Graphics Cards for Photoshop CS6

Following on from my previous post, I know it can be difficult to identify a suitable graphics adapter for use with Photoshop, so I thought I would share this link.

I would have chosen an Asus nvidia GTX650 1GB card, which seems to be excellent value for money - it's performance in these tests was mostly just 5-10% off the performance of the top-performing adapters, yet it can be found for a shade over £100.

In the event, the heatsink and cooling tubes weren't a great fit in my Dell Precision 490, so I had to drop to a GT640, which is slightly smaller physically, and cheaper but came with 2GB of memory instead of 1GB. It wasn't around when the above test was run but ought to be fairly similar to the 650.

Adobe 'Cloud'

Adobes' recent changes to their pricing structure has caused quite a bit of a backlash from photographers, if the Internet fora can be used as a measure of this. Me, I take a more positive view, at least in the short term.

Basically Adobe is shifting away from selling boxed products, instead selling applications by subscription. Once you subscribe, for a monthly fee, you can then download the latest versions of the applications you are eligible for under the subscription plan you chose. As long as you keep paying the fee, you can carry on using the software. Once you cease your subscription, then at some point Adobe will block your use of that software, until or unless you re-subscribe. That 'at some point' is currently 90 days but this is due to increase to 180 in the near future.

Adobe use of the phrase 'Creative Cloud' (CC) has caused a bit of confusion. To be clear, the applications bought through CC are downloaded and installed on your computer, and run on it just as if you had installed from DVD/CD. The application then periodically checks with Adobe that your subscription is still valid. To get around the issue of users being away from an Internet connection, there's effectively a 90/180 day grace period. So, plenty of time to go on an 3 month assignment then (are you listening National Geographic?).

I use two Adobe Products, Lightroom and Photoshop. Lightroom will continue to be sold as a boxed product according to Adobe, but Photoshop is moving to CC. I thought I had foolishly missed the opportunity to upgrade from CS4 to CS6, but in hindsight this may have been a wise move, because for less than £9 a month, I have now not only been able to upgrade to CS6, but will also be able to move to the next version, Photoshop CC, when it becomes available later this year, for no additional cost.

Given that previous upgrade costs have been around £180, short term I'm quite happy with this. It remains to be seen what the cost will be in year two, as Adobe is currently giving introductory discounts to encourage users to subscribe to CC. For now though, I'm happy to be running the latest version for the next 12 to 18 months.

Using an Old Router as a Wireless Access Point

These days, many of have a collection of 'free' wireless DSL or cable routers, as these tend to be given away when we change to a new provider, and usually these end up unused in a drawer or cupboard (as I type this I can think of at least 2 we have lying about).

This happened to me recently, and I really wanted to keep using the old router (BT Home Hub 3), as it had a natty power save feature (it switches off WiFi) that I could use to prevent the children accessing the Internet from any of their devices outside of the hours we had agreed. Having the WiFi just switch off automatically and on again at preset times seems much easier than trying to setup firewalls and VLANs to try and limit their access.

Also, with the BT Home Hub 3 it's very easy to bypass the power save feature and extend their access time, so the kids can watch movies, for example, at weekends and sleep overs. So, the challenge was to re-use the BT Hub as a dedicated access point (AP) for the kids PCs, phones and iPods.

A quick bit of 'research' (aka google) revealed that this should be relatively simple, but I thought it worth documenting the simple steps required. Below is what I did (the order is important!). I've assumed that you haven't re-configured the old router too much, but you could always factory-reset it before starting (which I would recommend if you customised it's setup a lot):

1. Firstly, disconnect your computer from any networks (wireless and wired).
2. Attach the old router to your computer using an ethernet patch cable.
3. Login by browsing to the old router's address (usually 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1, but often printed on a label underneath).
4. The username and password are usually on the label to, but you should change these to something more secure.
5. Go to the WiFi settings page and configure the access point's SSID as you want it (I took the option here to restrict this network to the slower b/g standards as a way of throttling the bandwidth being 'hogged' for Skype etc.!).
6. Next, change your old routers IP address to something that is in the range used by your new router, you'll probably find this setting on the 'LAN' settings page. In my case, the new router was 192.168.1.1, so I chose to set the old router to 192.168.1.2. Just make sure you're not selecting an address already in use - you'll need to login to your new router to check, or download fing.
7. Next, again usually in 'LAN' settings, disable DHCP (this is the service that issues out IP addresses, and you only want one device on your network doing this, and your new router is doing this and will continue to do so).
8. Disconnect your old router from your computer, and instead connect it to a spare ethernet port on the back of your new router.
9. Now, logon to your new router and in the LAN settings, look for a setting called 'reserve addresses' or similar, and reserve the address you selected in step 6. This ensures that the address will not be dynamically allocated to another device, for example if the old router (which is now just an AP) is switched off.

Finally, logon to the new SSID and check that it connects to the Internet. That's it, and for no extra cost I have a separate access point for the kids, time-limited and restricted to the theoretical 54Mbps of wireless 'g', while the adults and the Apple TV get to connect to the new router by wireless 'n', which theoretically offers 6 times the bandwidth (300Mbps). In practice, real throughputs will be a lot lower so this is a crude way of carving up the 25Mbps or so we have from our fibre broadband.

It Doesn't Have To Be a Numbers Game!

Some great articles going up at ByThom this week!

Print Size vs Resolution

I should probably inject some clarity into my comments below about D7000/D7100 choice, and why you might actually need more resolution.

The accepted rule of thumb for printing for display is 300 points-per-inch, so to determine the 'native' print size from your camera, simply divide it's horizontal and vertical resolution by 300 to give your print size in inches.

Thus the D7100 should be easily good enough for 18"x12" prints. But here's the rub: you can get to this size from a D7000 file by only slightly reducing the resolution to around 250ppi.

Such a reduction will be practically unnoticeable at normal viewing distances - chances are a carefully shot and post-processed D7000 RAW file will compare very well to a D7100 jpeg.

So, if you never print beyond A3, and if you're not already routinely shooting RAW, with good shot discipline and are completely competent in your RAW conversion and processing, then the D7100 is probably more camera than you need.