Today's Guest: Michael Sheasby of Lumapix
Today's Host: Damien Allen
September 2007
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Michael Sheasby Transcript Page
Michael Sheasby Expert PageANNOUNCER: Welcome to the VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight with your host, Damien Allen. Today's program is sponsored by morephotos.com the online photo sales solution to professional photographers worldwide.
DAMIEN: Good afternoon and welcome to the VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight. I am your host, Damien Allen. And today via phone we have with us in the Studio with Michael Sheasby, co-founder and CEO of Lumapix. Welcome to the program, Michael.
MICHAEL: Thank you Damien. Thank you for having us.
DAMIEN: Well we understand that Lumapix has got a great, great software available. Why don't you tell us a little bit about it.
MICHAEL: Well we sell a product called Photofusion. It's a composition environment. You can think of it as being like Photoshop, but considerably faster even for expert Photoshop users our tool is a lot faster for a couple of very specific tasks. If you're a pro wedding photographer, you might use it to lay out wedding albums. If you're a scrapbooker you can put scrapbooking albums together. People find that it's just considerably faster for doing those very specialized types of tasks.
DAMIEN: Does this work on all platforms? Are you able to use it say on an IMac or on a PC?
MICHAEL: Not at this time. We have a lot of discussion about whether we should be supporting the Mac or not. Photographers do ask for it, but we found the ethic question is the following: ok, you're a Mac user do you have access to a pc? And it's been quite surprising, yes the Mac has been gaining ground, but as far as far as we can tell, it only for the 15 - 20% of photographers are fewer Mac only sorts of people. So today we haven't had to worry about it and it's pc only.
DAMIEN: Now, you mentioned that this comparable to Photoshop. What are the major differences between Photofusion and Photoshop?
MICHAEL: The best way to put it is that Photoshop touches pixels, and we deal with objects. So we sort of put together a recipe of how a composition fits together that refers to images on discs; whereas, Photoshop, you know, the more recent versions of it can work with references, but you really do think of it as a retouching tool. Photoshop is a cloning, pixel burning tool; whereas, we sort of throw things together and then at the last minute decide how big to render the composition out at. That's what allows our tool to render small for sending to a bride by email or render very large if you're doing even grand format output. I mean, seriously, bust size output that's fine, you just crank up resolution, render it again and you see the results.
DAMIEN: Now you mentioned wedding photographers using this for putting together bridal albums, you almost mentioned scrapbooking, and I know scrapbooking is a huge, huge hobby now and it's a pretty big business, you see scrapbooking stores popping up at little strip malls everywhere. Was this put together for one side or the other, or just happens to benefit both?
MICHAEL: You know, honestly we started off just designing it for people like ourselves. My partner and I are from the high end special effects industry. We just built tools that were used for doing Star Wars and Titanic and the Mask and so on, and we just had this interest in doing photography tools for people with, you know, kids. We didn't know anything about the wedding market. We knew nothing about scrapbooking. It was still sort of in it's infancy when we put the program together, but our users told us, hey do you guys realize that you've cut my production and time for a wedding album down from a week down to 3 hours or have you guys every heard of scrapbooking? No. So people told us, and we listened and responded.
DAMIEN: You're at which version of the program now?
MICHAEL: We're just now releasing version 4.1 and every dot release like .1 there's been dozens of them between version 1.0 and 4 so we've been at it for a while now.
DAMIEN: Are there different levels for Photofusion? If I was say a professional wedding photographer is there a specific version I should purchase as opposed to if I'm an amateur scrapbooker?
MICHAEL: Oh yeah, we spread the product client out so that at the low end if you're a scrapbooker, you're interested more in the dollars that you spend and the amount of time you put into something isn't quite as important, because it gives you, you know, pleasure to work on your art work. We have a product called Photo shoot Photofusion Scrapbook Essentials, $40 US and one of the big things that separates it from the top end version is that it's a one page at a time product, you know, like Photoshop, you work on one page and then you save your work and create another page. But single versus multi page difference is one of the things that separates out the other end of the spectrum for us. The top end product is called Photofusion Extreme and that's designed for a pro photographer where every second counts. If somebody is paying you for your time to do a wedding album, then the ability to throw all of the pages into a single project more like, let's say, Powerpoint then Photoshop, you know, that's useful. You can say pick an image up from page two and drop it on page 15 that's part of the $300 Extreme Package.
DAMIEN: Now, with Photofusion can I do a slide show with that as well, or is it just strictly for putting albums together?
