Have you checked your TOS lately

It would appear that most of the Social Networks and big Internet juggernauts have decided to change their terms of service (TOS). Interestingly most indicated the changes started on the 24^th of June! I have no idea why this date matches up. Also the changes all pretty much incorporate similar terms, although written in obscure wording.

To paraphrase the essence is those services offering the ability to upload any information, store it or process it now let it be known that they are allowed to use this to suit their own purposes. Often they will add such as to improve their service. Similar conditions and wording have been in many TOS agreements for such services so they can handle our data, but their "clarifications" have muddied the water. A lot of users are starting to worry that this also means they can use your data in any way they like such as to train AI, modify and republish as they wish.

Needless to say, this has worried several people, particularly artists using such services as Adobe. Supposedly scores of users have tried to abandon Adobe subscriptions, then only to find it is very difficult, for some almost impossible, to leave without incurring significant fees. Similar problems and perceptions are affecting artists on Instagram so I’m not sure of the exact numbers but it seems a great rush that has apparently left Instagram for an alternative, Cara.

I actually do read the terms of service and must admit the changes are a bit hard to follow. However, I do agree they leave the way open for the services to claim ownership of anything you post on their particular offerings. In a few places, they do still say that you own copyright but I assume their lawyers just haven’t seen that clause yet.

Most of these services actually rely on us to supply the content that they then package up and use to convince advertisers to pay them money (often very big money). The problem is they “believe” we are happy having free access to their service, with the public exposure the world wide web can offer and not being paid for our content. Yes, these juggernauts have costs but their profits are larger, massive, even unimaginably disgustingly exorbitant!

So I decided some time ago not to share anything I intended to sell (like finished art work or photos) in a ready copyable form anywhere on the internet. I have still been publishing on the likes of Flickr, Blogger, Instagram and my own website, those things I’m working on, progress updates and just stuff I find interesting. This works for me because I’m not relying on the Internet to sell things my works.

Where does that leave us creatives and what can we do about it? 

I’m probably gonna leave social media to the bots for now and see what happens. Maybe play around a little in Cara.

Creativity in name, not so much in practice

Whilst I have long since stopped using Lightroom and other Adobe products, I do still take a keen interest in what is going on at Adobe and more particularly what they are working on. So I have been attending the virtual aspects of adobe’s big MAX conference for the last few years.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen described how the company is determined to develop "AI for social good” in his keynote address. They are certainly using AI within many of their tools. Creating a wealth of “one-click”, “fix-it”, “make it better” tools within their existing suites of applications. For sure it will take a lot of tedious hack work out of making visual images and video, but I don’t think this is going to re-assure the real creatives worried about the rise of AI art.

One really obvious theme is everything is moving to video (or at least animated images) and the general idea of creativity is all about building a social media space, going viral, capturing the hearts and mind in a few second, possible in a 2D becoming meta 3D style, design assets and brand kit consistency, again with that “single click” aspect dominating. Sounds like a lot of the sameness, everyone clicking on the same few links and expecting originally and creativity may actually result with more and more of the same!

The hyped “new” tool Adobe Express has a lot of the look and feel of Canva, perhaps with nicer integration with other adobe tools (so you need to pay more rent), The photographic enhancements in lightroom and photoshop are mainly not new and exciting, being offered in a number of other pieces of software, just not integrated so again you have to spend more renting it all. The sneaks segment usually my favourite to see what new technology might be coming up was a disappointment. Perhaps with the exception of project blink (for AI-powered video editing on the web)

I did like the short presentation by Relu Ou on "the myths and realities about Artifical Intelligence", Particularly his closing remark “Please let your imagination direct how you use these tools.”

Adobe Max and life without creative clouds

Life after creative cloud is fine, infact the computers have sighed several sighs of reliefs, start up is faster (no waiting for yet another "mystery" update). I've had enough of those with windows10, especially the ones that repeatably failed. Also I'm definitely wasting less time (some was learning but a lot of pointless play). Has my photography suddenly become poorer, don't think so (Dan Andrews lockdown has had more influence.) Am I more likely to use outrageous filter, ...  ...  ...Yes

So for yet another opportunity to learn that may become a waste of time. Comparing Adobe Max and  to last weeks ZOOMtopedia its a really clear example of how high quality video with snappy graphs is no where near as compelling as more interactive video streams that you know are truely live. You naturally follow the live much more close focus than the slickness of tight video was like have the TV on in the background Still I like the concept of learn and train in lightroom where you can select and example tutorial and work through it in light room.

Adobe Max is still on (the a big catalogue of "live" event) and is free to join but you may to set up an adobe ID.

