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?
Dealing with duplicate files on importing another Catalogue
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.
I jumped in with both feet and upgraded both my iPhone 5 and my iPad2. The phone worked great, actually seems slightly faster and there are some great improvements. The iPad2 was a little sluggish but did have a major issue. I could not get iCloud Drive to work which meant I could not update any of my cloud based spreadsheets.
Reboots, turning iCloud off then back on again; login out of iCloud, I tried it all but nothing seemed to work, so tonight I backed up the iPad and did a full system reset, setting it up as a new device, it was much quicker and iCloud drive worked.
I then reset it again and restored from the backup I had took, this time iCloud worked as it should and the sluggishness had gone. Not done much other testing yet as I have been checking out the Photokina announcements.
I’ll try and post a few thoughts from the show on Monday but Fuji and Leica really seem to be a roll and know where there going, I get the feeling Canon and Nikon are just treading water not wanting to upset their SLR sales, unfortunately for them SLR sales are looking like the only way is down.
Today saw the release of iOS8. Less of a visual change then iOS7, more polish and tweaks, but lots of under the hood changes and more api’s for developers to better integrate with the system.
I think many are disappointed that its not a radical change but that is rarely Apple’s way. A bombshell onto the market with the initial product then polishing it enough to keep it ahead of the competition.
With the tighter integration with the new Mac OS coming we hope next month plus iCloud improvements and the Apple Watch next year, then for Apple users it makes it a powerful combination of products. If your not fully into the Mac ecosphere then the updates will make much less of an impression to you.
I updated my iPhone5 and it seems a little quicker, I updated the iPad 2 and switching between apps is much more sluggish, i’ll update Caroline’s iPhone4 latter in the week. I have made sure I have an image of iOS7 for the iPad2 and the iPhone4 so if I need to roll back I can, always a good move for such old hardware.
I possibly made the mistake of upgrading my iCloud documents to iCloud Drive, for now may Cloud documents are only available via a web browser and my iPhone5, I cannot seem to get them on the iPad, and the Mac will not get that function until next month. I may just have to download them all and work on them locally for now.
This week we had the Apple announcements of their new phones and the Apple Watch.
Many may say these are me too devices, the phone is a copy of the large Android phones and the watch is just a copy of other smart watches released.
The difference with Apple is as always they have thought about the user experience and with the integration with the Apple Ecosphere.
The original Mac introduced the mouse to the world, the iPod was not the cheapest mp3 player but putting the user experience first made it the worlds number one. Since then we have had the iPhone. I have had smart phones since the very early days. All of them were more powerful in what they could do then the original iPhone.
But why did people buy the iPhone, well a simple example is that you could hand any of my previous smart phones to a none smart phone user and they could not have made a simple phone call. The email was basic and the web browser was a joke. The iPhone was a good phone, had real rich html email and a real html web browser. No other smart phone had that.
One of my old smart phones had cut and paste and a todo list. The iPhone went through several versions before cut and paste appeared and a todo list. People made fun of the iPhone because of this, but how many used cut and paste. On several of my other smart phones cut and paste was there from the beginning but it did not work. You could only cut and paste from within the same application even the system application did not support cut and paste within the different sections.
When Apple give you a feature is normally works very well. Yes Apple are restrictive, you either do it the Apple way or use another product but very often the Apple way is the most effective way.
Finally after many years Apple finally announced a personal wearable computer device.
The Apple watch once finally available next year is likely to be the most expensive of all the smart watches available. The new Moto 360 was the smartest and best smart watch of the bunch, if you did not use it too much it will last a day but use it as you would want to then you will find yourself charging it at least twice a day. The few things the Apple watch does it will likely do very well.
A few of the features mentioned that people testing it had used: some had used it as a remote to his Apple TV, another used it instead of getting his phone out to see who was texting him and quickly replying, anther as a viewfinder and remote to his camera. You make of it what you will. I am interested just because I am thinking of getting an iPhone6 Plus, its a little to big for bringing out all the time, using the watch as a remote for the larger phone makes sense to me. Also I am interested in fitness, I have a very nice and good looking analogue watch for best and a fitness watch, it also has an additional chest strap you have to wear to measure you heart beat. The data has to be manually transferred from the watch to a spreadsheet and into an App on my iPhone, the Apple watch will do that that quite well.
