Last week review 25-2022

Weekly review 25-2022 and again it was a hot week with only a few drops of rain on Monday 🙂

And from now on it’s going down again, the days are getting shorter and the nights longer. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that extremely high temperatures appear earlier and earlier in the year, as everything shifts.

This week it was about the question whether one needs rather gray filters with fixed extension factors and when varaible gray filters are meaningful or even necessary. To date I have always used a set of ND filters with fixed extension factors, but the variable gray filters are simply flexible. Sure, you can’t reach the extreme factors of 1000x or even more, but to still take a photo with 4 seconds exposure time in bright sunshine, a filter with only a maximum extension factor of 400x can be sufficient.

in one you also have the variable extension to be able to film with it, so to keep the 180° degrees. This is all the Andmore important as more and more cameras are using quite high basic ISO settings for filming, especially in 10 bit.

And ISO 640 on the beach is impossible to do without an ND filter 🙂

Then DxO released the Nik Collection version 5. This version 5 is supposed to be a more or less complete overhaul of the Suite Tools, with tools like Silver Efex, HDr Efex and Analog Efex as well as other tools for more creativity in image processing. The look of old analog films is also mimicked in b/w or very coherent HDR images are put together. DxO HDR Tool can also do this with just one RAW file, which I found very good. There is a trial version of the suite before you buy it for 149,– €.

The update still costs 79, – €, which I think is still a pretty proud price. Perhaps DxO also has it hard at the point, because remember Google had once released the Nik Collection completely.

Then Gimp, the flagship graphics program was released in version 2.10.32 and can now be found for download in the Microsoft App Store. Who would have thought that open source programs would make it to Micosoft.

f you still consider how much open source was once fought by Micosoft and today there is a Linux base in Windows and various tools were even ported by Microsoft itself.

All in all again very eventful weeks. I hope you enjoy the articles and look forward to your questions and comments.

ciao tuxoche