Tag Archives: hardware

iPhone RAW Image Exposures

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When RAW capture first became available on my phone, I started to use it.  Initially, I had to use a third party camera app which was fine but it did have some quirks about it and some things that just didn’t work right, despite some extensive communication with the developer.  Then the camera app of the phone got updated to allow RAW capture and I have been using that ever since.  There is something very strange about it, though.  When I import the images in to Lightroom, they are always about one stop overexposed.  I am curious whether this is a function of the raw format for Apple in order to preserve details in the shadows or whether it is a weirdness with my phone.  Included are two images – one with the base settings after import and one edited.  This is representative of what I get.  It doesn’t hurt the end result but it is rather strange.  Anyone have similar results?

My Copy of Lightroom Got Sick

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After a previous update to Lightroom (6.12), it became almost unusable.  Importing would take forever and, once the images were in, it would grind to a halt.  Keywording and editing became a nightmare.  I was struggling to work out what was wrong.  A check on performance showed the processor wasn’t busy but the RAM was maxed out.  I couldn’t understand why.  The first thing I do when Lightroom behaves strangely is to delete the Preferences file.  This file can get corrupted and mess with the performance badly.  Just delete it and restart and things are often fixed.  That didn’t work in this case.  When the new version of Lightroom was released, I hoped this would fix everything but sadly not.  (Meanwhile Photoshop itself is working just fine on this system.)

I had a long session with the Adobe tech support people which got me nowhere.  After telling me this was normal, they realized it was not when our screen sharing crapped out as a result of the machine slowing to a virtual standstill.  They tried a bunch of simple stuff and got no further than I had on my own.  They suggested a second session would be needed and then promptly sent me an email telling me that the issue had been successfully resolved.  Not sure how they concluded that.  Meanwhile, I wondered whether there was an issue with my Windows installation so decided to do a completely clean install.  This had some slight benefits but basically the problem still remained.

I have done a bunch of scanning of similar issues and I found out a technique the support team can use to tweak performance.  There is a config.lua file that can be created in the presets folder to influence the system.  I have added this file and it has certainly made a few things work better.  It has also slowed some things down as well which isn’t ideal.  This was not a solution though.  All it did was make the program slightly more usable.

Another session with Adobe ensued.  This time we got into the permissions for some of the folders that contained the catalogs.  Lots of time to reset these to give greater authority.  I was told this is sometimes an issue with large catalog files.  Lots of time later, I found that nothing had really changed.  The whole thing would still get bogged down very quickly.

Then I read about Lightroom 7.2.  This was a new update that was supposed to address a lot of performance issues.  It was supposed to make better use of multi-core processors as well as larger RAM configs.  I had seen a sequence of updates not improve things – my issues were clearly not the normal performance problems although I had previously experienced some of them too – but I was hoping that, if they had changed the architecture of the software, maybe whatever was causing my machine to have problems might have been tweaked/replaced.  If not, I was seriously considering the need to buy a new system since this was so horribly inefficient.

I waited for the release date to come around when I knew the update was on its way.  Then I got an update to the iPad version and it said the new version of Camera Raw was included.  This must mean it was close.  A day later, the update dropped.  I downloaded it immediately and opened up.  Hurrah!!!  Everything run fast, the RAM levels were moderate and stable, everything was happening as it should.  My system lives!  Let’s hope this isn’t a false dawn.

Building a New Computer

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In my world, computers tell you that they want to die.  They start doing something a little odd as an initial warning and then get progressively more troublesome.  I had been contemplating the replacement of my system for a while but recently, the CPU cooling packed up completely and I was stuck between getting some replacement parts or getting on with the new system.  I went the latter route.  This was helped by having a bunch of components on the old system that had been upgrades and could easily transplant across to the new machine.  This reduced what I needed to buy.

Things did not end up being plain sailing sadly.  I built up the system and got everything ready to run.  A press of the button and nothing happened.  In fact, that isn’t quite true.  There was a brief whirr from the power supply followed by a tiny wisp of smoke.  Great!  A dodgy power supply to start with.  Fortunately, the supply on the old system was good.  It didn’t have as many power plugs and the new one but enough to do the job.  However, the system still didn’t seem to be enthusiastic about starting up.  I gave up and visited a local computer place and they had a quick look.  It turns out my first problem was that a motherboard gets tied in to an OS installation and, since I was now on a new motherboard, it didn’t like the old drive.  That means a clean install which is a bit more time consuming.  However, that did not end the trouble.  The guys in the store couldn’t see anything else wrong so I decided to leave it with them for a longer look.

A problem connector proved to be the issue and then it was a simple process to get the installation of everything done.  Things seemed to be running fine for a while but then, when processing some video, it just shut down.  I thought it might be a memory error so ran a program called Memtest.  it came up with no issues.  I tweaked the BIOS settings for the memory but still it would get upset when working too hard.  I re-ran Memtest and changed it from Default setting to multi-threading and then it quickly failed.  A bit more information but still no solution.

Another trip to the shop and I left it with them.  They tried using one of their power supplies and it passed all of the tests with flying colors.  Turns out old power supplies degrade and often don’t have their full juice anymore.  A new unit with plenty of oomph and now I have the machine up and running.  it chews through things with relative ease.  I have also avoided reinstalling anything superfluous so we have a nice lean machine – at least for now.  Not sure I would build my own machine in future.  It was cheaper and gave me exactly what I wanted but it was a lot more effort than I had planned.  The extra to buy it might be worth it.