Am I an Apple Fan Boy? Well yes I suppose I am, as well as being a Leica Fan Boy, I also use Windows, Solaris, Ubuntu and Redhat and love them. If the tool does the job well then yet I am a Fan Boy for that tool.
Oh and do I think some parts of Android and Windows Mobile are cool; Yes I do so you can accuse me of being a fan boy for them too.
Use the best tool for the job, if like me you need Unix, are a Photographer and need powerful portable devices then I am afraid to say Apple devices are the best; for me, you may have a different option and that is fine.
On Sunday I updated a number of my old passwords, I try to change my passwords at least every year and important ones every month.
Cloud security is on the news a bit this last week as a number of celebrities have had their accounts ‘hacked’. The problem is that people choose simple to remember passwords and the other big issue is with the security questions.
You get questions like ‘what was my first school?’. The questions are generally personal but the answers are likely to on your Facebook page and that is the issue.
Some sites now offer two factor authentication, iCloud has offered this for a while but not many use it. If you want to set it up check out Apple’s support site here.
While editing this months picture of the month, there was a few aspects that did not seem quite right to me. So I dived into Adobe Photoshop’s colour settings just to check a few things and discovered that the defaults were set. Now this might be fine for many Photoshop workers who do pre-press work etc, but not for photographers. Luckily I have all my settings saved as a preset so could quickly apply them again but I was not happy that it had happened.
I suspect that during the latest Creative Cloud update that put Adobe Photoshop CC2014 on our machines it took the settings back to default.
I suggest you check any preferences you have set and make sure they are correct.
If your interested in colour management and getting the most out of your images then I suggest you check out one of my old posts on colour management and working spaces.
Since moving villages I no longer get a mobile phone signal at home. My current mobile phone contract is up next month and the excuse of not getting a signal at home plus the fact they will not unlock phones for free has pushed me away from my current provider.
So this month I had my phone unlocked and have been trying other networks.
As part of this testing I made a number of interesting discoveries.
Dependant on whose sim you have in and if you restore your phone from a backup or set up as new you get a few minor differences.
The first thing I spotted was the Cellular Menu became a Mobile Menu, also the options in here differed but not really surprising. No the surprising thing was things like security options, on the old sim I only had auto lock from instant to 15 minutes, but when the phone was setup as new with the sim from another network it had options up to four hours!
I would have thought the functionality would have remained fairly constant.
Now that my testing has finished I have a few choices to make. A review of the main UK networks was published this week, and the one I am on came top, but this network does not work at home and I still need to use my mobile at home. The network that works best at home came worst and in my testing was worst for data.
With those results in mind I am not quite sure what I am going to do. I could remember to put a divert on my mobile before heading home but what if I forget, and there is the cost.
I could just change networks and put up with a better service at home but poorer data elsewhere (though things are looking like changing in the coming year). Or even go to two phone. A basic mobile with my main number on it and the best data sim in my smart phone.
Not sure yet but I have till the next month to decide.
If your after an all in one DAM/RAW processor that enables none destructive editing there are only two products that you should consider these have been, Apples Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom, both were released at the same time and both have advantages and disadvantages, I even know some photographers who use both.
This summer Apple announced that they would be ending there Aperture product. Now they do have a replacement coming soon likely to be released together with there new OS this autumn but if its anything like there other software releases recently, its likely to be a step backwards with less functionality at the start.
With this in mind many users are now considering jumping to Adobe’s Lightroom. Lightroom has always been my preferred product, but if your an Aperture user I would be tempted to wait and see what Apple’s replacement is like before jumping ship.
Adobe have announced that they will be releasing migration tools to help and so far they have released the following white paper:
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.
Today saw the release of iOS8. Less of a visual change then iOS7, more polish and tweaks, but lots of under the hood changes and more api’s for developers to better integrate with the system.
