Nikon D700's Best Friend

The photo above says it all.  Jamming that 85mm onto my D700x (just kidding, it’s still a D700) is a dream.  First off, I feel the D700 is the strongest camera in the Nikon lineup, yes, even over the D3x. Paired with the Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 lens – a fraction of the price of the f/1.4 – you get tack-sharp images across the entire focal range, a bokeh to die for, and a photo that needs very little post work.  I thought this was the ultimate set-up.

But wait, there’s more! After adding CS5 into the mix – well, now it’s just now heaven.

As I said in my previous post, CS5 offers a ton over CS4. Now that I have begun to dig into it, I am finding that I no longer need the quick tools for editing photos.  I used to used Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 3 and Silver Efex Pro within Photoshop to help me curve and balance my shots, tone map, or slam into B&W.  But the controls are so much better in Cs5 that I no longer have the need to use these quick little plugins.  I am able to generate any one of the effects they offered (for $300) very easily with the CS5 tools.  Yes, even tone mapping through the pseudo HDR tools built into CS5.

It doesn’t get better than this.  I could live a happy and full rest of my life with just these three items.  Well, of course I need my Mac Pro to do my edits, but that’s a given.

Color corrected in CS5

Wether you are shooting with a bottom of the rack Canon EOS Rebel (and by no means is it a slouch), a phantom D700s / D700x / D800 or a top of the line Caddy of Cameras, the Nikon D3x, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is looking more and more like your weapon of choice.

When I first began test-driving this program last week, I was under-impressed.  It seemed to have the same old stuff – be it jumbled around a bit – with no real flare to it.  But that’s because I wasn’t looking at it’s potential.  I was merely line curving and stamping my photos with my signature.  That’s not even scratching the surface of CS5.

What’s Better?

I found that as I dug deeper, there seems to be a much better control of RAW images and color correcting (as in the tulips above).  Also, though it wasn’t used in this image above, the selection tool is much more accurate then in previous editions of Photoshop.  Clicking on the center tulip above, the tool seemed to have no trouble differentiating it from the background.  Much better.

The content-aware fill is freaking witchcraft.  And yes, that’s a good thing.  I could punch a hole in one of the tulips above and CS5 will fill it in with how it believes it should look.  I didn’t think it would work that well, but gaddamnit, it’s amazing.

I also played with lens correction (not in this shot) and it does a much better job at correction distortion and vignetting. Pretty much how the old one worked, but better.  It’s nice that it just pulls the EXIF off the image and does the rest for you.

Another enhanced feature I like is the B&W conversions.  There is a new B&W Lab that will give you a ton of more options when converting, even, get this, HDR B&W Conversion.  Yes, create an HDR image while converting to B&W.  Cool!  There is also some new HDR creation tools built right in (for color shots)!

My favorite things have to be the better 64-bit support for my Quad Core Mac Pro and the impressive RAW file management.

This shit is the bees knees.