Adobe has just released Lightroom 6.

There are plenty of places to find out about what's new, such as this post from Adobe for an overview, or Victoria Bampton's exhaustive "What's New" writeup.

For my part, in this post, I'll just talk about a few things I think are worth particular mention.

UPDATE: I guess I should mention right away that modern versions (from within the last couple of months) of my 45 plugins should work fine on Lightroom 6. The major upgrade does cause registrations of my plugins to be lost, but that's easy enough to fix (see here).

You Don't Have to Subscribe

Adobe is really pushing the subscription model these days (“Creative Cloud”), so most of the marketing copy you'll see today references only “Lightroom CC”. The stand-alone version, without integration to their cloud/mobile offerings, is still available if you dig, but the “Lightroom 6” branding is not being emphasized.

Personally, I like to own (“License”) my copy of software, so I'm glad that subscription is not the only choice. But in looking at the increased value of my Adobe stock since they started the move toward subscriptions, I see the writing on the wall that I may not have the choice forever. But today we still do.

Requirement for an Adobe ID

Adobe now flat-out requires an Adobe account to install Lightroom 6. This will undoubtedly lead to much bellyaching among a vocal minority for whom it is, on principle, an evil thing... even though like for the rest of us it is practically-speaking little worse than a one-time 5-minute roadbump.

My personal theory is that this new requirement is to help combat rampant piracy of Lightroom, which until now had little to curb it.

A side note: most folks probably don't realize that long ago (circa Lr3), I made it so that my plugins won't run on a pirated copy of Lightroom, with folks who got caught having to validate their new, legal copy to my satisfaction before my plugins would run on their computer again. I suspect that most folks who got caught this way simply decided to forego the use of my plugins rather than actually pay for their own copy of Lightroom, yet still, many many (multiple thousands) folks did respond by buying a copy of Lightroom. I know this because I handled each validation by hand, and have set aside time several days a week for the last few years to deal with them.

As a user of Lightroom I want it to grow and thrive, so anything that thwarts pirates without too much burden on honest customers is fine with me.

Raw Panorama Merge

This might feel like only a mildly-convenient addition in light of long having had the ability to merge panoramas in Photoshop or other tools, but you've got to realize that this is merging the pre-develop raw data, creating a single raw file of the merged composition.

It used to be that you had to develop each component photo to whatever final look you wanted, then do the merge and live with that one result. But now you merge prior to develop, and can then work with the result like any other raw file, with all the dynamic latitude and no-loss-of-quality white-balance adjustments that this implies.

I don't have much experience with Lightroom 6's panorama tool, but this panorama (from the top of this blog post) was created with Lightroom, from ten fairly bland shots taken by hand in the rain:

I spent all of a few seconds to select them and invoke “Photo > Photo Merge > Panorama” and let it do its thing. The results certainly exceed the effort that I put into it. 😀

GPU Acceleration

This new option in the preferences has Lightroom use the processing power of your system's graphics chip to boost performance, mostly with render speed in Develop.

With my high-end Mid-2014 MacBook Pro, I've got mixed feelings about this option. It indeed does speed up responsiveness in Develop, sometimes remarkably, but other times it seems to add a jitter to the display. I haven't pined down exactly what causes it, but I seem to notice the problem most when using the dust-correction tool.

Luckily the “Performance” tab in the Preferences dialog is sticky, so if I want to turn it on or off it's just a tap of Command-comma to bring up the option, and a click to toggle the checkbox.

Face-Detection and People Support

Some people won't care about face detection, but I find it's useful, especially after you get enough “critical mass” data. My production Lightroom catalog has 135,000 photos going back to 1986, many of them of family and friends, so there's value for me to be able to quickly identify all photos with such-and-such a person in them.

It's quite a lot of work to accurately apply this retroactively to 135,000 photos, so I've made only a small dent so far, but it's still useful.

Of course, one doesn't need automatic face detection to associate people with photos: many photographers already use keywords to do exactly that. I'm just too lazy to manually go through every photo to assign keywords that way. Having the hard parts automated tipped the scale for me.

It's not perfect, or even great, but this version seems to be “fairly good”, with some fairly restrictive design decisions that, how shall I say, leaves ample room for much improvement in future versions.

Crunching Pixels

There are several steps to the process. The first is that Lightroom's face-recognition engine must crunch on the pixels in the background to detect face locations. This can take a long time... on the order of several days to a week for a catalog like mine.

