Single-Serving Photo

Seldom do I employ such emphatic punctuation in a blog title, or such bombastic portmanteaus, but it seemed appropriate given the out-of-control creation of panoramas that I’ve been engaged in lately.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m out here in the great American west—“big sky country,” if you want to call it that—and some of the sights I’ve seen were nothing less than demanding of a panoramic treatment. On top of that, I suffer from a devastating case of technolust and wanted to really put “AutoPano Giga” through the paces. Well, I sure did. I also probably melted the heat sink off my poor laptop’s CPU…

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the case of AutoPano Giga, I think he was wrong; I think it actually is magic. I have tried a few panorama tools out there; the free and open-source Panotools, a couple of Mac-exclusive ones, and so on. AutoPano Giga is so easy and so fast and so accurate, it blows them all out of the water. Of course it also costs an arm and a leg, but at least you know why.

After the break, actual panoramas! (more…)

If you’ve been using Adobe Lightroom since Beta 1, as I have, and if you’re using a Mac, there is a very good chance that you’ve run into the awful “change modules” error. This error usually strikes when your catalog is being updated during a version upgrade, when other Adobe software on your computer changes, or for any number of other unrelated reasons (as I discovered).

What happens is roughly this: you open the program and the splash screen remains indefinitely. If you click it, it disappears, but Lightroom’s main window does not open. You receive a very minimal menu bar including “Lightroom,” “File,” “Edit,” and perhaps “Window.” The File menu is shortened and only allows you to open a catalog. I presume that this is what Lightroom would look like if you could put it into a state where it has no catalog open. During normal operation, you basically always have a catalog open.

Once there, you can try to open your catalog, but as soon as you do, you will receive the error: “An error occurred when attempting to change modules.” Feel free to click OK on that message, it will simply drop you into a weird, incomplete Lightroom interface that has no side panels and no film strip.

Having battled this error two different times now, I am confident I can offer some advice. (more…)

I’ve been a devout Photoshop user for over a decade. The first version of Photoshop that I ever laid hands on was 2.0… That’s pre-layers, and also the first version available for Windows! I started using it seriously around version 4.0 and I have kept up with nearly every version since then. I remember distinctly the addition of effects layers, shape layers, and the creation of the verb “to Photoshop” (which Adobe officially frowns upon).

Originally, I used Photoshop to create everything from promotional stickers and web graphics to letterhead and stationery. Eventually I moved to Illustrator for layout/drawing stuff, but Photoshop remains a huge part of my daily life. As the owner and sole employee of Fisheye Multimedia, I am called upon to repair and modify photographs for my clients and to manipulate newspaper layouts for framing. As a photographer myself, I spend hours upon hours in Lightroom and Photoshop, tweaking masks, adjusting curves, cloning and healing, and so on.

I am a very particular Photoshop user with specific needs and expectations established by years of use. Photoshop CS3 is a piece of crap. (more…)

Adobe has finally released the first upgrade package for Photoshop Lightroom, which brings us to version 1.1. I say “finally” because this upgrade introduces at least one feature that we hoped against hope would be in the first release, the ability to merge libraries, among other enhancements.

First, if you have Lightroom and it hasn’t already popped up and told you to download the upgrade, you should seriously click over there and do that. (more…)

In the last chapter of my Automated Workflow series, I showed you how to use some neat scripting tricks to apply watermarks to your photos automatically. In this chapter, I’m going to talk about naming and organizing photos and show you how to set up some scripts to make things easier for you.

You have a bunch of pretty photos; shouldn’t they have pretty names? (more…)