Lightroom Classic CC Update 7.5 – August 22nd 2018
This morning I updated Lightroom Classic CC to the latest version 7.5.
And likewise I suggest you all do the same thing.
It’s not very often you hear or see me being very positive about Lightroom, but this latest iteration has me impressed for sure.
There has been the usual added camera support, together with some fangled update to the book module with some new Blurb templates – but that’s all inconsequential in my eyes and just so much froofroo.
No, the big improvement on all 3 of my machines here is one of SPEED.
And in particular, large catalogue load-speed.
I have one particular catalogue that sits on a raided pair of hard drives, and it contains just under 70,000 images.
This catalogue normally takes quite some time to open fully and it’s something of a torture-test for Lightroom.
But as of this mornings update not any more it would seem – the catalogue opened and all 69,865 previews were in place in under 10 seconds.
So would I recommend you install this latest update?
You betcha I would….always bearing in mind that Lightroom is notorious for varied performance on different individual systems – so I accept ZERO, NIL, NADA, нуль responsibility!
One negative thing that DID occur twice, but I couldn’t replicate in the video nor since – the infamous PANEL BLACKOUT.
They usually occur in the Develop module and your left and right panels just ‘black out’, and all you can see is your image.
If you do suffer a panel blackout though, don’t panic!
Just hit the G key to take you back to the Library Grid View then hit the D key to go back to the Develop module – you should get your panels back immediately.
I’ll keep you updated if I find any problems over the next few days and weeks, and if you have any problems just let me know.
Well, I’d like to say the past week has been a blast, but Adobe screwed any chance of that happening by releasing version 7.3 of Lightroom on the 3rd/4th.
The week actually started off quite well with me uploading a Raw Therapee basic “get you started’ video:
I’d planned to get out and do some photography, and do some serious SEO work on my YouTube channel.
But when I turned my machines on at 6.15am on the 4th I was greeted with some queries from clients and blog/channel viewers about some new fangled update for Lightroom.
Then the CC update panel told me I had application updates for Photoshop and Lightroom, so we clicked update on both.
I’m a bit of a Photoshop junkie, and I always look forward to any update if I’m honest, just so I can go and have a play with it!
But I’ve been a bit ‘meh..’ over Lightroom for quite a while now, for a few reasons.
Firstly, it’s trying to become some sort of pathetic 1 stop shop image processor, catering to the ‘instant gratification brigade’ INSTEAD OF what it’s meant to be – a superb digital asset management program and a raw processor designed to work in conjunction with the KING of image processors – PHOTOSHOP.
Secondly, it’s unique demosaicing algorithm is ludicrously outdated in comparison to C1, Iridient and RT, and its capture/input sharpening controls leave a lot to be desired. Anyone who has been sensible and bought my massive sharpening training knows exactly what I’m talking about here, as I demonstrate these facts more than a few times!
In point of fact, on the demosaicing front, it’s not as clever as that found in either Canon DPP or Nikon Capture.
But, with a bit of patience and effort, you can strip all the crap background adjustments away, and get back to a relatively neutral starting point; as I’ve discussed many times previously on this blog.
So, once the updates were done, and I’d had a quick look at Photoshop, I fired up the new Lightroom v7.3 – and immediately wished I hadn’t!
Heading over to the Adobe Lightroom Forum I see A LOT of very upset users.
Strangely enough though, heading over to YouTube I see the exact opposite!
But, positive or negative, all the buzz is about the new profiles.
Lightroom v7.3 Profiles
There are tens of thousands of Lightroom v7.3 fan boys out there, plus even more users with a low level knowledge base, who do NOT understand what a ‘profile’ is – and Adobe are using this as a massive marketing tool.
Lightroom v7.3 profiles are simply Lightroom v7.2 PRESETS, re-bundled into something called a profile, and shoved into a different location in the Lightroom GUI.
The subtle difference is this – if you have a preset that gives a ‘certain look’ to an image, when you apply it, the relevant sliders in the dev module move.
But if you have a ‘profile’ that gives the same visual appearance, when you apply it the relevant sliders DON”T move.
A PRESET is a visible, front GUI adjustment, and a PROFILE is a buried, background adjustment.
You’ll see this corroborated by an Adobe Forum Moderator a little later on..
