Category Archives: Mac

Perfect Photo Suite Offers Low Cost Focused Tools for Photographers

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PPS BoxesPhotoshop: the gold standard for photo work is a terrific piece of software.  People who know the ins and outs of Photoshop can do literally anything they want to enhance or fix a photo.  But that’s the problem for us mere mortals.  Photoshop is not simple to learn.  It requires years of experience to get good at.  That is part of the learning process for someone in the photography industry but many people like myself need something to give us some of those dramatic effects possible in Photoshop without the large time investment.  Even Adobe sees this in its Photoshop Elements program that adds recipes for a number of these photographic effects.

There are many people who end up in the middle.  They have mastered organization programs like iPhoto or Picasa and want to take that next step.  One good place to start  is with Lightroom, as I have written about before.  But even Lightroom has its limitations particularly if you want to make changes to a portion of an image rather than the entire image.  There are a lot of good tools to assist you in these next steps including a few plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom but OnOne Software has a tool set that not only gives you some needed enhancements, it integrates with the tool you may already use.

Perfect Photo Suite 7 includes modules that allow photographers to focus on specific needs with tools that are created specifically for that workflow.  These include, Perfect B&W to develop black and white images, Perfect Portrait for easy portrait retouching, Perfect Effects and FocalPoint for creative effects, Perfect Mask for replacing backgrounds and Perfect Resize for image enlargement. This toolset also allows for a layered workflow without Adobe® Photoshop®, so you can combine the best parts of multiple photos, create composites, and quickly retouch portraits and landscapes. All of the products in Perfect Photo Suite 7 work together seamlessly as integrated modules to assist you in creating the images you envision.

With Perfect B&W you can achieve classic black & white looks instantly with a library of expertly crafted effects or customize your own unique look using powerful, darkroom-inspired controls that replicate old processing techniques. Enhance tone and contrast by boosting shadow and highlight details or bring back a touch of selective color. and control the exact appearance of your image using a set of adjustment brushes.  With Perfect B&W, you’ll infuse the artistry of black and white photography and create your own masterpiece.

Perfect Portrait lets you improve skin texture and color, remove blemishes, and enhance eye, lips and teeth. You’ll find that it’s never been so easy to create terrific  portraits

Perfect Layers lets you enjoy all of the benefits and creative power of a layered workflow, allowing you to combine, composite, and blend images—all without Photoshop.

Perfect Effects provides an easy, fast and powerful way to create images with impact with Perfect Effects 4. Choose from a robust library of photographic effects to add professional looks to your photos instantly, including the popular HDR and retro looks. You can also recreate the look of film and darkroom techniques, add glows, vignettes, borders, and correct common photography problems. With the ability to stack, combine and blend effects, and paint in effects to specific areas, your creative options are endless.

Perfect Resize, formerly known as Genuine Fractals, increases image size faster and without the loss of sharpness or detail that you might normally expect. The same patented, fractal-based interpolation algorithms that were in Genuine Fractals are at the heart of Perfect Resize with several improvements. Faster processing speeds, new presets that optimize clarity and detail of different image types, built-in output presets, and the redesigned user interface add to the power of Perfect Resize.

With Perfect Mash you can create high quality masks quickly and easily with new automated functionality and powerful tools. Automatic Background Removal, Drop and Refine Brushes, and clean-up tools make selecting subjects and isolating backgrounds for removal extraordinarily accurate.  You can create some amazing effects using this tool that really make you subject pop.

FocalPoint can create realistic selective focus and depth-of-field effects you would think could only be done in camera. Choose from a selection of lens presets to produce a specific effect or adjust controls to adjust the amount and kind of blur you want. You can even paint in sharpness or blur exactly where you want. It has never been easier or faster to focus your viewer’s eye and minimize distractions. This is like choosing you lens for the shot from an infinite lens bag and doing it after you take the shot.  It is really very cool.

Many folks will say, I can do all that in Photoshop.  Sure you can if you know how and want to spend the cost of using (not owning) this tool on a monthly basis.  You can even do some of these effects in Photoshop Elements or Lightroom but I will say you can’t do them as easy as you can with this toolset.

PPS PlatformsPerfect Photo Suite 7 is designed to meet specific workflow and budget needs with three different editions. It may be used as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, or Apple Aperture, and also works as a standalone. You simply choose the method that works best for the tools you already use.

