Michael Andrew's Lollipops

Last week I was looking for some Rebel XSi tutorials online and came across MichaeltheMentor (aka photographer Michael Andrew) on youtube. Looks like he has a tutorial dvd for sale, but I will probably just stick to reading my manual for the time being.

I haven't fully explored how many different products he has for sale, but the link on his site "Pop Your Colors!" caught my attention, because I'm interested in learning how to take pictures with clear, crisp, bright colors. You know how annoying it is to look at your digital image and it seems as if a film of grey is hanging over it. UGH. So I am interested in figuring out how to prevent or cure that.

He's selling a Photoshop tool called Lollipops that works on the "cure" side of things. You should watch the video that demonstrates how to use the tool. It's really interesting; I'm certain that you could acheive the same results without buying Lollipops, but the time savings that it offers is quite enticing.

On the other hand, that still doesn't answer how to prevent that grey film while actually shooting the picture. Lollipops could definitely be used as a fix for shoddy images (a cheat, I suppose?). But I do totally respect its use in the "Greener Grass" video; it is awesome to be able to take control of that sort of inconvenience (brown grass) that would otherwise take a lot of work to fix.

I also like that future updates are free; as long as you have purchased Lollipops, every update is available for immediate download. Quite generous when you consider the hundreds of dollars needed to upgrade from Adobe CS3 to CS4...

In other news, I have my beautiful baby Rebel XSi and I am slowly but surely learning all of its features. I have some pics from Andy & Co riding bmx but will try to take better ones for my next post.

muah! love ya!