A preset shows up in the control sliders, and you can easily tweak these after applying the preset.
Application of a PROFILE however, gives you no control indication of what it’s done, so you can’t tweak its adjustments because you can’t see them.
Profiles just pander to people who basically want Adobe to process their images for them – harsh, but true.
Presets – for me, the few that I make are simply to save time in applying settings to remove Adobes processing of my images.
But for years there has been a third party after-market revenue stream in preset bundles from certain photography trainers – buy these and your images will look like mine! So presets too steered their purchasers away from actually processing their own images, but at least those presets were designed by photographers!
Anyway, for those that haven’t seen the two videos I upload to YouTube about Lightroom v7.3 they are embedded below:
I was expecting a mixed response to those videos, from the sane and sensible:
Click me – good old Franky!
Click me
to the plain stupid:
Click me – I’m worth a read!
but I wasn’t expecting the raft of these, this is the tamest:
You have to have a thick skin if you stick videos on YouTube, but what the f**k does a comment like that achieve?
Anyway, F**K all that. At the end of the first video I do say that if I find anything out about the new default sharpening amount in Lightroom v7.3 I would let you know in a blog article.
So I headed over to the Adobe Lightroom Forum to beg the question – it only took 10 minutes and an Adobe moderator addressed the question, and a bit more besides.
I’ve screen-grabbed it so please click the image below to read it:
I’m interesting so CLICK ME!
So, the important take-aways are:
nothing has changed
and
part of an effort by Adobe to offer a more pleasing “out-of-the-box” rendering
and
At the ‘base’ level nothing has changed. The demosaicing algorithm is unchanged, MelissRGB is still the default colour space within the UI, and the Adobe Standard profile (DCP) for each supported camera is also unchanged. Likewise, the Camera Matching profiles are unchanged.
and
All of the new Adobe Raw and Creative profiles are built on top of Adobe Standard (i.e. Adobe Standard remains the base profile for all supported cameras). As such, these XMP based profiles apply settings under-the-hood.
Conclusion.
So basically the whole version update is geared SOLELY towards people with a camera who want instant gratification by allowing Adobe techs to process their images for them.
As someone who’s understood the photography process, and watched it evolve over the last 40 years, I count myself as something slightly more than just a fat bloke with a camera.
Forget about all this “I care about my images” garbage – I KNOW what constitutes a technically sound image, and ever since the inception of PV2012, Lightroom has been on a slippery slope towards losing it’s full professional image maker credibility.
Like many others, I still use Lightroom, and I always will. As I said before, it excels in Digital Asset Management, and it’s Soft Proofing and Print facilities are really without equal.
Have they improved any of those features? In a nutshell, NO.
My monthly subscription has gone up by £25 a year, and for my money I’ve now got even more work to do inside the dev module to make sense of my raw files. If you’ve lost the understanding of what I mean, go and watch the 2nd video again!
Am I even remotely thinking about dropping my subs and using another application?
I might look like a cabbage, but I’m not one! My £120+ buys me access to a constantly updated installation of the finest image processor on the face of Gods Earth – the mighty Photoshop.
And for those without the required level of prior knowledge, that privilege used to cost in excess of £800+ plus serious upgrade fees every couple of years. That’s why there was such ripping ‘trade’ in torrenting and cracked copies!
So overall, I’m quids-in, and I can think of Lightroom as something of a freebie, which makes even Lightroom v7.3 good VFM.
Added to that, I can always open a raw file in RT and get a 16bit ProPhotoRGB tiff file into Photoshop that’ll kick Lightrooms version into the last millennium.
But I can’t help it, I do resent deeply the road down which the Adobe bosses are taking Lightroom.
What they should have done is make CC into an idiots version, and re-worked the Classic CC into a proper raw editor with multiple choices for demosaicing, a totally re-worked input sharpening module, and interface the result with the existing Print, Soft-Proof and DAM.
But of course, that would cost them money and reduce their profit margin – so there’s no chance of my idea ever coming to fruition.
I take my hat off to the guys in the C1 dev team, but C1 is far too hostile an environment for any of those thousands of idiots who love the new Lightroom profiles – because that would mean they’d need to do some actual processing work!
And if C1 is hostile, then RT is total Armageddon – hell, it even sends me into a cold sweat!