After 3 months I wasn't overwhelmed

 I’ve had an trial of the creative cloud suite for an extended 3 month period. It really does have a comprehensive set of programs. In comparison I have a number of different programs, from several different software companies, that I use standalone but use whichever is appropriate and have to swap files between each application. I was expecting that by now adobe would be well integrated. I was disappointed there is only some interchangeability but it is pretty much the same step, saving &/or exporting then opening working on the file, save again and back on the roundtrip merry go round, like plugins have pretty much always worked. Ok it all works but I don’t need to be in the creative cloud environment to do it like this.

  I was once quiet a fan of lightroom up to revision 5 when it got so slow. So I was keen to see how light room classic had progressed and it had. The facial recognition was nice (but not essential for me) the HDR and Panorama were also fine and the synch to lightroom mobile seemed to work nicely. I was initially impressed. However I still had the strong impression that behind it all was the one person one catalogue, one spot to file your originals was underlying this all (the shared images just being smart previews). So I was a little underwhelmed here compared with tools I already had.

  I had decided to spend a fair bit if time learning Photoshop in detail, and it started well, I was particularly interested in layers and blending. I must admit it does do these tasks well, However things kind of fell apart after that there are so many menu, tabs, icons,  sliders and even different terminology for much the same process that I found trying to consume the actually well put together training material to be brain numbing. I did step down to Photoshop Express and that was useable straight away (I do have an old version of Adobe Photoshop express on my main machine, it came with my Wacom tablet, but I actually haven’t used it in 3 years. The new express is certainly update but again a bit disappointing.

  Illustrator wasn’t as hard to pick up and I made a couple of fun things with it, however when I tried doing a couple of cartoons I was a little shocked at how few graphic tools I commonly use I could actually find.

My final foray into the creative cloud world was video. I’m not very experience with video but interested and have been making a few experimental shorts. So I then dove deep into premiere pro,  The training material is good but stopped short of what I wanted. The wealth for a menus, tabs, sliders and icon and number of track types was a bit confusing. I reckon Davinci Resolve is easier to pickup. (that’s not a compliment by the way)  So after some time back down to Premiere Express (its ok easy and much quicker to get things done), then finally Rush.  

 Now Rush does about 90% of what I was after and sort of quickly and had a nice set of options including schedule upload to YouTube. Its very heavily aimed at social media influencer wanna-bees. So I actually used that for a few weeks to recorded a set of quick tips for watercolourist. This might be the one program I would miss when the trial ends. I’ve since discovered a few stutters in the videos on YouTube that are not the same as renderings on my computer (but I’m not totally off-put, it may have been easy to avoid.)

The ongoing rental (aka subscription) and its price, have always been a stumbling block for me. I can’t find any strong reasons for me taking up an subscription (and no discount was offered). I did however registered for Adobe Max, which is free for those with Adobe ID just before my trial version ran out. Maybe the blue sky of features yet to come might keep the adobe flame burning, but its nearly gone out for me.

Suspicious behaviour, and a decline in trust

The news that Adobe was going to put the price up (actually doubling the price) of their basic Creative Cloud Photographic offering, was soon “retracted” as just a marketing A B test. That’s some test!

Then came the news that long time CC subscription holders would have to update and only be able download two of the most recent versions of the adobe apps. The reasons given escape me because I also found them a bit difficult to swallow.

Next a third strike for Adobe!  They were exposed writing to users warning them that using old version of the software (that those user paid good money to “rent” from adobe) would leave them open to a third party legal action. Again I find this unbelievable unjust. Like Adobe is happy to abandon them. What is going on at Adobe, don’t they care what their users think.

So I must admit I was feeling a bit smug that I resisted the subscription model (for purely cost reasons) Even though I still have to occasionally update my software. Many companies try to get that upgrade fee out of you often (eg yearly) I normally resist and upgrade on the second or third iteration and or when new features I would regularly use are rolled out. Generally I download the free trial versions first so I get a good idea of what I need versus could wait a little longer for.

Such an upgrade was the latest version of Corel Video Studio it performed way better with the 4K video from my new little Olympus and I like the multi cam synch capture. Suddenly I was  being annoyed by a nagging pop up messages every day (offering what seamed a reasonable discount). So I caved in and ordered the upgrade at the AUD$51 price. Even before I had finished and had only downloaded the initial setup program, another message popped up offering a slightly higher discount. Bummer, This is not clever marketing this is just annoying.

I do like the Corel Video Studio 2019 Pro by the way. It is a good upgrade.

What the heck are your heavily automated market teams up to software suppliers? Do you understand why you are loosing our trust?

Chasing the missing colours further

The mystery of the missing adobe colours turns out to be is as simple as understanding the Colour Space being used in the HSL sliders, some unfortunate naming, and confusion on my part. I have exhausted my way around bothLightroom and Photoshop documentation and on-line tutorials etc. I did find a few others asking similar questions and found a few also doing direct tests on Lightroom with colour charts (see my approach below). I still had that empty feeling I was misiing something important.

