Category Archives: Software

Rosetta is dying

Mac Mini M4, OS X, Printing

But your old Brother laser printer does not have to.

Extensive reports from beta testers of Apple’s latest desktop operating system – Mac OS 27, or Golden Gate – suggested that the software was robust and reliable, so I updated from Mac OS 26 (Tahoe) to OS 27 the other day …. and promptly lost the use of my USB wired Brother HL-2300D laser printer.

Reading the Apple Community discussion board disclosed that Apple was no longer including Rosetta with Mac OS 27, and that old but reliable Brother printer used Intel era code to do its thing. Meaning it needs access to Rosetta.

Rosetta – some background:

Two CPU generations ago Apple’s hardware was running on IBM G-series CPUs – the G1 through G5. Apple’s notebook, the Powerbook, was widely regarded as the best laptop on the market and was running the G3 CPU. Steve Jobs wanted to up performance by installing the latest G5 but the CPU ran so hot that it was unusable, unless you liked a scorched lap. I recall owning a G5 iMac desktop and, indeed, it put my kitchen toaster to shame when it came to heat output. The fans would race to maximum under the most modest tasks. Not Apple’s proudest moment.

Anyway, Steve concluded that the IBM CPUs were …. err, toast, and migrated the hardware to Intel CPUs. Cooler, faster, cheaper. To aid in the migration Apple developed a brilliant piece of software named Rosetta, after the Rosetta Stone, whose multi-language engravings acted as a Greek-to-Egyptian hieroglyph dictionary. Hieroglyphs could now be understood. Apple’s smartly named Rosetta performed a like task in translating IBM G generation applications to Intel code, meaning that all those old G apps would run seamlessly on Intel machines. The performance penalty was minor and Rosetta ran completely invisibly. A nod in the direction of that old Apple marketing slogan, “It Just Works”. Eventually developers rewrote all their application to run natively on Intel CPUs and the need for Rosetta disappeared, meaning you forever lost the use of old apps which were never rewritten, though those were few and far between.

History repeats:

When Apple started developing its own desktop and laptop CPUs, Apple Silicon, meaning the M1 through M6 range, they crafted a new version of Rosetta which did for the Intel-to-Apple Silicon change what the original Rosetta did for IBM-to-Intel. Old Intel applications would run perfectly well on M CPU hardware, performing the translation task invisibly in the background. The seamless implementation testifies to some serious programming chops in Cupertino. As before, with most applications now rewritten to run on Apple Silicon, the need for Rosetta went away, so much so that Apple warned that Rosetta would no longer be shipped with Mac OS 27. And as that old Brother printer needs Rosetta to work, it ceased doing so.

The fix is simple, as this extract of the Apple Community discussion discloses. Install Rosetta.



From the Apple Community discussion board

The Terminal app can be found in the Utilities folder, and the whole process takes under a minute. And, Bingo!, my old Brother HL-2300D is as good as new. That printer is hard wired to my Mac Mini M4 and is no longer supported by Brother, so the chance that Brother will update the driver for Mac OS 27/Apple Silicon is exactly zero. But there’s no need to throw it away. Further it works perfectly well with dirt cheap aftermarket toner cartridges and I expect to get many more years from mine. Will Mac OS 28 include Rosetta as a downloadable option? Unlikely, but I’m confident some smart programmer will come up with a new fix.

Running old Intel-era applications:

If you have old Intel apps you like and if these were never rewritten for Apple Silicon, installing Rosetta in Mac OS 27 should allow them to continue functioning.

Lightroom use:

The current desktop version of Lightroom is Lightroom Classic. It requires an Apple Silicon CPU to work and I print using a wirelessly connected Epson ET8550 color ink jet printer. There are no issues using LRc with the ET8550 running Mac OS 27.

Lightroom masking in v15

Lightroom, Photographs

Extraordinary.

I’m one of the crowd that detests Adobe’s subscription model for its many photography applications, having paid to own Lightroom many years ago only to find that Adobe made sure it refused to work on the Mac Mini M4, forcing me to ‘upgrade’ to the subscription version with its predatory pricing. So much for lifetime ownership.

