I’ve added a skribit widget to the left-hand pane of the blog. Scroll down a bit and you’ll find it.

You can make suggestions for things that you’d like to me to write about or ask questions that you’d like me to answer. You can also vote on other people’s suggestions if you see an idea that appeals to you.

Adobe have put together a very funky web presentation to promote Creative License and it includes articles and videos from Nevada Wier (click on presentation #2). You'll find a lot of introductory information about the various Lightroom modules and some great pictures in the gallery. Nevada also runs a blog.

On a separate note, I'm finally going to be moving this week and it looks like the next few days are going to be hectic so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't get around to posting as much as I'd like. The good news is that when I'm settled I've got a whole series of educational and entertaining material to post on the blog and there'll be news of some exciting new ventures. I hope you'll sign up for the RSS feed and/or my newsletter, if you haven't already. Also, look out for announcements of a change in focus for me in future months. Watch this space!

Tags: nevada weir, lightroom

Anyone can download a 30-day trial of Lightroom 2 Beta but if you want to get your hands on an extended trial that won't expire until August then you either have to already own Lightroom V.1 or have a friend who can send you an invitation.

I've got five invitations to send out to the first five people to leave a comment on this post AND, if you're not already a subscriber, to sign-up to my newsletter.

Tags: lightroom

Prompted by Mitchell's comments about Capture One and an article in Professional Photographer magazine recently, I decided to continue my rather unscientific test of various RAW processors by including a look at SilkyPix Developer and also reinstalling Capture One for a second look.

I'd dismissed Capture One as a serious contender in an earlier post as it had seemed especially slow to respond and I couldn't see myself working with it on a regular basis without there being a serious challenge on my already shaky sanity. Closing down all other applications does allow Capture One to run a bit more smoothly on my machine and the various development sliders do give a real-time view of alterations as I make them. The Levels and Curves tools, however, do not show instant feedback and it's necessary to set a new point and release the mouse to see the effect of the change you've made. Anyway, it's not a deal-breaker, just a niggle.

I'm also searching for that X factor.

What I'm really concerned with in this test is discovering which RAW processor will produce the best images from my RAW files so I'm looking at tonal range, contrast, noise levels, chromatic aberration, lens distortion correction, exposure control, hue and saturation management, etc. I'm also searching for that X factor, which processing method is going to help me make my images zing?

I've started with a single test image and I've run it through Lightroom 1.4, SilkyPix Developer and Capture One 4. The image is of two boys at a charity project at New Delhi Train Station. Just to go off-topic for a moment, the charity takes homeless kids who sleep in and around the train station and feeds them, offers shelter and the opportunity to get some schooling. The kids also organise their own guided tours of the station, taking tourists to see areas that they might otherwise miss. It's a great charity and although one sees poverty in India at every turn, seeing it through these boys' eyes really leant it a very different perspective.

...

It seems more than a little inconsequential to return to a discussion of RAW processing after thinking about those kids in Delhi train station but that was where we came in to this post so I guess we should continue. I'll post about my experiences in Delhi Train Station in the next few days.

...

For the purposes of the test, I imported a single DNG file to each application, left the White Balance setting as it was set in the camera, removed all sharpening and noise reduction, left the exposure and other settings unchanged and exported a full-size TIF file. A further test should really see me using all of the options available in each package to see which gives the best results then. I know, for example, that Lightroom's "Clarify" slider can boost the mid-range contrast in an image in a subtle way that the others may not. Anyway, for this test, you're looking at Vanilla conversions with no tasty toppings.

If you're like me, when you read those comparison reviews in magazines you skip straight to the "Conclusion" summary at the end of the article to discover which of the contenders the reviewer thought was best. Well, to save you scrolling down the page, here it is.

Conclusion:

For this image at least, Capture One produced the best output. Indeed, the results were unexpected to me as the C1 file retained a lot more detail in the shadow areas than the Lightroom or SilkyPix files and the detail retained in the boys' faces was far greater. I hadn't expected to see quite so great a difference. It's difficult to demonstrate on a blog post, there isn't room to display the images at full-size and your monitor and browser combination may skew the results too but I've posted three high-quality JPEGs made from the TIF files below. The JPEG conversion may alter some things too so you'll have to trust my observations.

There's quite a lot of contrast in the boy's hair where the light's hitting it and the Lightroom version didn't give the same range of tones as the C1 file did. Consequently, there seems to be a lot more detail in the C1 file and if you look at the boy's face at 100% you'll see much greater detail retained. The SilkyPix image fell somewhere between the two, producing lots more detail that the Lightroom image but not as much as the C1 file.

The C1 image looks far more accurate to me.