But photography has always been hard work that demanded knowledge before you started, and a lot of hard learning to acquire said knowledge.
Hard work never hurt anyone, and when does the path of least resistance EVER result in the best possible outcome?
Never – the result is always an average compromise.
And good image processing is all about the BEST IMAGE POSSIBLE from a raw file.
Which brings me nicely back to my sharpening training – get it bought you freebie-hunting misers! GO ON – DO IT NOW – BEFORE YOU FORGET and before I die of starvation!
DO IT!
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A few days ago I uploaded a video to my YouTube channel explaining PPI and DPI – you can see that HERE .
But there is way more to pixel per inch (PPI) resolution values than just the general coverage I gave it in that video.
And this post is about a major impact of PPI resolution that seems to have evaded the understanding and comprehension of perhaps 95% of Photoshop users – and Lightroom users too for that matter.
I am talking about image view magnification, and the connection this has to your monitor.
Let’s make a new document in Photoshop:
We’ll make the new document 5 inches by 4 inches, 300ppi:
I want you to do this yourself, then get a plastic ruler – not a steel tape like I’ve used…..
Make sure you are viewing the new image at 100% magnification, and that you can see your Photoshop rulers along the top and down the left side of the workspace – and right click on one of the rulers and make sure the units are INCHES.
Take your plastic ruler and place it along the upper edge of your lower monitor bezel – not quite like I’ve done in the crappy GoPro still below:
Yes, my 5″ long image is in reality 13.5 inches long on the display!
The minute you do this, you may well get very confused!
Now then, the length of your 5×4 image, in “plastic ruler inches” will vary depending on the size and pixel pitch of your monitor.
Doing this on a 13″ MacBook Pro Retina the 5″ edge is actually 6.875″ giving us a magnification factor of 1.375:1
On a 24″ 1920×1200 HP monitor the 5″ edge is pretty much 16″ long giving us a magnification factor of 3.2:1
And on a 27″ Eizo ColorEdge the 5″ side is 13.75″ or there abouts, giving a magnification factor of 2.75:1
The 24″ HP monitor has a long edge of not quite 20.5 inches containing 1920 pixels, giving it a pixel pitch of around 94ppi.
The 27″ Eizo has a long edge of 23.49 inches containing 2560 pixels, giving it a pixel pitch of 109ppi – this is why its magnification factor is less then the 24″ HP.
And the 13″ MacBook Pro Retina has a pixel pitch of 227ppi – hence the magnification factor is so low.
So WTF Gives with 1:1 or 100% View Magnification Andy?
Well, it’s simple.
The greatest majority of Ps users ‘think’ that a view magnification of 100% or 1:1 gives them a view of the image at full physical size, and some think it’s a full ppi resolution view, and they are looking at the image at 300ppi.
WRONG – on BOTH counts !!
A 100% or 1:1 view magnification gives you a view of your image using ONE MONITOR or display PIXEL to RENDER ONE IMAGE PIXEL In other words the image to display pixel ratio is now 1:1
So at a 100% or 1:1 view magnification you are viewing your image at exactly the same resolution as your monitor/display – which for the majority of desk top users means sub-100ppi.
Why do I say that? Because the majority of desk top machine users run a 24″, sub 100ppi monitor – Hell, this time last year even I did!
When I view a 300ppi image at 100% view magnification on my 27″ Eizo, I’m looking at it in a lowly resolution of 109ppi. With regard to its properties such as sharpness and inter-tonal detail, in essence, it looks only 1/3rd as good as it is in reality.
Hands up those who think this is a BAD THING.
Did you put your hand up? If you did, then see me after school….
It’s a good thing, because if I can process it to look good at 109ppi, then it will look even better at 300ppi.
This also means that if I deliberately sharpen certain areas (not the whole image!) of high frequency detail until they are visually right on the ragged edge of being over-sharp, then the minuscule halos I might have generated will actually be 3 times less obvious in reality.
Then when I print the image at 1440, 2880 or even 5760 DOTS per inch (that’s Epson stuff), that print is going to look so sharp it’ll make your eyeballs fall to bits.
And that dpi print resolution, coupled with sensible noise control at monitor ppi and 100% view magnification, is why noise doesn’t print to anywhere near the degree folk imagine it will.