The first thing I did was turn off the “Automatically detect faces in all photos” preference item (the “Metadata” tab of Catalog preferences) so that I can control when Lightroom pegs the CPU looking for faces. In this mode, Lightroom looks for faces only when you've entered the “People” view (the letter “O” keyboard shortcut) and works on only the selected source.

For the initial check of my 130k photos, I'd select a year or two worth of photos, enter “People” view, and let it run overnight.

You can assign names to faces (discussed below) while the pixel-crunching of face detection is going on, but I don't recommend it, because as new faces are discovered, the Faces-Mode screen keeps updating... so trying to work with it can be confusing. I've always found it better to wait until the pixel-crunching face-discovery phase is over for a set of photos before I start the name-assignment phase.

Person Keywords

In Lightroom, a “Person” is represented by a specially marked keyword, and most times you'll want to choose the person's name as the text of the keyword. In Lightroom's “Keywording List”, if you want families to generally sort together, you'll want to put the family name first. I'd like to put names like “Friedl, Jeffrey”, but a comma is not allowed in a name, so I can't do that.

In the end I decided to put names like “Friedl/Jeffrey”. It's a bit ugly, but it seems to work well enough for me. Also, my People Support plugin has ways to automatically turn “Friedl/Jeffrey” into “Jeffrey Friedl” on export.

But some folks may well want to choose “FRIEDL Jeffrey” or “Jeffrey Friedl”. I suggest reading about a variety of approaches before investing a lot of time on entering names.

Lightroom can let you pick a keyword to be the default parent of all new People keywords. As you can see at right, I made a keyword named “-PEOPLE-” to hold all my People keywords (that's what the asterisk next to it means, that it's the default parent). I include the leading dash in the name so that it sorts to the top of the keyword list; the trailing dash is just for symmetry.

Warning: newly-created “People” keywords are, by default, marked for inclusion in exported copies of an image. If you prefer to keep them private, you can exclude all “People” keywords via a new option in the Export/Publish dialogs.

Also, my People Support plugin allows you to easily see which People keywords are marked for export, and to toggle that state quickly.

Assigning Names to Faces

After faces are found within photos, the next step is to assign names to those faces. There are a lot of ways to do this (accepting a guess offered by Lightroom, typing in a new name, dragging thumbnails to named faces, etc.). I'm sure many other online resources will go over this step better than I could.

Cleaning Up

The automatic face-detection engine misses a lot of faces.... it simply fails to notice their existence. So, if I really want to make sure that I have fully processed a set of photos, I'll go through them one by one in Loupe view, with the “Draw Face Regions” option turned on (via clicking the person icon in the toolbar).

In this mode, face rectangles that have been detected are shown, and if you see faces that have not been detected, you can drag out boxes for them. You can enter the name of each face as you identify it, though it's often easier to leave them unnamed until you've gone through all the photos, then return to whatever “Assigning Names to Faces” workflow you find most productive.

You can draw a face rectangle anywhere... it doesn't have to actually be a face:

It doesn't even have to be a person... you can use it to mark any object you like.

Lightroom doesn't “learn” from the faces that you draw, so there's no harm to the “face knowledge base” if the region you identify is not clearly a face.

Plugin Support for Faces

My People Support plugin has support for “People” keywords, and some enhanced functionality is enabled when used on Lightroom 6.

My Data Explorer plugin has extra search items when used in Lightroom 6, for counting people tagged in photos in various ways.

I wish I could have made my Picasa Face-Recognition Import plugin migrate its data directly to Lr6's people support, but there's no easy way, sorry.

For my first “real” cycling ride after my USA vacation, I had a lot of Under Armour clothes to choose from. I've been enamored with the brand for a while, so took the opportunity while in The States of actually being able to find my size to buy about a thousand dollars worth of the stuff, from sportswear to casual wear to jackets.

With sportsware I'm partial to loud vibrant colors, especially for visibility when road cycling. But perhaps in retrospect I shouldn't have quite gone so full throttle. Still, with this getup I bet I could always get a job as a rodeo clown.

By the way, the man I'm talking to above is Chris Rowthorn, who just happened to be walking by when I was meeting others for the start of the ride. He's the author of the Lonely Planet Japan guidebook, among many others. He used a few of my photos in his latest edition.

