Jeremey's Weblog

Kona... meh

You know, I'm just not all that impressed with Kona coffee. The Kona name is a brand that is marketed well and carries about as much significance as Juan Valdez. You can get bad Kona, good Kona, and even fake (almost) Kona blends (the Kona isn't fake, but it's a very small percentage of the overall blend).

But even with pure Kona direct from a small, trusted farm, I'm not that impressed. It's good, but it's not as good as some of the stuff I've gotten from Intelligentsia (notably Tres Santos). I just don't think it lives up to the hype, and considering the price point, it's definitely not worth the extra expense. Its flavor isn't particularly complex and it lacks the satisfying depth I like in a coffee. This is obviously personal taste, but Kona is definitely not head and shoulders above other coffees as it's made out to be.

I think maybe Kona has its reputation because people tend to be comparing bad coffee with decent Kona (you're not going to find Folger's Kona) or poorly brewed coffee with decently brewed Kona. Or something... but up against world class beans, I don't think it really holds up.

More Lightroom Beta 4

I've been using beta 4 more now and I'm really liking it. There are a couple new features and notes that aren't obvious at first glance:

• On-photo tone curve adjustment... just mouse over a tone you want to tweak and hit the up and down arrow keys, the corresponding tonal range gets a 5 point boost or cut
• In-histogram adustment... you can adjust the basic exposure settings directly from the histogram
• Brightness/contrast are pre-tone-curve now

I'm sure there are more. The first two are just really nice UI features, very convenient and intuitive. The third is of mixed value, IMO, but it is more like Camera Raw which appears to be the goal. I will say this... once I had a pretty good tone curve on a B&W, it was very sweet to just turn up the contrast with the contrast slider, leaving the tone curve as it was.

It seems like maybe the controls will require (or at least make possible) a few more "inside tricks" than the beta 3 controls did... the beta 3 controls were simpler to me... but I think these are more flexible and I love the four zones (instead of 3). By "inside tricks" I mean that producing optimal images might rely on knowing more about the processing pipeline than is immediately obvious in the UI. For instance, it isn't clear when brightness and contrast apply, or when the ACR curve is applied, and what the relationship between those functions and the tone curve is in terms of when to do what for what effect.

I've used the fill light feature more and it's pretty effective. It had an especially useful effect on a portrait I shot where the background came out a little darker and flatter than I wanted. The vibrancy control is brilliant, it does what you want saturation to do without doing what you don't want saturation to do (is that english?).

All in all, good stuff... I'm liking it. I don't find the controls as intuitive, again, and I miss the compression sliders... I don't see anything in beta 4 that produces the same result as those. Maybe those could reappear in an advanced panel... that would keep the confusion down but also provide the functionality.

Lightroom Beta 4!

Adobe Lightroom beta 4 is out. Woohoo! There are some significant changes, which I'll try to capture some of here. First they've gone to a darker gray UI background in most places and I think I like it. It's more like the Apple 'pro app' look. The largest changes appear to be in the develop module (so far), particularly the tone curve and a few new controls. I'm not completely sold on the new tone curve controls, but in fairness I haven't used them much yet. My concern is primarily over the loss of the compression controls... maybe those are still there in some other form. OK, here's the main exposure and tone curve stuff:

The curve is separated into four sections, highlights, lights, darks, and shadows. You can control the dividing line between each and obviously the value of each. There are also brightness and contrast sliders that do not appear as connected to the tone curve as they were in beta 3, which at this point seems a shame (but again, I haven't had much time with it). The separate lights and darks sections seem like a really good idea.

One huge addition in this release is constant feedback on where a tone in your image lies on the curve, as highlighted here (with mouse over part of the image):

That's much needed and pretty sweet.

There are several new controls in the Basic section also... notably Recovery, Fill Light, and Vibrance. Vibrance is very exciting, it's basically a smart saturation that tries to saturate without blowing out already saturated colors and without murdering flesh tones. I'm liking it a lot so far.

Recovery is a highlight recovery tool for overexposed or blown out images... I haven't used it enough yet to really comment other than to say that the idea is definitely very cool. Fill Light appears to bring some brightness into the darks range on the tone curve, but I haven't used this at all yet except to slide it around and see what happened. So no comment other than it sounds interesting.

Converting to black and white is cosmetically different in that a photo now has two modes: color and grayscale. At this point it appears that the two modes share a tone curve and basic exposure settings... but maybe they'll be separate in the future? Clicking "grayscale" gets you a grayscale image and the grayscale mixer panel appears... I'm not sure the value of this UI change unless it's to make room for separate tonal controls for grayscale and color versions of the photo. That would be awesome, I would use it instantly.

The web module is improved at least in its default template which dispenses with the silly mid-size mode and just goes with thumbnails and image. The slideshow module is disappointing in that there appears to be no way to do a Flash export, only PDF, which Lightroom makes sure to explain will not have your transitions or music. What's the point, then?