This brings me to a point where I’d like to draw your attention to my latest YouTube video:
Did you like that – cheeky little trick isn’t it!
Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
If I process on a Retina display at over 200ppi resolution, I have a two-fold problem:
1. I don’t have as big a margin or ‘fudge factor’ to play with when it comes to things like sharpening.
2. Images actually look sharper than they are in reality – my 13″ MacBook Pro is horrible to process on, because of its excessive ppi and its small dimensions.
Seriously, if you are a stills photographer with a hankering for the latest 4 or 5k monitor, then grow up and learn to understand things for goodness sake!
Ultra-high resolution monitors are valid tools for video editors and, to a degree, stills photographers using large capacity medium format cameras. But for us mere mortals on 35mm format cameras, they can actually ‘get in the way’ when it comes to image evaluation and processing.
Working on a monitor will a ppi resolution between the mid 90’s and low 100’s at 100% view magnification, will always give you the most flexible and easy processing workflow.
Just remember, Photoshop linear physical dimensions always ‘appear’ to be larger than ‘real inches’ !
And remember, at 100% view magnification, 1 IMAGE pixel is displayed by 1 SCREEN pixel. At 50% view magnification 1 SCREEN pixel is actually displaying the dithered average of 2 IMAGE pixels. At 25% magnification each monitor pixel is displaying the average of 4 image pixels.
Anyway, that’s about it from me until the New Year folks, though I am the worlds biggest Grinch, so I might well do another video or two on YouTube over the ‘festive period’ so don’t forget to subscribe over there.
Thanks for reading, thanks for watching my videos, and Have a Good One!
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Okay, so I’ve been ‘banging on’ about the problem that quite a few people have been suffering from with the new Lightroom Classic CC and GPU acceleration since Adobe launched the new application.
I must stress that this problem does NOT seem to effect anyone using MBP or iMac, or indeed any Mac Pro that runs a factory-fitted GPU. But if you can remember, I fitted my Mac Pro with an nVidia GTX 970 4Gb GPU a while back – mainly to help Photoshop CC with the heavy lifting in ‘Refine Edge’ and other masking/channel masking procedures.
But I’m now pleased to report that the problem is FIXED – and, as I suspected, the fix is simple, and the ‘fix’ is a tiny 28 byte file. Yes, that’s right, 28 BYTES!
It’s an API Thing
Now I’m totally rubbish with computer jargon, but API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, and with regard to GPU/Graphics Cards there a 4 main APIs:
OpenGL
Direct Ex – in other words Microsoft
Metal – in other words Apple
Vulcan – don’t ask/no idea
For some reason, on certain Mac systems, Lightroom Classic CC is not finding OpenGL, and is instead being forced into trying to use the OSX API ‘metal’.
The forums have been rife with Lightroom Classic CC problems for the last few days – this one included. On one of these forums, Adobes Simon Chen, had been attempting to field questions over this problem.
I asked Simon if there was any way to ‘force’ Lightroom Classic CC to ignore the OSX API and default to OpenGL – which was obviously there on the system, because the previous iteration of Lightroom had been using it quite happily.
Simon suggested the installation of this tiny 28 byte ‘config.lua’ file into Lightrooms’ Application Support root folder – and would you believe it, it works!
Below is a short video I’ve made this morning on how to download and install this tiny file which will re-instate Lightroom Classic CCs ability to use the OpenGL API.
So now I’m a happy bunny; and if you have the problem then just follow the video instructions and you’ll be a happy bunny too!
Big thanks to Simon Chen, Principle Scientist at Adobe for helping sort this irritating niggle out.
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Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop CC 2018 tips – part 1
So, you’ve either upgraded to Lightroom Classic CC and Photoshop CC 2018, or you are thinking doing so.
Well, here are a couple of things I’ve found – I’ve called this part1, because I’m sure there will be other problems/irritations!
Lightroom Classic CC GPU Acceleration problem
If you are having problems with shadow areas appearing too dark and somewhat ‘chocked’ in the develop module – but things look fine in the Library module – then just follow the simple steps in the video above and TURN OFF GPU Acceleration in the Lightroom preferences panel under the performance tab.
