iLife '06 is $71 on Amazon

Amazon (follow the Macintouch link to get them some money) really does have exceptional prices and rebates on Apple products. I wonder what kind of deal they've done with Apple. Amazon.com: Apple iLife '06 (Mac DVD): Software is $71! That's only $11 more than the educational price.

I have my iLife on order, but I expect it to be well worth the money. Apple makes transaction revenue on iPhoto use and through the tie ins between iLife and .Mac -- so they can afford to sell this cheaply.

iWeb review - MacWorld

MacWorld is publishing their through their iLife reviews, the iWeb First Look is the best introduction to the software I've come across.

They have reviews on iDVD and iPhoto. The iPhoto review is probably the best documentation we'll see for a while. Overall, great work by MacWorld.

The educational price for iLife is $60, so I broke down and went for it. It will hold me while I wait for Aperture to improve.

Sigma 17-70mm for APS-C dSLRs

Sigma 17-70mm lens for digital SLRs: Digital Photography Review

This is a replacement for the standard lens that ships with Nikon or Canon lower end dSLRs. I suspect it will cost @ $300 or so, but there's no price data yet.

It's for APS-C, not full-frame dSLRs (Canon owns the full frame dSLR market).

I don't know how the 3x4 (consumer cameras mostly) vs. 2x3 (film and almost all dSLR) ratio-wars will turn out, but I think the full frame 35mm sized sensor will become very rare. For better or worse APS-C feels like the new standard for 2x3 sensors.

Smugmug: just use sRGB and be happy

SmugMug is a digital photography site that serves both pro and amateur customers. They review the pros and cons of color profiles and come down on the same side of every intelligent review I've read -- use sRGB for printing.

I take that to the next logical step -- unless you really, really, really know what you're doing, use sRGB as your working color profile. Here's what they wrote. I had not seen the references to photo printing papers vs. ink jet printing. I wonder if the newer non-ink printers change their answers? (emphases mine)

smugmug - help - srgb versus adobe rgb 1998

The box of crayons you're given for displaying photos on the web is called sRGB.

There are other color spaces, such as Adobe RGB (1998), but no Windows-based browser can display them correctly. The Macintosh browsers Safari and Internet Explorer can, but only under unusual circumstances not seen in everyday browsing. [jf: probably if you change the color profile for your monitor to Adobe]

To your right you see the same photo displayed in sRGB (above) and Adobe 98 (below). You'll notice the Adobe version is washed out and pixelated in some areas. There is no way around this problem other than to convert your files to sRGB.

... In theory, Adobe 98 is broader, encompassing some colors sRGB doesn't, like the pure cyan in HP's original logo. In practice, for photographic prints, it offers fewer colors.

Suppose you take an art class and the teacher gives you 3 boxes of crayons: 256 red ones, 256 green and 256 blue. She calls them Adobe 98 and you notice some spiffy colors that the poor guy next to you doesn't have. He also received 256 red, 256 green, and 256 blue crayons, but they're labeled sRGB. [jf: 256 sound familiar? That's our old friend, 2**8. Aka 8 bit color space.]

The teacher then drops a bomb: you're not allowed to use the outer rows of crayons in your boxes because she thinks they're too gaudy for the landscapes you'll be drawing today. The person next to you can use all his crayons because none of them represent those gaudy colors. Now who has more crayons at their disposal?

Photographic paper and chemicals do not allow you to use all the colors of Adobe 98. For that reason, the sRGB tide has swept North American printers. The top labs, such as whcc, MPIX, EZ Prints (our lab), Shutterfly (whom we used to use), Kodak, Fujifilm, Photobox, Costco, Snapfish, Wolfe's, etc., all expect your file to be in sRGB and if it isn't, your prints will look washed out.

Yikes! What colors do I give up?

In our experience, 99 of 100 prints we see are completely represented by the colors of sRGB, including stunning landscapes on exhibit in galleries and shows. We've all been viewing photographic prints for decades and are often in awe of the vibrant colors we see in them. In addition, virtually every stunning photo you see on the Internet is painted with the colors of sRGB, because it's the only choice.

If a specific area of the shot is not covered by sRGB, such as day-glo colors, color substitution occurs when you or your camera creates the sRGB file. Rare is the person with a fine enough eye to notice.

Then... What's Adobe 98 good for?

Ink jet prints. Certain ink jet printers that have many ink cartridges can paint colors photographic prints cannot. In fact, some ink jet printers span so many colors that photographers use ProPhoto RGB. Also, many companies who print brochures and other offset-press materials may ask for your files in Adobe 98.

But Adobe 98 has the same number of crayons as sRGB, so by reaching out to more colors, you're sacrificing fine increments that are so important in shadow detail, for example. Not true of ProPhoto RGB, which unlike Adobe 98 and sRGB, is a 16-bit color space.
[jf: So it's not worth fussing with Adobe 98, but sometime in the future ProPhoto RGB might be of interest. I think JPEG can't handle that color space, but DNG certainly can.]

