Dropbox

Dropbox is an online storage service that finally does it right. Once again wary of yet another online storage service I signed up for their free 2GB storage account to check them out.

The sign-up is simple enough and they give you a program to download to your computer. This program synchronizes a folder on your hard drive with Dropbox. When the program starts up it makes sure your Dropbox folder is synchronized. Since you can install Dropbox on many computers, this is a great way to make sure you have the latest version of a file at all times!

Lets say you’re on a computer without the program installed.. Maybe a hotel or friend’s computer. Your Dropbox can be accessed by web and you can upload and download with ease. There is also a public feature and you can select files to share with friends and family.

The folks at Dropbox are kind enough to offer free accounts with 2GB of storage and paid accounts with higher sizes. Sure, 2GB isn’t much space any more (I have more space in my cellphone) but I certainly have about a gig of files that I want to have access to at all times and I admit that sometimes I forget to grab my Flash Drive when I leave the house. This service for me may prove very valuable, all my important files will be with me anywhere there’s an Internet connection.

Security.. Their website says that all servers are encrypted and even employees of Dropbox are not able to access files and directories. Sounds good to me.

Overall, the service appears to be solid and stable. For me, I would never use over 2GB so I can’t justify paying Dropbox for a 50 or 100GB account. Sorry guys, I just don’t have that much stuff I need with me at all times. Security looks rock solid and well, I think it’s much more secure than a Flash Drive. Are your files password protected or encrypted on your Flash Drive? What happens if you lose it? There you go.. If you have files that you need to have with you at all times and most of the computers you use are Internet connected (which ones aren’t anymore?) check out Dropbox.

Link: Dropbox.com/GetDropbox.com

When I first saw the Bokeh demo I figured it would quickly leave our minds as quickly as it appeared. I also thought – Hmmmm great, one less thing pro body shooters have over the good old point and shooters. So I grumbled a bit but the video stuck in the back of my mind.

What is bokeh (as a term, not the program)? Simply put, Bokeh is the look of your out of focus areas of your image. Of course it is much more, but for the purposes of this review, that’s the simplest explanation.

'Hot Air' - After Bokeh

I’m lucky to have almost every lens I could want at this moment in time (minus some very long or very specialized and thus very expensive glass) I have been thinking about picking up a tilt shift. Well over $1k US for the lens I want. I don’t mind an expensive glass purchase for something I would use regularily – the 400mm 2.8 L IS and the Tilt Shift lens would rarely see any real action to justify the purchase.

I watched the video again – hmmm, this could be something very interesting. Of course the video made it seem like magic, I patiently waited for the demo release and today there it was. Alienskin Bokeh demo 1.00. I downloaded it, installed it, loaded up a recent photo that would look good with a little more background separation.. The Alienskin window just sat there, my image inside with a complete blur over the entire field. I fumbled around with some sliders and buttons. Nothing. Oh man, don’t tell me I have to mask off everything before entering the program. Rats.. I guess nothing will ever save me from masking and selections. Yuck.

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I don’t like upgrading, I really don’t. If you’ve seen an error on the site earlier this was because of the upgrade. Which really is always easy to do. Backup your site, upload the upgrade files, run the upgrade. Done. Well, so far so good that is. Who knows where I’ll have modified files that were lost in the upgrade and need to be put back.

Don’t know why I needed to put my Akismet API key back in. Hmmmm.

So until next time, we’re back up. And I really dislike the changes to the Dashboard.

Well, once again it seems that Adobe cheated us in CS3 – we’ve been begging for Conditional Actions in Photoshop for years now. What are Conditional Actions you may ask? A Conditional Action would be an action that is smart enough to handle if conditions. Lets say you have a folder of Landscape and Portrait oriented photographs – you would either need to run your action on them separately or use ImageReady. ImageReady you may ask? Where is it? Adobe decided to do away with it in CS3. So let me get this straight, now I don’t even have the option to go into it and run Conditionals. Nice.

I must say that I have never had the need to use ImageReady since I upgraded to CS3. Wow, I’m shocked that it is gone. Now how will I make my blinking, fireball, dancing baby animated gifs for client webpages? This is truly upsetting.