Turn OFF GPU Acceleration
UPDATE: I have subsequently done another video on this topic that illustrates the fact that the problem did not exist in Lr CC 2015 v.12/Camera Raw v.9.12
In the new Photoshop CC 2018 there is an irritation/annoyance with the brush tool, and something called the ‘brush leash’.
Now why on earth you need your brush on a leash God ONLY KNOWS!
But the brush leash manifests itself as a purple/magenta line that follows your brush tool everywhere.
You have a smoothness slider for your brush – it’s default setting is 10%. If we increase that value then the leash line gets even longer, and even more bloody irritating.
And why we would need an indicator (which is what the leash is) of smoothness amount and direction for our brush strokes is a bit beyond me – because we can see it anyway.
So, if you want to change the leash length, use the smoothing slider.
If you want to change the leash colour just go to Photoshop>Preferences>Cursors
Here, you can change the colour, or better still, get rid of it completely by unticking the “show brush leash while smoothing” option.
So there are a couple of tips from my first 24 hours with the latest 2018 ransom ware versions from Adobe!
But I’m sure there will be more, so stay tuned, and consider heading over to my YouTube channel and hitting the subscribe button, and hit the ‘notifications bell’ while you’re at it!
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Lightroom Color Temperature(or Colour Temperature if you spell correctly!)
“Andy – why the heck is Lightrooms temperature slider the wrong way around?”
That’s a question that I used to get asked quite a lot, and it’s started again since I mentioned it in passing a couple of posts ago.
The short answer is “IT ISN”T….it’s just you who doesn’t understand what it is and how it functions”.
But in order to give the definitive answer I feel the need to get back to basics though – so here goes.
The Spectrum Locus
Let’s get one thing straight from the start – LOCUS is just a posh word for PATH!
Visible light is just part of the electro-magnetic energy spectrum typically between 380nm (nanometers) and 700nm:
In the first image below is what’s known as the Spectrum Locus – as defined by the CIE (Commission Internationale de l´Eclairage or International Commission on Illumination).
In a nutshell the locus represents the range of colors visible to the human eye – or I should say chromaticities:
The blue numbers around the locus are simply the nanometer values from that same horizontal scale above. The reasoning behind the unit values of the x and y axis are complex and irrelevant to us in this post, otherwise it’ll go on for ages.
The human eye is a fickle thing.
It will always perceive, say, 255 green as being lighter than 255 red or 255 blue, and 255 blue as being the darkest of the three. And the same applies to any value of the three primaries, as long as all three are the same.
This stems from the fact that the human eye has around twice the response to green light as it does red or blue – crazy but true. And that’s why your camera sensor – if it’s a Bayer type – has twice the number of green photosites on it as red or blue.
In rather over-simplified terms the CIE set a standard by which all colors in the visible spectrum could be expressed in terms of ‘chromaticity’ and ‘brightness’.
Brightness can be thought of as a grey ramp from black to white.
Any color space is a 3 dimensional shape with 3 axes x, y and z.
Z is the grey ramp from black to white, and the shape is then defined by the colour positions in terms of their chromaticity on the x and y axes, and their brightness on the z axis:
But if we just take the chromaticity values of all the colours visible to the human eye we end up with the CIE1931 spectrum locus – a two dimensional plot if you like, of the ‘perceived’ color space of human vision.
Now here’s where the confusion begins for the majority of ‘uneducated photographers’ – and I mean that in the nicest possible way, it’s not a dig!
Below is the same spectrum locus with an addition:
This additional TcK curve is called the Planckian Locus, or dark body locus. Now please don’t give up here folks, after all you’ve got this far, but it’ll get worse before it gets better!
The Planckian Locus simply represents the color temperature in degrees Kelvin of the colour emitted by a ‘dark body’ – think lump of pure carbon – as it is heated. Its color temperature begins to visibly rise as its thermal temperature rises.
Up to a certain thermal temperature it’ll stay visibly black, then it will begin to glow a deep red. Warm it up some more and the red color temperature turns to orange, then yellow and finally it will be what we can call ‘white hot’.
So the Planckian Locus is the 2D chromaticity plot of the colours emitted by a dark body as it is heated.
Here’s point of confusion number 1: do NOT jump to the conclusion that this is in any way a greyscale. “Well it starts off BLACK and ends up WHITE” – I’ve come across dozens of folk who think that – as they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing indeed!
