Lightroom Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Teton Photography Club

January 12, 2015

Getting away from iPhoto

If you own a Mac and have ever downloaded pictures to your computer, you’ve been prompted to add images to iPhoto. This is a very handy program for you to organize, edit, and share your photographs.

The program is built in, it’s free, and it’s quite powerful for the cost. Many people use the software and been quite happy with it.

However, if you photograph a great deal, are serious about your shooting, and really need to upgrade your images, the only major software on the market now is Lightroom. It has far more capability than iPhoto, being able to manage images with keywords, collections, heavy editing, and seamless integration with Photoshop.

iPhoto to Lightroom

What happens when you have overwhelmed the abilities of iPhoto and you want to expand your repertoire, go pro, or whatever else you might like to do with your images? How do you get these images out of iPhoto and into Lightroom easily? Unfortunately there’s no easy answer. There are software packages out there to do the conversion but there’s nothing that’s truly dominating the market.

You are most likely going to need to convert manually. Before you break out in a cold sweat, don’t worry, it’s not a terribly complex deal, just a bit laborious. However, once you make the switch to using Finder to organize your photos on the Mac then use Lightroom to edit the ones you want to work on, you’ll be set.

Mac, iPhoto and Lightroom tutoring

I spent the afternoon with a private lesson student working on exactly this process. There were over a hundred events in iPhoto to convert. At first it seemed overwhelming, but once I shared the tricks and procedure of how to make the conversion and organize the files, the student saw it really wasn’t a complex process. Just a bit laborious. Once the folders are set up in Finder and the files are exported as originals out of iPhoto, it will be much easier to manage, view, and share these images.

If you’d like help with this process, contact me and I can arrange a lesson show you how to make the daunting task manageable.

The post Getting away from iPhoto appeared first on Aaron Linsdau.

April 18, 2014

When you feel the need for speed

I have commented previously about the time spent at a computer in our world of high-resolution digital photography. When I am not out shooting, I am often in the office in Jackson, Wyoming at the computer importing, tweaking, categorizing, editing, and backing up large numbers of digital images. One of the first things I learned was don't try to do this on your average laptop.

Today's high-end digital cameras produce raw file images that easily exceed 25 - 40 megabytes per image. Large multi-layer edits and specialized combined images, like panoramas, can easily kick the file size up to 100 or 200 megabytes or even a gigabyte in size. Handling these huge files takes some serious computing power.

My recommendation for an office / studio computer for high volume editing is a traditional tower computer - usually a high speed model designed for gaming. These gaming PCs have high power processors, lots of memory, a dedicated video processor with additional memory, and high speed peripheral ports to external devices. My office system is based around such a gaming PC and is shown on the cover photo of this post.

Let's take a look at some of the specs needed to handle today's large files and editing software. I have a CyperPower PC available from many gaming PC distributors. The heart of this monster is a 4.33 MHz dual-core processor accessing 16 GB of RAM and driving a high speed video card with an additional 2 GB of memory. This is a good kick-start but the real accelerator in the system is a solid-state drive (SSD) that houses all of the operating system and all software. The SSD is between 4 and 10 times faster than the best mechanical hard drive and the speed is evident when you are opening large files. There is a Blu-Ray DVD / CD drive for loading software and burning preview disks for clients. The traditional 2 TB internal hard drive and 3 cooling fans completes the guts of the tower.

I have chosen USB-3 peripherals. You can use fire-wire and other proprietary connections but I like the ease of use and wide compatibility of the USB connectors. The tower has 2 USB-3s in front and 4 in back along with a few USB-2s for I/O devices like keyboards and tablets. I chose Logitech wireless wave keyboard and wireless 4-button / wheel mouse for general input and control of the machine. Another port is used for a high speed card reader for my CF and HSSD camera cards.

Also using the USB-3 connectors are a series of external hard drives for back-up and additional archiving of images. I use a pair of 4 TB primary back-up drives, a 2 TB travel drive, and a 1T drive with the SSD image just in case this highly reliable device should fail or be corrupted. Another option is a RAID drive with automatic dual-drive back-up. It is on my wish list but the high cost and lack of higher capacity make me stick with the twin 4 TB externals. When a 16 GB RAID device is available at a reasonable cost, that will be the way to go.

The main editing interfaces are a pair of 27" ViewSonic high resolution monitors linked by HDMI to the PC. Two large monitors are almost essential to efficient editing. When I am working in Adobe LightRoom, I use the keyboard/mouse with the interface on the right-hand monitor and a full-screen image on the left-hand monitor. This saves constant switching back and forth to full-screen views after each edit. When I need to open PhotoShop for more advanced pixel-level editing, it comes up on the right-hand monitor above the Wacom Intuos-5 digital tablet. I simply angle my chair a little to the left and pick up the stylus and I am ready to go. When I save the edited image, it drops back into LightRoom on the right-hand monitor and I am ready to move on.

In a nutshell, the keys for efficient digital editing are a high speed processor with lots of RAM and plenty of external disk space for back-ups. Meticulous cataloging and key wording of images and daily back-up of your work should allow you to stay in the field shooting and minimize your time at the computer.

April 18, 2014

When you feel the need for speed

December 20, 2013

Added thoughts on Adobe software plans

The following is a guest commentary from Teton Photography Group Steering Committee member Nick Wheeler:

I feel compelled to enlarge on my comments the other night about the new Adobe subscription model. Here is a link to one place you can still get the physical version of Photoshop if you want it.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=850333&Q=&is=REG&A=details

It’s also available from Amazon and many traditional software vendors. It is being sold now for less than what I paid in 1992, never mind inflation.

There are some users who have been resisting the latest “upgrade” to subscription pricing. These are typically long time users who have been updating since v2.0, so admittedly we have long since amortized the upfront cost. Our monthly cost was more along the lines of 5.00, so even the current discount of 10.00 per month looks like a ripoff. It’s a double whammy as we did pay the upfront cost and now we are forced into the subscription model.

There have been no worthwhile upgrades to Photoshop since version 5, everything since has been window dressing. For me personally the CS6 upgrade has been a terrible rehash of the interface, burying features (such as command-shift-option-E) in an undocumented no man’s land and rejiggering key shortcuts in some of the traditional dialogs (such as curves) as to make them much slower and more inconvenient to use.

Another poorly understood and undocumented feature of recent versions of Photoshop is the growing disparity in functionality between ACR in Photoshop and Lightroom. This will only be exacerbated as time goes on, and not necessarily in a positive way. Is Lightroom to become a dumbed down version of Photoshop + ACR? Will the slightly better version of ACR in Photoshop be eliminated because it’s a bit harder to use?

It may prove that the average user is far better off with the last physical version of Photoshop, combined with more advanced Beyer interpolators such as Raw Developer and more robust media management, my favorite tool of the past decade or so is now owned by Phase One and is sold as Media Pro. The end user would be far better off right now with CS6, Raw Developer and Media Pro than subscribing to the Adobe program alone.

I think it is in every photographers best interest to maintain a two horse race in software development for photographers. Blindly subscribing to the Adobe solutions may be a long term lose lose unless more competition enters the space. It would be great if enough end users agreed with this notion, did not subscribe and forced Adobe to hit the pause button on this strategy.

Admittedly it has been a great strategy for Adobe insiders with giant stock options on the line, providing them with a gratifying short term bump in the value of their options. For the rest of us – maybe not so great.

Nick Wheeler