Real World Workflow

this little ditty came up on digg today, via my girlfriend. I thought I would share with you:

BTW, I thought you guys would be all over this

“We are committed to exciting future developments for the Leaf brand of products through innovative engineering, worldwide marketing and customer service,” said Henrik O. Håkonsson, President and CEO, Phase One. “Leaf customers will benefit from the many synergies with Phase One.”

“Since introducing the world’s first digital camera back in 1992, Leaf has been recognized as a worldwide leader in the professional photography market. Our extensive digital imaging and color management knowledge, combined with Phase One’s software and hardware capabilities creates a unique opportunity for the world’s leading photographers,” said Dov Kalinski, General Manager, Leaf.

So it appears that Leaf Products will continue to be made. Phase One has dominated once again. After all, they have had the leading combination of hardware and software for many years. Capture One Pro 3.x was leaps and bounds better than the clunky and problematic Leaf 8.x as well as their releases of Leaf Capture 10.x. However, Phase has taken a back seat to leaf within the last year as it released its Capture One Pro 4 which released with a slew of bugs and a very undesirable interface for many of its loyal 3.7.9 users. Now with Phase refusing to make 3.7.9 compatible with newer backs, users are being forced to use the software. (However it is still an option to use Adobe Lightroom). My big hope for this news is that they will work together to create a strong hardware and software product. Especially since Red Camera is looking to kick all their buts very soon!

Very intriguing news. More here.

Adobe announced today that it has released an update to Lightroom as well as Adobe Camera Raw.

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom® 2.4 update includes these enhancements:

Additional camera support for several new camera models including the Nikon D5000 and Canon EOS 500D (Digital Rebel T1i)
Includes several corrections for issues introduced by previous Lightroom 2 releases

The new version of the Camera Raw plug-in, ACR 5.4 replaces the original one that was installed with Adobe® Photoshop® CS4;

You can download Lightroom 2.4 here (Mac only)

You can download ACR 5.4 here. (Mac only)

Its fun but kinda pointless. Worth the lite app. Check it out for yourselves.

Anyone have any tips/thoughts on the sloooooowwwwwwwwwww CF card workflow in v4.8? I figure it’s more geared towards casual shooters who want to edit card contents before downloading…but I find the generation of thumbs is making card download take FOREVER; you can’t even “download all” until the thumbs have all generated.

As a workaround, I’ve been ‘canceling’ and doing a direct OS drag-drop, then quickly ‘pasting’ settings onto the images and renaming later. But obviously this isn’t as convenient as a ‘proper’ workflow within C1. Anyone found any way to turn-off thumbs or another method to speed it up?

~Rob

Just went digging in the recipes folder and realized that the recipes are just xml files. I have used recipes as a way separate lo-res for each shot folder. ie under advanced have a sub folder name. Now its so easy to create 20 different recipes in textwrangler by opening one and editing the sub folder value and saving as. Open up C1 and there they all are.

screen grab as req.

Its been almost three months since Phase one and Mamiya announced their partnership. Now we have their three “new” backs. The M18, M22, and M31 which are 18, 22.1, & 31.6 MP, respectively.

Personally I think the partnership is great, but I’d like to see something new and improved.

more here

Has anyone ever had an issue with using a US-purchased external HD with a power supply in a country with different voltage? Particularly in England? I’ve got a London-based client who’s shopping for a 1 TB drive, but is concerned about the power issues. Offhand, I’d think there wouldn’t be a problem with just using an adapter, but with data, you can never be too sure.

So the last few weeks have been crazy, sometimes 2 jobs in a day kind of pace, where I can barely remember in the morning what studio and where I’m supposed to be. It was in the middle of this, during a particularly rough ad job, that I had an interesting, if not flat out scary sync issue.

It’s not that uncommon for Chronosync to prompt me to skip a file during a sync, usually it’s a preview file or something similar that was being modified while the sync was taking place. Normally I’ll just skip all and continue on with the sync.

You can probably guess where this is going.

After the shoot I just happened to be checking the BU’d folder and noticed a miscount in the capture folder. Sure enough, in the heat of battle I’d seen the error message and skipped all, but these happened to be capture files, not previews. Bad, Bad, Bad. Was it a huge mistake? Potentially devastating. In years of backing up I’ve never run across this and wouldn’t even want to think what could’ve happened if the original had been deleted etc.

If there’s a point to all this, it’s never get too complacent with your workflow. Set little checks to make sure everything adds up in the end. I knew a tech that was almost maniacal in comparing folder sizes after every shot and backup, and while I think there’s room for diverse strategies here, I also think she had a damn good point.

Leaf Capture v. 11.2.7 for Leaf AFi-II 10 and Aptus-II 10 offers significant improvements in image quality for photographers using new Leaf AFi-II 10 and Leaf Aptus-II 10 backs.

Other features include:

-Enhanced (and faster) Mos2Mos Processing
-ISO 80 Now Available
-Lens Calibration
-Enhanced Color Look (ICC Input Profiles)
-AFI II-10 Burst Rate now 1 fps

more here