Category: Computing

I did a quick shoot last week to test the D800 in studio conditions, afterwards back in the office, I did not have time for any editing so I quickly imported them to Lightroom, ran through my normal backup routine then added the photographs into a Collection to sync up to the Cloud.

The intention was when I had a free moment or two, to grab the iPhone or iPad and using Lightroom Mobile app to do some initial editing.

The problem was it never seemed to sync and the photographs never appeared on either of my devices.  Checking my settings I noticed that it said the app was unlicensed.  No matter what I tried I could not get it to sync and it would not even let me log out.  In the end I deleted the app from the iPhone and re-installed; once I logged in it burst into life and proceeded work.

By default when in the normal catalogue view within Lightroom the two main buttons at the bottom offer import photographs or export photographs.

But what about importing and exporting catalogues; well it is in the menu system but a faster way to get to it, is to just press the option key.

With Lightroom, you often get a different set of options on the buttons when you press the option key, give it a try.

PS if your a Windows user try the Alt key.

 

If your an Apple user you are most likely already aware that the latest bug fix for iOS 8 was released today v8.1.1, not played with it much yet but lets hope things are getting more stable.  I have had a few app crashes but nothing too bad.  Certainly not like iOS 2.0 which was in my opinion unusable.

Of more notable concern for camera users, at least for us Leica users was updated firmware for the Leica M series.  Not having the latest M I checked the site anyway expecting not to see anything for me but was surprised to see Leica have released updates for all the digital M series cameras including the original digital Leica M8.

Its great to see such support for a camera that was released back in 2006 I think and my M8.2 was 2008.

Certainly from recent history only Fuji seem to be giving there customers such good support.

Chris has also recently blogged about firmware updates for his OM D here.  I was glad to see that the Leica updates are applied the same way as my Nikon updates, just copy the firmware update to an SD card and update from Camera.

Like Chris I prefer this method of update.  I have not updated a recent Sony, but when I had to update the Alpha A55 I had to use the computer, see here for details.

Click on the link below for the update download and instructions.

Last Thursday we had another press conference from Apple, this time it was the iPad announcements, we also had a Mac update.

My old 2008 Macbook is getting a little slow now for Photoshop and while ok for light photography use its getting a bit difficult for more advanced work.

Since moving house last year and getting my new office, I am starting to think a nice desktop would be nice rather then a laptop.

With that in mind I have been looking at the Mac Mini’s and the iMac’s.

While the Mac Mini is a good little machine, and I may get one to use as a home server, the graphic limitations would mean it would not last as long as a new MacBook Pro or high end iMac

At the other end of the spectrum is the new MacPro, this for high end graphics and video work is excellent, but for editing still images is overkill.

So that leaves the iMac.  The smaller model is possibly better for my desk, I already have a large NEC Spectraview Reference monitor but it is not user upgradable, thus I would have to buy it maxed out.  The larger 27 inch model is user upgradable for RAM so I could buy the 8 GB version now and upgrade to 32 GB in a few years.

The current models have yet to be upgraded only the new 5K iMac has the new chipset so if I wanted one now that would have to be the one.

People always say never buy a first gen Apple product, now there is some true to that in the second gens are better, but the next version is always better and I have yet to have an issue with a first gen Apple product so that would not put me off.

While on holiday in Ireland I only had the iPad available to me as my main computing device.

Each day I backed up my photographs and imported them into PhotoSmith so I could add metadata to them.

After my visit to National Trust Village of Kearney which was my first photographic trip of the holiday I backed up to the iPad as usual and then tried to import them into PhotoSmith, but all I got was blank images.  I then tried my favourite iPad RAW processor,  PhotoRaw.  This had the same problem.

So I put the memory card somewhere safe and put in a fresh formatted one.  For the rest of the holiday things were fine, so I suspected a faulty memory card.  Once I got home I imported and synched everything up to my master Lightroom catalogue.  My laptop had no trouble reading the first memory card.

So what was the issue, well it turns out there is a bug in iOS8 at the moment, which causes issues if you shoot RAW+JPG.  It turns out by coincidence that the first days shoot was which the camera set to RAW+JPG, but the following days shooting was RAW only thus I did not have the problem.

Hopefully iOS8.1 will fix this issue.

With the Ireland trip being for pleasure I can forgo my normal strict photography practice and play around with the photographs a lot more.  After importing them into Lightroom on Monday I looked at the shots that I had specifically intending to work on in Photoshop.