What the Planckian Locus IS indicative of though is WHITEPOINT.
Our commonly used colour management white points of D65, D55 and D50 all lie along the Planckian Locus, as do all the other CIE standard illumimant types of which there’s more than few.
The standard monitor calibration white point of D65 is actually 6500 Kelvin – it’s a standardized classification for ‘mean Noon Daylight’, and can be found on the Spectrum Locus/Plankckian Locus at 0.31271x, 0.32902y.
D55 or 5500 Kelvin is classed as Mid Morning/Mid Afternoon Daylight and can be found at 0.33242x, 0.34743y.
D50 or 5000 kelvin is classed as Horizon Light with co-ordinates of 0.34567x, 0.35850.
But we can also equate Planckian Locus values to our ‘picture taking’ in the form of white balance.
FACT: The HIGHER the color temperature the BLUER the light, and lower color temperatures shift from blue to yellow, then orange (studio type L photofloods 3200K), then more red (standard incandescent bulb 2400K) down to candle flame at around 1850K). Sunset and sunrise are typically standardized at 1850K and LPS Sodium street lights can be as low as 1700K.
And a clear polar sky can be upwards of 27,000K – now there’s blue for you!
And here’s where we find confusion point number 2!
Take a look at this shot taken through a Lee Big Stopper:
I’m an idle git and always have my camera set to a white balance of Cloudy B1, and here I’m shooting through a filter that notoriously adds a pretty severe bluish cast to an image anyway.
If you look at the TEMP and TINT sliders you will see Cloudy B1 is interpreted by Lightroom as 5550 Kelvin and a tint of +5 – that’s why the notation is ‘AS SHOT’.
Officially a Cloudy white balance is anywhere between 6000 Kelvin and 10,000 kelvin depending on your definition, and I’ve stuck extra blue in there with the Cloudy B1 setting, which will make the effective temperature go up even higher.
So either way, you can see that Lightrooms idea of 5550 Kelvin is somewhat ‘OFF’ to say the least, but it’s irrelevant at this juncture.
Where the real confusion sets in is shown in the image below:
“Andy, now you’ve de-blued the shot why is the TEMP slider value saying 8387 Kelvin ? Surely it should be showing a value LOWER than 5550K – after all, tungsten is warm and 3200K”….
How right you are…..and wrong at the same time!
What Lightroom is saying is that I’ve added YELLOW to the tune of 8387-5550 or 2837.
FACT – the color temperature controls in Lightroom DO NOT work by adjusting the Planckian or black body temperature of light in our image. They are used to COMPENSATE for the recorded Planckian/black body temperature.
If you load in image in the develop module of Lightroom and use any of the preset values, the value itself is ball park correct(ish).
The Daylight preset loads values of 5500K and +10. The Shade preset will jump to 7500K and +10, and Tungsten will drop to 2850K and +/-0.
But the Tungsten preset puts the TEMP slider in the BLUE part of the slider Blue/Yellow graduated scale, and the Shade preset puts the slider in the YELLOW side of the scale, thus leading millions of people into mistakenly thinking that 7500K is warmer/yellower than 2850K when it most definitely is NOT!
This kind of self-induced bad learning leaves people wide open to all sorts of misunderstandings when it comes to other aspects of color theory and color management.
My advice has always been the same, just ignore the numbers in Lightroom and do your adjustments subjectively – do what looks right!
But for heaven sake don’t try and build an understanding of color temperature based on the color balance control values in Lightroom – otherwise you get in one heck of a mess.
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I’ve just had to spend some money and do a 2009 Mac Pro GPU Upgrade, mainly because of Photoshops new ‘Select and Mask” interface.
Ever since this new workspace was introduced it has caused me no end of problems with brush lag and general ‘hanging’.
And the fact that I need to run screen capture software at the same time, in order to feed the Tube of You, meant that for the last month Uncle Andy’s been unhappy..
For the last couple of months I’ve been toying with adding more RAM to the machine, so last week I sprung £200 at Mac Upgrades for 32GB of OWC RAM to replace the 16GB of Crucial that I installed a couple of years ago.
There’s nothing like the assembly of wide-field astro shots from a 36Mp camera to point out weaknesses in RAM capacity!
