mac
The iPad just became a must have for me
I just saw the video review of the iPad Camera Connection Kit adaptor by Terry White and basically the iPad is now #1 in my gadget wish list. Terry confirmed all the things I wished the iPad would do when you connect the Camera Connector.
- Reads RAW files out of the camera
- Previews the RAW images without a problem
- Apps can read the RAW files inside the iPad
One of the great things Terry shows is that you can connect a card reader to the iPad and download from your Compact Flash cards (the card format most professional cameras still use). This is huge since the Camera Connector only has 2 options, SD connector or USB connector.
I’ve always lusted after an Epson P6000 for it’s ability to preview files and work as a photo backup on location or a trip, but it’s ridiculously overpriced so I never considered purchasing one.
Now for the same money I can buy an iPad and trust me, it’s WAY more advanced and useful. I wouldn’t be surprised if Epson started to discount the P6000 any day now.
Check out the video at Terry’s site while I go put a few more dollars in my piggy bank.
Controling Flash (the internet kind)
Flash. In photography it’s an amazing tool that lets you have light wherever you go. It allows you to simulate sunlight and create cool special effects. You should learn to use and control flash if you want to expand your lighting knowoledge (unless you plan on shooting only during bright sunny days and even then you should use it!).
Today though, I will give you a little tip on the internet kind of Flash. The Adobe kind. I’m a fan of Flash. From the beginning it allowed me to create cool animations and interfaces and my current photography website is in Flash (here). But Flash has a couple of trade offs and yesterday I found a cool solution for some of those trade offs.
As a tool to create internet ads Flash just bugs me. Flash is known for being “crashy” and taking up heavy resources from your computer. Advertisers use it to create bright, jumpy animations that can get pretty annoying. And here’s where my recommendation comes to the rescue.
It’s called ClickToFlash and it’s a Mac only option (let me know if there’s a similar product for Windows out there). You download it and run the installer and in a couple of seconds an invisible shield has been raised against Flash on the internet.
From that moment on when you are browsing the internet all Flash content will be blocked automatically. You decide which animation you want to see and which you don’t need your computer to waste resources on. To show you how this looks here’s a screen capture of the New York Times with the plugin installed.
See that huge gray rectangle on the right? Yep, Flash.
Here’s the page without the plugin and all Flash content loading from the internet:
As you can see I didn’t need to download that big ad on the right when I arrived at the New York Times. It’s not that bad (although it did have a distracting animation) but I do prefer not to see if I can.
Ok so what are the downsides? Well, check out the page for the Space channel without Flash:
And here’s the site with everything loaded. Funny, in this case the ad is a normal html banner but the content of the page is Flash:
Another nice thing about ClickToFlash is that there is a preference you can set that tells it to offer you a higher quality videoclip when you visit sites like YouTube (it’s called H.264 but that’s just for the geeks). With this option turned on you can now visit YouTube and if there is a better quality version in H.264 of your video it will show it to you instead of the Flash (lower quality) version.
Here’s where you can get the plugin…and I did say it was free right?
Snow Leopard – Features I’m digging
Here’s a couple of things I’m really enjoying about the new OS:
Yes, this is something that should have been done ages ago but now that it’s an official Apple setting I don’t have to mess with installing third party utilities to have the date appear on my menu bar all the time. You can’t configure it at all but this is enough for me.
The Dock now has a cleaner interface for the pop-up effect when you click on a folder or applications….
…and now you can drill down inside any folder until you get to where you want. A slider appears on the right when there are too many items in the folder. Nice.
Another cool new setting in the Finder is the ability to see your icons at up to 512 pixels in size. That is gigantic when it comes to icons and you might think it’s not that useful but when you are looking for photographs or PDF’s this is great. You can see your images clearly and check the differences between the versions you have saved.
With PDF’s you can actually see the pages and make sure which document you want to open. This also applies to Pages documents and Numbers documents.
This are just a few of my favourites up to now. More to come as I keep exploring.
Snow Leopard this Friday
The rumors were true and Apple is releasing it’s system update named Snow Leopard this Friday August 28th.
Lots of cool things are included even though Apple is selling it as a small $30 upgrade.
The Finder has been rewritten to make it faster and completely compatible with all the new technologies. It also allows for huge icon sizes which is good to look through a folder full of photographs.
Sometimes Mac OS X prevents you from ejecting a disk, but you don’t always know why. In Snow Leopard you’ll see exactly which application is using the drive, so you can quit it and eject the drive properly. (Finally!)
Adobe has stated that CS4 is compatible with Snow Leopard but a firestorm erupted this week when they didn’t commit to completely supporting Leopard. We’ll have to see what Adobe does. I for one will be upgrading to Snow Leopard this Friday and will post anything of interest here.
