Camera Owners of the Bay Area

Happy New Year from COBA!

The February 2006 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, February 8, 2005 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 7:30-10:30 pm.

Pre-PMA Roundup

It’s that time of the year again, the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) conference in Orlando, Florida! We’ll have the latest photography news and rumors.

RAW Processors: Apple Aperture and Adobe LightRoom

It is a great time to be a RAW photographer. The marketplace for RAW processing software is expanding. This month, we will be covering several new software packages for organizing and converting your RAW images, including:

• Apple Aperture
• Adobe Lightroom
• Light Crafts Lightzone

Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom

From the Aperture website:

Designed from the ground up for professional photographers, Aperture provides everything you need for after the shoot, delivering the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers. Featuring a RAW-focused workflow, Aperture makes RAW as easy as JPEG, letting you import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish, and archive your images more effectively and efficiently than ever before. From capture to output, you work directly with your RAW files, never having to first convert them into another format before viewing, adjusting, organizing, or printing them.

From the Lightroom Project website:

Adobe Lightroom is the efficient new way for professional photographers to import, select, develop, and showcase large volumes of digital images. So you can spend less time sorting and refining photographs, and more time actually shooting them. Its clean, elegant interface literally steps out of the way and lets you quickly view and work with the images you shot today, as well as the thousands of images that you will shoot over the course of your career. Because no two photographers work alike, Adobe Lightroom adapts to your workflow, not the other way around.

I will also be demonstrating Aperture and LightRoom on a PowerMac Quad G5
and a 30-inch Cinema Display.

Light Crafts LightZone

LightZone is innovative and powerful software that provides photographers with a new and easier way to edit and correct their digital negatives and create photographs and fine prints. Now, photographers everywhere will quickly achieve professional results because LightZone is designed to work the way photographers think about their photographs.

• Most intuitive image editing solution for photographers
• Includes the tools that photographers need to get the image they want
• Significantly reduces the time to perfect digital photographs
• Delivers more predictable and precise results with less effort
• Easier to learn and use than pixel-painting software

Dean Tucker, CEO of Light Crafts, and Lars Vinberg, Product Manager, will be on-hand to demonstrate LightZone. You can download a trial version of the software from Light Crafts’ Website.