Category: Computing

General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography

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Light It – iPad Magazine

The new photography magazine Light It, has been released, from the Kelby Media Group, its a great magazine with light tips for all levels.  I downloaded it yesterday and really enjoyed it.

Unfortunately instead of getting praise for introducing another means of reaching photographers, all they seem to be getting is hate posts by iPad nay sayers.

Kelby Media Group provide printed magazines, internet videos, pod and web casts, seminars (and not just in America), books and DVD’s and now an iPad magazine.  Lots of different ways to reach photographers, whether you have a computer or not, and plenty for none iPad owners.  Yet all it seems people can do is complain.  How dare they produce a magazine for the iPad.  How sad, why cannot trolls get a life.

Now where did I put that CTO Gell, I want to try that sunshine camera flare technique!

http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/2011/archives/21059

 

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Lightroom Performance Tweeks

I have been doing a bit of reading recently, on optimising Adobe Lightroom to get the best from it.

One thing you can do to help, if you have the disk space available, is to increase your Adobe Camera RAW Cache. This will make your Develop module that little bit quicker when you start to use Develop.

The Lightroom previews used by the Library are different to those used in the Develop module. The Library previews can be generated on import, or when your first zoom into a 1 to 1 view.

Develop uses a different cache and this cache by default is set to 1GB. Now most of use can spare more disk space then this and its well worth increasing. On a desktop machine the up to 200Gb is commonly used by many photographers. If your working on your laptop then space often at a premium so 5 – 15Gb is more common.

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Stuck Alias on Side Bar

I am a relatively new Mac User. My day job in IT means I deal with Windows in all its flavours, Linux – Redhat, and Solaris.

At home I switched from Windows to Linux – Fedora, many years ago, but as I started to do more digital photography, I needed an OS that was supported by the main players in digital photography.

So while my home server is still Linux, for my personal computer I switched to the Mac. If you want to know why, well its was just because I had never used one before, and I love learning new OS’s. This possibly explains why I have so many phones, running everything from Symbian, Windows Mobile, and iOS.

I have now upgraded to Apple’s latest and greatest OS, Lion. Or OS X (10.7). After the upgrade I felt the need to have a bit of a tidy up. I had a few dead aliases (shortcuts ) on the side bar to old applications that I had gotten rid of during the upgrade.

But one refused to go, the normal technique, to just drag it off the side bar and watching it disappear in a puff of smoke did not work.

I checked Apple’s support forums and found several ways of getting rid of stuck Aliases.

If its really stuck then open up the command line and delete the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist from your user/Library/Preferences folder. Log out and back in.

It should reset side bar to defaults.

But I then found a far easier way, which I had to admit, did make me feel very stupid. To force it to go just hold down the command key and then just drag it off, this forces it to go.

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Hotel Wireless – Free for some, paid for others

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, after last weeks long weekend, it was followed by a hard week at work.

At the start of this week I had to pop down to London for a couple of days.  I was travelling light, but still took the iPad.  I fully intended to write a few blog posts but came across a very iritating but common issue.

Often during the day I came across free WiFi.  Even at the hotel there was free WiFi in the bar, but at the end of the day after I had retired to my room to write up my notes for the day and update my blog, the internet access in my room was paid only.

I could walk in off the street, have a drink in the bar and use free WiFi, but as a paying customer who had booked a room for the night, who wanted to use the internet in his room, I had to pay extra for the privilege.

Not fair.  So here instead of my usual update you get a quick rant instead.  Sorry guys!

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SnapSeed for the iPad

I love our iPad, and more and more Photography focused apps keep appearing.

SnapSeed is a app recently updated with RAW support, which is what attracted me to it.  If your away with just your camera equipment and your iPad sometimes you want to play with your images and test out your ideas.

I shoot RAW and until now there has been a lack of applications for the iPad that support the camera manufactures RAW formats.  Until now with the updated SnapSeed from Nik software.

Nik are a big player in photography processing, products like Silver Efex Pro, produce the best black and white conversion I have found.

This is not a review and not a recommendation, but it is a fun app.  The image above was initially processed in Lightroom then during my lunch break last week I had my first real play with the application and produced this.

Have not had time to test the RAW support, according to their website RAW files are supported when Apple’s camera connection kit is used.

To keep the weight down on our motorcycle road trip we took, once SLR, two lens and an iPad.

The photo in the previous post was taken on my iPhone then processed on my iPad while I was on my road trip.

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PhotoSmith for Lightroom 1.05

Well the other day I installed the latest Photosmith the Adobe Lightroom companion for the iPad.  I also updated the Lightroom plug-in to 1.0.10.

Caroline had been shooting some macro shots of flowers and local wildlife (mainly Damsel Flies, and Toads), so I borrowed her compact flash card to test the update.

I am please to report that it worked perfectly.  I imported the photos, keyworded a few.  Added some location information to one, and rated them and colour rated them.

I then tested the sync, and wirelessly imported them back into Lightroom.  I then made a few changes, sync’ed common information across all the photos and resync’ed again.

This information was then transferred back to the iPad.  During the day in spare moments I continued to update the metadata and keyword information on the iPad, and at the end of the day sync’ed again.

I am pleased to report PhotoSmith worked perfectly and can be well recommended.  Now we are just waiting for the batch syncing of metadata, and for me the killer feature, two way sync of photos, so I can take a shoot from the Laptop to the iPad, do some work then sync back.

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iBird UK: Now Universal

I have greatly enjoyed the iPhone App, iBird UK.  For someone like me who does not know their birds its an extremely useful tool.

I am growing increasingly found of  bird photography, thanks to the recent purchase of a Nikor TC17MkII which makes my 70-200mm f/2.8 telephoto zoom a 119-340mm f4.8 telephoto zoom.

Needing a quick reference guide, I downloaded the demo version and soon purchased the paid version see https://brown-family.org.uk/?p=2177.

The one thing that was a shame, was how poor it looked on the iPad, it being a iPhone app and not built for the big screen.  While not a reference book it was a useful app and I hoped the developer would produce an iPad version for the UK.  I would have willingly paid for it.

Well this weekend an update came out.  iBird UK is now a Universal App and works and looks great on the iPad as well as the iPhone.

Highly searchable with photographs, drawings and links to flicker.  It can also can play you bird song to help in your identification as well as having a notes field which even allows you to add your gps co-ordinates from the phone.

So thanks guys, but how about a more in depth world version for the iPad?

Check out there website for more details – www.ibird.com

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PhotoSmith Bug in 1.04

http://blog.photosmithapp.com/

After upgrading to PhotoSmith 1.04 for the iPad, it became unusable, not rendering a full screen image just a small thumbnail.

While waiting for the bug fix 1.05 that the developers have already released to Apple, I tried several things to fix it myself.

I managed to fix it by deleting the application, rebooting the iPad and re-installing the app to the iPad. Its now working again for me.

Already available is an updated Lightroom plug-in.  Keep up the good work guys.