Taming the Cable Chaos: A Creative Solution

If you're anything like me, you've probably experienced the frustration of dealing with a growing mess of cables and chargers around your computers. It's a common struggle in our increasingly connected world, with USB cables and their various iterations being the primary culprits. The sight of tangled wires behind the desk and in drawers is enough to induce a headache. The real challenge arises when you need to reconnect a long-forgotten device or simply ensure that a cable is still functional.

The first step was to prepare these clips for their new purpose. I decided to paint them with fluorescent acrylic paint, opting for different colours based on their designated usage or storage location. My simple colour-coding system instantly gave each cable its own identity.

With the multitude of places where computers are stationed and cables are used, I knew I needed a solution to keep things organized. That's when the idea struck me – why not tag each cable for its specific purpose/place? And so began my journey to conquer the cable chaos.

In the quest for an innovative yet accessible solution, I found an unlikely hero – the plastic clips that come with bread bags and many other grocery items. Instead of letting them go to waste, I started collecting these clips. They had the perfect shape for attaching to cables and were ripe for customization.

USB cables and power cords received their own distinct tags. Even the smaller chargers that always seemed to vanish into the abyss of drawers were not spared. I extended this tagging system to cables I frequently used during travel or those required for specific tasks. This sometimes led to a cable sporting multiple tags, each representing a different context in which it played a role.

No longer did I have to play the guessing game when searching for a particular cable or charger. The colour-coded tags eliminated the frustration of untangling a web of wires. Reconnecting devices I hadn't used in a while became a breeze, and the reassurance of a cable's functionality was just a glance away.

In the end, what started as a simple quest to tackle cable clutter turned into a creative endeavor. Those humble bread bag clips, transformed by a coat of paint, became the guardians of order in my tech realm. So, if you find yourself in a similar cable conundrum, consider giving this colourful solution a try. You might just find yourself appreciating the organized aesthetics as much as the functional benefits.

Revisiting & Extending my Photographic Punctuation Marks

Its been a while since I wrote about the idea of including pictorial punctuation marks in my camera’s photostream. It much handier (pun intended) than taking notes or trusting memory. As I’m taking more and more group image sets this is a very easy way to find and group like images just in the thumbnail view (eg PhotoMechanic as I load the photos where I can colour code them accordingly or in OnOne Photo RAW where I like to group Stitched Panoramas, HDR and Focus Stacked sets in their own sub–directories). This avoids a lot of wasted time churning thorough a mountain of similar images, and keeps things a little better organised.

Think of these first the hand signals as visual brackets

Panoramic Sequence, and direction of shooting. I still don’t use this all the time, because a panoramic series is usually pretty self explanatory. When I have used this I will add this marker photo before the panoramic sequence is shot. I further identify the stitched panorama series with a Green Colour Class

 HDR Bracketed Sequence, I use this to indicate I am taking 3 or 5 a photo sequence. This is another punctuation marker that I normally use to precede a sequence. I usually don’t bother put this in front of every HDR set in a continuous series (such as combined HDR and Stitch Panorama because it is relatively easy to find the groupings). I then use the Yellow Colour Class to easily identify the HDR sequences.

Focus Staking. or other multi-bracket techniques. This is a new marker because it can be very difficult to discern the beginning and/or end of focus bracketed sequences when more that two or three shots are involved. I have therefore adopted the approach of adding this at the end of each sequence. I use the Blue Colour Class to identify this type of bracketing.

I like to think of the next hand sigalns as simple punctuation marks  ; (=battery) . (=end)  ? (=cut)  ! (=good)

Battery Change, still my way of recording when I changes my battery, looking back through your photos and finding the previous battery change photo, then just subtracting the new photo number from the previous gives you the battery life in terms of number of shot per battery charge. On the Pentax DSLRs this can be weeks to months worth of shooting but on the mirrorless Olympus this is generally days to a week. Doing this let me work out I get around 750 photos from a single battery charge from my new Olympus OMD EM10iii, which is about double the claimed 330 shots.

