Family, Photography and other misc news
General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography
For those of us running OS X Mountain Lion the Spotlight function and the All My Files Folder can be very useful for finding documents.
It can also be irritating and difficult for the new comers to customise, how do you stop it from finding stuff you don’t need.
Well a quick and easy way is to just dive into System Preferences, and under the Personal Section, Click on Spotlight.
Click on the Privacy button and just add in the folders your not interested in.
I don’t usually blog on Wednesdays but the garbage being written on the forums about Adobe’s creative cloud has driven me to my keyboard.
So the big announcement at Monday’s MAX Conference was that Adobe will not be releasing a CS7. Instead you will have to subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud and their subscription based model. Basically instead of purchasing CS7 Photoshop or the the Suite you rent it, either by the month or year.
The internet forums, twitter and googleplus are full of outraged users. CS6 will still be available for many its a great choice but for the latest version you will have to subscribe.
Most users are complaining about a) The Price, & b) The Cloud aspect.
The headline figure is £50.00 a month, well actually its £46.88 if your not already a photoshop user. Thats pretty steep I would agree, but then again Photoshop costs £800 full retail and gets upgraded every twenty four months. Thats over £33 a month for just one package.
The problem with the rumours, half truths and rage about Adobe is just that, half truths. Yes the full plan is £46.88 but that gets you every single Adobe Suite Product. That is very good value. If you just want Photoshop then you go for the single app subscription, which is just £17.58.
There are also offers available for people who are already registered users. I contacted Adobe and they offered me a single app subscription for just £8.73 and for all apps £14.29. If you use two or more apps from the suite that is great value.
There is a problem for Photographers who just user Photoshop and Lightroom, the suite offering for those two is far to expensive, you are better off subscribing to just Photoshop and purchasing Lightroom as normal, and Adobe have confirmed it will still be sold retail.
The Adobe Photoshop Manager did recently admit in an interview that they are looking again at the offerings for Photographers so hopefully they can come up with something a little better.
Lets now address the second complaint, the cloud aspect. People are saying that the applications now run in a web browser and will only work on a fast internet connection. Well that is wrong. You download it from the cloud and install and use as normal so no change. The license checking is a little different. If you subscribe for a year then the software needs to check back to Adobe to see if your subscription is current every 99 days. If you subscribe by the month then I believe its 37 days.
With some of the tablet demos and syncing between Lightroom and iPad’s that Adobe have demonstrated then I think its not going to be long before people think the subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud is essential. Lets hope then can do a good deal for people who just want Lightroom and Photoshop.
Of course if Adobe ramps up the price too much next year my view on the price will be very different.
More details on the Cloud at ‘The Grid” of the Cloud syncing and iPad editing for Lightroom.
HDR – High Dynamic Range, is a useful technique when the dynamic range of the scene is beyond that of the sensor or film you are using.
Traditionally the one uses dedicated HDR like PhotomatrixPro, but recently I found a method of producing a more realistic method of producing a HDR image by doing the editing in Lightroom.
One can use HDR carefully and produce natural looking results like in the photograph at the top of this page. Often now you see HDR used to produce over the top cartoony images like in my shot of the University of Lincoln.
My workflow is generally as follows:
I generally shoot a five stop bracket, using auto bracketing. These photographs are then imported into Lightroom and I do basic key wording, copyright information and correcting for lens issues and basic import sharpening.
The five shots are then selected and exported to TIFF into my HDR Program. I use PhotomatrixPro. The HDR processing is now done and the resulting single file exported back to Lightroom. I can then do my usual processing and cropping back in a program I am more familiar with.
Well I did not spot it until recently (thanks to Matt Kloskowski) but you can now export the shots to Photoshop combine them and then re-import and do the processing back in Lightroom. Now Photoshop can do HDR but until CS6 third party programs have been better. This technique though just uses Photoshop to combine the images, which are then exported back to Lightroom and you can do the processing back in the program I am mist familiar with.
So how do you do this? Well for a start you need Lightroom V4.1 at least, V4.0 and before could not do it.
