This probably isn’t important… at all, it’s just that it’s confused the hell out of me.

Adobe have given Photoshop a new logo. Why would you change the logo in between releases? And will the dock icon no longer suite the rest of creative suite? And why should photoshop have a logo and none of the others? And why does it remind me so much of the Open University?

Susan tell’s me Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has been released.  Yeah, the photoshop bit in the name is really necessary.  Here’s my review summary…

Pros…

• It does stuff with photo’s.

Cons…

• It has no network support.
• You can’t store the library on a network location.
• It doesn’t even let you keep the library DB on the local drive and store the photo’s on a network location (it crashes)
• It doesn’t share photo’s over the network
• No network here jimini cricket
• It’s NASty with my NAS drive
• Hey mate, what’s a network do?
• A Network is as a network does
• A computer network is two or more computers connected together using a telecommunication system for the purpose of communicating and sharing resources.

Overall I give Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0:  No Network Support out of 10

Wooohoooooo.

OK so it’s a beta, but still, I don’t mind quirk’s when it finally doesn’t take 5 hours to load and have rosetta use up all my RAM.  Good days are here to stay.  As they say in New Zealand.

Windows Vista RC2 was released this weekend, it is supposedly the last milestone until it’s released for manufacture.  Although, knowing Microsoft they’re probably find a way to release another beta even after it’s gone to retail.

I haven’t really been bothered to play with it but I wanted RC2 for the bug fixes, I just wanted to get it set up quickly as I had gotten it with RC1.  I kept fluffing up the drivers though, I kept trying to find the latest and greatest graphics and sound drivers but somehow I always got into a muddle and ended up having re-install it again, if I just tried to roll-back the driver I ended up with curious unknown device dialogs popping up left right and centre.  In the end I just gave up trying to update drives and left it at the ones Vista installs by default, I’m not even going to bother with the Apple driver cd now.  So I ended up staring and that screen in the photo for a large slice of the afternoon.  It’s set up nicely now, touch wood.
You can still use the Beta 2 serial, which is neato.  Hey, imagine if they let me carry on with this serial even with a retail copy!  Ha wishful thinking.
Was impatient to get windows back up and running because I’ve gotten back into Elder Scrolls: Oblivion again after not bothered to touch it for months.  In fact, it turns out I wasn’t all that far from completing the main quest, none of story made any sense because fantasy plot-lines never do to me, I don’t have the necessary equipment brain wise to fathom any of it but it was certainly entertaining regardless.  Seemed to end all rather suddenly though and in no time at all, in true RPG style you’re left alone wondering… hmmm, what shall I do now?  Kill some boars?
Speaking of RPG’s, I watched that South Park episode again and I think my favourite line is “Kenny, get ready to turn on trueshot aura, at that moment I will use intimidating shout.”  Probably struck something in me because I seem to remember using intimidating shout a lot when used to play it (seems like ages ago now somehow) and it gives me a bit of an embarrassed sshudder to hear Cartman saying it.  haha.

Hey!  I’ve I just this second accidentally had 3 camera raw files (.orf files from my camera) selected in finder when I double clicked on them and in the process discovered to my surprise that you can open more than one raw photo at a time in photoshop’s camera raw import dialog and it looks like it will process multiple photo’s with the same adjustments in one go.  Ha, how cool!

If you ever need an example of how us people of the united kingdom are ripped off (or “rip off britain” as I believe its known) check this one out. Have a look at the price of this at amazon.com, and now at this from amazon.co.uk. Amazon haven’t made a mistake either, they’re the proper prices. To make it even more comical, if you were to purchase it from amazon.com, pay international shipping and even if it was prodded and probed by customs and you had to pay the tax… you would still be paying half the money that you would if you bought it from the UK. And that is just one reason why I despise adobe. Hmm, why have even been checking creative suite out when the universal version isn’t out yet?

It is going to be so embarrassing to watch our footie side play in the knockout stages, we barely survived against some unknown Caribbean island who I doubt even knew they were in the world cup.

It’s Eddies first birhday tomorrow, aww. I’ve made him a card, unfortunately my epson printer is absolutely useless with certain dark shades and the blue sky just came out black. Stupid thing. Nay mind. Don’t look too closely at the mock-reflections, particularly the present, its totally fake looking and all screwed up. haha, well, i don’t think Eddie will notice. Also, i dunno why but it seems to be incredibly difficult to find a good picture of a bone online, that low res yellow thing was the best I could find!

The comments system has been kinda screwy on my site for, well since forever I think. I was messing on my site the other day and figured whilst I was at it I may as well have a look at the comment issues. The current problem is that it doesn’t seem to pick up on avatars anymore. I didn’t get very far with the investigations when I discovered that the openid-comments plugin had been screaming at me for attention. I’d never looked at the MT’s system activity log doodar. The following message appears many times, over and over…

Plugin error: /home/scissor/public_html/itchmerry/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/openid-comment/openid-comment.pl Can’t locate object method “add_tag” via package “MT::Template::Context” at /home/scissor/public_html/itchmerry/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/openid-comment/openid-

Cuts off there annoyingly. The method its looking for is in the file mt/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm which is all present and correct on the remote site, so I dunno what it’s farting on about. Also, when I was playing with the site I installed MT on my mac all set up the same as I have it remotely so that I can try things out nice and quickly. Transferred the MT DB from the remote site to mysql on my mac using MySQL Administrator so that its exactly the same site as it is online and it all works fine, including avatars. So that’s annoying too. I hope MT 3.3 is out soon, then I’ll completely gut the install on the website and set up it from scratch. Apart from the DB obviously.

