I’ve finally gotten around to something I should have done a log time ago. I have finally upgraded the graphics card in my Mac Pro. I had been owing the original and extremely bad (by today’s standards) ATI 5770 and its paltry 1gb or ram. Amazingly enough I managed to get by all these years, but it was becoming increasingly problematic, so I finally ordered a replacement.

I’ve been managing to keep an ageing 2012 Mac Pro as my main computer for nearly 7 years now, and from time to time its really been a struggle. Over the years I’ve added various upgrades and replacement parts, and its somehow managed to keep going, despite getting a tremendous amount of use. Lately though it’s been driving me mad. It takes nearly an hour to reboot - from off to being useable. The OS comes up in about two minutes, but by the time everything loads and settles down and is useable - it’s nearly an hour. This is partly because of a slow system drive, and partly due to years of bits and pieces clogging the OS

For the longest time I’ve been using an iPhone 6 plus. It has served me well. In fact one of the first photos I took with that phone was actually featured in Apple’s first “Shot on iPhone” campaign when it originally started, and I’ve been using it ever since. I never got around to upgrading for various reasons, but lately I felt that it was maybe time to stop trying to use the ageing device.

While there was nothing preventing you working with Fuji files on Lightroom Mobile before, now that the latest version supports presets and preset syncing, the workflow has gotten a lot easier. If you follow any of my techniques for sharpening and managing Fuji files, you can now apply many of these to Lightroom mobile as well. There are of course limitations still, but its come a long way in just one version.

There wasn't much announced in yesterday’s WWDC keynote targeted at photographers, apart from some new search suggestions and ways to share in Photos. There was, however, a couple of features in the MacOS finder that could actually prove quite useful. Those are the new gallery view and EXIF information in the finder.

Quicktime is one of those things that people love or hate. Whatever your feelings on it are, it does do one thing really well, and that provides a way of allowing any application to open any movie file, so long as they have the right codec installed. Instead of an application having to directly support multiple video formats, they can just support QuickTime, and then if there’s a codec for the format installed, they can read that format. Which got me thinking, we really need something similar for images.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a new iPad. In fact, it’s been a while since I had an iPad that was actually usable. I hadn’t upgraded since the iPad 3 as I had nothing but trouble with that model, and it kind of put me off. But with the numerous apps coming out on iOS for photographers, I was starting to feel a little left out. I had been considering an iPad Pro, but I just couldn’t afford it. So when Apple announced the new 6th generation iPad with Apple Pencil support, I decided it was finally time.

My main computer is an ageing 2012 Mac Pro. At the time it was reasonably well specced, but lately, I have been really struggling with it, especially with newer versions of Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications. In particular, it has become increasingly difficult to run multiple applications at once, and with the most recent round of updates, I cool no longer run Lightroom and Photoshop simultaneously. 

I’ve been talking about working with Fuji Jpeg files a lot recently, and I wanted to show one way in which I regularly work with them, and that is to use Apple’s Photos application. So, in this video, I take a look at how I go about editing Fuji Jpeg files in Apple’s Photos Application on the mac. 

Apple’s High Sierra operating system is now available, and with it comes some changes to Apple’s Phots application. Most of these were previously announced, so not much of this will probably be a surprise at this stage. However, as I’ve just upgraded my laptop, I thought I’d take it for a quick spin to see if anything stood out. I’ve only been using it for a few hours now, so I’ve probably missed a few things, but anyway, here it goes…

You may have read this already, but if you’re a mac user considering upgrading to High Sierra, and you use a Wacom Tablet, then don’t. The company has announced that the system will require a new driver and that won’t be ready until the end of October.

Following on from my post the other day about using Aperture again, I created a little video showing the 5 features that I miss the most about using Apple’s discontinued software. 

As an experiment, and part of an ongoing project, I decided to launch Aperture the other day. It was the first time I have used the application in a long time, and It was an interesting experience. Because it has been so long, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The reasons that I wanted to try it out, was that I wanted to see how files from X-Transformer were working in various different applications other than Lightroom. The result was both eye opening and depressing at the same time.

For me, the Intelligent Search features in Apple’s Photos app, or what Apple refers to as “Advanced computer vision”, was one of those things that gets announced and then most people promptly forget about. However, once you actually try it, it’s actually pretty impressive, and while not perfect, it shows where the technology is going. 

Over the past few days I’ve been trying out a pre-production version of Macphun’s recently announced Luminar photo editor, and I have to say I’m intrigued. The new software, which is due out later this month, is a pretty advanced RAW converter and photo editing App. It’s like of like a combination of Camera Raw and Google’s Nik Photo Plug-ins all rolled into one. It’s surprisingly powerful, and I have to say, I’ve had fun working with it

As regular readers will undoubtedly know, I’m somewhat preoccupied (some would say obsessed) with various RAW converters and the differences between them, especially when it comes to Fuji x-Trans support. I’ve found that because of the uniqueness of Fuji’s X-Trans sensor, the results you can get from processing RAW files in different raw converters can vary significantly. I reported last week that Apple has (finally) added X-Pro 2 support to Photos and other software that uses Apple’s system wide Raw engine. I only briefly looked at it then, but in this post I want to examine it in more detail.

One of the features of Aperture that I really miss from Photos is the way it handled Raw + Jpeg pairs. If you shoot both, Aperture gave you a great way of managing them. It would allow you to specify which you wanted to import, or it would let you combine them into a RAW + Jpeg pair. It would let you decide, at the time of import, which you wanted as the primary source and you could easily switch between them in the software afterwards. In Photos, while it still combines Raw + Jpeg pairs, there’s no control over the import process, it always sets Jpeg as the primary source and you can only switch between them one at a time in the edit mode.

Apple has finally added RAW support for the Fuji X-Pro 2 to Mac OS X. The latest Digital Camera Raw Update released yesterday adds support for just two cameras, the Fuji X-Pro 2 and the Pentax K-7. It’s taken a while for X-Pro 2 support to come to Apple’s system level Raw services, but you should now be able to use X-Pro2 Raw files in software that uses that service, such as Photos, Affinity Photo or Aperture