Anyway, I was joined for the ride by Manseki Kanemitsu, whom I met last month for this ride, and Kumiko Naka, whom I met on my first short cycling outing in January.

We decided to ride off to see “the 100-year-old cherry tree”, a well-known tree off in the northern mountains. I mentioned it on my blog in 2007, here.

The road from Kyoto city proper to Kibune and Kurama is often too narrow to allow a bus and a car to pass each other, so in order to allow bus service several times a day, traffic is stopped until the bus passes through. Except during those brief moments of utility, the guy has to sit in the little hut seen at right in the photo above, being bored. Every time I pass them I think it must be the world's most boring job. (I've never seen them reading or the like.) This was the first time I'd actually seen them performing their task.

We were taking an exceedingly-lazy pace, so didn't mind stopping in front of the Kurama-dera Temple (鞍馬寺) for photos....

The road then dives into the mountain almost 800m (2,500 feet) up towards Hanase Pass (花背峠). This would be my second attempt, the first having been in February chronicled in “Attempting a 100km Bikeride in the Mountains of Kyoto, Part 1: Hanase Pass”.

This time I wasn't alone, so was happy to have a photo of me while riding...

I've got my camera slung to my back, and my bike is sporting a new rear bag that holds 2L of sports drink (that I ended up not using), a light windbreaker, my phone and GPS unit, among other little things. The design of the cheap rear bag is pretty bad, though, in how it attaches — just two Velcro straps that can let the bag roll sideways — so I'll have to see what I can rig up to hold it more firmly. But everything adds weight, which I already have more than enough of. 🙁

It's a gut-wrenching never-ending steep road, but I felt better than last time. I didn't need to drop into the easiest gear until 10 minutes in, rather than right away.

I stuck with Manseki (or he held back for me) until I got to the place I stopped for a rest the first time, and because I have no willpower, I stopped for a rest this time as well. But to my surprise, I didn't stop again until the top.

The main part of the climb, from the Kurama Onsen until the pass, has a 492m (1,600 ft) elevation gain over less than 6km of road. The first time it took me 47:44, and this time 43:02. I thought I'd done better than 3½ minutes faster, so I was a bit disappointed. (The best time registered on Strava for the segment is less than half my time, a blistering 20:26 by Ryo Inoue last year.)

Kumiko's leg was giving her trouble, so we decided to abandon the long hilly ride to the cherry tree, and instead return down the mountain a bit and then cut over to the village of Ohara via Route 477. This would entail a short but ridiculously-steep section of road that with Kumiko's iffy leg we ended up walking.

The tiny village of Momoi has no services that I noticed, except a phone.

The out-of-focus farmer is holding a tray of rice seedlings, moving them from his truck to his greenhouse. I thought a nice photo of this scene would make a good introduction to the rice-planting season that starts in a couple of weeks. But when shooting one-handed with little reaction time, I couldn't get the shot. Oh well.

We stopped by the front garden of a tucked-away temple. (To visit the temple would require an hour's hike, I was told, so we opted against that.)...

We then arrived in the village of Ohara, and stopped by a restaurant that Manseki knew, Ohara Riverside Cafe KIRIN...

We swung around and up to behind the Sanzen'in Temple...

I timed the photo to include the gate, knowing that it had been on my blog before.

We continued back into the mountain, past the end of the road...

According to Strava, my ride was about 60km (37 miles) over a lazy seven hours. Strava's numbers for distance (and hence speed) and moving time are pretty suspect; I've done my own tracklog analysis and I believe that they simply calculate incorrectly. But until I create my own web service and make it available for free, perhaps I shouldn't complain.

Here's a wigglegram from the same outing that produced “Photoshoot at the Peak of the Haradanien Garden’s Awesomeness”.

I think it's nicer than my first Haradanien wigglegram, for a variety of reasons.

However, when I showed this to a friend, he said that he felt that the foliage in the foreground was a bit distracting. My reaction was “there's foliage?” :-)

Joanne (at left) had to leave Kyoto that day, but Ting Ting (at right) joined my friends for a photoshoot the next day (which I couldn't participate in because I was making tofu). But I could join in the day after that, which lead to “Photoshoot with Ting Ting at the Murin’an Gardens”.

I've never done much to make my blog design more appealing for handheld devices like phones and tablets, but I'm taking a small step by trying out some new wigglegram code. On devices that support it, it should “wiggle” as you tip the device side to side. For reasons I haven't figured out, it's still much smoother to swipe from side to side with a finger on a touchscreen, but at lest it's a step.

