All posts by Thomas Pindelski

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An excellent Lightroom book

Technique

Evening writes good English.

It’s now coming on for two years since I made the painful switch from Aperture to Lightroom and scarcely a day passes when I do not rejoice in that decision.

From the resource intensive Aperture (sells more ‘newer, faster’ Macs, I suppose), illogical and buggy application to one that is logical, has yet to lock-up on me and is blisteringly fast on my middle-of-the road iMac, Lightroom (I’m on version 2.4) is a joy to use. I visit some of the Lightroom blogs now and then and find I am always picking up new tips, no thanks to the lack of a proper instruction book from Adobe, as none is bundled with the software.

Indeed, to my own surprise, I actually find that after 50 years of processing pictures, I’m beginning to enjoy what is ordinarily a drudge. Anyway, a while back I decided to get a good book on the product as it was increasingly irritating to find out more or or less by accident about features that really helped the processing step along.

In selecting my book of choice, the first dictate was that it had to be written by a photographer who can actually take good pictures. Why on earth would you want to learn any skill from an academic, clueless in real life application of his expertise? That dictate promptly excluded most of the many books out there – some of these people really have no right to be preaching about Lightroom when they cannot take a well composed, decent photograph.

The second driver was that the author has outstanding communication skills.

Having watched some of his instructional videos on the web the book to choose was easy – Martin Evening’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers. (Disclosure: The link is to Amazon – I get no ‘click through’ payment if you click on it. I have no position in AMZN at the time of writing.)

My main reason for buying a good reference manual, dictated by the poor quality of the materials included with the software and the generally poor Help files within LR – was that I wanted to be absolutely sure how best to integrate two catalogs of pictures. I wanted to add the one from my laptop to the master on my desktop computer. While I have daily back-ups of everything, I would rather get this right first thing than scramble to recover from mistakes by resorting to the back-up.

Evening’s book not only walked me through this in accurate detail, I found that it added value in many other areas where the apparently simple user interface of LR hides many special functions, often invoked through the use of the Alt key on the keyboard. Areas where I find real value was added include:

  • Importing and creation of import profiles specific to a camera or lens
  • Using filters to find images
  • White balance corrections
  • Sharpening – a whole chapter, much of it addressing magic simply invisible to the normal user
  • Custom profile printing

The book, at 600 pages, seems long, until you realize that much of that is the result of copious illustrations which make it much easier to follow along. I still think of it more as a dictionary – something you look up to learn from – than a tutorial, but I find I keep it at hand when processing and frequently dip in to learn a new trick or two.

It’s published by Adobe Press (I only learned this after buying it – it was most certainly not a reason for purchase) which simply begs the question why it isn’t included with the software in the first place.

Quibbles? On p. 582 Evening states “The graphics card does not play such a vital role in Lightroom’s overall performance.” This contrasts with my experience which shows that screen rendering of previously generated previews when flicking between images is considerably faster with the new nVidia 7600 GPU (256 mB RAM) in my iMac 24″, compared with that using the nVidia 7300 GPU (128 mB) it replaced. But I have no objective measurements to bear this out and it may just be the placebo effect at work as I try to justify all the time I have had to waste in repairing my faulty Apple computer.

Overall, it’s a fine manual by a real, working photographer who has had the benefit of a proper education in the use of the English language. Highly recommended.

WSJ puffery

Photography

Don’t expect objective reporting here.

Under its new ownership, the Wall Street Journal is redefining yellow journalism, seemingly perfected by W R Hearst in the ’30s.

Meaning, write what suits you politically and economically, and the heck with objective reporting of the facts. It makes the New York Times look like an arbiter of truth, which is saying something.

Today’s edition has a puff piece on the new Apple Tablet and how El Jobso is back and driving everyone to distraction with his attention to slim perfection at the expense of all else.

Well, I simply could not resist adding to the Comments section (link is probably available to subscribers only), with my own 2 cents worth – OK, $7,500 worth looking at the volume of Apple junk we have bricked. My opening sentence references Jobs’s oft quoted remark when asked why Apple will not make a cheap netbook:

I may have added a few months, maybe even a year, to the life of my 24″ iMac with all the work I have been forced to do to it, as described earlier, but when it fails you will see me going the Hackintosh route. And I don’t need any sanctimonious shill for the legal profession lecturing me on the legality of this – how can it be any less legal than selling devices under false pretenses (“It Just Works” as Apple advertises)? Thus my computer odyssey will have come full circle – a big well ventilated reliable PC box full of hardware running the best OS for the home and small business user out there.

Here’s an index to my recent spate of articles here on Apple’s awful hardware and let that be an end to it:

I am still committed to sharing temperature readings on my repaired/ventilated 24″ iMac with readers, and these can now be seen here.

Snow Leopard – Just Say No

OS X

Serious compatibility issues.

Apple has said that its 64-bit OS, Snow Leopard, will be on sale August 28. You know – all the usual twaddle – better, faster, smaller, etc. Just pay up, please. The cash register is right over there. We gotta keep those analysts on Wall Street happy. Goodness alone knows what additional stress the 64-bit OS places on already overtaxed graphics circuitry in overheated, poorly ventilated boxes. And excuse me, but just how many 64-bit third party applications are out there and don’t these need 32gB or more of RAM to show any benefit? Once again, it seems, we are being offered a Ferrari to do the grocery shopping, because the racetrack is closed.

Come to think of it, I’m still trying to figure out what, if anything, the ‘upgrade’ from Tiger to Leopard did for me, other than a butt ugly purple login screen. At least our machines did not fry under Tiger.


Snow Leopard (in)compatibility list – extract

Unless you are positively insane or unless you have checked this compatibility list and are willing to believe what you read, you really should hold off upgrading, no matter how cheap it is.

Older PPC applications like Adobe Photoshop CS2 (will not run) and Intuit’s Quicken (Intuit says it will run but they are a business which shares business morals with eBay and PayPal – no earthly way you can trust a company that disables its software every other year to force you to upgrade) are problem areas. I don’t know about you but I am not about to shell out hundreds of dollars on the latest version of Photoshop which does nothing for me, or trust Intuit, only to do my photo processing or mess up my on-line banking.

But there are bigger shockers in this list. SpamSieve, the ne plus ultra of email spam apps, superb in every way and leaving Apple’s Mail Spam function in the dust, will not run. Photoshop Elements will not run. Really! Disk Warrior (serious $) will not run. MenuMeters will not run. NeoOffice may not run (the thinking man’s free alternative to the garbage called Office from Microsoft). SafariBlock – a key ad blocker for me which stops all ads, including those irritating flash ads – will not run. SmartScroll will not run. Dozens of others are in ‘Unknown’ status.

And no news of all those fan (Fan Control, SMC Fan Control) and temperature measurement (Temperature Monitor) utilities which are essential to stop your Mac from frying. What if they don’t run? And what if your new OS fries the GPU twice as fast as the old one, seeing as Snow Leopard is meant to be so much faster?

Well you get the idea. Updating now is simply crazy. Let the guinea pigs who see no wrong in anything Apple do the bleeding for you.


Snow Leopard – run away fast or it will bite you in the rear.