Latest Lightroom news from Adobe

Latest Lightroom news from Adobe

LRCC2015splash

I’ve been teaching the latest version of Lightroom for the majority of this past week; mostly without a hitch. All-in-all, I’ve seen Lightroom 6/CC 2015 v2.1 working without any problems on 7 different machines; though these were all Macs running OSX 10.10 Yosemite so I can’t comment on PC or the dreaded El Capitan 10.11 OSX version.

I know lot’s of folk are still having problems with the existing release, and that a roll-back to v1.1.1 is still proving their option; but seeing as I manage to get v2.1 working without a hitch I suspect folk are not tidying up their systems before installation as much as they could – remove all traces of Lightroom and do a fresh install.

BUT…………yep, there is always one isn’t there!

Thousands have been moaning about the new, very different, and I have to say rather annoying Import Dialogue..

So the Latest Lightroom news from Adobe is that we can expect another update sometime very soon that will give us the old style import options back – WooHoo!

Tom Hogarty of Adobe made the announcement about 9 hours ago – you can read it here

Tom has been doing a lot of ‘back-pedalling’ and apologising to users on mass this week for the lack of beta-testing of the v2 release, and the new import dialogue options, or rather the lack of them.

He’s obviously never heard the old adage “if it ain’t broke DON’T fix it” !

Personally, I think Eric Chan should be put in the overall “Lightroom Head-Honcho” position over at Adobe – I doubt very much if this shit would have been allowed to happen if it had been so.

Adobe roughly means “house of mud” – mmmm………let’s hope it stops raining soon ehh boys!

For Mac users – I’ve still not upgraded to El Capitan 10.11 OSX.  If anyone has, and has managed to keep Lightroom CC 2015 v2.1 running, please can they let me know in the comments below.

Lightroom Crash Cured?

LRCC2015splash

Lightroom Crash Cure – hot-fix from Adobe

Adobe have now released a hot-fix for the Lightroom CC 2015/6.2 crash problem.

I applied the new patch to two machines and they both appear to be fully functional, but some people are still reporting problems.

The update should appear in your CC Apps panel notifications, or under Help>Updates.  If it doesn’t, you can try restarting Lightroom. I’ll tell you now that neither worked for me, so I manually downloaded the fix, so here are the links:

Mac 2.1 fix HERE

WinPC 2.1 fix HERE

If you are still having problems, please let me know.

And just to be clear, I have still NOT upgraded to El Capitan OSX 10.11.

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Lightroom CC 2015 v2.0 crash fix

Lightroom CC 2015 v2.0 Crash Fix

LRCC2015splash

Okay, there’s a lot muck flying around at the moment with regard to the latest version of Lightroom to be released by Adobe – CC 2015 v2.0 or 6 v2.0

Accusations of premature release because of Adobe Max etc aside, there is undoubtedly a problem, at least for Mac users, regarding v2.0 compatibility with the latest Mac OS – v10.11 El Capitan, and to an extent with the existing OSX 10.10

Now I have been doing a lot of Lightroom training and workshops so far this year, and I’ve been asked on more than a few occasions why I haven’t brought out any new tutorial videos.  Well the answer is quite simple – v1 iterations all seems to me to be a little ‘clunky’.

By that I mean ‘system load’ clunky – the actual GUI and general workflow and dev procedures are great. But I’ve always found it slow-loading, a little reticent to switch catalogues, and also sometimes very slow at recognising metadata changes and file derivatives from Photoshop, even though the edit commands had been issued directly from Lightroom in the first instance.

So I was quite hopeful when I heard we were to expect Lightroom CC 2015 v2…

Also, for a few weeks now, I’ve kept getting notifications from Apple about a beta 10.11 version of OSX – El Capitan.

Having been bitten in the arse by new OSX versions too many times in the past I decided to check out the ‘improvements/benefits’ together with any reported problems.  Seemingly (as of writing) this was a wise decision with regard to both Lightroom CC 2015 v1.1.1 and Photoshop CC 2015  – strange that so many folk globally didn’t think of doing the same!

I jumped from Mountain Lion to Yosemite – never went anywhere near Mavericks! As with most things in life I have the train of thought that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and I’ve found that this really does apply a lot to OSX upgrades – updates I take straight away; but changes in OSX I shy away from until all the bugs are ironed out.

Yesterday I did a Lightroom workshop at Calumet Manchester.  When I turned on the iMac that I use for these events I got a CC notification about updates to both Lightroom & Photoshop CC 2015.

Being the responsible twat that I am, I ignored the updates, seeing as I was about to do a whole day in Lightroom in front of witnesses!

And it’s a damn good job I did!

