Author Archive

Sorrow

O'Reilly's Lightroom Adventure sounds fun - as a two time Iceland visitor, I'm always very jealous of anyone going there. Then again, I don't really think photographers are pack animals - certainly I always scowl (at least inwardly) when another photographer invades my domain or nibbles at my prey. Maybe this explains the absence of …read more

Scary monsters

There's a time for photography and a time for drinking, and I'm glad to say I didn't take the camera to the Great British Beer Festival yesterday. Beardy's personal award goes to Timothy Taylor Best, a pint I'd never had before, and which narrowly pipped Archer's Golden into second place, ahead too of my long …read more

The Right Place

There's a limit to how much work you can do on an image in Lightroom, so right click a file and select Edit in Adobe Photoshop. Lightroom then applies any adjustments, adds a TIF file to the Library, and opens in it Photoshop. When your Photoshop work is done, the Library file is updated. A …read more

Mistreated

My Documents, My Pictures - I've always hated them. And the same ire is directed at programs that insist on saving stuff there, or to the user application folders. Tell me, how much important data gets stored in C:Documents and SettingsUserNameApplication Dataetc and how many users never back up that area and lose it when …read more

Feeling good

At last, Adobe have released Lightroom on Windows. First impressions are good in that it's very easy to select a group of raw files and apply global corrections and adjustments. But that's about it - it's a good raw processing tool with an easy workflow, but it's not much more. A lot of code optimisation …read more

Carpet crawler

Bob Johnson at Earthbound Light looks at Nikon Capture NX in Hands On and Second Thoughts: So, what's my verdict on Capture NX? I must say I have developed a deeper appreciation for what Nikon and Nik Software set out to create, but I'm not sure it's for me. My workflow revolves around Photoshop and …read more

It ain’t me, babe

George Jardine, Adobe's Pro Photography Evangelist, the bloke fronting Lightroom, is pretty clear about what kind of product it's not going to be. In this discussion of podcast 8: …we felt from the beginning that a database is the best answer for Lightroom photo asset management. We are committed to building as robust of image …read more

Summer breeze

I guess I'll miss it when Windows users no longer moan about the lack of a Lightroom beta: See the raw files jumping off the flash cards To your hard drive on a Friday might A beta Lightroom?s a-promised for Windows In summer - everything?s alright CHORUS: Summer beta will make me feel fine Processing …read more

Ain’t no sunshine

Listening to Lightroom podcast #8, as a PC user I'm frustrated at not still being able to test it for myself. But frankly Mac users who've got their hands on the program do so as photographers first, no matter how much they often bore you with their computer brand. So let them clap with joy …read more

Summertime

It's hot, Sven buggered it up, and John's getting grumpy. If it's not for Mac users of iView predicting the apocalypse after Microsoft's takeoever, it's Windows users unable to understand Adobe's statement they'll release a Lightroom beta for PC during the summer. And today yet another asks “why are you adobe people still making us …read more

Blood on the rooftops

Not one of the tandoori-chewing DAM glitterati, Mike Tedesco is Microsoft's Technical Evangelist - Pro Photo Community, and is therefore considered by some Apple-brand loyalists to be second to antichrist. He gives some responses to the iView takeover in this dpReview thread. Thom Hogan's comments are perhaps closest to my own speculation. When I was …read more

Stuck inside of Mobile….

From this DAM and Aperture thread at the Open Photography Forum: Sidecar Hell is only one issue, but a panacea for it already is to use the DNG format and store both the informational metadata and the editing metadata in the extensible XMP. There's no real reason why, just as Adobe stores its camera raw …read more

The end of the world as we know it?

You can really end a presentation on a bang when you demonstrate a product and then tell your partly-Mac audience that one minute ago the company was sold to Microsoft. But there I was yesterday at Old Trafford doing a one hour presentation on DAM with iView. It began at 4 and iView had called …read more

More blowin’ in the wind

How many pixels must one man shoot Before he starts to drown? How many gigs does it take till he learns He should have bought iView? And why does he now continue to cry And wait for pie in the sky? The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in …read more

Smoke on the water

As for the demo of Nikon Capture NX today, I'll just say the guy was demonstrating it on a laptop he'd only had for 3 days and had only seen the program for the first time yesterday. So he was reading his Powerpoints word by word, didn't know where his demo images were, and didn't …read more

Hush

Another Lightroom post at Adobe Labs: For all this moping and griping and citing usership surveys as if they were a substitute for any real knowledge, all of this harping boils down to one core statement. I don't own a Mac and I want to try Lightroom but can't have it; and Adobe should rush …read more

Things ain’t what they used to be

A bit of an opinion piece today. Lots of Windows-based photographers are complaining that the Lightroom beta is still Mac-only. I've read some describe it as an insult, others claim they urgently need it for cataloguing (trust your DAM to a beta?) and they seem unable to understand the commercial reasons behind it. It's not …read more

Blowin’ in the wind

Ben Long looks at the forthcoming Nikon Capture NX. This comment from the writer, a Canon user, caught my eye: If you're like me, you probably thought that NEF was merely Nikon's format for its Raw files, but the spec is actually much more versatile than that. NEF files can include Raw data or regular …read more

Houses of the holy

“I would like my images to be available in the future”, “My picture is my personal property. When a manufacturer decides to lock me out of free usage (by encrypting, or so), I recommend to boycott this manufacturer” and “If i'm gonna use raw i want to make sure i can read those files forever”, …read more

Lightzone

Lightzone from Lightcrafts has been around for a year or so and is another of the new breed of raw image file processors like Adobe's Lightroom beta and Apple's Mac-only Aperture. I looked at it a while ago and it was only available on the Mac, but now it's available for the PC too as …read more