All posts by Thomas Pindelski

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Notre Dame reopens

Photographs

Glorious.

Well, it took 5 years and almost $1 billion in contributions sourced from across the planet (yours truly included) and Notre Dame reopened today, recovering from unspeakable tragedy. While one sour note is sounded by the presence of the Pig of the Western World, as morally degenerate a human as has ever occupied the White House, all churches attract vermin and Notre Dame is no exception.

So let’s rejoice that the world occasionally does something really right. The Grande Dame is back:


The reopening ceremony. Click the image for the video of the ceremony.


The new spire.

Vive La France!

Mac Mini M4 – Part IV

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

Expect storage upgrades soon.

In Part III I wrote:

Internal SSD upgrades: Early teardowns of the Mac Mini M4 disclose that the NAND storage resides on a removable card. However, components on that card make it impossible to simply plug in a larger storage one as the Apple design ties the card to your particular machine. However, hackers with micro-soldering skills have unsoldered the two existing NAND modules from the card, replacing them with much larger ones for very low cost, and things work well. So you can bet that an aftermarket business will shortly arise offering this service. When you realize that Apple charges $200 for the jump from 256gb to 512gb, and $600 more to go from 256gb to 1tb, there’s money to be made from competing with Apple’s greed. So if you want a 1TB drive or greater it might make sense to buy the base 256gb $600 Mac Mini and wait for the market to offer upgrades.

Well, here we are not a month after the release of the Mac Mini M4 than French company Polysoft has reverse engineered the NAND storage in the Mac Studio and will soon be offering 8tb upgrades for $1,160. Here’s Apple’s pricing – greed personified while Mr. Cook walks around the stage, hands prayerfully clasped in supplication to the god of money:


Mac Studio SSD upgrades.

And here’s the excellent article and related video from Cult of Mac explaining what Polysoft accomplished and it’s really magical:


Click the image for the article.

In contrast to much of the appalling dreck found on YouTube, Luke Miani’s presentation is articulate and involving.

The real volume for Polysoft’s business will be selling upgrade SSDs for the Mac Mini M4 because that’s where the money is. I would expect they should have a competitive offering in a quarter or two. And yes, Apple’s greed for upgrades to that machine is equally abundantly on display. Well done Polysoft. Vive La France!

Carmel de Nuit

Photographs

Night photography.

When I think of night photography two names immediately come to mind – Brassaï and O. Winston Link. The former for his mythical images of Paris at night, the latter for the greatest steam train images ever made.

Back in 2013 I determined to photograph the festive season windows at night in that up market retail paradise, Carmel, and related the experience here. It bears adding that I have owned many 35mm focal length lenses but two stand out – the 35mm f/2 Asph Leitz Summicron for its contrast and the 35mm f/1.4 Sigma for its sensational definition – assuming you can get one that actually focuses correctly. The resolving power of the Sigma is unquestionably the highest I have enjoyed on any camera and the stellar definition is abundantly in evidence in my images. So it was the Sigma, attached to a Nikon D3x, which was the optic of choice for the night images of Carmel’s magnificent shop windows. Anything but lightweight, this combination was mounted on the outstanding Sirui K-40X ball head attached to an ancient and massive Linhof tripod. Looking at the data exposure times varied from 1/15th to 8 seconds and apertures were mostly f/5.6 or f/8. I let the Nikon do the exposure figuring though I had the camera set to underexpose by 1 stop, knowing that burned out highlights in these very high contrast images would not be recoverable in post processing. And speaking of processing, the new to me features of Lightroom Classic compared with my ages old Lightroom v6 made the already fine images even better, specifically the sophisticated masking tools and the ‘Texture’ slider which made the many images of clothing really come alive. Why, I almost feel good about sending Adobe $10 monthly for these enhancements. A couple of images were round tripped through Affinity Photo 2 to square things up.

Anyway, of the 56 images 42 were winners and you can view the slide show by clicking the picture below. The music is Cole Porter’s “I’ve got you under my skin” and the slideshow was generated using LRc. I encourage you to view this on the largest screen in your home, the TV, as the quality of the photos is nothing short of spectacular.


Click the image for the slideshow.

Thanksgiving?

Ramblings

Questionable, but reversible.


Macy’s Parade, November, 1981.
Pentax ME Super, 28mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

Oscar Wilde once opined that foxunters were the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. Adapting his saying to modern times one can only conclude that American voters are the deplorable in support of the unconscionable. Were I to tell the proverbial visitor from Mars that a majority of the voters of this nation just again elected a traitor/felon/rapist/grifter/multiple bankrupt/moral and ethical degenerate then that little green man would vamoose back to Mars real pronto. Well, looking on the bright side, I suppose that makes us immune to a Martian invasion.

Yet this, my 48th Thanksgiving in The United States, finds me as optimistic as ever, largely based in the belief that this too shall pass.

Yes, there are many things to dislike in addition to the recent election results.

There’s the one trillion dollars we spend annually on a military which has drawn or lost every conflict it has foolishly entered in the past 79 years. There’s increasing moral degeneracy where gender at birth is denied so that a handful of perverts can use the little girls’ restroom. There’s an electorate most of whom define “low information”. Our public schools are a disaster. There is a fading work ethic. Americans are becoming lazy, like Europeans. There is a level of inequality comparable to that found in the Gilded Age. And there is a massive obesity and health crisis caused by the addictive nature of ultra processed foods backed by the fast food industrial complex. And the cretinous – there is no other word for it if you passed Econ 101 – ideas of mass deportation and punitive tariffs will inflict great damage on the American economy, if they come to pass.