But the Select and Mask workspace in Photoshop show diddly-squat of an improvement with doubling the RAM. It wasn’t until I happened across a note by Scott Kelby where he noted that this new workspace was totally GPU dependent. No mention of this on anything from Adobe that I could see.
Now the thought of buying a new GPU for Mac should fill anyone with dread over the lightness of their wallet after the purchase.
Mac GPU’s are thin on the ground, of limited spec and HUGELY over-priced.
Mac Upgrades offer “flashed” PC GPU’s – AMD Radeons at an appalling £264 for a 2GB; that’s just daylight robbery in my opinion.
Flashing a mac-suitable PC GPU serves one single purpose – you can see your boot screen at start-up.
My boot screen lasts for about 7 seconds with my existing SSD system drive and the 64GB of new RAM – so I’m not so bothered about seeing it, especially if it can save me money AND steer me away from Radeon and on to an Nvidia chipset.
Opting for an Nvidia chipset allows a greater choice of GPU specification and performance.
So I’ve spent the last few days getting my head around the technicals, and they really are quite simple.
The PCIe slots in a 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 are only capable of supplying 75 watts of power. However, lurking on the board are TWO mini PCIe 6 pin auxiliary power connectors, each capable of delivering 75 watts each.
you can effectively drive a mac-compatible GPU requiring 3x 75, or 225 watts total of power.
And so I came up with this baby!
4GB – not 2GB, and £179 not £264 – and it only requires 150 watts of power.
So this very morning made a trip to Overclockers in Newcastle under Lyme and once back in the office it took less than 15 minutes to have the 2009 Mac Pro GPU Upgrade done and working.
Just look at this bad boy in comparison to the GT120 it’s replacing – at least 8 times as useful!
If you fancy doing this to your Mac Pro 4,1 then there are a few things you need to do before you make your decision:
IMPORTANT – you must download and install the Nvidia WEB DRIVERS from HERE if you are still running Yosemite or HERE if you are using El Capitan. You MUST do this BEFORE you turn your machine off to begin the upgrade – if you don’t you might be stuck with a machine that doesn’t turn the monitor on!
Install the downloaded web drivers and you will see the Nvidia drive manager icon at the top of your screen – click it and select driver manger preferences:
Why do I have to do this Andy?
The Mac OS has it’s own versions of Nvidia drivers (amongst others) but these are fairly crap, inefficient and far from up to date, and almost definitely won’t recognise you new GPU correctly.
Once you have checked that those web drivers are installed and up to date you should be clear to do your 2009 Mac Pro GPU Upgrade.
Once done you can power the machine on; you’ll hear the start-up chime but the screen will stay black for the time the boot screen would have been active – the screen will activate at either your account log in page if you have your machine set up that way, or it’ll go straight to your desktop.
And there you are – one 2009 Mac Pro GPU Upgrade – DONE.
Now for some Adobe application setup.
Fire up Lightroom and go to the preferences panel.
Activate ‘Use Graphics Processor’.
Click the ‘System Info’ button and check that the card is listed and is functioning properly:
Next, fire up Photoshop and go to Preferences>Performance:
Check ‘Use Graphics Processor’ and click the ADVANCED button:
You will see three options; Basic, Normal & Advanced. It will most likely be defaulted to Basic. I’ve selected advanced here but may have to change it ‘down’ if there is any fall-off in performance.
One final and very important item on the agenda, re-calibrate your monitor.
That’s it, a new lease of life given to a venerable old 2009 machine.
Apple is supposed to be dropping support for the 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 on the official launch of OSX 10.12 Sierra.
I’m not that bothered at the moment, it’s taken me up until July of this year to feel the need for 10.11 El Capitan – and that was only due to screw-ups with recent Adobe CC installers.
But sometime in the next 12 months I might avail myself of a Mac Pro 5,x. This new 4GB GPU will transfer direct to that and I’ll turn this Mac Pro 4,1 into an image server – at least that’s what I’m telling myself !
IMPORTANT: The procedure outlined here worked wonderfully for me – simple and fast. But it might not go the same for you – I accept NO responsibility for any f***ed up equipment that might occur outside these office walls!
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Important – if you are reading this post about the new Guided Upright Tool via subscription email PLEASE view it directly on the blog instead.
Yesterday Adobe released updates for Lightroom CC 2015, Lightroom 6 (non CC) and Photoshop CC2015.