In my previous post, I wrote how I spent a wonderful afternoon making tofu in japan with an 80-year-old farmer's wife. This post is about the rest of the visit, the experience that would normally be part of a tour one can take on a day trip out of Kyoto.

The tofu/meal part of the tour takes place in the hamlet of Hata (畑, literally “field”) tucked in the mountains of north-western Shiga prefecture. The terraced rice paddies, tended by hand for generations, can be quite photogenic, though my visit, two or three weeks before the planting, found them at perhaps their least photogenic.

Still, I was there, so I took some photos amidst a drizzle. The president of the tour company was my photography assistant. 🙂

At the end of the tofu story I mentioned that the left over “soy pulp” is normally discarded because it has such a short shelf life, but that we made a dessert with it. Doughnuts!

The main dish for lunch was going to be tenpura, an assortment of light batter-fried veggies. The tour-company staff asked whether such-and-such a vegetable would be included, and the answer was essentially "wasn't planning on it, but there's plenty growing outside anywhere you look... go grab some". So we did.

Much farther up the hill than the outside shots I'd taken before, I took the opportunity for more pictures...

In preparation for early-May planting, the paddies are slowly being flooded. It appears that water is diverted from mountain streams to fill the top paddy in any section; when it overflows, it starts to fill the one below, and so on.

Back inside, the veggies we brought in were washed...

I loved how she made more space in her tiny kitchen. She put a glass pot lid upside down over a gas-stove burner... it fit perfectly. On top of that a metal rack, and on top of that whatever had just come out of the fryer to drip and cool.

As I mentioned before, I was asked to join on this adventure to take photos for the tour company, but in the past I'd been on a variety of other tours with the same company as a “test customer”, to provide feedback on how to make their tours a better experience for their target audience (English-speaking tourists looking for something more than the popular tourist spots). For example, as part of one tour I visited this gargoyle-tile workshop. I've had some amazing experiences with them.

Anyway, along the lines of offering feedback, I suggested that the foreign tourist might want the option to sample some saké with such a fine meal, and somehow this lead to the lady bringing out some of her home-made spirits for us to sample.

These kind of things are fairly simple to make... you fill a jar with something to provide flavor, say, plums, then top it off with some kind of spirit... perhaps vodka, shochu, or wine. Then wait enough years for the flavor to transfer, and voilà, you've got “plum wine” or the like.

Based on how one goes about doing it, the results can vary wildly. It's always fun to order “plum wine” at a restaurant without knowing the specific maker because the flavor can range from as sweet as Kool-Aid to as bitter as orange juice just after brushing your teeth, and the alcoholic strength can range from “essentially water” to “this will not only grow hair on your chest, but will simultaneously burn it off”.

It turns out that this was at the extreme end of both, and it was too strong/bitter for me to enjoy. I have photos of the two tour-company ladies giving it a try, with their face scrunched up in an “oh my gosh this is horrible” anguished cringe. They looked like shar pei dogs. I will hold these photos for possible blackmail at a later date. 🙂

As a side note, I've (finally) discovered a way to get better photos when asking random folks to take a photo of me with my camera. Most folks are intimidated by a big SLR, and are not used to a viewfinder (they're used to looking at the back of their phone). In the past I'd set everything up, pre-set the focus point to some easy-to-notice location in the scene such as my eye, then tell them to place the little red square on my eye and press the button. Results have been very mixed, with most photos completely out of focus.

This time I had the bright idea to put my camera in live-view mode (a mode that I personally don't care for... I can't see the screen that close without my glasses) and focus in face-recognition mode. Then all they have to do is point and press, and hopefully it works out. It seems to have in the photo above.

To say that lunch was filling would be quit the understatement, so it was with some dread that we realized we'd still not had the doughnuts.

At least in my case, hot coffee does wonders to settle a full tummy...

The doughnuts were slightly sweet, but not overly so, so Americans used to really sweet stuff would likely want to have these with honey, powered sugar, or perhaps marmalade. Personally, I liked them just as they were.

All in all it was a wonderful experience, just as all those I've had the pleasure to enjoy with Tour du Lac Biwa. On this photo-taking visit there was no one to translate (which is fine, since I can speak Japanese well enough), but on the full tour, English-speaking staff is there to explain and translate. Highly recommended.

