Category Archives: Windows

Why an iPhoto user should consider Adobe Lightroom

Posted on by

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.

Selecting a Good Printer

Posted on by

Icon-Printer02-BlackPerhaps one day we’ll all be at the point where we no longer need to depend upon printed documents. That day make come along soon but it certainly isn’t today.  I’m often asked what kind of a printer should I have to use with my computer. That depends a lot on what you intend to use the printer for.  There are a number printer categories available today on the market. Each one depends a little bit on what you intend to use the printer for as its primary use. I’m going to cover some things to look for in a printer regardless of type of printer you want.

First off let’s talk about some things it’s very important to look for printer regardless of which category you are interested in.

Network Connections

Regardless of what type you choose, it needs to be network compatible. That typically means either a Wi-Fi connection on the printer or at least an Ethernet cable connection.  Wi-Fi connected printers are very handy because you can put them literally any place you need them. Ethernet connected printers are often more stable to be able to keep connected.  If your printer is going to be located close to an Ethernet port, always use the Ethernet connection. If not, Wi-Fi will have to do.  Even if you intend on plugging the USB cable into the printer from your computer, look for a printer that contains networking. Things change and it’s very easy to move the printer if it’s network compatible. If it’s not compatible with network connections it’s almost impossible to move easily and without additional cost.  Have a networking on a printer is usually a very small additional cost.

 AirPrint

If you own any type of an Apple iOS device, having a printer that supports airplay is a great idea. AirPrint gives you the ability to be able to print from your iOS device directly to the printer. The printer needs to be connected on your network but other than that it’s all automatic.

Color vs Black and White

If your main printing needs to print business documents choosing a black-and-white only printer will save you money. Black-and-white only printers today are typically laser printers. Toner cartridges are less expensive per print than the liquid inkjet cartridges.  Color printers on the other hand are available in either inkjet or toner-based laser varieties.  Laser color printers will typically be less expensive if you print a lot of color pages. But laser color printers are typically only used for business color documents. If color matching, or photography printing is important to you you probably need to go with inkjet.

 Separate Color Ink Cartridges

Some color printers have three colors that are all included in the same ink cartridge. Purchasing color ink this way means that if any one color runs out you’ll need to replace the entire cartridge. I highly recommend if you’re looking for a color printer to find one that uses separate color ink cartridges for each color. These printers typically cost a little bit more upfront, but you will end up paying less in ink down the line.

Photo Printers

It’s generally acknowledged that for printing photographs, the more colors the printer supports the better off the print will be. I typically recommend looking at a printer that has independent ink cartridges of multiple colors if I want to print photographs. The more colors the better.

 Printer Types

Now that we’ve covered some of these general areas of things to look for, let’s look in a little bit more detail a different printer types.  As I said above, today’s printers come in typically either laser or inkjet style.  Laser printers used toner and inkjet printers use liquid ink.  Each of these different printer types come in many different styles.  Printers today can be available in a printer only variety, or what’s typically call an all-in-one device.  All in one devices usually combine a printer and copier and a scanner.  Sometimes they also include a fax machine but this is not always the case so if a fax machine is important make sure that you find a printer that includes that is a feature.

Most consumer printers today are available as all-in-one devices.  People typically want to have a single device that can do all of these referral functions for them.  This method often saves money and gives you the ability to be able to do these things that are not often done without having to have a special device to do them.  Today, scanning is not used as often as it had been in the past.  More and more documents are available in digital format and as a result of having to scan in a paper copy is not used.  Some of these consumer all-in-one devices have the ability to scan photographs very well also.  If that’s important to you be sure to look for a scanner that can handle a high enough resolution to ensure your photos are captured with high fidelity.

There are many different brands of printers available on the market today and I am often asked which type or brand is best.  I think I can say that I’ve seen good printers from nearly every manufacturer and I’ve seen bad printers from nearly every manufacture too.  If you make your printer selection based upon the functions you want to perform, most manufactures printers will do a fairly good job.