Now for the best part.  These tools are truly inexpensive.  The complete professional suite for every workflow. Works with Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, and as a standalone is just $199.  The same toolset for your Lightroom or Aperture workflow and as a standalone is only $129.  If you don’t have Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, or Apple Aperture, a stand-alone only version runs just $79.  Perfect Photo Suite is available for Windows or MacOS and offers a 30 day free trial from the company’s website.

Pro Photographers will scoff at the need for tools like this but those of us with ambitions for some of those Pro looking effects  in our photos but without the time to dedicate to learning advanced Photoshop techniques will grow to love this toolset.  When you can produce the look you want from an image, photography takes on a new light for you.  These tools are a great bulb to help turn on that light.

How do I update Java on my Computer?

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Screen Shot 2013-07-19 at 3.20.48 PMQ: My Windows computer got a message that her Java version is obsolete and needs to be updated.  Is that safe and good to do?

A:  Java ia required for many applications to function properly.  Java allows you to play online games, chat with people around the world, calculate your mortgage interest, and view images in 3D, just to name a few. It’s also integral to the intranet applications and other e-business solutions that are the foundation of corporate computing.

Updating it is fine but I would do it by going to the Java Control Panel in Windows. This way you can be sure it is the actual Java software doing the update and not some web site masquerading as a Java update.

I would also turn off Check Automatically and then press Update Now.  This allows you to have more control of when the updates are done and ensures you do not get continually interrupted by the update requests.

Q:  What about on the Mac?  Does it use Java too?

Screen Shot 2013-07-19 at 3.26.59 PM

A:  Yes it does. On the Mac, at least to provide Jolla updates. But in mountain lion, Apple has deferred job updates back to Oracle who owns the Java code.  On the Mac, Java is also controlled by a  system preference panel.  From the Apple menu, select system preferences.  Near the bottom, you should see Java.

From the update tab you can see whether Java is up to date. If not, you can also update from there.
For either platform, you can download Java from Oracle.

Maybe it’s time to Upgrade your Flash Drive…

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lexar_S23_groupI got this advertisement in the email today and it made me think….

New USB 3.0 drive stores and transfers content faster

Spend less time waiting for your files to transfer with the new Lexar® JumpDrive® S23 USB 3.0 flash drive. Transfer a 3.3GB HD video clip in less than 90 seconds, 13x faster than the 20 minutes it takes using a standard USB 2.0 drive.*

One of the smallest USB 3.0 drives available, the slim, retractable JumpDrive S23 comes in colorful capacity options—from 8GB to 64GB—giving you a handy color coding system to help you organize your drives and their contents. And it’s backwards compatible, so it even works with all your USB 2.0 devices.

I can remember the trials of burning files to CD.  I even remember 360K floppy drives.  That takes you back.  Then floppies got bigger to 720k and 1.44mb.  We moved to 100mb zip drives and then 250mb.  Not to forget the orb drive too.  But today, file storage is as easy as a flash drive.  Easy and inexpensive.  Sure, the future is storage in the cloud unless you get somewhere with poor internet speed or god forbid no internet at all.

lexar_usb3_transfer.2When I saw this add, and checked Amazon’s price for these, it has become clear that faster is definitely better when the price remains low.  Sure, not everyone has a USB3 port but they soon will.  SO maybe its time to update that flash drive you carry to a USB3 one and perhaps even a larger one.

Think about it…. What is your time worth.

HELP! “Mailbox quota exceeded”

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StacksThat’s the bounce back message your friends may see if you fill up your server based email box.  Just because you download your messages you cannot be sure that they are being removed from the server by default.

There are two types of email server systems in common use today.  These systems are referred to as: POP and IMAP.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)

IMAP is a protocol by which you can read email. IMAP allows you to view your email from more than one place. E.g. from your desktop computer at work and from your laptop at home and from abroad and from your mobile device – multiple locations.

IMAP keeps the messages on the server until it is told to delete them.  In a typical IMAP implementation, all the messages you see on your mail program are located on the server.  With IMAP you have a service provider imposed storage limit called a  quota. If you run out of space on the server you will not be able to download new emails into your account!

POP (Post Office Protocol)

POP is better if you have no need to check your email in multiple locations. If you only ever check your email on one computer at, then POP is fine for this purpose.  In most cases, when you bring the email message down to your computer, it removes it from the server.  But this is a setting and some people, in a hope to save everything they ever get in email, just in case, set it to not remove messages.  In these cases you can also see the same message when you run out of space.

Which one is better?

