Photography News Issue 57

Advertisement feature 35

Photography News | Issue 57 | photographynews.co.uk

Nik Collection 2018 TheNikCollectionshouldbe familiar tomanyphotographers by now, as it includes some of the most acclaimed processing tools and creative filter packages around. Now supplied by software experts, DxO, theNikCollection2018 is a set of plug- ins for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom or Elements packages, working on MacOS or Windows. You get plenty for your £59 with the collection including: Silver Efex Pro, for black & white photography; Analog Efex Pro, for classic camera, film and lens effects; Color Efex Pro, with filters for colour correction, retouching and creative effects; Viveza, allowing selective colour and tone adjustments without masks or selections; HDR Efex Pro, for tone mapping high dynamic range images; Dfine, which has noise-reduction functions tailored to individual cameras; and Sharpener Pro, which does what you’d expect. There’s a 30-day free trial, so it’s well worth a try. £59 nikcollection.dxo.com

X-Rite i1 Studio If you’re looking for a start-to-finish colour management solution to improve your photography, then the X-Rite i1 Studio is a great place to start. Added to your workflow, the upshot will be prints matching perfectlywhat’s on screen. TheX-Rite i1 Studio canbeused to calibrate your monitors, cameras, scanners, printers and projectors – basically all the ducks in your imaging row – and ensure consistent colour across them all. You can even calibrate iOS devices, using the X-Rite ColorTRUEapp. ThepackcomeswithanX-Rite i1Spectrophotometer, a Mini ColorChecker Classic target for use with your cameras and scanners, and an i1 Studio protective pouch to keep it all safe and tidy. Using the downloadable software, it’s easy to create custom colour profiles, with the X-Rite i1 Studio assessing the hues and tones captured using the Mini ColorChecker target as a reference point and accurately calibrating your screen for true colour representation. £399 xrite.com

BenQ SW240 BenQ’s 24in 1920x1200 SW240 is petite by current standards, withmany screens topping 30in and having 4K resolutions, but it provides plenty of desktop space, and can be viewed at a comfortable distance without craning your neck. Its low-profile surround adds to the sense of space. Connecting via HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort, the slightly-higher- than-HD resolution gives great clarity and the screen uses a flicker-free LED backlight and gives a 178° vertical and horizontal viewing angle. Thematte anti- glare surface helps viewing accuracy, too. Best of all, as a ‘photographer’s’ monitor, the SW240 has excellent colour performance, featuring 100% sRGB and 99% Adobe RGB gamuts – much better than regular displays – and 10-bit depth for finer tonal gradations. The design is solid, with very little wobble and a reasonable 14cm of height adjustment, 5/20° tilt, 45° left/right swing and it can be turned through 90°. It also has a headphone jack, SD reader and two USB ports. £390 benq.co.uk

PortraitPro 17 PortraitPro, the dedicated portrait retouching software, is now on its 17th edition. As well as the well- known features, such as making improvements to skin and bone structure, the new edition includes: background editing, so you can edit your subject and insert a new

G-Technology 12TB G-RAIDwith Thunderbolt 3 For desktop storage you need lots of capacity, reliability and speedy transfer – and good looks don’t hurt either. Check out the G-RAID with Thunderbolt 3, with two removable 6TB 7200rpm disks creating a 12TB RAID0 drive, but which you can split to RAID1 and 6TB for fail-safe redundancy in the event of a disk failure. You can even use each 6TB disk independently of the other, so mounting as separate drives on your desktop. With transfer speeds of up to 440MB/s for performance the drive is perfect for very large digital files and high-resolutionvideowork. Aswell as its dual Thunderbolt 3 ports and an HDMI port, it also has USB 3.1 Gen2 for easy connection to virtually any device, and comes with a USB-C toUSB-A cable. £670 g-technology.com

background without leaving the software; snapshots, which lets you save your progress so you can try different effects, compare themand easily revert if you change yourmind; advanced presets, where you can save customfilters using your favourite tools and settings, then apply them with one click; batch processing (via the PortraitPro Studio Max version) which can save hours ofmanual retouching; improved vignetting; moremake-up options, such as new tan bronzer styles; more skin texture and tones, to avoid ‘plastic’ looking features, aidedby a newsharpen tool; and advanced automatic face- detection technology, which has been updated to bemore accurate andwork faster. Phew! From£29.95 portraitprofessional.com

LaCie RuggedMini Portable Hard Drive 2TB

Mobile hard drives are highly useful, especially when you’re shooting away from home and want to store what you’ve shot, or retrieve older files for editing. This pocket-sized 2TB drive from LaCie is shock, rain and pressure resistant, and it’s claimed you can drive a one-ton car over itwithout a loss of function.At 89x140x25mmandweighing only300g,it’ssmallandlightenoughtotakeprettymuchanywhere,

too. It also looks the businesswithLaCie’s iconic orange rubberised casing. Connection and data transfer is fast via a USB 3.0 interface, where you can transfer a 700MB file in less than seven seconds, and of course it’s fully compatiblewithUSB2.0 systems, too. AnApple Thunderbolt version is also available, as are other capacities. As well as offering physical security, the drive can also be password protected. £100 lacie.com