Full Stop, End is a marker to end one series or starts another. I used this often for a variety of breaks or just simple visual markers to aid looking through a large collection.

Cut, not something I use much, but I have used this simple bit of sign language to remind myself that the previous photos should be deleted. I never just flag photos to be deleted I immediately delete them as soon as they are loaded onto my computer, I also delete this marker.

Good, another new punctuation mark just to remind me that close to this marker is a photo I liked at the time, maybe good light, composition or just that perfect moment.

Whilst I normally take both Jpeg & RAW, I usually delete the larger RAW version of any punctuation photos, as I never intend to post process them.

Preserving Albums, Collections & Organization as you move digital photos

In the process of downloading my files from flickr I’m reminded of the unexpected issue most folk find when trying to transfer a lot of files between different photo managers. Things like EXIF and key words can be embedded in the files (in the case of Jpeg and Tiff, also DNG but not other RAW formats) and sidecar files (eg .xml can also carry this data with photos as they are transferred between packages. Unfortunately the organization features such as Albums (or Collections in Lightroom) are not transfered and/or not compatible between packages.

There is a simple solutions I have written about before. It is using special key words to identify the albums. I use names beginning with the tilde key ~ and write that into the keywords (or tags in flickr jargon). In most software you need to enable writing back of the keywords into the embedded data and/or writing the sidecar file beside each file. When you load into the new software it will read in these keywords and you can selective filter on a given ~keyword then do whatever is required to create the new album or collection.

Very simple really.

Accidental discoveries in lightroom

I’ve been using lightroom as my primary photo editor again on my travels, because my light HP spectre with its SSD drive have made lightroom fast enough again. There are things about lightroom that still hold me up and things about the way it has to organise everything in her own way that still frustrate me. In particular how to handle working copies. in my case these are files being past onto third arty plug-ins like Nik Software Efex range, OnOne and Perfect Exposure. What happens is the little PCPlugin windows pop up and I can chose to  edit a copy with lightroom setting (the default and most common response), a copy without lightroom settings (seems to only works with jpeg files) or edit the original (except this doesn’t work with most plug-ins). Then there is a small dialogue area at the bottom which contains the file format you will use in the exchange (jpeg, Tiff or PSD).This is all fine and I’ve done it hundreds of times because I just press ok, but the annoying part is lightroom now takes the copy and the original to the very end of your photo series. If you have more than say 50 photos in you directory this can be a few screen’s scrolling away of forever removed on the film strip. It is a tedious interruption to my thoughts and concentration.I have found one work around, just change to a different folder in the library module and back to the folder you working in, and Voila the files are back in their normal order, but these is even more tedium and frustration. Ahhh!!! Then I notice after I had done this at least once (but sometimes twice) the photos where not copied to the end of the folder on the lightroom screen but arrive beside the original in the alphabetical/numerical order or the origin photo.

The next discovery, I’m sure must be documented somewhere, but I just haven’t found where, is that photos in subdirectory/folder get displayed in the parent directory. I came across this by accident. To get my autostitch panoramas I need to export my starter images (they are now often HDR and tiff format) into jpeg because autostitch only works with that format. So I normally export it to a specifically named directory over in my photo scrapbook. Unfortunately it doesn’t take long to forget where an image is in that confused space. At some point while I was travelling, and probably late at night, I accidentally reset the the destination of export from lightroom from a specific location to same folder as original plus sending it to a defined subdirectory. Suddenly the export shows up beside the original? Not only that I could then create my panorama and import that back into lightroom in the sub directory/folder and it to shows up in the parent folder also. I don’t have to have duplicated files over in another scrapbook folder! Then I can stack the whole series behind the panorama (gaining a lot more organizational control of this folder)

Whilst I have been using lightroom for a long time, (I stopped upgrading from version 4.4) have read the manuals in detail and many guides I can not find ant documentation relevant to these discoveries/”features”. Coincidentally I did just watch an Ed Gregory You Tube video (below) that exploits this “feature” of photos in the sub directories/folders showing up in the directory above. 

