Sorry

Wow. There is not much to say other than sorry.

It has been nearly a year since I have posted anything... ANYTHING AT ALL here. Hmmm... Life has been crazy, one-year-old twins, a five year old, more international work than I have ever had before in a one-year span (this is a good thing!), and just life in general has made the blog sort of fall to the back of a long list of things I have been working on.

It is sort of like the friend you really like talking to and hanging out with, that you keep meaning to call, but life and responsibilities keep getting in the way until you run into that person somewhere and realize that you never called them and feel really bad about it, but how do you articulate that desire and intent to have called (or in my case, post up here once in a while) but communicate it in a way that they don't feel like you are giving them the brush off or trying to make it sound like a feeble excuse because you never meant to call in the first place. Is there a way to sincerely share that feeling so that they don't feel like they are getting the brush off?

I hope I am being successful at this. I will post more frequently. For those that have continued to check in a lot, I am sorry I have not posted. Life has gotten in the way... that is evidence of my not following through, not proof that I don't intend to post here or don't care. So please stick with me a little bit longer... I will be posting more info and more frequently. My technological life has undergone quite a few changes since last March when I last posted.

Talk to you soon, and again, sorry.

Viveza... burning and dogding bliss

So I am not a real big Photoshop filter user. Being that a lot of my work is editorial in nature, which makes it all about showing what is really there and not changing things (no cloning, erasing, etc.) there aren't a lot of filters that I use, and even fewer that I'd spend much money buying, since I rarely need or use them. The other part of this is that I am committed to making correct exposures in camera so that I don't have to spend a bunch of time "fixing" things in Photoshop. The only filters I use frequently are Nik's Dfine 2.0 and NoiseNinja which are both great at reducing digital noise of high ISO images, but even is hasn't seen that much use now that I am shooting with Canon's Mk III cameras.

So after processing my images in RAW, and I am working in Photoshop, most of my time is spend using curves, levels, selective color occasionally, and burning and dodging.

But then I came across Viveza... and it is a filter that makes burning and dodging and ranging color corrections really easy and it is one of the most effective filters that I think I've ever used. It ranks right up there with Noise Ninja in its ability to save time by cutting out many steps in the burning and dodging process.

In the few weeks I've been using it, I am also impressed with how well it keeps shadow and highlight detail and color accurate. It does a much better job of lightening shadows and darkening highlights than CS3's Shadow/Highlight adjustments. What I mean is that it doesn't add noise or mess with the saturation and contrast the way that the Shadow/Highlights adjustments seem to.

Nik, the maker of Viveza, also allows potential purchasers to download a 15 day unrestricted trial version. It is not cheap ($200+) but if you spend a lot of time burning and dodging, it can definitely be a time saver... happy computing!

SuperDuper is Leopard compatible

My favorite backup app in the entire world... no wait... the entire universe is now Leopard compatible. You would think that between family (especially with twins babies- Charlotte (L) and David) and work and church and ASMP other commitments I wouldn't have time to obsess over a backup program... but I make time for the important things ;-)

SuperDuper is now Leopard compatible. If you don't use it... buy it now and start using it. It is the best bootable backup solution for the Mac.

10.5.2 woohoo!?!

Apple has released Leopard update 10.5.2 which addresses dock issues and apparently a bunch of other stuff. It also seems to have fixed the Photoshop CS3 issue with the crop tool that I had posted about previously. I have not had a lot of work to do in Photoshop since running the update a few days ago, but is seems like the problem is gone... (fingers crossed that I am right!)

The install went smoothly on my MacPro and my MacBook but after running the installer, my MacBook Pro froze. (I left it alone for two hours and it made no progress... it froze.)

I had to force a restart and when I did, my MacBook Pro was not well. No internet connections, it would hang if I opened System Preferences and was displaying a boatload of other odd behaviors. It was not good. I downloaded the 10.5.2 update and ran it again, and it took the second time and restarted like normal... it seemed.

But after it finished booting, the fans came on after about 30 seconds and after looking at activity monitor where both processors were running at about 40-60% I realized that my troubles were not over.

I was able to isolate the problem to the spotlight indexing and I used Onyx
to reset the Spotlight index which forced the laptop to completely re-index the drive but it seemed to solve the problem. I'll post more if that changes.

The problems I had with the install on the MBPro also illustrate why having a good backup is critical. I would strongly suggest backing up your computer (with a bootable backup) before running any update for just this reason. Had it really killed my laptop, I would have just restored the machine from the backup and tried again. Time machine is not a bootable backup, fyi. Use something like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable backup.

Happy updating!