Extraordinary.

Several readers have pointed me to Adobe’s presentation of their new Photoshop Deblur plugin; there’s a video of it here which probably proves that Adobe needs to learn presentation skills more than it needs to learn C++. Stated differently, the cackling moron who bills himself as a ‘minor TV celebrity’ is enough to put you off Adobe’s fine products for a generation. Once you get past this fool, there’s a compelling demonstration by one of their engineers of Deblur.

This before/after picture tells you all you need to know:

It’s not released yet but looks promising. I would expect to find this in cameras in future, software correction being far cheaper than anti-shake hardware.

Remember how in the old days a spy would feed a photo with a blurred blob into the megatron computer and, seconds later, out would come a sharp image with the numbered account for that Swiss bank vault containing millions in bearer bonds? That day just got closer.

I ruminated on all of this over half a decade ago in a piece here titled It’s the Software, Stupid.

Smoke and mirrors.

You see them all the time in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Little Hondas with a gigantic and noisy tailpipe, invariably driven by someone about five feet tall, almost hidden behind the wheel. Lots of chrome, lots of noise, not all that much ooomph to show for it.

It’s an image which kept coming to mind as I tested Perfect Resize 7 which, in a past life, was better known as Genuine Fractals. The product’s stated aim is to allow you to make monster prints from small files, with the best possible quality, better than your regular processing application can achieve.

PR7 claims to get a quart out of a pint pot, just like that Honda driver, and it can’t be done. As the old car guy saying has it, there’s no substitute for cubic inches or, in the case of digital imaging, large sensor sizes.

PR7 retails at a costly $70-100 and installs as a Photoshop, Lightroom 2 or 3 or Aperture 2.1 or later plugin, accessible from within each application. Alternatively, you can open your file in the stand-alone variant which comes with the download. The download is 38.5mB and there’s a useful base tutorial; the others refuse to open (and they want how much?) owing to carelessness by the makers, but use is intuitive ebough. I tried PR7 in LR3.

After checking that it’s correctly installed as a plugin in LR3 –

– I invoked it using a favorite Canon 5D file of our son. The app opens within LR3 thus –

– and the controls are self-explanatory. I took the image from its (approx) 13″ x 19″ native size and enlarged it 4 times to 26″ x 38″, saving it back into LR3. The difference in the 5D RAW file size and the PR7 file size is startling –

– fully 19.4 times the size! Generation of the PR7 file took 45 seconds on my speedy Core4Quad 3.6gHz Hackintosh – a very fast machine. Do this a lot and you will be buying more hard drive storage fast. And if your computer is slow, be prepared to wait while PR7 does its non-magic. Is it worth it?

In a word, no.

Here are side by side screen shots of the 5d original and the PR7 versions:

5D original RAW image on the left; 4x PR7 on the right.

In addition to tweaking the micro-contrast (something LR3 can do with the Clarity slider), color balance changes slightly, as visible above – not good – and noise is reduced.

The original, taken on the superb 85mm f/1.8 Canon EF lens with my Novatron studio flash clearly shows the flash umbrella reflected in the eye. So does the PR7 version but the details are fuzzed in exchange for reduced noise and pixelation. It’s far clearer with full screen display of the original images than in the reduced size here. Frankly, you can get as good or better results using LR3’s native noise reduction tools with a touch of sharpening, without the nasty color shift PR7 introduces. You profiled that monitor for a reason, no?

So if you want wall sized prints – and PR7 does offer a nice tiling option but not something I would blow $70 on – and don’t want to be buying ever larger hard drives for the ridiculous file sizes created by (not so) Perfect Resize 7, save your money and use LR3 as is. Further, the tiling option does not work properly with LR3 – I told PR7 to make a tiled print with two constituent images of 18″ x 24″ each for a 24″ x 36″ original on two prints. When reimporting back and trying to stack the modified file into LR3, a single image is saved even though I told PR7 to ‘stack with original’. Save it to your desktop and you get the two images required which then have to be reimported into LR3 – a royal pain. It’s simply faster to tell LR3 to print a 24″ x 36″ original and do it in two passes.

More for OS X users.

Following on from yesterday’s article about Menu Bar apps, here are some others I simply cannot live without on my Macs and Hacks.

