Lightroom and CS3

I recently upgraded my camera from an ageing Canon EOS 30D to the newly-released EOS 7D. Jumping from 8 megapixels to 18, and adding HD video recording, as well as niceties such as Auto ISO, are real plusses for me.

However, I soon found an annoying problem: I use Adobe Lightroom 2 to manage my rapidly-growing photo collection (just a handful shy of 10000 now) and Adobe Photoshop CS3 to do clever stuff like panorama stitching. However, CS3 doesn’t recognise the RAW format that Canon uses in the 7D, although Lightroom 2 does, so I can’t load photos taken with the 7D in Photoshop. Bummer.

Adobe’s ideal solution is that I upgrade to Photoshop CS4, which will be several hundred dollars. However, the solution I came across was to use Adobe’s own tools to work around the limitation. Lightroom can convert RAW images to its preferred DNG format, and that format can be opened in CS3. Usually I convert my RAW images to DNG as the last step in my development process, but this is a neat little workaround, saving me a big chunk of cash at the same time.

Blogging on OS X

Some time back, I blogged about my dismay at finding no equivalent to Windows Live Writer for OS X. Well, since then I've been mainly using Blogger's web client to do my blogging, but the lack of a decent offline client has been a bit of a pain. For some reason, having to run Windows Live Writer from within a VMWare session, just grates a bit too much. So I thought I'd try out some of the Mac equivalents. OS X lacks a clear equivalent to WLW, which is as close to a perfect product as Microsoft is ever likely to release (not inspiring for a platform some 20 years old), and free as well. From what I garnered from the web, the best commercial products for OS X are ecto and MarsEdit. I downloaded both clients this evening, and ran through the setup routines. Ecto was a bit less friendly than MarsEdit, so I'm going to give MarsEdit a go first. This post is being written with MarsEdit, if you couldn't guess.

iSilo on the iPhone

One of the main reasons that I haven't bought an iPhone, apart from the hoops that you have to jump through to get it on the 3 network, is that it didn't support the iSilo document reader. Since iSilo is one of the main document formats for mobile devices (since the days of the Palm Pilot Professional - remember that?!), that would be a bit of a major pain, especially as most of the documents I read are in that format.

Fortunately after a lot of noise has been kicked up on the iSilo forums by iPhone/iPod Touch lovers, this application is now available from Apple's App Store.

One less reason now for me to get an iPhone!

UPDATE: oops, that last line should read, "One less reason now for me to not get an iPhone!".

Flickr and iPhoto

While having a wander around iPhoto, I found a rather nice little feature - subscribing to photo feeds. iPhoto can subscribe to RSS feeds, such as those provided by Flickr, allowing you to see your friends' latest photos in one place. Just grab the RSS URL from near the bottom of a contact's site (this can be for the whole site, or just a set or collection), and in iPhoto, select File | Subscribe to Photo Feed, and paste in the URL. iPhoto will grab the most recent photos from their site (it looks like 20 is the default). The only problem that I can see is that double-clicking on a thumbnail doesn't take you to the hi-res version, instead magnifying the default lo-res version, so it's not perfect, but it's a good way of keeping an eye on what your friends have been up to.

Microsoft beats Apple

Having made the switch after more than 20 years of PCs to Apple, with the purchase of a MacBook Pro at Heathrow Airport's tax-free shopping, I've slowly been shutting down activities on my recalcitrant LG laptop. I've already got the Mac versions of Microsoft Office, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS3; however, one thing that OS X is really missing is a decent blog client. By far, the best blog client going is Windows Live Writer. It's probably one of the best pieces of software to come out of Redmond in the past decade.

Until OS X can come up with something equivalent, I'm going to be using either Fusion or Parallels to let me run it in a virtual machine, along with the handful of other Windows-only applications that I use for which there are definitely no equivalents. Either that, or blog from work, where I've co-opted my Windows Server 2003 desktop to run it. During my lunch break, of course.