This Monday was the start of the Apples’s WWDC. I always try where possible to listen to the CEO’s opening speech. Sometimes we have new hardware but mainly new software.
As someone who is trying to be more private on the web, limiting their use of applications like Facebook to only a few times a month and stopping internet access after 9 pm at night, there was much to interest me.
I am a self confessed Twitter addict and in Apple’s iOS 12 it will be interesting if I can use the social media limiting side to control my obsession. As we try to create the right balance of intake of social media IM and Skype interaction with work, and downtime with friends and family tools like this may help.
Over the weekend there was another Apple Watch update. Apple have been really on the ball recently with the updates, even my old laptop running OS X 10.11 has been getting updates and it is ten years old now.
With the latest security bugs in processors, I have been patching our systems. So far I have not notices any performance issues and it was good to see how on the ball Apple has been on this one.
Well I have my desktop upgraded to the latest OS. It was seamless and I had no issues. My biggest worry my tablet works fine with the new drivers, as I had a lot of photographs to edit I was a little concerned.
We have Caroline’s MacBook Pro to upgrade, but my old laptop is officially stuck on 10.11.6 El Capitan.
The new MacOS desktop OS has been out for a few months now and I have been waiting for my last two drivers to get updated so I can upgrade. Well Wacom and x-rite finally missed there updates just before Christmas so finally I can upgrade. I am running some final backups now and will let you know how it goes.
Adobe issued a slight update to Lightroom this week and one of the things they have tweaked is the auto button in the develop settings.
Once you have tried the old auto, you never use it again, it treated all photographs the same and was never worth using; but now Adobe have updated it to use their new AI routines and I have to admit it does and OK job and can make a useful starting point.
I took a few snaps in the coffee shop and decided to take a note of the file names.
As you can see above, the Leica iOS app can see the photographs on the camera and its seeing the correct file name. I downloaded the files to my phone and these were saved to the camera roll app.
I then launched Adobe Lightroom Mobile and imported the images, both jpeg and RAW as I shoot both.
As you can see while the meta data is correct but the file name has changed. So its not the Adobe app changing the name but likely something forced on the Leica app by iOS when it saves out to the camera roll app.
If you have a big investment into Adobe Lightroom, its catalogue and backend database then moving is a difficult thing.
For image editing Lightroom and Capture One are now the big two, with a couple of others coming up quickly. I generally discount software from the camera companies, its at its best terrible and at its worse a crashing virus on your computer.
I keep reading good things about Capture One and as a PhaseOne medium format back owner I have a license, but I still just use Lightroom. Fuji users in particular are always singing the praises of Capture One as it took Adobe a long time to come to grips with the X-Trans Sensor that is in the X series DX crop bodies of Fuji cameras.
But I read an interesting article the other day on Photography Life and he points out that Capture One does not support none Phase medium format cameras; something I had not noticed. It certainly puts me of the product.
I am thinking hard at the moment about my future in 35mm full frame and large format, the Hasselblad may go back to just film use and I may trade in my 35mm Nikon gear and Phase One back for a more modern medium format solution that supports my studio and landscape needs. With Capture One only supporting PhaseOne on medium format, I will not be making it limit my camera choice, so Adobe have me for a while longer.
Lightroom reporting a different file name then the one on the memory card
If your like me or most professional photographers then you take a lot of pictures when shooting digital.
Being able to find photographs afterwards in your asset management system is important, and with modern meta data and database systems, the actual file name is becoming less important.
Sometimes though the file name is all you have to go on if your using more then one workflow.
With my desktop Lightroom catalogue, the new cloud based Lightroom CC on my laptop, iPhone and iPad, then keeping track of what I have imported and what I have not can get difficult.
At the weekend i’ll be shooting in the studio with several models and using several different cameras. Afterwards my work flow will be fairly straight forward.
Copy all the cards to the internal SSD of my Desktop Machine
These then will get backed up by my automatic PC backup
Import to Lightroom Classic
This copies the files to my main external Thunderbolt Drive
This also makes a backup copy to Dropbox
Initial metadata and develop by preset
Then sorting out selects and picks to do a final edit on
When I am shooting more informally then the work flow may be the above, but its more likely me just grabbing the card at the end of the day and then copying the files to Dropbox to sort another day. Or using my iPad SD Card reader and pulling in the photographs to Lightroom Mobile, or even using the Leica Mobile iOS app to pull off the odd photography.
The problem with these other workflows is that sometimes the process, it the Leica App or the iOS operating system itself is changing the file names. This then makes it difficult to keep track what photographs have been imported into my master library on the desktop machine and what are still to import. If not careful you can either loose photographs or end up with duplicate shots in your library.
This Monday was the start of the Apples’s WWDC. I always try where possible to listen to the CEO’s opening speech. Sometimes we have new hardware but mainly new software.