I’m never a fan of fixed workflows, so you don’t have to follow his approach meticulously just be inspired and know you can use sub folders/directories to house various working and exported versions of the photos but still see all the photos grouped together in the parent folder/directory.

Here is what I adopted on my last trip that seems to work seamlessly for me. I still use picasa to load and do the preliminary culling of my photos and I load the photo into daily folders with the name format YYYY-MM-DD this means that they automatically get sorted into chronological order. Using picasa is way faster still compared to lightroom and because I still shot RAW+jpeg I can cull the RAW/Jpeg pair at the same time (you don’t see the jpeg file in lightroom). I can als “”touch up”, crop, email and post the jpeg to the web immediately is I want (eg email photos to the family). When I’m ready to post process I just point lightoom to import from this gallery. Doesn’t take long and lightroom has happily loaded the requited details into her catalogue and ready to be useful. This is when I rate my photos and I’m trying out the star rating idea present in Jeff Harman’s PhotoTaco podcast (Culling like a Pro) below.

The idea is to only use three stars, set lightroom to auto advance, and then just hit the 1 2 or 3 key on you keyboard. This works in both the library and develop modules but works best on library if you also want to swap between thumbnail and full screen view of just a few images. The important thing is to go through your entire days shots. Each time you rate a photo you will moved onto the next. With a little concentration on the image and one hand over the relevant keys you can become very fast at this.
One Star is for the set up and background shots you want to keep but not process further
Two Stars is for any average shot, they maybe nice but are not the best in the days shots
Three Stars are for those shots with great potential that warrant a bit more post processing.
You will undoubtedly find that the two stars make up the majority of your folder but that’s life. Any non stared images should be deleted now (but I normally get rid of those in picasa when I load the photos). If like me you do a daily backup now is the time to do it.

Next I set the filter in lightroom on rating to plus 3 stars and I only have a few images to consider. Often I will also demote a few NQR (not quiet right) photos to further trim down what I need to do. Suddenly 2 hours post processing drudgery become 20 minutes of fun!

The final piece of magic that these discoveries lead to was using the subfolders to hold working and then exported versions, would allow me to see all the photos from one day in one place. I’m not sure if final should be a sub directory of Work (where I do my post processing) or a folder at the same level, Keeping my Final work separate and easily found is the important aspect here. I definitely need to have the option of separating the image size and finish (ie post processing sharpening) in he exported versions. I just have two sizes (small for the WEB or Full resolution for possible printing. My scrapbook mess is now obsolete! (not sure yet if I will try to back that diversity into this new structure, I suspect that will be too much work). There is some duplication of files, but they are at least stored more logically close to the original images. I also returned to using the colour labels to help understand the type of images within the daily (Parent) Directory/Folder. Yellow for HDR , Green for multi image panorama stitching or collage, Purple for family snaps, Red for images posted on the web.

I don’t want you to follow my process exactly but be inspired to simplify the way you organize your photos and/or reduce the time taken or tedium to give more time to be creative.

Ransomware & other ways to loose your photo collection

The Wanna.cry hullaballoo brings to light the vulnerability of keeping your photo collection on-line, on a computer or phone but in one place. This is running a big risk, do something about it now.

Avoiding most Ransomware, is not difficult, its just needs you to make small changes in normal behavior and regularly be wear of or do a few things. Be careful about clicking on links in unsolicited emails and phone message that have the characteristics of a phishing exploit. Be aware of identity fraud and becoming a little more private, be careful and aware in what you share. Even basic snapshots can hide a lot of useful information to a stalker (eg location) or hacker. A good example is the common trend for people to post their boarding passes from the airport gate on Instagram or Facebook which gave hackers enough personal information to gain free entry into accumulated frequent flyer points which they immediately stole. The most important protection is keeping your security/protection measures up to date. Which means installing rather than ignoring those security updates. The final and most important way to not be caught out with ransom wear is to keep an up to date backup, under your control, then the ransom on on a web site/computer becomes meaningless.