Lightroom and Camera Raw updated
Both Lightroom and Camera Raw from Adobe have been updated. Nothing earth shattering unless you use one of the cameras they added support to. Some small bug fixes were done including one with the crop tool that I’ve personally bumped into. Time to go update, boot up Lightroom or click here to check it out at the Adobe site
iPhone 3GS
In the words of Lisa Bettany
“my iPhone is now officially obsolete”
Although not totally obsolete, that’s precisely how I felt when I saw the new iPhone 3GS. The good news is that many of the cool new features are actually part of the new iPhone OS. In about 10 days I’ll be doing a lot of these:
• copy, cut and paste
• searching emails, apps and calendars
• MMS
• Landscape keyboard
But the feature that’s making my bank account very nervous is the new camera. It’s a 3 megapixel camera with auto OR manual focus and with video at 30 fps at 640 x 480.
You can edit video ON THE PHONE, and upload it directly to MobileMe or YouTube. Finally! I wouldn’t have to carry my iPhone AND a camera with me for casual photos and video. This is very cool.
Besides this, the speed improvement would also be a welcome change. It’s not that my (now “old”) iPhone is so slow I can’t use it, not at all, but any speed improvement in opening applications and rendering websites would be great.
Overall a great new version of the iPhone that will have to be checked out in person to compare with my current one.
Brace for impact!
Panic Sale
No, I’m not selling my computer and camera equipment…yet. I just found out about a sale that the folks at Panic.com are having over at their site. If you do any FTP to update your website or work with clients and you use a Mac, then you should be using Transmit as your FTP client.
It is hands down the best application out there for transferring files. Beautiful interface, easy to use and it has a ton of power under the hood if you ever need to get fancy with it.
Besides Transmit there are a couple of other applications that Panic offers like Coda for website design and Unison for using Usenet groups. I’m not into that stuff but FTP is almost a daily thing for me.
And the whole point of this post is that Panic is having a 3 day sale and all their main applications are 50% off.
So for $15.00 you can purchase the top of the line FTP program for Mac and also support a great software company (check their site to see how cool these guys are). Skip a few lattes and get it. Oh and check out the TV ad that their tech support guy created, it’s awesome!
Photoshop CS4
cs4 box
I’t may seem like CS3 was out not so long ago but it has been 18 months since that version of Adobe’s suite of industry standard applications came out. Last week Adobe unveiled CS4 and I find it has many shiny new things (including a ton of changes inspired by Lightroom) that are making me look for a way to upgrade as soon as possible.
Some of them are being shown for their cool factor which is undeniable, and although they definitely are appealing to me, I’m also very interested in experiencing the many changes that have been made under the hood. Those are not flashy or have eye candy but for people who work in Photoshop day in and day out, they are greatly appreciated. In John Nack’s blog (Photoshop product manager) there is a post that mentions all the changes that happened under the hood. Nerd alert- the following is kind of geeky and very Photoshop centric so feel free to check out the flashy Photoshop CS4 here and here if this is not your thing.
So for the stuff under the hood, here are my picks:
Smooth Pixel Rendering
Previous versions of Photoshop had the problem that at certain magnifications the image showed jagged lines that didn’t render correctly. That is finally fixed and images show in perfect detail at any magnification. This has bugged me for so many years, For years I’ve had to zoom in or out to see if what I’m doing is looking right…so glad this is fixed!
Spring Loaded Keys
A great time saver. With this new option you can be for example brushing or cloning an image and temporarily click and hold another key on the keyboard, use its corresponding tool, and then let go of that key and go back to using the original tool.
Adjustment Panel
Some of the most used tools like Curves, Levels, etc. are now found on a panel (used to be called “palettes”) for quick access. Time saver again.
Live Under Cursor Preview
Sounds complex but actually it means you see a preview of what you are cloning or healing as your brush; like in the Vanishing Point tool. Nice for aligning things.
Tabbed Document Viewing & Application Frame
Tabbing as a quick way to move through all open documents instead of going through the Window menu is great for quick file reviews. And finally the Application Frame interface with its tabbed documents at the top (like a browser) makes the upgrade worth its money for me.
tabbed interface
The flashy stuff will be useful too and I really want to test the new content aware scaling, but these changes and improvements under the hood are sometimes more valuable to people who at the end of the day can get their work done faster and in a more efficient way.
So there you have it, my picks for best new features you might not know about in Photoshop CS4.
Back in Vancouver
Fighting the flu that was everywhere in south florida. Slowly getting back into action. Not much more to report other than a quick bit of news regarding Adobe Lightroom. It seems Adobe released an update to Lightroom which wasn’t fully baked yet and they have pulled it from their website. They say a new version of this update will be available soon. For now they recommend that people who installed it, roll back to the previous version of Lightroom. More information in the O’Reilly Lightroom blog which by the way is a great source of information.
Apple updates Aperture
Apple finally updated Aperture to version 2 adding “100 new features”. I’m not too sure I need that many features in a new version of any program, but I will be downloading a demo and testing it out on my new Mac.I have tuned my workflow so much to Adobe’s Lightroom that switching programs is really not an option, but I definitely want to check out what Apple is offering and I think that the competition between Adobe an Apple will only mean better tools for photographers. Apple Aperture siteAdobe Lightroom site
My new venture. Learn photography with me.
