Family, Photography and other misc news
General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography
Its Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference this week. While hardware was not featured we did see the next update to iOS and to OS X.
Nothing spectacular but the multitasking updates for iOS for the latest iPads and the graphics and windowing improvements to OS X are nice additions. If the performance updates for Adobe are real then a new Mac and the new OS may make things really fly!
Got the chance to look at the new 12 inch MacBook from Apple. Its a fantastic little laptop, not suitable for real power work, but if all you need is Office apps, email and internet its a fantastic little road warriors laptop.
For me, I have it down to either a new 15 inch MacBook Pro or the desktop MacPro if I can get one from the refurb store at a good discount.
There are three pieces of advice I can give you for scanning.
So what do I mean by this.
Well scanning is time consuming so do the proceedure once at the highest native resolution of your scanner.
Clean your scanner plate with a soft cleaning cloth then clean your slides/film. Once mounted in the frame clean again. Don’t be surprised that after the scan you made need to clean again and rescan.
Maximise the quality of the scan. Your not after something that looks fantastic that’s your usual editing softwares job. You are after a flat low contrast file which you can work with in a flexible way.
As you can see from the histogram this image is finishing at 232 not 255 so adjust the sliders to maximise the scan over the images histogram range. I also give the mid tones a slight boost and also turn off sharpening and noise reduction. Our third party tools offer far better quality and options then what comes with the scanner software.
I quickly flick through all my images in the slide/film holder setting the histogram appropriate for each image.
I then select batch scan; I scan to a folder which I set as a watch folder in Adobe Lightroom, once each image is scanned it gets auto imported into Lightroom with my default copyright and develop settings preset I have created for this.
Apple today did a quiet update of the rest of the MacBook Pro and iMac range. For the most part it was a minor processor speed bump but for the new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, it did get a Force Touch trackpad and new PCIe-based flash storage that Apple says is 2.5 times faster.
Speed testing has shown it can get throughput up to 2GB/s. This is serious speed and puts the MacBook Pro well above other laptops.
One of the things I was pleased to see about my new scanner was that it included a copy of Silverfast Scanning software.
As usual I downloaded and installed the Epson drivers then downloaded the Silverfast software and installed it. It was at this point I hit a problem.
When I entered the license key it would not accept it. You had to have installed from the CD. So what if you have a very modern computer. My Mac is seven years old and has a CD drive, but my wife has a modern Mac with no drive. My work laptop is a new Lenovo machine which like a lot of current machines also has no CD drive.
Well Epson did include a note with a URL to go to if you have a machine with no CD drive, unfortunately the URL did not work. After a little digging I found that if I registered the serial code listed on the CD of the Silverfast software I could then request a CD less upgrade code. This I did which then meant I could register the software and start using it.
In this day and age where people are moving away from physical media they really need to make this easier.
Over the last few year computer and computer accessory companies have been getting better. Clearer instructions and simpler more straight forward software.
Epson printers have for many years been excellent products but with poor instructions. Of late and certainly with my Epson 3880 they were much better but it seems the scanner department still have some way to come.
Lots of bits of paper but no real single simple setup guide.
I was very pleased to see as well as the Epson software a copy of Silverfast and iOne profile targets.
As is usual for me I ignored CD’s and downloaded the latest versions from the web. This led to other issues which I’ll detail later in the week.
After rebooting my Mac recently I have been getting an iCloud login prompt pop up. It would not accept my credentials so I just had to cancel it.
All the iCloud functionality still worked. Eventually I got fed up with it and had a quick search on the net to see if any one else had the issue and if there was a fix.
Well it turns out quite a number of people had the issue but the fix was very simple. Just go into your iCloud settings, logout then login back in. Problem solved.
Collections in Lightroom are very useful ways of collating photographs together, I have various studio shoots, Black & White collections and family holidays all as various collections.
One of the very useful options is Smart Collections. You can define a rule, e.g. a studio shoot on a set date and have all flagged photographs automatically appear in a Smart Collection.
I was using this the other day to help me sort a studio shoot and wanted to potentially fine tune the sorting the following day if I had a few spare moments. I knew I would not have my laptop with me but I would have my iPad, so I looked for the sync option. Imagine my surprise when it was not there.
It turns out you cannot sync smart collections only standard collections, so I had to create another collection and copy the contents of my smart collection over to the standard collection to get them to sync across to the iPad using Lightroom Mobile.
The problem now is that tomorrow night when I flag up some more photographs to make final selections from, while they will automatically appear in my Smart Collection they will not appear in the sync’ed collection.
Come on Adobe, you have added some great new features in Lightroom CC, please add the ability to sync Smart Collections.
On Tuesday night as I mentioned yesterday, I installed Adobe Lightroom CC.
Unfortunately I could not get it to launch on one of my computers. A quick reboot, uninstall and re-install. I even tried a permission repair on the boot drive.
Then I remembered the last time I had an issue with an Adobe CC app. Log out of Adobe Creative Cloud and the log back in. Voila it now works.
At first it was rare for memory cards to be bigger then 4 GB. In fact my Leica says that cards bigger then 4 GB will not work. I now have a selection of cameras and digital backs from about 2006 to today. With cameras like the Nikon D800 at 36 MP a 32 or 64 GB card is essential.
So recently I decided to buy some new cards, and went for some 64 GB CF and 64 GB SD cards, but what would they work in?
Well I was quite surprised. Since V2.0 firmware I knew my Leica would word with the new SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) as I already had some of the new 16 GB SDHC cards, but what about SDXC (Secure Digital eXtended Capacity).
Well the old Leica M8 with the latest firmware 2.024 worked fine with the 64 GB SDXC cards. The 64 GB Compact Flash cards and SDXC both worked fine in the Nikon D800, and the CF cards worked fine in my digital back. So far so good, everything was working fine, but then I tried my Nikon D200’s, these did not recognise the 64 GB CF cards, which surprised me. I have a look to see if there is a newer firmware update for them.