I decided to investigate the missing colours for myself, I took a series of of different colour wheels into Lightroom (below is a conventional painters colour wheel) and just played around with the Hue Sliders in the HSL panel of Lightrooms Develop Module. This can be a lot of fun and well as giving you a sound understanding of how the sliders work. I strongly recommend trying it out for your self.

What I discovered  was first that the sliders did actually cover the full Hue (colour) range. Adobe have provided 8 slidesr so they where spaced 45^o apart (ie 360^o/8). Also each slider has an adjustment  range form –100 to +100 which seemed to cover 3 or 4 segments on the standard 12 division colour wheel (shown below). There also appeared to be some overlap with the adjacent sliders.

The next bit of the analysis is just my approximation. I assumed that each slider goes half way to the next slider plus a bit (ie 45^o/2 = 22.5^o plus 10^o) Then doubling that for the full movement of the slide from minus to plus yield 64^o (32^o*2) which is inline with my observations above. Now things where coming together,  I could build the table below and work out the range of HUEs in terms of the angular HSL measure.  the –100 column if the anticlockwise Angular number (eg, –23^o) and the –100 column is the clockwise angular number (eg, +23^o), give the extent of that slider in terms of Hue.

Adobe Colour	-100	Hue	+100	Better Colour Name
Red	328o	0o	32o	Red
Orange	13o	45o	77o	Orange-Yellow
Yellow	58o	90o	122o	Yellow-Green/Chartreuse
Green	103o	135o	167o	Green
Aqua	148o	180o	212o	Cyan
Blue	193o	225o	257o	Blue
Purple	238o	270o	302o	Blue-Purple/Violet
Magenta	283o	315o	347o	Magenta

I also to a HSL Circle (colour wheel) on which our common colour names had been applied to given segments. The obvious feature is our colour names don’t forma linear arrangement around the circle. Some colours (eg Yellow) have narrow range while others (eg green have a very broad range) at least in terms of their name.

Suddenly some of my previous observations, like if I used the yellow slider it was more likely to adjust the grass and foliage than the orche coloured yellowed of bleached grass or rocks. That the reds were very sensitive to their sliders whereas blues and greens less so. I also have taken the opportunity to better name the colours of the sliders. Thus now the Orange slider (now Orange-yelloe and the yellow slider (yellow-green) might both be required to enchance of shift the Yellowness of an image. Admittedly things get a little complex when luminance is also considered, that can be a latter topic for a post, but for now a better understanding of which hues are affected is a big step in the right direction to understand how to control colour in your Photograph.

So in conclusion, rather than there being missing colours, I found the names the HSL sliders where given in lightroom had lead me to think back to a conventional colour wheel (3 primaries, 3 secondary and 6 tertiary colours, ie 12 colours). Instead I should have realized Adobe had split the 360^o of the HSL Hue Circle into 8 division rather than 12. C’est la Vie

Hmmm …another Adobe Marketing Ploy?

 I got an email today telling me my adobe cloud trial was up, and I needed to join now (and it small print the price being $28.59 per month (yes per month!( Trouble is I made the choice long ago not to get involved in the adobe subscriptions. I still have lightroom 4.4 and Photoshop Elements6.0 (on an older computer and don’t use. So How come my trial was up?

Then I remember I had long ago downloaded bridge (a free version) and a few weeks ago I had reloaded it to see if it was touch screen freindly (ie bei9ng able to finger scroll through thumbnails etc.) It was so I forgot about it BUT apparently it upgraded itself to the CC version (still touch screen unfriendly) and because I have an Adobe ID signed me up without my having to accept anything I can’t even remeber the upgrade.

This type of hard sell and stealth marketing really puts me off considering and adobe products in the future and the sear5ch to be able to replace lightroom has now become more focused.

#Adobe #FAIL

PS My creativity hasn’t ended

Adobe Really?

I received a marketing email from Adobe with the tittle “Get over your ex. Photoshop can help.” and the graphite above.

My first reaction was how inappropriate, I assumed it was the girl to be removed. Given all the “me too” and chauvinistic harassment outcries on social media. It struck me trying to rewrite history was not appropriate here.

Ok I clicked on learn more and saw that it is supposedly the girl getting rid the guy. This is probably an even cheaper shot, an over reaction to the Nikon Asia debacle. It might placate some of the social media noise but most potential photoshop users are not the selfie obsessed me too celebrity wanna bees, nor the self appointed fashionista elite who probably already have. The potential new clients are more likely to be normal folk. Probably ordinary dads and mums.They will be more interested in hoe to remove the telephone poll coming out of john’s head, or that nosey neighbor photo bombing the background in a family snap shot that they want to remember. Content aware erasure and “patch drop” (adobe term) are wonderful tools, they deserve more than such trivialized promotion.

