875 - But I'm Different Now

Oops, I got these two images ready and uploaded yesterday while I was on the train, but at home I simply fell to bed 🙂

I’m still with these tones. I said that the point is, that you tone first, and selectively apply multiple curves and levels later. That’s how you get the color variance. I like that.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. Take a moment and look at this image. Ultra-wide, you say. Typical tilt, you say. Yes, but look harder. Look at the pavement.

Fishy, huh?

Yup! It’s the fisheye again, but somehow the vertical lines are too … straight.

Now look at the next image. The curved horizontal in the background makes it distinctly more fishy, but look at the bicycle and at the wooden screen behind. Straight verticals, although not parallel.

This is the work of a new plugin that I wanted to buy in a long time but never have. It’s called Fisheye-Hemi™, and although it should not be used automatically all of the time, it makes the fish a much more versatile lens. Basically this is something to try, to just have a look, see what the effect does. If it looks good, one keeps it, if not, one presses undo.

The notable difference between this and a rectilinear mapping is, that you don’t completely lose your composition. It does not look so stretched at the edges either, and it keeps most of the pixels in your image. I spare you the before/after comparisons, there are plenty of examples on their website. To me this looks like a perfect complement to any fisheye lens.

There is one thing that I want to point out though: The license, although reasonably priced, is somewhat fishy too. It allows installation on one computer only, and I suppose they have some protection installed, because when you enter the license code, the program checks the license with their servers, maybe binding it to your particular computer. Actually, at that price it’s fine with me, I only hope that it does not bitch when I re-install after an upgrade. Well, we’ll see when I buy a new laptop sometime this year.

The Song of the Day is “But I’m Different Now” from the 1980 Jam album “Sound Affects”. See a video on YouTube.