One big problem here is that not all service providers provide both types of email access to choose from.  Most services that are intended for use on phones, tablets, or computers, may only offer IMAP.  Examples of IMAP providers are:  Gmail, iCloud, Outlook.com, Yahoo, and AOL.  In the over al scheme of things, IMAP is a much more modern protocol because it, having a centralized storage database for mail, allows you to delete a message from one place and have it deleted from all your computers or phones attached to this mailbox.

But not every provider provides IMAP.  Many Internet service providers will only give you access by POP.  These are typically companies more interested in providing internet service than mail.  An examples of this is Mediacom, a local internet service provider where I live. These companies don’t want to provide IMAP because while it is much better for the consumer, it requires more server infrastructure to store these messages on their end.

How do I deal with “Mailbox quota exceeded”?

This depends on the type of account you use.

For a POP account, you need to be sure your mail client is set to delete messages from the server. Most mail clients are very similar in setting this up.  You need to go to the account settings and look for a checkbox that says something like” Remove from server after:” and provides some choices such as one day and one month.  One Month is usually a reasonable setting.  With this turned on there is often a “Remove now” button that will remove all server mail older than the one month setting you chose.  But don’t worry, with a POP account, if the messages are on your computer, even though you delete it from the server, it will stay on your computer.

For an IMAP account, it’s not quite as straight forward.  Since the messages on the server match those on your computer, the only ways to clean this up are to either delete messages, move them to a local folder, or increase your quota.

Deleting messages is simple but requires quite a bit of time since you need to make decisions on what is good to keep and what is not.  Be sure to empty the trash in mail to clear them out after marking them as trash.  Moving them to a local folder requires you to create a folder within your mail client and select messages from your inbox to copy to this local folder.  This then stores this mail on your computer and removes it from the server.  If the domain is something that you host of have control of, you can often go into the service providers cpanel (control panel) and increase the mail quota.  This is a little different for all providers so you might want to read their instructions before trying to do it.

The most important thing to keep in mind is to not be a hoarder.  Clean up your email and don’t let many thousand messages accumulate just because you don’t have time to go through them.  Setup up a junk filter and have these messages deleted immediately.

[stextbox id=”info” caption=”Setting Mac Mail to delete messages on a POP account”]

 

MacMailIn Mail, do the following:

Go to the Mail menu and select Preferences
Click on the Accounts icon and select the Advanced tab
Click the checkbox on for “Remove copy from server” and select “On Month” in the dropdown box below the setting
Now press Remove Now

Remove mailo dialog

[/stextbox]

Want to access your home web camera but your IP address continues to change?

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Screen Shot 2013-07-05 at 9.49.26 AMIn todays connected world, many people would like to be able to access their computer, DVR, webcam or camera system remotely without having to remember a confusing (and ever changing) IP address? DynDNS is a great option for those who need Dynamic DNS and Remote Access capabilities without any bells, whistles or fireworks.

What Does It Do?

DynDNS Pro allows you to assign an easy to remember hostname (such as yourname.dyndns.org) to your location’s IP address. By installing an update client on a device at that location, your hostname is automatically updated whenever the IP address changes, ensuring you can access your device remotely at any time.

Most internet service providers charge you extra to provide a fixed IP address that does not change. Others don’t make that an option at all. DynDNS allows you to get around those restrictions and still get access to devices in your home or business. This service works in conjunction with a good router or firewall in your location. THink of the router as the locking system for your internet. And DynDNS as map of how to get to your front door.
After signing up and paying a low one year subscription rate of $25, you download a small client piece of software that you run on your Mac or Windows machine. The software needs to run on a machine that will be left on all the time. This software senses your external IP address provided by your internet service provider and sends it to the DynDNS service. On the service you setup a permanent url with DynDNS as the access point for your network. An example might be http://myhouse.dyndns.org. The software you have installed on your computer checks for the actual IP address you are using from your service provider every 5 minutes. Lets say for example it is 100.120.130.140. It then tells the DynDNS service that the url ttp://myhouse.dyndns.org is at the ip address 100.120.130.140.

To access the devices in your location, you simply configure them for http://myhouse.dyndns.org rather than the ip address numbers. DynDNS does the network address translation to rout any requested traffic to your location front door. Once at the door, port forwarding on your router needs to be configured to provide the necessary secure access. This process may sound difficult but a networking professional could assist you in setting it up.

With a service like DynDNS you can get access to those security cameras, network storage devices, or DVRs easily from anywhere in the worls. When you service provider will not give you a fixed IP address for a reasonable cost, DynDNS can come to your rescue and make your connections work.

Firewire is Dead! Mac Users better get ready for it.

