Having gotten 99.99% moved to my new computer I find that I am now discovering small tweaks that I had come to rely on but didn't really think to recreate during the initial massive migration. One of these little items provided the ability to view the EXIF and IPTC data in an image being browsed via a contextual right-click menu choice from Firefox. I tend to use this dozens of times a day.
If you are a digital photographer and don't know what EXIF and IPTC data are, the very quick answer is that they are metadata (data about data) embedded in most modern image file formats. Your camera embeds EXIF data when you take an exposure which records such things as camera type, ISO, f-stop, date, time, etc. IPTC data describes the image and is embedded by the photographer using a software tool such as PhotoMechanic (my choice) or LightRoom (which I use but not for this purpose.) For specifics of these formats do a Google search.
So, I am out browsing around on my favorite photography forum, POTN, and see an image that I find interesting taken in very low light at a concert (something I do a lot of) and want to know what ISO, f-stop and shutter speed was used. With the Add-On I use in Firefox 3 I can just right click the image and select the EXIF viewer and bam ... there's all the information. And with the viewer I use I can also see the IPTC data and even the GPS data if it is there.
I have used several EXIF viewers, all freeware, and I vastly prefer the IEXIF from Opanda. The nicest thing compared with others is that the popup window with the information is expandable and sometimes that EXIF or particularly IPTC data can get very long. The Opanda presentation is simple, elegant and easy to use.
So, what do you do? I don't know what Mac users do! But if you're a PC person you go to Opanda's website and from their homepage you install IEXIF V2.3 (at the moment.) This needs to be sitting on your computer. You then install the Firefox Add-On in the usual fashion. Restart Firefox as normal for adding an Add-On. Browse to an image and right click and there's a new item from Opanda and you simply click it. When you're done, close the IEXIF window because otherwise it will stick around ... you can have several of these open at once which is handy.
I consider the Opanda an essential piece of software.
Be safe!
Dwight
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Computers: A Necessary Evil
I feel as though I have yet again been missing in action blogwise! For those of you who aren't interested in all things computer, feel free to leave now. For those who would like to benefit from the experience of others, read on!
The last time I built new computers for my photography business was about two years ago as a result of my then current primary workstation going completely dead. It was a case of my PC-DL motherboard dying while under warranty. That was a very painful lesson as I had to finally buy a new PC-DL motherboard and move all the components from the failed motherboard to the new motherboard in order to demonstrate to ASUS that it was the motherboard that was bad ... they finally sent me the replacement but, of course, I already had one. But since I couldn't put my business on hold for a month while screwing with that computer, I built one, and then another for backup, to replace the PC-DL. I used ABIT AN8 and KN8 motherboards.
First I built the ABIT AN8-Ultra. All went well until my first big image download via a USB port. About 6GB in to the transfer the system locked up ... just froze. For two years I simply endured these lockups because I couldn't figure out what was wrong. They finally started getting worse and worse. In the meantime I had built the KN8-Ultra system (as my backup box) and just started downloading there and transferring across my intranet. I'll short circuit this story to say that it turns out that ABIT released this board with a significant design flaw making running USB with dual CPUs very unstable. Never a note on the website. Never an email to registered users. Nothing. Nada. They just let everyone suffer. Of course, this is typical motherboard manufacturer style. I was finally able to get perfect stability by running with only a single CPU enabled ... but it made the box very slow with the Athlon 4400+ CPU only running one core.
The KN8-Ultra box with an Athlon 4800+ processor was my backup box (both backup in the sense of data backup and in the sense of being available if the primary box should die) and will remain so into the near future. It is reliable but doesn't seem to want to take a big video card upgrade to support my Dell 30" monitor.
With those two computers having various issues I decided to build a new machine and optimize it for Photoshop. In my mind that means as much memory as Windows 32 bit XP Pro can take, a powerful CPU and at least three separate RAID arrays. After much research (you cannot do enough research no matter how much time you put into it so just accept that) I decided on an ASUS P5E WS Pro motherboard. This motherboard supports two PCI-E x16 video cards so it should be able to drive the 23" ACD, 30" Dell and the Wacom Cintiq 21ux ... I haven't yet put the second video card in as I am using it in my about to be decommissioned AN8 box. In addition, this motherboard has a PCI-X slot and I happened (due to a total brain fart on my part) to have an LSI MegaRaid SATA 300-8X raid controller card which makes it a great fit ... but, the PCI-X slot turns out to really be just a PCI-E X1 slot with a different adapter so I can't really get full performance out of it, sigh. And, of course, this isn't revealed up front by ASUS!
