Pablo Averbuj

Maui pictures are up

Last weekend I uploaded the pictures from Maui. I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out for the most part. On Tuesday I realized that pictures were coming out with some dirt in the upper left corner. I thought it was dirt on the lens and that it happened on Tuesday morning but since I hadn’t taken any lens cleaning equipment I lived with it begrudgingly. When I got back I cleaned the lens only to realize it wasn’t on the lens, it was on the sensor. And when I started going through the pictures I realized it’d been there sinse Sunday! The upside is that it’s easy to edit out, it’s usually only obvious when it’s up against the sky. The downside is I have no interest or intention of so doing.

Photoshop Elements

I don’t think I’ve ever had to deal with this many pictures in such a brief period of time. In less than a week I had to deal with: 1200 pictures from our pre-wedding picture session, 2200 pictures from the wedding, and another 1600 pictures from our honeymoon. And all at least 6 megapixel (I think it exceeded 10 gigabytes). It made me glad I ordered a new drive for the NAS before we left (we were nearly out of space and we still hadn’t transferred all the wedding video which will probably be another 20 gigabytes or so, but I digress).

Photoshop Album (PSA) was not very happy with me and it was getting long in the tooth, especially in terms of software age. I downloaded the trial of Photoshop Elements (PSE) from the Adobe site and I have to say I was pretty impressed. The organizer in PSE has some improvements I’ve been longing for, like excluding tags from a search query. It also added star ratings (in PSA it was either a favorite or not, PSE has 1-5 star system), and the integrated editor has almost all of the features of full photoshop and more; it has a feature to auto-straighten images, which comes in handy with my congenital inability to take horizontal images (Pablo’s CrookedPix[tm]).

Tagging the honeymoon pictures was pretty staright forward, probably took me an hour or two. There was a very limited set of people in the pictures, so it was fast going. The wedding pictures are another matter entirely. It took me two or three nights to get through the important pictures, and I still have 550 pictures of people dancing that I need to tag.

I ended up buying the full version of PSE, since Lightroom isn’t quite yet ready (in truth, I haven’t had a chance to play with Beta 4 very much, but it still doesn’t respond swiftly enough for me. But now I’ll have to figure out how to get the tags from PSE into Lightroom when Lightroom is ready. I saw a message on the Lightroom forums that PSE can export the tags into the EXIF data (thank you Adobe!) and Lightroom is smart enough to read the tags in, so I might be saved!

I’ll be putting up the vacation pictures in my gallery, and the wedding pictures at the wedding website.

Photoshop Elements feature I like:

• Nice panorama merging (see gallery soon)
• Export tags to EXIF
• Exclude a tag from search results
• Multi-star rating system (wonder if thise exports Lightroom as well)
• Edit versioning!

What web?

It’s pretty interesting but I’m this close to not needing a web browser (or bookmarks I guess). As I wrote previously, I’ve been happily using Google Reader for a while, but I still had to tediously visit certain websites that didn’t seem to have RSS feeds. No more! There’s a guy publishing a National Geographic Photo of the Day feed, and I also found Tapestry Comics, a directory of RSS feed for a bunch of comics including all of the ones I read. So since ditherati.net seems to have gone the way of the dodo (I miss you ditherati!), that takes care of all but 1 of the websites I visit on a daily basis.