Musings on Photography

Some time back, I wrote about color drift of LCD displays, and about LCD scrubbing to get rid of LCD image persistence.

At that time, I wondered if running an LCD scrubber would get rid of the LCD drift. Well, over the past few days I’ve been running the scrubber on my Apple MacBook Pro each night, and this morning, I reprofiled the display.

Bottom line: scrubbing didn’t seem to make much difference that I could see.

As a side note, I’d observe that even the monitors I’ve bought which were very close to correct with the manufacturer’s profile out of the box have since drifted to the point where that original manufacturer’s profile is now substantially off.

There is no substitute for owning monitor profiling hardware and software and profiling your monitors (even your LCD monitors) at least monthly. It’s a bummer but that’s the way it is.

Some time ago I wrote about profiling of LCD monitors, and about whether such monitors drift over time the way CRT monitors do. I have more news on this front.

Recently, as part of my effort to keep all the monitors in our house accurately profiled, I generated a new profile for my Macbook Pro. When I did that, I noticed that the response in the blue channel had changed - over time, it took less signal to get a given amount of blue. And my recollection was that this wasn’t the case. It appeared that over time, my laptop screen was slowly getting more and more blue. “That’s weird,” I thought, “I wonder whats up with that?”

And then, in an entirely unrelated event, I installed new map software on a Garmin Nuvi we’ve just bought. The fact that we have a Nuvi is unimportant - what matters is that to load the new software into the Nuvi, I had to run a program that put a colorful window on the screen and then didn’t do much but move the scroll bar for about an hour. Afterwards, to my annoyance, you could see a fairly prominent ‘ghost’ of that window on the screen, no matter what was displayed in that spot. The display of our iMac had, as it were, persistence of vision.

A little research netted me some info on image persistence on LCD monitors. Although everyone will tell you that LCD displays don’t ‘burn in’ the way CRTs do, that’s not quite true. But a panel which is showing image persistence can be restored (in many cases) by displaying either a screen of just white, or a screen of moving patterns to ’scrub’ the pattern off the screen. The problem is (simplifying greatly) that the transistors in the panel tend to take a ’set’ when displaying a color for long time, and afterwards tend toward that color. Scrubbing the panel with patterns erases this ’set’.

The most lucid writing I’ve found on this is here, where Daniel Sandler describes his experience with image persistence on his monitor, and how he solved the problem, and the screen saver he’s written that scrubs the display to eliminate it.

Ok, so I’ve got Dan’s screensaver running on the iMac, and it’s slowly erasing the problem. But that bit I’d read somewhere else about pixels taking a ‘color set’ kept nagging at me, until I put 1 and 1 together to make two, and started to wonder about whether the observed increase in the ‘blueness’ on my laptop might have anything to do with LCD image persistence. Because guess what - on my laptop, I use the default Mac desktop image, because I’m lazy and it’s a decent desktop image. But it’s BLUE.

So now I’m wondering if running the scrubber on my laptop will eliminate the blue drift that I’ve observed. Once I’ve eliminated the problem on the iMac, I think I’ll take a crack at the screen on the laptop, and see. And I’ll check the other LCD displays around here, as well, and look at the profiles.

More, as the TV news says, as the story develops.

It’s been some six months now since I started the switch to Macs. Doug Plummer wrote an excellent summary of his experiences with his switch to Macs, which I encourage everyone interested to go read.

The brief recap:

• the first Windows machine replaced was my Sony VAIO laptop, which got replaced with a 15″ MacBook Pro.
• the next machine replaced was the big computer in the studio (a dual processor Athlon) which got replaced with a dual dual core Xeon Mac Pro
• After that, the Shuttle based Windows XP machine in the kitchen got replaced with a 24″ iMac. This iMac also took over the job of serving up music over the network, allowing me to eliminate another Shuttle that had gotten relegated to being the music server.
• the firebreathing FreeBSD file server with a one terabyte RAID filesystem got replaced with a little Mac Mini and a two terabyte Western Digital Mybook in mirror mode, which provides one terabyte of redundant networked storage.

Two Windows machines remain: one machine which I run Quickbooks on, and one machine in the studio which is not currently being used. The quickbooks machine will go away as soon as I buy a replacement accounting software for the Mac (probably NOT Quickbooks) and the other machine will be replaced by an iMac as needed, probably in the next few months.