These updates reconciled a few bug fixes and added new camera support BUT, Lr CC subscribers got themselves a new tool – yeah!
And what a useful tool it is – the Guided Upright Tool.
Below you’ll see a video of me showing how to deploy the tool, but basically it makes a damn fine job of getting rid of awkward and complex distortions from wide angle lenses that I’ve always had to resort to fixing with the Photoshop Warp Tool.
Firstly, lets take a look at the develop module panel where it lives:
Compared to the old Lens Correction Panel in previous versions of Lightroom:
As you can see from the comparison image at the top of the page, this tool does a fine job of quickly and effectively removing the skewed field curvature from the lighthouse – watch the video below on how I did this – really simple!
You might want to click the YouTube link at the bottom of the video to view at full size.
Caveats:
Something I forgot to stress in the video – you MUST check the ENABLE PROFILE CORRECTIONS in the lens corrections panel in order for the Guided Upright Tool to function.
You can only use a maximum of 4 lines, so choose them wisely!
When you add a third or fourth line you MAY get a warning “ ! Invalid Guide Configuration” – if you do, simply hit the backspace/delete key to remove the line causing the conflict.
Because the resulting correction can result in a major ‘crop’ to the image, you may loose vital pixels and end up with a less than desirable composition.
Plus Points:
Fast, effective and a time-saver; giving you the ability to correct for distorted horizontals and vertical at the same time.
I rate this as one of the best tools Adobe have added to Lightroom in ages, though I can’t give it 10/10 because we end up with a cropped image, and as I hinted at earlier, there are ways to do this in Photoshop that maintain ALL the pixels in the image.
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Adobe have just released a new update for Lightroom CC2015 & Lightroom 6.
This update is of particular relevance to Nikon users who were suffering with the missing lens data information I posted about previously.
The new update is touted as fixing the problem, and it certainly does so for new imports from what I can see. But for images that are already in your catalogue and are showing the “unknown lens” tag in your metadata and filter bar, you are going to need to do a bit of extra work!
Adding the update does NOT fix the existing issue! WTF……….??
So here is how to FIX the problem.
Open your catalogue Library Module in Lightroom CC2015.5.1 or 6.5.1
Click on All Photographs in your Catalogue Panel (top left below Navigator)
Hit the backslash ( \ ) key to bring up your filter bar
Select All Dates together with All Cameras & All Lenses, and select the Unknown Lens category
Head up to the contextual menu and go Select All – all cells should now be highlighted
Go to Metadata in the contextual menu and select Save Metadata to Files
Go back to Metadata in the contextual menu and select Read Metadata from Files
Once you click READ you will see your images sequentially vanish from the selected UNKNOWN LENS view as Lightroom updates its metadata records.
HOWEVER – this does NOT work with ANY Virtual Copies, Proof Copies or video files that you have within said catalogue.
To correct these, you have to make new virtual copies, then select the old ones and copy all Develop Settings from the old ones to the new ones! And don’t ask me what you do with video files because I can’t work that one out.
What a bloody carve-up!
If you want the official instructions from Adobe they are HERE
Creative Cloud subscribers should also take the new Photoshop CC 2015 update – this adds camera support and fixes to CameraRAW.
On a lighter note the new update has also added new camera support for the Pentax K1 and Sony DSCRX10M3
Lightroom CC 2015: Lens metadata field missing on import
The latest incarnation of Adobe Lightroom has left some of us with a BUG!
If you open the filter bar in the Library Module you may see something like this:
The bug in the system is showing UNKNOWN LENS in the metadata tab of the Library filter bar.
This is a bit strange seeing as it recognises the same lens on the same camera a week before!
If you see this sort of behaviour in your Lightroom installation DON’T PANIC.
As you can see, the lens metadata is being read in the Lens Corrections panel in the Dev module – so don’t for one minute think that all the metadata has been mysteriously stripped from your files!
This is a bug inside the ‘inner gubbins’ of the latest version of Lightroom CC and Lightroom 6, and Adobe are working to rectify the problem in the next update.
There isn’t a great deal being mentioned on the internet about this particular problem – you wouldn’t know about it unless you tried filtering the Library by lens.
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And there you are – one 2009 Mac Pro GPU Upgrade – DONE.
