Lightroom 5 Beta Now Available

Adobe is working on a new version of Photoshop Lightroom and the first public beta is available. You won't want to use this for any production work and the installer won't update any of your Lightroom catalogs, but you might want to grab the beta version for a test drive because some of the new features are remarkable.

The new version will have 6 key improvements and I'll mention all 6 of them but one really caught my attention.

• Advanced Healing Brush: This makes it easier to remove problems and fix defects, even when those problems have irregular shapes. Examples: Threads, utility wires, and dust spots.
• Upright: This is the WOW! feature. The one that has my attention. Lightroom has made it possible to make some of these changes manually, but now they're automatic. As the same suggests, you can straighten a tilted image with a single click, but it goes far beyond that. Upright analyzes images and detects skewed horizontal and vertical lines. You then choose one of the four correction methods and watch the magic.
• Radial Gradient: Lead your viewer's eye through your images with more flexibility and control. The radial gradient tool lets you create off-center vignette effects, or multiple vignette areas within a single image.
• Off line editing with Smart Previews: If I spent more time on the road, this would be a big deal. With Lightroom 5, you can work with small copies of your images and, when you return to home base and the larger images are available, the changes you made on the small images will be applied to the library images.
• Video Slide Show Sharing: Lightroom's slide show functionality has been improved again. That happens with just about every release. Now you can combine still images, video, and music to create HD videos that can be viewed on computers and smart phones.
• Improved Photo Book Creation: The photo book creation process continues to improve with more templates and the ability to modify templates and make them your own.

Get Yourself Upright

This is a photo of the office when I was having a problem with the desktop computer. I had pulled the notebook into service and decided to take a picture with a wide-angle lens. Vertical lines aren't vertical and there is clearly apparent distortion.

Click any of the smaller images for a full-size view. Press Esc to dismiss the large image.

The starting point involves enabling profile corrections.

Lightroom examines the photo's metadata to learn what camera was used and what lens was on the camera, then automatically makes some corrections.

The image is better already.

Lightroom offers 4 Upright options: Auto, Level, Vertical, and Full. Auto is usually the best choice but individual images might respond better to one of the other settings.

Notice how straight the lines are now.

You can still make some manual corrections if you wish. The camera wasn't positioned exactly straight-on to the scene, so a few additional (and very minor) corrections helped.

I was so impressed, that I went out in search of something that I could photograph badly and then correct.

I found this building and, as you can see, I tilted the camera up to get the entire building in the picture. As a result, the building appeared to be leaning away from me.

Lightroom made all the corrections. No manual modifications were needed. This is going to be a very popular feature.

When you install Lightroom 5 beta, the software will remain active through June 2013. Once the final version of Lightroom 5 is available, please follow the new installation instructions.

Adobe cautions that this release is a public beta, not a final product. "Neither the quality nor the features are complete yet. We want to show you our direction and get your feedback so that we can incorporate it into future releases. This public beta release does not include all of the features that will be part of Lightroom 5, but instead gives you a preview of some of the new features."

The download is available to anyone who wants to try it from Adobe Labs.

Learning What Your Camera Can Do

A camera is just a fancy box with a device that allows light to strike a sensitive surface, either film or a sensor. On the front, there's a tube with a lot of glass elements and that's the piece that allows the photographer to create an image that matches a vision. Ben Long's Lynda.com session on lenses brings the entire subject (excuse me) into focus.

Any photographer will tell you that it's the photographer who is responsible for making the picture and that, ultimately, it's not about the equipment. But a high-priced digital camera that allows more accurate shooting than a point-and-shoot camera helps the photographer. So does having the right lens. If you enjoy photography, you'll find all of Long's sessions worthwhile, and this latest one on lenses is particularly fascinating.

Beware, though. After watching, you might have a great urge to go out and spend a lot of money. The good news, though, is that Long will give you plenty of pointers here so you'll avoid buying the wrong lens and he has some suggestions for how to obtain specialty lenses that you need only occasionally at a low cost—no larceny involved.

Long is a photographer in San Francisco and he's also a writer and teacher. For the Lynda.com series, he's a natural because he seems quite comfortable in front of a camera while describing what goes on behind a camera. And technically this series is helpful because occasionally Long sets up the camera so that we can see on screen what he's seeing in the camera.

The series, which runs for just under 4 hours, starts with a description of what a specialty lens is (one that's longer or shorter than normal or has other special characteristics such as built-in swings and tilts) and then moves on to discuss wide angle, super-wide angle, and fish-eye lenses. This is followed by telephoto and super-telephoto lenses and then by what can only be called oddball lenses such as the Lens Baby or the Holga attachment. There's also an excellent section on close-up photography and macro lenses.

Throughout the course, Long attempts to reveal money-saving options such as close-up attachments instead of an expensive macro lens and how to duplicate in software the effects of a tilt/shift lens.

Each section begins with a down-to-earth description of the lens type. (You can hear Ben Long on the podcast.)

Ben Long on ultra-wide lenses:
"Ultra-wides are great for capturing huge sky full of clouds. Geometry is also a great source of super wide subject matter. In addition to letting you capture longer lines and bigger geometric objects, ultra-wides let you show relationships between shapes and objects that you might not normally see. No matter what lens you're using, you should always experiment with changes in point of view. But with ultra-wides, you can play a lot more."

