Our recent preview of Lightroom 3 – Beta has generated a lot of buzz about the future of digital processing. One of the questions that keeps coming up is: how do I migrate from Aperture to Lightroom?
Well, it’s not has hard as you think, as long as you’re willing to invest a bit of time up-front to do it right.
Follow us after the jump, and we’ll have you loving Lightroom in the amount of time it takes to get a pizza delivered.
Even though I own both Adobe’s Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture, I use Lightroom because of the advanced development module, the ability to paint on different exposures, and non-destructive editing. I had very high hopes for Lightroom 3, which Adobe just released in beta, and am pleased to say that with one pretty significant exception, I’m very pleased.
I am a “Fashionable Photographer”, meaning I own a ridiculously expensive camera, that I barely know how to use, and possess a virtually limitless budget for gear which are little more than fashion accessories to my lifestyle.
Yet despite this I am not the sort of dude that is likely to lay down one hundred and forty bucks on a set of DVD that I could just watch for free on account of a friend loaning them to me.
And yet I did, and I’ll tell you why, after the jump.
Snow Leopard is being widely touted as a performance increase, but the OS upgrade resulted in a 10-15% performance DECREASE on both my Mac Pro as well as my MacBook Pro — at least, according to the Xbench benchmarking tool.
Now of course, that could just be things that Xbench measures, perhaps it doesn’t account or provide sufficient weight for multi-threading, and multi-tasking. But we would like to get to the bottom of this, and are asking for your help.
If you followed our handy dandy upgrade guide you ought so still have a functioning Leopard install to boot from. If so, please follow this testing protocol:
Power down your machine until cool.
Boot Leopard, and kill all running applications
Run XBench All tests except the drive test**
Upload results using the name: CoM – YOUR NAME – PRE (Uploading XBench results is part of the process. Once you’re done, it asks if you want to upload your results and what name to give it)
Use the same protocol with your Snow Leopard install, but name the result CoM – YOURNAME – POST.
Thanks in advance I’ll be releasing results in the next few days.
** Why no drive test? XBench places too much emphasis on hard drive performance, and in an era where all hard drives perform basically the same, it skews all performance tests to the center. Running the test without drives provides a better picture of the actual performance delta.
I tried to write this article seriously. After all I’m an executive management consultant and an analyst; this is what I do for a living.
Even Leander chimed in, “Leigh, you’re becoming a parody of yourself, a crank only hauled out to rant about stuff and then tucked back in the closet.”
I want you all to know I tried, I really did. But this notion of Microsoft opening up stores is so Dog-Damned Stupid, it makes my fricken head want to explode.
So I’m siting on an airplane trying to leave DC yesterday, after three hours on the tarmac, and the flight attendants bringing us “Apple Juice” (really just Jack Daniels), even the most stone-faced folks with their noses in books will get chatty. He tells me where he works, they’re a client, I tell him where I work, and so on.
After take off, he sees me trying to watch Lonesome Dove on my ipod and mentions he has a splitter and did I want to watch a movie on his computer. Sure I say.
Well that’s when the fun starts, his computer takes like 10 minutes to boot, Windows had a hard-crash he says. then when the movie starts, it’s all stuttery and such,we try to watch for like 10 minutes, and finally I mention, hey, you wanna try mine? He says, sure, may as well…
I pull out the 17inch Macbook Pro, like it was the gold artifact in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, his eyes go wide, I open the lid, it’s on instantly, I’ve got like half a dozen spreadsheets and documents open, it doesn’t matter, I pop the movie in, it starts right up, as a final floursih I produce my remote control, and set it next to him, “You Drive,” I said.
The punchline: My new friend, is a senior executive at Dell.
The Movie, Lakeview Terrace, not so awesome.
My I’m a Mac Moment, Priceless.
Sound off and share your “I’m a Mac Moments” in the comments, I’ll pull them together into a best of post later in the week!
