Category Archives: Software

Running Lightroom on the iPad

iPad, Lightroom

Prepare to have your mind blown.

Yes.

You read that right.

I am using my iPad as a remote viewing and control device for Lightroom, which is running on my desktop HackPro under OS X Snow Leopard.

The iPad app I am using is named LogMeIn Ignition and costs $29.99 for the iPad. You think that’s a lot? To allow you to run any of the apps on your desktop from your iPad wherever there is wifi? Gimme a break.

After installing LogMeIn Ignition on the iPad, download the free LogMeIn application for every computer you wish to control remotely and start it up on that computer. So far I have just set up the HackPro in the office and here is how my account at LogMeIn looks, viewed in Safari on the HackPro:

Moments after invoking LogMeIn on the HackPro desktop, I started up LogMeIn Ignition on the iPad, made contact with the HackPro, touched the mouse symbol on the iPad and …. loaded Lightroom 2 remotely from the iPad. This is what the iPad’s screen displayed:

Lightroom 2 on the iPad

You can just make out the LogMeIn app on the HackPro’s screen – it’s the small circle to the left of the CPU sign in the status bar at the top.

Clicking/touching on the iPad’s screen moved me from grid view to full screen view thus:

Timings?

  • Two seconds to start the app on the iPad
  • Eight seconds to select the HackPro and login
  • Ten seconds to load Lightroom icon on the iPad’s screen and see what Lightroom is showing on the HackPro. I can alternate between the two views – full screen and grid in Lightroom by simply shaking the iPad. This is the equivalent of the two disparate monitor views on the desktop. Add four seconds.

The possibilities here are so huge I’ll stop for now while I begin to digest what can be done remotely, but here’s how the view changes from one to the other monitor attached to the desktop, by simply shaking the iPad:

Shaken and stirred – the full screen view in Lightroom, viewed on the iPad

Screen refresh on the iPad takes about a second, compared to instantaneous on the HackPro – you are sending a lot of data over wifi, after all. I see no reason why this would not work over 3G with the 3G iPad, though I expect screen refresh would be a good deal slower.

What’s that you say? You want to run ancient Rosetta apps from your desktop on the iPad, like Photoshop CS2? No problemo!

Photoshop CS2 on the iPad

What was all that about the iPad being suited solely to reading and games?

Photoshop CS5

Software

Things are not looking so good at ADBE.

If I were the CEO of Adobe I would be getting pretty worried.

Look at the issues:

  • Flash is going to die. Apple refuses to use it on its mobile devices and the alternative, HTML5, runs on everything, is bug free, fast and doesn’t spool up the fans in your computer when launched, drawing large amounts of power
  • Acrobat is mature and has no growth potential
  • No meaningful offerings for mobile computing
  • An entrenched culture of low energy and late to market
  • No focus, with time wasted on slagging Apple rather than making new products
  • The worst customer service on the planet, bar none
  • A core product which is, let’s face it, dead

Yes, that core product is Photoshop. Just as the LP reached perfection within its limitations when the CD was launched, so has PS reached a like peak and really has no place left to go.

The only significant additions to CS5 over CS4 are built in lens aberration correction (which you can get in a $25 PS plugin named PTLens which I recommend unreservedly) and Content-Aware Fill.

The latter option will be beloved of advertisers and dictators. Now when the Russians next rewrite their history books (“Let me check the history. Have we written it yet?”) and decide that Lenin is now persona non grata their army of retouchers will be replaced by a dude with CS5 which will likely as not be a pirate copy. Two key strokes and, hey presto, Comrade Lenin is gone.

Lenin? Nah! He was never in our band

What has not changed in CS5 is the awful user interface, one of the worst there is, or the egregious cost, hardly justified by ADBE finally making the thing run in 64-bit mode. Sure, a few pros will be unable to live without it, but a few pros do not constitute meaningful earmings per share, and if I was running Adobe, I would definitely be fixated on those:

A tale of two companies.

Adobe needs to craft some really innovative products, like Lightroom, for the mobile user. An iPad-using photographer is rarin’ to process his pictures on the road and a touch enabled, rethought Lightroom would be a hot seller. But, when you realize that the only reason Lightroom exists is because Apple came out with Aperture, forcing Adobe to react, then it’s not like you conclude that the people running Adobe, who seem to prefer spending their time slagging Apple over Flash use (or non use), are about to suddenly get it.

Think about this. Storage in the iPad is currently limited, so not much space for your RAW files. But a new mobile processing app will allow you to make all your changes on the road and then simply upload the RAW sidecar file with your processing data, which is very small, to your cloud storage. Thereafter you delete that day’s RAW originals from the iPad, once more freeing up space, your snaps remain on an SDHC card and your processing changes reside in the cloud. Once home you re-download the RAW originals from your SDHC card (at $20 for 8gB it’s not like you need to save on these) then your desktop app goes out to the cloud, downloads the minuscule sidecar files and hey presto! you are ready to export or print. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for something like this from Adobe.

At $660 for basic CS5 or $200 for the upgrade from CS4 I would say save your money and wait for someone else to come up with the next generation of photo processing tools unless, that is, you are in the Politburo.

As for ADBE stock – a great short after the near term earnings bump from CS5. Sad really, as without Adobe and Postscript and Photoshop, the Mac would likely not exist today.

