Monday April 6
 
16:29
 
PC Upgrade – Part 1

I’ve been very happy with the 26,000 yen PC I built at the end of last year except for one thing: Lightroom. It runs like a dog. A lame dog. A lame dog that hasn’t been fed for a month.

Everything else runs perfectly – even iTunes is as ok as you can expect from iTunes! – but not Lightroom. It’s just too slow and clunky.

It’s probably something to do with my 120GB+ photo library and the fact that most of my photos now are RAW, but that’s not the whole story. Lightroom was useable on my Mac with a comparable load. On my PC it isn’t.

So yesterday I decided to upgrade – I bought a Phenom II X4 920 (2.8GHz x 4) CPU and two 1TB hard drives to set up as RAID 0. With CPU and hard disk upgrade, I should get much better speed.

PassMark CPU Mark
5200+ X2 (2.7Ghz x 2): 1,280
920 X4 (2.8Ghz x 4): 3,285
i7 920 (2.67GHz x 4 x 2): 5,456

On the processor alone that’s a 2 1/2 times speed up from my current setup for 19,000 yen. Yes, the i7 would be faster, but I’d need to invest around 90,000 yen on a new motherboard, graphics card, and memory. I’d rather wait for the moment. The new processor brings the cost of my PC to 45,000 yen – 39,000 yen if I take out the cost of the old processor (I’m not including the price of the hard drives in these figures).

I did a quick test in Lightroom before and after installing the new processor, without installing the hard drives. Exporting 43 RAW files to 500 pixel JPEGs took 3m 45s with the old processor and 1m 27s with the new – which is almost exactly 2 1/2 times quicker. Nice.

Recalculating my Vista Experience Index score, I got a bit of a surprise. Not only did the processor rating go up, but graphics performance also went up! Once again, this score puzzles me. Not sure why the score for graphics should change because I thought that was all handled by the GPU. Maybe it’s related to the BIOS upgrade I did? Or maybe not everything is done by the GPU.

Processor: Old 5.2 New 5.9
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB: 5.9 (No change)
Graphics – ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics: Old 3.5 New 4.1
Gaming graphics – 3323 MB total available graphics memory: Old 3.6 New 4.0
Primary hard disk: 5.4 (No change)

Hopefully when I’ve added RAID 0 for the photo storage I’ll get even better results from the Lightroom test – Lightroom is very disk intensive. I’ll post the results in part 2.

Tuesday February 10
 
15:26
 
How Has My Photography Improved?

I know a number of people now who are new to DSLRs and are asking me how they can improve their skills, so I’ve thought back over my DSLR life and asked myself this question: “What are the basic things that I did which really improved my photography knowledge and skills?”

This is the result: How To Improve Your Photography

If presents the four basic things that I’ve done which I think have helped my photography progress the most. Hope it’s useful to people.

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 20
 
15:39
 
Bolloxroom

“An error occurred when attempting to change modules.”

And it was all going so well…