Lumière d’Argent

Today I came back from a photography day, eager to see some of the pictures I took. I take the card from my EOS 5D, put it in the FireWire card reader, run Aperture, ask it to import from the card and… no pictures. Aaaargh!Nothing, zilch, nada, gone.Total despair.I just let it go for a while thinking that’s life, things happen, it is not that bad, could be worse, was just a few pictures, some people are hungry, etc… but still, I could not really get over it.I decide to run a Google search on the problem and see what I find. Nothing interesting. I run the same search on the dpreview.com forum and there I find a message about how PhotoRescue saved a photographer with the same problem.I download PhotoRescue evaluation, run it, and after working about 20 minutes, it recovers all the pictures I ever took with the camera! It raises some interesting questions about what a formatting by the 5D actually does, but most importantly all my lost pictures were there. Of course, to be able to actually save the rescued pictures, I had to pay the PhotoRescue license, a reasonable $30.Now I wonder about that Seagate 8GB Microdrive. Should I? I am 99% positive I did not make any mistake in the manipulation. Since I bought it Compact Flash cards prices have fallen dramatically so maybe I should just replace it. I don’t know.

Stephane :: Apr.16.2007 :: Software :: No Comments »

OK, I have resolved that Aperture is after all the best compromise today as a foundation of my software toolbox. It takes care of storage, backup, editing, sorting, searching, cataloguing and RAW conversion so well it is enough to justify it already.

I still need PhotoShop, but I realize I use it as a stop gap until Aperture gets what is missing like local adjustments, a more developed print module where I could put arbitrary text on the print, and something usable for spotting. Seriously, that’s all I use PhotoShop for. And maybe when I get the Mac Pro spotting will turn out to be usable in Aperture too.

LightZone is great, but, as said before, using two external editors with Aperture is a mess and better avoided. So I’ll stop using it.

Given my PhotoShop usage, I seldom see the point of upgrading to CS3. CS3 will be faster on my Intel Mac but CS is already faster than on my previous 1 Ghz G4 and I never found it too slow. On the Mac Pro I’ll have all the speed I can dream of.

So Aperture and my ancient PhotoShop do it all for me, greatly reducing the software needs.

I wonder if many other photographers out there arrive at the same conclusions and what impact this could have on the photography software market.

Stephane :: Apr.09.2007 :: Software :: No Comments »