Mouse Locator:

This installs as a System Preference pane and flashes a cursor circle to help you find your mouse cursor. Incredibly useful with multiple displays where the mouse cursor is easily lost. If instructors making software teaching videos used this their work would actually be possibly to follow. As it is, everytime I watch some video on LR3 or Photoshop I end up frustrated trying to see exactly what the mouse is being clicked on. I run this on all my machines. More here.

Total Finder:

Apple’s OS X Finder stinks. In Lion it positively reeks. Total Finder takes out some of the reekage with enhanced features like split screens and is highly recommended. Total Finder integrates tightly into OS X and version updates after new OS X releases are timely.

More here.

Spam Sieve:

By broad acclaim, SpamSieve is the best spam filter in the universe for Apple Mail. The one in Apple Mail works about as well as Finder, meaning hold your nose. Michael Tsai, the author, does a superb job of keeping it updated for new OS X releases. SpamSieve integrates tightly into Apple Mail, the latter much improved with the ‘Conversations’ feature in Lion. It’s the best $30 you will ever spend, from the change left after junking your iMac and building a reliable Hackintosh. More here. I have been using this app since OS Panther.

NetNewsWire:

This journal’s choice as the best software of 2009, NetNewsWire puts the lie to the saying that ‘information is power’. Properly filtered and delivered information is power, the fire hose of the internet browser being for losers whose time is worth little, prefering aimless surfing to focused content delivery. Thank goodness these nitwits exist – who else would we sell all that Chinese crap and American TV sitcoms to?

For the iPad I recommend Reeder which does a far better job of using the touch interface.

Second Bar:

Another huge failing of Apple’s Finder is its inability to display the menu bar on more than one monitor. SecondBar, still in beta for what seems ages now, has just been updated for Lion and is now pretty stable. It replicates your menu bar on additional displays and stops a lot of mousing about. It used to work on my third display which is attached using a USB-to-DVI adapter (the two DVI ports on the video card being used) but no longer does so. Shame. More here. Quite why on earth this is free beats me.

SteerMouse:

I use an old Logitech bluetooth mouse which never came with Mac drivers. SteerMouse not only does the trick, allowing extensive programming of additional buttons, it also allows me to use a proper mouse with OS X in contrast to the execrable offerings from Cupertino. Over these many years, despite its focus on the UI, Apple has never got the mouse remotely right. The closest it came was the MightyMouse with its scroll ball, but the latter would clog and fail after use, and could not be repaired unless you took a hacksaw to the little bugger. I have tried many mouse utilities and this one is the best. A close second is Microsoft’s Intellimouse software (free download) which works well with their RF wireless mouse. Both install as System Preference panes.

EyeOne:

Many photographers use the EyeOne colorimeter to profile their displays. My rant about EyeOne back in February remains exactly on point. As I write the nematode worms at xRite have yet to release an Intel Lion version of their app, meaning your colorimeter remains a paperweight unless you have a Snow Leopard or earlier version of Mac OS available, which allows the related software to do its thing. Scandalous incompetence for a company which has a virtual monopoly in the colorimeter business. Like the jerks at Intuit, xRite has blithely disregarded millions of its users. Unlike the jerks at Intuit, they actually make a great product. What is it with these people?

ImageWell:

I make it a principle to rarely run pieces here without at least one image. Pictures are worth a thousand words. So no article of this kind can go without mention of ImageWell which makes the sizing and uploading of images to my hosting provider trivial. $20. I have used it for the 5+ years this blog has been around and it ‘just works’. When you see images here with circles or arrows to distinguish information, that’s ImageWell at work. It’s on all my Macs and Hacksters.

Transmit:

Transmit is another one of those utilities which has been around for ever, is constantly updated by its makers and one I cannot live without. It allows seamless upload of files to your hosting service. When I create a new slide show for display on my static photography blog, Transmit is the tool I turn to. Cabel Sasser, the author, is a genuine code genius.

Instapaper:

I do not know Marco Arment, the man behind Instapaper, but it’s probably a reasonable assumption that he does not have Apple’s cash pile of $76 billion. If he did, he would be suing their rear off right now for stealing Instapaper from him and adding it to Safari as a Reading List feature. Instapaper is so much better it doesn’t really matter. Whenever you see an article from your feed reader which deserves more time later, or one on your iPad which has Flash content which will not play, one click or two touches and off the URL goes to Instapaper for retrieval at your convenience. Brilliant, simple, effective and a massive efficiency enhancer.