However, giving credit where it’s due, the masking and highlight recovery capabilities of v15, the latest upgrade, are extraordinary. These are best illustrated by the image I took of Marion Campbell in 1977 in the Outer Hebrides island of Harris, off Scotland’s northwest coast.

Back in 2008 I wrote:

I have been trying to process this snap for thirty years. Every decade it gets better as processing technology improves. Oh! if only I had had a fill in flash with me. Anyway, I now have the burned out highlights largely recovered and some vestige of detail in that wonderful, craggy face.

And that effort was tortuous indeed, requiring much work in Photoshop.

Now, with Lightroom v15, the process has become an order of magnitude easier. A while back I had re-‘scanned’ my early Tri X film images using the Nikon D800 and a Micro Nikkor lens. Definition is as good as you will ever get from a film scan, and far faster than using a flat bed scanner with its mediocre results.

Still, the ‘scanned’ image does not look great. After importing the image into LR and straightening things up, with some added tweaks on the sliders I had a half decent image but one which still has horribly burned out highlights from the window behind Ms. Campbell’s head:



The unprocessed film scan from the D800.

Adobe claims that v15 of Lightroom uses AI – doesn’t everyone claim AI as the magic sauce today? – in helping with masking, so I had a go using the dropdown box which gives several masking options:



Masking options.

I chose ”Select Subject’ and LR did a great job of doing just that, allowing me to add contrast and vibrance to the face. Next I added another mask, this time choosing ‘Select Background’, which LR accurately did, and had at it with the Highlights slider, for a truly exceptional result. A third mask using the ‘Brush’ this time allowed me to paint in her blown out hair with another tweak on the Highlights slider and here is the result which took less time to do than to write about:



The final result.

So finally, 48 years later, I have the displayed image which, until now, has resided in my mind’s eye.

Why, I’m almost feeling good about that Adobe subscription ….

Adobe +50%

Lightroom

Yes, a 50% price rise!

The crooks at Adobe are at it again.



50% price hike.

The rest of the letter goes on in tedious detail about how Adobe is the greatest public benefactor since Social Security and generally claiming sainthood. It’s so puke worthy I am not publishing it here.

When I was using my Mac Pro I had ‘lifetime’ ownership Lightroom for a single purchase. When security enhancements – which Apple refused to apply to that fabulous machine (shock news!) – ceased to be available I had no option but to upgrade to a modern Mac Mini M4. Naturally, Adobe saw to it that my Lightroom ‘owned’ application ceased working at the same time, forcing me to sign up to their $9.99 monthly subscription.

I passed on Photoshop, buying a lifetime ownership of Affinity – and that looks like it’s about to adopt a subscription model soon as well. Affinity does most things Photoshop can, though there’s a bit of a learning curve involved.

I write ‘forcing me’ as I have yet to find an application which competently combines LR’s excellent processing and cataloging features, but now I will get serious about doing some research of alternatives.

Meanwhile I have signed up for one year with the crooks at Adobe at the existing $10 monthly rate, and earnestly hope this is the last time I ever pay them:



Topaz Labs Image Unblur

Photographs, Software, Technique

It actually works.

I’m not much one for post processing. Maybe a touch on the Highlights and Shadows sliders and a correction of a leaning vertical or two, but that’s pretty much it. Mostly I’m of the set that believes you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

But this is an image I rather liked for the girl’s intensely watchful expression and it was a real grab shot. No time to think, just point and click. And the result was a blurred image owing to camera motion.

Here it is after processing in Topaz Labs Image Unblur:


The deblurred image.

In addition to passing the image through the web-based Topaz app (which has jumped on the ‘add AI to anything to make it sexier’ bandwagon) I added Sharpening=113 in LRc. The result, shown in this after and before 100% pixel peeping comparison in LRc is fairly remarkable, with artifacts at a minimum:


After and before.

Topaz gives you 20 freebies but for the life of me I cannot figure out the pricing thereafter. Still, 20 is likely to last me a few years …. even if encroaching age points to more blurred images!

Leica M10, 35mm Canon LTM.

