Last week review 01-2018

Last week review 01-2018 and here in my area the weather doesn’t feel like winter, too warm and very rainy 🙂

The first article of a new year is traditionally a review of the past year but also to the 4 years this blog is online. Meanwhile there were many topics published and up-to-date articles worked on. Mainly the base articles will not change this year, so this is why i probably won’t post an article every week, at least on a regular basis.

With a little over 450 articles the focus still is on RAW converters, Lightroom, HDR and panorama photography and of course a couple of IT topics. I added articles on the DJI Mavic drone, but because of the bad weather (a lot of rain and too windy) i couldn’t use the drone the last couple of weeks.

On Dec. 19th last year Adobe published the last update of Lightroom with the version number 6.14, while the update for the Lightroom Classic version was published a week earlier.  With this update Adobe added support for newer cmearas and lenses for th last time in version 6.14. According to Adobe’s motto to make new functions available only to the subscription model this update doesn’t include any of them like for example the new auto function in the devlopment modul.

MacPhun as the software company behind a RAW converter and a  HDR tool they used 2018 as a version number for their software back in 2017. Both Luminar 2018 and Aurora HDR 2018 could convince in some parts both apps in the newly relased Windows versions had a big disadvantage, they could not export 16-Bit Tiff for further post proecessing.  Shortly before christmas the company released updates for both programs which now implement an export in 16-Bit Tiff and JPEG in different sizes and qualities. Now i’m waiting for the promised DAM modul in Luminar 2018.

April last year Google offered their famous Nik collection free of charge for everyone. Meanwhile DxO bought the rights on the software from Goolge and uses the so called U-point technology in DxO Photolab. Everybody expected that the software would be activly developed after DxO acquired the rights. Now DxO expressed to develop the Nik Collection and release a new version in 2018. But they didn’t say anything about a release date or the price of new software.

And then there were and still are a lot of daily news about Meltdown and Spectre. These are security holes in the CPU of almost every manufacturer like Intel,Amd and Arm. The bad news are that according to a Google publications all affected manufacturers were informed about the problem in mid 2017. And this sounds very bad. Microsoft, Apple and Linux already published patches which should solve or at least work arround the problems with software. But the best thing would be to change the CPU 😉

So that is all for the first week in new year 2018.

ciao tuxoche