On January 7th I had to purchase a new laptop. The reason? The size of D800 files. To process one from start to finish it felt like I was passing a birthday every time I worked on one. Soooo I decided that it was time to suck it up and buy a new machine. The machine I decided on was the non Retina display 15 inch 2.7 Macbook pro with a 1TB hard drive. The reason? Glossy screens in the field do not work for me and a hard wired hard drive that I cannot replace should I need to (I have yet to own a laptop where I have not needed to) is not a prudent choice for someone who works his laptop as hard as I do. I get that this is the future, but for now I can still delay the inevitable. Also it has an Ethernet port, Firewire 800 USB 3 and Thunderbolt. SO everything I own today works. This time I decided to suck it up and instead of doing the transfer of software from old to new, I would do a complete clean install of ALL of the software. Which is, on the very best day and by anyone's measure, not my idea of a good time. To compound this joyous experience I was leaving for Burma (Myanmar) first thing in the morning January 8th. So January 7th I had every computer I own download all of the software that I needed from the internet. The plan install on the airplane all software.
One of the things that happens is laptops, if you travel a lot and live on your laptop, become like the closet of a college student the night before the parents come to visit him the dorm; filled with EVERYTHING you have ever owned. The other thing is you take that for granted. You just accept that everything you need is just there 'cuz..well.. it's just there. I replace my laptop every three years and the one I was replacing was going on four years, so yeah it was time.
Well I did not think to actually BRING the old laptop....
So when I went to install all the software I did not have the any of the serial numbers. Because the folder that is in my Documents folder "ALL_SERIAL_NUMBERS" was not on my new laptop it was on my old laptop. Did I mention I was going to Burma? And did I mention where I was going in Burma was the Himalayas to photograph remote mountain tribes? To say the internet is slow in Burma would be to give slow internet a bad name, and to think that there would be internet access in the huts of remote mountain tribes in the Himalayas? So I was left as an option "demo mode" for all of my software.
Which worked! I had to click "demo" everytime I lauched anything, but I caused this issue so I had only me to blame (I hate that when that happens... yelling at yourself is only fun for those watching).
So yesterday I was in Florida ( I live in Los Angeles, I flew straight to Miami from Yangon Burma, or 31 hours, to teach). Well the demos timed out. Most importantly the demo for my beloved Niksoftware Color Efex Pro 4 timed out... It was not until that moment that I realized just how important and how much of my imaging relies of that technology. In the simplest of terms I cannot creat the images that I create without it. I was stopped cold. Did I know how to kinda work around it in Photoshop? Yeah I guess but why? I cannot achieve the quality of image enhancement. Not to sound like a commercial but if anyone form Niksoftware is listening thank you. Thank you for every image I have created in the past 13 years.
This is the image that I was stopped until late last night. This image was captured by a Nikon D800camera. 70-200 f4 Nano coated VR II lens in the Nikon Electronic Image File Formant (.NEF) Shot on Lexar 128 gigabyte 1000 speed UDMA Flash media 200 iso. file was post processed using Capture NX2 Photoshop CS6, Nik Color Efex 4.0.
Final file is stored and scaled using Genuine Fractals.
© Vincent Versace 2013
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