The colours in the C1 file are more subdued (compare the boy's orange and yellow jumper) but I think the C1 result is more accurate. Indeed, compare the front boy's face in the Lightroom and C1 images and I think you'll see quite a difference, even in these JPEGs. The C1 image looks far more accurate to me, whereas the Lightroom image seems to have had a saturation bump. The SilkyPix image falls again between the two others in terms of colour accuracy.

Now, this is all down to personal preference and a matter of interpretation. There's also the question of whether a more saturated image is better for certain uses. If I'm shooting images for a travel company, they might want what I'm going to call the "Sunny" look so the Lightroom image might be the one I'd go for. However, the C1 image is the one that I'd choose for accuracy and I think it shows a far more realistic interpretation of the scene.


Capture One


Lightroom


SilkyPix

Both the C1 and SilkyPix files showed greater detail.

Finally, I zoomed in to 500% in each image and compared the area of the boy's brown eye. These screen shots won't reveal what I saw as they're too small but you might discern some differences between the three. Lightroom appeared to smooth out areas of similar luminosity, which resulted in some small skin blemishes appearing reduced. I sound like a beauty advert, "Lightroom smoothes out the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles". If I were a studio portrait photographer I'd go with Lightroom in a flash (pun intended) as those tiny blemishes are certainly less noticeable than they are in the C1 and Silkypix files and studio portraits tend to be all about flattering the subject, I guess.

Both the C1 and SilkyPix files showed greater detail and seemed to retain more tonal range. Lightroom seemed to tend to smooth and flatten the area across tones a little.



Capture One - Adobe Lightroom - SilkyPix Developer

From a usability point of view, I still can't beat Lightroom.

So, what does all this boil down to? Does it even matter? Nobody's going to look at files at 500% and who's really going to notice the small differences that I claim to have seen? Furthermore, isn't it all down to usability at the end of the day? Isn't the best application going to be the one that gets the job done most efficiently?

Well, yes.

And no.

From a usability point of view, I still can't beat Lightroom, even with it's rather inelegant GUI. I can run through a day's shoot quickly and easily in Lightroom, get the results out and be ready to shoot the next day without coming home to a backlog. Capture One's not a DAM application so it would be unfair to compare on that basis but I'd struggle to get as many RAW files processed in C1 in the same time as I could with Lightroom. With SilkyPix, even more so. I haven't mentioned the interface in SilkyPix but it's pretty confusing.

So Lightroom's still going to be my work horse. It's the tool that gets 98% of the job done and in terms of being a tool to work with, it's easily the winner. However, for those 2% of images that I'm really excited about, the ones that I'd want to pay more attention to and that I'd want to give the very best treatment to, I'd be tempted to run them through Capture One and suffer the speed issues in the knowledge that the resulting file is more likely to give the detail and range of tones that I'd be looking for.

I still have a couple of days trial left with Capture One and I'm going to see if it will integrate easily into my Workflow. I see that it will output DNG files so it's possible that I can include C1 processing as an optional step in my workflow without too much hassle. SilkyPix, which I've pretty much dismissed, won't output DNG files so it's probably a non-starter for me but the processing looks superior to Lightroom's to me, although that's on the basis of this one image so take that conclusion with a pinch of salt.

Overall, I'm very pleased that I was prompted to take a second look at Capture One so thanks Mitchell and Nic for your comments. I'd like to see if I can get it working more smoothly before I buy a copy but it was certainly worth testing it again.

All of the three applications I've mentioned here are available as trial downloads and Lightroom is also offering version 2 as a public beta.

Links
Adobe Lightroom
Phase One Capture One 4
SilkyPix Developer Studio

Luminous Landscape's review of Capture One

Tags: capture one, lightroom, silky

I'm probably about half-way through my comparison test of Adobe's Lightroom 2 (beta), Apple's Aperture and Capture One and there are some early observations that might be of interest. I should reiterate that my testing methodology is far from scientific and largely based on whatever work I happen to be doing on any given day. The purpose of the test is to discover which of the three tools works best for my particular digital workflow and it's quite possible that you will come to different conclusions. People tend to like to draw a line in the sand about their equipment and can become quite defensive about their choices so I just want to say that if what you're doing works for you then go with it.

The first thing to report is that there's been an early casualty in this three-way shoot-off. Whilst the interface for Capture One 4 was funky and I immediately liked it, the package was just so slow to operate that it was quickly clear that it was going to be impractical for me. I'm using a one year-old MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz with plenty of spare memory so I would expect my software to whizz along quite happily. It's a laptop but that's how I work and if the software won't run on my machine then that's pretty much the end of the test as far as I'm concerned. So, whilst Capture One might boast all manner of functions and special effects that would impress me mightily, there was never any chance that I'd get as far as finding them. Importing images was reasonably quick but altering any aspect of a DNG file converted from a 1Ds MKII RAW original took an age. Also, there didn't seem to be a way to see alterations in real-time. I may be wrong about this but I'm used to moving sliders up and down and seeing the changes immediately in my image. In Capture One it seemed that I had to release the slider to see the effect. Subtle changes therefore seemed very difficult to achieve. And as it was taking a while for those changes to become apparent I quickly lost patience and ditched Capture One before the trial expired.

