Why I changed my Raw Photo Editing Software Back to Canon Digital Photo Professional

I published an article a bit over a month ago about how I moved my Photos Library to and external drive so I could store more RAW photos in the Photos Library file. As I'm getting back into photography I discovered a few things with Apple's photo's software that I didn't like, mainly with the RAW Processor. Let's go through these a bit to see what is going on.

First is how the edits are handled and stored. Just like with other image formats that Photos supports, RAW edits are done non-destructively. Unfortunately, this also means, Apple uses the same way of storing the edit Metadata. If you export the RAW file, you get what was imported into Photos, only on exporting to a non-RAW format do you get the edited results. I expect this is the way software such as Lightroom works as well and thus should be expected. I doubt Canon's Raw file recipe can carry the metadata from third party editors anyway. I can't even call this strike one.

The second problem is the editing capability, especially for black and white. While Photo will allow you to apply colored filters to an image in post-processing, it is a simple slider that allows you to select what you want to see. You don't know what position gives you no filtering or the position that gives you what colored filter. If you use the auto setting, you have no idea what filter was selected, even if you like the auto selection and thus can't even think about replicating it using a film camera in the future. This may be possible with paid third party add-ons, but my budget is tight and thus why I'm shooting black and white digitally in the first place. This was strike one.

The next two strikes are related to each other. This involves how Photos handles the picture style selected in camera or from Digital Photo Professional if you edit with that first. Photos completely ignores the picture style you select and performs it's processing exclusively. That's strike two, but that's only part of the story. Photos and Apple's Raw Processor is 100% capable of handling and processing this metadata. In fact, when you connect the camera to import into photos, the picture style selected appears on the preview, but disappears when you actually import the image. This is strike three.

Now, I can't put the blame on Apple too hard for this. I don't think Photos is designed for the intermediate style editing that I'm doing and it is very likely that Apple's software engineers are thinking along the lines that someone like me will pony up for Adobe's Lightroom software or another third party equal. There are things I don't like about Digital Photo Professional too, these mainly are due to the way processing is handled for batches of exports and the fact that the code is Intel only at the moment.

Tune back in here tomorrow at 10 AM Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 UTC) for why I chose to start using my DSLR Kit Lens again.

New Posts Coming Out On Schedule Soon

As you know I don't have a regular schedule for updating or even looking at my blog here. Unfortunately, this also means that sometimes I have a lot of content to put out and end up putting it out in too short of a span. To avoid flooding the blog with too much content at once this time, I'm using scheduled publishing to spread this out a bit. The first of these posts will come out at 10 AM Eastern Daylight Time today. That's 14:00 UTC. The second post will be scheduled for tomorrow at the same time. Both of these posts are digital photography and software related so you don't want to miss it. Keep an eye on here Monday at the same time just in case I get a third post out.

Tech Tip for Mac Users, How to Add a Mac Formatted External Drive to Time Machine

If you read my previous post regarding moving your Photos Library to an external drive and saw that I have Time Machine configured to back up my external drive, you may be wondering how to do this yourself. Please note, these instructions assume you have either a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or APFS volume, other types may not work. Additionally, you cannot back up data stored on a Time Machine volume using this method. I've been backing up my large external drive using this method for over five years.

1. Connect your external drive
2. Open the Time Machine Preferences.
3. Click on the "Options" Button
4. Locate your external drive on the list of excluded items.
5. Select your external drive and click the minus sign and then click the "Save" button
6. Start a backup manually. This will take some time as it will do the standard incremental backup of everything else normally backed up, but will perform full backup of the new drive you added.

Time Machine will back up your external drive any time the external drive is connected and mounted during a Time Machine backup. Time Machine will not provide any error and will simply skip backing up the external drive if it is not available. You can also backup multiple external drives using this method.

Tech Tip for Mac Users, Move Your Photos Library To An External Drive For More Space

I've been hoping to get back into photography, but two things were discouraging me. The cost of film is increasing and my MacBook has limited storage space on the internal SSD so storing a lot of RAW files would not be ideal. When I switched to using Apple's Photos app to manage my photos I thought I was required to use the internal SSD. I have an external drive for larger files, which I have configured with Time Machine as I used to store my digital photos there.

If you plan to do this, Apple does have instructions which I will repeat here, however, this is discouraged as Time Machine does not backup external drives by default. You want to make sure you have Time Machine making a backup of your external drive that you are using for photos prior to moving your library.

This had been discouraging me for quite a while, but I need to explain my workflow first to show the impact of film versus digital on my storage requirements. With film photography, I do not have the large RAW files that I do with my digital photography. When I have my film processed at a lab they scan to JPEG images and any editing that would need to be done is usually performed during the scanning process. I do not need large TIFF files. With digital, I'm on my own for editing and trying to get the best image out of what I captured. This means I need to capture a RAW file from my Canon DSLR which is around 17 or so megabytes per image instead of about 3 to 6 megabytes per image. Even a large number of film photos would eventually cause difficulty with my SSD space.