Oh well – awesome Photoshop community to the rescue! Sivaratnam Gunaratnam has created a script for Photoshop CS2 (which works in CS3) that lets you set a basic conditional. Now this is not the end all script to solve the problem, but it sure is a lot of help. Right now Siva’s script will let you set one conditional and if the condition is met run an action in your action palette. If not, run another action in your action palette (or no action at all). You can set conditions like height/width (is, is not, greater than, not greater than), file type, file size, RGB/CMYK, filename, exif, etc.. Recently I’ve been using ‘If Height is not greater than Width’, which is your basic way to differentiate between Landscape and Portrait images. Pretty clever.

Okay, you still need to create two sets of actions for this. One for each condition. I have an action that resizes my landscape oriented images and an action that resizes my portrait oriented images. It would be very nice to still have conditionals like ImageReady used to have so I can have one Action for each condition, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Lastly, some features commonly found in actions are just not available in the script. For example, changing the file name, overriding save actions, etc.. You *MUST* record the action to save to a specified location. Not too big of a deal, I have a folder on my scratch drive that the script dumps images into, I rename them first inside of Bridge, run the action, they get funneled into this folder and I move them out.

So, if you want conditionals – check out this script. Siva says a version 2 is in the works, but like most unpaid projects who knows when we may see it. I’d be willing to throw some green to the project to see a new version with a lot more features, but even more, I’d like to see Adobe finally get on the ball and give us Conditionals within Photoshop!

Thanks Siva!

Link: http://sivaratnam.googlepages.com/

I saw a trailer for a game from Majesco Games that looked great. “Wild Earth: African Safari”. The trailer starts off with a Mom and kids sneaking up to the television in an attempt to photograph wildlife on Safari. Suddenly a lion charges them, Mom clicks a button, the lion is captured on film, everyone falls back on the couch and laughs (I guess you can’t be eaten on a Wii game). Further in the trailer you are told to ‘Photograph animals without disturbing their natural habitat’. Wow, a nice eco-conscious game that doesn’t pull any punches. The trailer actually shows animals hunting for the kill and dragging prey back to the pack. Another screen shows multiplayer action where one person drives a vehicle while the other photographs the action. I wonder what kind of zoom you get?

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I was asked, begged, bribed to release this program so here it is. If you read my Eye-Fi review you know what it is. Latest Viewer is a quick and dirty program that looks at a directory every five seconds and it displays the newest JPG file. It comes with absolutely no warranty or guarantee. This version (which is essentially still in ALPHA) was created around my needs and setup. It takes a Canon Small JPEG which is 1728×1152 and reduces it in size about 80% to fit on screen. Larger files may be too big on the screen, smaller ones will be small. Non-widescreen configurations may suffer some edge/corner loss since this was created for use on a widescreen laptop. Future versions (if there is interest) will include many more options. Automatic resizing of any sized images to any screen configuration.

NOTE: This zip has been virus-scanned and is just an executable, does not require an installer. The whole thing needs to reside in C:\eye-fi and whatever device you are using must be set to dump its files to that directory. I have only programmed the whole thing to look at times. It does not differentiate between AM and PM. For example, files shot in the morning at 9am will be seen by the program to be newer than a file shot at 1pm on the same day. To get around this, when you break for lunch, move all the files you’ve shot out of the C:\eye-fi directory. If you are using Eye-fi, be sure to turn off the feature to save files in dated subdirectories. I have set the package to expire in a year. If I (or anyone else) doesn’t have anything better out by then, I’ll do a full release of the program. I plan to build onto the code. Note that no matter what orientation you shoot in, be it Landscape or Portrait mode. The program displays the image in Landscape mode. Until I can write something that looks for orientation data in EXIF this is how the program is. If you shoot mostly in portrait mode, turn your monitor on its side. It will only read files with the extension of .jpg and not .jpeg! Not compatible on Mac and I highly doubt I will ever create one. If you have comments, questions or know of another program does this better please let me know. Latest Viewer was created because I could not find a program that would display the newest file in a directory.

Download Latest Viewer v0.1 here

Press ESC to exit the program!

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