Its nice to see more and more of the mirrorless camera system makers making improvements via software updates.
Both Fuji, and Olympus have made real functionality improvements via software updates. Lets hope it continues.
Photoshop is 25
Its now 25 years since Thomas Knoll came up with the concept of Photoshop, the prepress tool that also became essential for Photographers, that was until Thomas and the team came up with Lightroom.
Well done guys.
Apple Pay and Starbucks
It does seem like support for Apple pay is growing. Its going to be interesting to see if it takes off in the UK.
Whilst I general try to frequent independent coffee shops, Lincoln’s Coffee Aroma and Norwich’s The Window being two of my favourites if you need a coffee then the big chains like Costa, Nero and Starbucks are always nearby, and if your a Starbucks iOS app user in the USA you can now use ApplePay with the Starbucks app.
Apple Updates
The last few weeks has seen a number of bugs and security issues announced by security investigators for Windows, Unix and OS X (which is Unix but people forget because of the pretty easy to use interface).
Last week one of the three bugs was patched and today saw the release of 10.10.2 which fixes the other two. If you have a Mac with the latest OS please update now.
Windows fixes will be coming soon, its just a shame that the security investigators released their findings to the world before all machines could be patched.
iOS also had an update today so its been a busy day, backing up all my machines, and updating them.
Terry White’s 30 Creative Cloud Tutorials in 30 Days
Many photographers use Adobe Lightroom and/or Adobe Photoshop in their workflow. If you do its highly likely then you subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud.
If you do then I suggest you check out Terry White’s Tech Blog at the moment as he is publishing 30 tutorials in 30 days on various techniques on many of the Creative Cloud products.
Check it out here, you may learn something new.
So what did you get for Christmas
Terry White apart from being a Photoshop God and a good photographer is always posting about interesting gadgets he has found but this year he really topped himself. How cool is this. How often like me do you want to charge the iPhone or iPad in the kitchen, and now you have this a kitchen roll stand with built in charging!
Building PC’s
Back in the good old days of 386 and 486 processors, I got into building my own PC’s. This continued up to the point where I got my first Mac and since then I have always had Mac’s.
I keep thinking about a home media server and also a friend recently has been asking me about building a server to run some virtual machines on for training. So with this in mind I spend a few hours recently looking a component prices, also to compare I looked at the PC World prices.
Unless your after something specific, looking at prices today its very difficult to justify building your own machines, and also the more I looked the more tempted I was with the thought of buying an old refurbished MacMini.
Screen Differences
Chris and myself both posted some images from our weekend wildlife shoot. It was interesting that while most of our shots looked fine on our own colour calibrated monitors, the office laptop made my photographs look over exposed and Chris’s photographs underexposed. Now while maybe neither of is was spot on with our exposures, they certainly were nothing like as bad as they looked on these office laptops.
The difference being of course that both myself and Chris operate colour calibrated and profiled work flows and that includes profiling our screens.
The office laptops are not and it really shows. It also goes to show how ridiculous it is to judge cameras from low quality jpegs posted on the internet. If a camera is tempting you, try it in your hand and take a memory card to shoot a few test shots to process in your own work flow and see how they hold up.
It also highlights how you should also not judge exposure from the LCD on the back of the camera, they are certainly not profiled and what looks good is generally not the best for actual image quality.
Printer Paper Choices- new Baryta Papers
For fine art printing paper is a very personal choice. For outstanding image quality Ilford Gallery Silk and Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique have been the top choices, but I feel as do many that a fine art print is more then just the image, it’s a physical tactile feeling as well. The feel and weight of the paper plays a large part.
Because of this I do like some of the Baryta style papers and was pleased to see Hahnemuhle have released two more. I look forward to testing them.
Hahnemuhle’s Photo Silk Baryta (HPSB) 310 gsm & MOAB Juniper Baryta Rag (MJBR) 305 gsm; read a review here at Luminous Landscape.
Smart Collection Tips by RC
Generally I don’t use many Smart Collections in Adobe Lightroom. I do have a habit of flagging a few favourite images with a particular colour flag, and I have a Smart Collection to collate them together, and of course one for my five star images.
Most of my collections are project based or collections of published work or projects.
Reading the Lightroom Killer Tips website the other day, there was a great tip about creating a collection to hold your Smart Previews which I thought was a excellent idea.
It makes it far easier to manage your Smart Previous and get rid of the ones I no longer I need.
http://lightroomkillertips.com/5-ways-use-lightroom-smart-collections/