There are only 7 days left to join my Photo editing contest sponsored by Aurora HDR and get a chance to win an Everyday messenger bag. So don’t leave it for the last moment and head over the the contest announcement page, to get the full rules and all needed files to enter the contest :)

Many of you have already joined, and for those who need a bit of inspiration, here are some of the entries that I already received. You can see many more in the contest event on Facebook. It’s always so interesting to see how different the result is when different photographers edit the photo, isn’t it? :)

For bigger things, I did a review for, I like to do a follow up after few months, to make an update on how it is to use them. And since it just has been two months I got the Surface Pro 4, today I will share with you how it is.

Stability & Reliability

For the whole time I was a part of the Windows Insider program. So the version of Windows 10 I used on the Surface Pro 4, was always the newest one from the fast ring. If you are a part of it, you know that Microsoft is releasing a new version of windows almost weekly now. I also always kept all software up to date.

In the two months, I had a blue-screen error once. I had no other errors, restarts or hiccups at all. The problem with the crashing video drivers was corrected few days after I posted my review. Actually, the only repeating problem I found is a bit strange one. When I use hibernate, after the Surface wakes up, I sometimes can’t stream video to it. It’s just crazy choppy and slow. Not sure if this is caused by the wifi driver, but a restart always solves it. But this is more of an annoyance than a real problem.

Keyboard & Pen

I thought I would not like the keyboard. I write with all 10 fingers and my normal keyboard is a MS natural ergonomic keyboard, so much bigger, angled and split in the middle. But to my surprise I really like the keyboard. It’s big enough for me to work it, it is not that bouncy and it’s very responsive. I did write quite a few articles for the blog while laying in bed with the surface on my knees and it was still fine :). The touch-pad works OK, but I got a mouse for the surface, so I prefer not to use it.

I have not used the pen for editing at all. But I did use it for taking quick notes, to mark up web pages (it was great when I was preparing the page update, just loading a work in progress version into edge and then use the pen to note needed changes right there) and I tried a bit of drawing, not that I really know how to. I got a program called Mischief, which is an endless drawing/note taking canvas, and that is a great companion to the pen. All the time I had 0 issues with it.

Both keyboard and pen magnets are strong enough to hold them in place and not even when putting surface in the bag either of them ever got loose.

Performance & Battery

I haven’t done much photo editing on it recently, but I did quite a lot of other Photoshop work, like creating flayers and similar. I was very pleasantly surprised by how it managed to keep up and even after hours of work I never heard the fan. Once I even forgot to plug in the power cord, and I haven’t noticed it at all for over three hours.

There were of course instance when it got taxed quite more. Especially when working in Ligthroom, the fans come on rather quickly. But in a more relaxed situation, having few Edge tabs open, video playing in the background, and few more apps, I never once noticed them on. Actually, mostly they turn on when you just leave the surface on and you do nothing. The system then starts to probably do some maintenance tasks and heats up for few minutes.

On average I was getting around 6 hours of battery in my use. Maybe not the best, but enough for me.

Durability & Software

In the two months I got no scratches or any other blemishes on the Surface. But since I’m always very careful with my things, that is not really a surprise :)

My favorite feature of the Surface has to be Windows Hello. It works for me 100% of the time and I have not needed to type my password once after the initial setup. This really should be standard on every single PC. Also Edge was the only browser I used, as it is great with scaling web pages on such high dpi screen.

The system boots up crazy fast, and I have not seen a real difference between full startup and hibernation.

Conclusion

I have not turned on my Nexus tablet once in the last two months. That on its own should tell you how satisfied I am with the surface as a tablet. Once one gets used to some different controls, it’s just great. On the other side, it’s also a really nice laptop. It’s so small when placed in a bag and still really powerful.

One of the issues when creating a Panorama, are the missing areas around the sides, due to how the images have to be warped to fit each other. To correct this, one needed to either cut off the areas, fill them in or try to war the image to get rid of them. With the newest update to Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW, there is now one more option, called Boundary warp.

Here I’m showing it to you in Lightroom, but it works exactly the same in Camera RAW. To be able to use it, you have to first merge a panorama in Lightroom. To do so, just select all the files of the panorama, right click one of them and choose Photo merge/Panorama, or go from the top menu Photo/Photo Merge/Panorama, or even faster, hit Ctrl+M.

