Newest Adobe deal for Photographers (valid till 2nd December 2013) - take or leave it?

Adobe has a limited time offer, called Adobe Photoshop Photography Program (valid till 2nd December 2013), which offers a bundle of Photoshop CC and Lightroom via a Creative Cloud (CC) monthly subscription of 9.99$ (in Europe it is priced 12.29EUR per month). There was (and is still ongoing) a lot of discussion on Internet about the new business model of Adobe. I am not going to discuss pros and cons of such model. Instead I am going to present some considerations taking different user categories into account.

New users

For someone that does not have Photoshop and Lightroom it is probably a good deal. For 120$ (147.5EUR) per year one gets those two packets. CS6 and Lightroom 5 bundle if bought separately, would cost 848$ (699 and 149 for Photoshop and Lightroom, respectively). So the subscription price would exceed the purchase costs of the standalone version after 7 years. This of course under assumption that the subscription price remains the same.

The added value is that the upgrades of the software are included in the subscription price of the Creative Cloud. And in the period of 7 years one can expect 2-3 release updates of both products.

So for the newcomers it is in my opinion the interesting option.

Existing users

If someone (like me) has purchased Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom, then the benefits of such deal are not so obvious. Let's face it: Photoshop CS6 is very extended package and most photographers don't even need the updates (there are people still using CS2 and CS3 with a great success and pleasure). And update of Lightroom will be available as a standalone application for 79$. 

So for the sake of switching to CC I would not take this deal. 

But there is one more aspect that makes it interesting for at least some of us.

Users using two different OS platforms (Windows and Mac)

If someone has both a Windows and a Mac machine and wants to use Photoshop and Lightroom on both platforms, then he/she should seriously consider the offer from Adobe, in my opinion. Why? Because the licensing model of Photoshop (prior the CC version) does not allow to use the same license for two machines equipped with two different operating systems. In this case Adobe offers either purchase of two licenses (which means 699$ extra) or the so called platform swap. But platform swap is not an option since the usage of software is limited to one machine.

For the CC version the situation is different: one can install the software on two computers, disregard the operating system they run. More on that in this discussion thread.
So for 120$ per year one gets the software running on both platforms. For me this is a deal maker.

Make your own Easter greeting card

Easter is coming and it is a good habit to send the greetings to the friends or relatives on a greeting card. Since couple of years I make such cards by myself, which is a lot of fun and gives the cards uniqueness and personal touch.
Last year I described some techniques useful for this kind of photography. In this post I am going to describe the whole process of making such card, from the basic concept, to the publication.

Easter theme

All starts by selecting the basic theme. The symbolic of Eastern is focused on the symbols of new life: eggs, chickens, green and yellow colors, hare. So it is almost unavoidable to have at least some of them on the card. In my first attempt I have chosen for eggs and chickens. 

The composition

I like postcards that have a 3D-look. So I wanted to compose a picture that would give strong impression of depth. To achieve that I set up the scene in three planes: foreground, with the eggs, middle part with the chickens, and the background with the hanging eggs:

The perceived depth of field can be manipulated by different aperture settings.

The light

The above picture was taken in the ambient light, coming from the window located right to the scene. I wanted to give the chickens some warm punch as key light. To do so, I have used two speedlights with the CTO filter placed left and right to the chickens:

To avoid light spilling both strobes were equipped with a snoot to focus the light beam. Both strobes were controlled from the camera build-in flash via the iTTL system of Nikon. First attempt:

The chickens are warmly lit, but the rest of the scene is dark. Too dark. Time to put the fill light. Fill light was been created by third flash and a golden reflector bouncing the light from the flash on the scene. After applying fill light the scene looked like that:

That is better. The scene still have a warm look and all elements on the foreground are properly lit. Last step is to improve the light in the background. To do so another flash was used, equipped with the yellow filter. I have experimented with several positions of the background flash:

Manipulating the background light was easy, I just held the flash light in my hand during shooting in the different places of the scene.
Finally I have chosen the middle image for further processing.

Post processing

For post processing I have used combination of Lightroom, Nik software suite and Photoshop.

In Lightroom I have applied lens profile and camera corrections.

In Nik software I have pre-sharpened the image (with RAW sharpener), applied the golden reflector filter, blur vignette (in Efex Pro), added some local brightness to the eggs in the background (with Viveza)

In Photoshop I have removed some distracting spots. There is the final picture:

Some technicalities

Reuse the setup

The whole 'production' took me about 3 hours. Since a lot of effort has been put in the light setup once the chickens were ready I decided to create another card, with a hare in the main role:

As one can see, the scene is very similar to those with chickens, yet different. Taking this picture took me just couple of minutes thanks to reuse of the existing setup.

Try different gels

When I was done with my basic setup I have tried to light the scene with flashes without gels:

It hasn't been chosen eventually but it is always worth experimenting with different settings and sometimes it can result in a new, inspiring scene.

Hanging eggs

To hang the eggs I have used a combination of the flash light stand and a piece of other pipe mounted on the light stand: