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Canon EOS 7D updates (January 2011)

January 5, 2011 by conrad

Canon EOS 7D product photograph

If you’ve got a Canon EOS 7D, here’s some 7D news you might have missed during the holidays.

Firmware update version 1.2.3

A recent update to the 7D firmware addresses issues with the Speedlite Transmitter STE-2 and the Macro Ring Lite. Download 7D Firmware Update Version 1.2.3 here. This isn’t the first firmware update since the 7D came out, so even if the Version 1.2.3 fixes don’t apply to you, you might want to install this to get caught up if you haven’t installed any firmware updates since you bought the camera.

Add a lock to your mode dial

Do you ruin shots by accidentally nudging your mode dial to the wrong setting, ending up with B when you meant M or with Tv when you meant A? Now Canon will add a mode dial lock to your EOS 7D or EOS 5D Mark II…but it’s cost you. About $100. Engadget has the details.

Canon rebates expiring January 8, 2011

The current round of Canon rebates expires this weekend, so if there was Canon gear Santa didn’t bring you, now’s your chance to pick it up for yourself. Rebates apply to bodies, lenses, flashes, and more. For more information, go to the Promotions page on the Canon USA Professional Imaging Products web site. It’s worth checking that page periodically, since Canon tends to offer different rebates and discounts during the year.

I won’t be publishing news on every camera out there, but if you and I have some hardware in common you’ll periodically see some news about it right here.

Posted in Cameras, Canon 7D | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Discover better photos by getting high (or low)

December 13, 2010 by conrad

It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing a subject, shooting at eye level, and simply moving on; I have to remember to break out of that habit all the time. Walking past a building site the other night, I was intrigued by the color and perspective of the green pipes they brought in. The way the pipes leaned out over the new walls looked like a battleship gun Terry Gilliam would dream up. The eye-level shot I took really didn’t do anything for me and I deleted it, but I really wanted to make the shot work. I remembered to try pushing the pipes up into the sky or down into the ground simply by moving the camera up and down. As a result, I got two shots I liked a whole lot more than the eye-level shot.

Fire Station 21 pipes looking up

Fire station pipes looking down

For the first shot I lowered the camera to about a foot off the ground, and for the second shot I raised the camera as far up as my arms could reach. That simple 6-foot difference produced two noticeably different images.

What the photos don’t show is the chain-link fence around the building site. To make the fence disappear, I moved the camera right up to the fence and shot through it. The fence turned out to be more of a help than a hindrance, because I was able to brace the camera on the fence with both hands to steady a long exposure enough for the camera’s image stabilization to be able to make up the difference. This was made easier because I was shooting with my pocket camera, a Panasonic DMC-LX3 set to shoot raw at ISO 1600. If it had been an SLR, I wouldn’t have been able to rest the entire lens inside one of the chain link holes.

It was the screen on the back of the camera that let me compose the shots without having to lie on the wet ground or finding a ladder. There’s a rather significant group of photographers that’s devoted to the optical viewfinder, and they tend to take a dim view of shooting with any electronic viewfinder. These two shots are examples of why I don’t agree with them. On the camera screen I was able to compose and check the composition at the edges, level (with the help of the on-screen grid option), and check exposure with the help of the histogram and clipping display, and I could do it with the camera at an odd angle far from my face. Being able to read the screen from a distance freed me up to create two very different compositions from the same spot on the sidewalk.

When processing the shot later in Lightroom 3.3, noise reduction, Clarity, and Vibrance were very helpful in cleaning up the image and punching up the color and local contrast. High ISO shadows can be a little purple on this camera, so I reduced the purple saturation in the Hue/Saturation/Lightness panel.

Posted in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Digital Photography, Point of view | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Updates: Photoshop CS5 12.0.2, Camera Raw 6.3, Lightroom 3.3

December 6, 2010 by conrad

Adobe photography application icons

Adobe has released a wave of updates for its professional photography applications:

Adobe Photoshop CS5 12.0.2 (no release notes link, see download/updates link below)
Adobe Camera Raw 6.3 (click for release notes in PDF)
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.3 (click for release notes in PDF)

As usual, you can read the release notes and download the installers from

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/

or:

To update Photoshop and Camera Raw directly, start Photoshop and choose Help > Updates.

To update Lightroom directly, start Lightroom and choose Help > Updates.

I may pull out some highlights from the release notes here later when I have more time, but for now you can refer to the links above.

Posted in Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Digital Photography | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Print color profiling targets with no color management

November 30, 2010 by conrad

Adobe Color Printing Utility 1.0

Adobe Color Printer Utility 1.0 released

If you print color target images because you build printer profiles, and you’ve been frustrated that the No Color Management option is missing from the Print dialog box in Adobe Photoshop CS5, you can breathe a little easier now. No, make that a lot easier. Adobe has released the Adobe Color Printer Utility, specifically designed to print RGB TIFF color profiling targets without the risk of having the test swatch colors distorted by a color management system.

You may have read about this issue on page 97 of my book Real World Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers, in the sidebar “What happened to No Color Management?” As the book went to press, Adobe had announced they were working on this utility but it was unclear when it would actually become available. Now that they’ve released Adobe Color Printer Utility, the Adobe tech note referenced in the book has been updated with links to the Mac OS X and Windows versions of the utility. Here’s the link to the tech note and download:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/834/cpsid_83497.html

The system requirements are also on that page.