Overall this looks like a good update, but I'll reserve more opinion for when I've had more time with the develop module controls. It is definitely disappointing to have no significant improvement to the basically broken slideshow module (broken for export, which is what I'd want it for primarily).

UPDATE: see my next post: More Lightroom Beta 4

Iain

Iain
Originally uploaded by jeremey.

This is a few months old, but I really like the high-key processing and slight toning (I just processed it this way yesterday... the shot itself is a few months old).

TUAW Stoops to New Low

In the interest of wasting more bits writing about wasting bits... the Unofficial Apple Weblog has stooped to a new low, IMO, with this post about a small UI nit in iTunes 7. I normally don't make much noise about inane blogging, we all have our moments, but sometimes a post is just over the top. Do we really need to assume corporate world domination intentions because Apple removed a button to hide its mini-store? There it is in the menu, you can still hide it... which I do... I'm glad there's no button! Why would I want a button on my screen that I'll click exactly once in all of history?

But that's missing the point... why is this news? Why would anyone blog about it on a major Apple rumor site? Oh... maybe they're hard up for readers and they needed some more digg-able headlines. Nice. Unsubscribing now.

Bose Companion 2

One interesting factoid (to me) about the Mac Pro: it's just a computer. Apple is famous for all-in-one designs and my laptop had lots of integrated stuff... like, say, speakers. I've never bought a Mac workstation box before; the Mac Pro doesn't have stereo speakers built in (for obvious reason). So I bought Bose Companion 2's with it... this is something of a mini-review, I suppose.

Basically I think these are good speakers, but they're wildly wrongly EQ'd unless thumpy mud is your thing. They're not even in the same ballpark as flat. I'm not surprised that they're not flat, but they're far too hot in the 100-250Hz range and they don't make any attempt to compensate elsewhere. Normally speakers attempt to be fairly faithful and I boost the bass and treble a bit... the EQ looks like a very flat "V". Not so with the Companion 2's. It's still sortof a "V" but with the point moved way left in the spectrum and it curves back to flat in the high end. Looks more like the birds I used to draw when I was a little kid.

My biggest complaint, aside from the EQ, is that the bass isn't very tight. It gets boomy fast.

Another important note - they sound better loud. They don't do quiet very well, which is too bad, but not entirely surprising.

I have these sounding pretty good, but the EQ is definitely wacky. Depending on the song, 125Hz needs to go up or down a bit, but it's not worth the bother. This is basically iTunes' "spoken word" EQ (!!) with some bass added back very carefully.

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Mac Pro and Lightroom Update

I've been putting the Mac Pro to good use with Adobe Lightroom. The machine is fast enough that Lightroom (still a beta and definitely not optimized) runs very nicely. I'm importing lots of old images that I previously had cataloged in iView MediaPro. Images in iView just aren't very useful because they're not immediately accessible. I think Lightroom and Aperture are going to finally put to death all of the arcane workflows people have been getting by with.

From now on I'll be importing directly into Lightroom, and it automatically creates a backup copy of the imported files on my external drive. My Lightroom library automatically gets backed up once a week. What else do I need?

I do look forward to performance optimizations (and fixing the incessant checking of thumbnails), but as far as I'm concerned Lightroom is good to go on the Mac Pro.

Mac Pro

I'm sitting at a shiny new Mac Pro as I write this... woohoo! It's really fast... it's difficult to describe quite how fast it is. I'm getting my dream machine in installments... this is the first. I'll have to wait a while for more HD space and a cinema display... maybe winter. But 250G solves my immediate needs quite nicely.

More Wiretapping Without Warrants

Though Wired is hardly an unbiased source, this is worth reading and doing some further research on one's own (like reading the bill in question, etc.): http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71778-0.html?tw=rss.index

Reading proposed amendments is always tricky because it's difficult to tell exactly what the sum result will be. But in any case, this is a worrisome change, as is the move for a unanimous consent motion. One is naturally given to wonder why, if this bill is reasonable and necessary for the defense of our nation against terrorism, Congress would vote on it in such a way as to leave no record of the vote.

This administration would have a lot more credibility if it just said what it thought and then did exactly that, in public. When you got straight A's in 3rd grade, did you hide the report card? No... but C's and D's... that would be worth hiding and misrepresenting. If the administration thinks it needs expanded domestic wiretapping powers, then why doesn't it just say so? Make the case to the people. Hiding it just feeds the conspiracy theorist in us all (there's very interesting psychology research that suggests we all have one living in us somewhere).

iTunes 7

iTunes 7 really really really rocks. There are a bunch of new features, but the one that is far and away number one is 'cover flow'. Cover flow lets you thumb through your music like thumbing through a stack of LPs. Only it's always sorted in any order you want. I used cover flow before Apple acquired the technology, but it was sloth-like and loosely integrated... but after Apple's massaging it right into iTunes, it's fast, beautiful and fun.

It's amazing the music I've rediscovered just in 24 hours.