None of this is good.

Yet consider. America leads the world in every field of technology, has the best medical care on earth (if you can afford it), remains the most philanthropic nation on earth, is home to most of the greatest institutions of higher learning, has the best managed economy on the planet, in the jewel that is New York City lays claim to being the cultural center of the earth and the nation continues to offer the near certain chance of economic success to any one – native or immigrant – willing to work hard. No genius level brains required. I should know.

I continue to take inspiration from Milton Friedman whom I was privileged to meet on his 90th birthday in 2002, still as sharp as ever, who reminds us that “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” I passionately believe that, once they come to their senses, Americans will live up to Friedman’s dictum. And as that great half-American reminds us: “Americans will always do the right thing, having first tried all the alternatives.” Winston Churchill.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Affinity Photo 2

Lightroom, Software

Hasta la vista, Photoshop.

Much as the many enhancements in Lightroom Classic, compared with my decade old Lightroom version 6, reduce the need for Photoshop, there are still those images which require the more granular processing capabilities of a Photoshop-like application. However, on upgrading my 15 year old Mac Pro to the latest Mac Mini M4, Photoshop CS5 refuses to boot. That’s sleazy Adobe for you.

I think I have found a solid replacement for Photoshop: Affinity Photo 2. No subscriptions, just a one-off payment of $34.99 with a full 7 day trial period, no watermarks. That’s Black Friday pricing. Some research discloses that Version 1 of Affinity Photo was continually upgraded over a seven year period at no cost to owners, so paying that sort of sum every few years is not exactly something to grumble about. Affinity only asks for money for major version upgrades.


Purchase options.

I needed traditional PS tools to edit this image and clean up the background people, plus add selective lens blur. LRc is just not sophisticated enough to do that. (The image was taken on a Panasonic GX7 micro 4/3 camera. One inherent issue with micro four thirds sensors is that the short focal length lenses which are standard with the sensor come with high depth of field. That’s physics, not Panasonic’s fault).
Here’s the before and after, the ‘after’ processed in Affinity Photo 2:


North Beach, San Francisco.

The Affinity interface is very much like PS. Adobe is asking $23 to $35 a month, meaning $276-$420 annually, which I think is exorbitant. And that’s on top of $120 annually for LRc. You pay for Affinity in a couple of months by comparison, and you own it. I set up LRc to allow round trips just like in the old PS days (Option-Command-E to export to Affinity – you set this up in the Lightroom Classic Preferences->External Editing panel) and then just a Save in Affinity will return a modified .tif file to LRc. The original RW2 file above is from Panny RAW in the GX7.

Given the similarity of the tools and commands to PS the learning curve is not all that bad, and layers are supported. Here’s the interface – I have tailored it to light gray finding the default black hard on the eyes:


The processed image and the Affinity interface.

The 7 day trial period delivers a fully functional app. I downloaded mine from the Apple App Store, the safe way to go.

There are many good tutorials available on You Tube. For a round trip from Lightroom Classic I find that the exported .tif file pops up in Affinity Photo 2 in some four seconds on my base spec Mac Mini M4. I have never seen a beach ball in Affinity which processes everything very quickly. Affinity is optimized for Apple Silicon. From their website:

“The new GPU represents an industry inflection point—we now have compute performance surpassing nearly all discrete GPU hardware, but retain the key benefits of unified memory. This required us to step back and think again about where performance bottlenecks might be, as it’s clear the ‘old rules’ no longer apply.

“The results of this work yield a benchmark score of around 30,000 for the M1 Max 32-core GPU, absolutely obliterating any other single GPU score we have ever measured. Our changes have also improved performance on the previous M1 chip, which is now roughly 10% faster in our benchmark in version 1.10.3.”

Apple says it recorded up to 5.6x faster combined vector and raster GPU performance in Affinity Photo with the 16-core M1 Pro, and up to 8.5x faster with the 32-core M1 Max.

So there. Mostly BS, but you get the idea.

One word of advice. One of the really well implemented enhancements in Lightroom Classic is the Denoise function. This does an excellent job of taking out chroma noise in files without destroying detail and it’s very processor heavy, typically taking 30 seconds on the speedy Mac Mini M4. (Chroma noise is very common in files which are produced by small sensors in micro fourth thirds cameras). Once you round-trip an image to Affinity (or Photoshop) it comes back as a .tif file which Denoise cannot currently handle. At this time the function only works with most stock RAW files and will not work with either Apple Pro RAW, .tif or .jpg formats. So if you are going to use Denoise along with a round trip to Affinity, do so before the round-trip, while you’re core file is still in RAW format.

While Photoshop has a deeper AI focus – Photoshop’s neural filters will allow you to change a dour face into a smiling one if that’s your thing – the key AI feature of PS is available in Affinity. This has been around in PS for over a decade and is named Content Aware Fill. In Affinity it is called the “Inpainting Brush Tool”, and can be found in the drop-down menu for the Blemish Removal Tool. It’s a useful tool for removing extraneous items from images and works every bit as well in Affinity as in Photoshop. Further, the Magic Lasso outlining tool, frequently used in conjunction with Content Aware Fill in Photoshop is identical in Affinity. Both do an excellent job of selecting an area of choice to which you wish to apply localized changes.

Affinity also offers applications for graphics designers and publishers. These are also attractively priced. I have no need for those, but if you are into those fields they’re probably worth checking out. All apps come in both Mac and Windows versions. Now if only Affinty would clone the excellent database and cataloging features of Lightroom I could ditch sleazy Adobe for once and for all.