MICHAEL: Just think of it as Photoshop in a sense that sure, you can put together 15 slides and then render them out and show the results. I know that one of users won a national competition for a digital album meaning a series of slides that were produced one after the other in our tool.
DAMIEN: We are speaking with Mr. Michael Sheasby of Lumapix. Lumapix is the software creator of Photofusion 4.1, a compilation software that makes scrapbooking and photo album compilation a breeze. Michael, could you please give us your website and contact information for our listening audience.
MICHAEL: Sure, it's www.lumapix.com. If you've got questions, give us an email biz@lumapix.com or give us a call (877) Lumapix.
DAMIEN: We are in the studio today with Michael Sheasby, co-founder and CEO of Lumapix. We are the VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight. We're going to take a short break for these commercial messages, we'll be right back.
ANNOUNCER: This VTalk Radio Spotlight is sponsored by morephotos.com, the online photo sales solution to professional photographers worldwide.
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ANNOUNCER: We now return you to the VTalk Radio Photographer's Spotlight with your host, Damien Allen.
DAMIEN: Welcome back to VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight. I'm Damien Allen. Again, we are in the studio via telephone with Mr. Michael Sheasby. Michael is the co-founder and CEO of Lumapix. Welcome back to the program, Michael.
MICHAEL: Thank you, Damien.
DAMIEN: So how long has Lumapix been creating this wonderful software for photographers and scrapbookers?
MICHAEL: It's heading on four years now. My partner and I came from a company Soft Image it's best known for doing special effects and game and television software. We worked on the user interface for this package that did high definition video editing, paint compositing, and titling, and our story there is that we just tired of selling Lambourginis, you know, it's a very, very expensive system we worked on; over $100,000, and we just decided we'd rather sell hamburgers. Just inexpensive tools that work fast with the same level of thought went into the user interface with this tool, but it costs several zeros less than what we used to do. So we struck out on our own and here we are.
DAMIEN: We had talked before about users of Photoshop and users of your product and you're saying that the speed of your product is such that you can smoke just about any Photoshop user?
MICHAEL: That could be a fun thing. I mean, I hadn't planned it coming on here, but I'm willing to entertain a challenge if somebody believes that they are ripping fast in Photoshop, then we'll set them up with a test. We'll just take a random album and we'll do a head to head time it and publish the results. I'm actually quite happy to do that.
DAMIEN: That would be something I'd want to get on video. That would be a great poster.
MICHAEL: It would be a lot of fun actually.
DAMIEN: In deed. In the process of compiling all these albums, I would imagine there's a lot of editing and creation that's needed to be done, and I know in many types of editing software, it's destructive once you've made the edit, that piece is gone. What type of editing protective layers do you have with the software?
MICHAEL: Well, everything is a non-destructive decision. If you say, I want to put this picture on page 5 and then you assemble the album and give it to the bride for review, if she says, oh, you know, I don't want to see that picture, get rid of it and swap something else out; in our application you're always working with a recipe which means it's trivial to swap that picture out, but keep the color correction, the cropping, the frame that it's been put within. You can always change your mind, not just on layering, but even reversing cropping, or if you've, I don't know, applied a black and white filter, you can change your mind and bleed back 50% of the color. Nothing is ever destructive. You export to a final image format like jpg or psd until the moment you do so, it's open season. You can make any kind of change you want.
DAMIEN: Will the system also run on the new Windows Vista?
MICHAEL: Oh yeah, it does just beautifully.
DAMIEN: Can this be purchased in stores, or does it have to be ordered directly from Lumapix?
MICHAEL: The best way to do it is certainly coming off the website. We do have a bunch of people, Kodak mentors for example, that tour and sell it to crowds at trade shows and so on. We've got a few retail placements, but honestly just visiting Lumapix.com to just watch videos and if you decide that you like it, it's the easiest way to pick it up.
DAMIEN: Is there a demo version of this available at the website?
MICHAEL: Yep.
DAMIEN: Alrighty. Well, we have been speaking with Michael Sheasby of Lumapix creator of Photofusion version 4.1. We'd like to thank you for joining us today on the program today, Michael.
MICHAEL: My pleasure.
DAMIEN: And before we let you go, could you please give us your website and contact information again please.
MICHAEL: Sure, www.lumapix.com and if you've got questions, (877) Lumapix, 586-2749.
DAMIEN: Thank you very much for joining us today. You have been listening to the VTalk Radio Photographer Spotlight. I am Damien Allen. Have a great afternoon.
ANNOUNCER: You have been listening to the VTalk Radio Spotlight; only on www.vtalkradio.com. Radio for the 21st Century.
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