thechrisproject photography

First, the printer. My first foray into printing my own pictures has been the HP B9180. So far, I’ve been very happy with it. I still have some difficulty printing from Lightroom or, well, printing with anything other than HP’s Photoshop plugin. I recently upgraded my home machine to the much awaited Photoshop CS3 Extended and found that the HP plugin doesn’t like to play nice with it. In fact, it won’t play with it at all. After some searching, I found a solution online.

As an aside, I’d like to mention that dpreview.com has the worst forum software ever. Searching for “cs3 b9180″ brings up a dpreview thread high in the results. Take a look at that page. The conversation that people are having there isn’t threaded very well. You can only see one reply at a time! It’s quite the pain in the ass.

So one of the posts there led me to this post on photo-i, which has the brilliant solution: copy two files out of your old Photoshop directory into their analogous locations in the CS3 directories. I’m glad my CS2 uninstallation didn’t delete those files. If yours did, or you never had CS2, you can download the .msi installer for the plugin and manually extract the two files you need. The beginning of the photo-i thread has instructions on how to do that.

Which leads me to print permanence.  The much esteemed Wilhelm Research has released print permanence ratings for the B9180 and they look pretty good.  On HP Glossy Advanced paper, the unshielded color print scored 102 years.  230 years under glass and 250 under UV filtered glass.  Black and white prints had much better longevity, scoring 230, 250, and 250 years, respectively.  I’ll tell you what: that’s good enough for me right now.

Next: Picasa. In the beginning, I used Picasa. It was Good. It was fast. I could look through thousands of pictures in seconds. It didn’t render large previews on import, but it rendered them pretty quickly when you wanted them and the search… well, it was a Google search: fast and good enough. I really liked Picasa for quite some time. I used it to post pictures to my now-defunct Blogger blog. I uploaded galleries to my Picasaweb site. When I got my new XTi camera last winter, I was horrified to find that Picasa didn’t support it. Digging into the Picasa Support group, I found that people had been reporting the same problem since September! I posted and discussed and waited for another month or so, using Adobe Bridge in the meantime. Bridge was slower, but the previews showed up.

Eventually I gave up all hope on Picasa and began looking at other programs, including iViewMedia Pro, Breezebrowser, and Lightroom. Lightroom tickled me right, so I purchased it and didn’t look back. Until today. I had a number of pictures from a friend’s party that I wanted to put online. I generally add pictures like that (high volume, low development time per picture) to Picasaweb and set them to private. This allows friends to see them and keeps all the quickie pictures off my Flickr stream. While I was uploading the set of pictures (which I had already made into JPEGs via Lightroom), I asked Picasa to check for updates. It found one, installed it, and then opened again and started importing my XTi’s CR2 files without the pinkish hue.

I’m glad they finally got around to fixing this, but I’m definitely not switching back. The other main issue I had with Picasa was that there isn’t a decent filtering/ranking system. When I’m going through 700 shots, there needs to be something other than 1-star/no-stars and tags. You can work around it by creating tags that imply rankings, but it’s a hack and it’s not convenient. Being able to hit a single key to rank an image is very important when you have hundreds of pictures to go through.

In the end, the problem is this: Picasa just isn’t aimed at me. When I bought a new DSLR and started shooting thousands of pictures a month, I guess I just jumped out of their target demographic. The thing that irks me is that they do so much right. Browsing and searching speeds are amazing. The development controls are enough to prepare a bunch of snapshots for an online gallery. You can do white balance, contrast, cropping, and many other things with amazing ease and speed. If only Adobe could match the speed, they’d have the killer app in Lightroom.

So, that’s my tech update. Here’s a picture for your reading effort:

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