Category: Computing

General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography

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New Apple iMac’s and a ‘New’ (old) Colour Space

iMacsThis week Apple released new iMac’s, for people wanting a desktop computer they are very nice, though the bottom spec model is a little pricey, the high end models are well worth the money.

The new displays, 4K for the smaller model and 5K for the larger represent a significant improvement in display technology.

They also introduce for many what will be a new colour space.  Most monitors are sRGB, and while fine for most work, do not really cut the mustard for colour critical work for desktop publishing, photography and film.

For myself I use a high end NEC Reference Monitor that can output Adobe RGB, a far bigger colour space and about as good as you can get currently.

The new Mac’s though do not use sRGB or Adobe RGB but a colour space called DCI-P3, which while as big as Adobe RGB is shifted more into the Red’s and the greens are different.  Its a colour spaced by and for the movie industry and I can imaging lots of studio’s placing there orders immediately for these new computers that support this colour space natively.

For photographers then the new iMac’s are better then what we had before but we do need to consider we are not getting Adobe RGB.  If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription then you will find Photoshop supports DCI-P3 (labeled SMPTE) and it might be worthwhile if your getting one of these Mac’s to adopt DCI-P as your standard working space.

smpte

Personally I would recommend doing all your work in ProPhotoRGB, while your display cannot show it this has more colours then either Adobe RGB or DCI-P3)

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Rolling Back to Lightroom v2015.1.1

Download Lightroom

 

Tonight I got fed up of waiting for Adobe to fix Lightroom so downgraded my Laptop to Adobe Lightroom v2015.1.1.  You can download it from here: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/lightroom-downloads.html?PID=7252638

Lightroom

Its a simple task, uninstall the old version, download the main Lightroom v2015 then the update you want.  I then went though my Orkney images and completed my Panoramic’s light this one below:

StornowayI’ll be leaving this version on my Laptop now until Adobe issue a fix and I have tested it on my main machine, at least now I can finish up editing my Orkney photographs.

 

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Adobe Issues – Lightroom v2015.2.1

Orkney Sea ScapeThe shot above was take with my Leica while on board ship, as I came back to Scotland from the Orkney Islands.

Its a stitch from several images which I put together with Adobe Lightroom v2015.1, quite a nice photograph I hope you agree and a very good stitch done automatically via Lightroom.

I still have a number of photographs still to process from my Orkney trip including a number of panorama’s that still need stitching together and some HDR’s that need putting together.

These personal photographs have been on hold for the last few weeks while I finish up my final Wedding Photographs for customers.

But now its back to my own work.  Now I blogged early that Lightroom 2015.2 had been released and it had some issues.  Every time I tried to exit the program it would hang.  The fix I posted early was a work round that stopped that at least.  Well I also found another issue, you cannot create Pano’s from Leica DNG files, I do not if all RAW files are affected or if its just a DNG issue.

Well last night Adobe issued a fix, Lightroom 2015.2.1.  So I tested and the crashing is still there, in fact it crashed the first time I loaded it and the Pano function is still broken.

Now I had to produce some prints this week for a commercial shoot I had done earlier in the year, now I wanted to test printing from Lightroom on Apple’s latest OS, so as I have already upgraded my laptop, I created a new Lightroom catalogue containing these shots and fired up my laptop to print off the images.  Now it all worked fine, in fact not one crash, but I had not done the Adobe workaround on my laptop.

So I checked out a few forums and a number of people mentioned that if they created a new library referencing all there old photographs the new Library did not crash, so last night I gave it a try.  I created a whole new library referencing my existing photographs and guess what, no crash.

So Adobe; please, please , Please, just now fix the pano issue so I can finish up my Orkney Photographs.

 

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Adobe Lightroom 2015.2 Known issues

I have only upgraded my Laptop to Apple’s latest OS but have upgraded both my laptop and desktop to the latest Adobe Lightroom 2015.2, usually point releases have few issues.

I had a few prints to run off for a client yesterday and it gave me the perfect opportunity to test Lightroom 2015.2, the new Mac OS and my Epson Printer, a 3880.  No issues at all.

One issue I do have is on my main machine since upgrading Lightroom but running the old Mac OS.

I cannot seem to close Lightroom, it hangs.

A quick search on the web found the following article from Adobe Support.  Unticking the “Show Add Photos’ seems to have fixed it for me.

Screen Shot 2015-10-07 at 08.43.21

 

  • Tethering with Nikon & Leica cameras

Tethering Nikon & Leica cameras using Lightroom CC 2015/Lightroom 6 is not currently supported on El Capitan.