The big Gotcha's! First, the P5E has two onboard RAID controllers, one of which has e-SATA connectors. That's wonderful except the Marvell driver doesn't seem to support ACHI which is necessary for e-SATA hot swap. And since the 'e' in e-SATA stands for 'external', not having hot swap is rather stupid. Also, the Marvell controller supports IDE and there is an IDE adapter on the motherboard ... but its unadvertised restriction is that if you use it for non-disk use, such as with my IDE CD-ROM, you will be sorely disappointed when after doing a complete install of Windows and try to do the reboot, the BIOS will be unable to find your boot disks! Oh, how easy it would have been if ASUS had noted that you must use a SATA CDROM! What a waste of three days of my life trying countless variations. It was only by virtue of my boss using his Linux Rescue Disk that we discovered this cleverness! I have disabled the Marvell hardware since it is clearly a half-assed and useless addition to this motherboard. And finally, the wonderful RealTek audio chipset and driver won't install under default Windows XP ... it will run the full driver install until the last instant and then fail for no obvious reason. After days of searching via Google I found that there is an incompatible system device, the UAA driver, that must be disabled and then uninstalled before installing the RealTek drivers ... but once you have discovered that "feature" (that ASUS doesn't publish)the sound support appears to work well and the driver is very friendly for those of us who are audio challenged.
Anyway, this new box is finally up and spinning as my primary business computer. I have an E8600 3.33 GHz dual core CPU, 4GB DDR2 memory, three RAID arrays: 2x250GB RAID1 for system disk, 2x250GB (soon to be replaced by 3x320GB) RAID0 scratch disk, and 3x750GB RAID5 work disk. It has two 1G NICs although it would be nicer if it had WiFi instead or even Firewire-800. I migrated the last of the applications and data from the old box to this one over this weekend. And here let me put in a BIG plug for MozBackup ... a shareware utility that will export/import your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles including email, registry settings, add-ons, etc., etc. I had read about several add-ons that supposedly did this in Firefox but none had good ratings and a complex solution for doing it by hand with Thunderbird and even though I am moderately computer literate, no manual system seemed to work properly ... MozBackup did exactly what I wanted, creating my old environment on my new box using the principal of 'least unexpected result' perfectly! I have already PayPal'd them their requested Shareware donation.
Phew, I am now on my new box with Adobe CS3 Web Premium, LR2.1, Corel PIX3 & Painter X, PhotoMechanic 5, and other odds and ends and expect to get back to doing useful Blog entries once again. Certainly one thing you can learn from my blog is that almost nothing goes as expected in small business and most of the unexpected events are not good! :-)
Be Safe!
Dwight
The last time I built new computers for my photography business was about two years ago as a result of my then current primary workstation going completely dead. It was a case of my PC-DL motherboard dying while under warranty. That was a very painful lesson as I had to finally buy a new PC-DL motherboard and move all the components from the failed motherboard to the new motherboard in order to demonstrate to ASUS that it was the motherboard that was bad ... they finally sent me the replacement but, of course, I already had one. But since I couldn't put my business on hold for a month while screwing with that computer, I built one, and then another for backup, to replace the PC-DL. I used ABIT AN8 and KN8 motherboards.
First I built the ABIT AN8-Ultra. All went well until my first big image download via a USB port. About 6GB in to the transfer the system locked up ... just froze. For two years I simply endured these lockups because I couldn't figure out what was wrong. They finally started getting worse and worse. In the meantime I had built the KN8-Ultra system (as my backup box) and just started downloading there and transferring across my intranet. I'll short circuit this story to say that it turns out that ABIT released this board with a significant design flaw making running USB with dual CPUs very unstable. Never a note on the website. Never an email to registered users. Nothing. Nada. They just let everyone suffer. Of course, this is typical motherboard manufacturer style. I was finally able to get perfect stability by running with only a single CPU enabled ... but it made the box very slow with the Athlon 4400+ CPU only running one core.
The KN8-Ultra box with an Athlon 4800+ processor was my backup box (both backup in the sense of data backup and in the sense of being available if the primary box should die) and will remain so into the near future. It is reliable but doesn't seem to want to take a big video card upgrade to support my Dell 30" monitor.
