Fire bush

Las Campanas, Chile (Jan 9, 2006)

Since I am back I have been working on the 500+ photos I have shot in Chile. Of these photos maybe 20% are good enough to deserve a second look, and probably not more than a few % of them will end up printed in this blog.

Handling this relatively large number of images needs some kind of organization. Until now I have always classified my images manually, using some clever sort of folder structure on my computer, and then opening only the “keepers” for final processing. This time, however, I am experimenting with the beta version of Adobe Lightroom, to see if it may be worth the expense.

So far I have seen both the good and the bad.

The good is that the program is quite useful to organize large numbers of RAW data files, do basic adjustment on them without the need of opening them individually in Photoshop, tag and do searches on them, rename them as something meaningful according to the shoot date, and create automatically the data structure I was using before.

The bad is that it is still buggy software (is more like alpha software, rather than beta) and it has the tendency of eating up all my RAM and create huge swap files (virtual memory cache) on my computer. It seems that the problem is that Lightroom tries to create full size thumbnails of the whole database, and that sucks up a lot of CPU and memory. I hope they will optimize this, as I am running the software on a laptop, with the photo database on external disks served by a remote computer on my home network. The other bad thing is the Photoshop integration, that is almost non-existent. To edit an image in Photoshop, Lightroom first creates a TIFF version of the RAW file, that is added to the library, and then the TIFF image is opened in Photoshop. This is quite silly, because a new TIFF is created each time you open the same image in Photoshop. Much better would be if the image is opened without being first written on the disk, leaving to the user the freedom to save the modified image back on the library, or not, to avoid the proliferation of huge TIFF files for each failed processing attempts. I don;t want to have n TIFF copies of each image I process saved in the same directory as the original images. I want to save only the one final processed file I like, in a separate location with processed images only.

These two problems are apparently the subjects of many discussions at the beta tester online forums, so I hope they will be fixed to make the product usable. Anyway, I am interested in knowing what is your solution to deal with the pile of images you produce in your photographic activities...

The image above is yet another bush, fire red in the sunset light, I saw on top of the cerro Las Campanas, in Chile. The moon was just rising as the sun was setting (being an infrared observer I always get “bright” night with the moon, as opposed to “dark” moonless nights used by optical astronomers that cannot remove the sky glare from their images and spectra). Looking at the photo now, I wish I had my tele-objective with me, as I could have zoomed in on the moon from a distance, to get a larger image on the moon compared to the size of the bush.