Phototheca

Once again I find my confidence in Adobe shaken, this seems to be a more common occurrence than being impressed by their efforts, indeed it seems to me that over the last couple of years Adobe have been a driving force behind improving products for half a dozen other image editing products because Adobe have decided to shy away from the non professional market. Their choice, seems short sighted to me but if you have a pigeon that needs holing feel free.

As a result I have been looking for a Digital Asset Management tool because there are plenty of excellent image editing products out there, I am currently experimenting with DxO, I've repeatedly tried Olympus' own product (it's appalling, no two ways about that, Windows 3.1 style and performance, come on a bit of basic design and a half way decent programmer would sort that) and I've been having some time with Darktable. That is an interesting program because whilst it is miles off on look and feel the jpg files it generates are fantastic, I had no idea that all programs were not created equal on that front.

So DAM software :

• Digikam, conceptually excellent, on Windows it's clunky and doesn't write standard format tags which is pretty pointless. 
• Picasa, it still works, tags work fine but location tagging has stopped working.
• PhotoTheca, I rather liked the look of this product but the free version has a 5,000 photo limit and the first folder I tried to experiment on have just over 1,000 files and the program tried to only load around half of those and then crashed.
• Lightroom, much as really dislike adobe nowadays and keywords are dog slow to add and geo tagging has stopped working on my version it is still the only DAM I have found that is remotely respectable at the moment.

Lightroom 6

Eureka, I've figured it out. That failure to load all of my files into photomerge, it's just a means of encouraging us to understand just how good the healing tools are, perhaps.

Adobe customer "care"

....still no care occurring, decided going to bed is going to more effective at solving my lightroom problems than waiting any longer. I am now wondering if I handed over my money a bit early in the product's life cycle.

Adobe Lightroom 6

I've been on a bit of a photography spending spree the last couple of weeks with a new lens, a couple of filters and a monster monitor for editing, culminating today if coughing up the £50.09 for Adobe Lightroom 6.

Download took a while on my connection but we got there and then had to surmount the hurdle that my physical media didn't need a serial number entered on install, so had to rummage in the loft for the original disks.

Run for the first time, I suspect the line between Lightroom 6 and cc is a thin one given this version's installer is 200mb smaller than Lightroom 5's most recent update.

What new toy to try, well the big one for me is Photomerge, this is basic functionality that has worked for a while now just not in lightroom. By good fortune I happen to have some pictures I took of a field to try out my new lens, no artistic awards but I know that photomerge will eat the 13 shots for breakfast. I guess the number is the give away here.

Seconds later I have "unable to merge photos. press cancel". Ok, so my first tried I just grabbed all 13 frames, so 13 jpgs and 13 raws so let's try the raws, no same error. Ok let's try the jpegs, no same problem.

Ok, I've stitched these pictures in another product with no problems and I can put them together by eye.

So take 2 jpgs, merge, cancel, 3 jpgs, merge, cancel. I'm sure you get the picture. The second to last of the 13 pictures fails, I don't know what it doesn't like but my merged picture seems to have a little something missing :

so, for the third time in a week I have tried to contact Adobe support. The community forums seem to fall into a "redirect loop" problem almost at random (yes changing my name worked as suggested on other sites but do I really need to change my name everytime I try to use the site) - still awaiting an escalated contact on that one (perhaps time to visit the spam folder). 2nd attempt was for something I spend so long waiting at the "we are still assisting other customers" I forgot, went to dinner and then got an indignant "well we tried to talk to you message".

Today, well I tried again having discovered that pressing F1 for help in Lightroom 6, as per the menu option, goes to a page that appears to be down (actually Chrome is reporting a failed DNS lookup & I've tried a couple of online DNS lookup services and the name does not resolve) so while typing this I've been sitting at the Adobe chat screen waiting for some contact, that's the site which in my chrome tab says "Adobe Customer Care".

It seems I can going to be testing that "updates" feature a lot.

Monitoring the situation

One lesson learned from my struggles with Light room is that squinting at my monitor for long periods only serves to hurt my eyes and prove that I need a better monitor both in terms of size and quality.

So ordered something newer and bigger, a Benq GW2765ht, 27", 2560x1440.

Inspite of ticking the "deliver on Monday" box it turned up today.

This is a big screen. It has physical buttons on the side which is a blessed relief after the touch sensitive tat on my LG e2350.

It has taken some work to install,  with the supplied HDMI cable my Sapphire hd5770 vapr x cannot display that resolution but after a few abortive attempts at connecting the display port cable everything is working, including sound.

The built in speakers are excellent, for built in speakers.

Display is stunning and colour reproduction is beautiful.

The monitor rotates to portrait, although on the supplied stand even at the extent of its height adjustment it scrapes the base (so scratched with minutes of opening the box, clearly not tested very well), this does not appear to have any auto-sensing of orientation but it does work, although cable length may be an issue.

Really pleased so far.

Lightroom goes dark.

I have recently spent some hours editing photos and discovering that Adobe Lightroom sometimes does an extremely poor job of loading in raw files from my Olympus e-m10. Indeed the supplied Olympus Viewer 3 software does a notably better job with much improved noise handling and pictures so much closer to the original scene.

A Google search has identified this is a commonly noted problem whilst I have now had to open a support case as to why the adobe community forums are inaccessible to me (on chrome, ie, at work and home on different machines, only my account and the adobe site are common factors, tried again today with no luck and am days beyond when they said a supervisor would contact me to assist) so I cannot find if this has been raised there.

Luckily this level of support is what I would expect from free software, oh wait, I paid good money for something that does half a job, I now need to use ov3 which, although the results are good, the product is like free software, which it I is in this case.

Come on adobe get it sorted.

While we are on the subject, sending me an update for desktop light room that tries to get me to install creative cloud is just not on.

Gimp, Gimpshop and Photoshop

Well, following a good cleanout with CCleaner my Photoshop trial has finally ended, as has the install of CCleaner, so I'm looking for an alternative.

My tip here is the Gimpshop, that is supposed to load Gimp looking like Photoshop looks just like Gimp and inspite of declining all the junk ware that it comes with it installed it all anyway so it's come off and I'm still picking up the pieces and trying to get back to a default Google search - why does anyone think that installing cr*p on your machine is going to endear you to them.