Adobe TimeWaster Pro CS Whatever

in General Rants , Sunday, January 29, 2012

The last 5 weeks or so have been pure hell. Essentially non-stop 12 hour working days, with hectic weekends in between. No time for photography. No time for life. This weekend was supposed to be the start of some sort of recovery period. I spent most of Saturday comatose, but today, Sunday, after shovelling last night’s snow fall, I thought I’d spend some quality time printing out a few images. Relaxing, enjoyable, right ? Yeah, sure. So come 5:30pm I’m ready to kill somebody. In fact if I saw somebody, anybody, with an Adobe corporate t-shirt on, I’d whack them hard with the snow shovel.

Having been deceitfully tricked by Adobe into upgrading to a Photoshop CS5 I neither needed nor wanted before Christmas, I finally got around to trying to print from it today, to my Epson 3800.

I had read, ages ago, that Adobe, principally, but with Apple and Epson’s help, had managed to screw up printing (nothing important, just printing) and that there was some issue with v2 ColorSync profiles.

Some issue. Right: like print absolutely F*CK ALL except a pale cyan background.  I’d heard about this, vaguely, but I though it had to do with white areas having a cast, not the whole print.  I tried everything. Reinstalled the 3800 driver, re-started, etc etc, eventually dug into ColorSync and found that the profile (built with ColorMunki and carefully optimised) was indeed a v4 (naturally, since that’s up to date, and worked fine with Photoshop CS3 on the same OS - 10.6.8 - and the same printer). Trying a v2 profile, for a different paper, gave me a print.

So now I’ve got to rebuild all my profiles. Wasting stacks of paper. Until the next time I fall for one of Adobe’s useless, eye-wateringly expensive, bug-ridden pieces of crap they call “upgrades”.

Please, somebody, anybody, out us out of our misery and create a realistic Photoshop alternative. PLEASE!!!

Oh dear, Olympus….

in Olympus E-System , Friday, November 11, 2011

I’m not completely unaware of the current misfortunes of the Olympus Optical Co. That the company is being steered into the abyss by a bunch of arrogant management jerks is no great surprise - that’s one thing that there’s no shortage of.  If anything it might serve to at least tone down some of the more unpleasant aspects of Japanese culture, such as the pathetic obessession with “loss of face”. But never mind all that. What I’m find really disturbing is the general level of idiocy revealed on the various interweb fora, where people (I use the word reservedly) are practically foaming at the mouth in outrage at Olympus and of course Olympus cameras (I really am starting to believe that, yes, most people in the world ARE more stupid than me, at least on the evidence I see). 

But it does sort of make me wonder if maybe I need to think about changing camera systems.  But not for long. I am worried that Olympus will go out of business, which is certainly possible, but not because I’ll lose face because I’ve got an Olympus (actually the logo is taped over. Has been for years. Helps avoid idiot conversations), but because the ONLY company making a reasonably large-sensor camera with a 4:3 aspect ratio might stop doing so. And then what ? Yep, only choice will be the mindless apeing of the 35mm frame, a ratio which only came about by happenstance in the first place.  Well, maybe Panasonic will carry on, or buy Olympus, who knows.

I’m finding I take more and more vertical format shots, without really being conscious of this. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t in “35mm format” - it’s too narrow.  Without Olympus, the next step above compacts is, er, the Pentax 645D, which I’d love to own, but is way above my pay grade.

Steppin’ out… actually taken with my Ricoh GR, not an Olympus

Actually for selfish reasons I sort of hope Olympus does go down the plughole. Then the lemmings will rush to buy Nikons or whatever and even fewer people will be shooting 4:3, and I’ll have less competition. Not that I’m competing.

Admin Notes

in General Rants , Friday, July 22, 2011

Just a quick note about some changes and fixes I’ve recently made here.  First of all, I finally noticed that the links in my RSS feeds were broken. That means that my faithful subscribers (yes, all 4 of you) couldn’t click through to the articles on the site. Brilliant, no ? Anyway, it’s fixed now. Sorry.

Second, you’ll probably notice I’ve added little bubbles showing how many comments there are on the articles listed on the home page. I haven’t bothered with handling the case that there are more than 99 comments. That will be a nice problem to have.

Finally, I am going to try to get around to making commenting easier, especially for frequent visitors (that’s, er, Tim. And maybe RB, sometimes).

Have a wonderful weekend
David

Ethical quandry

in Film , Saturday, May 21, 2011

I recently spent some time on the Eolian Islands, out of season, avoiding the (extreme) heat and the tourists. While I was there I visited one of my favourite locations, the main crater of Vulcano, a couple of times.

I was to find that since my last visit, the crater floor had been adorned by some “urban art” in the form of stones spelling out various declarations.

Straight from the scanner: the crater floor

I don’t really want to start a rant about this. Some people will find it unacceptable, to the point of wanting the perpetrators skinned alive (and they’ll likely as not have British or German passports), others will just take it as part of the scenery, others will find it amusing. The question is, should I include it in my photograph ? Certainly the last I time I visited, it wasn’t there, or at least if it was I didn’t notice, so it wasn’t in my pre-conceived photo either.

Not quite what I had in mind

So should I edit it out ? It’s not a very challenging task in Photoshop CS3. Possibly even less so in CS5. But is it “cheating” or “wrong” ? It is after all a fairly major part of the scene, and there’s a very long tradition of graffiti in the Mediterranean area. Pompeii, for example, has plenty. So in fact it could be considered to augment the interest.

To start off with, I didn’t think too much of it. I’d decided right from the outset that first I was going to edit it out, and second, most probably, it was going to be converted to black and white. Like this:

What I had in mind

Apart from any ethical issues, am I actually playing it safe and traditional here, and churning out yet another boring, bland photo with nothing to say for itself ? Justified, worthwhile edit - or lost opportunity ?

I’m really not so sure…

Media Pro becomes Media Pro

in General Rants , Friday, May 20, 2011

So. It’s finally happened. (Microsoft) Expression Media, ex iView Media Pro, is no more, and PhaseOne MediaPro 1 is with us. And in theory - or it least, in marketingspeak - the integration of Media Pro and CaptureOne, which I wished for at least as far back as 2005, is here to.

Well sort of.  This is what we actually have:

BEFORE

Expression Media ... or is it MediaPro ?

AFTER

MediaPro ... or is it Expression Media ?

So the difference is… the panels are dark grey instead of light grey, the colours are a taste to be acquired, to be polite, and the icons are nearly invisible. Excellent.

The much trumpeted CaptureOne “integration” is at lipstick-on-a-pig level, and apart from that very little has changed, although if you take a look at the product forum, you might conclude that an impressive range of exciting new bugs has been inserted.

In itself this is hugely disappointing, but on the plus side, the product is at least being developed, and by a focused and far more appropriate owner than Microsoft. I think we’ll have to wait and see what Phase One manage to do over the coming months. If release 1 is a stable (cough) baseline which they will then build on with frequent updates and bug fixes, including some significant new features, fine. If on the other hand they think they’re done here, and can sit back for two years and then release another facelift, well then it’s RIP.

As far as I’m concerned, I would like these features:

- reworked and easily application-interchangeable hierarchical keywording

- proper integration with Capture One, not whitewash

- support for versions, stacks, whatever you call variations on a master image. ANY master image, including scans (this then helps with proper C1 integration

- options for UI colour scheme