Lightroom 5 Beta

Lightroom

Out now.

Adobe has announced the free availability of Lightroom 5 and as in previous releases the enhancements are substantive. Lightroom 4 brought greatly improved Highight and Shadow sliders and the team at Adobe has been diligent in bringing the latest RAW converters to LR in a timely manner. Most recently, they distinguished themselves with a revised release of converters for the Fuji X series of cameras which use a non-standard arrangement of pixels, resulting in enhanced image quality. Impressive.


Click the image to go to the download page.

Adobe reckons to have the bugs out by the summer and they have to be commended on the way they obviously listen to users. The final release will allow conversion of your existing LR4 or earlier catalog(s) of images. The current Beta version does not permit conversion, so I simply imported a handful of RAW images to see what was of interest.

These were the significant new features which caught my eye:

Automatic verticals and horizontals:

One click in the Lens Corrections panels and keystone distortion (leaning verticals) is (reversibly) removed, automatically. You have a choice of verticals, horizontals or both and it’s instantaneous. Be sure to apply your lens correction profile of choice to render lines straight (meaning you are removing barrel or pincushion distortion) before using this tool.

Visualize spots:

A new control renders the image in high relief to make finding spots easier. Very effective, along with a slider to change the degree of ‘spotiness’:

Simply click on the spot removal tool to invoke, then click the ‘Visualize Spots’ box.

Non-circular healing brush:

You can now elect to define an irregular area for use with the healing brush. The old circular functionality is retained. The size of the irregular area cannot be varied with the mouse’s wheel, whereas the size of a circular spot can be, as before:

Variable aspect ratios:

This allows stretching or squashing of an image with a simple slider. Very useful, and ideal for obese Americans:

I have an image where fixing verticals loses too much content. So I first squeezed it in LR5 using the new aspect ratio slider, then applied the verticals fix and the result was identical to what I achieved in DxO Viewpoint, and in a fraction of the time. Very nice indeed.

No code bloat:

There are many enhancements to other modules like the Book and Slideshow ones (the latter now allows embedding of videos). It seems that LR is on a 2 year upgrade frequency and this new release looks very promising. I’ll let smarter (?) users help Adobe work out the bugs and I expect the upgrade will be the usual $100, which is a bargain.

BBC iPlayer

Photography

Finally in the US.

I have complained before about the unavailability of BBC’s iPlayer web app in the US. When some priceless program was shown on the BBC in the UK with no export contemplated, the only way to view it was to impose on UK friends for a copy, a laborious process.

It’s no great secret that the taxpayer-funded British Broadcasting Corporation puts out the best TV and Radio on the planet. While taxpayer funding is seldom an attractive proposition it does allow the continued existence of culture in a UK market increasingly dominated by the criminal vulgarian Murdoch, a man who has systematically corrupted legality, good taste and decency in any market and medium he has touched.

Sadly, the BBC has the business acumen of a third world country, thus iPlayer is not available in the world’s largest market. However, thanks to instructions from a (British!) friend, a fellow expatriate, you can now easily enjoy iPlayer from the US.

To accomplish this sleight of hand, click the picture below to go to Overplay.net.


Click the image.

Sign up for the SmartDNS service only, for $4.95 a month, cancelable at will. You will be issued two DNS numbers either or both of which have to be entered in your device’s DNS settings. This accomplishes the simple goal of fooling iPlayer into believing that your device’s location is in the UK, allowing you to access iPlayer’s programming. Overplay.net accomplishes this by routing your program demands through a UK-located server. Quite why the BBC does not offer a like service for a similar fee, preferring to cede the revenue to an outsider, is way over my head. It’s hard to imagine a more trivial technical effort. Licensing too tough? Bosh. Look at what Apple has done with iTunes, all third party content, whereas most of the Beeb’s shows are home grown. They mostly already own the rights.

Here’s the entry in OS X in System Preferences->Network->Advanced->DNS:


These work only with an Overplay.net subscription.

In iOS the entry is in Settings->WiFi>right arrow. This also allegedly works with Windows – good luck with that.

This approach will allow any of your devices to access iPlayer whether at home or travelling where wi-fi is available. (Streaming video over a cellular connection gets to be very costly, very fast, and is not recommended). If your need is for home use only over your home wi-fi, you can enter the DNS address(es) in your Airport Extreme router and not bother with individual machines. Go to Applications->Utilities->Airport Utility->Edit and enter the DNS address here:

iPlayer allows you to save content to a local disk, just like with a DVR. The web app retains programming for 30 days and a local copy will last 30 days from the date saved.

What are some of the best features of BBC programming? Well, sports fans will immediately appreciate the absence of cloying, saccharine US commentary which immediately defaults to personal stories in lieu of focus on the sport to hand. You know, some utter swill about how the athlete overcame his dyslexia through professional cycling, abandoned a vocation as the next Shakespeare and triumphed against all odds, even if loaded to the gills with steroids. I’m a fan of Formula One and the British commentary is night-and-day better compared to the trash put out by the same Murdoch in the US on his truly wretched Fox propaganda channel. My other interest is cricket and of course that game is largely a stranger to these shores, though there’s fun to be had on the Stanford campus down the road where expat Indians enthusiastically apply willow to leather during summer weekends. The BBC’s cricket coverage on both radio and TV sets the standard.

The drama and comedy content on the Beeb is in a class of one, of course, and there’s ample programming for the culture vulture.

You can watch on an iPhone, iPad or iMac, and one of the best options is to use a MacMini connected to your big screen TV to enjoy shows on a large screen. Better yet, use something reliable and cool running like a HackMini which can be built for low cost. As far as I can tell, AirPlay is not implemented, meaning you cannot simply route content from a laptop to a TV connected to an ApppleTV device.


BBC Radio 3 – the last repository of all that is culturally great.

Best of all, I can now drop the premium pricing plan for my cable feed which I pay simply to get two Formula One races a month. Plus there are no commercials. What’s not to like?