However ransomware, virus or worms are not your only risks, Equipment loss damage of malfunction is a much higher possibility and in some cases approaching a certainty. In the case of mechanical spinning harddisk it is a certainty that they will eventually fail (fortunately generally their life will be about 20 plus years). Equipment particular smaller portable items are also prone to get damaged or lost. Mobile phone really don’t like getting wet or dropped. There contents sometimes survive, particularly if have them on a microSD card but I hear many sad stories  of photos lost this way. Making sure your phones get backed up properly is the guaranteed way to avoid the risk. Sure you can sometimes recover files from damage harddrives and phones but it can be very expensive, its much easily to go get new equipment (your going top have to spend that money anyway and pick up an reload from your backup.

 

So what is proper backup. There is lots of advice on the net but the best approach is the 3-2-1 method (see the basics in the David Bergman Video above). Have three copies (yes three) on two media/devices (eg disk, DVD etc) and one copy off-site (eg on-line, bank vault, a friend house across town). There is a lot of options in how you actual do these steps and set up something you can easily manage. It may involve some extra expense (like buying a second hard drive subscribing to an on-line backup service) but remember you are responsible and the should take control of the steps (ie don’t expect a free social media service to do anything special about “your” photos.)

Go start that 3-2-1 backup today, don’t delay it could be too late!

Backing up the actual photo files is also only part of the issue. There are important aspects like how you rate the images and organize them, and in the case of non-destructive editors how the image has been manipulated. Some of this information can be written back into the header of Jpeg files but most photo processing software today stores this separate to the software. In the case of lightroom it is all stored in database  its calls the catalogue. other software such as picasa store this data in a special ini file in each directory containing photos. The original adobe bridge software stored the information in a readable ascii companion file (.xmp) normally known as a sidecar file. Whilst these are not standard, and adobe itself has muddied the waters by changing some format so you need to know the ,they have been around a long while and many other software packages can at least read the metadata and ratings in these files. Some packages (like Corel’s Aftershot Pro and XnView) can also write the basic .xmp files. You need to look at the help (or manual) for the software you used and work out where these files are and how copies can be included in your normal back up set. While Lightroom does itself keep a separate backup of its catalogue it is likely to be on the same computer as the software and photo library. So it is important to include this in the 3-2-1 steps.

If you’re a regulkar reader of this blog, you will know I keep harping on the issue that backups are different to archives, but while they are also copies they should be organized in such a way that photos can be easily found (that metadata discussed above) and there is also the even bigger issue of what format have the best longevity.

Backup your software and operating system by creating a recovery disk (eg in Windows 10, you get the opportunity to create some recover media from which you can reboot your computer) in the case of hardware or software problems. Its fairly large so you will probably need a 16 GB USB drive. I made mine (for my three windows 10 computer) in fluro green) so they look different to any other USB memory key I have. Luck I made the effort because my main desktop reported an update error, and after clearing the upload and reloading the security patched it still seemed unhappy and after the next shutdown it refused to start. Rather than panic I got out the recovery key and rebooted from the USB. Five minutes later I had my desktop back. So make that recover media now. Another item you must remember to backup is the software you use to view your photos plus the registration Keys that you got when you purchased the software. Don’t assumed that you will be able to always download older version of the software. I know corel, adobe and microsoft are not making what they consider superseded available for download. So Search out that install package and include it in your photo backup. Digital photos are binary files and need to be interpreted and rendered to suit your output device, by software. The big risk with proprietary RAW photo format (which many on-line photographers encourage you to use) is they may not be supported in future software. Jpeg is an accepted public standard and so ubiquitous that it is unlike to not be viewable but .DNG, .CR2 .Nef etc might be a little like having a beta Max tape but no player.

Regularly make your best/favorite/precious photos in photobooks, or at least 4” by 6” (10 by 15cm) prints. This is really a physical variation on the backup (in another media) but it does work. Think of all those old shoe boxes with photos from your parents, that have survived the years. Unfortunately many get trashed in post death cleanups. They are controlled by you but can still be more directly/privately shared by you to just those you want to see them.

