Apple's Mobile Me Login Page

 

 

The much awaited Mobile-Me of Apple is up and running. This is their replacement for their old .Mac service. Check it out at http://www.me.com

Will I use it? I’ll probably get the free 60-day trial to see if this fits my needs. The attractive part is the iDisk where I can have access to my files. This is part of the 20GB storage that’s being offered by the standard $99 price. Might not hurt to have some photos stored there… hmmm… gotta save for it! Anyway, check out the Mobile Me prices here.

Oh, and one more thing, you also get a customized email, something like yourname@me.com!

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and I finally did it - I joined NAPP yesterday! For those of you who don’t know what NAPP - it stands for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. After paying the $99 membership, I immediately went to the site and checked out what’s special inside. Well, it IS worth it so far. I got access to all of the tutorials that are available for members. Plus, they also have a forum where you can reach out to fellow photographers/photoshop users. Oh, I also get a 1 year free subscription to Photoshop User Magazine. I opted for the electronic version because I’m located in the Philippines.

If you’re thinking about joining, go ahead and do it. They also have discounts to a lot of products for photography/photoshop. Click the link below if you want to join NAPP now.

You may ask - how did I get to know NAPP? Well, I ran across them via their Video Podcast - Photoshop User TV. If you haven’t seen this, I suggest you go to iTunes and subscribe to their podcast. They give you tips weekly plus of course, you get to hear their jokes. That’s always what I am looking forward to. The 3 Photoshop guys in their show are: Scott Kelby, Matt Kloskowski and Dave Cross. I also subscribe to their blogs. Here they are:

• Scott Kelby: www.scottkelby.com
• Matt K: lightroomkillertips.com
• Dave Cross: davecross.blogspot.com

I have learned a lot from watching their tutorials and reading all their blogs. I am even planning to go to Photoshop World in Las Vegas this September. I’ll probably sign-up this week. I have been postponing my sign-up and I just lost on the Pro-Pass for the event. Lesson learned, I should have signed-up earlier!!!

Well, for those of you who are also fans of NAPP or Photoshop User TV, I hope to see you online (in NAPP) or in Photoshop World.

Hope to see you there!

Nikon just announced a new camera - the Nikon D700. It’s Nikon’s match to Canon’s 5D camera. It’s basically the D300 with the full-frame sensor, or, you could also say that it’s a lighter version of the D3. For the exact specs, check out Rob Galbraith’s post on the D700.

Also, Nikon introduced the new SB-900 along with the new 45mm and 85mm perspective control lenses.

You may as download Nikon’s 24-page Brochure (PDF) on the D700.

Some photos to honor Kobe as this year’s MVP:

Gotta bring the Lakers luck in Game 6 so I’m posting more photos from Staples and the Team LA Store…

Laker Fans:

NBA Finals Ads:

Kobe’s Vitamin Water Ad:

Laker Posters

Pau Gasol Authentic Finals Jersey (Kobe Authentic Jerseys are all sold out):

Los Angeles, CA - June 12, 2008

I was fortunate enough to be at LA last week during the NBA finals. I passed by Staples Center to get some Finals gear as well as check out how the place is setup. All I can say is that the energy at that time was really high! I saw several people line up as early as 2PM for the game. I even saw some Laker Girls (I think they were Laker Girls) buying some Finals merchandise in the LA Team Store! Lots of things were happening - there was an ESPN sports van across the arena doing some promotions.

It was unfortunate that the Lakers squandered a 24-point lead and eventually lose to the Celtics during that game. However, they were able to bounce back in Game 5! The series is now back to Boston and I’m posting this prior to Game 6 hoping to bring the lakers some luck. Make history, guys!

Enjoy the photos -

Staples Center:

Lakers Team Store & Lakers Merchandise

Me at Staples Center (Yes, I bought a Kobe Finals Jersey!!! )

Two things to share with you today.

First up, Mozilla just released Mozilla Firefox 3. It’s free to download at their site. Aside from all the new features, one cool thing about this is that it supports color management. How will this work? Simple, follow the 2 steps below:

• Step 1: Install the Color Management add-on. Once installed, enabling and disabling color management is as simple as checking a checkbox and relaunching Firefox 3.

• Step 2: Manually edit the color management setting. The steps are:

1. Type about:config in Firefox 3’s address bar and press Return. The configuration settings will appear.
2. In the Filter field, type gfx. The list of settings will shorten to show just those related to graphics, i.e. gfx.
3. If the Value for gfx.color_management.enabled is False, double-click anywhere on that line to toggle the setting to True.
4. Quit and relaunch Firefox 3.

To confirm that color management is working, check out the photos on this page. If all four quadrants of the first photo are a seamless match, then colour management in your copy of Firefox is up and running.

Thanks to Rob Galbraith’s post for the news.

Second, ever wondered what the differences are between DPI and PPI? I’m sure you’ve seen PPI (pixels-per-inch) in Photoshop and DPI (dots-per-inch) in printers (and even your monitor display resolution) and you always wondered how this will impact the photos you’re editing both for online publishing and printing. Well, here’s an article from tildefrugal.net on that explains both DPI and PPI. I hope it’s helpful to you, it sure is helpful to me!

June 3 - my 30th birthday! I can’t believe I’m this ‘young’! Hahaha! That’s all, folks!

Hey guys, sharing with you some of the recent news…

In case you haven’t heard it yet, Adobe has released trial versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth CS4. Yes, it’s CS4! You may get them at the Adobe Labs website.

Also, Jeff Revel has an article on Photoshop Droplets. You may want to check them out. I am using them for sharpening photos in Photoshop after exporting them in LR. This is a tip I got from Scott’s LR book. There’s huge time saved by using them.

Hungry for color management articles? Here’s a good article on color management from pixsylated.com

Another thing, here’s an ad for the new Canon 450D (Rebel XSi) that was shot using a Canon EOS 1D Mark III from Rob Galbraith’s site. You may also check out Canon’s XSi Commercial website.

Finally, since I’m constantly looking for a nice desktop wallpaper, I wanted to share with you what I’m using right now… I got it from Adam Betts (pretty awesome designer, if you check out his work). It’s an Apple logo on a black leather texture. It kinda resembles my wallet so that’s why I like it Anyway, check out the wallpapers here… there are 2 versions - 1 with an apple logo and 1 without.

How do you backup your photos or your laptop for that matter? As a subscriber to multiple blogs, here are some practices that might work for you:

• Scott Kelby’s Backup Strategy: great explanation of how Scott backs up all his photos and files.
• Terry White’s thoughts on archiving and backing up files
• David DuChemin’s Backup strategy (Pixelated Image): by the way, this is where I got the idea of using a Hyperdrive!

As for me, here’s what I do:

Photos: I use the Hyperdrive as my main backup. I transfer all my photos there after a shoot and then I connect the hyperdrive to my MacBook Pro later and download photos to Lightroom. I start off by importing all the photos to my laptop’s drive and then when I’m done, I copy the whole library again to a different drive. I usually have 1 LR catalog for each month or for each major shoot so that I can easily back them up.

The photos in the Hyperdrive are then transferred to a different hard disk so that I can preserve my negatives.

Files: Unfortunately, I have not taken advantage of the Time Machine or Super Duper apps in Mac. I have to get another spare drive for this or probably the Time Capsule so that I can do this automatically. Or, maybe I’ll just save up for the DROBO…

Backing up all my data has been a top priority for me and I still have to compute and prepare all my spare/external hard drives for this! I’ll try to do this soon before disaster strikes… (knock on wood)…