All posts by Thomas Pindelski

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Lightroom 4 rocks

Lightroom

A non-trivial improvement.

When Lightroom 4 first came out I pooh-poohed the improvements. The book module, restricted to Blurb as a printing house, was no big deal and the code bloat was awful, with the app some nine times the size of Lightroom 3.

The GPS mapping feature is OK but needs more work (trip route indication based on file times would be a start) and a global change to the new 2012 process for one’s picture catalog would be insanity. Some of the changes are significant and you risk messing up hundreds of hours of processing work. However, credit where’s it’s due. For the right image LR4’s ability to recover highlight detail where there was none is extraordinary, matched by its enhanced capabilities in the shadows.

Limekiln, 5D, 24-105. LR3 left, LR4 right.

For many users the enhanced capabilities of LR4 obsolete HDR with its clunky processing cycle and default ‘awful orange’ look. HDR is increasingly the province of the Kinkade Set which never saw a piece of kitsch it did not like. For those new to Kinkade he is the drunken letch – now mercifully deceased – who gave the world crap for the wall in abundance. You can search his name because I’m damned if I’m printing his garbage here. The man makes HDR look good.

But Adobe didn’t leave 4.0 alone. The Bokeh Cabal was going on about how some lenses were rendering out of focus detail with purple color fringing, even though LR fixed the in focus bits well. Adobe calls this ‘lateral chromatic aberration’. So they added an enhancement in LR 4.1 to fix this. I paged back through my catalog to some images snapped on the Panny LX-1 which, though it has a decent Leica lens, opts for purple fringing at every opportunity. Sure enough, Adobe was telling the truth. Their enhanced chromatic aberration correction really works.

For photography LR4 is the single biggest improvement I have seen in ages, increasingly obsoleting add-ons and Photoshop itself, the latter restricted to the occasional round trip to fix leaning verticals or to add blur or to erase Cousin Vanya, and so on. And while Adobe’s corner office seems to have frequent difficulty telling its ass from its elbow, there is no denying that their crackerjack software engineers are the bees’ knees. Too bad Apple has abandoned its original constituency of creative users, as ADBE would be chump change for AAPL and a great fit.

As for processor efficiency, LR4 barely moves the needle on CPU temperature when processing; Aperture, in its defense, does permit you to brew your tea on the keyboard under like conditions, at half the price of LR. Neat feature, that.

Lenny

Photography

A man for the ages.

“A young man came to see me, this morning. He had some ideas for lyrics. I think he has something.”

That ‘young man’ was Stephen Sondheim. The speaker was Lenny. Their collaboration gave us the greatest musical made.

West Side Story. The tale of America.

It opens with the simplest possible graphic.

Manhattan.

Then:

The Sharks gather. Is that a photograph, or what?

The story of ethnic strife is as old as the ages.

But there’s a little something more. This version has Bernstein and Sondheim.

And every cliché in the book.

The dumb cop. The White Boy trying to be ethnic. The worthless Irish, doomed at birth.

And ….

“Wall to wall floors in America.”

Could Sondheim write or what? Like Cole Porter he would go on to write not just the words but also the tunes. Sure, there’s a fair measure of Lenny schmaltz in the music here. Hey, that goes with the territory. My, but did talent attract, or what?

Trying to be not white.

Lenny knew the genie was out of the bottle. You no longer dated on ethnic lines. You dated because you wanted to. It was café au lait. There was no unscrambling the ingredients hereafter.

So, simply stated, would you rather be with these folk, and their passion?

Or with these, an umbrella up their posterior?

There is some genuinely awful acting, singing and lyrics here. Try ‘Maria’. But none of that detracts from the best musical America ever made. Because it is about the very essence of America.

“Maria. Say it loud because there’s music playing. Maria.”

“Instead of Puerto Rico, she’s queer for Uncle Sam.” Rita Moreno blows the doors off.

I mean, come on:

Great photography? Great music? Great lyrics? Great choreography?

Yup. The lot.

Grab West Side Story, and revel in the genius of Lenny Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

Microsoft Surface recycled

Hardware

More of the same.

Microsoft Surface was a visionary product from Redmond, a decade ago. A huge table-style touch screen allowed icons and elements to be moved around by touch, and the whole thing was just so tomorrow.

Of course it was so good that it had to die; Microsoft has long known how to kill a good thing. Though there are many brilliant, innovative thinkers at Microsoft, neither skill has been in abundant supply in the corner office, occupied by a doofus whose only claim to fame is that not even he has managed to screw up one of the world’s great annuities – Windows + Office. The only other product which has sold in volume in the Ballmer years is the Xbox360/Kinect, emphatically not a Microsoft invention, and one whose profitability is a rounding error, so brutal is price competition in the game console segment.

For a long while I have refrained from knocking Microsoft in this journal as it has just become sort of assumed that anything from Redmond would be a costly time sink, and why mock the afflicted? But Microsoft’s latest just begs for a thorough thrashing, which it is my pleasure to administer.

Doofus with his latest disaster.

I mean, goodness, must he really insist on demonstrating something he is clearly clueless about? Has no one at MSFT the courage to tell this emperor that he has no clothes? Imagine the management culture at a company which prohibits criticism.

You see, Surface is the name for MSFT’s new line of tablets. Yes, the same tablet which Doofus was knocking (in this case, knocking on) two years ago. That was just when MSFT’s previous tablet effort was scrapped. And there’s little reason to think that the new one will last any longer. Goodness, they couldn’t even make up a new name for the product.

Each iPad comes with bullet proof software, iOS, robustly interlinked Mail, Scheduling, Address Book, etc. through iCloud, and a vast ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of applications developed over many thousands of man-years.

Now look at MSFT’s offering. First they are offering the tablet with two completely different CPUs – ARM and Intel. Eh what? Lucky developers having to craft apps for that. Then they come with plain, touch or type keyboard covers. There are two sizes – 32 and 64gB. And while they are mum on cellular, you can bet they will have to offer at least two carriers in the US, in addition to wi-fi only. And of course they come with a stylus, presumably because the touch interface is so poor there is no alternative.

And this from a manufacturer whose experience in hardware is largely limited to making mice and has little skill in complex hardware supply chain management.

Oops, did I mention applications? Ummm, no, there are none as of the time of writing.

Worst of all, the Surface Mk.2 runs Windows. Two different versions, no less. That spells DOA to me. And by the time these things hit the stores, if they ever do, iPad4 will have been released, instantly obsoleting whatever claims to currency Surface2 may have made.

So thanks, Microsoft, for reinforcing my disgust in you and confirming my decade old decision never to touch one of your foul products again. Apple may make mediocre, overpriced PC and laptop hardware, but OS X and iOS are robust as they come, the iPad is insanely great, and the whole ecosystem linking the two hardware platforms is not something that the dysfunctional corner suite in Redmond is remotely capable of disciplining into a functional whole.

Kudos to Bill Gates, however. He got out at the top and is doing truly wonderful things with his fortune. I would prefer to see a fool like Ballmer running MSFT into the ground than have Gates return and leave behind his groundbreaking philanthropic work. The only thing which mystifies is that Gates allows this Boob to continue running the business.