We recommend customers who rely on Lightroom for tethering Nikon and Leica cameras not upgrade to El Capitan at this time.

Our engineering team is working with our partners to correct this issue and provide compatibility in the future.

 Some customers are reporting crashes with Lightroom CC 2015.2/Lightroom 6.2

  • If you are experiencing crashing, please try the following:
  • Go to Lightroom > Preferences.
  • Click on the General tab
  • Uncheck “Show ‘Add Photos’ Screen”Restart Lightroom

Our engineering team is actively investigating this issue

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OS X 10.11.0 El Capitan

OS X 10.11This weekend I updated my seven year old MacBook Pro to OS X 10.11.0 El Capitan.

The issue found initially was that Dropbox would not work, I visited their website and downloaded the latest client and after that things were fine.

So far apart from the usual built in apps, like Safari and Mail I have only tested Adobe Lightroom 2015.1.1.  So far no issues.  I still have lots of things to test but once I have proved all my key apps and also the screen calibrater, Wacom tablet and Epson printer and scanner work, i’ll risk updating my main work machine the MacPro once OS X 10.11.1 is released.

 

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Apple Releases OS X 10.11

Apple released the latest version of OS X its called El Capitan an odd name but there are making some bold claims for this minor OS update. 

The big thing for graphic users is Metal a new API layer to access the graphics card. Apple claim 40-60% speed improvement and Adobe after testing an optimised version of Photoshop are backing that claim. 

I will not be risking my work machine until OS 10.11.1 is released but I may upgrade my laptop this weekend and test all my apps. 

I cannot risk breaking printing, screen calibrating software and my Wacom tablet. So testing on another machine or cloning your hard drive and testing on a spare is always a good idea. 

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Apple Release iOS9.0.1

imagesApple released iOS 9.0.1 yesterday and I see it should have fixed the issue that prevented me from upgrading my iPhone 5.  I’ll be waiting until the weekend before trying and i’ll be having a good read on the forums to see what issues people are having.

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Wifi Calling

If like me you live in a remote village then mobile phone coverage is limited.  The last few versions of the iPhone have supported WiFi calling but its a feature that few carriers seem to want to implement for their customers.

Orange or as its now known EE turned it on earlier this year but only for customers who bought there phones from them.

I switched to Vodafone last year as its the only network I could get any cover in my village but even then its touch and go.  Well they have now announced wifi calling starting this month so I wait for a carrier update but I am not too hopefull as there website says its going to be for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus only.  Lets hope that’s not true.

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Upgrading my Apple AirPort Extreme 

I purchased a new Apple AirPort Extreme this week. The idea is to move the old one into the end room recently decorated, which together with the two AirPort Expresses, covering my office and master bedroom would cover the whole house. 

As I often am with Apple I was very surprised at the ease at which things went. 

I plugged in and the AirPort Utility on the Mac discovered the new device and gave me three options. 

  • Migrate setting from Existing AirPort Extreme and replace
  • Add to existing network
  • Setup as a new network

I took the first option and after a few minutes it prompted me to transfer the cables from the external harddisk and BT router from the old AirPort to the new. This I did and after a few minutes everything was back up and running on the new device. 

I then ran the wizard and added the old Airport in to the existing network as a wireless extender. Once setup I unplugged the old AirPort and plugged it into the room. 

Easy. 

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On line Storage – in the Cloud

Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google, Adobe Creative cloud and of course Apple’s iCloud; not to mention all the other third party smaller solutions.

Currently I have 2.8 Gb of free dropbox, 5 GB free iCloud and 20 GB of Creative Cloud, but none of this is good enough for hosting current projects and keeping my five star images safe on line.

I have started to look again at online solutions as last week I had two disk fails, one hosting a current Wedding photographs I was editing and another hosting my live Master Lightroom library.

Now lucky I lost nothing, I always try and keep at least three backups at home and one off site but I was worried for a while.

Maintaining off site backups is a pain and there generally about a month out of date so I am sure you can see why I have started to look at online ‘cloud’ backups again.

Now usually these things are quite straight forward, if your a Microsoft user and/or MS Office users Microsoft’s OneDrive is the one to go for.  Google is fine if you trust them with your images but they are out to make money out of your by targeted advertising, possibly not for storing a clients images on.

As an Apple user then you may think I would suggest that, well up to this week that would have been a no, they were too expensive but with this weeks price drop they are now only a couple of pounds a year dearer then Dropbox with the new iDriveApp for the iPhone it may become an option but currently for me Dropbox is at the top of my list.