Yearly Archives: 2012

Lightroom 4 Beta

Lightroom

Meh!

You can download the Beta version of Lightroom 4 here. Windows XP users are SOL.

After a quick look and comparison of pictures on identical monitors side-by-side against LR3, here are my observations:

  • Not a major upgrade unless you do movies.
  • RAW Import and preview generation speed no different from LR3.
  • Despite renamed sliders for Highlights and Shadows I found I could exactly replicate the effect of these in LR3.
  • Enhanced local adjustments nice to have; overall adjustments, while renamed, add little to LR3 viewed on 2 monitors side-by-side.
  • The localized Sharpness adjustment range is still frustratingly narrow, requiring export to Photoshop if you want real control.
  • Export to Blurb is nice – if you like Blurb – but there are canned export plugins for other services for LR3 – I use the one for Shutterfly.
  • No Content Aware Fill added. Still need to roundtrip to CS5 to do that.
  • GPS? Only my iPhone 4S has that so of little use.
  • Soft proofing no biggie – you could do that through Mac Preview in LR3. And you cannot soft proof on your secondary display, only in the main one, which is kind of stupid.
  • ‘Adjust Print Brightness’ is BS as you cannot preview it – at least I cannot find out how – and it’s no excuse for proper printer setup.
  • No crashes or hitches (OS X Lion 10.7.2), though switching to the Develop module rapidly refreshes the screen a couple of times – easy fix for Adobe.
  • No help files – click Help and you get LR3 Help.
  • ‘Email a photo’ implementation sucks as it does not access the Contacts app on my Mac, meaning you have to input the full email address, and setup is awfully clunky. Adobe needs to integrate this better to make it useful. Right now it’s faster to export a JPG and drop it on Mail app.

The localized Develop adjustments panel in Lightroom 4.

Email setup in LR4 – of course you know your SMTP Server and Port, right?

While I will be upgrading after all the usual debugging is concluded, simply to keep current, the best thing that can be said is that Adobe appears not to have broken anything in what is already a robust and stable cataloging/basic processing/printing tool for RAW files.

Lumin

iPhone

Ingenious.

The Lumin app for the iPhone allows the use of the phone’s camera as a magnifier, with or without illumination from the built-in LED. That’s incredibly clever, and I have found it ideal for determining serial numbers on hardware for insurance purposes. Such numbers are increasingly screen printed in very small fonts on equipment and the their falling size and my aging eyesight conspire doubly against me.

You can take a snap of the area imaged and email it to yourself with ease – here’s an example of the serial number on my Panny G3:

Other uses include looking at restaurant menus in poorly lit diners, spotting that wood splinter in your finger, examining your Border Terrier’s nose to try and determine just how it manages to stay frigid, and …. well, you get the idea.

There are many flashlight apps in the iPhone AppStore, but none that can compare to this. Try and buy an illuminated magnifier for $1.99 that fits in your vest pocket and doubles as a flashlight.

Kodak ads

Photography

Some classics.

In an interesting article in The Atlantic titled The Triumph of Kodakery the author includes several classic early Kodak advertisements.

A search of the web discloses many more. What is striking about these is not only the clarity of the message, but also the artwork. The message remains relevant today, the artwork has rarely been surpassed.

The first four, which are very old, do not use a photograph in the advertisements, but only the churlish observer would object to that. No history of photographic innovation can deny Kodak its rightful place at the head of the long list of inventive geniuses in the last century.

A new desktop look

Photography

Clutter be gone!

I wrote about the new look I had adopted for this journal on the iPad and iPhone here.

Since making that change I have been increasingly frustrated on returning to the old desktop theme, replete with sidebar, drop-down boxes and clutter. Cramped and tired, it was due for an overhaul.

After a bit of searching I came across the Book Lite theme (link at the bottom of the page), the single column theme you are looking at. This relegates all the links to the bottom of the page and presents a far cleaner page to the reader. After a bit of tailoring to use more of the display’s width, replacement of the inept WordPress Search function with Google Custom Search – the latter accessible through a link at the top of the page, and a few other tweaks, things were looking pretty good, so I put the new look into service.

Links now appear at the bottom of the page.

Here’s how this page looked in the old style:

On those rare occasions where posts include long text paragraphs, I will break text into two columns (a real pain to do) and the new look serves that presentation well. For the technically inclined, the theme used supports widgets, making arrangement and inclusion of links at the base of the page a simple matter. The ability to translate content – however poorly – using Google Translate has been retained, as have all other link functions from the old theme.

Going forward I will be adding more multimedia display tools, including scrolling photo galleries and enhanced video integration.