Lightroom 5 was released the other day, and in my blog post about it, I warned about a potentially insidious Publish-related bug that could cause you to “do stuff” on different photos than it appeared you were working with. Since “do stuff” could mean “delete these images”, at worst this means that you could accidentally delete images from your disk without even realizing you'd done it.

The folks on the Lightroom team at Adobe have always been most generous to me with their time and attention, and that remains the case with this bug, and we've been working together on understanding it. At this point, I can report that things are both better and worse than I initially thought.

It turns out that with effort, I can reproduce the bug in older versions of Lightroom (Lr3 and Lr4), so at least in one manifestation, this is not a new bug. It's telling that I didn't notice the bug in the four years I've worked with Publish, and I didn't hear about it from any of the hundreds of thousands of folks who use my plugins. This makes me feel that it must be an exceptionally rare bug, and that somehow I just got unlucky in that I'm hitting the bug easily after the upgrade to Lr5. If this is true, the “general alarm” of my initial post is unwarranted.

However, the fact that I and others didn't notice the bug doesn't mean that I and others weren't affected by the bug; the insidious “silent killer” nature of it means that you simply don't know exactly the ramifications unless you happen to catch it right away. If you are affected, but don't catch it right away, it may be days or months or years before you notice that something was done to the wrong image, or not done to the right image.

Clearly this is a Big Deal if you're bit by this bug, but we just don't know how widespread it is in the wild. Perhaps I'm the only one who actually suffers from it in Lr5, and that as such it's just unfortunate for Lightroom's PR that I happen to have a well-trafficed blog.

The investigation continues; I'll post updates as warranted.

In any case, I continue to find what's new in Lr5 indispensable, and I heartily recommend it. But for now, when working in Publish, I suggest always keeping the Filmstrip open and making your selections there.

Continued here...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/320 sec, f/5, ISO 3200 — map & image data — nearby photos
This Seems Like About the Right Balance
between foreground sharpness and background blur
at the Gioji Temple (祇王寺), Kyoto Japan

Desktop-Background Versions
1280×800  ·  1680×1050  ·  1920×1200  ·  2560×1600  ·  2880×1800

I play and experiment a lot when I'm out with the camera, slowly trying to add bits of experience of what “works” and what doesn't. The photo above, from a trip a year ago to one of my favorite hidden gems of Kyoto, the Gioji Temple, is one of a series of five shots that I took at different apertures, to get different levels of blur in the background.

I often know exactly what I want in a result and how to get it, but sometimes I just can't predict what aperture will give a pleasing result, so I do this kind “same scene, different aperture” series fairly often.

Along these lines, I shared pairs of photos at different apertures last year in “Little Orange Mushrooms and Depth-of-Field Comparisons”, but because I didn't use a tripod, the jumpiness between the images of a pair is a little disconcerting.

I've finally figured out a way to automatically align the images in a series like this, so I'd like to show the five-photo series from which the shot above is taken. Sweep your mouse from side-to-side to see the aperture change:

Animatable Scene (5 frames) — slowly sweep mouse from side to side to view effect
写真の上をマウスであちこちにゆっくり動かすと景色を変わる。

At an Aperture of f/1.4

You can see quite a change in depth, and in the natural vignetting of the lens. Which one, if any, appeals to you most?

(I wish the composition were better, but I was just taking these as a depth-of-field test, so I didn't plan on sharing them.)

The interactive display above uses the same underlying technology as my wigglegrams (most recently seen on “Kyoto’s Amazing Haradanien Garden, Part 4”), repurposed to show a different kind of depth. I like the effect, though it would be better if I were to use a tripod instead of software to stabilize the sequence. I wish I weren't so lazy.

I guess I was in quite the “experimentation” mood that day, because other posts from the outing include the aperture-pair little orange mushrooms post mentioned above, and “Polarizer Examples With the Moss and Ferns”, also showing educational pairs of photos.

It was a great visit resulting in many posts, starting with “Rich Colors: A Good Start to an Amazing Day in Kyoto” and “Tag Along With Me on a Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Gioji Temple”. As always, the “nearby photos” link under most photos shows you photos and articles from nearby, from the same visit and from other visits throughout the seasons.

Lightroom 5 has been released... see the announcement at Adobe.

There's a bunch of new stuff.... a good place to start your own investigation is Victoria Bampton's “What's New in Lightroom 5” and “What's New in Lightroom 5.0 Beta” articles. Also, Sean over at Lightroom Blog is keeping a list of tutorial/review links.

The most exciting new things for me are “Smart Previews” (I can work with my entire 130k library of images on my disk-starved laptop), “Upright” perspective correction in Develop, where I can easily correct for my bad habit of not holding the camera level, and the new advanced healing brush, to paint away things you don't want in the image. I also like the new True Full Screen mode.

Warning Warning Warning

One thing I don't like is a very dangerous Publish-related bug that remains in the final 5.0, that can cause you to delete your master images without even realizing it!

The problem is that the selection shown in a Publish Grid may not be the actual set of selected images, and so when you intend to perform operations (update metadata, delete images, export, etc.) on what you see as the selected images, it might not happen... a completely different set of images may be affected (updated, deleted, exported).

In my eyes, this is just shocking. This screenshot shows the problem, using the Publish Collection for my “Selected Blog Photos” gallery on Google Plus as an example:

Example Manifestation of the Bug
Notice how the selection appears differently between Grid and the Filmstrip?

The selection shown in Filmstrip is the actual selection... it's the selection shown in Grid that this bug causes to sometimes be wrong. In the example above, the two water-polo shots of my 10-year-old son are shown as selected in the Filmstrip, and they are the ones that any operations will actually act on, yet in Grid, six unrelated images are shown as selected. They are not actually selected, and invoked operations will not act on them.