If anyone wants to prove me wrong about Capture One and tell me that there's a special preference setting that overcomes these problems then I'd like to hear it. As I say, the interface looked interesting and I wanted to like it so I'd give it another go if I thought I'd see an improvement.

Aperture is like dancing on ice, as smooth as silk and wrinkle-free.

So now on to the two remaining contenders. Firstly, I should remind you that Aperture 2 is a full release and Lightroom 2 is a public beta so we excuse it some quirky behaviour. What we don't excuse it for however is the clunky interface. Lightroom's modular panels are already feeling old-fashioned and although I'm pretty familiar with it so can move around quickly with keyboard shortcuts, it's just ponderous. In contrast, Aperture is like dancing on ice, as smooth as silk and wrinkle-free. It boasts that particular "Apple design" feeling that immediately beckons you in. Open Lightroom and you feel like you have to work, open Aperture and you feel like it's time to play. If they were people, Lightroom would be a dour, stodgy Yorkshire lass sitting in the corner of a smoke-filled, dingy pub drinking Stout and Babycham whilst fingering her moustache and mumbling at her whippet, whilst Aperture would be a leggy blonde model perched elegantly on a stool in the corner of a Soho wine bar, sexily sipping a cocktail before beckoning you over to her table with a smouldering pout and and a suggestively raised eyebrow.

I fear that I may be stepping up to the point at which I over-egg this analogy. What's that? I've passed the point already? Fair enough. Let's forget the aesthetics and talk about delivery. I'll pick out two things that I've discovered in my recent trial, either one of which could be a deal-breaker for me but which, when combined, probably sound the death-knell for one of these applications as far as I'm concerned.

Firstly, Chromatic Aberration. Yep, I've said it and now it's out there we'll just have to deal with it. I use the best Canon lenses available but occasionally I'll get a case of CA and boy does it itch. Clearly, it's something that's best cleared up as soon as possible. This image was shot at the wide end of a 16-35mm f/2.8 L lens (1/4 sec, f/22, ISO50 for those who like to know) and shows CA, or purple fringing, around the areas of high-contrast.


If you look at the lamp post you'll see a green stripe on the left and a purple stripe on the right where light of different wavelengths is being resolved at different points on the sensor. Probably. We don't really care why but we do want to rectify it. In Lightroom there's a cunningly named "Chromatic Aberration" tool and I bet you've already guessed what it does.
Yep, move the sliders from side to side and be ready to catch your jaw as it drops open with amazement as the fringing disappears. There's also a "Defringe" setting that will pick out the highlight edges in the image. That's all well and good. Hover your mouse over the image above to see it with the fringing removed.


So now to Aperture where a search for the Chromatic Aberration removal tool reveals... nothing. There isn't one. Has it been renamed in a cunning ploy to prevent Windows-users from taking over the Apple software? Well, possibly. Searching the Aperture help files reveals no mention of Chromatic Aberration. It does, if I remember rightly, mention "Fringing" briefly and the way to deal with it is apparently by manipulating the "Moire" and "Radius" tools. All I can tell you is that I fiddled and fiddled and the "before" and "after" image shows the results. I think I actually ended up making it worse. If you hover your mouse over the Aperture image you might not even notice any difference.

Further research on the web revealed that there are other ways of removing CA in Aperture that involve colour replacement or something but by that stage I'd lost interest. It seemed that the blonde in the Soho wine bar might not be all she was making out to be and the dour Yorkshire girl was beginning to look more appealing.

If somebody can explain to me how to remove Chromatic Aberration in Aperture as easily as it can be removed in Lightroom then I'll be keen to learn but as far as I can see, it's just not possible without a lot of fiddling and that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

I'd say that the Aperture brushes are more intuitive at first glance

So, on to my second finding. Both Lightroom and Aperture have new "Dodge and Burn" tools that supposedly provide functionality previously only found in Photoshop or similar photo manipulation packages - although nobody here is using anything other than Photoshop, right? OK then. Here's the thing, they both work equally well and although there's some differences in the way the tools operate it's nothing that you wouldn't overcome if you were using one or the other package regularly. I'd say that the Aperture brushes are more intuitive at first glance but they both do pretty much the same thing. Aperture's brushes are pressure sensitive whereas Lightroom's are not so if you're using a pen and tablet that might be a consideration. However, this might be dealt with by the time the full release of version 2 hits the shops.

