It took some time and a learning curve, but I am now more or less happily using Adobe Lightroom 2.4 to manage my more serious DSLR nature photography. (I still use iPhoto for point-and-shoot family photos and the like.) Lightroom’s ability to correct exposure problems is nothing short of magic, and has rescued many photos. Here are some updates on things I’ve talked about in the past, as well as some open questions.
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It sounds like most folks think Lightroom 2.1 is the way to go. However it’s still missing the autofix controls from Elements:
Auto Smart Fix Corrects overall color balance and improves shadow and highlight detail, if necessary.
Auto Levels Adjusts the overall contrast of an image and may affect its color. If your image needs more contrast, and it has a color cast, try this command. Auto Levels works by individually mapping the lightest and darkest pixels in each color channel to black and white.
Auto Contrast Adjusts the overall contrast of an image without affecting its color. Use when your image needs more contrast, but the colors look right. Auto Contrast maps the lightest and darkest pixels in the image to white and black, which makes highlights appear lighter and shadows appear darker.
Auto Color Correction Adjusts the contrast and color by identifying shadows, midtones, and highlights in the image, rather than in individual color channels. It neutralizes the midtones and sets the white and black points using a default set of values.
Auto Sharpen Adjusts the sharpness of the image by clarifying the edges and adding detail that tonal adjustments may reduce.
Auto Red Eye Fix Automatically detects and repairs red eyes in an image.
Are there any plugins to add these capabilities? Could someone write one? Has anyone documented what these actually do at a technical level?
I’m looking for a program to organize and edit my photos on the Mac. The editing duties are light. Photoshop Elements fully meets my needs there, and I really don’t want something more complex. In particular I live by Auto Smart Fix and Auto Sharpen. However I’d like to not come out of one program just to edit a photo.
I like iPhoto’s organization, but it’s too buggy and has atrocious editing and previewing tools. Lightroom 1.4 doesn’t organize quite as nicely as iPhoto, but is a little more stable. Maybe 2.0 is better? What’s my best choice? Here are my desiderata:
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Put an illegible CAPTCHA on the support page:
Yes, spammers are so going to write bots to automate warranty checking, and this just has to be stopped.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. On the very next page, I have to type in the model and part number again, and solve another CAPTCHA.
Doesn’t really matter, I suppose. After the failure of the Maxtor OneTouch 4 I just bought a couple of months ago, it’s not like I was going to buy another Maxtor drive anyway.
I’m restoring a complete home directory from a crashed disk onto a new Mac via Time Machine. Unfortunately it seems Time Machine is not smart enough to just replace the “beth” directory with the “beth” directory, or “Desktop” with “Desktop”, or “Pictures” with “Pictures”, and so forth. It would be nice if it could do a smart merge, or somehow made it easier to do a complete restore instead of a file-by-file restore.
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So there I am, just having arrived at my parents’ house, away from my backup drives for a week or so when up pops a dialog:
20 Days?! How the hell did that happen? This bug may have had something do with it. Or perhaps I just disconnected my USB backup drive and forgot to plug it back in. But why didn’t Time Machine warn me before now? 24 or even 48 hours I can believe, but it really should warn you that you aren’t backed up before two weeks go by.
