Memos From The Digital Darkroom

This weekend I went to Fry’s Electronics to purchase a new external backup hard drive. The one I have been using for backup is a 500 GB drive that’s is almost full. I plan to store it in a safe location and put a new drive into service. For the new drive, I wanted something larger, preferably 1 TB.

Anyone who’s been to one of the Fry’s Electronics locations on the west coast knows that Fry’s has lots of choices when it comes to external hard drives. But it didn’t take me long to find a perfect drive for what I wanted. It was the 1 TB Simple Tech [re}drive, shown below.

1 TB [re}drive by Hitachi.

The outer case is completely recycleable.

This drive is a new drive from Hitachi. It’s called the [re]drive because it’s designed to have a low impact on the environment. The case is made of aluminum (30% recycled) and bamboo, both of which are easy to recycle. To see a full list of the environmental impact of this drive, click here. Additionally, the drive is designed to use much less electricity than comparable drives, which means that it also saves you money. The best part about this drive is that it was only $99.99.

Whether you’re into helping the planet by being green, or helping the green in your wallet, you’ll like this drive. You’ll especially like it if you’re using a Mac because its aluminum case fits the visual design of most Macs. If you use it with a PC, you’ll like the fact that it’s formatted and ready to go with award winning Fabrik Backup software preloaded onto it.

Mac Installation Note

When I plugged this drive into my Mac G5 it was necessary to prepare it for use on a Mac by erasing it, which is fairly straightforward. The software guide that comes on the drive explains how to do this using the Disk Utility program (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility).  When I chose Erase I got an error that said, “The drive could not be unmounted”. After a bit of Googling I found out that all I needed to do was eject the drive by dragging it to the trash, leave it plugged in and powered up, and then choose Erase again. It worked like a charm.

BTW - my wife, who owns a small accounting firm (juliafitzgeraldcpa.com) was also in the market for some new backup drives. She bought two of them.

(This is a article I wrote for the Portland Metro Photographic News website. )

The first time I saw Adobe’s Lightroom, while it was in its earliest beta version, I wondered what the point of it was. I could already do everything it did in Photoshop. Why did I need to learn a new way of doing what I already knew how to do? However, as I began using the software on a daily basis, I soon realized that Lightroom?s approach to workflow is quite different than the Photoshop approach.

Photoshop is an amazing assortment of image editing tools. There are tools for web designers, graphic artists, engineers, doctors, 3-D modelers, and even photographers. Photoshop is like going to the hardware store and ordering one of every tool. Then tossing all those tools into a giant toolbox. Whenever you need any particular tool, it will be somewhere in the toolbox. It may take a while to find it - and then you may need to spend some time learning to use it - but it will be there.

Lightroom was designed specifically for photographers. It’s more like going to the digital hardware store and ordering only the tools a photographer uses the most often. Then laying out the tools on a workbench in the order in which they are intended to be used. This intuitive user interface, combined with a narrow purpose, makes Lightroom an ideal working environment for photographers.

At this point you may have come to the conclusion that I think Lightroom is better than Photoshop. However, I believe that a well-balanced digital post-production workflow requires both Lightroom and Photoshop. That’s because each of these products is intended for different parts of the workflow.

Follow this link to read the rest of this article.

A couple of weeks ago I was teaching a Lightroom workshop to a group of photographers in Eugene, Oregon. When we were going through a hands-on exercise on importing files, three of the students had a problem following my instructions. It seems that some of their file naming presets had gone missing. Fortunately, the same thing had happen to me several months ago so I knew how to solve this mystery.

This is what the file naming menu should look like.

One of the options in Lightroom’s Import Photos dialog is the File Naming options. This menu, shown on the right allows you to choose from a group of common presets for renaming your files as they’re imported. For some reason many of these templates can disappear from the list, leaving only two or three options.

If this happens to you follow these steps to recover the missing naming templates.

1. Choose Lightroom > Preferences (Mac), Edit > Preferences (Windows).
2. When the preferences dialog opens, choose Presets from the buttons at the top. When you do, you’ll see the dialog shown below.
3. Choose Restore Filename Templates to reset the file name templates  menu to its original options. Be aware that if you have custom presets that you’ve created, they won’t be shown.
   

   Lightroom's Presets preferences allow you reset individual groups of presets

This ability to reset individual groups of presets and templates without affecting the others is a nice feature in Lightroom. Remember it whenever some of your presets or templates go missing.

In earlier days of digital photography, the primary approach to organization was to organize files into specific folders based on image content. This system can lead to some problems. A much better system is to use keyword tags to identify and filter for specific image content.

A change to the preferences in Bridge CS4 affects the way labels added in Lightroom are shown.

You can quickly navigate through files in Lightroom or folders in Bridge using the back and forward buttons on your mouse.

When I sit down with a new client, I ask them a series of questions that are designed to help me understand their level of workflow skills and knowledge. I’m often amazed at how often people who seem to be Photoshop savvy seem to get sharpening wrong. I ran into this twice last week so [...]

In all of the years I’ve been into photography, I’ve never tried shooting fireworks. It’s something I’ve been interested in, but  never got around to doing. This year I decided to change that by making a point to go downtown and shoot the fireworks show that launched the 2009 Portland Rose Festival.
When I arrived at [...]

This article is related the the Customizing Cursors in Photoshop article. I thought of mentioning it in that article, but I get so many calls about this problem that I felt it was best to discuss the issue on its own.
Has this ever happened to you: You’re merrily working away in Photoshop when your normal [...]

Last week a student in one of my workshops asked me how she could determine exactly which part of the image her Photoshop tool would affect when she clicked. The reason she was uncertain was because she was using Photoshop’s Standard cursor display.
The figure to the left shows the Brush tool with the Standard cursor [...]