Category: Computing

I had noticed that I had a lot of old applications on my laptop that I no longer used including a couple of versions of Photoshop and Lightroom.

So I ran a couple of backups, then formatted my internal SSD and booted from the OS X install disk I had created.

With Adobe Creative Cloud and Apples iCloud rebuilding and getting your computer back up and running after a clean build is getting easier and easier.

Grab any digital SLR, power it on and your instantly ready to shoot.

With mirrorless that is not always the case.  Recently I saw an interesting video on Youtube looking at startup times for the Leica M 240 series.

Its often said format in camera, and the video demonstrated that a card formatted in camera compared to a memory card formatted on a computer made quite a difference to start up time.  So first rule format in camera.  If you have to format on the computer, download SD Formatter which will do it correctly.

So above is the original image which I produced the two prints from.

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Its virtually impossible to see the differences of software correction at this size and even on the two prints it was hard to spot.  The only difference immediately obvious is a slight composition change caused by the corrected verticals. 

 It’s in the corners that you can see the most difference. The noise and software correction has lowered the resolution making them look a touch softer. 

I made two A4 prints and I invited a few people to choose which they preferred. 

The score was four to one with one undecided.  The majority all preferred the uncorrected print. For myself I also preferred the uncorrected print. This test is a little unfair as in reality I would usually post process an image in between these two extremes but it has given me much to think about. 

I also recommend that you occasionally print some of your work. We get too fixated on our images on the screen, wanting noise free perfection and viewing the images at 100%, 200% or even 400%.

It’s often only when you get a print in your hand you realize how good your photograph really is. 

I like cameras that produce real RAW files, just the data please – thats what I want from my camera.  Admittedly its getting harder as more and more companies include adjustments into their RAW files.

My Leica M8 and the latest Leica M (Type 240) allow adjustments but when you import the images into a product like Adobe Lightroom all these types of adjustment like lens adjustment, noise adjustment etc are all optional and are off by default.  This means you can customise as you want.

You may question why you may not want these adjustments, well any of these adjustments will reduce resolution and can cause smearing, especially at the edges.

With Leica M glass, you can get issues with the edges, these old designs work well with film but digital likes the light-rays appears perpendicular to the sensor.  A little adjustment is sometimes necessary but its nice with the Leica M cameras to have the choice.

Interestingly testing has shown that the Leica SL does apply a little correction to M glass that cannot be turned off.  This is a same as the design team for the Leica M have really shown how it should be done.

In case your interested the above image has all adjustments including noise switched off.  It was taken with an old CCD Leica M8 at 640 ISO and a slow lens set to f/5.6 to give a bit of depth of field.  This has resulted in a noisy image and one which resulted in a shutter speed of only 1/8 second.

Once of the joys of small mirrorless cameras is that with no large flapping mirrors you can shoot with quite slow shutter speeds, though 1/8 of a second and no image stabilisation is pushing it.

We used to have serial, parallel, and of course keyboard and then mouse ports.  Lets not forget Video and of course SCSI for high bandwidth.

Since then computers have gradually improved with display port, HDMI, USB 1, 2, oh and firewire 1, and 2.

It seems a never-ending race.  Different parties pushing different standards and every few years you have to buy new devices etc.

Apple for a long time have been at the forefront of this race.  Firewire which they created with Sony never got widespread adoption but has been much better then USB 1 or 2, and lets not get started with the abomination that is the USB 3, its a horrid connector with decent bandwidth.

Thunderbolt which Apple developed and handed over to Intel to push is now leading the standard to unify all these different connectors.  It can carry power, video, do USB 3 and backwards.  It has the same connector as USB-C and so finally we may get one connector and cable that can do everything. The only problem is now waiting for the chipsets and computers to support all of this.

When they arrive its likely we will see more computers like the new Apple MacBook with the USB-C connect that we can use for anything we want.  Roll on the future.

 

Tuesday saw me shoot a few on location corporate portraits. 

I shot jpg & RAW (NEF) using a Nikon D800 with the jpg’s going to SD card the RAW to CF card. 

While still on site I uploaded the jpg’s to my iPad Pro 9.7 and into Adobe Lightroom. 

I then gave them a quick rating. 

Once home, I imported the RAW’s into the Desktop version and had the import process drop them into a collection and sync with Creative Cloud.   Once imported and backed up I left the desktop to render full sized images and went to bed. 

While in bed I grabbed the iPad and sync’ed the ratings between the jpg’s and RAW files. 

I then chose my selects and picks dropped then to separate collections and set the white balance on them all. 

Tomorrow night I hit my desktop and edit my picks that will be sat there waiting for me. 

Now if only Adobe would let me set meta data on the iPad.