Ben Long on telephoto lenses:
"The defining characteristic of these lenses is that they give you a tremendous amount of magnification power, making them ideal for shooting far away objects. You'll use super telephoto for times when you can't get close to your subject. Nature shooters and sports shooters are the most obvious candidates for this big lenses. But longer focal lengths also compress the sense of depth in your scene."

Ben Long on macro lenses:
"Technically, a true macro image is one that shows your subject at exact size. We refer to this shooting at one to one. An inch in your image corresponds to an inch in the real world. With the right lens, it's possible to go even closer."

The video shows each lens type in operation and how it can be used for creative effect. Long even touches on some important tricks, such as how to avoid the danger of having two filters lock together so solidly that you can't get them to come apart and, if you make that mistake, how to get them apart without resorting to the use of a large hammer.

I strongly recommend Ben Long's Specialty Lenses Program, and you can watch a few of the videos without subscribing just to see if you'll enjoy the rest of the program.

Lynda.com offers numerous programs on a variety of subjects and Ben Long's growing selection of videos about photography are particularly welcome. Ben Long is also on Facebook.

Short Circuits

Apple and Samsung Are Still in Court and Always Will Be

This is like the adaptation of the follow-up to the sequel of a Friday the Thirteenth movie. In November, Apple and Samsung will be back in court and Apple's attorneys will ask a jury to reinstate $450 million in damages from Samsung.

Earlier this year, US District Judge Lucy Koh reduced the $1 billion in damages that a jury had given to Apple by about half. Now the judge has set November for a re-trial in which Apple will argue that it deserves the entire one billion dollars.

Apple won its suit against Samsung last year when a jury concluded that Samsung had violated Apple patents in creating its Galaxy line of smart phones.

Also this week, Judge Koh rejected a request from Samsung to move the case to the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals even before the question of penalty has been resolved. In other words, you haven't heard the last of this case yet.

Separate from whatever happens in November in Koh's court or later in the court of appeals, another trial is scheduled for March 2014 for round 2 of Apple's patent suite against Samsung.

This should be great news for at least two law firms.

Newspaper Readership Isn't Up ...

... but it's not falling as quickly as it once was. A report by Christine Haughney in the New York Times this week provides a cautiously optimistic outlook based on digital circulation.

That is good news because, as much as some people like to talk about their disrespect of the media, newspapers have been the best source of vetted coverage. Few radio stations outside of public broadcasting even make any pretense about having news departments these days. Television news, even at the network level, tends to be more about ratings and less about information. So newspaper reporters continue to be the people that Thomas Jefferson was probably thinking about when he said "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

Haughney's article noted that overall there was a small decline in total circulation over the last six months, but digital circulation is rising.

Perhaps surprising and definitely encouraging is the fact that digital circulation now accounts for about 20% of daily readership.

The article is based on a report by the Alliance for Audited Media, which audits the circulation of nearly 600 (593 to be exact) daily newspapers. Overall, the readership decline was 7 tenths of one percent.

Haughney's report notes that The Wall Street Journal's circulation is the highest at 2.4 million (up 12.3% from last year). The New York Times is in second place at 1.8 million (up 17.6% from last year). USA Today's circulation dropped nearly 8% in the past year, putting it in 3rd place at 1.7 million. In 4th and 5th place: The Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News.

Readership figures include both print and digital subscriptions. Haughney notes, "Last week, The New York Times Company announced that paid digital subscribers to The Times and The International Herald Tribune had grown to 676,000 by the end of March." Read the full report on the NY Times website.

Apple, with $145 Billion in Cash, Borrows Money

Maybe someone can explain this to me. Let's say I had $5 million in the bank and plenty of cash flow to take care of my daily living expenses. Why would I ask for a loan? That's what Apple seems to be doing. The company has approximately $145 billion in liquid assets and now it's seeking to sell $17 billion in bonds.

$145 billion, by the way, is more than the gross national product of countries such as New Zealand, Ukraine, and Bahrain. More than the gross national product of the 100 smallest economies in the world, combined. Or, as the New York Times put it, enough to "buy every office building and retail space in New York."

Those who know more about high finance than I do (and that's just about everybody) say that it's a deal designed to make stockholders happy. Once upon a time, business decisions were made for business reasons. Increasingly, they seem to be made only to please stockholders.

Until this week, Apple was the only large company in the technology sector that had no debt. None at all. But last week Apple announced its first quarterly earnings drop in about 10 years. That, of course, led the pundits and Wall Street to near panic. You'd think they had just been told that they would have to install Windows 8 on their Macs.

So it appears that Apple will reward investors with a huge payout, a payout so large that it will drop the company's cash reserves to a meager $45 billion (or about the size of Costa Rica's gross domestic product). So of course they need the loan.

Apple will make these payouts to investors by paying higher dividends and by repurchasing some existing shares. That's made shareholders happy enough that Apple's stock prices rose about 10% this week.

Apple's future, while far from bleak, isn't as certain as it once seemed. For the past decade, Apple's profits grew annually by 10% or more. Even a high-finance neophyte such as me knows that rates such as that are not sustainable. Now that projections are in a more reasonable range (around 7% per year), investors have put on their sad faces.

If Apple pays out $100 billion and has $145 billion in cash, why does it need a loan? The answer, it seems, is actually straightforward. Only $45 billion is cash the company can put its hands on right away, so the company needs another $55 billion to make the payout.

Quick, Apple fans, buy something so you can please the investors!