Surely its Time to Move On (maybe better not to panic)

Despite the hype, it is really clear to me that Adobe have done a google style deprecate with lightroom as we know it. That desktop program that most photographers rely on, but wish it was faster, multi-computer LAN compatible shared catalogue, and better still multi-user to mention a few wishes from the many that have gone unanswered for the past 4 or 5 years. I actually think the rot set in before the creative cloud subscription, which has only delivered a few feature that most other software already had, I think the writing was on the wall when version LR5 was first release. In fact I have not upgraded since version LR4.4 (mainly because I haven’t bought a new or different camera camera system, so I don’t need upgrade). I just had to buy a SSD drive to get lightroom running (more like limp along) at a reasonable pace.

Lightroom has always seemed a High Maintenance Mistress to me. She has to control everything, and often just for no sensible reason. I still can not forgive her for loosing so many of my collections (once my favourite way to organize my chaotic digital photo universe). Which is probably why I have been open to trying different and new software from third party to plug ins to alternative programs. Well there isn’t a magic answer to the best program. I doubt it will every exist. Yet with something to manage your growing collection (like Lightroom,Picasa, VnView, ACDsee, Aftershot pro, On1 Photo RAW or even Photo Mechanic) and a good collections of editing tools (too many to mention in one sentence, yet Luminar is clearly a rising star) everyone will be able to get by. Albeit with the frustration or round tripping between different packages and learning different short cut keys etc,. Such is the keen digital photographer’s lot.

It appears from my remote view outside the Adobe Creative cloud Juggernaut, that adobe is the mobile and portable tablet or lightweigh browser (cloud) applications (aka consumer new shinny toys) rather than powerful computer environments. Surely even the fan boys can see that the new Lightroom cc is pretty much a single image at a time thing that needs a lot of extra bits to make it useful for serious users. Even then it will require a fast internet with plenty of band width. At least those serious will still have Lightroom Classic CC, which is the old Lightroom you can speed up by using the jpeg thumbnails embedded in your RAW files (like Photo Mechanic and On1 RAW Photo 2018). Excise me for suggesting this sounds a lot like “buying the emperor new cloths”

However Don’t Panic, read the Lightoom Queen’s recent blog post. Just keep using what ever you have now and only look for something new when you get that new camera!

Enough with the sly-install-ware

I’m still a bit wary of windows 10, so I’m a still instantly concerned when anything changes. I went to use adobe digital edition, which I use with borrow box to read ebooks through my local library (normally a great servcie). Adobe told me there was a new edition and did I want to update, I pressed the install now not update later but nothing happened so I borrowed a book and downloade it, during which adobe closed and asked me to read its term and conditions, for the update and press ok. Annoting but all seemed to work then I notice the little yellow norton icon (which just seemed to be a web link so I deleted it and went back to reading my ebook).

Much later a new window proclaimed norton had scanned my system and did I want a 30day trail. I can only assume that the norton scan was assocaited with the adobed install. This time there was an extra link in the installed programs, so I also deleted that which again offered anoth 30day trial!!!! Enough. Delete.

Piggy-backing the secretive installation of software is something both companies should NEVER consider. Both have fallen greatly in my estimation. Such practices are how people become infected by malware & viruses. Now I’m not even confident that hasn’t to me.

PLEASE CEASE AND DESIST Adobe & Norton, or don’t you care about your reputations anymore?

Not all is harmony in the XMP World

Whilst many software applications can share metadata via XMP files, the situation is far from a recognized standard.  XMP is an extensible XML style format, which means it can be customised.  Applications that read this data, need not be able to understand everything.  They just need to honour (and not modified) any such data.  Adobe itself use the XMP the file to store details of proprietary Post Processing methods within Lightroom, These methods are unlikely to be known by the software, and that software should not be expected to reproduced the exact Lightroom process.  Corel’s Aftershot Pro also uses its own proprietary XMP format for its processing, but also offers the opportunity to save standard XMP files by which it means just the metadata.

Is in the area of metadata that there does seem to be good agreement between packages.  Specifically key wording, star ranking and the colour flags/patches or classifications do seem to be reliably exchanged between programmes.  Most of the EXIF data seems to be so exchanged, when exception might be camera settings and lens identifies (usually of read from RAW files) that don't always make it into XMP files. Some some software does not acknowledge IPTC metadata.

Finally I don't expect to be told what isn't read from and XMP file.  Anything that isn't under stored get ignored.  So for example you may have set the Likes and Dislikes in OnOne's perfect photo suite, but they will not be interpreted as Flag as Pick or Set to Reject  in lightroom so they just don’t show up.

Taming the shrew

I have been carefully investigating a way that lets lightroom co-exist nicely with other packages across a range of computers. Specifically I am trying to avoid having to commit to let lightroom force a specific workflow on how I “manage” my photos. I much prefer to be able to browse photos where ever they are. Yet lightroom’s development modules can be extremely useful (at times) so I am keen to let her free but at the same time avoid all her high maintenance demands.