The moral of the story is:

In Lr5, never select images in Grid in a Publish Service.

Even using the next-image arrow key does not properly update the true selection, though it does update in Grid, making you think everything is working fine. It's a very dangerous bug.

It's best to avoid working in Grid in Publish until this is fixed, but if you must, be sure to do so with the Filmstrip also open, and use the Filmstrip to make and identity selections.

Continued here...

I mentioned in my previous post that we'd taken a quick weekend trip to Nagasaki, Japan mostly to try different foods, as it has the longest history in Japan of integration with the outside world. Along these lines, we stopped by a Hamamatsu location to try their shippoku cuisine (長崎市、浜松の卓袱料理).

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 32mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 4500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Arrival

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 42mm — ¹/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
A Different Kind
of chain restaurant

The place seemed fairly upscale, but it's a chain of about 100 restaurants owned by the same company that does “Ringer Hut” fast food (named after a 19th-century Nagasaki merchant from England).

The shippoku cuisine is (said to be) heavily influenced by the long Chinese presence in Nagasaki, but frankly, it all seemed like “normal” Japanese to me. Whatever you call it, it was tasty, so let's look at the dishes...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 58mm — ¹/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Light Soup

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 58mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sweet Beans

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 58mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Assorted
mustard & renkon, beef, okura and chicken(?)

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
As Fresh as You Can Get
wasabi root grated in front of us

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Demonstrating

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 4500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Various Sashimi

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/400 sec, f/4.5, ISO 4000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cooked White Fish
of some sort, with a tart plum sauce

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 62mm — ¹/400 sec, f/4.5, ISO 3600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Fish and Green Miso

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 62mm — ¹/400 sec, f/4.5, ISO 3600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Something Tasty
I forget what these were, but they were crispy on the outside, molten on the inside

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 56mm — ¹/400 sec, f/4.5, ISO 5000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Another Assortment
eel, chicken, pumpkin, eggplant, daikon

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/200 sec, f/4.5, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Pork
that absolutely melts in your mouth

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 66mm — ¹/400 sec, f/4.5, ISO 4500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Lightly Pickled Veggies

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 58mm — ¹/25 sec, f/4.5, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Another Light Soup
the camera freaked out and overexposed this by a couple of stops,
recovered as best I could in Lightroom

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Light Dessert
watermelon in gelatin

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 5000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sweet-Bean Soup
to end the meal on the same kind of sweet note as it started on

A lot of dishes, but each one little, so the amount was just right for me. (You also get Japnese white rice in there, which I forgot to photograph. It looked like rice.)

Having lived in Japan on and off for 20+ years, I find it odd that I don't recognize what makes this meal specific to Nagasaki... it wouldn't surprise me to see something quite similar in Kyoto, except perhaps Kyoto would tend to include tofu and yuba.

9-image panorama — map & image data — nearby photos
Nagasaki Bay
from Thomas Glover's house — scroll side-to-side — 水平にスクロールしてね —
or click through to a 13,000-pixel-wide version

We spent a rainy weekend in Nagasaki (長崎). Nagasaki, Japan is most famous internationally for its place in mid-20th-century history, but for hundreds of years it was most famous as the only foreign gateway into Japan, and as such it has a unique and colorful old-world international vibe along the twisty streets sewn over its steep hillsides. It has particularly strong Dutch, Portuguese, and Chinese influences.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 60mm — ¹/100 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Streetcar Tracks
along with the hills and the international vibe, calls San Francisco to mind

Mostly went for the food, which was often a blend of Japanese and some other culture's cuisine.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 38mm — ¹/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cheesy “Netherlands Pot”
かまど番屋の「オランダ鍋」

Unlike Kyoto's purposefully-laid-out gridwork of streets (which is quite rare in Japan), Nagasaki's streets have developed organically by many combined cultures over hundreds of years, branching into and around the many nooks and crannies of the very hilly area.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 52mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
View from the Hotel

Most areas of Japan try to have a confection that they're known for, so that visitors buy it to bring back as a representative gift for family and co-workers. Nagasaki's is castella (カステラ), a simple spongecake.

I had plenty of yummy castella on the trip, but I somehow neglected to venture into this “Castella Shrine”...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 26mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
“Castella Shrine”
unholy offspring of shameless marketing and cultural touchstones

I did get to meet someone famous in Japanese history...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 31mm — ¹/400 sec, f/3.5, ISO 4000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Me and Ryooma

The Glover Garden (the former home of Scottish merchant Thomas Glover) is a pleasant hillside garden offering many pretty views of the area.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 26mm — ¹/400 sec, f/3.5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Enjoying the View

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 28mm — ¹/400 sec, f/5, ISO 900 — map & image data — nearby photos
Swarm
the fish have trained humans to provide food

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 34mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Elevator Door

This elevator just outside the back gate of the garden was particularly interesting, as this close-up crop from the above image shows:

Between “Up” and “Over”

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/400 sec, f/11, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Elevator Shaft

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 58mm — ¹/1250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
View From an Opposing Hill

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 26mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 140 — map & image data — nearby photos
Same View as Above
from 149 years ago

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sculpture Detail
outside a restaurant with heavy Chinese influences

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 42mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1600 — map & image data — nearby photos
My Omelet

Fumie found an amazing flight+hotel deal for our trip. Adding an extra night at the hotel cost just $30 per-person, but that includes an amazing breakfast buffet that by itself goes for a well-worth-it $23. The trip was an excellent value.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 28mm — ¹/640 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
ANA Crowne Plaza Gloverhill
our hotel, next to the aforementioned Glover Garden

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Merge

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
Chinese Influence

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 66mm — ¹/400 sec, f/8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Typical Path
narrow, winding, steep