Snow Leopard for Photographers

UPDATE: It’s Saturday afternoon and I’ve just completed my upgrade to Snow Leopard. It took only 45 minutes on my 13″ MBP and the upgrade went perfectly. This saved me about 8 GB of hard drive space and both startup and shutdown times are significantly faster. Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 also startup faster but other than that I haven’t noticed much difference. All in all, a very nice $29 upgrade!

It’s Thursday afternoon and the release of Apple’s latest operating system, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, is just hours away. For photographers running Lightroom or Photoshop on a Mac or MacBook, this is an important upgrade for purely performance reasons.

Macworld has done a great job of compiling all their Snow Leopard articles so you can get up to speed quickly and easily. I don’t know about you but for $29 (USD) I’ll be upgrading sometime this weekend!

Lightroom 2 on a 13″ MacBook Pro

As most of you know, Apple made some major product announcements earlier this week at their worldwide developer conference. While the new iPhone 3Gs looks very cool, it was the new 13″ MacBook Pro that really caught my attention.

I’ve always liked the light-weight and small form factor of the my 13″ MacBook, but really lusted after the more powerful graphics processor, larger hard drive and aluminum unibody construction found in the MacBook Pro models.

Now we have the best of both worlds in the new 13″ MacBook Pro and I went ahead and ordered mine a few days ago. Setting it up and migrating all the programs and files from my old MacBook went perfectly and only took a few hours to complete.

And what a result! Lightroom 2 really flies on this machine and with the faster CPU & GPU, I don’t hear the constant whine of the fan every time I start working in Lightroom. If you use Adobe Lightroom 2 on an older MacBook you really should look at the new 13″ MBP. It’s one sweet machine.

Apple’s Last Year at Macworld

Apple Announces Its Last Year at Macworld

I know this isn’t really photo related but what a shock for the folks that put on Macworld. It would be like Adobe not attending NAPP’s Photoshop World.

Wow! Without Steve Jobs’ annual keynote, black mock-turtlenecks may go out of style!

Learning Lightroom 2!

I’ve decided to put Apple’s Aperture 2.1 aside for a few weeks while I’m learning to use Adobe’s Lightroom 2 image management program. Given all the media hype over the past several months of beta, I just had to try out Lightroom and see how it stacks up against Aperture.

Given the complexity of learning a whole new way of managing my RAW workflow I’ve also decided to get some help from the folks at Kelby Training and recently signed up for a 1 year training subscription. Most of the Lightroom classes are presented by Matt Kloskowski from Photoshop TV and his Lightroom Killer Tips blog. I really like Matt’s presentation style (which is a lot like Scott Kelby’s writing in his books) where each training video is like sitting down with a friend who is showing you exactly how he uses Lightroom. It’s open and friendly and he gets to the point of each short video very quickly so you can go ahead and try out what he’s describing for yourself.

Here are a few links to other Lightroom 2 training materials.

Adobe’s Lightroom 2

Adobe’s Lightroom Design Center

Lightroom Killer Tips

Kelby Training

Lightroom News

Will I switch from Aperture to Lightroom permanently? Right now I just don’t know, but the on-line training for Lightroom and the number of photoblogs covering Lightroom is much greater than for Aperture. I guess only time will tell!

Hi, I’m a PC and My Friend Mac Just Gave Me Some Malware!

It goes like this…

“Hi, I’m a PC.”

“And I’m a Mac, and I just gave my friend PC here some Malware to chew on!”

If you’re a MobileMe user like I am, you’ve probably already downloaded the latest update for your Mac and the iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 firmware so that you can “sync” them up over the Internet. And if you’re also a PC user like I am in my day job, you may have also downloaded the latest version of iTunes so that MobileMe can sync your Outlook Contacts, Calendar and Email with your Mac and iPhone. Cool stuff indeed!

But, if you’re not a MobileMe user and you’ve downloaded the latest version of iTunes for your iPod & PC, you’ll find a little surprise just waiting for you in your Windows XP or Vista Control Panel. Yes indeed! A MobileMe control panel applet will appear without so much as asking for permission to install or even informing you that it had been installed.

In my book, that’s called Malware and I’m quite surprised that Apple would even think of doing this to PC users without so much as a checkbox to unclick (as they did in their latest QuickTime update).

Shame on you Apple for resorting to such tactics!