Last week, I mentioned a new feature that came with the latest version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. At the time, I hadn't had time to work with it. Now I have and it's every bit as useful as I thought it would be. Panoramic views are some of the most dramatic images a photographer can create because they're extremely wide or extremely tall. And despite the advances in phone-based cameras, panoramas are still better when created with a digital SLR.
But they were hard to create. Note my cautious use of past tense.
The images I used for the panorama comprised a dozen pictures made at The Wilds. I didn't use a tripod and, no matter how steady your hand, it's all but impossible to create a perfectly aligned series of photos.
Lightroom can match objects in multiple images to create the panorama, but the result will often be significant areas with no pixels. You'll see them at the top and bottom of the image.
The Panorama Merge Preview dialog now features a Boundary Warp slider setting (0-100). As you adjust this setting, Lightroom intelligently warps the panorama boundaries to remove undesired areas of transparency.
I generated a panorama last summer and was pleased with it, so I decided to see if Boundary Warp would be able to improve it. The feature can be used in conjunction with Auto Crop. When you select Auto Crop, Lightroom crops transparent areas at the end of the combined images. Boundary Warp minimizes or eliminates the transparent sections.
Here's a side-by-side comparison that shows the difference. Last summer, the panorama had large areas with no pixels at the top and I had to crop much lower than I wanted. With Boundary Warp, those areas are filled in without adversely affecting the rest of the image. As a result, the final crop can be considerably higher and display more of the sky so that the image is balanced that way I intended it to be when I created the images.
I placed a line near the bottom of the pictures to align the tour bus. Last year's image is on the left. Notice how much of the sky had to be cropped away to eliminate blank areas. With Boundary Warp, I was able to maintain much more of the sky. Other features introduced into Lightroom between last summer and now allowed me to make the sky more dramatic and to make the other colors more intense. These side-by-side images show the extreme right side of the full panorama.
Here's the full panorama:
My 2015 attempt (top) compared to the 2016 version (bottom)
Merged panoramas generated by Lightroom have also been improved by the addition of meta-data that is compatible with the Photoshop Adaptive Wide Angle filter. This filter can be used to correct apparent distortions caused by using wide angle lenses. Sometimes this kind of distortion occurs in panoramas. The intent is to straighten lines that appear curved in photos taken with fish-eye and other wide-angle lenses, but it also works with panoramas.
The filter detects the camera and lens model and uses the lens characteristics to straighten the images. Adding information to the resulting panorama makes using this filter easier with merged images. Here's how the Adaptive Wide Angle filter works. The adaptive wide angle filter dates back at least to Creative Suite 6, so this is not a new video:
The video is by Nicole S Young, a food & stock photographer living in Seattle. She is an author with Peachpit Press.
Certainly the specs are impressive for the Synology DiskStation DS216+, but at $300 or more for a network attached storage (NAS) box without any disk drives, they should be. It's billed as a high-performance 2-bay NAS server for home and small office users.
Performance will depend on the disk drives a user chooses to install, but the hardware inside promises the fastest performance possible from any installed drives. Synology says that the NAS system can do more than just share files across the network. "Home users can transcode and stream high quality video to all of their devices," according to information from the company.
What's inside: An Intel Celeron Processor N3050 with encryption provided by Intel AES New Instructions (Intel AES-NI). The combination is expected to exceed 111 MB/s reading and writing. The DS216+ can perform on-the-fly H.264 4K to 1080p video transcoding and the company says this makes it a contender for streaming multimedia files.
The NAS device is available now, but be sure that you budget the cost of 2 disk drives to put inside the case. Expect to pay another $300 for a couple of disk drives such as 4TB Western Digital Red drives that are intended to be used in NAS devices.
The device uses the Btrfs file system. Btrfs (B-tree file system) is based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle that Oracle Corporation designed for use in Linux starting in 2007. Btrfs can provide self-healing storage because of the way copy-on-write works. It also includes automatic defragmentation, on-line balancing for better speed, and various other advantages. For more information, see the Btrfs article on Wikipedia.
No tools are required to install disk drives and the device allows drives to be swapped without powering the system down. The DS216+ includes front LED controls and SATA, USB, and Ethernet connections.
For more information, visit the Synology website.
Claiming excessive drive failures, a law firm representing Christopher Nelson has filed a class action lawsuit against Seagate. Some of the evidence for the trial, if it occurs, will come from on-line backup provider BackBlaze. The company regularly publishes disk drive statistics and has described a high failure rate for Seagate 3TB drives.
The suit was filed on February 1 in the US District Court for Northern California. In the suit, Nelson says that he purchased a Seagate Backup Plus drive in 2012, but the drive failed catastrophically and without warning two years later. Nelson was unable to recover data from the drive, but Seagate replace the drive with a refurbished unit. That drive failed less than a year later.