Our experiences have been excellent. Both Paula and I love the Macs; Paula is particularly happy with the switch because she finds the Macs much easier to use. I’m happy because I seem to be spending less time in day to day maintenance.

Some observations, in no particular order:

• Setting up a Mac and getting it integrated into our network of other machines is far faster and easier than setting up another Windows machine. Much of this seems to be Apple’s heavy focus on the ‘out of the box’ experience. Another part of it is that the Mac’s reliance on technologies like Bonjour, etc. mean that getting the machine to find the resources (printers, servers, etc.) on the local network is far easier - setting up a Mac to use a networked printer, for instance, is a matter of a few seconds, instead of half an hour of finding the install disk, installing software, etc.
• The Mac hardware is really nicely built, except for the Mighty Mouse which is really a very bad mouse. We’ve had one Mighty Mouse fail already.
• Macs don’t come with a huge bolus of crapware installed, which means that the machine does not come out of the box bloated with stuff you don’t want.
• The Macs we’ve got are, without exception, extremely quiet. Both the house and the studio are now quite a bit more pleasant.
• Although Doug describes all sorts of problems getting his network to work, we’ve had no problems at all, and in fact I find the Macs interoperate nicely with both Windows, Freebsd, and Linux.
• In general, stability of the Macs has been better than what we got from the Windows machines. I’ve crashed Mail.app several times, and occasionally some app will get confused about where the focus is. Paula has found that playing java based games online seems to eventually lead to Safari getting very slow and stupid; the solution she uses is to quite Safari and restart it, which is far easier than a reboot.
• Rather to my surprise, the installed software on the Mac (things like iPhoto, etc.) are actually decent. Replacing our Windows Media Connect based music distribution with iTunes has been a huge relief; WMC is hopeless but iTunes is actually pretty good.

We’ve suffered from no hardware problems on the order of those encountered by Doug, who’s had ongoing problems with his Mac Pro that have caused him great heartache.

In the end, my observation is that Apple, which is free from the constraints imposed by the demands of large corporate IT departments, has largely focused on improving the experience of the average home user, starting from opening the box when you get it home and continuing on through setup, maintenance, and use.

In terms of the adjustment going from Windows to the Mac, both Paula and I made with switch pretty painlessly. Paula loves the Mac, claiming that it’s far easier to figure out how to do things she’s never done before. Neither of us seem to suffer from Doug’s “can’t figure out where I am” difficulties, although I understand perfectly what he’s describing. Without being able to point to any particular issue, my general observation is that getting something done on the Mac seems to take me less time than it did on Windows.

More on all this after we have made the transition to Leopard.

What I’ve come to think of as the Big Switcheroo is now winding slowly down to a close. Essentially all of the household computing is now done on Macs. We still need to replace one Windows machine with an iMac, but that will come soon enough. To my delight, Paula has cottoned on to the Macs without any pain at all.
Some amount of the struggle was finding replacements for various tools I’d accumulated in Windows world, especially with regard to backup and synchronizing files on multiple machines.

On all the Windows XP machines, the important stuff off each machine was backed up to one of the file servers daily, using SyncBack. So far, the replacement I’m using for the same function with the Macs is Chronosync, which does much the same thing. Chronosync seems sufficiently flexible for my needs.

For email, Microsoft Outlook has been replaced with the standard Mac mail.app, which we are finding to be pretty nice. Moving the HUGE archive of email from Outlook to mail.app was an epic struggle, involving drinking of mystic potions of dubious origin, much girding of loins, and winding myself up like a Berserker. Oh, and the help of O2M, an application that runs on windows, grovels over your Outlook folders, and spits out files in a format that can be imported by mail.app. Well, it does that, unless your folder is really big. More than, say, 4 thousand messages and all bets are off. A large portion of several days was spent in battle with the email stored on various Windows machines, breaking up large folders into smaller folders and moving the email. Of all the things involved in the switch, moving our enormous archive of email (think hundreds of thousands of email messages) was by far the biggest hassle. All the hassle was on the Windows side, by the way.

The composition window on wordpress.com, which is WYSIABNQWYG (what you see is almost but not quite what you get) if you happen to be using a browser other than Safari, reverts to HTML mode only if you’re using Safari. Since we use Safari, this was the goad needed to force me to investigate offline blog software. After a brief, abortive try with Qumana, I seem to have settled down fairly happily with Ecto which I picked because, like Qumana it runs on both the Mac and Windows platform, and at the time I picked it I was still suffering from the delusion that I might still run Windows in some places. Recently MarsEdit has come to my attention and I’ll probably check it out when I get to the fabled time when things settle down somewhat.