Select all the photographs in the bracketing set in the Library module.
Then go to the Photo Menu, select Edit in, and then, Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop. This will cause Photoshop to Launch (you will need CS6).
Once all the images how loaded you need to change a setting in the right hand menu panel within Photoshop CS6. I recommend you click on the button Remove Ghosts and then change the Mode from the default of 16 Bit to 32 Bit. Then click OK.
It will now process the selected files into a single TIFF file (it must be saved as a TIFF). If you shoot with a 24 megapixel camera or more and have a older computer this could take some time!
Then close Photoshop and when prompted to save click Yes. Photoshop will save the file and Lightroom will import it. You can then edit the resulting file with a number of advantages.
When you now edit the image you will find that there is far more data available then if it was a single image.
With the five set bracket I took I have plus/minus 10 stops available in the exposure control. This gives you the advantages of HDR but not the cartoony look.
Here is the final image, turned into a Black & White with lot more detail available in the what was a blown out sky.
Now that I have learn’t this technique I’ll be re-visiting some of my older brackets and seeing if I can do a better job of post production. Here is a quick re-edit I did of a interior shot of the lovely and majestic Lincoln Cathedral.
A few years ago Apple started to offer the option of SSD’s instead of a hard disk. Costs were very high, people blamed the ‘Apple Tax’ but early SSD’s with good performance and that worked correctly with the OS were few and far between. Most of them had maxiumum capacities of 64 – 80 GB’s not a lot for your main laptop but certainly an option for the new Ultra Light Laptops that Apple pioneered with their Air Range.
Now most manufacturers offer the option of an SSD and in the capacity of 120 – 250 GB they are getting quite affordable.
The little Macbook Airs now only come with SSD’s and the top of the range MacBook Pro can have one at 768 GB!
Last weekend I finally got to have a go with my wife Caroline’s MacBook Pro Retina, this 15″ Retina with 16 GB of RAM and a large SSD is a real speed machine, and I was amazed at the improvement it made working with large files in Photoshop.
My MacBook is the original 15″ Unibody from 2008, its little 320 GB disk is nearly always close to full so I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade, not by buying a new laptop but by getting a SSD to replace my old Harddisk.
The 2008 model is very easy to upgrade, simply open up the battery access panel and there staring at you is the battery and hard disk.
First you need a SSD, I took the easy option and just asked Crucial the memory company for a compatible model at 512 GB in size.
Once it arrived, I took a full time machine backup and also cloned the disk to an old external with a neat piece of software called SuperDuper.
If your using a version of OS X that was released from the app store you will also need some installation media. I have blogged before on how to create a bootable Install disk but in case you missed it you can find it here.
So with your laptop all backed up, you need to assemble your tools: a bootable OS X install disk, the new SSD and a Philips 00 Screwdriver and a T6 Torx Screwdriver.
Shutdown the laptop and turn over. Taking suitable antistatic procedures open up the access panel and remove the battery. Then with the Philips screwdriver undo the three screws. Carefully remove the drive and undo the cable.
You will now need to remove the four T6 screws in the side of the old hard disk. Once removed put them into the new SSD.
Connect up the cable and insert the SSD, bottom edge first being careful of the cable. Fasten in with the three Philips screws and put the battery back in. Put the access panel back and you are now ready for the fun bit 🙂
Connect up the power and also connect up your OS X bootable device. It’s now time to switch on and let the computer boot from your install media.
Choose the disk utilities option and format the disk. You can then do a fresh install of your OS. To get your data back you can either use Time Machine or just reinstall and copy your data back.
Its been over seven years since I have done a totally clean install so I thought it was about time. Finding all my software and licenses was fun but it was not long before I had a super fast MacBook Pro.
If your interested in installing an SSD do make sure its supported and also check the firmware revision. Mine did not ship with the latest firmware and some firmware has issues with OS X and Windows 8. Find a firmware that is supported and upgrade.
The firmware upgrade is straightforward but I’ll cover that another day.