With those two computers having various issues I decided to build a new machine and optimize it for Photoshop. In my mind that means as much memory as Windows 32 bit XP Pro can take, a powerful CPU and at least three separate RAID arrays. After much research (you cannot do enough research no matter how much time you put into it so just accept that) I decided on an ASUS P5E WS Pro motherboard. This motherboard supports two PCI-E x16 video cards so it should be able to drive the 23" ACD, 30" Dell and the Wacom Cintiq 21ux ... I haven't yet put the second video card in as I am using it in my about to be decommissioned AN8 box. In addition, this motherboard has a PCI-X slot and I happened (due to a total brain fart on my part) to have an LSI MegaRaid SATA 300-8X raid controller card which makes it a great fit ... but, the PCI-X slot turns out to really be just a PCI-E X1 slot with a different adapter so I can't really get full performance out of it, sigh. And, of course, this isn't revealed up front by ASUS!
The big Gotcha's! First, the P5E has two onboard RAID controllers, one of which has e-SATA connectors. That's wonderful except the Marvell driver doesn't seem to support ACHI which is necessary for e-SATA hot swap. And since the 'e' in e-SATA stands for 'external', not having hot swap is rather stupid. Also, the Marvell controller supports IDE and there is an IDE adapter on the motherboard ... but its unadvertised restriction is that if you use it for non-disk use, such as with my IDE CD-ROM, you will be sorely disappointed when after doing a complete install of Windows and try to do the reboot, the BIOS will be unable to find your boot disks! Oh, how easy it would have been if ASUS had noted that you must use a SATA CDROM! What a waste of three days of my life trying countless variations. It was only by virtue of my boss using his Linux Rescue Disk that we discovered this cleverness! I have disabled the Marvell hardware since it is clearly a half-assed and useless addition to this motherboard. And finally, the wonderful RealTek audio chipset and driver won't install under default Windows XP ... it will run the full driver install until the last instant and then fail for no obvious reason. After days of searching via Google I found that there is an incompatible system device, the UAA driver, that must be disabled and then uninstalled before installing the RealTek drivers ... but once you have discovered that "feature" (that ASUS doesn't publish)the sound support appears to work well and the driver is very friendly for those of us who are audio challenged.
Anyway, this new box is finally up and spinning as my primary business computer. I have an E8600 3.33 GHz dual core CPU, 4GB DDR2 memory, three RAID arrays: 2x250GB RAID1 for system disk, 2x250GB (soon to be replaced by 3x320GB) RAID0 scratch disk, and 3x750GB RAID5 work disk. It has two 1G NICs although it would be nicer if it had WiFi instead or even Firewire-800. I migrated the last of the applications and data from the old box to this one over this weekend. And here let me put in a BIG plug for MozBackup ... a shareware utility that will export/import your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles including email, registry settings, add-ons, etc., etc. I had read about several add-ons that supposedly did this in Firefox but none had good ratings and a complex solution for doing it by hand with Thunderbird and even though I am moderately computer literate, no manual system seemed to work properly ... MozBackup did exactly what I wanted, creating my old environment on my new box using the principal of 'least unexpected result' perfectly! I have already PayPal'd them their requested Shareware donation.
Phew, I am now on my new box with Adobe CS3 Web Premium, LR2.1, Corel PIX3 & Painter X, PhotoMechanic 5, and other odds and ends and expect to get back to doing useful Blog entries once again. Certainly one thing you can learn from my blog is that almost nothing goes as expected in small business and most of the unexpected events are not good! :-)
Be Safe!
Dwight
Monday, October 13, 2008
LightRoom 2.0 with Hal Schmitt at The Institute
I spent the weekend with Hal Schmitt learning about LightRoom 2.0 at The [Lepp] Institute in Los Osos and running off to shoot the Santa Barbara County Vintners' Association Harvest Festival at Rancho Sisquoc, California. Both were superb.
But I need to back up just a second to report that I have had two major computer failures that have been taking up my time which is why I haven't been blogging as frequently as intended. I won't dwell on them ... I am a compulsive backer upper and would have lost no data even if I had not been able to recover both machines which I have been able to do. One up side is that I have built and am migrating onto a new machine that I will describe completely with pictures when I'm done and one down side is that the two failures really have complicated the hell out of the process of migrating! But I will fill you all in later when I have a nostril above the waterline.
LightRoom 2.0 is here. Hal says LightRoom 2.1 is close and that it will fix lots of the little bugs that have been revealed, making a much more solid release by Adobe. I have been a LightRoom user since the first public release of 1.0 due to a most fortuitous coincidence of taking a class at The Institute that I thought was going to be Photoshop but which turned out to be LightRoom. It is now an integral part of my workflow where I mainly use it for RAW conversion. I rarely Photoshop any images after the conversion. This is mainly because the things you do with Photoshop are not things that interest my current clientele. But this is changing and as I move into more areas of photography such as fashion, glamor, family and maybe weddings, I will need these skills. To this end, LightRoom 2 looks like another significant increment in the toolkit. I have LR2 installed on my new machine and 1.4.1 on my old machine ... I'm trying to tease myself along!
