Category Archives: Software

Perfect Effects 8

Lightroom, Photographs

Free software, impressively engineered.


Click the image for the download.

onOne Software is offering its Perfect Effects application, usually $100, free for a limited time. You can download it by clicking the above image.

I did so and it installs as a plug-in in PS CS5, LR 5.4 and Aperture, becoming immediately available in LR which is my default processing application.

The engineering could not be better. Export a file from within LR’s Develop module and you get a simple display with a large number of effects to choose from. Save the file and it is saved as a ‘.psd’ copy in your LR catalog, adjacent to the original. I especially like the ‘Glow’ effect when subtle hints of age are called for in an image, and you can easily modulate the glow amount with a slider. Selective application of effects is also possible. A nice tool for the working photographer.

Here’s how the application’s display appears:

And here are the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images:


Before Special Effects ‘glow’.


With Special Effects ‘glow’.

ImageWell

Software

A CAD app.

ImageWell is a $20 lightweight CAD app which I have been using for ages to upload images to this blog. It stores the path for the image which is simply dragged and dropped on the app, resized with a couple of key strokes, one more click adds the drop shadow, and off she goes to the server.

But this small app offers far more than image upload. With a very undemanding learning curve you can create charts and technical drawings of remarkable sophistication. Case in point my 12 year old son had to prepare an earthquake evacuation drawing as part of an earthquake awareness class. Now while this is somewhat reminiscent in utility value to those ‘nuclear safety’ newsreels of the cold war, which showed children hiding under desks for protection from Ivan, the project was a lot of fun and he emerged an ImageWell expert. With a minimum of tuition he was able to produce this:

This took him about an hour, including learning time.

Adding text to images is equally simple. Drag and drop the image, insert a text box and you are done.

ImageWell is highly recommended for Mac OS X users and bloggers, and will also do nicely for all but complex CAD projects. If you are making technical instruction manuals, it’s hard to beat photographs annotated with text using ImageWell.

Lightroom 5.3

Lightroom, Photographs

Fixes a frustrating bug in OS X Mavericks.

Each major release of an operating system from Apple brings with it renewed fears that the ceaseless dumbing down of the user interface will bring with it new horrors, more disabled third party software and much time wasted on remedies. Indeed, since OS Leopard, 4 releases ago, I cannot think of any ‘enhancements’ in subsequent versions of the OS which have moved the needle on my satisfaction scale – with the possible exception of the addition of the frequently frustrating AppStore in Snow Leopard – and the loss of the excellent Rosetta emulator and additions of such primal idiocies like LaunchPad leave one scratching his head along “What were they thinking of?” lines. After breathing a sigh of relief once the ever more massive upgrade is completed and the anomalies sorted, the best one can say of recent OS X releases after the pain and wasted time required for installation is “Thank goodness nothing is broken”. For Hackintosh aficionados the problem is far greater, as every major OS release – and some minor – has brought with it massive upgrade headaches, one factor which contributed to my migration from that excellent breed to a used Mac Pro.

For most photographers Adobe is the vendor of choice for photo processing apps and their recent track record of upgrades puts even Apple’s shambolic performance to shame. Minor changes since PS CS3 have added little value, and the recent move of CS to a Cloud model means that you have to keep making monthly rent payments for the privilege of using Adobe’s PS until the undertaker comes along, or lose access to your catalog. Sure, CS6 is backward compatible for now, but would you like to bet how long that continues? Then there’s the small matter of Adobe losing a big chunk of its Photoshop code to hackers the other month, along with 10, 30, 100 or 500 million customers’ credit cards, depending which of their press releases you care to believe. Let’s at least hope that the code thieves come out with a better, cheaper product.

That said, Adobe has done an excellent job of keeping Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom (which uses the same RAW decoder) current with regard to the many new cameras coming to market, and their latest LR release adds many. If you own LR, which can still mercifully be run locally from your machine with no rent payments due to keep the software active, you can continue to use LR as your catalog/point of entry application for your files, round-tripping to your locally installed CS3/4/5/6 with no rent due to Adobe. Anything later than CS2 runs on Intel Macs without Rosetta.