There isn’t much to the utility itself; the most important commands are Open and Print. All the magic is in the printing code, which presumably burrows its way directly to the printer, bypassing the printing color management code of the OS so that you get a pure reading of how the printer reproduces color.

It was a bit of a wait for those who needed this tool, but there are definite advantages to printing profiling targets from a utility instead of from within Photoshop. Adobe and its users no longer have to watch the No Color Management option break when Apple and Microsoft update their printing code, and you no longer have to pay for Photoshop just to be able to reliably print a color profiling target. Now you can just use a free utility that Adobe can update more quickly and independently.

There are no targets included with Adobe Color Printer Utility. The RGB target you see in the screen shot above was downloaded from the Luminous Landscape website (luminous-landscape.com).

Special notes

Adobe Color Printer Utility is intended only for printing color management target files when profiling a printer through RGB-based driver software—usually an inkjet printer, and not when printing CMYK through a PostScript RIP. Adobe Color Printer Utility isn’t intended for printing CMYK-mode profiling targets. The issues it addresses don’t exist for a PostScript-based CMYK workflow, such as a prepress workflow. You’ll probably find that printing CMYK-mode targets from ACPU doesn’t work when you output through RGB-based printer drivers.

Also, do not use Adobe Color Printer Utility for normal print jobs. (Yes, the name is a little misleading.) It’s only useful when you’re profiling a printer.

Posted in Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Color management, Printing | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

iPhone asks for unknown voicemail password

November 30, 2010 by conrad

iPhone voicemail password request

Has your iPhone all of a sudden started asking you for your voicemail password? Is it not letting you in even though you’re sure you entered the right voicemail password? Or have you completely forgotten the password?

When this started happening to me, I ran a search on Twitter and found a lot of people complaining about the same thing. Which means it might have been an AT&T system glitch and nothing we users did wrong on our phones. People have proposed various solutions out there, everything from calling AT&T customer service to having the phone send you a new temporary password via SMS. But what worked for me was a lot simpler and I didn’t have to use a different password.

My fix. I used my iPhone to dial my own phone number, which answers by putting me directly into my voicemail account. I then followed the voicemail menu to where you can change your password, and get this: it didn’t ask me for the old password before entering the new one. How convenient. I entered the password I wanted, and the next time AT&T voicemail asked me for my password, I entered that one and it worked.

When you get to the AT&T voicemail menu, here’s the sequence (or just listen to the menus if they changed them around):

  1. Press 4 for personal options.
  2. Press 2 for administrative options.
  3. Press 1 to manage passwords.
  4. Press 1 to change the password.
  5. When the system asks you to enter the password you want, do it.
  6. When the system lets you know the new password is set, press * to back out of the menus until the system says “Goodbye!”

The next time the Voicemail screen asks you for your password, the one you just set up should work. And all of your saved voicemails should show up again. That’s what happened to me, anyway; if it isn’t working for you I really don’t know what to do next except maybe contact AT&T.

OK, that was easy. But if there was a kung-fu film called Enter the Password, at this point its hero might say, looking around with suspicion, “…that was too easy.”

Security concern. While it was convenient to be able to change my password without having to know whatever mystery password AT&T was expecting before, security-minded readers may see this as a security hole. It means that if your iPhone is in the wrong hands for less than a minute, they could easily lock you out of your own voicemail by changing your password. Just another reason why every smartphone user should use the feature that locks your phone when you don’t use it for a couple of minutes, requiring a passcode to get back in. Yes, a phone passcode is a hassle, but there’s just too much personal information on these phones now and too much access to key parts of your life to allow a smartphone to be unsecured.

Posted in Apple, iOS (iPhone/iPad) | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Photoshop titles now available in Apple iBookstore

November 17, 2010 by conrad

Reading my book on an iPhone

If you’ve always wanted to read a Photoshop book on a tiny iPhone screen, your life is now complete: I just got word that my recent books, such as Real World Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers, are now available in the Apple iBookstore on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. An easy way to find them in the iBookstore is to search for my name, Conrad Chavez.

The books are formatted for easy reading in the iBooks app on iOS devices, and if you want to see what that looks and feels like, there’s a “Get Sample” button you can click to download a free excerpt. Or just look at the pictures here.

Posted in Adobe Bridge, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Color management | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Photoshop CS5: Mac font-related crashes fixed by Mac OS X 10.6.5

November 10, 2010 by conrad

For some time now, Adobe has been advising customers that some Photoshop CS5 crashes were traced to bugs in the font code in Mac OS X. It appears that Apple has now fixed many of those crashes in today’s release of the Mac OS X 10.6.5 update, according to Photoshop engineer Chris Cox in a post at the Adobe support forums.

If you’ve experienced these crashes (I haven’t), download Mac OS X 10.6.5 and you’ll hopefully see an improvement in Photoshop stability. As always, I recommend downloading the Combo updater if you’ve got the bandwidth for it.

On a side note, if you’ve got a new camera and you’ve been waiting for Mac OS X to support its raw format, check the list of camera raw formats added in 10.6.5. It contains new support for some notable recent models such as the Canon PowerShot S95, Canon EOS 60D, and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5.

Posted in Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Mac OS X | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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