Once back in the office I did some checking about said updates and found that the ‘shit had hit the fan’ big-time – Christ, even “Queen” Victoria was saying not to take the upgrade!  On further reading I noted that a lot of the reported problems were coming for the most part from folk running OSX 10.11 – El Capitan….and Windows 10 too.

Being the eternal sceptic, I couldn’t help getting the feeling that a lot of what I was reading was like ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’ – so you can guess what I did next; yep, installed Lightroom CC 2015 V2.0 on my Mac Pro!

How wrong was I !

Working within an existing catalogue, everything seems fine on the face of it; it boots much faster and generally appears to be error-free.

But trying to export an image causes it to crash, and it can’t make new catalogues either, it just seems to ignore the process.

The simple fact is that the upgrade is broken – seemingly for all versions of OSX and for Windows PC users too.

So my advice is to NOT upgrade Lightroom from v1.1.1 (July 2015) and do not upgrade your OSX from 10.10 to 10.11.

Adobe are, as they say, on the case.

The Short Term Lightroom Crash Fix

But, if you are one the many poor unfortunate folk who HAVE updated to Lightroom CC 2015 v2.0 then do not stress (and this applies to PC versions too):

That’s it – you’ve now ‘rolled back’ Lightroom.

It’s worth going into the preferences panel to ensure the GPU Acceleration is turned off – this being the cause of the major faux-pas with the original launch!

From what I’ve seen of the new Lightroom I can say I’m impressed, and I certainly hope the official fix, when it comes, doesn’t kill off the apparent speed increase.

The Dehaze filter in the EFFECTS panel is still crap BUT it’s now become very useful in other ways – they’ve added it as a local adjustment within graduated and radial filters and the adjustment brush – now that will add some definite ‘plus’ possibilities for sure.

There’s a new look and layout for the import dialogue box with some big chunky ticks and crosses to make things a bit more obvious to the Lightroom ‘newbie’ as well as other bits ‘n bobs that may prove useful or not as the case may be.

But overall I like it – from what I’ve seen – apart from the fact that it doesn’t work right now!

I’m actually looking forward to the fixed issues version –  it may well turn out to be something of a seriously BIG improvement.

The new view when you click IMPORT in Lightroom CC 2015 v2.0

The new view when you click IMPORT in Lightroom CC 2015 v2.0 for the first time – some have suggested this is responsible for crashing v2.0, but personally I can neither prove or disprove the theory.

UPDATE – 06.02am Saturday 10/10/15

Last night Adobe released a hot fix to address the problems for Mac and Windows PC users – click HERE for more info and links.

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Prospec USB 3.0 card reader

Prospec USB 3.0 card reader.

A few weeks ago I decided that my Mac Pro4.1 early 2009 needed to be upgraded to USB 3, seeing as I’d not long since fitted it with an SSD for the OS – yes, I found myself in the mood to spend money; obviously I was unwell!

So I bought a 4-port expansion card from Mac Upgrades, installed it in the Mac and connected my 8TB G-drive – and all has worked perfectly ever since.

Being a mainly Nikon user, the XQD reader showed an instant improvement in transfer speed too, but for all my CF cards I was still stuck with my ancient Sandisk USB 2 reader.

I perused a few USB 3 reader prices in was left gasping – obviously I was now feeling a little better!

But then I spied this:

Prospec USB 3.0 Multi-Card Reader

Prospec USB 3.0 Multi-Card Reader

Twenty quid! That’s right, just £20 – bargain!

Real world read-speed testing using Black Magic, and 32 GB Prospec 1010x CF cards yield the following results:

  1. Sandisk USB 2 reader – 36.9 MB/sec
  2. Prospec USB 3.0 reader – 112.7 MB/sec

and just as a comparison, the Sony XQD reader and H-series card averages 139.2 MB/sec.

Previous blog posts have shown you that I’m a fan of Calumet Prospec CF cards; mainly because they are re-badged Delkins, and in my experience simply bomb-proof and good VFM.

I can’t say for sure without checking, but this Prospec USB 3 reader looks VERY much like a re-brand of the Delkin USB 3.0 multi-card reader, but is basically £10 cheaper.

It certainly sucks up uncompressed D800E 14bit RAW files at an impressive rate of knots I can tell you.

In my earlier Prospec CF card post I did allude to the slightly odd fact that the larger the CF card capacity was, the faster its read speed became.  I also bought a 64Gb Prospec 1010x, just to give the D800E more capacity for shooting HQ time-lapse – this card clocks a read-speed average of 119.8 MB/sec – basically 7MB/sec faster than its 32GB cousin.

Yes, there’s cards and readers out there that might yield faster results; but at what cost to your pocket?

But this level of “REAL WORLD” performance is plenty fast enough for yours truly – especially if, like me, you have short arms and long pockets!

You can view the product HERE – BUY one!

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Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.