When I launched Lightroom tonight, I got a tickler for the LR 1.4.1 upgrade. I wonder how long this upgrade will last? 🙂
Tag Archives: Lightroom
Bad Adobe, Good Adobe
I can always tell when something is happening out in the wastelands of the tech world. NewsFire will be screaming at me with multitudes of new feed-matter. Tonight, NewsFire was definitely screaming, and Adobe figured prominently in two threads of thought and chatter.
The first was the Good News. Adobe released the first public beta of Lightroom 2.0. This is claimed to be 64-bit ready code, and chocked full of new features. I haven’t had a chance to load it yet — I wanna see if there’s any caveats about keeping a separate library, etc. You can bet I’ll be playing with it this weekend, and seeing what I can do with it. Currently, I only use Lightroom for DAM, and really don’t use it for quick touches, printing, web site building, and all that other good stuff it does well. Casey keeps nudging toward using it for more than just that. His site is mostly built with Lightroom, and it looks pretty dang good. That’s a pretty good endorsement.
And then came the Bad News. Adobe released some word on the Next Big Thing: Photoshop CS4. (And the crowd goes wild…) And it’ll be 64-bit…. (wait for it)… if you’re on Windows. Yep, the big ol’ Macs like mine will still have to contend with 4GB of memory for the beastliest images we can put together, with our Windows-based brethren able to address vast amounts of memory. From this interview, the guess is that the performance boost would be in the neighborhood of 10 percent, unless of course you’re loaded gigapixel sized images where, with enough memory, the 64-bit version could be 10 times faster!
One path to get around this is to dual boot the Octoputer, running 64-bit Vista (Adobe says that’ll be the supported platform). That would be just like a native Windows machine, but would require me to purchase a new Photoshop license. Currently, I don’t believe Adobe allows you to upgrade version and change platforms in the same fell swoop. The other path to get tasty 64-bit goodness would be to virtualize a 64-bit Vista environment through VMWare (Parallels doesn’t currently support this), and run CS4 in that environment. The big question there is whether you’d burn up the benefit of the 64-bit code by virtualizing it.
So in one day, Adobe delivers both Good stuff and Bad stuff. I’m not sure whether I should be happy or mad. Or both. Or neither.
Wait for it… and the crowd goes “boooooo”…
Adobe Giveth, and Adobe Taketh Away
OK, color me gullible, color me masochistic, color me with rose-tinted glasses, but when a software update is released, I kinda expect it to work reasonably well. I don’t expect the update to be pulled, and I don’t expect me to have to uninstall an app and re-install just to recover.
On the 13th, Adobe released a new version of Camera Raw and an update to Lightroom. Neither of these had earth-shattering implications for me, but I try to stay pretty current on things, just in case. In my world at work, the first question the dude in support asks you is if you have the latest versions of everything, so that flavors my judgement to trust the vendors when they release patches and fixes. So, swallowing the Kool-Aid, I pounced on the upgrades, and loaded them on both Doc Oc and the Little MacBook That Could.
Fast forward to today, and there’s word all over the place about both packages being pulled, and how it’s necessary to uninstall Lightroom to downgrade to the previous version. Now admittedly, that’s not a tough thing, but that ain’t right!
So tonight, it’s the uninstall-o-rama, along with the downgrade-o-rama, and a little bit trepedation of whether I’ve hurt anything by using the new version, and whether I’m gonna lose anything by performing the surgery necessary to fix the fumble by Adobe.
In their defense, Adobe usually does a good job of keeping things on the right side of the error-line. Why two packages released together would be withdrawn so quickly is beyond me, but I’ve gotta hope that the next update will go a little better!
A 40D Wart
Having shot almost a week’s worth of random shots with the new rig, all is well on the rig side. The computer side… well, that’s another story.
Adobe quickly released Adobe Camera Raw 4.2 to quieten the screaming hordes that had bought a shiny new 40D, only to discover that none of the Adobe suite of products would read anything other than the jpegs coming from the camera. And all was well — jpegs and RAW files were importing just fine — or so I thought.
The problem is that ACR doesn’t work with the new sRAW files the 40D can produce, which means that neither Photoshop nor Lightroom can read ’em. These funny little files are getting a lot of press as being a quick-and-dirty RAW format for folks that don’t need big file sizes, but need some of the advantages of RAW. It’s a nifty idea that may be ideal for some folks. However, neither the Adobe line, nor my Mac’s Preview, will display them at all. Heck, the Mac still can’t display a 40D RAW file in Preview!
These are just growing pains, and this too shall pass, but you’d think that Adobe, Apple and Canon would at least have had a powwow prior to the camera hitting the street!
So, for those of you looking for images shot since I picked up the 40D, you may have to wait a bit. My automation is really tied to ACR, and if it can’t read some of the files that I’ve shot, I’ll just have to re-import ’em again, and I’d really rather not do that. Thanks for your patience!