General Archives
iDrive
What a lousy week. Sunday's high - United going 5 points clear against the Scousers - was sorely dented the following afternoon when a Mac user drove his Volvo into the side of my car, which had been parked in front of the house. As if I've not said some nice things about Aperture recently! …read more
Black and white and Lightroom 1.4
Never quite got round to posting about Lightroom 1.4, did I? I'd thought of doing so, and setting the post to display on the day of 1.4's release, but I had other things on my mind earlier this month. First was a small operation, and then I was hiding away in the Lake District for …read more
Geotagging within Lightroom
geotag-lightroom-plugin is Jeff Barnes's plugin that adds GPS data to photos from within Lightroom. Locations are read from the standard GPX file format and exif information is stored in the image files using Phil Harvey's exiftool. Just tried it, and it seems to work, though it is a work in progress. Interestingly, it adds menu …read more
XMP madness
Of course, you’ve got to be sceptical of a PC-using Lightroom author’s opinions on Aperture, even if he also uses a Mac and pretends to know a little bit about using it to manage and process his pictures. After all, would you listen to his view on driving a BMW once you know he’s driven …read more
Progress chasing
Looking over the fence as one does, and no doubt breaking a couple of biblical commandments, one Aperture feature that I've always liked is Smart Albums. Partly for me it's a very simple principle - any database-driven application should let users save any queries and search criteria. Modern business systems also help control and drive …read more
Dim not DAM
I knew this would happen. One day John Nack links to a misguided extract “Setting up an organizational system in Lightroom” from Rob Sheppard's fine book on Lightroom (apart from anything else, I'm glad to see it has Windows screenshots). A day or two later and it's popping up in an O'Reilly blog post to …read more
Aperture and tethered shooting
I don’t do much tethered shooting and don’t have much feel for how common a requirement it is. But for some it obviously matters a lot, and it’s no surprise to see that Aperture 2.0 has introduced a tethered mode. This morning I tried it out with a Nikon D200 (it’s worth noting you have …read more
Aperture 2.0 speed
There's little doubt that Aperture has been harmed by being slower than Lightroom on equivalent Apple hardware - as well as by being worse than glacial on non-Apple computers. For myself, I never found version 1.56 was too bad on my MacBookPro with 2Gb RAM - slower though not impossibly so was my feeling. But …read more
Essential gear + Aperture 2
Ever have problems remembering your keyboard shortcuts? Some people just print them out and stick them to the monitor, while I go try use one new shortcut every day, but if you're an Aperture user, what you need is AUPN's long sleeve t shirt. Update - Aperture 2 has just sneaked out. I suppose I …read more
SlideShowPro for Lightroom, Dreamweaver menus, and a quick hack
I recently added some Flash-based galleries which are powered by the SlideShowPro for Lightroom engine, but I found that they had truncated my site's DHTML menus when the galleries were viewed in Firefox (my preferred browser on PC and Mac). These menus were “Spry” objects added in Dreamweaver CS3, though I suspect other similar menu …read more
Saving the (animal) farm?
I've said before that O'Reilly's Inside Aperture and Inside Lightroom blogs have been getting a bit tired lately. Folk evangelize about how their chosen program has revolutionized some aspect of their work, when either program - or indeed earlier DAM programs - would have done so. This is just one where you could just as …read more
50 ways to leave your lover
This post isn't really about Extensis Portfolio, iView or Lightroom - it's really another of my despairing rants - but today I was asked about getting metadata out of Portfolio and into something like iView or Lightroom. The direct answer is that Portfolio lets you sync the metadata into jpeg and tif files, but for …read more
Lightroom Wiki
The Lightroom community help system has just gone public. Adobe's not the first software vendor to use Wiki technology to get customers to write the product manual that you used to expect the developer to provide. It makes a whole lot of sense too - users often know much more about the real world issues …read more
Search trends
I never claim to be an early adopter, and only recently discovered the value of Google Alerts. Now Matthew Campagna shows me the use of Google Trends by charting searches for Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture: One thing to consider, however, is that Aperture remains exclusive [JB: in the sense of “limited”] to Apple computers, …read more
Lightroom, and the use of virtual copies for slideshow speaker’s notes
Someone asked an interesting question at Adobe's Lightroom forum - how can you make speaker's notes to accompany a slideshow? He wanted these notes to be hard copy printouts, with multiple images per page, and with notes beneath each picture. Having inflicted death by Powerpoint on many occasions, this is how I'd approach it in …read more
Another gallery – Swiss re-enactors
Added another SSP for Lightroom-generated gallery of photos of Swiss Medieval re-enactors. Some of the shots were outdoors but those which worked best were taken in Chillon castle's great hall at lunchtime. The wonderful directional light, low December sun bouncing in off the lake, had immediately had me thinking of the Dutch painters of the …read more
New gallery
Getting my Flash-based site up and running is taking me more time than I'd hoped. Now there's a surprise. Actually, that's not quite fair - within about 3 or 4 days I had written something decent, but I am being a bit ambitious and would like to integrate this site's text-based content into the new …read more
Lightroom and the Camera Raw Cache
Lightroom 1.3's exploitation of the Camera Raw Cache is very new and I haven't had time to experiment or reflect on it, so for now I'll just point to this thread Lightroom 1.3 creates CameraRaw Cache and quote a couple of posts from Thomas Knoll: It speeds reopening files in the develop module. It speeds …read more
The lost post – more about stack types
Now what were the points I made yesterday? Well, this is an HDR image showing the Castelrigg stone circle near Keswick, Cumbria. Preparing it made me check how many frames I shot in the Lake District were intended for multiframe applications, in particular for HDR and panorama. The answer - 20% - was surprisingly high …read more
A month of lakes
Got back from the Lake District last night. I was staying in the village of Rosthwaite where my brother and his wife have bought a holiday house and it’s great to report that this little country still has places with no internet, no mobile phone coverage, and almost no radio reception. So nothing else to …read more