I took photographs to post process using three techniques while away:

• Focus Bracketing
• Panoramic
• HDR

The techniques involved are broadly similar so I thought today I would show you one of the panoramic shots I took.

Now today many cameras do in-camera panoramic’s but these leave you with a jpeg file, what I like is starting with raw files.  To do a really good job you can get a pano head for your tripod but these are all shot handheld.

As you can see I took six shots with a good deal of overlap, all as RAW.  The final shot was just a marker so I new where the set ended.  Its just a shot of the palm of my hand at the maximum shutter speed to make a dark frame.

After a very basic edit in Lightroom all six images were opened as layers in Photoshop using the Lightroom Merge to Panoramic in Photoshop command.  This created image at the very top.

 

I have just spent the week in Ireland and Scotland on a photography trip.  I was travelling light, with just the Leica M and iPad.

One of things I often like to do is log the GPS co-ordinates into my metadata.  Now many compacts now have built in GPS but for more advance systems this is either missing or requires an add on.  Nikon and Canon do a plugin to the hot shoe, the Leica T for instance has a GPS built into the external EVF.  One of the handgrips available for the Leica M 240 has GPS built in.

There are other ways to get the data in and both myself and Chris Bennett use GPS4Cam a simple little iPhone utility.

While shooting in Ireland, I did a little testing with the camera set up in different ways, so sometimes I shot RAW+JPG and other times just RAW.  The camera is faster and more responsive just shooting RAW but I also often like to have a JPG in Black & White to evaluate along side the RAW.

While sorting out the images back home I discovered that the GPS4Cam desktop client was unable to read the Leica RAW files, now these are standard DNG’s not proprietary.  It has in the past had no trouble at all with Nikon proprietary NEF RAW files so I did not expect this.

The solution was quick and easy, just open up the Q code image in Photoshop via CameraRaw and save as a jpeg, then it had no issues.

 

I have my photographs all in a single master Lightroom catalog not counting my yearly backup catalogues, and for me that works well.

My main computer is also my laptop and it’s getting on a bit now so I have started to think about either replacing it or supplementing it with a new desktop.

I’ll need to keep the laptop and would also like to use Lightroom on it too.

This brings up the issue of operating with two Lightroom catalogues and keeping work in sync.

After the Collingham show I decided to give a two catalogue two computer workflow ago.

I borrowed Caroline’s MacBookPro, logged in and created a blank Lightroom catalog, I then dragged and dropped my Lightroom settings folder into the Catalog folder from Dropbox where a script I have keeps it all in sync.

This then quickly and easily gave me a working environment just like my machine.

Now for the easy part, import the Collingham pictures and get editing.  I used my presets for an initial edit and gave them a quick rank, then selected my picks with the flag option.

Now to get them onto my main computer.

I exported all the photographs as a fresh catalog so as to preserve the original to the desktop folder on the laptop included raw files.

If I do adopt a two machine strategy I’ll create a shared area on the main desktop computer to put the files onto but for this test I just used AirDrop and dragged and dropped the exported folder to my main machine.

Now time to start work on my main machine.

First job was to launch Lightroom and import the catalogue and files, I now had everything up to date and in the master catalogue.  I then did a little editing on a couple of the picks.

Later that evening I picked up Caroline’s laptop and launched my Lightroom with the small catalogue just containing the Collingham pictures and reviewed them again.  I found a couple more picks and did a quick edit on them.

Now this was the interesting bit.  I had two Lightroom catalogues on two different computers, both with different edits.  Could Lightroom cope.

Once again I exported the Lightroom catalogue but this time only exported the database not any files, they were already on my main machine and if any metadata updates in the case of jpegs or dng’s had taken place the overwrite could loose me data (Note I sometimes shoot RAW + JPG but never just JPG).

Again I transferred the database over using airdrop, a very useful and fast way of transferring documents on a adhoc nature if your on the same local network.

Now for the import on my master catalogue, first job, backup my master catalogue, just in case it went horribly wrong.  Then for the import, how would it handle duplicate entries?

Well it turns out very well, as you can see above there is a tick box to preserve the duplicated files as a virtual copy.  Also my fear of overwriting the files and not exporting the actual files is not an issue as the database can also be imported at this point with the option to bring in Metadata and develop settings only and not the original files if you so wish.