Free iPad Wallpapers

I know its April first, but I assure you, I am deadly serious about this: Free ProLost wallpapers for your new iPad. Right-click to download the 1024x1024 originals one at a time, or download them all in a zip archive.

They’re square so they can work in both portrait and landscape modes—the iPad crops them on the fly. Some are definitely on the busy size, but you can set a different image as your lock screen, so maybe they have a place there.

All images were processed in the new Lightroom 3 Public Beta 2.

Since I don’t have an iPad yet, I don’t know which of these will work the best—please let me know in the comments which work out well for you this weekend!

These images are copyrighted, but free for you to use as wallpaper and lock screen images on your personal iPad. If you want to share them, please link to this page.

Magic Bullet PhotoLooks

Yesterday Red Giant Software announced the release of Magic Bullet PhotoLooks. It’s the same Magic Bullet Looks you know and love, re-engineered for use on high resolution stills in Adobe Photoshop.

In case you don’t know, Looks, and now PhotoLooks, is a creative toolset for giving your images an overall cinematic look. It’s based on the model of an actual camera, with filters, lens characteristics, and film processing tricks. By accurately simulating the physics of light, glass, and celluloid, it creates a fun, creative environment for experimenting with your shots. Start with one of 100 presets, see how they’re put together, then modify them to taste—or design your own and share them with friends.

Longtime Magic Bullet Looks users will recognize the interface, presets, and tools—so much so that they might even wonder what’s new about this new version. A lot has changed under the hood, but all in ways designed not to be noticed. Here are some examples:

• That PhotoLooks is a native Photoshop plug-in means that not only can you use it directly from within Photoshop, but you can also use Photoshop’s Smart Layers to keep PhotoLooks as a non-destructive adjustment that you can tweak again and again, even after closing and re-opening the file. Aharon Rabinowitz shows you how to do this in the above tutorial.
• PhotoLooks contains the beginnings of a Color Management solution, so that your color-managed Photoshop workflow will match what you see in the PhotoLooks UI. Future versions will refine and enhance this feature to work with any popular color space you might care to use for your photography workflow.
• The last one is the biggest change and hopefully the most invisible: The Looks rendering engine has been re-written completely to work on high-resolution stills. While working on your look, you get the fluid, GPU-accelerated experience Looks has always provided, but when you press OK, your look is rendered by the new CPU render engine that can handle the gigantic image sizes common to current-generation cameras. If you’ve used the “secret” stills feature of Magic Bullet Looks, you may have run up against limitations in resolution. That won’t happen with PhotoLooks.

PhotoLooks is $199, or $99 if you already have Magic Bullet Looks or Quick Looks.

What’s fun for me, as the guy who designed it, is to see a whole new legion of creative professionals exposed to the power and creativity of Magic Bullet Looks. Here are some of their impressions:

I am not exaggerating when I say that Magic Bullet PhotoLooks will re-invent the way people think about filters in Photoshop—I have never seen anything like it.

-Deke McClelland, award-winning Photoshop author, and trainer

Another favorite feature of mine is the Look Theater. I get creatively stumped with my photography occasionally, and it is so cool to be able to just sit and watch my photographs take on a new persona without me having to lift a finger.

-Justin Seeley, Photoshop trainer and graphic designer

Magic Bullet PhotoLooks is a fantastic tool, with absolutely no adoption curve.

-Thorsten Meyer, Photographer

To make a perfect look for a photo [using Photoshop’s built-in tools] can be an arduous process of changing levels, curves, diffusion, glows, spot exposure, color correction, vignetting, edge softness, etc. However, the thumbnail for each of the 100+ presets in Magic Bullet PhotoLooks instantly updates to show its effect on your photo making it really easy to compare the effect of each one.

-Jack Tunnicliffe, Java Post Production

You can read more testimonials here.

ProLost Holiday Shopping Guide 2009

Man, it’s been quite a year. Let’s buy some stuff.

I know you have this friend: “Yeah, I just got this new (insert name of entry-level DSLR). I really like it. I haven’t really had much time to learn to use it though. I mostly leave it on auto.” When they say “I really like it,” they sound like a coffee shop employee describing the vegan chocolate cookie as “delicious,” i.e. lying. They hold up their camera and sure enough, it has the kit lens. Flimsy and slow, not even worth the $120 it added to the price of the camera, it is the reason your friend is not as excited by their DSLR purchase as they thought they’d be.

