nothing2fancy

Playing with Lightroom presets

I found this O’Reilly blog today that explained how to set up a few of his favorite Apple Aperture presets. I re-did them in Adobe Lightroom and thought I’d post a link to them for anyone else interested. I tried the effects on a few shots and every one required some additional fiddling to get it to look just right, but these pre-sets will get you pretty darn close to the final product.

.zip file

I’m going to see Daft Punk at Red Rocks this summer

I’m freakin’ pumped beyond belief that I’m going to be seeing this band:



at this venue:


Click for a bigger version

We’re so nerdy

I’m sitting on the bed working on my defense, Stephanie is sitting at my desk shopping for shoes. 2 years ago we wouldn’t have been able to have a face-to-face conversation under these, the most trying of circumstances. Thanks to iChat AV, those days are over!

This is a guy

….who’s almost done writing his thesis. I’ve got a crap ton of work left to do tonight, but the end is in sight.

iChat AV is cool

The neat thing is how
good the quality is, despite our pretty slow connection. We first started off using Alex’s computer to host the chat and we all looked like blobs, after switching to my computer things sped up. The only weird thing about it is that you can only host a 3-way video chat if you’re on an iMac or a Mac Pro, Macbooks don’t work….weird.

Adding insult to injury

I know I’m not that great of a speller, why does Word have to rub it in my face?

File under "things my computer should have come with"

So, as anyone with an iMac knows, there’s no easy way to shut off the display. It’s possible to set the display sleep timer to 1 minute, but this causes the display to shut off every time you stop to read something. On Macbooks it’s possible to dim the screen all the way and have it shut off completely, but that doesn’t work on iMacs. I suppose the inability to shut off the display doesn’t make much difference if your iMac is in an office, but if it’s in your bedroom (like mine) it’s pretty annoying having to wait 15 minutes for the display to shut off if you’re using the machine right before bed. Luckily, I just found a widget that’ll automatically shut the display off, yeah!

via Infinite Loop

Got an offer from Capital One

Got an offer from Capital One for the Data Analyst position. I’m surprised they gave me an offer considering I was mispronouncing “Analasyst” all day long. In addition to the base salary they got the most confusing web of bonuses and benefits I’ve ever seen. I need to go hire an accountant to sort this shit out for me.

Empty trash on flash drives

One of my minor annoyances with OS X was that when you “delete” files from USB drives they’ll stay on the drive (hidden and inaccessable, but they’re there, taking up space) until you empty the trash. I realize that I can empty the trash on USB drives using UNIX commands, but that’s too much of a PITA, I usually just empty the trash, deleting all trashed files on both connected drives and on my desktop.

Finally I discovered this script that allows you to drag and drop your external drives into a script that will permanently delete all files that are trashed on that disk. Brilliant! Check it out. I imagine this will come in handy for any OS X user that uses flash drives.

My digital picture workflow in Adobe Lightroom

I recently invested in Adobe Lightroom since Picasa isn’t available on Macs and iPhoto sucks ballsch. First off, if you are torn between Adobe’s Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture you need to ask yourself, “Do I have a blazingly fast mac with a high-end graphics card, crap-ton of ram and a bleeding edge processor?” If the answer is anything other then yes….go with Lightroom. I tried using Aperture on my brand-new iMac….amazingly freakin’ slow. The CMU Tartan uses Aperture on their Mac Pro….barely runs. Aperture, like iPhoto, will run sloooooow for you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Anyway, I’ve been using Lightroom for a couple of weeks now and I think I’ve found a system that works really well. I thought I’d share it with anyone else who might be a little discouraged with their first impressions of Lightroom.

1. Copy your images off of your CF card. If all the images you are importing have a theme, nows the time to add some select keywords to the photos.
2. Click on “Previous Import” under the Library tab. This will display all the photos you just imported.
3. Hit “F” twice to get Lightroom to full screen. Hit shift-tab to hide all extraneous windows (if you want windows back you can either hit shift-tab again, or click on the gray arrows on the top, bottom and sides of the Lightroom window). Click on the first image you imported and hit “E” to get to loupe view. Hit “L” twice to darken the background and eliminate distractions. Now you can concentrate on your images. The first thing I do is run through them once, quick, to week out the crappy ones. If an image is blurry or very badly exposed just tap “X” to get rid of it. If the image is especially good, hit “P” to pick it.
4. Now that you’ve weeded out all the very bad ones it’s time to stack the images. Note: this is only useful if you’ve taken multiple shots of something and want to choose one best version. You may want to skip this part, as it might not apply to you. I like it, though, because when I post a lot of pictures and this keeps my loyal viewers from having to browse through 15 shots of the same thing. In the menu-bar go to Photo->stacking->auto-stack. Choose an appropriate time scale, I use 5 seconds usually. This will auto-generate stacks. Now you just need to pick the best image from each stack.
5. The easiest way to do this is: Hit “N” to enter survey view. Once in survey view use the scrolling image bar at the bottom of the window to find your stacks. If you click on the stack number (upper left-hand corner of your images) all images in the stack will open up in the same window, allowing you to compare them. You can immediately hit the x button on the window to eliminate the photos that obviously aren’t the best. Once you choose the one image you would like to use, select it and hit “shift-S” to set it as the pick of the stack.
6. Now that all your images are stacked and the bad shots are weeded out, it’s time to add keywords to your pictures. Go to “photo->stacking->collapse all stacks” to collapse your stacks. You can add keywords however you find is easiest, I just go through and try to add at least one word to each image. If one image screams “bridge” to me, I’ll add the keyword “bridge” to that image and all other images that have a bridge in them. The more keywords you enter the easier your life will be when someone asks for some picture of a bridge you took 3 years ago.
7. At this point I export the pictures for posting to my website. With the stacks all collapsed I don’t need to worry about posting multiple images that are pretty-much the same. Once those images are exported I click on the pick flag at the bottom of the screen to filter out all images not flagged with a “pick” These are the images I want to spend some time editing and post to my flickr account.

I hope this helped someone out there. I’ve been incredibly happy with Lightroom, especially since I was used to Picasa and was sorely disappointed that there was nothing on the Mac that even approached the utility of Picasa.