Lightroom

photography No Comments »

I’ve only owned my Canon EOS 30D for less than two months so I have a lot to learn still about digital photography. Only recently I discovered what an amazing difference a few simple tweaks to white balance, color temperature or hue can make to a digital photo. You could argue that I shouldn’t need to do any color adjustments if I took the photo right in the first place, but I bet that even the best of digital photographers use photoshop to fix and enhance their work.

I’ve been using Photoshop Album for my point-and-shoot camera, which is great for organizing photos but not so great for fixing them up. Adobe Photoshop can do it of course, but editing a whole set of photos is cumbersome and the controls are not that easy to get to. I think I’ve found the answer to this problem and it’s called Adobe Lightroom. It puts all the controls that a digital photographer needs right at your fingertips and can manage entire photo shoots. It will simply save your settings in a project file and will not touch your original shots. When you’re all done you can export your photo selection, but you can still go back later on and tweak more if you need to. I can’t wait to get started with raw images now, which Lightroom supports as well (in fact, it was probably designed for raw editing).

Lightroom is still in beta, which is downloadable for free. It’s a little slow sometimes and it seems to be missing some basic features you’d expect to find (like a full screen view or the ability to remove red-eye effect), but all in all in all I think it’s already a great tool for digital photographers. Check it out.

new ISP

general No Comments »

So I switched to a new ISP… Eapps has been causing me too much headache lately and I didn’t want to deal with administering a Linux virtual server any longer. A no-root-login Linux ISP like Bluehost will do just fine. Plus, I have 10 times more disk space here for less than half the price.

Likewise for Mambo… it was cool and all, but the site was acting up so an upgrade would have been appropriate. I decided not to stick with Mambo and migrate to Wordpress instead. I still think Mambo/Joomla is very cool, but I just have better things to do than maintaining a full CMS with all its bells and whistles. A simple blog is all I wanted anyway.