My solution has two parts.\

1) I have decided to only setup the master lightroom catalogues in one place.  Yes I have multiple catalogs.  I've come to the conclusion that I have too many photos to have a single catalogue. The performance of the library module in Lightroom definitely takes a dive passed around half a million photos.  My solution has been to have one catalogue for each year. These may be a bit small but they are easy to manage. I only set up these catalogues on my archive and the catalogues are on the computer it is connected to.  Elsewhere lightroom is only used on the understanding it is temporarily and any cataloguing is only temporary, but with the specific condition that an .xmp file is always generated for any activity.

2) .xmp side car files to the rescue

One of the aspects that led me to like Picasa straight away was the ability to cull, rate and keyword photos as I preview them immediately after loading. At that stage I was only shooting jpeg format and this information was immediately incorporated into the embedded EXIF data within the photo. However this embedding only works in jpeg format, not the various RAW format. Thus this extra data the metadata followed the photo wherever it was stored. However in the default lightroom settings this information is stored in the central catalogue, if the photos is moved or copied by any program or utility other than light room this information will not follow the photo. There is however a mechanism in the Adobe photo management philosophy that can store this information for each photograph separately. Instead of including it in the EXIF data embedded in the photo itself it creates a separate small file, with the extension .xmp (for Extensible Metadata Platform). This is actually an old fashioned feature, probably with origins in the Adobe bridge software. It means you must copy two files, the original photo and the matching xmp file together. Finding the way to write this magic XMP file, is not immediately obvious in the lightroom menus. It can not be found under the more logical metadata menu, rather it is somewhat buried under the Edit/Preferences  and select the General Tab and the press the Go To Catalogue Settings button on the bottom right. Finally select the metadata Tab on the far right and tick the third item Automatically write changes to XMP.

Whilst Picasa does use XMP style metadata for its facial recognition face tags, it cannot read or write a standard metadata as separate adobe xmp files. However both OnOne’s Perfect Photo suite 9 and Corel’s Aftershot Pro can read and write the metadata into and from .xmp files, since both of these have browse modes I can also easily to the rating and keywords as a preview photos and this will find its way with the photos, wherever they are and even be loaded into lightroom when it imports of photos of my archive catalogue.

Lr CC …curiouser & curiouser II

This snippet from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a perfect metaphor for how I feel, trying to understand why Lr CC doesn’t seem to want to play with me. All the prominent sites claiming super performance have left me bewildered and assuming it has to be my hardware! or just me!

Well the hardware assumption seems to be correct. The clue was under Edit/Preferences then under the Performance tab (evidently it is my graphics card is the thing that doesn’t want to play). Lr CC had ticked to use it by default and then reported that it had been disabled due to errors. OK So I started looking through the Adobe Community help and found this post regarding Issues with Lightroom CC/Lightroom 6 and AMD graphics cards. I haven’t tried reverting to an earlier version of my driver (which doesn't seem very logical advice). However just deselecting the use graphic processor box has certainly seen LR CC become better behaved. Ok its still not fast but it has stopped crashing and thrashing.

But why not just do the deselection, if Lr CC recognised errors?

Perhaps Absolem will know?

Dream On… Photoshop

Someone at Adobe has put together a slick YouTube video to celebrate 25 years of Photoshop

YES that’s right Photoshop is 25 years old this month! It is both seen as the gold standard of photo manipulation and the very essence or trickery and the fake (“its been photoshopped!”). This video probably won’t change that notion, The reality as I see it (noting I don’t have photoshop) is it has a long learning curve, that’s why there’s a whole aftermarket of many expensive courses and thick book to learn it Experienced users can certainly do magical things, but that might take some time and skill. Finally photoshop is now only available via a subscription, you can’t buy it and own it you just rent it

Perhaps I’m not as optimistic for its next 25 years as Adobes seems …Dream On

The Anatomy of (an older version) of PhotoShop Elements

Adobe have released a new version of Photoshop Elements, version 13, surprising as boxed software (not as part of their subscription service!). I must admit my version (7) has languished in the seldom used category and is only running on my studio laptop, and supposedly where I connect to creative cloud). Whilst photoshop elements tends to be looked down on by the purists, it has always struck me as a better way to get most of the features of Photoshop with a much simpler learning curve and a much more affordable price. The new version looks a lot different in terms of the User Interface, so what I am showing here is not likely to be immediately beneficial to a new purchaser wanting to learn how to use the software (and version 13 is clearly aimed at the new user) However I have chosen to show it before my look at the lightroom workspaces because it helps put in place the abobe concepts (and work flow) Organize –> EDIT (FIX) –> Create –> Share and how they have become separate workspaces.. The significance of these “workflow-centric” concepts still pervades adobe’s software offerings.