But here's the killer. When you dodge and burn in Aperture a new TIF file is created. In Lightroom, you make non-destructive adjustments to the original RAW or DNG file. So if I make a small dodge and burn adjustment to 100 RAW files in Aperture I end up with an additional 100 TIF files, all taking up space on my hard-drives and creating a new asset management dilemma and requiring additional back-up space. Essentially, my files are duplicated and now I've got a pre-production file and a slightly different post-production file. What would be the point? OK, in Lightroom 1 I would have had to create a TIF file and then had to import it to Photoshop to make any dodging and burning adjustments but that's not the point, in Lightroom 2 I don't need to do that.

There are some things in Aperture that still tempt me: the inclusion of Noise Ninja and Photoshelter upload plug-ins for example. Yes, there are things that would make my digital workflow life simpler and it does feel like you're doing something creative when Aperture's open but with no decent Chromatic Aberration tool and the thousands of additional TIF files that I'd end up with it's just not enough.

I'll keep Aperture on my Mac until the trial expires and I'll keep an eye out for developments that overcome these issues but, for now at least, it looks like I'm turning my back on the gorgeous blonde in the Soho wine bar and heading home, hand-in-hand with the dour Yorkshire lass. She may not look much, but she can deliver - and that, my friends, is what counts.

Tags: aperture, lightroom, capture one

My sources suggest that today will be the day that Canon will announce the long-awaited arrival of the EOS 5D Mark II. Watch this space! And remember, you heard it here first.

Tags: canon

Google Maps now offers Street View for certain US locations. For those of us who'd be just as happy reading an Ordnance Survey map as a good novel, the recent advances in mapping technology have been amazing. Once upon a time the technology was limited to the legend in the corner of the map where you could remind yourself whether a cross with a circle was a church with a spire or a tower.
Now it's possible to zoom into your chosen location and to see a photo of the street. You can turn around, follow the road in any direction and even zoom in to read a sign by the side of the road. I took a quick drive around Manhattan this morning, pausing outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue before heading south into Greenwich Village to check out the parking situation outside my favourite cheese shop on Bleecker.

It looks like somebody drove up and down Manhattan's streets with some kind of 360 degree camera strapped to the roof of their car, taking a snap every few metres. Interestingly, although there are Street Views available on Google Maps for New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia and many other US cities, Washington has been left off the map, so to speak.

No doubt there'll soon be a Street View operation in the UK and I'll be keeping an eye out for the Google Street View Van so I can rush to the window and gurn for the camera.

Tags: google maps

Prompted by a conversation with some of my friends from Winchester Photographic Society, I've given myself a couple of hours today to perform some software testing. Our conversation began as a general question about the way digital camera sensors record information but the answer made me want to re-examine the process to see if I'm getting the very best out of my digital files.

Let me start by saying that my testing is in no way scientific and there may be some of you who spot obvious errors in my reasoning or the process that I've followed. You'll be correct. I'm not a technical guru, I'm a photographer. One of my favourite analogies is to draw comparisons between photographers and musicians and in the same way that a musician doesn't really need to know the exact process used to make their instrument to be able to play a decent tune, it isn't essential for a photographer to understand digital workflow in order to take a decent picture.

However, an appreciation of the mechanics of the trumpet or the oboe, or an understanding of the dynamics of acoustics will, I'm sure, help the musician to be more "in tune" with their performance and perhaps the same is true for photography. Maybe having a grasp of the mechanics of digital workflow will help a photographer get the very best out of his instrument. I guess, at the very least, it's not going to hurt. Read more...

Tags: lightroom, aperture, capture one, tutorials

There's a very comprehensive review of X-rite's new "Color Munki" over at northlight-images' web site. Despite getting off to a dodgy start by spelling both "colour" and "monkey" incorrectly, the nice people at X-rite seem to have produced a tool with a host of useful functions. Not only will the Munki (seriously, we have to call it this?) calibrate your monitor for you, it will also calibrate projectors, printer output and read spot-colours from almost anything.

I like the idea of the digital pouch application that alerts clients if they're viewing an image on a system that hasn't been colour managed. It's all very well setting up your own monitor very carefully but as soon as your image files have been burned to a DVD or e-mailed to a client they're in no-man's land and the results could look hideous in the wrong environment.

At first glance the ColorMunki seems to have had some serious thought put in at the design stage and the resulting hardware appears smart and almost Apple-like in its finish. The little neoprene pouch looks funky too and it seems that the whole set-up would easily squeeze into the corner of a suitcase. So it might be that I can start taking a profiler with me when I travel. Whatever next?

