Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Over the week-end, there were 2 announcements made that deserve a quick mention.

Apple have upgraded Aperture to version 2.1

This is a quick update after the recent launch of version 2.0 and not only includes a number of bug fixes and performance updates but also adds a new plugin architecture. To demonstrate this, a dodge and burn tool has been included.

If you already have Aperture 2 installed, it is well worth hitting the ‘Software update’ button for this!

Adobe announce Lightroom 2

Hot on the heels of Aperture 2, Adobe have made the Beta version of Lightroom 2 available. This worked well for Lightroom 1 as the feedback from users prior to launch really helped focus the development based on feedback from ‘real’ users. Initially, the Library module has been redesigned and includes most of the features you can find in Aperture such as multiple monitor support.

I was chatting with Damien a couple of days ago about Aperture and photography in general. One of his comments about Aperture referred to the loading notice you get whenever you switch view to a new image in the viewer. I have been playing with this and although it is still quick to change, it can get a bit bogged down if you have a lot of images to skip through. I then experimented with the Quick Preview mode… what an amazing difference it made to browsing.

Press ‘p’ whilst in the Aperture browser and you will find that ‘Quick Preview’ is displayed underneath the picture.

With this on, try skipping through pictures and check the speed difference. As soon as you want to slow down again and begin working on the images, press ‘p’ to toggle quick preview mode off.

My copy of Aperture 2 arrived this week-end and it has been installed and the sample projects imported.

I downloaded the demo about 2 minutes after it was released and not being one for impulse decisions, about 2 minutes later I decided that I will move my workflow from Lightroom to Aperture! Within those 2 minutes I discovered that the performance, tools, integration and overall feature set will suit me more. Lightroom is a great application and I have nothing but respect for it but when I used Aperture to very quickly add images to my gallery then access the photos from Pages, I realised I had already saved a lot of time compared to the equivalent Adobe workflow. A few more tests along these lines and I was confident that Aperture is the way forward!

When I have finished ruining the sample photos, I am going to look at importing my 8,000 images as referenced files. I plan to keep all the original images on my external drive and the library file on my Macbook Pro. This gives the benefit of being able to access the library when travelling but also saves HDD space which is starting to get quite low! When I originally moved to Lightroom, I lost all the keywording I had done on the PC but luckily I manage the files in a logical way which helps me find the images I need. I know there are a lot of rubbish images in my library so I may take this opportunity to tidy things up a bit. From there I will decide if I am going to keyword everything again. At some stage in the near future, Aidy and I are going to design a keyword tree for the images on Encaptured. I will recreate this tree in Aperture and ensure that I use it as I go so that when I get round to uploading images, everything is cohesive.

I’ll report on my progress as I get round to each part of the transition as I am sure there will be other users out there that may make the same move. With any luck, my experiences will provide some guidance!

I just used Monolingual to recover nearly 4GB of space on my Macbook Pro’s HDD. I am very tempted to try the option that removes the PPC elements as it seems to be quite safe. The application’s FAQ says this;

You can use Monolingual to remove non-Intel architectures for your installed applications (even if some of the applications are PowerPC-only; Monolingual is smart enough not to remove PPC forks if those are the only ones in the universal binary). However, you should not strip the System frameworks if you want to use Rosetta.

I have no idea how much space this could save though. For some reason the main OS X Library directory is huge so I need to find out more ways to regain some space. Got any ideas?

Phrixus.co.uk has just had quite a lot of updates over the last week.

• • My theme has had a few adjustments to keep it up to date.
  • There are more navigation options.
  • The archives page has been rewritten.
  • My very customised Gallery 1 installation is now gone and has been replaced by a more integrated Gallery 2 version.
  • The Travelogue no longer links to a separate blog. I could never be bothered to apply updates etc. Now it is integrated into the main site using Google maps rather than the custom flash map I used previously.
  • The photoblog image on the homepage is now a random image from the photoblog album.

I am pleased to announce that my photography website, Encaptured Photography, has just been updated. Along with a minor update to the style, a lot of the code behind has been made more standards compliant. Along with this have come a few areas that need to be tweaked for various browsers and I expect to have this completed over the next few days.

New features include:

• Updated system to order custom ICC colour profiles for your home printer.
• Full text, keyword searching with boolean (and/or/not) operators.
• Image colour searching.
• Integrated system for searching for related images by keyword.
• Simple, in window (AJAX) slideshow for quick and easy browsing.
• PDF contact sheet download from lightbox view.
• Share photos in your Facebook account.

Feel free to head over and take a look around. If you notice any problems, please comment here or use the contact form on the site to let me know! Watch out as we hope to start adding more images and categories over the next few months.

