Category: Computing

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

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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.

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RBPhotographic Shop Coming Soon

You can now see some new links at the top of the page.  The most exciting is our new Shop.

The shop is not live yet, were still in the process of setting up, but I hope to go live on 1st July 2011 for USA sales and a few months later for Europe.

Here I will be offering limit edition prints, fine art prints, and free ecards.  Have a look and tell me what you think and feel free to try out the free ecards now (not available on all images).

Visit www.rbphotographic.co.uk and the new shop, have a good look round, first ten people to email enquiries with a comment on the new shop will receive a free coupon entitling you to a 50% discount from the shop.

Discounts valid from the launch of the shop for 3 months.

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Lightroom 3.4.1

Update released for Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Camera RAW.

“Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.4.1

The Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 3.4.1 update includes these enhancements:

• Additional camera support for several new camera models including the Canon Rebel T3i, Nikon D5100 and Fuji FinePix X100
• Corrections for issues introduced in previous versions of Lightroom 3
• The Lightroom 3.4.1 update includes an important correction for a bug introduced in the Lightroom 3.4 release”

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Lightroom bug for JPG Shooters

The Adobe Lightroom team issued an important announcement concerning a bug that can affect jpg users.

“The Lightroom and Camera Raw team would like to inform you of a potentially severe bug that was introduced in the Lightroom 3.4 and Camera Raw 6.4 update.  Please note that this bug only impacts customers who are saving metadata to JPEG files with a rare characteristic.(JPEG files must have an unusually large block of private camera data included in the file to be susceptible to the bug*)   This scenario is so rare that we do not believe that it is necessary for customers who have already upgraded to revert to the previous version of Lightroom or Camera Raw.  However, the bug could cause image corruption which falls within our highest severity category of bugs.  The team believes it’s very important to notify you of the risk and provide an estimate of when we will be able to deliver a correction in the form of Lightroom 3.4.1 and Camera Raw 6.4.1.  We intend to have these updates available by Friday, May 27th.”