If a ColorMunki comes my way I'll post a review of it and make a comparison to the X-rite Monaco Optix that I'm currently using.

Tags: colour profiling

Just to round off my earlier post about this web site and the software that I use to construct it, when I'm done there are a few checks that it's worth making to ensure that your hard work is being received at the other end in the form that you expect. So here are a couple of web sites that I use to make those checks.

• Browsershots - produces a screen shot of your site as it appears in various browsers with different screen sizes, resolutions etc.
• Sitescan - checks your web pages for correct setup of Google Analytics
• Feedvalidator - checks that your RSS and Atom feeds are properly formatted
• W3 Validator - checks to see if your HTML has valid markup

Lastly, to get some idea of who is visiting your site and what they're doing whilst they're there, I use:

• Google Analytics - the ubiquitous visitor analysis tool
• Feedburner - for information about readers of your news feeds

Tags: web site

So, I've taken a very quick look at the Adobe Lightroom V.2 Beta and there are some excellent things, some unexpected things and a couple of disappointments. Overall, I'd say that it's another step towards making Lightroom an indispensable application for most photographers and, perhaps more importantly, a step towards eliminating the need to have any other image processing, workflow or asset management software.

I'm not going to use the Beta full-time as it's still a little buggy and I'm hoping that a couple of the things I saw as oversights might yet make it into the final release. Whether they do or not, I would think the upgrade will be well worth the £9.99 that Adobe are going to be charging. Wait! What's that? You think it will be more than £9.99? Seriously? I'll bet you a Tall Chai Latte that I'm right.

Here are my first and somewhat hurried impressions:

Likes

• Importing images seems much quicker.
• Filtering is much more intuitive and the ability to create custom filters based on dates, location, EXIF or IPTC data will be useful. The filter tool is much more accessible in the interface too.
• Smart Collections are wonderful and I've just realised that I can create a set of Smart Collections that will show my images at the various stages of my workflow. So I can have a Smart Folder for images just imported, another for ones with keywords applied, another for when location and GPS info has been added etc. etc. My images will automatically move through the Smart Filters as I process them and I'll never need to wonder what stage in my workflow an image has reached. (further inspection reveals that I've over-egged this one and that a lot of the things I expected to see aren't available. I nearly moved this into "Glitches" but decided that I liked the Smart Collections enough, even without some of the more obvious inclusions, to leave it here).
• Post-crop vignetting allows a vignette to be applied, as you might guess, after cropping. This wasn't possible in V.1.
• The addition of a function to add exported images to the catalogue might seem like a small thing but the implications are quite significant. Currently, I use iView (or Expression Media as it has become) to manage my incoming and outgoing images. It's going to be easier now to get Lightroom to manage the full library and it's another step towards Lightroom becoming the be all and end all of digital workflow management software.
• The ability to apply a small amount of sharpening to exported images

Glitches

• Lightroom doesn't like being moved around Mac "Spaces" and seems to relaunch the Finder
• I wasn't able to open V.1 catalogues and couldn't import V.1 catalogues into V.2. I think this will simply require V.1 catalogues to be upgraded.
• Ouch! Rendering 1:1 previews was very slow and processor-hungry. It seemed to take longer to render previews than in V.1 although that's not a scientific test and rendering hogged the processor like a selfish child with a new teddy.
• Using full-screen mode the second monitor display turns on and off and on and off and on...
• Although you can view an image in a second monitor, it's not possible to make changes here, you still have to use the first monitor and the changes are rendered after application. This seems like a half-way house to me. The point of having a second monitor is that you want to be able to make changes directly into it. This is a disappointment.
• When building a Smart Collection it's possible to look for images where "Keywords" = "are empty" but there's no "are empty" option for "Caption" or "Title". Surely an oversight. Also, with one keyword added the "are empty" criteria obviously returns nil but there should be an option to search for "Keywords" = "less than 20 words" or "less than 200 characters" or something similar.
• the "Stack with Original" checkbox inside the Export dialogue remains stubbornly greyed-out

I found that looking at the V.2 Beta left me feeling alternately impressed and disappointed. No release is ever going to offer all of the things that you might desire and Lightroom is still far and away the best, most used, most time-saving and least dispensable piece of software on my Mac but the inability to alter things directly on a second screen seems like a missed opportunity and the limitation of the Smart Collections seems like another function that could have offered even more than it does.

Having said that, the improvements to the interface are welcome, the localised adjustments will mean the I open up Photoshop even less than I do now and the little "Add to catalog" button in the Export dialogue is another nail in the coffin of iView from my point of view.

I'd recommend looking at the Lightroom 2 videos that have been posted to lightroomuser.com and also suggest Matt Kloskowski's Lightroom Killer Tips podcast if you're a regular Lightroom user.

