About this Blog

Photo Writing is the web version of the Photo Writing mini-magazine produced by Limephoto and Emil von Maltitz since 2010. As of 2015 it is now completely online. Feel free to browse through the articles and please leave comments in the comments section if you would like to engage with us.

Monday, June 7, 2021

A Review of the New Nik Collection 4 - lack lustre update, or must have app collection?


Last week, with very limited fanfare, DXO launched their now annual update to the Nik Collection of plugins and standalone image filters. This ostensibly brings the suite of applications to version 4. Although in a bizarre naming twist, only two of the apps are actually at version 3, with most of them still at version 2, and some still at version 1. The last properly major update was in 2019, and I wrote about it in this article. Version Three came out in 2020 and was essentially some bug fixes and the inclusion of a miniature filter and the start of a theoretically non-destructive workflow. The new version is essentially a reboot of two of the Nik Collections apps: Silver Efex and Viveza.


Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Shooting Distance



Arguably, the first thing that novice photographers attempt to ‘fix’ in their images is the issue of flatness, the sense or feeling that an image is 'flat' when looked at. The way we perceive our world is three-dimensionally. Images are not three-dimensional though, hence our interpretation of the two-dimensional is often one of flatness. The complaint tends to go along the lines of ‘this doesn’t do justice to what we saw’, or ‘it looked a lot bigger in real-life’ or simply, ‘it looked very different when we saw it’.