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firewire-logo[1]The IEEE 1394 interface, was developed in the late 1980s by Apple. Apple called this interface FireWire to put a more consumer oriented name to it. This interface is a serial bus interface standard for high-speed communications and synchronous real-time data transfer. Basically, we all know it as a method to transfer data from a storage device to a computer.

When firewire was first developed, the real competition was serial cable transfer or a brand new standard called USB. But firewire was hundreds of times faster than USB. This allowed firewire to become the standard for video camera data transfer as video moved into the digital arena.

Many Mac users were first introduced to using firewire with a video camera. A firewire connected video camera was an important part of Apple’s iMovie introduction because using this type of camera interface allowed the new iMovie software to not only load the video data but to control the playback of the camera. This was a huge advance from the need to press play on the camera and then capture on the computer. It allowed iMovie to become the standard for video production in homes and businesses world wide.

But firewire not only allowed video data transfer, it allowed data transfer of all types. Firewire harddisks became the gold standard on the Macintosh side of computing as people used the fast transfer ability to have quick backups and even use the external drives to run the operating system of their computers. Eventually, USB caught up in speed with USB2 but because USB was a shared bus system, slower devices or multiple devices on the bus reduced the speed to a crawl.

Firewire advanced to be twice the speed of USB2 but it never really caught on as the video camera industry moved to solid state memory and memory card storage. This left firewire to primarily a disk storage interface.

For years, I have recommended firewire to mac users (and PC users with a firewire interface) for harddrive storage. It has always had better throughput than USB2 and it was chainable so you could add an additional drive to the chain and get more storage.

Unfortunately, that time has passed. Apple has given firewire the boot in early June 2012 with it’s introduction of thinner machines. Firewire was already jettisoned from the MacBook Air since it’s introduction. At first, this was worrisome since USB performance just was not up to the large data transfer tasks. But with the introduction of Thunderbolt in Apple’s new systems, all that remains is availability of peripherals to put the nail in the firewire coffin.

Thunderbolt (originally called Light Peak)is an interface for connecting peripherals to a computer via an expansion bus. Thunderbolt was developed by Intel and Apple together. Thunderbolt provides a much more capable bus than firewire ever did and does so with blinding speed. But the technical capabilities will not kill firewire. The size of the connector is what has done that.

As devices get smaller, the space for a connector becomes precious. Firewire connectors are just too large for new devices while thunderbolt connectors are much smaller. Combine a better technical solution with one that fits and that explains firewire’s demise.

So for Firewire users world wide, it’s been a good run. Fortunately, Apple has introduced a Firewire 800 to Thunderbolt adapter to get us by until our firewire peripherals need to be replaced.  Firewire served us well but its time has come for the old parts bin. Faster connectivity is here with thunderbolt and even with USB3 to some extent. Don’t morn it’s passing but revel in the faster data transfers of the future.

 

Posted in Mac

Taking your Photos Beyond iPhoto

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Elements 1Do you want to do more with your photos than iPhoto can do?  Perhaps make some edits to the photo itself or a portion of the photo?  I previously wrote how Lightroom from Adobe might be an answer for your photo needs.  I believe for many people looking to move forward from iPhoto, it is.  But some users have a need to be able to edit a portion of a photo.  In that case, Photoshop Elements may be the right tool to use for this need.

iPhoto gives you the ability to make some terrific modifications to your photos.  If you need to adjust the color or saturation of a photo, it gives you great tools to be able to deal with these kinds of corrections.  But what if you need to make a change to the image itself?  Perhaps you need to fix the color of only a portion of the image.  To do this you need additional tools.

The industry standard for such work is Photoshop.  Photoshop gives a professional photographer the ability make nearly any change to an image that could be dreamed of.  But Adobe Photoshop is an expensive program that can only be obtained on an ongoing subscription basis at $29/month and it has a steep learning curve.

Fortunately, Adobe recognizes that the photo enthusiast cannot spend this much money to do minor edits to their photos.  Adobe also sells a product called Photoshop Elements.  Elements provide much of the ability to make modifications to photos that an amateur photographer might need.  In addition, they also provide additional tools that make typical modifications you might want to make even easier.  As good as iPhoto is, there are times it is just not quite enough and elements gives you those extra tools you need to save that all important shot.

Some of the great features in Elements include:

  • Cookie cutter tool
  • Smart brush tool
  • Photomerge modes, like Group Shot, Scene Cleaner, Faces, and Style Match
  • Guided Edits and Quick Fix mode
  • Automatically divide scanned photos when using a scanner
  • Photo creation templates for photo books, greeting cards, calendars, and more.
  • Easy online sharing options for Facebook, Flickr, etc.