But now I have to return my attentions to Lightroom V.1 to do some real work. There's no rest for the you know who.

Tags: lightroom

I realise that being excited about the release of a software upgrade might be considered a little sad and yes, I probably need to get out more. However, Adobe Lightroom has become such a large part of my daily workflow now that the announcement of the Public Beta release of version2 of the software was greeted with a raised eyebrow and a pause for a celebratory cup of tea in this office. Yes, celebrations are low-key in my world but the inner excitement is volcano-like and here now are my eruptions:

• Localized (sic) Corrections. That's dodging and burning to you and me. Non-destructive manipulation of certain parts of an image without needing to open photoshop
• Multiple Monitor Support - At long last I can take full advantage of multiple monitors and be able to view an image on my big monitor with the toolbars out of the way. This is going to be a BIG bonus.
• Better Photoshop Integration - The ability to export images as Smart Objects. Cool!
• Smart Collections - Not sure how these will work yet but I assume we'll be able to make collections based on certain criteria, dates, exif data, locations perhaps. Smart Collections by location, if I weren't so keen to project a demure exterior I'd admit to salivating.
• Keyword Suggestions - Lightroom will, apparently, start to suggest keywords when new words are added. Spooky!

OK, so the download has finished and I need to go and test it out. I'll report back with my findings later in the day.

Download the Public Beta of Lightroom 2
Lightroom 2 Discussion Forums
More info on Jack Nack's Blog

Tags: lightroom

Before I start this post proper I will have to apologise to Masher for changing my web site template once again.

Sorry Masher.

Unfortunately, the previous template was giving me RSS gyp and we all know how painful that can be. In order to make it up to Masher I invite you to peruse his recent blog post about the WayBack Machine, a site that caches earlier versions of web sites, although it probably didn't even have time to cache the last incarnation of my site, so fleeting was its appearance.

The WayBack Machine doesn't cache all images but it does still give a pretty accurate version of how web sites looked in the past. For example, in 2003, gavingough.com looked like this, in 2004 like this, like this in 2005, turned into a photoblog in 2006, looked a bit dull in 2007 before emerging as the beautiful butterfly that you see now.

And it's got to stay like this for a while now, not least because we can't keep confusing Masher. Tell you what, if I change the web site again this year Masher I'll give you my 1Ds MKII.

Probably.

I'm occasionally asked about web design and in order to give me something to point people to, here's a quick list of the software I use.

• Rapid Weaver - from realmacsoftware is unquestionably the easiest and most flexible web design tool for Macs I have ever had the pleasure to use.
• fluidgalleries - from Evrium, is what produces my portfolio pages. It's simple to administer, the customer support is second to none and they have a two-for-one blitz sale every month. Mention me if you're buying from them as I'll get a referrer bonus!
• Silk - from Josh Lockhart is the RapidWeaver theme that you're looking at now. Like all RapidWeaver themes it has loads of configuration options and is easy peasy to use.
• Kuler - is an online colour management site from Adobe where you can create and store colour theme combinations. Pick a colour and the site will display the analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound and shade colours to go with it. Hours of fun. No, really. Hours!
• Feedburner - manages my RSS feed. Click on the link on the left hand side of this window to subscribe if you haven't already.
• Haloscan - manages the comments on my blog. It's free, integrates with RapidWeaver and seems to be able to identify spam very accurately.

I think that's about it. If there's anything else you'd like to know then feel free to ask. I have to stop playing with my web site now to go and do some real work.

Probably.

Tags: web site

Understandably, there is some sentimentality about the potential passing of Polaroid instant film and this has prompted a campaign to save the technology and keep the film supplies alive. The campaign organisers have had discussions with both Fuji and Ilford about the possibility of licensing the Polaroid technology. I hope they are successful, not least because I have a future project in mind where I'd like to use Polaroid film and it's going to become increasingly difficult to get hold of the film if nobody's prepared to take it on.

Tags: polaroid

Buffalo have announced a 500GB MiniStation TurboUSB hard drive that comes encased in a shock-resistant cover. It has a fixed, wraparound USB cable, which is handy and, best of all, is USB powered so doesn't rely on a separate power supply.

I currently use Freecom Toughdrives and LaCie All-terrain drives when I'm travelling but this is the first 500GB bus-powered drive that I've seen.

Although the extra space would be great (my current drives are 120GB only) I think the wraparound USB cable could have been a bit neater. The Freecom ToughDrive, for example, has a USB connector the slips back inside the case so there's no chance of it getting caught on something and pulled loose.

Tags: hardware

Joe Barrett, a photographer from the South West of England, is offering a free eBook detailing tips and tricks that he's put together for Adobe Lightroom. All that Joe asks in return for the free pdf download is that you ket him know if you find it useful.