The screen is laid out in several blocks. There is the conventional Menu Bar at the top and a second tools bar of handy context related tools, depending on what is displayed in the main workspace and which module you are in. The are two extract useful keys with drop down menus. The first controls the display formats (which can include a folder views, which takes away from the space available for the main workspace, full screen view, side by side comparative view etc) There is also a quick edit to access the main edit features. Once you selected and image by double clicking on it, that single image files the workspace and you can work on that images and/or take it into the other modules.

The Fix (aka Edit) modules is where you do most of the refinements and retouching, Each of the buttons on the panel on the right-hand side takes you into a separate tool (or set of tools) to do that task. Several of these begin with Auto and these are essentially wizards that attempt (they are not perfect) to correct or enhance specific aspect of your photo. For any one new to photography they are probably wonderful but more novelty that long term tools. at the bottom are three keys that bring up a separate edit window with the serious edit tools.

There are many edit tools and filter options but the simple icons and small thumbnails on the filters make it easy to understand what they do, so the system is easy to pick up. The big feature that photoshop elements offers that few other inexpensive photo editors do is layers (a topic that requires more detail that I should spend now). The layer controls are simple but are really focussed on copying part or all of the source image and allowing a good range of blend modes between them (ie they are very useful but you probably need to know what you are trying to achieve).. I suggest they require a bit of understanding of how layers and blends work before they become useful to a new user (ie this is one area I trust the new version of Photoshop elements has refined)

There are two more modules, which I seldom have used, but they are likely to be very helpful. However since I have never used them I got a bit lost trying to figure out some basics and that is  when I discovered the on-line help no longer works (See notes at the bottom of this post). I suspect the back ends for the photo book and Online albums may no longer work. An area that many novices get into difficulty is email images, particularly images from larger DSLR cameras, is emailing.They tend to send the full resolution image, which is way to big to display of computer or photo screens and very large to send). The email tool support outlook and resizes the photo to suit viewing in any email browser. (there is a slider to further adjust the image size id necessary)

So whether you spend most of your retime in the organizer windows and use the auto wizards or dive into the more photoshop-like edit windows you should find photoshop elements a well though through image management and processing system, delivering a significant number of features that the full photoshop reputation is based on.. It is clearly marketed as an introduction for new users and is likely to be a great stepping stone towards photoshop. Having said that many would probably be quiet satisfied with it as their only software. Thus selling this as a standalone box software does make sense, at a time when adobe is moving towards subscriptions for its higher spending users

Somewhat interestingly you can only get help on-line, (which is what you get is you press the help key) back to version 11 of photoshop elements.  Don’t despair the user forums have a list of various useful archive references files, covering most things back to version6).

One Clue closer to understanding a LR foible

Last night I was tired and left Lightroom running on my laptop computer, which was plugged in but in Sleep mode. This morning my computer showed that windows had preformed and “important” security update for Windows 7 and restarted my computer sometime over night. Lightroom was up and running but a Collection (Adobe’s name for an album) I had definitely set up last night was missing, it was missing in the last catalogue backup made as well (not surprisingly as this was made earlier). This starts to explain at some of the unexplained problems and frustration I was having with Lightroom late last year and earlier in the year. I now suspect that, if the computer is shutdown (in this case by a windows update) and the catalogue backup not run,(It may have been waiting for a user response to run it) and lightroom terminated. Then when the system resumes although lightroom resumed fine it uses an older backup. So the problem really is triggered by the windows update. At least one of the problem events earlier in the year related to a significant power outage. I had already identified that leaving lightroom running overnight was not a good idea, so I have to share a little of the blame.

Ok why this time didn’t I loose any RAW edits? The answer was simple I have adopted the tactic of always writing any changes to a sidecar file (.xmp file) immediately.

Thus what we have is not really a BUG in lightroom more a personality foible to do with how she maintains her precious catalogue. (How to do this is mentioned in my previous post).

The moral, Lightroom is a High Maintenance Mistress

Don’t Leave Her (Lightroom) Running Unattended (ie overnight)

The Story behind Many More Mistresses

Towards the end of last year just when I was settling for just two of my many photo processing mistresses I had a change of heart, mainly out of disappointment with adobes suspected creative cloud related hassles and the quirks of trying to spread lightroom across a few computers, this lead me to see I was really carrying two separate photo streams, one for my RAW files, one for the Jpegs, with subtly different ways of moving the photos around. So why haven't I just bitten the bullet selected one format and one software package. Well if I did it would probably have to be Lightroom, but there is the rub, she is a very high maintenance choice, everything has to be done her way or not at all. She is really only good at one computer and one photo collection relationship. She can be wonderfully talented when it comes to lifting the magic out of a boring Raw file, but I she can demand a lot of time. She can process jpeg but seems to deliberately stops short of her best. She does have a nice companion now in the form of the Perfect Photo Suite from OnOne, which can undertake some of the areas lightroom falls a little short without creating any compatibility or reload issues.
 