On Windows, I used the RSS features built into Windows Explorer. On the Mac, I dabbled with the RSS features in Safari and promptly concluded that “that way madness lies, let me shun that”. After evaluating both Newsfire and NetNewsWire, I settled on NewsFire. After a few weeks with that, I complained about it here on the blog, and several readers pointed me back to NetNewsWire, so I gave it another try. At this point, I’m sold, mostly because of its ability to display blog posts in the context of the blog, and not just text on a page.

One of our file servers is an aging machine running FreeBSD, with a large RAID filesystem. It’s getting to an age where I’m starting to think about replacing it, so some thought has been given to what I might replace it with. As it currently stands, I could replace this huge, firebreathing (the server is fairly noisy) system with a Mac Mini and one of these Western Digital MyBook Pro II external disk drives configured in mirror mode for redundancy. At current street prices and choosing the least expensive Mac Mini, this would give me a fileserver which would outperform the FreeBSD server and would be relatively inexpensive for what you get - one terabyte of fairly high performance redundant networked storage. One big advantage is that, if the building catches on fire, you grab the external disk and run. The fact that it runs a commercially supported OS and I can replace the Mac Mini just by driving to the Apple store and forking over bucks rather than by assembling the machine myself is a plus. The fact that it would be almost silent and consume about 1/5 the power the BSD machine does is also a plus. Folks who are lusting after NAS that performs a bit better (and is more capable and configurable) than the current crop of fire-and-forget NAS units might want to give the Mac Mini approach a ponder.

For photo editing, I’m using Photoshop CS3. It’s better than CS2, which is not to say that I think it’s good. I’d like someone at Adobe to explain to me why, on a machine as fast as my Mac Pro, it STILL takes forever to start up Photoshop. What in the world can they be doing?

Managing the collection of photos is being done (with some regret) with Adobe Bridge. For me, it works. It’s rather like Churchill’s comment about democracy being the worst possible form of government, except for all the others. Bridge is the worst possible tool for this job, except for all the others, which all seem to suffer from bizarre, deal-breaking defects. All of my comments about Bridge on Windows can be ported to the Mac without alteration.

For word processing, spreadsheet, etc. we’re using Microsoft Office. When Office 2008 for the Mac finally ships we will get it, although I have gazed upon Apple iWork and wondered how long before it is sufficiently refined that I can sever ties with Word and Excel. Perhaps never, but one can hope.

All of this acquisition of software tools has run up some expense, although none except the Adobe stuff is even slightly expensive. On the other hand, I haven’t had to buy, install, configure, curse at, and be annoyed by any antivirus software. This puts me very slightly ahead on cost and way ahead on muss, fuss, and general botheration.

As part of the household switch to Macs, we’ve taken delivery on one of the iMacs that Paula will be using. As a bit of a treat, I gathered up a bunch of photos that I’ve made in and around the house, and put them in a folder, and told the iMac to use the photos in the folder to make a slideshow as the screen saver. I don’t know what I expected - snap transitions, blah blah, but I thought it would be fun. But it turns out that the Mac does cross fades between the photos, and it also does a little Ken Burns style pan-and-zoom across/into/out of the photos, so that the slideshow is filled with motion. And, you know, I watched it go, and I thought “Hey, this looks pretty darn good. Especially for no effort!”

And that got me thinking about slideshows. It got me thinking about slideshows as a way to present a body of related photos, in a sequence. I’ve always hated, and I mean intensely hated, those web sites where portfolios are presented as slideshows. I hate that I want to flip through the photos quickly, and can’t, or that I want to go more slowly, and can’t. I guess slideshows are like children’s invented summer plays - when it’s not your children they’re excruciatingly horrid, but when it’s your children, the same play is a beautiful testament to the wonderful imagination and creativity encoded in your genes.

So I was sort of expecting that the next slideshow I came across I would think was the same old horrid painful dreadful stuff.

