The Assignment Houston meetup at the Houston Museum of Natural Science was a big success! Thanks to Erin from the Museum and Laurie from Assignment Houston for organizing a very cool event.
A TON of photographers showed up... I was enlisted to take the group photo, I did a merged/stitched panoramic (visit the photo on Flickr to see the full size version, if you dare):
Judah turned 9 months old recently!
Just a shot from inside that I really like.
Discovery Green is a very cool park smack in the middle of downtown Houston... I went this morning to check it out and get some photos before it got TOO hot. I like forward to spending more time there in cooler weather. :)
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houston, discovery green
I love my wife. She's an amazing mother and a very gifted "natural parenter" and teacher/supporter of natural parenting/mothering things. I was really proud to take her and Judah (the baby) to the Caroline Collective grand opening... she and Judah shone. I wish I had pictures from that night, but here are a couple from a fairly recent trip to Memorial Park.
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wife, love, mother, mothering
I'm really digging the naked portafilter (a "naked" portafilter is one with no spouts... the espresso flows directly from the basket to the cup). It's a great training tool, helping me spot channeling (light blonde flows w/in darker flow), but it's also just really cool to watch. I took a shot of it today:
This is the Rancilio 58mm filter sold by Chris Coffee.
I wanted to follow up on my Lightroom 2 first look post with some additional details and screenshots.
A word about the screenshots... the full shots are reduced from my full screen size to 1500 pixels wide. Each 500 pixel image in this post is linked to the full version, click it and it'll open in a new window. The sharpening comparison shots are PNGs so that JPEG artifacts won't fool with the results. Apologies if you have a braindead browser (older IE) that doesn't handle PNG properly. The 3-up images are JPEGs, linked to 100% crop PNG versions (not all that much larger, but without any artifacts from resizing or JPEG compression)... again, click on them for a new window. The 4-up PNG of the 640 pixel output is small enough to fit on this page.
First, here's a screenshot of the develop module:
Second, the selective editing user interface, the white circles on the image represent handles to separate selective edits, in roughly the vicinity that they were made... very nicely done:
You can click on a circle to select that edit and hitting Delete will delete it. Nice! When you do mouse over a circle (with a delay) or click on one, you see the mask you made:
For grins, here are before and after images showing some dodging of the head, light burning of the eyes, and clarity added to the eyes. The left image is before, the right image is after.
Switching gears a little... one of the more interesting features of Lightroom 2 is output sharpening on any export, as part of the export dialog:
Here are some comparisons of the output sharpening results... first, Judah's eye, exporting to JPEG, 80% quality, sRGB, full size... left to right you see Low, Medium, and High sharpening (click for 100% view):
Second, Judah's sleeve, same as above:
Lastly, here is the sharpening applied to a 640 pixel export (i.e. exported from Lightroom at 640 pixels). Upper left is NO sharpening, upper right is Low, lower left is Medium, and lower right is High:
Cool stuff!
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photography, photoshop, lightroom, lightroom 2
Adobe released a beta of Lightroom 2 this week, and it's very cool. The Develop module just keeps getting better and better. A few highlights of the new/fixed stuff:
I imported the images from my "6 months old" shoot w/ Judah as a test. Lightroom doesn't have a managed library concept like Aperture does, so I have to get past the less abstracted file management model... so initially, as is always the case with Lightroom, I'm a little irritated with the import process. I REALLY like the project model in Aperture, and after importing into Lightroom, I don't feel like I know where my images are.
Projects make sense to me, why Lightroom has yet to have a mode where you work with projects and not folders on a disk (even if they are folders on a disk) I don't know. I'm fairly certain that I could make the folder model work like projects, but I think I'd be spending a fair bit of effort to do so.
Lightroom's Develop module is fabulous. It is definitely the strongest piece of the application. The non-destructive selective editing brushes (dodge and burn, clarity, etc.) are excellent, and fact that they're non-destructive is a big win over Aperture 2.1's dodge and burn controls (though Aperture's mechanism is generic and extensible by third parties, I'm not sure that Lightroom's is... but Photoshop is Lightroom's extensible editor anyway).
The quality of the RAW processing is excellent... I probably have a hair-thin preference for Aperture's renderings, they're better in the red channel IMO, but the difference is slight.
The other feature I've tried (so far) is the web gallery. I like Lightroom's HTML web galleries (the Flash galleries are unusable, IMO, because Flash itself ignores ICC color profiles). However, I want some kind of permanence to a gallery. I want to create it, name it, and keep it around, to add to later (or whatever). Aperture handles this very nicely and Lightroom doesn't handle it at all. I can cobble together the same effect from creating a collection for the gallery, and then also creating a web gallery preset so that I can reproduce the settings later... but this is hardly "creating a gallery" which I can later modify.
I guess it boils down to web galleries being one-offs in Lightroom, and an integrated feature in Aperture. I prefer the Aperture way by far.
Overall, Lightroom 2 is very compelling as a digital darkroom, but a bit disappointing as a workflow tool IMO. I admit that I may not be "getting it" and I can do everything I want, but it isn't clear to me and because it isn't clear, it doesn't work for me. But I know Lightroom works for a lot of people, so it's more a matter of workflow taste.
Having said that, the new develop features are so compelling that I might consider buying Lightroom anyway, especially if they price it at $199 (where Aperture is).
This is really a 'first look' review... I'll follow up when I've had a lot more time to spend in the app.
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lightroom, workflow, lightroom 2, adobe, photography
So... I upgraded the RAM in my Mac Pro from 2G to 6G (for $157!!) and the difference is incredible. Aperture used to be pretty lame on the performance front, now it screams (upgrading to 2.x helped some too). Really, it screams... the extra 4G totally transformed the experience of using my machine.
I'm running all of my normal apps, plus Aperture, plus Photoshop CS3, and I don't notice any sluggishness.
RAM is cheap. Go buy some!
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aperture, apple, photography
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