 Hi, this is Alistair Jenks of the NoCillicast Apple Podcast, hosted at podfeat.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, the 28th of January 2023, and this is show number 925. In this week's show, you'll hear my third and so far last instalment of my Streamdeck series, where I descend further into my madness, plus a contribution from Steven Getz on how he abandoned the Adobe subscription train and ended up on the Adobe subscription train. But first, Bruce from Tennessee joins us again to talk Finder and Terminal, and how to make them play well together. Hi, this is Bruce from Tennessee, also known as Use the Data, with a tip for working with the Finder and Terminal. The problem to be solved is that when working with files, I find some operations to be easier in the Finder, and others to be easier in the Terminal. And there are times where I need a Terminal window open to the same directory as my current Finder window. There are also times when working in an existing Terminal window, where I want to either have a Finder window open up in that same directory, or get my Terminal window into the same directory as an existing Finder window. As Allison reminded me, we've seen some ways to do part of this from the Finder. As explained in an October 2021 tiny tip, like in the show notes, the path bar in Finder is powerful, and you can use the option click on a folder in the path bar to open a Terminal window in that particular directory. So that's one way to solve one of the three cases. But how can I deal with the other two cases? The answer is a bit of shell script work that I'll describe in a minute, but let me first describe the results. So when I'm in a Terminal window on my Mac, I can simply type cdf short for change directory to Finder, and that Terminal session will now be in the same directory as the front most Finder window. Going the other way, I can type f here short for Finder here, and I get a new Finder window opened up in that same directory as my Terminal session. So if that's not useful for you, then feel free to fast forward to the next chapter in the podcast or move along to another blog entry. Now I've had this capability for a long time, but in Allison's call for some content, it occurred to me to share this with the Nosella castaways. The answers come from Brett Terpstra in a blog post that is just under a decade old now, and links to both Brett's site and that specific post. I was pretty sure that this had come from Brett and his site, like Allison's, has a great search feature, so finding that post wasn't that hard once I went to go look for it. However, several things have changed about macOS since 2013, and some of those changes affect what we need to do to make this work in a current version of macOS. When Brett wrote his article, macOS used something called bash as the default shell in the Terminal. Starting in 2019 with macOS Catalina 10.15, the default shell is now something called ZSH. For a large fraction of the things that the user might do in the Terminal, there's no difference. But if you want to customize your environment, the differences are significant. For more about bash, ZSH, and other shells, go all the way back to taming the Terminal Part 1 of N, blank in the show notes. Bart and Allison also provide a lot of information about customizing your Terminal environment in taming the Terminal Parts 13 and 14. Again, blanks in the show notes. And over in programming by Stealth, the Dynamic Duo have also provided great information on these configuration files, managing them, particularly in episodes 121 and 122. So if you've set up a new user account on a Mac at some point starting with macOS Catalina, you're most likely using ZSH. And Brett's instructions won't work for you. If you've carried forward a user account, either with migration assistant on a new Mac, or because Macs last a long time, and you're running a Mac that came out of the box with something before 10.15 Catalina, you're probably using bash. You can use Brett's instructions to set up the commands, although I go into a bit more detail in the posting. So how do you tell whether you're using the new ZSH or bash? There's a few different ways to do this. But the simple way that's worked every place I've tried it is to type echo dollar sign number zero in the terminal session followed by a return. The results will tell you if you're running ZSH or bash. If it says bash, just follow Brett's instructions and you're good. Although like this, I use a slightly different name than he does for one of the commands. If you're running ZSH, then you need to edit your .z profile file, rather than the .bash underscore profile file that Brett describes, and the incantations for my CDF commander are slightly different. Barton Allison described editing text files like this .bash underscore profile and .z profile from the terminal in taming the terminal part 11 of n, like in the show notes, and they use the nano editor. Following that guide while working in the terminal, you could type nano space tilde slash .bash underscore profile if you're running bash, or you could type nano space tilde slash .z profile if you're running ZSH. The tilde and slash are there to make sure that you're editing the file that's in your home directory, regardless of what directory you happen to be running at the moment. For bash, you can copy in the lines that I show in the show notes. They've used a slightly different abbreviation for open a finder window here than Brett did, and so there's a slight difference from his blog post. If you're running ZSH, then it's a slightly different set of lines, again shown in the show notes. If you're wondering where to put these lines in the file, just add them to the end, then save the file using ctrl o to quit, and then quit nano with ctrl x. Quit the terminal app, and then launch a new terminal window. The cdf and fhere command should now work for you. The way to create my fhere command is the same for the two shells, but the syntax to create that cdf command is a bit different. For those who are interested, that cdf command is invoking a bit of apple script to get the directory for the frontmost file finder window. It's also interesting to me as a command line aficionado as being an example of using all three types of quotes in one line. Bart and Allison go into the two of the three types of quotes in programming by stealth episode 143 of x, like in a shout-out. The third type of quote, the so-called back tick, which is above the tab key on my US keyboard, is there to tell the shell to execute this command and give me the results as a string. I hope you found this to be a useful tip, and my thanks to Brett Terpstra for figuring all of this out and posting it on the internet, and to Bart and Allison for their great work in both taming the terminal and programming by stealth. Peace, and may you find beauty in the world around you. Thanks