Rock their world with a fast fifty—a 50mm prime with a large maximum aperture. For Canon, there’s the no-excuses 50mm f/1.8 II ($100), and the best deal going 50mm f/1.4 ($360). Or show ‘em you really love ‘em with the crazy 50mm f/1.2 L ($1600). For Nikon, there’s the 50mm f/1.8D ($125), and if you want to go big I recommend the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX ($500).

All of these are available on the ProLost Store Fast 50s page.

You also have this friend, or more likely a family member: They have a Canon PowerShot that’s never done them wrong over the several years they’ve owned it. It has a tiny little LCD screen and uses its flash in anything less than searing sunlight. They have no idea how things have improved since they spent $400 on that little beast. A new Canon Powershot that beats this oldie-but-goodie in every way can be theirs for only $150 or so: the Canon PowerShot SD1200IS. It even comes in fun colors.

What’s nice is that Canon has not changed their menu interface much over the years, so there’s not much new to learn with a new PowerShot.

For the director in your life, here’s a weird but amazing gift idea: A green laser pointer. I use these on set for everything from placing background talent to describing the height of a light, or the cut of a shadow. The green ones are visible in broad daylight, and of course demand cautious handling, as they could damage human eyesight if abused. Once you spend a day on the set with one of these in your pocket, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without one.

(There are many cheap laser pointers out there, but they are most likely lower-power lasers being overdriven. Don’t skimp.)

Another great gift for anyone who spends time on a film set is a Gerber 22-41545 Multi-Plier ($52). You can schnick out the pliers with one hand, which was something I first saw on a shoot, and it was such a profound sight that I threw my Leatherman into the ocean.

Do you still know someone who doesn’t have The DV Rebel’s Guide? If so, buy one and bludgeon them about the head and shoulders with it.

Blu-ray is the best way for a movie fan to enjoy their favorite films, and the players are not only getting more affordable, they are also starting to be as good at Blu-ray playback as the Playstation 3. The Sony BDP-N460 ($200 or less) not only plays back Blu-ray disks with the speed and slick interface of the PS3, it also streams Netflix and Amazon on-demand movies via a wired internet connection. Want to use it wirelessly? Pick up the Linksys WET610N Wireless-N Ethernet Bridge ($80).

You’ll want some good Blu-rays to play of course. I recommend a few recent sci-fi classic remasterings: Close Encounters of the Third Kind ($32) (because Spielberg films are film school every time you watch them), The Terminator ($10) (because Jim Cameron was a DV Rebel before there was DV, making this movie for $6 million, roughly the bottled water budget of Avatar), and Galaxy Quest ($17) (because damn it’s funny, and my name’s in the credits).

Lastly, something from the jaw-dropping inspiration department: Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows. From 1945 to 1950, Stanley Kubrick was a photojournalist for Look magazine. Will it shock you to learn that his photos are stunning? Even though he was a teenager at the time? I didn’t think so. This book is a reminder that every photo you make can be a step down the road to becoming a better filmmaker.

Happy holidays from ProLost!

Camera Tests

A friend of mine shot this with his 7D. Right after a hundred other friends of mine shot the exact same thing with theirs.

A friend was starting in on a project that he thought he might shoot on the RED One. Understandably, he shot some tests. He was concerned about shooting in low levels of tungsten-balanced light, which is understood to be a situation that does not play to the RED One’s advantages. He was going to test against some other digital cinema cameras, and invited me to come play.

I think he was rather surprised when I told him that I would rather not. I explained myself thusly:

I’m glad people test cameras, in the same way I’m glad people test condoms. But a condom-testing event doesn’t sound fun to me at all. At some point, you just want to pick a condom that you have reason to believe will do its job satisfactorily, and get busy.

Cinematographer Geoff Boyle just posted this dutiful comparison of three 50mm cinema primes; Cooke S4, Zeiss Master Prime, and RED. I highly recommend that you download the full-res DPX files and compare them at the pixel level, because it will cure you of ever wanting to do such a test on your own. The differences are so infinitesimal that they could be accounted for by light bouncing into the scene off the operator’s cargo shorts.

Are camera tests useless? Not at all. I’m grateful that so many people want to do them. It frees me up to grab a camera that I think is going to be pretty much right for the job, and get busy.