Tag: adobe

929 No Drama in Photo Land

Today we’ll touch on the Adobe content analytics issue, a bit of Flickr pro drama, big movies shot on film and a really interesting firmware from Canon.

Topics:

  • [WORKSHOPS] Almost Full: Eastern European Photo Roadtrip : The September Eastern European tour is filling up. The Sep 2-11 leg has one spot left, the Sep 14-23 leg has two spots left.

    On these tours we’ll touch Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Transylvania with lots of Eastern European culture and history and great photography over the course of 10 days. Don’t delay, let me know if you have questions.

  • [PHOTO, NEWS] Adobe Denies AI Training With Your Pics : Recently, there was a suspicion that Adobe uses data from its customer’s cloud pictures to train its AI models. In TFTTF 927, I talked about that. Petapixel reached out to Adobe for clarification. Adobe responded that they had that policy in place for a decade and that they do not use any data stored on customers’ Creative Cloud accounts to train their experimental Generative AI features.
  • [PHOTO, NEWS] Flickr Pro Ads or Not? : Photographer and long-time Flickr user, Thomas Hawk, posted on Twitter about his disappointment over the introduction of ads on Flickr Pro accounts, despite their policy stating ads should never appear on Pro member’s accounts. Alastair Jolly of SmugMug responded quickly by saying that the ads were the result of a bug while introducing new features. Drama averted!

    On the note of social media, you can find Chris on Mastodon:
    @[email protected]
    @[email protected]

  • [PHOTO] Film Is Magic. Hollywood Agrees : Film photographer Isabelle Baldwin posted a Twitter thread about Oscar-nominated movies shot on Kodak film, highlighting the advantages of shooting on film over digital, including the unique look and feel it gives to the final product. And Chris agrees. Shooting on film changes the approach to photography, some of it is because you make decisions on film stock and sensitivity at the beginning of the workflow, freeing up the photographer’s focus on the creative aspects of taking the picture. Also the limited number of shots per roll of film increases the perceived value of each shot.

    Nice little side effect of Hollywood shooting on Kodak Film: It’ll help them keep making film for photographers.

  • [PHOTO] R6 II Stop Motion Animation Firmware : This one slipped under Chris’ radar: Canon makes a special firmware for stop motion animation that is specifically supported by Dragonframe with the Canon EOS R/RP/R6 Mark II. The firmware increases live view resolution to full HD, adds focus peaking, has aperture lock and focus programming. Plus a couple of side effects.

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849 Subscription Model

Chris takes a look at the frustration people have around Adobe’s subscription model. Especially as it concerns us photographers. The Adobe subscription model, the politics behind it and if the Data Transfer Project might be a way out of this.

Photo by Johnny McKenna

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Adobe Lightroom 4.2 issues solved. Leaves a bad aftertaste

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some Lightroom 4.2 performance issues. I finally finished the job, despite the issues. To fix the problem, I had to go through several things that were recommended on the Adobe support forum. Including setting up a new catalog, optimising the old one (several times), making sure OS and everything was up-to-date (everything was), making sure there were no preview renders going on (there weren’t), making sure Lightroom wasn’t writing XMPs automatically, increasing the raw cache size from 10GB to 50GB (does that even make sense on a catalog that holds less than 5000 pictures?!)

The good thing: LR4.2 is now performing at acceptable speed.

The bad thing: I have NO idea whatsoever, which of the above steps actually made the difference and at this point I don’t have the time to do any deeper analysis on the problem.

And neither should I have to.

The whole incident leaves a really bad taste. I love Lightroom. I’m passionate about Lightroom. I’m actually so passionate about it, I teach Lightroom. It allows me to do things I couldn’t do just a few years ago. Lightroom has become the hub for 100% of my photography. But please, can anyone explain to me why a point update from 4.1 to 4.2 should require some customers to go on a week-long hunt for a solution to a problem that wasn’t existent on the same system with the same catalog just a minute before the update?

What’s going on at Adobe? (oops, I think I have a a deja-vu) – your guess is as good as mine. Let me try: maybe Adobe didn’t finish testing 4.2 before they released the software to the general public (sure feels like it to me). Or maybe the beta tester base was too small (which could have resulted in them not catching the big bugs). Or maybe Adobe’s quality standards have been dramatically lowered over the last year (I sure had that feeling when the 4.0 update killed my tone curves back in May).

I’m getting really tired of this. Adobe, please don’t make me go through this again when you release 4.3.