@Randem

Apple just never ceases to impress me. This is another home-run. Go watch the video and see how huge this tiny little laptop really is.

A few weeks ago I got an iPhone and was unable to use it with my computer. Last week I got Adobe Lightroom and then was unable to use it with my computer. The time had come to do something about that. So Friday I went to the Apple store and I got OS X Leopard.

I was unsure if Apple was still supporting G4 computers, but I was able to find that answer on their web site: they are. What I was not able to find, however, was any indication that I could upgrade. In other words, I was not prepared to do a clean install and wipe out my computer. The representative at the Apple store confirmed that I could do an upgrade.

The upgrade process took nearly three hours, and used almost all of the 10GB of free space on my hard drive. I hadn’t expected that. But I’ve found some ways to recover some space, so that’s not an issue. In fact, there really aren’t any issues. It just goes in and works. All of the upgraded software kept my settings and kept on working as I expected.

The only thing that stopped working was the driver for my Wacom tablet, but Wacom has provided almost a dozen driver upgrades on their web site in the three years since I first installed it, and after downloading and installing the new driver, my tablet worked like a charm.

The new features, going from 10.3 to 10.5 are amazing, and seem to run quite well on my iBook, even if it’s not a dual core Pentium. And yes, I took a few minutes to play with the new features of the OS, but only a few minutes, because what I really wanted to do was play with Lightroom… which is awesome.

And what about the iPhone? No dialogs popping up when I plug it in. No device listed in iTunes. I think something must have gotten set to ignore the iPhone when I tried it on 10.3.9 and it didn’t recognize it. Time to Google it.

Last week I was talking to Matt Medlen about new Adobe products when he asked if I had heard of Lightroom. I had not.

We went to Adobe’s web site and watched the video demonstration, and I knew immediately that I had to have it. Photo editing software designed for photographers by photographers? They’re not kidding. It works exactly the way I do!

Where Photoshop can be thought of as a digital darkroom, offering all the tools you need to make a single photo great, it is unfortunately quite cumbersome for any task involving more than one photo, and its tools are extremely technical and powerful, but this comes at a major price of user-friendliness. Anything I want to do to a photo can be done in Photoshop, but it takes a great deal of time, and comes with a high learning curve.

Enter Lightroom. The first, and most important feature of Lightroom is that it is 100% nondestructive. You can edit a photo all day long without ever altering the original. This not only allows you to preserve the maximum original quality of the photo, but also makes possible some space-saving ideas like burning a session to CD, and then working with the photos right from the CD rather than having to use hard drive space.

Because the edits are non-destructive, they’re treated as a series of actions, and that brings to mind another killer feature of Lightroom: if you have a series of photos all shot in the same conditions (for example, low light), and you make the necessary edits to one photo, you can then highlight the rest of the photos and apply those actions to the entire session.

The cropping tool actually overlays a rule of thirds grid onto your photo to assist in finding the best crop. And better, if you have to correct the horizon, the crop is constrained to the boundaries of the photo, rather than having those triangle-shaped white (or black) strips of background color on each of the corners.

And another huge feature for me is that exporting the session as JPEGs does not force you to do a bunch of math in order to calculate dimensions. You choose a maximum width and a maximum height and click export, and it will resize your photos for you, to within your constraints, while maintaining your aspect ratio.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg, but it was enough to make me certain I had to have this software. So now I have it. Of course my iBook was running OS X 10.3.9, and Lightroom requires 10.4, so after it installed, it refused to run…