Lightroom 1.1 is out!

And it's grand. I absolutely love the new Clarity control and the improved sharpening. Seems quite a bit faster too. Go check it out here. I'll do some more testing soon and report on it soon.

Picasa does not support icc profiles

I was playing with Google's Picasa on my windows install and I found out that unbelievably, Picasa does not respect color profiles embedded in images, which is tantamount to assuming that the image is in the monitor profile, i.e. an extremely bad assumption especially since currently so many people use narrow (narrower than sRGB) gamut laptop LCDs. This is probably the worst mistake one can make in any photo organization/editing program and really disappoints me in google. This is almost as bad as Blogger stripping icc profiles from uploaded images. Please Google, get with the program! Even Apple's iPhoto, a slow but great for consumers program, does this correctly.

Manual dynamic range reduction

I played a little with HDR software but wasn't always happy with the results. Often it would look better to just combine exposures (if done, otherwise just one RAW image) and use masks derived from the images. So I tried to play with an older image that had a correctly exposed sky, but several stops underexposed foreground (it was dawn inside a canyon). I simply used a mask generated from one of the color channels with a exposure adjustment layer in PS. Came out quite well I think:

Finally

An amazing thing just happened. Apple just came out with a version of Safari for windows. What this means for photographers is that there is finally a browser on windows that color corrects images (even if it is quite buggy)! I tested it and it works! Respecting embedding profiles is extraordinary important as is evident from this excellent 7-page writeup. It's been extremely embarrassing and annoying that even in Vista, IE does not respect embedded profiles, but even worse that Firefox does not color correct on any platform. Let's hope that Safari's excellent example will lead the way.

Rusty and Crusty

Walked around Georgetown when my mother-in-law was here last week. They have an amazing play structure in the city park in Georgetown that my daughter loves. Georgetown is an amazing mix of dilapidated houses and trash, but also well-maintained touristic fronts.
This mansion for example was just gorgeous:
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These old rusty engines were on a trailer in front of the old schoolhouse:


Some sort of emergency generator:


More to follow later!