I will say, if you’re looking to print higher-quality photographs. I would recommend looking at an Epson printer or Canon printer.  Both of these manufactures doing much better job of color matching than other companies.

With all that said, here are couple of my favorite printers on the market today.

 Screen Shot 2013-05-21 at 4.33.36 PMBrother® MFC-J4510DW Inkjet Color All-in-One Printer

I recommend this printer as a general work horse home printer.  It has a ton of features and it doesn’t cost a fortune.  It is also one of the only printers on the market it prints the paper sideways.  This makes it possible to print up to 11 x 17 sizes with ease.  The color on this device is good but not the best but for general printing this is a good one. 

Screen Shot 2013-05-21 at 4.35.38 PMCanon® imageCLASS® MF4880dw Mono Laser Multifunction Printer

I really like the Canon ImageCLASS printers for black and white only printing.  This one is a multifunction laser device that is quite fast and has great quality.  If your primarily print documents for business, you can’t beet the quality of a good laser printer.

 

Screen Shot 2013-05-21 at 4.37.40 PMEpson® Artisan® 1430 Wide-Format Printer

This is a color wide format printer that produces great photo quality images.  It is only a printer (as most higher end photo printers are) but it makes up for features in the great quality you get for photos.

There are many great printers on the market today.  I usually till people to take a look at the weekly ads from Staples and Best Buy and see what’s on sale. Just because of printers she doesn’t make it great, but very often great printers are sold at a discount price through these ads on Sunday.

Hopefully this gives you a few ideas of what to look for in a new printer. Printers are not things we need to buy too often, because they typically last longer than the computers that we used to print from.  But when the time comes, be sure to get the features are your really interested in.

 

Microsoft Office 365: Is it time to lease your office space?

Posted on by
Reply

office1Microsoft Office is still the standard for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. Many people will argue that there are better application alternatives than these products and to some extent that may be true, but if you have a need to share files in an office environment, Microsoft Office is the place you need to be.

Cross platform users know this because Office is available, in one version or the other, for both Windows and Mac operating systems. For the most part, Office files are interchangeable between platforms as long as you run the current version of the product. But Microsoft see the future of it’s cash cow applications a little different that we have looked at it in the past. Microsoft wants to lease you your office.

Microsoft’s latest release of office is called Office 365. Office 365 includes the familiar Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with many new features that help you create, communicate and work even more efficiently from virtually anywhere. In addition to updating the traditional Office suites, we’ve developed brand new subscription versions of Office for home and school, specifically designed for the way you use Office today. Each of these subscriptions include the latest versions of Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, for PC or Mac plus offerings such as Skype world minutes and online storage with SkyDrive. This new version of office is a subscription service rather than an outright purchase. Microsoft still allow you to purchase your copy of Office if you like but the pricing of Office 365, particularly if you have more than one machine in the family makes it a much better deal in the long term.

For example, a year of Office 365 costs a home user just $99. For that cost, they can load office on 5 PC’s or Macs. If you purchase the lowest version of office for Mac or PC, it costs $139 for just one machine. But for the yearly fee, you get more than just 5 copies of office.

Subscribers will also receive future rights to version upgrades as well as per-use rights office 2across multiple PCs or Macs and select mobile devices . The Office applications you can use across PCs, Macs and other devices varies by platform just as they do for the purchased versions. If you have an active Office 365 Home Premium subscription, and available installs, you can install Office applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook on your Mac. And you can load Office on your PC that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher,and Outlook. Not only that, you can load it on a total of 5 machines.
Current Office application versions for Office 365 are Office 2013 for Windows and Office 2011 for Mac. Customers with an active subscription will be entitled to the newest versions when available.

Each active Office 365 Home Premium subscription is also entitled to 60 Skype world minutes per month, which can be used to make Skype calls to phones in over 60 countries /regions and 20gb of space on Microsoft Skydrive, their cloud based dropbox alternative.

