Droplets in Photoshop CS5

Every photo I upload to Flickr goes through a watermarking process. To do this, I created a watermarking action within Photoshop (started this in the CS3 days). These actions can be 'converted' to so-called droplets. These are 'shortcuts' you can place on e.g. your desktop. Every image you drag onto this droplet gets opened in Photoshop and the preconfigured actions are applied.

This worked in Photoshop CS3, and CS4 (after some modifications to the original action). But in Photoshop CS5 the droplets won't execute. The action itself runs smoothly within Photoshop, but when you export it as a droplet, the action won't start. You have to start the action manually.....

I even tried to create an action / droplet from scratch in Photoshop CS5, but that one won't run either when I drop a JPEG on the droplet. This is a reason for not upgrading to CS5 on my main machine (which also still runs Leopard for compatibility reasons).

According to the online Adobe Photoshop CS5 helpfiles regarding droplets, the droplets should still function. So I write this of as a bug in the initial release of Photoshop CS5.

HDR Processing in Adobe Photoshop CS5

The new CS5 edition of Adobe Photoshop has refined the HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing. Now, you won't need the Photomatix plugin (in theory).

After selecting the 'Merge To HDR in Photoshop' option in Lightroom, the images get exported to Photoshop and it starts doing its magic. Normally (in the earlier versions) you would end up with a 32-bit image, but now you have the option of manipulating the 8 or 16-bit version of the image. Just like in Photomatix.

Photoshop CS5 HDR interfaceInitial experiences are not really positive, but that can be related to my experiences with Photomatix. A quick glance at the controls available, it should be able to produce similar results.
Talking of Photomatix; The plugin used in CS4 won't work in CS5. You need to download the CS5 version of the plugin at the HDRSoft.com website (Mac / Windows). The new version is universal (32 and 64-bit), free of charge to registered users, and works only in CS5.

One thing I didn't expect was that Photoshop started downloading a lens database from the Adobe website during the creation of the HDR. No idea if this is used in the HDR creation, or that this is done only once and used in other Photoshop CS5 plugins / filters

SafeSign and Apple OSX Snow Leopard

Last week I got an e-mail from one of the product managers @ AET Europe regarding the availability of SafeSign / Tokenlounge for OSX Snow Leopard.

The content of the e-mail wasn't very encouraging.... It seems that the Snow Leopard of SafeSign / Tokenlounge release is delayed by a bug in the Apple Keychain;

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We use systemkeychain -T to create a login keychain (for a new FV user) associated with our token. When trying to unlock this newly created keychain during login with the smartcard, we get prompted with the "unable to unlock login keychain" panel - as you have observed -.
This is basically our main concern, as this was perfectly running under 10.5. Any idea why the system wants to update the login keychain password, prompting the user with that panel???

What we have discovered beside, is that when you click Create New Keychain on that panel, the keychain gets encrypted with the PIN of the smartcard instead of the RSA key, which is a major security issue (Same behavior if you click Update Keychain Password)...
You can easily verify this last issue by removing your smartcard, launching Keychain Access and entering your PIN code to unlock the keychain...

Once again, we didn't have this kind of problems with Leopard.

As long as this issue isn't resolved, there will be no version for Snow Leopard. The (security) risk is just too big.
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So, we need to be patient, and wait till Apple solves this. In the mean time, when you need the SafeSign software for your every day work, you shouldn't upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Check the follow-up on the original SafeSign post for the availability on the Leopard version of SafeSign / Tokenlounge.

Creating Panoramas for the Web

I intend to create several panoramas during my next holiday, so I'm investigating the possibilities for presenting them on my website. Several pieces of software are under investigation, and so far Zoomify is the only one which is relatively simple to operate.

AutopanoGiga is probably the buggiest software I've used (it crashed almost every other panorama), but creates the best panoramas in my opinion. Better than PTGui, but that one is 100% stable. Somehow you can't have everything :-)

The other pieces of software for creating interactive flash/QuickTime movies from panoramas are:

• AutoPanoPro / Giga with the AutopanoTour as the flash export module
• Pano2VR

Results (read: experiments) can be found on my Panoramas page in the Photography section of this website.

Note that the Zoomify versions are stored on a sub-domain outside of the SquareSpace domain. Since the sub-domain hasn't the best of up-time, you might be looking at a relatively blank page. The reason for this is a silly limit on uploading ZIP files to the SquareSpace backend. These ZIP files may contain up to 100 files. The entire Zoomify environment contains over 6500 files, and I don't feel like uploading these by hand....

If all goes well, the Pano2VR panoramas will be stored on the SquareSpace backend, and therefore be better accessible.

Apple Released OS X Update 10.6.3

Apple released the .3 update to Snow Leopard (10.6) today. You can find this update under the Software Update menu, or on the Apple website as a single (combo) download [.dmg].

The update was ~450MB, and took about ten minutes to install. After the reboot everything seemed to work fine. Some applications (I guess the ones that got updated) reverted back to their default settings. E.g. Firefox wasn't my default browser anymore, but NetNewsWire was still my default RSS reader.

I also thought that QuickTime X (how I dislike that app....) reverted back to its default settings, since my pr0n..... euh movies started opening in different windows. Since I can't find a Terminal command for this on the Internet, I guess that I'm mistaken on that. I might be confusing the excellent QuickTime Pro v7.x with this piece of whatever.
There are no visible enhancements on QuickTime X

An annoyance that got fixed is the deletion on SMB shares (Windows 2003 Server). Without the update, the files got deleted, but the directory they were in stayed behind. When you tried to remove this directory, you got this fancy error code.

The important pieces of software that functioned properly after the update uncluded:

• Adobe Photoshop CS4
• Adobe Lightroom v2.6
• BBEdit v9.2.1

Anyway, (more) updates will follow when I run into unexpected behavior.

Nikon Learn & Explore iPhone App (part deux)

It took them long enough, but they finally released the Nikon Learn & Explore app for the iPhone in the Dutch iTunes store. I'm still wondering why it took them a couple of months to do so.

Enough negativity for now. Initial impression is that it gives you something nice to read with excellent (example) photos. No matter if you're just starting or a more advanced photographer, there's always something to learn (and explore).