Automated file import in Lightroom

Leica, Lenses, Lightroom

6-bit coding comes into its own.

For an index of all Leica-related articles click here.

My earlier piece on 6-bit coding of Leica M-mount lenses concluded with the following codes for my four lenses:




Lightroom stores lens correction profiles, which correct for vignetting and distortion, for the first three. Strangely the Tele-Elmarit is missing.

While 6-bit coding corrects for edge color effects in-camera, there is still a need to apply lens corrections in LR or LRc for the best results. Ordinarily this is done manually, frame by frame, a very laborious approach. You have to check the lens maker and then choose the correction profile from a very long list, one frame at a time. Not good.

Here is how to have Lightroom do that automatically when the files are imported. Even if the imported files were made with more than one lens, the correct profile will be applied to each, along with chromatic aberration correction. Here’s the process.

Take a picture with each of your 6-bit coded lenses and import those into LR or LRc. Go into the Develop module on the first image and scroll down to the ‘Lens Corrections’ pane at right. Check the first two boxes as shown below. My examples are specific to the lenses I own. Choose as appropriate for yours.

21mm f/3.5 Voigtländer Color-Skopar Aspherical VM:




  • Click on ‘Make’ and choose ‘Voigtländer’
  • Click on ‘Model’ and choose ‘Voigtländer VM 21mm f/3.5 Color-Skopar Aspherical’ from the long list
  • The correct Adobe profile will appear in the box ‘Profile’
  • Click on the drop-down ‘Default’ above under Setup
  • Click on ‘Save New Lens Profile Defaults’
  • My 21mm Color-Skopar is 6-bit coded as a Leica 21mm f/2.8 Elmarit pre-ASPH, which is what Lightroom sees in the imported file
  • You have now instructed LR that every time it’s importing a file with the 6-bit code for the 21mm f/2.8 Elmarit-M to apply the profile for the 21mm f/3.5 Voigtländer VM Color-Skopar Aspherical lens.

The next time you import a file taken with the Voigtländer lens, the correct correction profile will be applied along with correction of chromatic aberrations.

Now repeat this process for files taken with your other lenses, selecting the appropriate Make and Model each time, then saving the result. Here are my settings for the other three lenses I own with 6-bit coding. Amazingly LRc has corrections for the two Canon lenses, each over 50 years old:

35mm f/2 Canon LTM:




50mm f/1.4 Canon LTM:




90mm f/2.8 Leitz Tele-Elmarit:




In the case of the Tele-Elmarit there is no lens profile stored in LRc so I chose the one for the 90mm f/2.8 Elmarit-M which is very similar. Both lenses are almost distortion free so you really do not have to check the ‘Enable Profile Corrections’ box, but you still want to correct for chromatic aberrations.

Now on your next import these profiles will be applied automatically. The next step is to correct the lens’ names in EXIF data using the tool I describe here which takes little time and allows the serious business of post-processing to commence.

A note on changing lens names:. For my three non-Leitz lenses I like to change the names from the Leica 6-bit coded names to the correct ones – 21mm Voigtländer and 35/50mm Canons. If I apply the EXIF tool to do this any Lens Correction changes made using the above method are erased, and the lens corrections have to be applied anew after the lens name change. To avoid this, instead of using the above method to apply lens corrections, create Develop presets for each lens with the appropriate corrections profile selected, saving them in the Develop modules Preset pane (click the ‘+’ sign’) thus:



Develop presets in LRc’s Develop module

Import the images in the usual way, run the EXIF tool to change lens’ names as required then in the Library module of LRc select the images to which you wish to apply Lens corrections using the Quick Develop panel at the right, thus:



Applying Lens Corrections using Quick Develop

For 100 images this takes a mere 2-3 seconds.

So the order of events is:

  • Import images from the SD/SDHC/SDXC card
  • For non-Leica lenses use the EXIF tool to change lens’ names
  • For non-Leica lenses apply the lens correction profile using the Quick Develop panel in the Library module of LRc after selecting images from each lens in turn using the Metadata panel in the Library module
  • You cannot select multiple images in LRc’s Develop module to apply lens corrections. This workaround lets you do so.
  • You are done