I had a fantastic experience on Friday, part of which included making tofu from scratch with an 80-year-old lady in her old farmhouse in northern Shiga prefecture, about an hour from Kyoto.

She's five-foot-nothing of pure grandmotherly warmth, but was a bit shy of the camera, so my photos of her don't really reflect her incessant beaming smile. I was there as a photographer on behalf of Tour du Lac Biwa, a tour company that arranges off-the-beaten-path “experience” tours in Shiga prefecture, for English-speaking visitors. It's the same tour company that I appeared on TV for, and that arranged this gargoyle-tile workshop visit.

Friday's tofu-making experience is part of this tour about taking life at a slower, countryside pace. Some of my photos will likely find their way to that page.

I was well paid for my photography work, leaving her house with a belly beyond full with her simple, close-to-nature farmer's-wife cooking made with the skill honed during 58 years of marriage and back-breaking by-hand mountain farming. The ultra-fresh hand-made tofu discussed in this post ended up being just one little dish of the entire meal, but that's the subject of a later post.

I had no idea how tofu was made, but now I'm quite the expert, so let me list the ingredients:

• soy beans
• water
• small sprinkle of concentrated sea water (or other coagulant)
• hard work

The beans were apparently soaked in water overnight. As I arrived, she was pouring off the water into a big pot, then blending the beans as seen above.

The pureed beans and the water they had been soaking in are then simmered for about half an hour while being constantly stirred.

This is in the lady's private house that's been in her family for generations (though she married into it only 58 years ago). What you see is extremely typical of a “modern” old Japanese-farmhouse kitchen. Nothing's for show here.

Despite that we were there to impose on her (she was doing us a favor by running through all this for the camera), her natural kindness as a host could not be curbed, so she insisted we stop helping and have tea. I just wish my photos would have captured the warmth of her presence... she looks a bit severe in the photo above, but was anything but.

After it had simmered for about 35 minutes, it was time to filter out the solids. The hot liquid at this point was now soy milk.

Did I mention that it was hot. Hiromi-san was trying to not get burnt, but Kimiko-san (the old lady) just commented “yup, it's hot, isn't it”. She's done this before. 🙂

Usually she does it all by herself, but this time she had to accommodate “helpers”.

I tried soy milk before, from a California supermarket. It was horrible, tasting like what I imagine water wrung from a tree-hugger's old socks would taste like.

On the other hand, this warm, fresh soy milk was excellent. This was perhaps my biggest surprise of the day.

Of course it's not at all related to milk, but “soy milk” sounds better than “simmered-bean juice”.

The only time she used anything other than her finger and experience to judge the status was when she measured the temperature of the soy milk prior to adding the coagulant. It had cooled a bit more than she wanted (too many cooks in the kitchen slows things down, I guess), but deemed it safe to proceed.

Adding this bit of salt causes the soy milk to coagulate, separating into tofu and water.

She then gently poured the tofu/water combo onto a filter cloth set in a colander...

The newborn tofu swaddled tenderly in filter cloth, she set a pan on top and filled it with water. This provides a gentle pressure to slowly, gently squeeze out more water. She let it sit like that for about 40 minutes while she worked on other parts of the meal.

Unlike soy milk, which I'd tried the one time long ago then never again until today, I've had tofu many many times. Generally it has no taste, and is just a healthful delivery vehicle for garnishes or other tastes.

This fresh tofu was different... it had a sublime soft deliciousness that's hard to describe, but it definitely stood on its own as a tasty part of a meal. I didn't want to spoil it with a garnish, but then Kimiko-san pulled out some home-made miso garnish... but that's a story for another time.

By the way, after straining out the bits of bean pulp from the soy milk after simmering, those bits of bean become a sawdusty-looking substance called okara...

It has a very short shelf life so commercial producers of tofu usually throw it away, but it's highly nutritious, and not something a farmer is going to waste. (It's also the answer to my soft not-foam-filling “What am I?” quiz from the other day.)

We ended up making a dessert with it.

(Note: if you visit Japan and want to take this tour with the specific intention of making tofu, be sure to mention that because lacking a specific request, what the lady prepares on any given day depends on the season, what she has on hand, and perhaps her whim. So be sure to mention specific requests. Some people specifically avoid tofu, for example, due to allergy or simple dislike of the stuff.)

Continued here...