If you wish to move your photos library to an external drive, you need to perform the following steps.

1. Select the external drive you wish to move the library to, this drive should be one that is usually connected to your machine and one that is included in Time Machine backups. This drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or APFS. You cannot use a time machine drive or a drive formatted in another format such as FAT or exFAT.
1. If you are not sure how to configure an external drive to be backed up by Time Machine I will follow up with an article on how to do this.
2. Close the Photos application if it is open. Also ensure that no devices such as iPhones or iPads will sync to your Mac during this process.
3. Locate your Photo's Library folder in the Finder. This is usually in the pictures folder in your home folder. Note this appears as a file that opens in Photos, but is technically a folder.
4. If needed, open another Finder window and open your external drive.
5. Drag the Photos Library folder from the source to the external drive. This only copies the folder, we will remove the old folder.
6. Double click on the Photos Library folder on the external drive, this will launch Photos.
7. Go to the Photos menu and select preferences. Ensure that the library location indicates your external drive. Click the "Use as System Photo Library" button.
8. At this point iPhones and iPads can sync again.
9. If your desktop wallpaper is stored in photos, you should drag this individual photo to the Pictures folder and reset your wallpaper to one of the default options and then to the file in the Pictures folder. This ensures the correct wallpaper is displayed even if the Photo's Library is not available.
10. Next find the old Photo's Library folder and move it to the Trash/Bin. Do this with Photos open so it will not let you remove the wrong copy. Do not empty the Trash/Bin yet.
11. Perform a Time Machine backup, ensure that the backup is larger than the size of your photos library. If you have multiple Time Machine drives, repeat this step until all the backup is made to all Time Machine drives.
12. Close and re-open Photos to be absolutely sure the Photos Library is configured correctly. When re-launching, launch from the dock, Applications folder, or Launchpad to ensure that Photos is defaulting to the correct folder.
13. Once Time Machine is fully updated, you can empty your trash to remove that large Photos Library from your internal drive.

Staying at home, getting some TV back into the home office after 11 years.

During this COVID-19 outbreak we are all staying at home. I decided yesterday to finally restore TV to my home office area. It has been 11 years since I stopped using the set for watching TV, but I never removed it. I finally decided to connect a converter and antenna so I could get some TV to watch while I'm on my computer or while teleworking.

I decided to go with off air reception for multiple reasons. One, the limited channels would reduce the likelihood of distraction during working hours. Secondly, my local cable system doesn't carry one of the stations I can receive off air simply because they are out of market, but this station carries news out of the neighboring state, something my family is missing out on. Lastly, since I already owned all of the equipment required, in fact the converter was originally bought for this set, but I had initially had issues with reception.

Many may consider me crazy for using a CRT television in this modern era, especially for something other than retro games, but again, the equipment was already present and this set was already installed as I had used it with many sources over the years even when I didn't have off air programming on it.

The picture is beautiful even with the distortions, but those distortions can likely be repaired with some capacitor changes. Even though it is standard definition, I can still read the small text on the local news even though it is a bit blurred and the picture is far better than the TV would have displayed when new in 1986.

Back On Blogger, what is this?

You may have just noticed I rolled back to blogger and any article from 2018 and 2019 is now gone. Due to the lack of work I've put into this blog in the past two years, the Wordpress hosting is not economically viable and is being cancelled. Due to the hasty migration, some of the articles have been lost, however these minor articles can be re-created if I choose to do so.

iPhone USB can be made faster too.

With the fast charge capability of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X generating hype since this is the first time Apple started supporting what is considered a fast charge, however, multiple iPhones support faster charging than the charger in the box allows

These Models support a Maximum of 5 watts from the adapter:

• iPhone
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4
• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 5
• iPhone 5c
• iPhone 5s

These models support a maximum of 12 watts with an upgraded Adapter such as used with the iPad:

• iPhone 6 and 6 Plus
• iPhone 6s and 6s Plus
• iPhone 7 and 7 Plus

These models support (about) 36 watts with a USB-C to lightning cable and a USB-C adapter with Power delivery. In addition these support 12 watts with an upgraded adapter such as used with an iPad. These models support 5 watt (soon to be 7.5 after an iOS upgrade) wireless charging.

• iPhone 8
• iPhone X

This means that every iPhone since iPhone 6 can support faster charging than the included iPhone power adapter allows with the lightning to USB and presumably the Lightning to USB-C cables. The lighting to USB option requires an iPad (or compatible 2.1 amp third party) adapter.