“Privacy is becoming a privilege” … Paul Thurrott (Windows weekly podcast)

Automatic Grouping of your photos in flickr

In my recent post about the updates to flickr I put a teaser in about finding the Magic View (which you can find in the middle of the option header line under the camera roll). This is the most obvious application (it shows up elsewhere) of flickr’s new vision search engine, that scans incoming photos, recognises, colour and patterns, such that it can “understand” what objects and themes are shown in each photos. I am impressed at how well it performs, with only a very few misclassifications. If you already have a big collection of photos on flickr, magic view is the place to tame it.

The magic doesn’t stop there, even as you select select an image to upload (and the one on the right was uploaded from my phone the image is scanned and extra relevant tags are added (shown as unshaded boxes around uppercase Text) You can delete these is they are not approariate and at the sand time add your own

I have also updated the new flickr loadr but it still has the in discriminant vacuum cleaner style approach and thus there is less control of tagging and you just need to accepts the fact that the photo will will probably only the tagged with the most common and specifically most popular subject tags. However once uploaded it is still easy to group, retag and assign albums in the conventional organizr

The final place you will notice this advanced image analysis at work is in the search function, It will detect suitable images that match the theme even when the photo is not tagged with that theme. Again it works very well especially of standard popular photographic subjects like sunsets (I didn’t realize I had posted so many)

There are also some “advance” search options like colour matching, orientation and size.

Google Photos without the +

Between the time I posted my blog post and shared some photos with family & friend from the Singapore airlines lounge in Singapore, just before midnight Singapore time last thrursday, and arrive back this morning in Melbourne friday morning.  Google+ Photos had changed to just plain Google Photos. The logo is the same, just mining the + in the name, and superficially the screen displays are the same (the update is for both the web albums and mobile+ apps, at least for the android app) but the menu panel is minimal and gone are the  album selection menu and controls at the top of the view. The few controls visible are just small icons. the first Icon on the upper right is assistant and my assistant tells me I’m all caught up but I suspect this is where the former autoawesomes might live for now one. The middle icon is for photos and where thumbnails of the photos are  display, organised by date (uploaded). the final icon is for collections and seems to house both stories and albums. the three dots access some additional settings/features, but if you preferred the old drop down menu you can click on the menu square in the upper right (it has three horizontal lines.

At first impressions it can be very difficult to find being able to do much at this level and you really have to click on a photo to find any familiar tools, such as being able to edit the image, but again using something much simpler than snapseed. The one important change I found quickly was in the ability to share (now very much focussed on sharing with the world rather than just google+ folk, The Ability to share into blogger and flickr do seem serious oversights. The import addition is the blue circle with a chain to indicate a direct link, which the image URL that can be posted in included in web links etc. (note it is not html the code to embedded a links just the URL itself).

At this stage the interface is certainly clean but it is over simple if you are used to picasa web album and have put up with google+ photos. The introductory screen that claims it is easy to edit and share photos is correct because at first look that would seem all you can do (you seem to have to let google do the other stuff on your behalf). My real concern with the way google auto backup (called autosync) is pulling everything into the cloud is how are the photos being organizes and it would appear that the assistant will do that (despite telling me there is nothing to do) I’ll guess I’ll really have to wait to judge just how useful the assistant is going to be. The start up introductory screen also shows a screen called Automatically organized and searchable, with an example of finding all the dog photos, like the new flickr classification this looks like the style of feature I thought showed promise in everpix. However where is it and how does it work? well it popped up automatically as soon as I tried to do a search (using the lonely looking search box at the top of the main screen. Well it obviously is trying some sort of subject recognition system on the images to let you search but such categories.

I was both a little surprised at how well it had search through my photos for Things & Places and apparently doing a reasonable job. yet there where clearly a number that where also wrong.  It would be nice to be able to correct these misclassifications, but as yet I can’t see how. I really hope that this uses an AI image recognition whereby I could help train the selection further for even better automatically tagging and grouping. Lets see what the future brings.

