Category Archives: Software

Go where the money is

Economics 101 and Photoshop CS3

Well, the glowing reviews are coming in from the big magazines extolling the genius of Photoshop CS3.

So, what are you going to do? Trash your biggest advertiser? I don’t think so.

Heads up, class, for Dr. Pindelski’s Three Rules of Economics:

  • All control drives up price
  • A fool and his money are easily parted
  • When wondering about decision making, always go where the money is

I have been using Photoshop CS3 in beta form for some four months now so let me write in clear, unconflicted language.

This remains the hardest to use, worst user interface, clunkiest photography software available. Rather than improve on previous versions it just gets worse. The menu structure is so poorly organized we now have new options like “Show all menu items” in drop down lists of umpteen selections! Just try to find something basic like Image->Contrast/Brightness without this option.

Increasingly, real world photographers – those who prefer to take pictures rather than process them – are adopting user friendly products like Aperture and Lightroom. For the average person who does not need a zillion variables applied to his snaps, CS3 is simply God’s way of telling you that you have too much money, time or both.

The power of RAW

RAW offers a vast range of adjustments without destroying image quality

Here’s a case in point where RAW originals really make sense.

I was traipsing along through the charming side streets of Burlingame in the Bay Area of San Francisco when this neat wall sconce presented itself. Now I did have Bertram the Border Terrier straining at the leash in the other hand, so I did a pretty lousy job of holding the camera level. Add the high contrast of the scene and I knew some post processing would be de rigeur.

Here’s the original – if this was a film scan it would be pretty much past saving, the highlights comprehesively blown out (not hard to do with digital!), the perspective badly in need of repair, everything tilted.


Wall sconce. Lumix LX1, RAW, 16:9 format

Rather than recount the adjustments made in Aperture at length, here’s a snapshot of what I did:

I also had to roundtrip the file from Aperture through Photoshop, where I fixed the lens distortion and perspective, tilting the top of the picture towards the viewer to correct for the low angle from which the picture was made; Aperture does not (yet) provide these adjustments.

And here is the result:


Cropped for 4:3 format

The highlight details (look at the textured stucco wall finish) have been nicely recovered with a combination of the Exposure and Highlights sliders. While Aperture does not support Lumix LX1 RAW, I used the workaround explained here to give me the full range of RAW adjustments.

The ‘repaired’ version will scale nicely to an 18″x24″ print, something you would not dream of doing with the original.

Why Lightroom is a good thing

Competition Apple’s Aperture sorely needs

Imagine if taxpayers got to choose the lowest cost provider for things like the judiciary, law enforcement, taxation, national defense, freeway repair, and on and on. There’s no earthly reason why all these aspects of running a nation could not be privatized. Remember those Cajuns who gave George III’s mighty army of redcoats such a whipping at the Battle of New Orleans. Yes, a private, for profit army, which took on and defeated the most powerful country on earth. Presumably GW chose them not for their political correctness or sensitivity to other cultures, but because they could place a musket bullet square between the eyes of a Briish soldier at 200 yards. But as you drive to work on potholed roads, avoiding tax collectors masquerading as Highway Patrol cops (here in California their cars are emblazoned with inanities like “To Protect and to Serve”), wondering what war we will lose next, and troubled by the insane cost to you of all those inept government lawyers on your payroll, it begins to dawn that competition is a good thing. Always. It’s one of the immutable laws of a profession with few right answers – economics.

So it’s good to have a strong competitor for Apple’s Aperture. That supports another law of economics. All competition drives down price. Case in point – Apple cut Aperture’s price by $200 when Lightroom started to look like a serious threat. Apple’s growing arrogance and prigishness is naturally controlled by the spectre of an alternative. Great!

While I make no secret of my dislike for Adobe Corporation (or Macromedia or whatever it’s called today) and its products, I very much like that they have taken Aperture on, head-to-head.

Why do I dislike Adobe? Load a piece of Adobe software on your computer and you end up feeling treated like a common thief after jumping through all the security and authorization loopholes. The other day I tried loading my copy (‘my’ as in I paid for the wretched thing) of Photoshop CS2 on my iBook and what do I get? Some lawyer schmuck at Adobe telling me that I have exceeded the maximum number of installations permitted for my software. Never mind that one of these had to be erased as it failed to work, thus making me a thief of my own property ….

Further, the world’s worst user interface is to be found in Photoshop, so it’s little wonder I switched to Apple’s Aperture once it came out.

So when Adobe rushed out Lightroom in Beta form a while back, I took a quick look to see if there was any great value added compared to Aperture, and found none. It was amusing, however, to see that the brilliant, original thinkers at Adobe felt duty bound to try to emulate the look and feel of Aperure. Good artists copy, great ones steal.

