Friday November 28
 
18:15
 
Freedom

For the last two months, I’ve been working on getting my old photos into Lightroom - all 55,000 of them. I’ve been gathering photos from the 30+ DVDs where they have been residing, organising them into conceptual units (Family, Friends, etc), fixing dates and orientation, ensuring the photos are tagged with the relevant DVD so that I can find the originals again, etc. At the same time I’ve been setting up backups, both to Flickr and automatic incremental backup to a USB disk, and setting up a new workflow to replace my old pre-Lightroom workflow.

That organisation is now complete, with the exception of uploading to Flickr. Yes, I don’t have everything micro-tagged with “Korea”, “food”, “falling over drunk”, but those things are searchable. Now it’s time to move on.

So this week I started reading books on the Develop module within Lightroom. Many books. Comparing what each said, and really trying to get it all into my brain. Some were better than others - but through throwing myself into it and cross referencing what I didn’t understand, I’ve now started to get a real feel for how the different parts of Develop work and why. I just regret that I don’t have that many images to really play with, because I only started shooting RAW recently.

One thing that became clear to me when reading the “day in the life” type workflows in these books was just how many of the photographs we see are post processed. Almost every digital photograph we see has been custom post processed in some way - from white balance, to exposure, the more extreme corrections.

I’ve never been one for post-processing. This is partly because I regarded it as “cheating” and so wanted to capture an image which was “right” from the beginning, and partly because I didn’t have the time to do so, since I was lacking both the workflow tools and skill.

I’ve always challenged myself to get great “out of the camera” images and been disappointed at the small percentage of “wow”s compared to the media and other photographers. I realise now that I’ve been far too hard on myself - trying to create the “perfect” image straight out the camera when everyone else is tweaking away.

In some ways, it was partly my misconception. I thought I was doing no post processing when in fact my images were being post processed - but not by me, by the camera. Everything is an interpretation of the RAW underlying photo data - I was letting the camera “interpret” that. It decided the white balance, added generic level of sharpening, enhanced the colour, shone a fill light. Sometimes I wasn’t happy with the result - but then how could I be when generic post processing is applied to everything? Do cameras have eyes? Can they judge everything perfectly? If computers could do that, “Auto Levels” in Photoshop would be perfect every time.

Now I get the chance to decide what “generic” processing should be applied myself - enough so that my images look decent enough to be uploaded to Flickr - and I can tweak as necessary on top of that.

I don’t feel nearly as “fake” about post-processing now that I understand:

RAW has to be post processed, and if I don’t choose the defaults, my converter will.

PP was happening all along when I was shooting JPEG, but it was outside of my control.

No professional digital photographer is using their photos “as is” and presenting them to clients; they are all post processed in some way - from grey-selecting white balance and adjusting exposure to more extreme PP such as cloning out unwanted parts, selective sharpening, and adding highlight or removing distractions.

Since I started playing with Develop in Lightroom this week, I’ve really started to get the “wow” I was missing before, without feeling I am “cheating”. So far I’ve been playing with photos of people - myself, friends - so I’m not posting them here, but when I can take more people-free photos, hopefully in Thailand in Dec, I hope to get some on here.

Friday November 28
 
13:37
 
Lightroom 2.1: Virtual Copies

I’ve started to use Virtual Copies extensively in Lightroom. Whenever I want to make an adjustment to an image, instead of adjusting the original, I right click on it and select “Create Virtual Copy”. This means I have both the original image and my post-processed image, the virtual copy, both easily at hand in the film strip and grid view - but using almost no extra disk space. I prefer this approach to snapshots.

But Lightroom 2.1 has a problem selecting virtual copies to appear in smart collections.

The sensible way to do it would be to select by File Type - after all, to us these appear as separate images. That, however, is not possible - presumably because these are not individual files, but are stored in the library or in metadata.

Thinking laterally, virtual copies have a value in Copy Name - original images do not. So a smart collection based on “Copy Name is not empty” should work, right?

Wrong. All original images are returned - minus the virtual copies.

If you want a collection of virtual copies, ie. where Copy Name is not empty, then you have to select by “Copy Name is empty“. If you want to exclude virtual copies, ie. where Copy Name is empty, then you have to use “Copy Name is not empty”.

Crazy. Apparently this bug was introduced in LR2.1 RC1 and reported to Adobe but still made it into the official 2.1. Let’s hope 2.2 fixes this and does the sensible thing of allowing “FileType is Virtual Copy” or “Virtual Copy is true”. Lightroom 2.2 is due out in December.

Thursday November 27
 
11:02
 
Acting Like A Bunch Of Girls..

..is nothing new for Thais, but now they are acting like children too. Grow up people! Your government was only voted in a year ago - if you hated them then you shouldn’t have voted for them.

The PAD is a loose grouping of royalists, businessmen and the urban middle-class opposed to Mr Thaksin.

No it’s not.

The PAD is a big bunch of children who named themselves after a sanitary towel.

What astonishes me is that the King isn’t making a statement calling for the end of the protests. Whereas no-one listens to the British Queen, Thai people respect and follow their King. I am sure he could end this in seconds.

Tuesday November 25
 
15:58
 
Every Laugh Is Sacred

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.

We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube.

The Pythons still have their originality - instead of moaning about losing money, like the movie and music industries, they have turned the situation to their advantage. I don’t use You Tube much, but things like this might cause me to use it more (even though I have the complete Monty Python on DVD).

Monty Python You Tube channel, via Eyal.

Thursday November 20
 
15:39
 
Bolloxroom

“An error occurred when attempting to change modules.”

And it was all going so well…