In fact, Seagate no longer sells that model.
What's interesting here is the decision to use data published on the BackBlaze blog. The blog has carried several reports about high failure rates experienced by Seagate drives. As a provider of on-line backup services, BackBlaze uses disk drives in a manner that's somewhat different from the way drives are used in most homes and offices. Drives in such an environment would be expected to fail faster than drive in a more forgiving environment.
The blog describes failure rates for various brands of drives. The 3TB drives in general seem to have a higher failure rate than other drives and a post written late in 2015 says that 4TB drives are less likely to fail: "4TB drives, regardless of their manufacturer, are performing well. The 2.10% overall failure rate means that over the course of a year, we have to replace only one drive in a Storage Pod filled with these drives. In other words, on average, a pod comes down for maintenance once a year due to drive failure. The math: 2% is 1 out of 50. There are 45 drives in a pod, so about once a year, one of those 45 drives, on average, will fail. Yes, the math is approximate, but you get the idea."
Statistics Based on 49,056 Hard Drives. Chart provided by BackBlaze.
The law firm Hagens Berman has posted information on its website for those who want to be a part of the class action suit.
The failure rates reported by BackBlaze for the Seagate ST3000DM001 were unusual. They were considerably higher than normal and the distribution was odd. All but 6% of the data center's Seagate 3TB drives failed and the remainder were taken out of service. Seagate's 3TB drives used just 3 platters while most other manufacturers used 4 or 5. Seagate claimed high reliability for the drives, stating that only 1% would be expected to fail in a year.
And they won't take NO for an answer. Actually Microsoft will take NO for an answer, but then they'll ask again. And again. Starting this week, Microsoft began pushing Windows 10 to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 machines. Users still have the final word, but Microsoft will continue to recommend the update.
As do I, for that matter. Any computer that can run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 can run Windows 10. The new version is more secure than any previous version, but you've heard that from me before. Some people just don't like change and don't want to give up the operating system they know for one that doesn't behave quite the same.
Windows 10 has been accepted far faster than Windows 8 and considerably faster than Windows 7. At least 200 million devices worldwide are now running Windows 10 and even enterprise customers are showing interest. About three quarters of enterprise clients are actively testing Windows 10.
For those who don't want Windows 10, you can just say no. Microsoft will just ask why. Not literally, but the intent is there with the "recommended" upgrade. This applies only to consumer versions of Windows, the ones you'll find at home and in smaller companies. It does not apply to enterprise versions.
Microsoft says that users can stop the installation by changing the Windows Update settings. That keeps the upgrades from installing automatically, but Microsoft will still ask. If you decide to go ahead with the installation and decide you don't like it, or if you accidentally install Windows 10, you can still get back to where you were. Users can roll back to their previous version of Windows anytime within a month (31 days).
Many Windows 7 and 8.1 computers have been factory configured to install recommended updates automatically. This means the setting called "Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates" will be selected. That is Microsoft's recommended option, and mine. Microsoft says that users with these computers will have the upgrade pushed to their machines starting now. How soon Windows 10 will arrive isn't clear. Microsoft says this is a "phased roll-out", meaning that it can show up any time from now to some nebulous future time. And if you have a computer that doesn't meet the hardware requirements for Windows 10, you won't receive the upgrade. That said, Windows 10 will run on just about any modern computer.
Computers in large organizations don't receive free upgrades and system administrators can set Group Policy settings on computers across the network so that the update will not be installed. IT managers also have the option to set a special Registry key that prohibits the upgrade from installing.
A new cloud technology company says it will give the Internet a grade once per month to report on overall privacy. Mezzobit says it will monitor data collection, consumer tracking, and security on the top million websites to calculate the Data Transparency Index. The index is intended to provide an objective barometer for 5 key areas of Internet data operations along with an overall composite score.
Data security and privacy are of concern to consumers, corporations, and governments according to CEO Joseph Galarneau. "We see headlines every day about this," he says, but "there's shockingly little reliable information regarding what's happening across the global Web."
Mezzobit will scan websites and examine transactions. The company says that its index will reveal how consumers are treated when they visit popular on-line destinations -- specifically what data is collected about them by which companies and how website visitors are tracked.
A former editorial director of Consumer Reports, Kevin McKean, is an advisor to Mezzobit. McKean says the Data Transparency Index "should be a wake-up call to the industry that Web and mobile sites need much better control over their data collection processes and partners."
The first survey was conducted in December and the overall score is 42, which is an important number for anyone who knows anything about technology -- particularly those who have read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Full details regarding the Mezzobit Data Transparency Index can be found on the company's website.
