Fantastic way to use a Luminance Mask for photos

Looking over various workshops at the Aperture Academy I saw this post about using a Luminance Mask and tried it on an image that seemed a bit flat. This is the result.

BTW the instructions list Mac commands, on a PC it is:

“CTRL + ALT + 2″ to create the Luminance selection

“CTRL + J” to load the selection as a layer

Tail of Nightmarish Proportion

From The Digital Trekker, the Drobo Nightmare

Vlog #6 from Matt Brandon on Vimeo.

Anyone who takes any time to make pictures wants to keep them. That bit of serendipity that plays in every shoot makes those photos unique and the thought of loosing a shoot or worse, a whole collection makes my heart sink.

The video above should be a warning, Matt got lucky, the drives themselves still worked but everyone needs to remember, RAID is meant to keep your system up in the event of a drive failure. RAID does not protect your data from typical computer issues like viruses, accidental deletion, overwriting or corruption. It also does not protect against disasters like fire, flood or theft.

Matt mentioned CrashPlan and because of his geographical location, it may be out of the question for him but  here in the states, I started using crashplan a week ago to backup my photos to both a local large USB drive and their cloud storage. The local USB drive is used for quick recovery, in case of computer issues while the cloud would be used for disasters. I looked at other plans and for the amount of data I needed to store, nobody else could compete. I am not going to write a sales post for CrashPlan, if they sound interesting, go take a look. It is up to you how you protect your photos but please do something to get multiple copies in multiple locations.

A Hack for when Lightroom can’t find Photoshop

I made the foolish mistake of uninstalling Photoshop 5 after installing Photoshop 5.1. After the uninstall, Lightroom 3.5 could no longer find Photoshop. “Edit in Adobe Photoshop” was grayed out as well as “Merge to Panorama…” and “Merge to HDR Pro…” when multiple photos were selected was also grayed  out. Meanwhile there is no setting I could find that would let me change it.

To make matters worse, Bridge was somehow pointing to PS CS4 which it may have been doing for a while now, I have not used it since I started using Lightroom.

I have stuff to get done and after trying to re-install the latest versions of Lightroom and Photoshop with no luck, I decided to do a little Windows 7 64bit hacking (this should also work in Vista). What I did was create a Symlink, (described in more detail here here ).

WARNING: I am presenting a fix that worked for me.  You could mess things up here if something goes wrong. Chances are it wont but if it does, you are responsible for your actions. Also, this is longer than my normal stuff so hang in there, go step by step.

This assumes you have already uninstalled older versions of Photoshop and both Photoshop and Lighroom are closed.

• First find all your Photoshops, I had folders for

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4 (64 Bit)
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5 (64 Bit)
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 (64 Bit)
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5.1

• Remove any presets, scripts etc that you might want to save from the older versions.
• Copy the folder names down in notepad, (press Windows + R, type “notepad“, press Enter).

Hint: If you click in the address bar, it will change the “friendly” name to the real name that looks like those above.

•  Delete the folders from the uninstalled versions. DO NOT DELETE THE CURRENT VERSION(S)

• Open the command line as the administrator by going to: Windows Ball (start) > All Programs > Accessories
• Right click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator
• You should see a box with a command prompt of C:\Windows\system32>
• Then type the following command at the prompt and press enter

mklink /D “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5 (64 Bit)” “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 (64 Bit)”

Hint: You can copy and paste this if your paths are the same

Hint: This line above says MakeLink /Directory FromHere ToHere

When you press enter, it will show a verification:

“symbolic link created for C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5 (64 Bit) << ===>> C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 (64 Bit)”

• Do the same for the other folders

mklink /D “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4 (64 Bit)” “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 (64 Bit)”

mklink /D “C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4″ “C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5.1″

Now everything looking for Photoshop.exe will find the one you want to use.

Fix for Wacom tablet with sticky stylus trouble

I am only posting this because this has happened a few times and it always takes me a moment to remember how to fix it. The moment is usually right after I download and install the latest drivers, reboot and realize it is still broken.

If you notice any of the following odd behavior:

• Mouse wont click buttons or let go of a move or handles
• Keyboard or tablet buttons are unresponsive until the stylus is pulled far away
• Drawing before you touch down

You can check to see if your stylus is in calibration. To do this open the Wacom Tablet Properties > About > Diagnostics page
Look at “Pressure”, it should read 0% until the stylus touches the tablet and go back to 0% as soon as you pull away. If it is reading 7~8% with no contact it is enough to keep other buttons from working correctly and drive you crazy.

Try pulling the tip out of your stylus and putting it back in.

Now check your pressure again, you should be good to go.