But no. This morning, I came across this slideshow on Dave Beckerman’s blog. I sort of winced when I hit the ’start’ button. And then I was entranced. A slideshow. A slideshow with MUSIC, the very sort of slideshow I hate, hate, hate. And, truth be told, I loved it. It doesn’t hurt, certainly, that Dave’s photos are awesome. It doesn’t hurt that I like the music, either.

But a week ago, I would have hated it intensely. Interesting.

Just a quick note to comment on the speed of the Mac Pro I bought. It’s a four core machine (dual dual core), 3.0GHz, with 4GB of memory.

Mostly out of curiosity, I decided to compare the speed of some common operations in my digital workflow on the Mac Pro and on the old Windows machine (2.4GHz Athlon dual core, 3GB of memory). I was expecting things to be roughly 2.5-3x faster, but since some of the speedup was from increasing the number of CPUs, I would not have been surprised to find a less radical improvement.

On wide radius unsharp mask, the new machine is roughly eight times the speed of the old one (that is, the old machine took eight times as long to perform the task as the new one).

Running my noise reduction software of preference (Noise Ninja) on an image from my EOS-5d, the Mac Pro is roughly 4 times faster.

I was startled to see that both Photoshop and Noise Ninja were quite capable of parallelizing these two tasks. Maybe the software world (or at least the image processing software world) is more multi-cpu ready than I thought.

There’s a limit to the utility of speed, of course. Reducing the time to do the unsharp mask from 10 seconds to just over a second makes the work go more smoothly, but cutting it from 1.2 seconds down to .15 would not provide nearly the same benefit. Since my switch from scanned large format film to the EOS-5d for most of my photography, the speedups I’ve seen so far are nice but not earthshaking. But if I were working entirely with really large images (scanned 8×10 film, say, or images generated by stitching) the speedups would make the difference between operations being brief enough to sit and wait to see the results, instead of starting the operation, getting up and getting another cup of tea, and coming back.

Even better, the speed does not come at the cost of noise. When I built the dual processor Athlon machine, I took special care to build a machine which didn’t generate noise. It took a bit of work. Unlike the Mac G5 that my friend Rob loaned me (which makes noise rather like a fighter jet with afterburners on when the CPU usage ramps up) this machine is utterly silent all of the time. As someone who is afflicted with a sensitivity to environmental noise, I really appreciate this.

On Monday, I started our switch to Macs by ordering a replacement for my current laptop.  The outgoing laptop is a Sony S560, the incoming laptop is a 15″ Macbook Pro with 2gb of memory, a 7200 rpm 160gb disk, and the matte screen.  I’ll try the MBP with 2GB of memory, and see how it goes.  If it’s fine, I’m done with that machine.  If not, I’ll upgrade to 4GB of memory.  (as a side note, the MBP will be substantially faster than the dual processor machine on which I currently run Photoshop.  They just keep getting faster.)

The decision on the matte screen was close.  The glossy screen shows deeper blacks; the matte screen has no reflections.  After some dithering, I came down on the matte side.  It could easily have gone the other way.

Apple are saying the machine will likely be delivered sometime next week.  I’m hoping for sooner rather than later, of course.

As a side note, Apple have already started spamming the email address I gave them with advertising, without even waiting to actually deliver the product I ordered.  I certainly understand how this happens, but nevertheless it ticks me off.  It shows an unflattering eagerness to inundate me with advertising when a company doesn’t even deliver the product before firing up their advertising on my email address.  Even worse, there appears to be no way to tell Apple “Please send me email related to products I’ve purchased (and which you’ve actually delivered), but spare me the unrelated crap, thanks.”  You’d think that Apple would do better.

Several folks have asked questions about what motivated me to switch.  I’m not interested in engaging in some point by point feature comparison, and in any case, that’s not the way the decision was made.  I just set up the borrowed Mac G5 quad, and started trying to use it.  The first day was frustrating.  All of the frustration was getting to know the Mac interface and the available Mac software tools; in all other respects I just plugged the Mac into a surge suppressor, connected it to my network, and things Just Worked.  The Mac automatically found every network connected printer on my network. The Mac, without any hassle, seamlessy integrated with my file servers. 

The second day I was happily using the machine, without much thought.  By the end of the first week, I was regularly going to the Mac to do things instead of using my laptop or my big desktop machine.  Now, close to a month after I borrowed the Mac G5, I’m hoping that Apple has underpromise and will beat their delivery date by a lot.  I’d really like to be doing the bulk of my computing on the Mac platform right now.