Joe's eBook offers some useful tips if you're starting our with Lightroom and, as always with an application as comprehensive as Lightroom, even the more experienced users among you will find some new tricks.

Even small things like being able to show typographic fractions for exposure information (page 11) and being reminded of the "Synchronize (sic) Folder" option (page 17) are useful tips that most of us would probably have overlooked. Cheers Joe!

Tags: lightroom

This is the first and, as far as I know, only tablet Mac currently on the market. It's made by Axiotron and has only recently hit the shops. I've yet to see any reviews of the Mac Tablet but it certainly looks like a flash bit of kit. It's so much more productive working with a Wacom tablet rather than a mouse and so the appeal of being able to draw directly onto the screen is obvious.

Tags: mac

The Polaroid company are saying goodbye to photography, having announced that they will stop producing their instant film stock. I briefly had a Polaroid camera many years ago and the film was just too expensive but it's fair to say that being able to produce those instant results was akin to being a magician back in the 1980s.

Tags: kit

No, it's not the US Presidential Primaries, it's arguably just as important though.

SuperDuper is a back-up package for Macs that creates a fully bootable system backup. I have my Mac set to wake up automatically at 5:59am each day and the SuperDuper backup kicks in at 6am. By the time I arrive at my desk there's simply a message to confirm that the back-up has been successfully completed. What could be simpler? In the event of a disaster, I can boot from my SuperDuper archive, which is stored on a dedicated Firewire drive.

And now SuperDuper is fully compatible with the Leopard OS so it really is a SuperDuper Tuesday!

Tags: mac

The Digital Photography Review web site, which is a great source of in-depth camera reviews, is launching a lens review section. The lens reviews will be illustrated by a fancy new widget.

"At the heart of the reviews is a unique interactive ‘widget’ has been designed to present the test results in a way that allows visitors to experiment visually with variables such as focal length and aperture and see immediately the effect such changes have on overall image quality, and to compare the performance of different lenses. The user-friendly presentation ensures that even those with limited technical knowledge of optics or digital imaging will be able to use the reviews."

What's great about the new widget is that allows you to set the focal length and aperture by sliders so you can see the relative performance of a lens across the entire range. There are only four reviews on the web site so far but I expect these to be added to pretty quickly.

Tags: kit, photography

I'm having some prints made by a pro printing company at the moment. And when I say "Professional", that's exactly what I mean. All the pro printers I've ever met have been passionate about their work. They eat, drink and sleep printing, know every pantone colour by number, can quote the weight of every paper stock ever made and can tell when you haven't included an ICC colour profile with your digital files just by sniffing the CD cover.

But none, I suspect, can quite compete with this guy:

Tags: printing, video, photography

Canon have announced a new digital camera in their EOS range. The 450D will replace the 400D and features a 12.2 Megapixel sensor. Yikes!

With Live View, the EOS sensor cleaning system, 9-point auto-focus and 3.5 frames per second this is an entry-level camera that packs a lot of punch.

There's a full review over at dpreview.com.

Tags: canon, photography

Concluding my uncustomary spate of blog posts, here is the nifty little MacBook Air and a link to where you can find out more about it. I see that it's due to retail at $1799 in the USA so you'd expect it to be about £900 in the UK. A quick look at the UK Apple store reveals that the Air is £1200. Why we have to pay so much more is a mystery to me but it seems to be an across-the-board situation that Europeans have to cough up more to satisfy their techno-addictions than our transatlantic cousins.

I also note that the standard MacBook Air comes with a 80Gb hard drive but that for an extra £900 you can replace that with a 64Gb solid-state drive. I guess the solid-state drive is more desirable because you there will be fewer issues with heat.

I'm amazed at the technology and the fact that it's possible to get so much into such a thin notebook. Having said that, there's not much to choose between a MacBook Air and a normal MacBook in terms of specification so you're really paying the extra cash for the size and weight reduction. I'll stick with my MacBook Pro for the time being although I guess that it won't be too long before Apple announce an "Air" version of the Pro.

Tags: mac

Well, surprise, surprise, Steve Jobs does indeed announce a new, weeny MacBook. It's called the MacBook Air, is wafer thin but has a full-size keyboard with 13.3" display. It boasts a 80GB drive as standard with Core 2 Duo at 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz.

My first impression is that it will be the product that further boosts the reputation of Apple for innovative design. I mean, he announced this shiny new notebook by sliding it out of an A4 manilla envelope for goodness sake. I feel a Magpie-like complex developing...

(read more at macworld.com)

Tags: mac

Further to my previous post about the possibility of Steve Jobs announcing a new, scaled-down laptop at this week's Expo, one accessory manufacturer keen to keep ahead of the game has already made their own announcement: "Expect a press release late Wednesday night regarding a new laptop case to ship this Friday if Steve Jobs announces a new laptop at MacWorld tomorrow".