I then got side tracked trying to checkout the Updated Android Google Photo app which downloaded ok BUT then reported I need to update the Google Play Services (but that failed!) and left me unable to get access to any photos on the net. Effectively turning  what was a reasonable photos app off. Was Not Happy about that. However I have subsequently deleted some space hungry google apps got play services to play and reloaded those apps.  Not sure my access to my picture is any better but the theme search seems a bit of fun (at the moment). Its probably not good enough yet all the same.

Finally there was an interesting claim that you will get unlimited free storage. Big claim but you have to do a bit of investigating and the unlimited free storage, only applies if you leave it to google to decided what is high quality (and will compress larger photos to that size). This may not concern you if you are just using on-line storage as a way to have your images in one place and easy to search as opposed to having the photos on google being your only backup (with full size images). You can still opt to stay with the  free 15TB offer and even pay a little bit to have more stored on-line.

This post is a week late because of the hassles with the blogger not found errors. Live writer is back and publishing and that’s probably more important to me than the changes in Google Photo.

Why AfterShoot Pro is my field preference

I’ve been posting a lot about lightroom recently, but it actually doesn’t get as much use as it could. I’ve been seduced into using AfterShot Pro on my laptop and particularly as a way to rank and cull RAW images quickly and easily. I’ve been using AfterShot Pro 2 (in the 64bit version) and it very fast and responsive. My approach is definitely about setting up the workspace I want and not about a workflow. I just want to use a single screen and not have to chop and change between modules.

There are just four components to my AfterShot workspace.

1. I select to use the file system tab and navigate to the directory containing the files I have just loaded, then I collapse the left hand panel to give me more working room (the < at the top left of this panel toggles the panel between hidden or displayed). I normally have the standard view which has both a large image and a line of film thumbnails (like Lightroom’s film strip). I can use my mouse to select from the thumbnails or the right and left arrows to step though the photos.
2. On the right hand panel I select the Standard Tab, which gives me all the Basic Adjustment sliders for simple changes. However I often just tick Perfect Clear, to give me an idea of potential to post process and Raw Noise when appropriate.
3. I can then Rate (and colour label) the photo. These flags can be transferred to other packages like Lightroom and Perfect Photo Suite via Standard xmp files. (How that is done is a subject for a future post)
4. There are several other tools displayed above and below the main image (such as crop and straighten on the lower left tool bar). The tool I use most is the little Magnifier Icon on the upper right. It adds a magnified circle offset from the mouse cursor. As you move the mouse over the image the circular magnifier enlarges that part of the image (no time wasted switching between the original and a zoomed view.)

I can also add Keywords at this stage, but I tend to do that in batches rather than add them individually to photos.
Unless I need an image fast I probably will not process a photo any further in AfterShot (usually I don’t even need anything further for a fast preview or web post). I can use the Star Rating or Colour Labels to filter only the photos with potential for more post processing in Lightroom and/or Perfect Photo.

Flickr’s new Camera Roll

 

Without any fanfare, well not that I have noticed, the revitalised flickr folk have rolled out a new way to view and organize your photos. You can’t miss it its got an orange beta tag beside it and it is now at the top of your You menu tab (where your photostream used to be, its now second).

At the moment it only provides a time line that you can sort by date taken or date uploaded. It only show one or a few (more viewed) photos from each month and the months are only expanded for the year you are interested in. At the bottom of the screen you can access icon to adjust privacy, edit selected images and add them to albums. Thus it won’t rival the current photo organise tool, also under the You menu Items on the flickr menu bar, but I still find this organizer a bit clunky so I’m interested to see what extra features  and flickrbots might be added. I do see some glimmers that the camera roll may tackle some of the promising ways everpix (ie the meta collection) seemed to be heading, before it shutdown.

I like the idea of being able to browse through a large collection, be guided to the highlights and have some smarts behind the scene grouping and refining what I see

Not sure Flickr’s camera roll will deliver this but its probably a step in the right direction.