Word 2010 Merge: Error has occurred: table is not in the expected format

If you are trying to do a Word 2010 data merge from Excel 2010 with a fresh Office install and all you get is a string of error messages like the title. Try this:

1. Close Word 2010
2. Open Access 2010, wait till it fully loads.
3. Close Access 2010
4. Open your Word doc again and you should be good to go.

I got some clues from this post here but it seemed too buried to be useful.

How-To: Easy X-rite ColorChecker Passport Profile Generation in Lightroom 3

My earlier post contained a link to a video from X-rite that goes into detail about how to use the X-rite ColorChecker Passport in Lightroom and ACR (Adobe Camera Raw).

This is just the quick steps to generate a profile in Lightroom 3

1. In Lightroom, select a picture you took with your camera of the ColorChecker Passport
2. Right click on the picture and select Export > ColorChecker Passport
3. Give it a name that will mean something to you later,
   I use: (camera model) – (conditions) – (Photos WB settings)
4. Wait… and done.
5. Restart Lightroom and it will show up in Develop > Camera Calibration > Profile

Living with Android & Samsung Galaxy S

So I gave up the iPhone 3Gs after the poor iOS 4 experience and picked up a Sprint Epic, AKA Samsung Galaxy S (with a keyboard) on Sprint. The rest of the carriers have Galaxy S variants as well (more on that here )

One thing to note: I am pretty well Googlized at this point with contacts, calendar, rss and tasks on Google, to name a few. I did this because synchronizing the various applications (Outlook, iTunes) and whatever phone I had always seemed to threaten data consistency one way or another. Now all I have to worry about is Google being evil.

Some of the apps I have added to make things a little better or replace defaults (all free).

• DoubleTwist: Music player that works a lot like an ipod (also has a desktop component that I am not using).
• WiFi Analyzer: This helped me trouble shoot speed issues with my home router.
• KeePassDroid: Is able to open a KeePass database in read only mode (if you are not using KeePass for passwords on your desktop and don’t have a solution you already love, you might want to take a look).
• Gesture Search: Search anything on your phone using finger scribble on the whole screen.
• Shazam: Will tell you what a song is called by listening to it and checking a large database.
• Sound Manager: Lets you control when your phone makes sounds based on type of sound and time. This is great if you don’t care to be waken up by email but want to wake up to SMS messages or whatever.
• Photoshop Express: This lets you edit pictures right on you phone.
• GTasks: Allows offline use of Google Tasks with syncronization.
• Caffeine: Keeps the screen on and unlocked while running, goes back to normal when it is not.
• Google Reader Client: for RSS reading.
• Nook for Android: For BN books
• Audible: As with all Audible applications, this one is not as good as it could be but it works better than the Audible for iPhone app.

Monitor Calibration and Print Profile Troubleshooting

Everybody says calibrate your monitor and use print profiles and everything will turn out great.

What happens if you are calibrating and profiling, following great workflow using good paper blah blah blah and things still don’t seem right. For me I knew something was wrong because my video looked over saturated and my prints dull.

After searching the web and coming up with nothing useful, I started digging around and found that my Nividia drivers have their own color control (other video makers may as well). Under Nvidia Control Panel, Display, Adjust desktop color settings there are Gamma, Hue, Vibrance and even a Color channel mixer.

For 2. Choose how color is set pick Other applications control color settings

For 3.  Apply the following enhancements

Vibrance = 50%

Hue = 0

Mine was set to a Vibrance of 58% and it was enough to cause no end of headaches. How it got this way I may never know, that was the first time I had seen that dialog box.

X-rite ColorChecker Passport with Lightroom and Camera Raw

I heard about the X-rite ColorChecker Passport on Michael Frye’s website. If you are calibrating your monitor, this is a great way to calibrate your camera. Ok, technically you are not calibrating your camera, you are calibrating your RAW images. If you are not calibrating your monitor, nothing else you do with color calibration will matter, you should stop reading this and google monitor calibration. Michael does a good job explaining the ColorChecker but I found X-rite has an excellent webinar video tutorial for using the ColorChecker Passport with Lightroom and Camera Raw to get the most accurate color from your camera. The video goes over how to use the Passport to get the right white balance in portraits and landscapes. It also shows how to make camera profiles in Lightroom without doing DNG conversions first.

When will toolbars go vertical

So here we have an example of what I saw when I opened IE 8 on Windows 7. Notice how poorly the space is used, this install has 6 vertical top bars, 7 if you count the status bar at the bottom bar.

The wire frame is typical 960 x 700 size and it is still cut off on the bottom.

Meanwhile, most of the bars have dead space in them. I did attempt to consolidate bars, what you see here was the best I could do without disabling features.