The only significant bug I have noted in moving to OS Mavericks is that Lightroom lost the very useful feature of showing file counts in the Metadata panel. Now, mercifully, Adobe has fixed what Apple broke by issuing LR 5.3 which restores count data, as shown below:



LR5.2 metadata in Mavericks.


LR5.3 – counts restored.

I find this data very useful for tracking my activity levels. If I find them dropping I tell myself it’s time to get up, grab a camera and get out more.


A break from Xmas shopping. Union Square SF, GX7, 17/1.8 Zuiko MFT.

Lightroom supercharged

Lightroom

More speed, free.

All this talk of speed in the guise of my Mac Pro adventures – click on ‘Mac Pro’ in the menu bar – got me thinking about speeding up LR5 even more. What follows should apply equally to earlier versions. I’m on Lightroom 5.

Lightroom stores data in three files, and all of mine reside on a spinning hard disk drive:


LR files.

These are pretty much self explanatory:

  • .Previews.lrdata is the file with Previews. To maximize LR’s speed, generate 1:1 previews on import of new images. This greatly speeds access to images and you only burn time once to generate these, rather than each time you want a full-sized preview.
  • .lrdata stores development adjustments you have mede to your original files. LR never touches the original files, rather storing a set of metadata in this file telling LR what adjustments were made.
  • Pictures. These are your original RAW/DNG/TIFF/JPG files. You can actually go into this directory and see them in there.

My Previews and data files are 36GB, whereas my Pictures directory is 268GB.

Given that LR only accesses the Pictures directory on generation of exports, slideshows or prints, this means it is using the Previews and data files for most of the Library viewing and Developing that the user demands. So it makes sense to have these files on the fastest access device, and that means an SSD, not a poky HDD.

Accordingly, I moved the following two files to my SSD:


LR files moved from HDD to SSD.

This took 6 minutes. Here is the process taking place:


LR access files being moved to an SSD.

Here are the files on the SSD. after I cleaned their names up:


LR files on the SSD.

Until SSD prices fall further, it’s uneconomical to use an SSD for storage of the original files in the Pictures directory – they remain on the slow HDD.

You can now start LR by double-clicking on the .lrcat file newly moved to the SSD. Next time around you will find that your desktop icon remembers that’s where you want to start LR from, and it will remain the default starting point for loading of the catalog and previews.

The results are well worthwhile if you have an SSD with sufficient space to do this.

On my Mac Pro start up time falls from 7 to 3.5 seconds. First entry to the Develop module falls from 7 to 4 seconds and is instantaneous thereafter. You cannot hit the arrow keys fast enough – the application will easily keep up with you as you page through images in glorious 1:1 preview size. Deletion of unwanted images is instantaneous.

Me? I’m erasing my SSD Bak drive, used as a recovery from various predecessor Hackintosh catastrophes, mostly occurring on OS X upgrades – the bugaboo of many a Hack – and dedicating that SSD to the LR catalog and previews. I will move the backup of SD Boot from SSD Bak to a 120GB partition on one of the HDDs in the Mac Pro, where there is space to spare. Recovery is unlikely to be necessary, and should it be so, the slow HDD bootable partition will be just fine.

Lightroom 5

Lightroom

Worth the money.

All the enhancements I set forth here are in the final release, made yesterday. The upgrade from earlier versions is $79 and easily worth the money, not least for the splendid keystone correction which is built-in.

Conversion of my catalog, some 10,000 mostly RAW files totaling 265GB with another 35GB of full size previews, took around 5 minutes and performance seems identical in all respects to Lightroom 4, meaning excellent. The application opens in 5-7 seconds on my nuclear powered Hackintosh (Sandy Bridge i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX660 GPU), and image-to-image changes are instantaneous. Life-size previews really help here and I recommend you create those when importing files. The penalty in terms of storage space is modest, with 13% additional space used in my case.


Rain in Burlingame, CA. A rare sight.

Photo taken on the iPhone 5, processed in Lightroom 5.