Picasa was almost always there, and is on every computer antway, fulfilling the basic needs . She tackles the standard enhancement without fuss, doing them quickly and she seems to get along with other software and computers, not that she doesn't like taking control of her home territory, but she will accommodate the odd stray and share when necessary. Picasa, was slow to take up processing RAW but she can and does it in a very google I'm feeling lucky kind of way. Her talent is doing a decent job of the basic editing and management of my needs for Jpeg files but I'm not so sure of her on-line alter ego, google+ photos. She always seemed to love and nurture my collection of photos. I am finding AfterShot Pro is a nice compliment, she both sees the possibilities of further post processing and in handling the update of metadata in .xpm sidecar files.

The previous few post have looked at the combination of software I run on some different hardware in different work spaces. I think I will remain a man with many photographic mistresses for some time to come.

• On the Road with more than One Mistress

• Letting My Mistresses into the Office

• The Many Mistresses in my Studio

This could make a big difference

The creative cloud/photography bungle for $9.99/month, which give access to both lightroom & photoshop, at least while you pay the subscription BUT a lot of internet comments are focused on what happens if you stop paying? Lightroom is a non destructive editor so the original photos will always be there, however lightroom shores all the processing in its catalogue and if that is gone you will loss all your processing, ranking, metadata etc. From personal experience this is not a happy moment. In photoshop you have to save your edits to that’s not such an issue there.  Well starting with LR 5.5 on creative cloud and lightroom downloaded to your desktop will be still useable, in terms of viewing, printing and organizing your photos even if your subscription lapses. You get can still use all the models (except Develop & Map) which means lightroom will work but you can’t edit you photos further of geotag them. This is a big concession from adobe and may convince many the $10/month is a reasonable deal.

I’m not rushing to take up the deal, at least for a while I’m staying with LR 4.4. I’m still a bit miffed that adobe have nobbled the free aspects of Behance so much and I’m definitely not paying their black mail price for Behance Pro!

Too Trusting, Lightroom in a high Maintenance Mistress

I’m guessing it had to happen. I had indexed a few photos that where temporarily on my stora (a network NAS drive) and inadvertently left lightroom running. Over night my system evidently updated itself (and or the stora or internet router was reset) so that the computer had restarted and the stora had a found itself a new dynamic IP address. Other open programs like excel and the chrome browser had been reopened but lightroom had failed to open, and attempting to reopen it lead to a message that most of the folders in my catalogue could not be found.. As I started to look around many files had the previews obviously messed up and fragmented or the wrong image as the thumbnail preview I was also getting messages that a number of files where possibly damaged (yet in external checks they didn’t appear to be so). I had seen this before, so I was too worried. Then I realised a lot of ranking and most collections were missing. No problem I thought I had seen that backing up catalogue message many times, but in retrospect I had never checked my backup and probably was not backing up often enough, even though I had a number of backups stretching back a long time.

The Good news is that lightroom doesn’t edit your original files so everything is intact, including the files of the stora.

However the changes I made in lightroom, ranking and flagging are now largely gone.

The various collections I had created were also just skeleton versions of their former selves.
The backup catalogue did have my recent data so I can’t explain why so much is missing. I do understand that the links to the items on the stora are now broken but the master copy of my photos are on the same external drive and the links seem fine just record of my the previous work is not there. It is possible that something has been unravelling without my noticing it and the overnight restart has just bought it to my attention?

Fortunately a few months ago now while investigating how to exchange my processing in lightroom across computers (not an easy task). Lightroom is selfishly a one user one computer style of gal. I had set lightroom to Automatically write changes to XMP, this save edits, ranking and metadata into an xmp side car file written beside each image. This way any files edited or “managed” on a laptop would get the same edits and ranking when the directories containing them where copied to my master collection and imported into the master lightroom catalogue (or any other lightroom catalogue). Otherwise the outlook is bleak because I just don’t know how much work has been lost and trying to recover it is a task I don’t even want to contemplate
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One bit of true irony was that as I looked at the restarted computer, Adobe Flash dialogue box was on the top window saying an update was ready to load and with the offer to also load a trial of lightroom 5.2! I certainly hope this crude attempt at bloatware was not what caused my computer to reboot!

I know this probably has nothing to do with my hassles within creative cloud, or the hacking of adobe, but this is adobe’s third strike. I have to admit lightroom has always been a high maintenance mistress within my photo world and despite the good times we may have to work out other less restrictive but reliable ways to manage and process Raw formats.