How do you answer the experts who disagree with you?

Here are two well-intended statements from great authors that have ruined the prints and online displays of many good photographers:

If your work is destined for print, then sRGB is a very poor choice indeed.
— David Blatner and Bruce Fraser

sRGB is fairly ghastly for photographers. I wouldn't even recommend it for web designers.
— Scott Kelby

... The practical reality is the web can only display sRGB files and 99% of commercial prints are produced through labs that only accept sRGB files.

Q: I've seen examples online of Adobe 98 files that show more color range than sRGB files.

A: These are terribly confusing to most people because they are sometimes offered by respected names. Every example we've seen, however, displays sRGB files pretending to be Adobe 98 files, because sRGB is the only display option on the Internet.
[jf: I'm not sure this is entirely true, though they repeat it often enough. I think Firefox respects color spaces, and IE 7 probably will. OS X Tiger and Safari do well.]

No less an authority than Rob Galbraith did that in an article on Microsoft's site.

Q: The printer I've used for years accepts Adobe 98 files. Why don't you?

A: We are considering doing what they do: converting your Adobe 98 files to the narrower color space the printer/paper/chemicals can handle. Converting from a broader color space to a narrower one involves decisions about color substitution. If you've read this far, you're probably fussy about color. Do you really want to lose control of those decisions?

The last statement is interesting. They're saying sites that claim to accept Adobe 98, so as to attract discerning customers, are in fact slyly converting to sRGB on the back end. Hmmm.

Martian SlingShot - OS X file synchronization

TUAW reviews an OS X Tiger (10.4 required) sync application:

Martian SlingShot - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) $30

This little gem of an application allows you to keep two folders on different Macs (on the same local network) in sync, using a schedule.

Why would you want to do this? Well, perhaps you have a folder full of documents that two people in your house need to use, set up one Mac as the 'publisher' of that folder using SlingShot and the second Mac as a subscriber and you're all done.

I'd like to sync my iBook to one of my iMac folders, but the iBook runs 10.3.9. I suspect this app uses the SyncServices built into OS X Tiger. (Apple uses them for .Mac synchronization.)

PictureSync: speed uploading

This OS X app works with iPhoto and covers Smugmug, Flickr, Shutterfly (the ones I use) and more. Not to mention FTP and export to folder.

PictureSync

Easy photo-sharing and annotation

PictureSync is a convenient utility that simplifies batch uploading your photographs and video clips to online services, - directly from your image-management application or files, whilst preserving your own valuable annotations and metadata.

It's easy to upload, the trick is the metadata. I'll try this. It's free to try with some nags. $14 to buy. The author is redoing it completely -- but I know that can take a long time.

Inspiration on the Palm

I earlier noted that the almost forgotten application, Inspiration, has a version for Palm, PocketPC, Mac Classic, OS X, and Windows. I think that's some kind of record.

I tried the $30 Inspiration/Palm version (free 1 month trial -- pretty good!), and I synchronized it with the desktop on Windows. The synchronization is a bit awkward, but not too bad. There's a menu item in Inspiration that lets you open the PalmOS Data file (.ihf). Then you save it to your desktop data folder (.isf). If you'd like you can export it back to the Palm (save as .isf). I had to read the manual to figure out how to get started; it's not very intuitive but really the PalmOS doesn't make this easy [1].

On Windows the PalmOS data files are saved in a rather unusual spot. Depending on how you browse to it you see two different paths, so I assume it's some virtual directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Inspiration Handhelds\jfaughnan
or
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Inspiration Handhelds\jfaughnan

I'd never messed with this "shared documents" folder before, but it's evidently there for a reason.

So making the sync work takes some discipline. It's not like 'Desktop To Go' that theoretically keeps the desktop Word document and the Palm document automatically synchronized. I'd prefer something that didn't require thought, but given the limitations of Windows this is probably as good as one can do. (I didn't try this on my Mac because I still sync my CLIE to the PC - my wife tend to hog the Mac.)

Inspiration/Palm works surprisingly well on the CLIE's relatively high res screen. The images are crisp and I can get quite a bit on there. The Outliner is very simple to use. I like the graphical view better than I'd expected.

Inspiration doesn't have the glitzy output of MindManager (though I'm not sure MM does much more than Inspiration), and it's not nearly as powerful an Outliner as OmniOutliner, but this mega-cross-platform stuff is pretty interesting. I hope they are able to make the jump to Intel, but frankly the app is very speedy and would probably run ok with Rosetta. I'm going to be using it for a while and I expect I'll buy the Palm version.

[1] The Palm software was built for Windows 95, it was never redone to adjust to NT/2K/XP's multi-user model. This causes no end of problems, including making this sort of thing hard to do.