Adobe sells Photoshop Elements for $99 in a box but you can often find it for as low as $69 from the at Amazon.  Elements is cross platform with the same license so it will run on Windows or Mac with no problem.

If you are looking for the next tool to put into your photo fixing bag of tricks, elements might just be the one for you.  At the lower cost, it is a great way to begin looking at serious photo editing and provides the easy to use tools to get those fixes right the first time.

To find out more about Photoshop Elements 11, check out the features from Adobe’s web site at the link provided.

Is this Spam?

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Here is a little trick to help you determine if an email sent to you is real or a spam email.  Most of these emails that make you question whether they’re real, include a web link in them. The web link is usually written out so that you can see the entire link.  People sending out spam have realized that if you see the link, and it looks real, the odds of you clicking on it are much greater. Your mail program gives you the ability to help determine whether those links are really real. If you hover over the link with your pointer or cursor, a link will pop up showing where that link actually really takes you.

Take a look at the example below:

Screen Shot 2013-06-11 at 8.04.13 PMThe link in the above email looks like it goes to a page at Amazon.com. But when I hover over the mail you see that it’s actually going to a completely different place. By hovering over the link before you click it you have the opportunity to determine for yourself whether that email is probably spam, or a real email that you need to address.

 

Why an iPhoto user should consider Adobe Lightroom

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LR LogoiPhoto is a terrific image catalog.  It stores your photos automatically and you don’t even need to think about where they are going or what format they are in.  Apple does a terrific job of making iPhoto easy to use for the novice.  But once you are past the novice stage, iPhoto trails off in its features to other image software.  Some may say that Aperture from Apple is your next option but Apple has not revised it in years and it is getting quite long in the tooth these days.

Many people who have come to this place in their electronic photo life ask me if they need to get Photoshop to be able to move forward with making changes and manipulations to their images.  Photoshop is a terrific professional image editor that certainly could be in their future.  Unfortunately the high cost of Photoshop and the subscription use plan they have put in place makes going this direction too expensive for the hobbyist photographer.

Ok, so those people should get Photoshop Elements, right?  Elements is the consumer version of Photoshop that will do 99% of what a non-professional photographer need to do.  In fact, I expect many pros to revisit the elements tent now that it costs nearly $360 per year just to use Photoshop.  That may be a reasonable direction to go.  But I believe there is another option, Adobe Lightroom.

LR ScreenshotLightroom is a image catalog program similar to iPhoto.  It allows you to import images and store them, and then make manipulations to them in a non-destructive way.  Lightroom can also do much more to take you to the next step in your photo editing experience.

First off, Lightroom lets you store your images anywhere on disk you want.  You create the storage structure and you control what happens to those images.  The storage location does not need to be on your main harddisk like it does in iPhoto and it can even be on multiple drives on your computer or network.  Not only that, you can import your photos to Lightroom and then remove the drive the photos are on.  Lightroom 5, the latest revision, lets you still do edits to those images that get applied to the master the next time you plug in that drive.  How cool is that for a user with a smaller SSD harddisk!

Here are a few of my favorite features in Lightroom that make it superior to iPhoto for advanced image editing work:

Advanced Healing Brush

Do you have photos with dust spots, splotches, or other distractions and flaws that get in the way of a great image?  We all do.  With the Advanced Healing Brush in Lightroom 5, you can not only change the brush size but also move it in precise paths. Unwanted scene elements — even those with irregular shapes such as threads — just disappear.

Upright Tool

I thought the camera was straight!  Straighten tilted images with a single click. The new Upright tool analyzes images and detects skewed horizontal and vertical lines, even straightening shots where the horizon is hidden.

Smart Previews

As I mentioned above you can even work with images without bringing your entire library with you. Just generate smaller stand-in files of your full-size images. Any adjustments or metadata additions you make to these files will automatically be applied to the originals.

Location-based organization

You can find, group, and tag images by location, or plot a photo journey. It even automatically displays location data from GPS-enabled cameras and camera phones.

Highlight and shadow recovery

If you shoot in camera raw format, or even if you don’t, you can bring out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.

Fast cross-platform performance

Perhaps you edit photos on a PC at work.  You can speed up day-to-day imaging tasks and process images faster with cross-platform 64-bit support for the latest Mac OS and Windows operating systems.

