2009 May 13 | 'Design Thoughts' : rjslade

Back Again – Late Spring in Umbria

13 05 2009

It is now mid-May 2009 and the last posting was late October 2008. What can I say – It has been a long time, a time of adjustment for me and my wife – we lost my mother-in-law in November – she has lived with us for some 25 years of out 28+ years of marriage, first in Ottawa, and then here in Umbria. We miss her – a lot – We put together a bit of a tribute to her which if you are interested you can see here:

http://www.rjslade.com/nswager/

Hardware and Software Changes

We have switched from Apple Aperture to Adobe LightRoom

Also during the intervening months and with upgrades to Sarah’s computer and camera she has been busy learning the new hardware and software. The G5 she was using was replaced by 4Gig Ram 2.5Ghz dualcore Intel MacBook Pro, and a 24 inch LCD screen for the studio.

The Canon 20D became my camera and she added a Canon 5D MK2 to her Canon 40D.

Oh and did I mention that Adobe CS4 shipped in there!

The upgrade presented an issue that ought to be talked about. I had two full Extended PShop versions of the CS3 Suite. While I use most of the programs in the suite, my wife uses PShop and PShop – LightRoom is not part of the Suite! So what do I need – One upgrade to the full Suite, one upgrade to the non extended version of PShop and one full version of LightRoom – I will put up with not being able to use LightRoom while she is using it – I only use it to try workflow issues anyhow – they are her images and she can do the tweaking. First we have the fact I am now resident in Umbria Italy, the software was bought from my VAR in Canada – I want to continue to do that – He is a good friend, and can use the pennies for the upgrade that Adobe would keep for themselves if I was able to order it at American prices via the web (which I cannot – yet another issue!) So the full suite upgrade, the PShop upgrade and the full LightRoom! The disks duly arrive and I start plugging in the serial numbers (I had already been using the 30 day demo’s). The suite went OK except that DreamWeaver has not even till now been recognised as part of the Suite and I cannot install any plug-ins into it! -

Adobe have confused copyright protection with usability and copyright protection seems to win out – please bring back the days when you can just drag the application to the Application Folder!

No go for the PhotoShop upgrade though – No way it was going to accept any of the numbers I had! Buried deep, and I mean deep, on the Adobe web site I found what appears to be the definitive list of what can upgrade which and guess what- You cannot officially go from the CS3 to a standalone version of PShop – not without a standalone number of the PShop included in CS3. At this point I blew my stack and provided it with a number and moved on.

( Given that I have owned every damned Adobe product, available on a mac over that last 20 plus years, a lot of which they discontinued after I had paid for them, and taught designers how to use them ( who also bought the ones they needed ) – I regard this as very shabby treatment. ADOBE be careful – you are getting too large and unfocussed on your user base and they will start to bite back if treated this way! )

After the previous explanation of why Aperture vs LightRoom, have we switched? I want to state that Aperture is a great program and remains in some ways better than LightRoom! But the user is using only in conjunction with Photoshop and is submitting her images to sites which we do not totally create so that the ability to modify the web templates is no longer as big a feature. In our opinion, LightRoom better at keywording and its relationship with PhotoShop is better.

Combined with those previously mentioned Adobe upgrades came some very good web based training from Lynda.com. We have used the Chris Orwig series on LightRoom2 for Photographers and PhotoShop for Photographers and found them to be very helpful.

So where are these new images?

For the latest work by PHOTOempt go to www.photoempt.smugmug.com