[stextbox id=”info” caption=”Does It Make Sense for Me?” color=”000000″ ccolor=”ffffff” bgcolor=”e3e3e3″ cbgcolor=”000000″ bcolor=”b7b7b7″]
credit-card_moneyLet’s say you have one Mac and two PC’s. On one of the PC’s you need Office Professional for Access.

Office Professional – $399
Office Home – $139
Office Mac – $139
Total investment in Office – $677

If there are new office versions every three years –the trend recently– in three you will have invested $677 by purchasing Office. But in year 4, when the versions update, you invest another $677 to stay up to date. For that same $677 you can stay completely up to date with Office 365 for those three years for just $297![/stextbox]

You don’t have to use a spreadsheet to realize that if you want to keep up to date with Office, and you have more than a couple machines in your household, $99 per year becomes a bargain very fast. Many people will balk at the thought of leasing this software but it you take a few minutes to chart your needs versus what the costs will be, you mat just find out that Office 365 is a real deal for your family.  Read more about Office 365 on Microsoft’s Website.

New Logitech Keyboards can Light Up Your Life

Posted on by
Reply

LK MacKeyboards are a matter of taste and preference. I still run in to a few people, usually older now, that pine on about the teriffic IBM keyboards of the early PC era. But keyboard technology has moved on to provide a much better yet different experience.

I have tried many keyboards over the years. Some better than others and had basically settled on using an Apple wireless keyboard with my Mac and a Dell wired keyboard on my PC. All of that has changed with a new entry in the keyboard space from Logitech.

The Logitech Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboard and the Logitech Bluetooth® Illuminated Keyboard K810 are nearly twins. THe feature set is exactly the same for both units with the major difference bring the keyboard layout. The Logitech Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboard has a keyboard layout for the Mac with Mac control and command keys in the correct locations while the Logitech Bluetooth Illuminated Keyboard K810 has a keyboard layout for a PC with a windows key in the correct location. The other differences between the two are color with the Mac version sporting a bright color and the PC version a smoked aluminum color.

With the differences described above, the rest of the functionality is common to both keyboards. One of the best features of these units is the ability to press one button to switch in an instant between your Bluetooth devices. Logitech allows you to quickly toggle between typing an email on your Mac or PC, to taking notes on your iPad, to replying to a text on your Phone. Thats right, the keyboard can be paired to 3 different devices at the same time and switch between the devices with a simple press of a key on the keyboard. Think of the possibilities.

With a single keyboard you can move from your PC to your ipad and then to your AppleTV all without any repairing or making any setting changes. If you travel with your spouse, each of you could have your phone paired to the keyboard and trade the keyboard back and forth as needed throughout the trip. Or better yet, the keyboard could also be paired to your computer at home so that you just pick it up and bring it along when you travel. How cool is that!

These keyboards have another feature that I really like. Being an Apple laptop user for years, I have grown accustom to the lighted MacBook keyboards. I love to get that additional light from the keys to assist me in typing in a darkened room. Well Logitech has provided that same keyboard, behind the key, lighting in this keyboard. Now weather at home in a dark room, or on a darkend flight, you can get that lighted keyboard experience for your iPad or Android tablet. The illumination automatically adjusts to suit the light conditions in the room. You can also manually adjust the brightness of the illumination using the F5 and F6 keys. A motion sensor detects your hands as they approach the keyboard and turns the backlight on/off to help you save power when you are not typing.

You charge these units with the included USB cable and you’ll enjoy between 10 days and up to a year of power, depending on the intensity of illumination and time spent typing. As a plus, particularry when you travel, there is an On/Off switch to ensure the keyboard does not come on in your travel bag.

Both keyboards are priced at $99 so it is definitely not the least expensive keyboard you can find, but if it is used for 3 devices, the cost doesn’t seem too bad.

There is lots more to like about these keyboards. Check out Logitech’s website to read more about the Mac version or the PC version