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I think it's mainly characterised by the nice dark (but gentle) vignette. And the very aggressive skin smoothing of course.

@cathm

Ok, thank you so much for helping me. I will try the callibration in a few minutes.

That's bad. You need that as close to 100GB Free as much as possible. Even if you got around 75GB Free, that would be better. Buy CleanMyMac X from MacPaw and run it weekly. Hit your downloads folder and delete all the crap that is in there. You'd be surprised on how much stuff ends up in there. Cull images. Delete-Delete-Delete the photos that will never see the light of day. With a 200GB Main HD, you need to be hyper anal on what is stored on that drive. How full is the LaCie Drive? How is it connected to your Mac? USB or Thunderbolt? Do you use the LaCie for anything else, like Time Machine?

Thank you SO much! I'll be buying you a beer!

Hi everyone, I finally decided to step up my editing!! Forums are a blast from the past! Feels so odd now, but I used to live on forums in the 2000's. I am preparing my ass to be chewed out bc this crap I'm doing now is bad.

thanks Brian! I'll do this in the next few days and follow up!

The hardware installation is the easy part. It’s the cloning of the existing drive is the hard part. This is a normal procedure and isn’t out of the ordinary these days. For peace of mind, backup anything important that is on your main drive this weekend. Stuff you can’t live without. That said, if everything goes smoothly as I’m predicting, you will have nothing to worry about.

Well, go ahead and do the raw processing (I assume the sky should be white?), then crop and correct the perspective if needed, then show me.

I'd say it'll work fine!

Me too, but my prints have been awesome.

Boo-Yah!!

OMG!!! I just had to share...my computer has already shipped!!! It wasn't supposed to arrive until 20 January. Tomorrow is my birthday, so I guess happy birthday to me, it will be here the day after. So glad I had you walk me through this adventure. I know what I'll be doing, uninstalling that stupid McAffee that they force you to buy.

I must say this is a look that I have wanted to use somewhat because of my photography involves landscapes -- I can see where it might be tempting to overuse the effect. Thank you for this section.

What's changing is the transparency along the way. Each of these little tabs are either 0% (meaning completely transparent) or slightly higher (meaning partially visible).

Yes, this is an uncommon one, because it's not the colour that's changing. You can see it's an entirely white layer. There are only two little tabs at the bottom, from white to white:

All the "Cloud" really is.... someone else's Server / Computer. That's it. No magic, no Voodoo, or Mystery, just great a Marketing Term. Dropbox is a Cloud Service. OneDrive is a Cloud Service. BackBlaze is a Cloud Service. Every single one of these that I have mentioned is just a Server Farm somewhere that your files reside in under your account. The difference between them is HOW they backup your files. OneDrive and Dropbox Act like a Thumbdrive more than a EHD. You copy files over to them, or directly store stuff on them, but you typically aren't doing any real-live work from them. Stuff like that is done on a local HD, whether it's internal or external. BackBlaze and the like are more like SyncToy or another backup program, like Veritas BackupExec. (We won't get into this one, it's really meant for Servers.) Basically BackBlaze backup your whole system if you tell it to, or automatically backup drives that you specify. They are meant to be used if something really bad happens to your computer and you need to restore files. They aren't meant to be used in a "Live" environment.

Thanks so much for your help. It's great to have a resource as wonderful as you available.

I won't be using this computer to work from home. I have one that they provided me. I want to keep anything work related off of my personal computer.

Apple will blame anything that isn’t installed by Apple. They will blame the extra 3rd party RAM that you installed as the reason that you mouse batteries died. Seriously. CleanMyMac is available on the App Store I believe, but I will need to check this. Now the program called MacKeeper, THAT PROGRAM IS EVIL. Don’t ever install MacKeeper. Everything that CleanMyMac does you can do by hand yourself. Especially if you leave it at the defaults. It’s just easier and safer to use CMM.

Got them from my family for Christmas - I didn't even tell them that's what I wanted! Thanks again for the suggestion and hope your Christmas was good:)

That's great, well done.

Ooh- that’s a nice looking set. Thanks For the link And happy holidays!

Oh, one other thing I'd like to add... Take those reviews with a "Grain of Salt." You are editing photos and chances are, your screen will be kept on the dim side in order to match your prints. So you won't have to deal with the "Blooming" and that sort of thing, because you won't be pushing your monitor to be so bright like in those photos.

From what I have read, the -D and the -DX are exactly the same thing. Both have a HDMI port and a DP port. The only difference is which cable comes in the box. The difference in price on Amazon right now is $40. The price on the Dell page is much more. I'm going to pull the trigger. My current systems both have HDMI outputs. I have a bunch of HDMI cables that I bought from Monoprice or Amazon Basics. Thank you for the help.

Don't forget, 85mm gives you more compression, which tends to make people's faces look more natural. That's why 85mm and 105mm are your typical "Portrait" focal lengths. Longer focal lengths do this; it's just not the magnifying affect you get with just cropping in, the "look" of the photo is also different. For your situation, yeah...a 24mm is your target. 28mm is your typical Smartphone wide angle, so keep that in mind. It sounds like a 24mm, 50mm and 70-200 will work just fine for how you shoot.

If you have access to a printer, I want you to print out a white balance sheet. Here are instructions on how to do it. After you create one, take a few photos of it. I want to see how the white looks. Post the results here.

There are lots of ways, of course. Here's a pretty easy one ... Add a blank layer, then use the eyedropper tool to sample some of the yellower skin just under the eye. Add a Solid Color layer of that colour, and change its blend mode to "Screen" (which will immediately make the whole photo quite light). Invert the mask to hide that, then use a very low opacity white brush (eg 3%) to gently paint into those spots.