Catching up…

One of the few positive side effects of being stuck at home with a stinking cold is that I can spend some time recovering some of the backlog of uploads I've been wanting to make to this site. So finally, I've selected 20 photos from last September in Sardinia, out of 300, and added them. You can see them in the Sardinia Gallery. It's getting more and more difficult to keep everything pointing in the same direction. I discovered that Mac OS X 10.5 (some cat or the other) has arbitrarily removed support for Image Capture scripting, so I had to delve back in the black hole of AppleScript - surely the most truly awful programming environment ever conceived - and work out how to use Image Events. Naturally, the logical approach didn't work, so as ever I had to find a workaround. Since I am now, for better or worse, using Lightroom for sorting and raw processing, I had to find a way of generating web images in the way I need them without first rendering the RAW files. I thought I'd hit upon a neat trick, using the fact that Bridge CS3 knows about colour labels I apply in Lightroom, and thus enabling me to pipe these to my Photoshop action, but, naturally, there was a glitch here too: seems you can only have one folder at a time open in Bridge, and Lightroom organises files (as I told it to) in multiple folders. I may be wrong about this - Bridge is nothing if not obscure - but it does look like Bridge really is absolutely hopeless as anything much behind a pointless file browser replacement. Then there is the sneaking feeling that Lightroom maybe isn't the optimum way to process RAW images. I don't know. I like the adjustment tools and the highlight recovery in Lightroom, and some of the browsing tools, although the rest, in my opinion, is a clumsy mess, probably the result of trying too quickly to be master of all trades. The problem is that Lightroom does offer, in theory, a very nice integrated solution, unlike anything else other than Aperture. Amazing really - as soon as I find a bit of time to get back to photography, it is immediately sucked up by keeping up to date with the software. Still, I quite like some of the Sardinia photos.