple domination mainly due to pricing. I want to go higher but the doorknob is so high.
OK, for a stationary system, I use an AMD 8 core proc with 16GB, a Radeon 7970 GPU with 3GB and three SSDs for Boot, Apps and Data, plus 3TB HDD. The display (as noted elsewhere) is a 39″ Seiki 4K TV. This machine is fabulous for working on some pretty large RAW files created by my Nikon D800. Opening a 73MB NEF photo, including launching Photoshop CC 2014 takes 8 seconds. Opening that file if the app is open is about 1 second. Rendering is similarly fast, so the computer really never gets in my way at all. Granted that the cost is higher than a dual core Mac Mini, but my time is worth it.
Friends don’t let friends purchase PCs. Clearly, you purchased a lemon or a gray market refurbished MacBook. Purchasing a Mac years ago was the best one thing I ever did to improve my digital developing.
Cheers
You got lucky.
This is nonsense. My ASUS cost one third ofthe amount of a MacBook Pro. It has a metal case, the keyboard is the same and the screen is gorgeous. I hook it up to an ASUS 2640 x 1440 beautiful monitor. All together, with a large monitor and a powerful machine like this I am glad that I decided against buying the Mac. I would recommend it to any friend any day.
I believe that’s a software specific constraint, not platform: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/file-formats.html
Look into Dell XPS or Dell Alienware gaming laptops. I own both of those for years. very good powerful machines.
Thank for all the advice to those who have commented. There seem to be some die-hard PC/Mac fans out there!
Jimmy, I use a 39″ 4K Seiki TV as my primary monitor at home and a Surface Pro 3 for portability. Recently, I also picked up a HP Stream 7, a little 7″ quad core Atom processor to toss into my pack to serve as my Camranger controller in the field. It was running Windows 8.1, but is now on Windows 10 Tech Preview and looks like it might work out. I added a 64Gb microSD card to provide for some data storage space. The Stream cost me $69.00 at the Microsoft online store, so not a big deal to experiment.
hey Jimmy, I love the easy panel.I tried using autumn colours, It worked on most part of the image but few greens were left out. How can I solve this issue
Wow… what a great post! I had a good experience merging documents online and happy to share it with you. Merging files is super easy with AltoMerge. Try it on your own here
http://goo.gl/NwG4R0and you’ll make sure how it’s simple.