Selective adjustment brushes

Expand your creative control with flexible brushes that let you adjust targeted areas of your photo for just the look you want. That detail in editing is tough in iPhoto.  Then you can selectively adjust brightness, contrast, white balance, sharpness, noise reduction, and moiré removal.  That’s nearly impossible with the limited edit tools in iPhoto.

These are just a few of the newer tools in Lightroom that make it a great addition to your photo edit tools.  The next thing is getting your images out of iPhoto.  Apple makes that possible, but not too easy.  The best method is to export your images, with adjustments you made in iPhoto to your disk.  I recommend setting up a structure for this.  Many people like their images in folders by date.  This is the common standard if you are coming from a PC and have photos.  I usually create a folder called Images and then have dated folders under it.  Lightroom can do the organizing for you if you just export the photos.  There are other ways of opening the iPhoto Library package and bringing out the images that way but this is a little detailed for this forum.  Here is a great New York Times article describing some of the issues.

There is also a great site with videos about Lightroom from Scott Kelby’s group that might want to take a look at to get a better feel for Lightroom before making a move.

Once your photos are out of iPhoto, you need to also be sure they are being backed up since this is the location that changes also get stored.

iPhoto is a great tool for people to manage their personal photos and for novice photo editors.  Adobe Lightroom is the logical next step for those that want to do more with photos.  Lightroom is available from Adobe as a part of its Creative Cloud subscription or as a standalone $149 product for Mac or PC.  Adobe offers a 30 day free trial and I highly recommend trying before you buy to see if the workflow matches your needs.

Need more Solid State Storage on your Macbook Air? OWC can Fix You Up

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Aura Pro DriveOne of the problems I saw when Apple introduced the Macbook Air was the lack of expandability.  Not only can you not upgrade the RAM in these machines, but you also cannot upgrade the solid state hard disk space.  Or so Apple claims…..

I use my Macbook Air when I travel.  It is a terrific companion that is light weight and powerful.  I have a 2011 model with a 120gb solid state drive.  For most of the time since I purchased it, I have been fighting the space issues on the solid state drive and wishing I had purchased one size bigger.  A couple of months ago, I had the need to run PC software on it so I installed VMWare Fusion and Windows 7 on it.  To do this I had put my disk on a serious diet.  I deleted enough to put the virtual machine disk onit but rather than having a machine that was close on harddisk space, I ended up with a machine completely out of space.  One of my thoughts was to replace it with a newer model with a larger SSD but that is expensive and the machine was still plenty fast for the work I do while on the road.

I ran across an ad for Other World Computing that claimed to have an upgrade for my 2011 MacBook Air’s SSD  to a larger size with greater 6G speeds so I had to check it out.  OWC has upgrades to 240gb and 480gb that are plug in compatible with the MacBook Air.  In addition they have a case where I can reuse the original SSD as a sleek new external drive.  With pricing for the 240gb version at $319 it was much cheaper than a new computer so I decided I needed to give it a try.

KitThe installation kit includes the upgraded drive, a tapered aluminum Envoy storage solution case, Torx T-5 screwdriver, and a Pentalobe compatible driver.  This was everything I needed to install this in my Macbook Air.  OWC even has detailed videos on their website describing the process.  With all the parts and my Macbook Air laying on a soft cloth, I setup my iPad and began the video.  Fifteen minutes and a dozen or so screws and I had the upgrade complete.  I then installed my old drive in the external case and began the data migration process.

EnclosureThe external case is USB3 but my 2011 Air is just USB 2 so it took about an hour and a half to migrate my data from my old drive in the external case to the new drive in my machine.  I did the migration using the restore utility inside Disk Utility.  It all went without a hitch.

It really feels good to have 110gb of breathing room on my hard drive.  It gave me the opportunity to put some of the applications back on that I was forced to delete to get VMWare fusion enough space back on the machine.  It also allowed me to move more of my data files I want for travel onto the machine and still have plenty of free space.

In the end, I spent about the same had I purchased the larger SSD in the beginning but I also now have a very fast, small and lightweight 120gb SSD drive in an external case.  Taking that into account, this was a much less expensive solution.

The question of it being faster with this new drive still remains. My Air was very fast to begin with so it is a little hard to tell if the drive is much faster.  The documentation leads me to believe it could be as much as twice as fast for disk reads.  Let me just say it is fast enough for the work I need it to do.

I would definitely recommend this solution for anyone with a Macbook Air and not enough free space.  OWC also has upgraded SSD drives for other macs that I believe are just as easy to install.  Overall, I am very happy with this upgrade.  Check out all the possibilities at the Other World Computing website.