So, in his usual inimitable instructor fashion, Hal has created a really super LightRoom weekend that combines material for LR newbies and for those of us migrating from 1 to 2. I think our class of about a dozen was a mixed bag of new and continuing users. No one was bored! And there are a lot of little tricks and treats that I can't imagine stumbling upon or even reading about that are part of Hal's show. In fact, I was chatting with Hal and a couple of other students when I heard myself say, "It's not that I get everything that I expect in taking a Hal Schmitt class, it's that I get so much that I didn't expect that makes Hal's classes so exciting!" Hal and Victoria bring a lot of top flight instructors through The Institute, but I don't think any of those I've attended or read do quite the job that Hal does. He's not as cute as Tim Gray. He's not as verbose and chatty as Scott Kelby. He's only been into photography for a short time. But he understands teaching and students so thoroughly that he is seamless and getting better with experience.
Hmmm, I guess I'm impressed ... yet again. Anyway, Hal covered all the significant new stuff, particularly in the develop module, as well as its interface with PS CS3, since that's where the meat of the new release lives. But be clear, you would understand the entire workflow through all modules after attending this weekend seminar.
Enough of that! My next Institute class will be with Andy Katz the first weekend in November doing vineyard and winery photography and I'll give you another report.
I have a lot of topics lined up (my wife is getting tired of all the boxes, lenses, bags, Pelican cases and the like that are cluttering the hallway to and inside my office and studio) to write about. I really want to show the rest of my gear so I can finally talk more about using it and the workflow involved. So stay tuned and we'll get to everything from grapes to girls and concerts, too!
Be Safe!
Dwight
But I need to back up just a second to report that I have had two major computer failures that have been taking up my time which is why I haven't been blogging as frequently as intended. I won't dwell on them ... I am a compulsive backer upper and would have lost no data even if I had not been able to recover both machines which I have been able to do. One up side is that I have built and am migrating onto a new machine that I will describe completely with pictures when I'm done and one down side is that the two failures really have complicated the hell out of the process of migrating! But I will fill you all in later when I have a nostril above the waterline.
LightRoom 2.0 is here. Hal says LightRoom 2.1 is close and that it will fix lots of the little bugs that have been revealed, making a much more solid release by Adobe. I have been a LightRoom user since the first public release of 1.0 due to a most fortuitous coincidence of taking a class at The Institute that I thought was going to be Photoshop but which turned out to be LightRoom. It is now an integral part of my workflow where I mainly use it for RAW conversion. I rarely Photoshop any images after the conversion. This is mainly because the things you do with Photoshop are not things that interest my current clientele. But this is changing and as I move into more areas of photography such as fashion, glamor, family and maybe weddings, I will need these skills. To this end, LightRoom 2 looks like another significant increment in the toolkit. I have LR2 installed on my new machine and 1.4.1 on my old machine ... I'm trying to tease myself along!
So, in his usual inimitable instructor fashion, Hal has created a really super LightRoom weekend that combines material for LR newbies and for those of us migrating from 1 to 2. I think our class of about a dozen was a mixed bag of new and continuing users. No one was bored! And there are a lot of little tricks and treats that I can't imagine stumbling upon or even reading about that are part of Hal's show. In fact, I was chatting with Hal and a couple of other students when I heard myself say, "It's not that I get everything that I expect in taking a Hal Schmitt class, it's that I get so much that I didn't expect that makes Hal's classes so exciting!" Hal and Victoria bring a lot of top flight instructors through The Institute, but I don't think any of those I've attended or read do quite the job that Hal does. He's not as cute as Tim Gray. He's not as verbose and chatty as Scott Kelby. He's only been into photography for a short time. But he understands teaching and students so thoroughly that he is seamless and getting better with experience.
Hmmm, I guess I'm impressed ... yet again. Anyway, Hal covered all the significant new stuff, particularly in the develop module, as well as its interface with PS CS3, since that's where the meat of the new release lives. But be clear, you would understand the entire workflow through all modules after attending this weekend seminar.
Enough of that! My next Institute class will be with Andy Katz the first weekend in November doing vineyard and winery photography and I'll give you another report.
I have a lot of topics lined up (my wife is getting tired of all the boxes, lenses, bags, Pelican cases and the like that are cluttering the hallway to and inside my office and studio) to write about. I really want to show the rest of my gear so I can finally talk more about using it and the workflow involved. So stay tuned and we'll get to everything from grapes to girls and concerts, too!
Be Safe!
Dwight
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