Me? I continue to use CS2 (in Rosetta mode!) and still dread every time I have to roundtrip to it from LR2. My use is now restricted solely to correction of converging verticals.

iPhone Explorer

iPad, Software

An interesting app.

Yesterday I speculated about using the iPad as a storage device for pictures taken on the road. Let’s assume for a moment that the iPad version of iPhoto supports Panasonic G1 RAW or whatever your choice of RAW format happens to be.

It should then be a simple matter to connect the iPad to your home computer and, using iTunes, sync the devices in the same way as you do with the iPhone.

Meanwhile, until the iPad becomes available and some experimentation is done, I came across a free application named iPhone Explorer which permits files to be moved between the iPhone and your desktop.

Here’s a screen shot:

What you are seeing is a Finder-like directory of the iPhone – mine is the 2.5G original, by the way. The file named _1050431.RW2 is a RAW file I dragged and dropped from my SDHC card, inserted in my desktop, onto the iPhone. I then tried drag and dropping that same file onto the hard drive in my desktop and it worked perfectly. So if this application works with iPad (and there’s a chance it will or that an update will be crafted) you can use the iPad as a storage device in lieu of external drives when travelling with your camera. Where am I going with this? Simple. The less you have to carry on a trip the more likely you are to focus on taking pictures.

The advantage of an application like iPhone Explorer is that I do not want my photos which I have stored on the iPad downloaded into iPhoto on my desktop. I want the RAW originals imported into Lightroom. (Lightroom can already import JPFGs but that is of little interest to me). So by using the iPad as a storage and preview device, I can cull the losers on the iPad and, once home, import the remainder by drag-and-drop into Lightroom.

The only change I made to iPhone Explorer was to set the minimum file size it will accept on the iPhone at 14mB – slightly larger than the largest RAW file size produced by the Panasonic G1.

As you can see my iPhone only has 2gB of space, or enough for some 180 RAW files but this does prove that if you can get the RAW file into the iPhone (or iPad) then it’s easy to transfer it to your desktop. The issue then becomes how to get the file into the iPad, and I’ll have more on that when I have one in my hot little hands – if I can wrest it from our 8 year old son, that is!

Autoviewer

Software

A fast web display application.

I chanced upon the free application Autoviewer the other day which, once downloaded, can be used as a web display generator using iPhoto or Lightroom and comes in Windows and OS X versions.

I tried it with Lightroom 2 using the ‘Web’ module (first time I have ever gone there, believe it or not) into which Autoviewer integrates elegantly and within 30 minutes had uploaded a 42 slide presentation of recent street snaps which you can see by clicking the picture below.

San Francisco street snaps July, 2009 – January, 2010

Autoviewer uses Adobe Flash technology so it may be a bit poky on older machines. However, I used my netbook with its slow Atom CPU and it does fine. There are also SimpleViewer (tabular presentation) and PostcardViewer (what is says) options available through Lightroom 2, though the full screen approach seems to work best for formal presentation of photographs.

I know I have to edit this selection down, but thought a quick first look would be of interest, as I’m beginning to think that a slide show presentation is superior to the clickable thumbnails I have traditionally used on my web site.

Auto Blur

Software

Auto blur.

With smaller and smaller digital sensors lenses get shorter and depth of field grows. It’s tough to beat the laws of optics but, in my opinion, all those calling for ever faster small lenses to limit depth of field and thus differentiate the subject from its surroundings just don’t get it. That’s yesterday’s technology.

The faster the lens, the larger the lens, which defeats the whole purpose of compactness – the very attribute in a camera that makes you take it with you.

What I think is needed is what I call Auto Blurâ„¢. We already have face recognition technology. So why not add technology to blur everything that is not the main subject. Rollover the image to see what I’m talking about (renders fine in Chrome and Safari on my Mac). Refresh your browser if the image is not visible. Will not work on mobile devices.

Thumbsucker before and (mouseover) after AutoBlurâ„¢.

This is a typical G1 image with the kit lens at 18mm fully open at f/3.9. Everything is sharp.

Now, in this case, the background in the mouseover version was tortuously conferred using PS CS2 and the lasso tool – not my idea of fun – but why shouldn’t this be a simple user choice in the camera’s settings?

Software is cheap and weightless. Fast lenses are not.

Follow-up: A reader has alerted me to a Photoshop plugin from Alien Skin named Bokeh which provides many options for the blurring of backgrounds. However, the plugin is seriously overpriced at $199, as the key step – selection of what is to be blurred – remains the exact same time consuming process in Photoshop which I had to use above. So it’s not a solution. Combining face/shape recognition technology with auto-blurring is the approach for those who favor picture taking over picture processing.

Further follow-up: Anothe reader has pointed me to Nik Software’s Viveza 2 – see the Comments to this piece. I see two advantages and one drawback. The advantages are that you do not need Photoshop, as the plug-in will work with Lightroom or Aperture. Further, the selection tool in Viveza 2 is truly amazing – exactly what is missing from Alien Skin’s Bokeh which uses Photoshop’s clunky selection tools which are labor intensive at the best of times. But the key drawback of Viveza 2 is that it does not provide adjustments of sharpness which is what the above piece is all about. Instead (click the link provided at the end of Arun’s Comment) you have to resort to machinations in Photoshop once again. So if only Nik Software could add a sharpness slider to all the other sliders in their tool, that would seem to do the trick until Panasonic or Sony do this with in camera software. Or, even better, if Adobe decides to add this sort of thing to Lightroom – now wouldn’t that be nice?