Software of the Year

Lightroom

No contest.

By a country mile, Adobe’s Lightroom is my choice as Software of the Year.

While Lightroom has been around for quite a while, it has continually moved to strength and has never become a resource hog. It runs very fast on a capable machine, be it Mac or PC, yet will perform at quite usable speed on something more modest like my 2012 MacBook Air. Photoshop deserves like praise for speed; I’m still on CS5.

For cross-platform users, the LR catalog will load just fine in Windows and in OS X, and Adobe’s realistic licensing permits use on two machines. While it was hard to imagine any great improvements to LR3, LR4 surprised mightily with it’s greatly enhanced Highlights, Shadows, Clarity and Vibrance technologies, all materially improved from version 3. Used creatively, the first two begin to approximate the power of HDR with none of the complexity or garish results. Add a touch of noise suppression from the built-in controls and you have pretty much all you could wish for in day-to-day processing. With an outstanding database with easy keywording and filtered image retrieval, you are looking at a very powerful tool indeed. Aftermarket apps to load images to Shutterfly or to offer specialized processing needs are easily added. I find I rarely leave the confines of Lightroom for my processing needs, with round trips to Photoshop generally being restricted to perspective correction (PS’s tools are more powerful than LR’s) and, of course, to selectively blur backgrounds with the excellent Magic Lasso tool and Filter->Blur->Lens Blur. It would be great if Adobe was to add these functions in LR, but I suspect cannibalization of their PS cash cow is a key concern.


This merely scratches the surface of the metadata capabilities of Lightroom.

The one other external processing tool I use occasionally is Snapseed, which now accepts TIFF files generated from RAW originals, meaning no loss of quality. I use LR4 with two displays and it is beautifully engineered for this purpose.

Having chipped my many old MF Nikkors, I especially like how LR reads the EXIF data and automatically invokes the appropriate lens correction profile from the many I have created. It just takes one more bit of drudgery out of the processing step.

Best of all, LR is remarkably inexpensive for what you get, which includes Book, Map, Slideshow (really outstanding) and Print modules, all well integrated, for $115 at Amazon. The best book I have found is by Martin Evening who not only writes and illustrates his instructions well, but also takes great photographs. A $33 bargain which really should come with the software.

Update 12/17/2012:

This just hit my inbox. At $129 there are few better bargains in photographic software:

Instant: The Story of Polaroid

Book reviews

Book review.

From Chapter 5:

This is a gripping read, not least for nuggets like the above where Edwin Land, the creator of the Polaroid camera, forsees the cell phone as we know it today.

Inventors like Land come along once a century. In the 19th it was Thomas Edison. In the 20th, Edwin Land.


Click the book for Amazon US. I do not get paid if you do that.

I got the Kindle edition and the pictures are both poorly reproduced and wrongly formatted. Get the hard copy version.

I have experienced the thrill of seeing a black & white print appear in a tray of developer under a red safety light. I enjoy the immediacy of digital almost daily. But nothing compares with the sheer magic of watching a Polaroid SX-70 color image appear in your hand some sixty seconds after the print has emerged from the camera.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in photography and awed by a genius who made the last great photographic invention of the analog era.

Bob Gorman

Photographers

An old friend passes.

Few simple things in life afford me as much pleasure as taking the pup for his evening ramble two blocks down the road to drop in on Bob Gorman at Weimax.


Bob Gorman, RIP.

To Peninsula regulars, Weimax is as good a wine shop as it gets. None of the mass merchandising of the big chains or the soullessness of the supermarket. The people here know you (and your dog) by name, are always happy to make time and chat, and no one minds waiting while locals shoot the breeze.

For me a trip to Weimax with Bert the Border Terrier always meant one thing. A chat with Bob on the latest happenings in the world of photography. We would share exhibitions we had seen and strongly felt opinions, and often exchange books from our burgeoning photography libraries. Recently he loaned me a monograph on Lee Miller and I replied with one from my collection. Bob loved photography and he had a rare eye for beauty.

I last saw him just before Thanksgiving when he explained he was off camping in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz forest off Highway 35, close to the Pacific, with the obligatory few bottles of favorite red, with food to match. Bob lived well. Today I dropped by with a recommendation for a new book only to be told by his assistant:

“Bob does not read any more.”

“Aw, c’mon, everyone reads. And Bob reads more than most.”

“Bob had a stroke at Thanksgiving and passed away.”

Bang. A brutal message, no punches pulled. But how else to put it? I was floored.

Just like that. No warning, no alert, no tell-tale hints.

Bob had moved on.

There’s nothing I can say.

Bob’s Flickr page survives him. It’s a repository of the many, many things he saw, loved and felt he had to share. Bob was a great enthusiast, and he knew all that is good and right, be it Paris, Italy or his beloved Bay Area. To get a sense of his eye, take a look at his pictures from Le Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. His Flickr pages – where he posted under the pseudonym ‘Romaneye’ – are wonderful resources for those looking for subjects. (Yahoo account needed to login).

Here’s the last snap Bob posted to his Flickr pages which contain thousands of his images – it’s a study of the Olsen Residence designed by architect Donald Olsen in 1952. Bob and I both loved the work of Julius Shulman and the modern International Style architecture school, so ably portrayed here. I cannot think of a better way of saying ‘Goodbye’ to a dear friend.

Wherever he may be, you can be sure of one thing. Bob is still busy snapping the many things of beauty his eye could never resist.