Macaroni:

Remember that old saw that when something goes awry with your OS X installation that you need to go to Disk Utility and run ‘Repair permissions’? Fughedaboutit. Blow $10 on Macaroni and have it do this tedious task invisibly in the background.

Hard to think of a better way to spend $10. I have been using Macaroni for at least the last four OS X versions and I never have to run ‘Repair Permissions’. Never.

1Password:

To say that Agile Systems has committed the software cock-up of the year with its formerly great password utility 1Password is sort of like saying that Hitler marching on Russia was not so smart. A great product is currently ruined needing constant password input where before there was none. Wait a minute! Isn’t this app meant to cut down on password input? In Safari it’s now crap and in Firefox 6 (just released and no bloody different from Firefox 5) it does not work at all as we await an update from these dopes. Let’s hope they get on it. Finding anything on their web site is an experience solely for masochists and they are doing an excellent job of disregarding the outpouring of derision and anger for the mess they have made of a great product, which still works well (still – until they screw it up, I suppose) on the iPad and iPhone. 1Pissword, as I now think of it, keeps your password file on Dropbox in the cloud, accessible from any device, and tightly integrated into Safari and Firefox desktop browsers. Currently it makes Microsoft Vista look good.

iBank:

Giving Microsoft an excellent run for the “Couldn’t design software if you paid them” award are the stinkers at Intuit. OS X in its Intel version has been out, what, 5 years now? But forget about Inutit making Quicken run on Intel Macs. The current offering (cynically named ‘Quicken Essentials’ which always reminds me of soiled underwear) does indeed resemble toilet paper and the last ‘good one’ (relative term given its suckage) was Quicken 2007. If you update your Mac OS to Lion, tough, it won’t run. So after much scratching about I moved to iBank which did a decent job of converting the Quicken data file with 20 years of my life in it. The app is not so good at investment transactions, meaning I have to depend more on the crooks at Fidelity who have good database access when they are not screwing me on bid-asked spreads, but what are you going to do? A curse on Intuit and their kind. iBank’s forum makes lots of promises for improvements but they never happen, in my experience.

There’s a fortune waiting for someone who can make a cross platform, competent asset and money management app.

Bing:

Long time readers here know I detest Microsoft’s OS. In fact meeting a Windows user my first reaction tends to be one of caution, much as, say, meeting a fat person who is too friendly. Both have lots to say about their standards, or lack thereof. I prefer neither in my home or office. So when I tell you that I abandoned Google for Microsoft’s Bing on all my hardware over a year ago, you may raise an eyebrow. It’s a case of the lesser evil. Microsoft is an incompetent but successful monopolist and I have nothing but tremendous regard for Bill Gates. He’s right up there with J D Rockefeller in my book and like the oil baron is doing great things for the world (having also first tried to destroy it) with his capital.

But the main reason I prefer not to use Google is that I deeply resent a business model which is based on theft and whose creators perpetrate the sham that what they ‘give’ you is free. Google steals your ideas, your photographs, your financial data and your very identity, then sells it to others for gain. And you are going to store your data in their ‘cloud’ using their ‘free’ office apps? Get a life.

While I rarely do free form web searches (mostly a waste of time with paid results topping the list) when I do it’s using Bing which also shows me a stunning photograph daily on its home page.

VirtualBox:

Last, and most certainly least, sometimes even Mac users have to run Winblows. You can pay money to VMWare or Parallels for their products and continue the frequent lock-up experience which comes built in to every copy of Windows through at least XP SP3, or download nice Mr. Ellison’s VirtualBox free from Oracle and install Windows within this little prison, whence it cannot escape to pollute your pristine OS X workspace. VirtualBox rocks, has industrial grade support from Oracle (who bought it along with Sun a while back and have continued to move the product to strength) and you can run any number of other OSs within it. A great product, despite the company it keeps.

Why, for those who still don’t get it, ‘it’ being the fact that the OS has more to do with efficient computing than hardware, and who are still running on a non-hacked Windows box, you can even load OS X into VB on your Windows machine as in the following snap where OS X is running on a Win 7 computer:

Enough already. Get a Mac or make your own, and get your life back.