The Gaia Birds Revisited :: My PhotoImpressions Method

It is a while since I created my first photo mosaics of parrots, for a group challenge on Redbubble. I have recently returned to the theme for inclusion within My Monash Exhibition at the Highway Gallery. However my PhotoImpression technique has developed a lot since the original Gaia Bird series back in 2005So I figure it is time again to explain some of the processes I use and why I am applying them. I actually adopted the term photoimpression to describe my process back in 2006, and I have noticed that the term is used a lot now for other photo related things, including as the name for a few competing phone apps which have nothing to do with my process. Further the wide spread use of “magic” filters and photoshop trickery means that a lot of people seem to believe I am just using a one click style filter or pre-set. Nothing could be further from the truth, so I’m taking this opportunity to explain my steps and why I do them. My focus of late has been on trying to look at the photographic processing as an artist might. In this series I have refined my workflow into four basic steps which map into four processes any artist might recognize and probably uses.

1. The Sketch, the first step is to look at the composition and tonal values of the image. Not all images make for good photomosaics, they need to have a strong compositional toning. I have found the easiest way to construct my sketch is to work in black and white. There are dozens of methods to create a black and white image of your photos, including a lot of presets and filters. In fact it is a bit of a holy grail to many traditional photographers, that perhaps yearn for film days. A lot of these conversions try to closely match the original film look and many of those popular films had different responses to different colours, for example red are often represented by darker tones and some blues or greens will appear lighter. This could misrepresent my tonal composition, so I have found I like to do my black and white conversion myself just by bringing saturation right done (moving the slider fully to the left). Most photo editor let you do this and it is very simple in picasa or lightroom. I might crop my image and possibly use the tonal sliders to better balance the highlights and shadows. At this stage I also like to generate a test mosaic, for which I still use mosaic creator. I pay particular attention to the shape of the tessellations I am using for the mosaic tiles. In the case of this series I liked a simple diagonal diamond tile which compliments the birds feathers. What has happened now is the photo has been largely deconstructed into a very pixelated image that still has the lorikeet just visible but you will probably only see it if you know it’s there and half close your eyes. 
2. The Kuler Palette, the next step is to mix my colours. Whereas in the past I have used a conventional colour wheel and the theory of harmoniously and complimentary colours or computer based palette pickers (such as now in many web design tools). Adobe has such a utility called Kuler and under their Creative Cloud Service, the new version now has the facility to select the colours directly from your photo in a variety of moods from colourful, deep, dark or muted. This chooses 5 colour in a suitable palette and indicates the area on the photo that was used. You can also move these point to get subtly or even radically different colour schemes. You can save and edit these schemes in the more familiar colour wheel format. There are a few images on lorikeets in my series so I created a set of complimentary colour palettes, some harmonious some complimentary around the Lorikeets and their forest background  I thus choose my palette from a number of related images not just the photo I had selected to process. This hopefully reflects the way an artist might take in the atmosphere and ambience of a place, when painting “en plein air”. Not just "copying" a single photo.
3. The Brushes, my next step relates to how I make my marks, the type of brush strokes I wish to use is a simple artistic analogy. My objective here is to use the limited colour palettes I have selected above and introduce a little variety in the texture of that “brush mark”. I know that it is frequently this strength and direction of these small textural details that make the work of some artist so distinctive, appealing and interesting. In essence it is these marks that let you see the artist’s hand. For this aspect I have been experimenting with using mathematical patterns based around fractals (geometric shapes first identified by Benoit Mendelbrot that have special dimensional aspects) With the aid of a computer these crumpled shapes can be simulated in theoretically infinite detail and echo many real world phenomena. For this series I have use a open source program called Apophysis since it not only allows me to select and control the shape of the fractal trace it also allow the selection of the colours of the rendering, for both the background and the gradient of colours mapping the multidimensional fractal into a two dimensional rendering. I took care to use a strong triangular seed shapes for the fractals and thus into the patterns generated so as to compliment the diamond lozenge shape of the tilling for the mosaic. For this series I generated these  tile patterns in considerable detail (over 3000 pixel wide). I also generated over 350 coloured and textured tiles to give the mosaicking process a decent range of brush strokes to selected but limited palette of colour.
4. Applying the Paint, this is the final step and again carried out in mosaic creator. This time the resolution of the image to be generated is increased and the library of new coloured fractal tiles is used to infill the photomosaic, but within the same tilling as the preliminary grey scale mosaic. I return the colour (Hue) and use not only the best match for tone but also a closest match for colour. Many colours in the original photo thus needed to be “shifted” slightly to match the selected palette of colours and the degree to which tone is matched is also refined making the matching within the mosaicking process by going from minutes to almost hours for this final render.

If you now look closely the individual diamonds in my tile tessellations are now replaced with the swatches of the fractal flames, which add new colour and texture back into the image. The magic is that your eye now sees the photoimpression (see first image above for the full image) as having nice detail and the colours as perhaps richer but the bird is again realistic, it just no longer has the detail or exact colours of the original photo. These have been refined as if by an artists eye.