The first question that should leap to mind is: “Why on earth is CoM reviewing Windows?” Frankly, for many professionals, we have no choice. Many of us have to use Windows software in the course of our jobs, or at a minimum use web applications that require that bane to open standards developers everywhere: Internet Explorer.
There’s no easy way to do this, so lets just rip off the band-aid and see if there’s a scab underneath.
Number Seven Hundred and Thirty Six on the list of things that really torque me off are people who intentionally and knowingly mislead folks for fun and profit. And to this list of Mortgage Brokers, Right Wing Talk Radio Hosts, and Tobacco Lobbyists, we can now add Roger L. Kay, “President” of Endpoint Technology Associates (aside — people who are “president” of companies employing 50 or less people, are number 977 on the ‘annoying list’.)
El Presidente Roger authored a white paper at the behest of Microsoft titled: “What Price Cool” which serves to illuminate us all as to how we’ve been paying some imaginary “Hidden Apple Tax” all these years.
Of course, a younger man might shrug this drivel off, yet as I grow older I find my patience for such things eroding. While I’m not quite at the yelling at kids to get off my lawn stage, I am quite crotchety enough to spend my Saturday night debunking this garbage.
AppleTV is dead, it just hasn’t stopped moving yet. With fewer than 2 million units sold, it hasn’t achieved the commercial success of its rivals, and continues as a failed effort on the part of Apple to extend the digital hub into the living room.
The final nail in AppleTV’s coffin comes yesterday as Netflix announces a digital only subscription option, but the fatal shot was fired back in November. Follow me after the jump, as we discuss how Netflix strategy not only killed AppleTV but also threatens more than just longtime rival Blockbuster, and what (if anything) Apple can do about it.
Lacking the network of preexisting business customers, and B2B distribution channels of it’s principal rival IBM, Apple’s success was midwife’d by a hodge-podge of independent resellers and enthusiasts.
It seems apropos, on this the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh, to celebrate one of the few that remain of this early band of crazy ones, misfits and rebels, without whom Apple Computer would be little more than a footnote.
Apparently distraught over their utter lack of market-share, all of the approximately eighteen 30-gig Zunes in the wild have apparently committed mass suicide (is their number large enough to be considered a “mass suicide” or is it simply “suicide together”? –ed).
No word on the fate of fat-harry-zune tattoo guy.
You can read more on this breaking story as it develops at Wired or Ars.
Update: I don’t know why the picture of the dude with the Zune tattoo shows up on the RSS feed, next to the title making folks believe that he might be an ‘iPod killer’ or that he might have killed himself. Sorry zune tattoo guy…
It seems that suing Apple is no longer just the sport of crazy chicks allegedly denied their dog-given right to resell iPhones at extortionist rates because Apple discounted them. Instead, we have crazy patent campers who think that 25 years after Apple pioneered the use of the GUI in personal computers, they’re entitled to license fees on a patent granted last March.
Join me in going totally off the deep end after the jump…
UPDATE: Tons of People have signed up already. It will be this afternoon before I can add anyone else. I’ll have an update on the specific prized to be awarded later this week!
For those of you who’ve been following our Greatest Mac Moments posts. We’ve not discontinued them. They weren’t generating the kind of discussion I’d hoped, so we’re moving the format to monthly, where we’ll publish 5 at a time, which ought to spur some discussion.
Also, we’d like to announce another project. Following on the heels of our ridiculously successful “Just One More Thing” timeline, we’d like to create a timeline of Apple Products, complete with Dates, times and announcement videos if we can find them.
We would like Your Help! We’re going to open this one up to CoM readers to contribute. The top contributors will be eligible for prizes like an iPhone, iPods and other cool gear!
The Timeline is Here. It’s blank right now, but we hope to have it complete by the 25th Anniversay of the Mac in January.
If you’d like to contribute, send an email to: CoMTimeLine at gmail dot com, include a valid email address and we’ll get you set up.