Just a few days after installing Leopard I have been going through my system and updating various bits of software. One of the apps I updated was MAMP, the excellent server I use for local testing. My document root is outside the main directory so I didn’t think about the mysql databases that are still held within the directory. Needless to say after updating the app, all of the existing databases were lost. After a few seconds of panic I thought about Time Machine. Navigating to the mysql root in the new directory and hitting the TM button brought me into the past where I found all of the db’s… one multi select later and they are all back in the present. I don’t care about the other 299 improvements, Time Machine alone is worth the cost of the upgrade! I’ve become such an Apple fanboy it scares me!

It seems that Apple has gone absolutely mad with new product releases. New iMac… check out how slick and silver it is! New Mac Minis for the media centre. I am quite impressed with the new keyboards though they do not have a full width wireless option at this stage. If I am at my desk I prefer the number pad to be there!

Finally, iLife 08 and iWork08 have been released. I have iWork 07 and it is an excellent suite so I iwll certainly be upgrading soon. With the introduction of an Apple spreadsheet app and Microsoft Office compatibility, it’s a bit of a no brainer!

I have a number of network based drives that I access quite a lot on my home network. One of the problems I have experienced with “OS X Tiger” is when browsing these shares. It seems that the auto refresh does not always detect changes and/or new files. One great solution I have discovered is ‘Refresh Finder 1.1′ by S�derhavet

Very cool and tidy todo app from http://www.carpeaqua.com/software/checkoff/

This may be obvious to every other Mac user out there, but as a new switcher, I need all the help I can get to try and memorise all the new things I learn about the platform.

My task for today was moving all of my 250GB of files from my old Windows backup onto a new HDD so that I could reformat the old drive for the MAC. Sounds easy but each time I tried to do the 16 hour Firewire->USB2 transfer, it would stop with an error. I have now manually copied across the files and folders but to ensure nothing was lost I needed to find a way of comparing the two directories.

Filemerge – Small app… big help

I was very lucky to be hunting around the computer and come across this great application that I think was installed with the Apple Xcode tools. It very easily allows you to compare two text documents and luckily…even two directories. What a gem! You get two lists that are colour coded showing the differences.

Icing on the cake

I found another great addition use for this tool, it can actually merge the two directories or files together. This very simple tool has a lot of power which is why I have made a note here for myself in he future!

Should anyone come accross this site in search of a Photoshop script to generate the output required for Pixaria. Then you may have found the right place!!

On this project page you can learn about the script, download it and find instructions for setup and use.

I have updated my homepage photo today and I have a reason for announcing it! Apart from the fact its a cool shot of a racing yacht that got stuck on the rocks during last Sunday’s race…. it is also a picture that I edited using the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4 software. If you have not seen or tried this software yet, you should give it a go. The features and performance are outstanding and I can see that it will be a fantastic part of my workflow from download-to-print/web when the final product is finally released. As I will be receiving a free licence, I am keen to learn as much about it now as I can because other than the hefty image manipulation I dabble with that would require the full Photoshop app, I would say that Lightroom does 97.5 % of what any photographer needs and it’s very very slick.

Check out the latest release and details of the software on the Adobe Labs Website.

Thanks to a link from Gringod, I downloaded the ‘New Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet for Windows XP’ from the M$ website. This great tool finally gives you control of the colour profiles installed on your system and switching between different profiles for different tasks is a simple matter of selecting what you want.

The real benefit for me came in the added bonus side effect of the tool overcoming an issue with the ATI X800 graphics card installed in my system. By reading the ‘Readme’ file after installation (something I never do but may start now) I discovered that it is possible to use flags on the application. By altering the application to start with a /L flag, the tool will load up the default profile in stealth. This shortcut could then be placed into the startup folder to be run when logging in to Windows.

I was keen to try this because I have been having a long term problem with the ATI drivers. My calibration tool has a profile loader that will load the profile when the computer starts but the ATI drivers would then override the proper profile with something akin to nothing! I discovered a year ago that I had to remove the profile loader from startup, wait for Windows to load then use the loader. All would be well with the LUT (Lookup table) and I could continue as normal… this was a complete pain though and now that this has been solved on my PC, I am quite pleased!!

• From the M$ site, the tool has the following features;
• • Install and uninstall ICC color profiles
  • Inspect, rename, and compare two different color profiles
  • View a 3D graphics plot of color profile color gamuts
  • Associate color profiles with devices such as printers, monitors, and scanners
  • Apply custom color gamut adjustments to one or more displays on the fly
  • Set up display calibration reminders at intervals you specify

If you have a keen eye, you may have noticed some very slight changes to the design and features of the site. Over the last few days, I have been upgrading the backend and cleaning up my old code. The site is now running on Wordpress 2.0 and I am pleased to report that there were only a few issues with the upgrade. Luckily, everything seems to be working as normal (Please let me know if it isn’t ).

The theme for this site has had a big overhaul and has seen a 50% reduction in file size… not too bad. This includes the new elements I have introduced such as the new style menu on the right and the post navigation you can see when you view an individual post. The best news is that it still passes validation. For my next tricks the new gallery will be opened as soon as I figure out how it all works and the media pages will be seeing some cool features and content when I have finished writing my next plugin!