Dave II is having his 3rd Blogiversary, he always has neat, rather inspirational give aways as part of his festivities, last year I won a devastatingly good-looking t-shirt! Trouble is some of his prizes are quite heavy so international readers kinda have to really want the loot. Anypoop, I don’t think I deserve to enter this year as seen as I thought his lost blogger was Rudyard Kipling, so glad I didn’t email that in. Phew.

I truely suck at photoshop. I mostly put that down to a lack of inspiration rather than a lack of technical prowess or something. So I’ve been watching the photoshop.tv podcast for a few weeks and its absolutely fascinating! The stuff I’ve learned from that show has completely changed the way I look at image apps. You absolutely must subscribe. There’s also the russel brown show, but it’s presented rather like a children’s entertainer would. What I’d really like now is a podcast of this quality for illustrator.

The attached image is a retouch of this one, as you can see I still have a lot to learn lol. Oh yeah, shortly after the photo was taken the poor easter bunny stood too close to the window through which the sun evilly melted its back. haha, made rather a mess of my desk. Still, the chocolate was tasty.

I still can’t remember what I was going to write about. It is seriously driving me insane.

I was thinking today, how I grudgingly use photoshop. It’s the only thing I know but I would love to use The Gimp instead. Photoshop is overpriced, we all know this, The Gimp however is completely free and it’s powerful as well but the only OS where it really fits in is Linux and that isn’t any good at all. If there was a good mac version of it I would toss that overpriced photoshop garbage out of the window immediately. Ebay won’t know what’s hit it. As any mac user will testify running a large scale app via X is rather like driving a clapped out 2CV through the streets of beverly hills, it just doesn’t fit in somehow. It’s especially trying having to adjust your eyes to the file dialog when all other mac apps have their own specific flavour. When I looked at native cocoa/carbon ports of the gimp the first few I stumbled across all insultingly required cash! Pah, the closest I’ve come across is Seashore, which, when I first fired it up looked damn perfect! My excitement quickly dissolved however when I discovered that they have only ported a tiny subset of the gimps features. In seashore they have only managed to recreate MS Paint. Heck, do you know what would make my day? No my year! It’s if Apple decided to do with The Gimp what they did with Konquerer. Now that would be amazing. Come on apple! How hard would it be??

A little over a week ago, just before declaring my new blog ready (well as ready as it will ever be) I tested it on a couple of different platforms (like you do), previously this meant testing it on windows & linux and the different browsers but now i have a mac i have more platforms to experiment with. In fact i designed this site on the mac, so the testing involved checking it worked on windows. When I did I almost jumped out of my skin, I felt the world collapse around me, all my beliefs were proven false, I had been living a lie. Somehow, the colours of the banner art didn’t match the page colours, for instance the purply-bluey colour behind the logo was a different shade to the purply-blue running down the right hand side of the page. How could this be? Turns out that PNG files store the gamma of the display, so that when displayed on a different machine the browser can adjust the brightness of the image to that that the original author saw. Problem is different images don’t necessarily have a gamma stored, and page styles aren’t adjusted either so it goes a bit out of sync. The PNG’s gamma value comes into play particularly when going between mac’s and PC’s because mac’s typically have their gamma set to 1.8*, whereas windows and linux prefer a gamma of 2.0*. It makes me wonder how many sites i’ve done in the past on windows which have had incorrect colours on a mac? We really ought to be warned about these things.

In typical adobe style the situation is made worse because of a missing feature in Photoshop. You see, the PNG gamma setting is not documented anywhere, and photoshop offers no method to leave it unset. To make things worse photoshop presumes that you have your mac ALWAYS set to the default display gamma. So all PNG’s are spit out with a 1.8* gamma regardless.

This is where PNGCrush comes to the rescue, its a small command line app for adjusting various properties of a PNG, there are several ways to fix the gamma issue but I’ve found the following to work the most consistently.

• Assign the colour profile for your display to your photoshop image, (for instance choose “Color LCD” from the Assign Profile dialog)
• Export the PNG via the Save-For-Web feature
• From a terminal window, navigate to the images directory and type something like…
  pngcrush -rem gama originalimage.png fixedimage.png

You can also do a whole directory of png’s thusly…
>pngcrush -rem gama -d fixed *.png
it will create a dir called fixed with the new png’s.

It’s a faff, but its better than having mismatched colours. ubuntu users will undoubtly find PNGCrush in Synaptec. Whilst mac users can install it via darwinports by issueing…
>port install pngcrush

Windows users can find it where ever.

* I think this is right, i can’t be bothered to check.