.

Archive for the 'Tech' Category

Posts relating to techie things

Lightroom Plugin Development: Adding a URL Handler to a Lightroom Plugin
This post is of interest only to Lightroom plugin developers. Round about Lightroom 3.2, Adobe added support for intercepting "lightroom://" URLs, but have not documented it yet, so I'll do so here. It's particularly useful as part of an OAuth-authentication procedure. What You can have your plugin automatically respond to certain "lightroom://" URLs if they [...]
View full post »
Informal GPS Logger Test: iPhone 4s GPS is Shockingly Good
In the comments of a recent post about GPS receivers, it was suggested that the GPS receiver in the iPhone was useful for keeping tracklogs. I had bad experiences with iPhone location services when I tested in 2009, but perhaps my test wasn't good, or perhaps the old iPhone 3 wasn't good, so I thought [...]
View full post »
In-Camera Geoencoding and the Nikon D4: Case Study In Product-Development Costs, Ignorance, and Naïveté
Now that Nikon has announced its next flagship pro SLR, the Nikon D4, with much flowery prose but few hard details, discussion and debate and speculation and flames and praise have filled camera circles. This post is long, but here's the two-sentence summary for the "tl;dr" crowd: As with most any technology release (hardware or [...]
View full post »
Inspired Artistic Temple Shot By Paul Barr
Rarely does a photo take my breath away, but this rendition by Paul Barr does it every time I come across it. I don't know what it is about it, but if you'll excuse the pun, I'm really drawn to it. Paul recently got an iPhone 4s, and to compliment its camera he loaded a [...]
View full post »
Heading Out To Photograph The Fall Foliage? Don’t Forget The Polarizer Filter
function show1880(p, b, px, bx) { document.getElementById(p ).style.visibility = "visible"; document.getElementById(px).style.visibility = "hidden"; document.getElementById(b ).style.borderColor = "red"; document.getElementById(bx).style.borderColor = "gray"; } mouseover button to see that version show1880("t1880_00", "t1880_02", "t1880_01", "t1880_03"); Since writing "A Few Polarization-Filter Examples" several years ago, I've been meaning to do a post on a polarization filter's effects when shooting fall [...]
View full post »
Getting Photos from Lightroom to an iPad is a Lot Harder (to Do Well) Than You Think; Here’s How
Wow, what an ordeal. It started a month or so ago when I decided to put some of my photos on my iPad and iPhone, and found that it was harder to do well than I would have thought. A lot harder. A month later, finally, and I have a good workflow. It turns out [...]
View full post »
On Why the iPhone 4s is a Disappointment, and on Steve Jobs’ Greatest Failure
Like many eagerly awaiting an iPhone 5 announcement, I was disappointed the other day when Apple announced the iPhone 4s. In thinking about the logical response to my disappointment, asking "would I have been happier had they named the new phone iPhone 5?" the answer is "no" because bumping up the number from 4 to [...]
View full post »
Calendar Template PSDs for 2012
FYI, I've just pushed calendar template PSD files for 2012, on my Photoshop calendar-template-building script page. If you can run the script, you don't need the templates, but if you can't, they'll perhaps be useful in making your own 2012 calendars.
View full post »
A Couple of New Lightroom Export Plugins: to Twitter, and to ExposureManager
I've recently released a couple of new plugin for Adobe Lightroom.... Twitter added the ability to include a photo with a tweet a few days ago, so I've had my nose to the development grindstone and today release my "Export to Twitter" plugin. Most of my "export to..." plugins (e.g. to Flickr or Facebook....) already [...]
View full post »
The Challenge of Comment Moderation in a Spiteful World
Moderating blog comments -- the triage to weed out spam and such before making submitted comments visible to the public -- can get complicated. Obvious spam is easy (delete it), as are obviously on-topic relevant personal comments without links (approve it). But there's a lot in between. In particular, if there's a link you have [...]
View full post »
Scott Kelby Responds, Dazzling With His Marketing Magic
Scott Kelby's marketing skill continue to amaze me. I posted the other day in "The Amazing Marketing Power of Scott Kelby" that I was disappointed in Scott Kelby for hyping a product close to him in a blatantly dishonest fashion. It seems that he responded to the tsunami of criticism a few days later in [...]
View full post »
My New Lightroom Plugin: as Close to “Layers in Lightroom” as You’re Going To Get
In my previous post, about factually-incorrect hype of a photo-editing application that claimed it provided "Layers in Lightroom", I noted that an idea had come to me to almost actually provide "Layers in Lightroom". I had a proof-of-concept version out to friends that evening, but it's taken a couple of days to spiff it up [...]
View full post »
The Amazing Marketing Power of Scott Kelby
If you're not really into digital photography, you may have never heard of Scott Kelby, but he's quite the media dynamo in the on-line digital-photography world. He founded a Photoshop user's club some years ago, and seemingly has never rested since. As an example of his business savvy, rather than launching the club with a [...]
View full post »
Important Note for Nikon D3/D700/D300 Shooters Who Use Lightroom or Photoshop
DEC 2011 UPDATE: the "v3" camera profiles mentioned below have now been supersceeded by "v4" profiles mentioned here, available with Lr3.6. If you shoot with a Nikon D3, D700, or D300, and use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, you'll want to know about the "Camera v3" beta camera-calibration profiles described in this Adobe-forum thread. (The actual [...]
View full post »
Finally: My Faux-Mat Photoshop Script is Out
I've finally pushed out a public version of the faux photo mat builder that I mentioned a month ago: It's been a ridiculous amount of work to build, and then almost an equal amount of work to write up the presentation. I have no idea why I spend so much time on something that few [...]
View full post »
Dabbling in Some Fine-Art Printing for My Office
The Problem The room I use as my office at home has a layout not good for much of anything but the bedroom it was designed to be, but space is always tight in Japan, so one makes do as best one can. In this case, my desk is "floating" (not up against a wall [...]
View full post »
Is There Some (Blending-Mode?) Magic to This Photoshop Problem?
This post is a request for ideas from Photoshop-savvy folk, about how to best approach a particular Photoshop issue I'm facing. So, I'm working on a Photoshop CS5 script to generate photo-realistic fake matting around an image, for when you want to display a print on the wall, but don't want to go to the [...]
View full post »
Balmer’s “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Quote
An article I read today included the author's speculation that: "the Verizon iPhone is expected to add a few more billion dollars to Apple's bottom line" "A few more billion dollars" would be big money to me, but it's probably not all that big a deal to a company the size of Apple (the 2nd [...]
View full post »
Sort of New Lightroom Plugin: Major Update to my Picasa Face-Recognition-Data Import Plugin
I've just pushed a major update to my Picasa Face-Data Import plugin for Adobe Lightroom so that it now uses new plugin features of Lightroom 3 to maintain real keywords for the names associated with images. It's much less kludgy than the version for Lightroom 2, but using Picasa on images in your Lightroom catalog [...]
View full post »
New Lightroom Plugin: JPEG Export Quality Tester
I've just published a new plugin for Adobe Lightroom, the JPEG Export Quality Tester that I mentioned in last summer's "An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings". The plugin allows you to quickly generate and inspect versions of an image at all the JPEG quality settings that Lightroom offers. I'd written the plugin quite [...]
View full post »