2005 January » Niklas Saers' blog

iPhoto 5 – First Impressions

Jan 312005

The TNT delivery guy was here and delivered my iLife ’05 pack which I bought solely because of iPhoto. (Apple refused to give me a student discount for the software, even though I ordered via the net. I’ve heared people don’t get student discounts in Apple’s stores.) I use my Canon Ixus, Canon EOS 20D, HP Scanner and Nikon negativescanner much, so being very annoyed about the sluggish performance of iPhoto 2 but loving its way of interacting with my blog and organising pictures, and hearing good thing about performance on iPhoto 4 and that iPhoto 5 would be better performance wise, I decided to upgrade after they threw in RAW handling (which seems to be a total fake).

First impression: the DVD was filthy. I opened the box, took it out of its envelope, and had to clean it before putting it in my drive. Wow, I’ve never had that happen to me with new software before. Was the packaging done by hand or something? Anyways. iLife takes a whopping 4.7 GB, or 5% of my harddrive. The installation took 45 minutes, the converting of my iPhoto 2 library of 800 photos took 2 hours! (I run a 1Ghz iMac with 1GB ram)

Scrolling is indeed much faster. Not as fast as f-spot, but still fast. Opening a 8 megapixel picture takes 3 seconds, opening a 20 megapixel picture takes 6 seconds. Saving a slightly cropped 20 megapixel picture took 37 seconds! Saving a slightly cropped 8 megapixel image took 8 seconds. Each edit must be saved before proceeding to the next picture, no option to make changes on previews and then batch them together in one go. Meaning I won’t be using iPhoto to edit my 20 megapixel photos that my filmscanner makes.

RAW: (what we’ve all been waiting for) No camera color profiles to load, no spot white balance to set. Just lots and lots of impresise sliders so you can see what it looks like and choose a setting based on that. In other word, it’s no replacement for ufraw (or whatever RAW converting application you use). Even Canon’s bundeled software handles development from RAW images nicer, and I really don’t like that bundled software. So even though I have iPhoto, I still want to keep working on RAW support for f-spot, and you might want to stick with your favourite RAW processing software.

Good thing: getting to continue my work while it does the importing. Bad thing: doing so led to my first iPhoto 5 crash, after under an hour of usage. Wee. I hope we’ll see Apple updating this one quickly. Bug report sent.

Preferences: why can I not choose Thunderbird as my email program?

So, based on my first impressions, this is my wishlist for Apple to improve iPhoto ’05:

REAL RAW support
Batch handling for editing
No crashing
Faster image handling

RAW support in iPhoto

Photography, Technology No Responses »

Jan 312005

Apple sent me a mail saying my iLife copy has been dispatched. In the mean time, California Fox reports that iPhoto’s RAW support is, well, fake. It imports RAWs, but rather than use the RAW files as a source when modifying brightness, temperature, exposure, saturnation etc, it uses an intermediate JPG copy. And as we all know, this just isn’t the same. This is not what we asked for when we wanted RAW support, and just not mentioning this and waiting for people’s reactions seems just irresponsible on Apple’s part.

In the mean time, I’ve come across f-spot and I’m currently tracking its CVS and looking at integrating Udi Fuchs’ ufraw into it. This’ll be my first shot at C#, so I’m wondering both how the task will be and how people will respond to it. I do NOT, however, plan to settle on intermediate JPGs.

End in sight

Photoblog 2 Responses »

Jan 302005

Toes

Blogs No Responses »

Jan 302005

According to An Open Shutter, his most searched for word is toes. Funny thing. So far my top search word is 47th street photo. The more nerdy words score good as well. What search words bring in people with you? And how do you bring people to your site and keep them coming back? I stick with my photos and hope someone will bother with my ramblings as well.

Cloudy moon

Photoblog 1 Response »

Jan 282005

Yay, I’ve got my camera back. That is, my camera went in for service to get the 13 detected hot pixles (or whatever the correct term is), but the repair guys forgot to put in the battery when they gave it back. To make things harder, I live in Denmark, the repair shop is in Norway. But one month later, I’ve got it back, and they’ve done a good job changing the cmos.

Anyways, I ended up taking a lot of pictures with my 100mm f/2.8 macro, and while this is quite unfocussed, it ended up having the atmosphere I wanted. I have no tripod and I’ve given my father back his 300mm f/4 that I used for my previous moon shot, but I had to try this one out to see if it was any good. I took a few at lower ISO settings that got more details of the moon, but they reduced the lighting on the clouds. I’ve got to play more with GIMP or Photoshop Elements.

Tekna looking for the stars

General No Responses »

Jan 222005

The Norwegian language has a problem: there is no such word as management. The word we use for management is leading, which as even a pre-first year management student knows is just a tiny fraction of it. In my experience, many Norwegian managers know nothing much about management. And since my experience is mainly from the IT sector, no wonder that the perhaps biggest organisation for technological and natural sciences professionals, Tekna arranges a course in Astrology and Management (ok, Astrology and Leading is the actual title, but from the text they obviously mean management)

Thanks to Erik Tunstad for bringing this up

Did Shakespeare have syphilis?

General No Responses »

Jan 172005

Everyone seems
to wonder if Shakespeare had syphilis. He may have been given bath treatments to kill the bacteria and have had to inhale quicksilver to “cure” him and may have died from the treatment, which caused him to loose hair, shiver and become asocial. Or, people may be exagerating. You read the evidence and figure it out.

Niklas Saers' blog