From the category archives:

software

portal

If you’ve ever taken a photo of a window or side of a building, you’ve probably encountered perspective distortion. I usually correct this by performing basic image adjustments in Lightroom, and then launching Photoshop to fix perspective on the final image. With the update to Lightroom 3 that was released today, Adobe has made it so that I’ll never have to launch Photoshop again.

Thanks to the improved Lens Corrections panel, you can now remove distortion, correct the vertical and horizontal planes, and rotate or scale your images. Select Manual from the panel, and as you begin to adjust your image, a helpful grid overlay appears, helping you to make sure corrections are straight and true. To see the difference this makes in an image, look at the image on the right. The top is the straight out of camera image with no adjustments, and the bottom photo is what it looks like after perspective distortion has been corrected.

I know, right?

This feature has drastically simplified my workflow. No more roundtrip editing, no more wondering whether my aging version of CS3 will bring my MacBook to a grinding halt (because Lightroom runs beautifully on my limited hardware).

Lightroom has long been my preferred image editing program, but with the addition of this new feature, Photoshop is now unnecessary for 99% of the shots I take. You can learn more about perspective correction, lens corrections, and how to control chromatic aberration in this helpful video from Adobe. A free 30-day trial of Lightroom 3 is also available for Mac and Windows.

{ 3 comments }

12 + 1 Useful Web Apps

1 April 2010

Rochelle Mazar put together this (gorgeous and incredibly useful) presentation about useful web applications using Prezi. Lately I haven’t had much time to spend investigating new web services, but thanks to Rochelle I’m now aware of about 8 different services I’d never heard of before, but am eager to try out. The presentation looked so [...]

Continue reading →

You Lie?

26 November 2009

I was checking out Slammer, a new graphic design tool that allows you to create all kinds of grids (seriously – you can create golden triangles, Fibonacci series, a 960 web developers grid and much more), when I noticed something a little odd on their website. There’s a section below the fold that outlines the [...]

Continue reading →
Thumbnail image for Educational Discounts for Library Employees: Why Not?

Educational Discounts for Library Employees: Why Not?

3 September 2009

This morning while burning through RSS feeds, I came across a post from a developer who wanted to remind their customers about educational licensing for their product. Educational licensing is nothing new; many software companies and hardware manufactures offer discounts not only to students, but to K-12 and post-secondary teachers. It’s a great benefit, and [...]

Continue reading →

Restore 1 Password Functionality to Safari 4 Beta

24 February 2009

1 Password has released a beta that fixes the Safari 4 issue. Choose: 1 Password > Preferences > Updates and make sure Include Beta versions is checked. If you’re like me, and you’ve come to rely very heavily on the 1 Password password management software, you were probably disappointed to find out that 1 Password [...]

Continue reading →

Creating Library Skills Tutorials on the Quick with Jing

8 January 2009

Lately I’ve been looking into different ways of teaching library skills to library customers and staff. Librarians and (and trainers, like myself) need to be where our audience is; we can’t always expect that they’ll be able to attend training sessions in person, and I believe that creating brief library skills videos is a great [...]

Continue reading →

Picasa for Mac – Not Ready for Prime Time

5 January 2009

It took a couple of hours, but I was finally able to download Picasa. A review is forthcoming, but early impressions aren’t great. Wired reported that Picasa, Google’s image editor, was available for the Mac OS. I like iPhoto, but I find iPhoto ’08 runs a bit slow on my MacBook, so I was eager [...]

Continue reading →

Battle of the snappers: LittleSnapper vs. Jing vs. Skitch

12 December 2008

Adding images to a blog post, presentation, or word processing document can help you make a point easier than using text alone. Not only that, but adding images to text makes the text come alive, and providing a bit of visual interest for your readers may make them want to stick around for more of [...]

Continue reading →

VMware Fusion + MacBook + Ubuntu = easy

7 September 2008

One of the things I’d like to do with this blog is to try to help less technical librarians and library staff become more confident with their technical skills, and, hopefully, help them feel empowered enough to tackle those things that they thought would be impossible. Now, I’m no technical guru by a long shot; [...]

Continue reading →

Apture != Snap Media. Apture == Awesome!

20 May 2008

If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you’re missing the point of this whole post. Go to cecily.info for the full post. Thanks! One of the things that makes me steer clear of Vox websites is their adoption of the Snap web service. I hate, hate HATE mousing over those windows and having unwanted [...]

Continue reading →

Why e-mail merge makes me want to throw a tantrum

19 May 2008

Update: 5 April 2010: Lifehacker has a detailed post that shows how to set up mail merge in Gmail. My need seemed simple enough. I had a spreadsheet of e-mail addresses, usernames, and passwords that I’d created for a client’s WordPress site. I needed to take the spreadsheet data and merge the data into an [...]

Continue reading →

Coda Clips – A Repository of Clips for Coda

28 April 2008

If you’re like me and are a fan of Coda, the one-window web editor from Panic Software, but you’ve bemoaned the lack of default code clips included with the package, then you’ll be very happy to hear about Coda Clips, a repository of code snippets that can be added to the software. It would be [...]

Continue reading →