Virtual Albums

One aspect of digital photo management that I like is the ability to create virtual albums (collection in lightroom).  These are not duplicate copies of the photos just different views that show only the photos selected without having to move to the folder/directory in which it is stored.  The photos remain in the original folder on the computer, there is just an additional link entry in your album to find that photo and display it.  It is the perfect way to store and show only a best photos or photos on a given theme. They are a great way to organise your photo collection and probably deserves a more detail post in the future.

The downside using an album structure in current software is that it can be very hard to transfer this structure to other computers and/or software.  Each package has the unique way to maintain the album contained within its code.  A few packages will let you exports and upload the contents of albums but fall short of being able to export the album structure,    For example Lightroom does allow their collections to be exported as lightroom catalogues, then reimport this catalogue into lightroom on a different computer.  The process is simple enough but is better described by Steve’s Digicam post. Another examples is the original Picasa and Picasa Web Albums (the on-line side, which is now google+ photos) which lets you maintain matching Albums on-line as on your computer and synch the two.

Use Album Keywords as Metadata

A neat way I have to be able to exchange the the organization you have established with your albums and then be able to exchange this between packages or onto online services that support the Album concept, is to code all the contents of the album (or collection) with a unique Keyword, tag or Hashtag. I was for a time using the ~collection_  prefix to identify this organization metadata by I have abbreviated this to ~alb_ (for Album). Of a  photo or batch of photos is transfered it is usually easy to search for the new metadata, Tags or Hashtags and create a new album or similar grouping from the search results.

To finish here is a great post by +Will James, on how to reorganize your albums in google+/picasa web albums.

Its Perfectly Clear why she is becoming a new every day mistress

Having given up on choosing just one photo manager/post processing system I have been happier just using the software that seems most appropriate at the time (I often call this my many mistress project) One of the steps that I do want make sure is not tedious is what happens when I first load my photos and review them. This is one area that Lightroom has left me feeling there is a better way, other than running away to get a coffee and getting distracted. Infact my short trial of Photo Mechanic, opened me to the possibility that there was a better way. I also had become comfortable with doing a lot of this preview and culling in Picasa, which is much faster to load photos and very easy to use. The problem was that ranking and other organizational issues where just wasted on Lightroom

Enter AfterShot Pro, which is a much appreciated Christmas gift. At first it appeared to be duplicating a lot of Lightroom functionality. The really attractive part of this new mistress was the fact that you could just look at photos without having to import them all into its library. It does take a very short moment or two to build a thumbnail (on the fly) but its as easy as moving to the directory where the photos have been loaded (I still use picasa for this) using the navigation (browse) panel on the left of the screen. Choosing the appropriate view, must admit I swap around a bit but I prefer the Multi-Image View (as shown above).  The basic edit features are always there on the right (no changing modules as in Lightroom). I’ve already mentioned the little magnifier tools I still think its a gem. The fact that I can save my ranking and metadata to xmp files that Lightroom can pick up later is one reason I have started to do most of my previewing in AfterShot.  Like Lightroom (and Picasa) AfterShot Pro is a “non destructive” editor, the original photo remains unaltered and you can store its adjustments in an xmp file, the problem is this post processing isn’t compatible with Lightroom’s processing. I’ll probably write more on this later.

An unedited RAW image on a calibrated screen, can be a very boring thing. It often takes a fair few steps (ie not just Auto White Balance or Auto Tone in Lightroom) to see the potential of an image might have for further tweaking and post processing. Which brings me to another real gem I have discovered in AfterShot Pro. It now has the Perfectly Clear plug-in, built into the basic edit panel. This a an “image enhancer” (their term to differentiate themself from other “creative filter” plug-ins) by anthentech, which you can be still purchase separately as a desktop application or downloaded as a smart phone app. The details of their “science” make good reading, but they had me hooked when I saw the quote “Your “Enhancement” Software Takes the Camera Distortions and Makes Them Worse”. The proof though is in the pudding and I have always tried to me honest and fair in my evaluation of AUTO anything style claims. They usually fall short of the mark for me. However I love perfectly clear as I scroll though my photos because with one click I can see the potential of a raw image. It gives me a target to strive for in Lightroom later without having to invest a lot of time tweaking an image and not be able to transfer this to Lightroom. I will probably still try to do better with some manual tweaking later but I haven’t invested a lot of time, and if I’m in a hurry to email a proof or just upload an image to illustrate a blog post that one click is pretty much all I need to do. Perfectly Clear does work with jpeg as well, but it may not have as much potential to work with as the equivalent RAW file.

