Question of the Week:

*  Alan asks     “I’m thinking of branching out from printing merely on paper to printing on canvas and metal. Canvas seems pretty straight-forward, but how can one tell if a photo will look good on metal, short of ordering it? Not sure I want to invest the money if there’s a chance it’ll end up on a scrap heap”

* Michael Humber asked “I recall this being discussed before but did a search and nothing popped up. Does anyone know of a free software to recover deleted files from a compact flash card? I have a Sandisk card.”

* Jeff: Keep the boxes your memory cards come in, or at least find the code inside the pro level ones that gets you free access to a recovery tool.  SanDisk has the code on a sticker stuck to the inside of the back of the box.  Lexar has a little pamphlet insert with the code on it.  If you can’t find one, and you need the software, might be cheaper to buy a new card just to get the code to the recovery software.

Main Topic:

* Only one, somewhat significant new feature – panorama merge boundary warp.  Analyzes the image and auto warps the edges so that you don’t crop away a huge portion of the pano.  Jeff tested it using a bunch of shots he took while snowshoeing last week and it works much better on multi-row panos, not so great on a traditional pano.  Especially tends to make the horizon uneven.

* Supposed to do a much better job of “preemptively building” 1:1 previews, which means you shouldn’t have to do that on import anymore – the 1:1 preview will be done as you are zooming into photos and culling them.  But I tested this by importing a set of photos and waiting for the 1:1 previews to be built in 2015.3, then going through them one at a time in the develop module as fast as I could but waiting for the “loading..” message to go away.  Then I upgraded to 2015.4, deleted my Lightroom cache (to get rid of the 1:1 previews that were generated), and imported the same set of photos from a different directory.  I didn’t get through the images scrolling through them in the Develop module any faster.

* Thumbnail updates do seem significantly faster.  After you sync or paste settings to a lot of photos the thumbnail updating the view of the photo with the new settings applied was visibly faster.  Didn’t time it, but it was a lot snappier.

Drones

* DJI Phantom 3

* Destination weddings.

* a cave wedding.. how in the world do you light that

Doodads of the Week!

 

Jim: Atmosphere Aerosol

Nick: Vallerret photography gloves

Jeff (1/28): SteelSeries QcK Gaming Mouse Pad ($10)

* Jim 2: Glorious Extended White Gaming Mouse Mat