Since my first look at Lightroom the application has had many enhancements and now seems a credible competitor to Aperture based solely on what I have read. Take that with a pinch of salt as I have not used the final version. Indeed, I will not be trying it as life is simply too short for so complex a change not one year after moving everything to Aperture. I do recall that (a less than fully featured) Lightroom was much faster on my iMac G5 than Aperture. Add the fact that there are still some glaring issues with Aperture that need fixing, and it’s good to have a robust, well funded competitor from Adobe that will run on Apple computers.

Aperture remains very slow to add RAW support for a broader range of cameras (though the just announced OS X 10.4.9 had added the Leaf Aptus backs for porfessional users) and, most critically, is just too slow for a high volume snapper working in RAW on anything but the very best Macs – meaning big dollars. So while I recognize that Apple’s goal is to sell hardware, and one insiduous way of doing this is by making software that runs too slowly on anything but the costliest machines, it’s great to see Adobe putting Apple’s feet to the fire. Let’s hope the next version of Aperture does not need a $7,000 computer to run properly. Ever tried exporting a jpg file from a RAW original in Aperture? How about a 60 second wait per picture?

Come on Apple – wake up or lose the fight. Make Aperture faster. Forget eveything else until you have done this. Not a little bit faster. An order of magnitude faster. Never mind more plug-ins, user controls, this or that doo-dad. The application needs speed. Everything else is secondary. I am more likely to upgrade to a better Mac because I like the user experience with my iMac than because I am frustrated with the slowness of your product.

Apple’s Pages revisited

Posters are easy with this great application.

I had decided to get some posters printed to better publicize my photo show in April which will be at a local wine gallery here in central California’s wine country.

Before trudging off to the printer and getting once more cross-examined on the arcana of RGB versus CMYK (printers speak in an exclusionary language all their own – can you wonder the profession is in terminal decline?) when it comes to printing the wretched thing, I thought I might give my home printer a try instead.

Now page composition is about the last thing I want to do. I admit it – I have little interest in learning some complex page composition application for once a year use, when my time is better spent taking pictures. But then I remembered that one of the fine Apple applications I have enjoyed a lot for book assembly is Pages, so I fired it up and looked for poster templates.

I clicked on ‘Gallery Poster’, clicked on the ‘Media’ icon which popped up my library of Aperture pictures (a feature which arrive with version 2.0.1 of Pages) and simply dragged and dropped a picture of choice onto the template. Pages resizes it automatically as long as you respect orientation – meaning a vertical snap for this template. Ten more minutes were spent on the narrative and the results is this – note the sexy drop shadow I added for effect:

OK, so I’m twelve minutes into this project and so I start getting ambitious. I make half a dozen posters, dragging alternative pictures into each, Export them to a medium quality (to keep file size down) PDF file which I then move to my web site server. A couple of dozen emails later to friends, asking their opinion, and it’s off to bed. The originals are in Canon 5D RAW format but Pages seems to know all about that – smart!

Next morning a bunch of replies shows two clear winners and I print each on 13″ x 19″ satin paper on the Hewlett Packard HP90 ink jet printer. And it’s off to the gallery and local merchants to see how many I can get interested in hanging the poster in their windows.

Postcards announcing the show? No problemo. Into the Pages postcard template and we are done:

I’ll get some two-sided photo paper for these and rip off a few dozen on the HP.

Now is that interactive design or what?

Now back to taking pictures.

Printer profiles and root canals

There’s little difference.

When making a couple of test prints for my son’s annual birthday picture I realized that the prints were coming out far too cool toned compared to the screen image.

Oh! boy!

Something had changed – whether my screen had aged or my HP DesignJet 90 printer has changed, or the Commies had got to it …. or some combination of these calamities.

While a colorimeter is a nice tool, you can profile your screen almost as well using Apple’s built in profiler, accessed in System Preferences->Displays->Color->Calibrate:

I find a target white point of 6000K gets me the closest screen-to-print match in my environment. Yours will differ.

Then I loaded the latest, updated drivers from HP. It always pays to have the latest drivers for your paper of choice.

What is surprising about this process is how much the perceived colors of your print will vary as you walk around the house with it. My display space is in a corridor with warm, incandescent lighting, so I have to balance skin colors to be right in that location.

They say that to evaluate a sound system use the voice or piano for calibration because we all know how those should sound. Well, for prints, use a human being whose skin color you know.

The results are worth it:

Some day computers screens and color printers will come with built in colorimeters (the latest professional models from HP now have these built in) so that this sort of thing becomes less of an agony, obviating the need for test prints. Stated differently, printer profiling with the current stage of desktop computer technology compares unfavorably for fun with a root canal.