If you want a clear article on doing this and many other simple computer jobs, check out the ifixit.com website. You can find an article here on the MacBook Pro upgrade I undertook.
This good Friday we had an invite to visit Caroline’s sister, Angela in Chesterfield.
We also had a little chore to do. Get Angela’s ‘new’ desktop computer up and running. This was an old Windows XP machine that Alan, Caroline’s farther no longer needed.
First job was a booting problem, quickly diagnosed to be a flat motherboard battery, which was easily fixed.
Then getting it on the internet, this proved harder then expected. Angela’s Wifi supported and was using MAC address filtering as an additional security measure. Unfortunately the old wireless router’s management software only supported IE6. We tried Safari on the MAC, the iPad and Firefox, but none were supported.
In the end I ended up booting up an old VM of Windows XP that I happened to still have sat on an old external harddisk that was sat in the bottom of my computer bag. Lucky!
With the VM booted up on my Mac it was soon in IE6 and logged into the router to make the necessary modification.
Back in the day when Microsoft’s IE6 was the leading browser more often then not software was specifically written for it.
Luckily today most things are a little more standards based, so no matter if your using the latest Microsoft Operating System or a Mac running OS X, even other flavours of UNIX and LINUX; we can all work together.
For a while now, every time I started Safari I would get an error message warning me that a plug-in was not supported and would be disabled. The plug was SplashID.bundle.
I have searched for this plug-in but up to now have been unable to find it. I tried the usual plug-in directories in the main /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and the users library ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins.
Finally I have now been able to find it, delete it and get rid of the error message. It is in fact located in /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins and called SplashID.bundle
Apart from this irritation, I have found SplashID a very useful password manager on my Mac and my iPhone.
I was pleased to see that the much anticipated Adobe updates to support the Mac Retina displays were released today.
I cannot provide a lot of feed back yet, as I will need to prise the MacBook Pro Retina out of my wife’s hands in order to test. Maybe I can get her to make a blog post about what she thinks to the updates?
After the intense rain of the last couple of weeks, it been lovely to be greeted with bright blue skies the last few days. With the low sun its been a difficult commute into work but with the improvement in the weather my thoughts have been on winter landscapes.
So with that in mind the mapping applications have been coming out and I have been looking at where the sun will be and where the tide will be over this weekend, as I feel a large format trip over to Whitby is in order.
If we pop up on the bike i’ll just be taking the Leica M4, M8 or Nikon V1, but if we go by car then it will be with my biggest heaviest tripod and the Ebony Large Format Camera.
If your interested in Apps for photography have a look at ‘The Photographer’s Ephemeris’ not a cheap app but very useful for looking at where the sun and moon will be at a particular location on a particular day, better on the iPad then on the iPhone.
WordPress is extremely reliable, and far easier then maintaining a standard website.
For the first time these weekend I had an issue with it. I have a test site which is a duplicate of my main site, and whenever I upgrade a plug-in or WordPress itself, then I test first on my dev site.
I needed to update a plug-in on this site but WordPress got stuck in maintenance mode. A quick web search and I soon found the solution on WordPress’s support section. When the site goes into maintenance mode it creates a file in the root directory called “.maintenance”, this prevents the site being accessed or administrated, in order to login again you need to ftp into your site and delete this “.maintenance” file.
As with most things easy when you know how.
As many of you are possibly aware Kodak over the years have produced some great and class leading CCD sensors for digital cameras. Many of these are used in Medium Format Cameras and in Leica M Digital cameras.
With the troubles that Kodak have been having, they sold off the sensor division and its now know as Truesense.
They have recently made some interesting announcements, first they are going to produce some m4/3 sensors and a monochrome only sensor like that in the Leica Monochrom. The bigger surprise is that these are going to be CMOS based sensors, so we will also get video and live view.
I doubt any of the main stream camera manufactures will pick up the monochrome version, its mainly going to be used for scientific uses in specialised areas, but maybe one of the small players or a new upstart may produce something with this for the enthusiast photographer.