Mac Studio arrives…
The Apple logo on top of my Mac Studio. ©Neil Turner, June 2022

A couple of months ago I wrote about the amount of power that I perceived that I needed in a computer in order to efficiently edit images. Shortly after that I saw a Mac with an M1 Max processor in action converting batches of RAW files and I decided that I’d order a Mac Studio a couple of days later. I went for the base model with a 512Gb SSD and 32Gb of RAM for two reasons; the first of which was that it was easily going to be powerful enough for even the chunkiest RAW files and the second was that it was the only model that had any chance of being delivered in time for the heavy batch of editing that I am now in the middle of.

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No ‘perfect pictures’ here
©Neil Turner. Office worker on a lunch break. October 2008

A question for my fellow photographers:

When was the last time you finished a shoot, went through the edit and genuinely thought that you really couldn’t have done better?

My answer is that I cannot remember ever having that thought. I’ve come close and been really happy with what I have done man, many times but I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that ‘complete satisfaction’ hasn’t featured in my work.

I have never taken a perfect picture and I have certainly never made one in post-production – but I’m OK with that.

This question was triggered by listening to an artist being interviewed on a radio programme who said that she had gone through something of a crisis of confidence having finished a piece and in that moment thinking that it was perfect. She talked about coming very quickly to hate the idea that she might never achieve that level of mastery of her craft again and that she may well have reached a professional peak at a relatively young age. That was something which her passion for what she did led her to develop a form of depression.

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Thirty-plus year old memory
Sir John Cassels – Chair of a Government Inquiry into post-sixteen education. Photographed at his home in south-west London. May 1991. Photo: ©Neil Turner

When I published this May 1991 portrait on my Instagram feed a couple of years ago I was shocked by the clarity of my memories of shooting it. A year or so after publishing it I was giving a talk to a wonderful group of people at a camera club who had invited me to come and show some work and tell some anecdotes and, once again, I remembered so much detail about the day and the pictures. The power of still images to evoke a time and a place is a wonderful thing. I thought that it would be good to share those memories again here and this is what I wrote underneath the post on Instagram:

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Computer speed and power in my real world

When Apple announced their new desktop Mac – the Mac Studio – I watched the keynote address and was very interested in what this new bit of kit had to offer. Starting at £2000.00 including VAT it looks like a veritable speed machine. I have read some reviews and looked at test bench scores which are supposed to give us real world performance data so that we can compare one machine against another. With all of that in mind, it looks really good. But… what do those score mean for me?

In the editor part of my working life I often end up editing 200, 300, 400 or more RAW files from different cameras a day. When I am shooting my own pictures it is rarely that many and, of course, the files will all be from my own cameras and therefore not varied set of RAW formats. The most power hungry work will all be inside Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) and I want to know what time savings this new Mac will actually give me. Having watched several reviewers (mostly high-end video editors) talk about what has frustrated them in their workflow I started thinking about the relatively few times I find myself waiting for things to happen in ACR.

The truth is that there aren’t many things that take time and frustrate me with my ageing 15″ MacBook Pro but here are a few:

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Masking in Adobe Camera RAW
Subject masking in ACR 14.2

Spending a lot of my working life as an editor means that I get very worked up about changes to the software that I use. A couple of months ago I mentioned the fact that masking in Adobe Camera RAW 14 had become simultaneously better and more complicated. I have been asked to talk about what I mean and about why it is better.

In the past you could pick a linear gradient or radial gradient straight from the tool box and apply those relatively simple options to an image really quickly. You could also use a brush to painstakingly paint a mask onto an image in order to carry out local colour, tone or contrast corrections to the masked area. The two most common functions were quick and simple whilst the more complex functions were, well, complex. I grumbled about why you couldn’t have the best of both worlds because the method for selecting the simpler ones had changed from a single mouse-click to three mouse-clicks.

It turns out that in ACR 14.2 you absolutely can.

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A downside of technology
© Photo Neil Turner.

Anyone who knows me and anyone who has read this blog would probably say that I am keen on technology. I would agree – I’m a geek. Despite my love of the whole digital process there’s one thing about the way that we work these days that I am not so keen on.

What’s that then? I hear one or two people asking. Put very simply, I don’t get to meet or even chat with editorial clients any more. I know that the whole COVID-19 pandemic has put a mighty spanner in the works but even accounting for that I was disappointed and a little bit shocked to realise that I have never actually met any of the folks who have commissioned me to shoot editorial work since well before we went into the first lockdown. Some of that can be explained away by my being based a hundred miles from London where a sizeable proportion of them live and work but even accounting for that I find it really sad that I haven’t got to have a coffee with any of them or even shake the odd hand here and there.

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Looking forward to 2022
Derwentwater, Christmas Eve 2021 © Neil Turner

After another year of COVID-19 restrictions and client hesitancy I just wanted to wish everyone a merry Christmas and to wish you all a happy, creative and prosperous new year.

I doubt that it has been easy for any of us so be safe, spend time with family and let’s all make sure that 2022 is better than either 2020 or 2021.

Adobe Camera RAW 14

I am a firm believer in keeping up with technology, learning new things and generally being ‘up-to-date’. The one thing that regularly makes me question that philosophy is the changes that Adobe make on a regular basis to their Camera RAW plug-in for Photoshop. This isn’t going to be my first blog post about what they’ve changed and how it effects my workflow. I was unhappy about what they did in Version 12.3 (but I got over it). I was pretty pleased with Version 13.0 and remained so throughout its lifespan. Now that I have had some time to digest what Version 14.0 has to offer I thought that I’d come back and share my impressions.

Before I get into this remarkably short post I’d like to mention one of the relevant things that I have learned over the years – to avoid commenting on change until I have given it a chance to grow on me.

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