Once you get the popup window, you will see the merged panorama. If you have Auto Crop on, you have to turn it off first, to be able to see the whole photo, including the missing areas. Now here you also see the Boundary warp slider. Move it to the right, to see how the photo will start warping to fill in all the missing areas. It will also try to straighten the image while doing that.

Here are three different situations, and how it worked out. I this first one, a scenery landscape, it worked out perfectly. The sky looks great and even the road was straightened perfectly.

In this second example, it was not that perfect. This is the biggest weakness of Boundary warp. If you have straight lines close to the warped borders, Boundary warp can distort and bend them. You can see it here on the right, where the bridge is just not straight. In this case, one would have to either crop this away, try to warp it back in Photoshop, or tone down boundary warp, to a lover setting, where this is not so visible. Either way, more work is needed.

In this last example, here again are straight lines close to the edge. But since the needed warp is much smaller, there is no visible distortion in the final image.

Boundary ward is a really nice addition from Adobe. It will make some quite challenging panorama corrections that much easier. And it even leave the result in RAW DNG format, which makes it even better.

Contest update

In the first 3 days of the contest, already over 50 of you submitted your version of the photo I provided. There are still two weeks to do so, so if you want to join the fun, and have a chance to win a Everyday messenger bag, just head over to the contest page to check it out :)

New 3440×1440 wallpapers

According to the page stats, every day I get visitors to the site, looking for 3440×1440 wallpapers. And as I know how hard is it to find wallpapers at that size (as I have the same resolution on my monitor) here are two more I added to the selection :) Get them from the wallpapers page.

You will also notice a little reformatting of the wallpapers page. As it was getting a bit too long, I have implemented and accordion menu, where you choose the aspect ration you want, and that part of the site is displayed for you.

One of the accessories, I felt the need for last year, was also a way to shade the camera while shooting through a window. Doing this with just a jacket or something similar is just not effective enough and is just cumbersome. So in the end I went ahead and ordered a LENSKIRT. For what it is, its not the cheapest accessory (49usd right now) but if it helps, thats secondary.

I have tested a new version of the LENSKIRT, which corrects the quality problems I mentioned here. You can find the update here.

What’s a LENSKIRT

LENSKIRT is a cover you attach to a window using suction cups. Once that is done, you put the camera from the back into it, and tighten the drawstring to seal the back of the LENSKIRT. Like this, you completely cover the camera, and prevent any light from creating reflections on the glass.

In the package you get a LENSKIRT and a short flier with few tips on how to use it.

Build & Quality

The quality is a bit of a disappointment. The front part is from a solid material, but the back cloth feels really flimsy and cheap. It’s even partially translucent, as you can see on the previous photo. The way the LENSKIRT is sewn together looks like someone was in a hurry, and didn’t care that much. On my piece, one corner is not properly aligned and the inside of the thick front material is visible. Also the way the big pieces are sewn together looks ugly and very amateurish (as you can see from the included photo). If the price was 10 dolars, I would say I got what I payed for, but with the higher price, I was expecting much more.

The suction cups are nice and each one has a small nob on it, to make the detaching easier.

Does it work?

I had no issues attaching the LENSKIRT to glass. It takes a bit of experimenting to find a good order in which to attach the suction cups, but it does work. Also putting the camera inside is easy.

LENSKIRT works really nicely in removing the light reflections once used. Here is an example for you. Same settings, same position of the camera, same lighting inside the room. The first shot is without the LENSKIRT, the second is with the LENSKIRT.

As you can see, I got rid of all the reflections. But to show you better the inside, here is a photo with the camera zoomed out and pulled a bit back. There is a bit of a light leak around the sides, but you would not see that wide anyway, as you would see the suction cups in the shot. To get best results, the camera lens should be much closer to the glass.

Conclusion

The LENSKIRT works great on what it should do. But the quality is not representative of the price it costs. If you know you will be shooting through the glass a lot, you should get it. If no, that you don’t need one.

I have tested a new version of the LENSKIRT, which corrects the quality problems I mentioned here. You can find the update here.