Do you think they know something we don't?

(Original article on macworld.com)

Tags: mac

In last year's Macworld Expo keynote speech, Steve Jobs announced the arrival of the iPhone. If you want to hear what the "must have" Apple product for 2008 is going to be first then you can find live blogging from the event at macworld.com.

If you wanted to put money on a new, scaled-down MacBook Pro being announced (ideal for travel photographers, for example) then you'd get short odds around here as the rumours of such a device have been rampant in recent weeks. I hear that the mini Mac notebook will retail at between £800 and £1000, won't contain an optical drive and will rely on flash memory. Let's see what Mr. Jobs has to say.

Tags: mac

Firstly, I'd like to wish you a very Happy New Year. 2008 promises much and I hope that your year is an enchanting and rewarding one.

The start of a new year is always welcome from the point of view of the fresh start that it offers, the opportunity to clear away any cobwebs and to set off with fresh resolve (that's "resolve" as in the state of mind not "Resolve" the hangover remedy). I'm particularly excited about 2008 as it seems to promise much. There are, of course, many trips planned for me personally and I'm very excited about the new places that I hope to be visiting and the new photos that I hope to be taking, more of which later.

I'm kicking off 2008 in a great position professionally, with contracts with my top three stock photo libraries in place and knowing that each is keen to see new material so I'm hugely enthusiastic about the prospects on the stock front.

The Photo Workshops that I'm planning with Jason Friend are filling up fast. The Dorset workshop in April has already sold out and so we're hoping to add a second date on April 20th. There will also be another Dorset workshop in October and I'm joining Jason and Jo Sparks in Cumbria in February and we also have plans to tackle Hadrian's Wall. Watch this space for future plans for overseas workshops in Morocco and locations in South East Asia. The Photo Workshops are something that I've been keen on running for several years so it's nice to feel that they are now coming together.

For the Techies among you, I've spent the period between Christmas and New Year doing a complete uninstall on my Mac, replacing Tiger with Leopard, and re-installing all the software necessary for running a successful Travel Photography business. Apple claim that Leopard brings 300 new features to their OS and although they count some new desktop wallpapers as "features" there is enough in the new system to make the time upgrading well worth it.

If you're interested in the software that I use, you can find a complete list under my profile at iusethis.com. I have nothing against Microsoft but you'll see that we're now a Microsoft-free zone at Gough Towers, which I guess is something of a rarity these days.

Finally, on the techy front, I see that the tablet Mac is well on the way. I'll be interested in seeing how that works from a practical point of view as I suspect that it might be simpler to use than a laptop, especially when much of your work involves processing and cataloguing photographs.

Tags: mac

Apple have released a list of 300 new features which will form part of the new OS X (Leopard) Mac operating system. Well, they say there are 300 new features but six of the features listed are the six new screensavers so you have to take that number with a pinch of salt.

Nevertheless, Leopard offers Mac users a few more of those nifty things that make using a Mac so much more satisfying that using a PC. Little things like being able to click on a name in your address book and being shown the appropriate Google map for that person’s address. And, as we all know, it’s the little things...

Of more interest to photographers will be things like 16 bit printing, which will be more important in coming months as more printers and cameras begin to support full 16 bit technology.

The new OS also includes “Time Machine”, which will provide backup versions of your Mac that allow you to return it to a previous state or offer previous versions of files that have changed.

The “Preview” application has been updated and we’ll finally be able to manipulate PDF files easily.

I guess it will be worth waiting a couple of months for Apple to iron out the bugs but it might be something that makes an appearance on my Christmas list. Although I never know why I make a Christmas list, I invariably end up buying most of the things on it weeks before Christmas.

Tags: mac

iPhoto comes as part of Apple’s iLife package for the Mac. It’s pretty good and I’ve been using it to manage those photos that I want to keep out of my Professional workflow: pictures of friends and family gatherings, parties, etc.

The only problem is that the iPhoto library can soon get pretty bloated and it seemed impossible to manage multiple libraries very easily. I wanted to keep the main library on an external disk but a smaller library of the most recent photos on my laptop, so that they’d be available when I’m out and about.

Enter iPhoto Library Manager. Doing pretty much what it says on the tin, this software manages multiple iPhoto libraries, enables sharing of albums, copying, switching, iPod synchronisation and even a bit of iPhoto First Aid should your library throw a wobbly.

There’s a free version although that restricts copying to no more than 20 photos so pretty pointless really but the full version is only just over £10 and well worth the investment.

No, I’m not on commission although if anyone from FatCat Software is reading this...

Tags: mac