AfterShoot & before LR

I recently received After Shoot Pro as a gift, and using it in earnest has been something of an epiphany after  my many mistresses ponderings. I have been aware of After Shot, (formerlty Bibble) for a while even tried a quick trial some months ago and seen the many reviews mainly comparing it to Lightroom. The general consensus was it was “becoming” a viable alternative to Lightroom (or Aperture)  for processing RAW format photos but the reviewers differ on who might benefit from using it. Well other than the obvious it is somewhat cheaper to purchase (particularly in Australia).
What suddenly struck me as I was only starting to review and classify and tweak a few images directly, ie without having to first import them into Picasa or Lightroom, was that After Shot pro is really fast and easy to use. After a bit of experimenting I settled as the combined thumbnails and single image display as what suited me. I can move through the thumbnails (like the film strip in Lightroom) rate the photo, do some preliminary editing and metadata tagging with only a few key strokes. In other words I can do most things on a singles screen (I don’t have to jump between modes)
The massive difference to Lightroom, and one I haven’t investigated in enough detail yet is the ability in After Shot pro to work with layers, for selective editing. Unfortunately the “spot” removal and retouching (called heal & clone) are accessed under the layers panel, so they are one step off the one single screen approach. I always try out the Auto-fix and Auto-enhance features but soon find them wanting, well at least not what I want. Perfectly Clear is a little different, sure it enhances the contrast and lifts the colours a little but it does it in a tame fashion, that closely matches what I remember seeing, Specifically it stands out from others when it comes to handling portraits, “keeping them real”. If the photo is well exposed it may not even make more than a few subtle changes but on underexposed and unfortunately strongly shadowed images it seems pretty reliable. I know perfectly clear  was, and apparently still is, a popular plug-in for Photoshop & Lightroom. Having it built into After Shoot is a bonus. The other real gem is the magnifier, all it does it is work exactly like a smallish magnifying glass, or loupe, which you can move around to view any part of your photos with the mouse. It makes that  Lightroom 1:1 viewing look and feel tedious. One final thing that soon became obvious to me was although  After Shoot Pro makes extensive use of short cut keys, they where not always the same as Lightroom, However I also found you can easily redefine the shortcuts, using file/preferences/keyboard, so I changed a few to match the shortcut keys I commonly used in Lightroom. You can also set up short cut keys to perform key wording from your keyword sets.
Yes there are several things After Shot Pro doesn’t do which Lightroom can, Red Eye removal is one obvious omission. Probably a lot of fine tunning Lightroom gives more options.  However its speed, ability to work on any image anywhere without “loading/importing it” and easy to use basic tools make After Shoot Pro perfect as my first review tools. The fact that I can transfer any rating, flagging, tagging and metadata edits into Lightroom later makes it the ideal first step to view and organize my photos without that long delay! So I see AFTER shot as a better way to review and organise photos BEFORE Lightroom, rather than a Lightroom replacement.
Lightroom has been a very finicky yet well loved mistress and doesn’t play well with other software so she is just going to be left on my studio computer and might only get used when I have time to pander to her eccentricities, everywhere else and particularly on my laptops and netbook After Shot is now my preference because she is fast, slim (less than 1/6th the size of Lightroom) and with more than adequate skills for me. The big outstanding issue is whether I will bother to re-catalogue my photo archive in Lightroom, after my recent disappointment?