for that contribution Bruce. I think I'm going to set up those commands for myself because when I develop scripts to solve a problem, I always end up using both finder and terminal, and it is certainly a pain point getting them both to be in the same place, particularly if I am using multiple directories. The only thing that's missing for me is something to remind me to use them, and now it's time for Stream Deck down the rabbit hole, part three. At the end of part two, I had a really useful set of buttons, many with nice button faces, and I was looking into how to get live information to display on a button. I knew there were plugins that did this for their specific functions, but I could not figure out how I could get my own information shown. I posted a question on the Mac power users forums and was pointed to an application called Better Touch Tool, or BTT for short. I'd looked at this software before, and even trialled it, but I didn't really see myself using custom gestures on my mouse or trackpad, which were its flagship feature. However, now I was being told a good handle Stream Deck buttons. I checked it out and was amazed at the feature set included in this software. At its core, BTT has many types of triggers and many types of actions, and you can wire these together in any way you can imagine. The triggers include the aforementioned custom gestures, but also keyboard shortcuts, tech snippets, Siri remotes, MIDI device controls, a BTT remote app on your phone, the MacBook Pro touch bar, and as of a recent version, the Stream Deck. Actions include, well, everything. There are 15 different categories with actions like sending a key press to a specific application, a requirement I mentioned in part 2. Performing a mouse click, hiding an application, running a script, opening a URL, resizing a window and putting the computer to sleep. In all, there are over 150 defined actions, and while many are very specific, like Press F19, some are very flexible, like run a script or send a key to an application. BTT addresses the Stream Deck in one of two ways, you can either install a native Stream Deck plugin, which BTT will then communicate with, or you can quit the Stream Deck software altogether and have BTT completely control the Stream Deck. I dipped my toes in the water with the plugin until I got an idea of what could be achieved, then very quickly went all in with full control. Because I made this leap fairly early in my Stream Deck journey, there may be things I mentioned here in the context of BTT, which are in fact possible with the native Stream Deck software. The BTT interface is fairly straightforward. Where I disliked the clunkiness of the Stream Deck software, BTT is a lot more obvious to me, though it does have some quirky bugs you will almost certainly have to work around. One is when deleting actions from a trigger. It doesn't seem to like deleting more than one at a time. I must get around to reporting that one. The application is hierarchical in the way it works. On the left is a list of applications. There is a special entry of all which contains triggers and actions that will apply regardless of the currently focused application. Then you can set up triggers that only appear when the named application is focused. A good example of the usefulness of this is having buttons on my Stream Deck to set finder tags, which only makes sense when finder is the focused application. On the other hand, my light controls make sense no matter which application has the focus. The next level is the trigger types. There are separate sections for Stream Deck, Touch Bar, Keyboard, Mouse etc. This makes a lot of sense as the different trigger types have quite different requirements. There is no need for example to have an icon for a keyboard shortcut like there is for a Stream Deck button. Next is the groups and top level triggers. I should preface here that I've mostly only worked with Stream Deck and Touch Bar triggers thus far. Groups on the Stream Deck manifest as a button which when pressed opens up a whole new set of buttons. I have all my light controls in a group for example. The first action to set up a Stream Deck button is to add a trigger which, broadly speaking, represents a single button. You then get to configure the button including some rules for when it will appear, such as based on modifier keys being held down or only on certain Stream Deck devices if you have more than one. You can also position the button explicitly or leave it to BTT to flow into an available spot on the device. The other aspect to buttons is their appearance. Delightfully, BTT has built-in support for SEF symbols so you can easily create decent looking buttons with very little work. You can also put regular text on them and there are controls for colors and sizing and positioning of the symbol or text and color of the background. My preference is to create my own image and this can be very simply dragged into the configuration. There is an oddity in how BTT handles custom button images. It seems like it wants a 96 pixel square image by default. However, I have conclusively proven that my actual Stream Deck buttons are 72 pixels square. I just create my buttons at 96 pixels and drag them in and it all seems to work. So it's not a problem as such unless you're trying to be pixel perfect. With basic configuration and appearance set, the real fun begins, adding the actions. Unlike Stream Deck's clunky multi-action action, BTT expects you to add multiple actions. My longest one to date has 26 actions. Adding actions is fairly straightforward, although another bug rears its head here. When you add the first action, the application jumps back to the top level of its hierarchy, so you do not immediately get to edit your action. If you're in a group, this is quite disconcerting as you're taken back out of the group. It's easy to just go back into the action, but there are a few paper cut bugs like this. As soon as you have configured any triggers and actions, they are live, though with groups it seems you have to exit the group in return to see new buttons or new imagery on existing buttons. So I have described a greatly expanded, if somewhat buggy version of the native Stream Deck software. Is that worth the price of BTT? I think so, because it has a much wider array of capabilities for the Stream Deck and even with the bugs. It's easier to build up complex action sequences and also to have your buttons adapt to the current environment. Then you can add in all the other capabilities of the software. I have a Touch Bar equipped MacBook Pro. I've never been against the Touch Bar, but neither had I really made much use of it, until I got BTT. Now I have a battery percentage and charge time indication, the latest readings from my personal weather station which opens my weather underground web page when tapped, a list of ejectable drives which ejects those drives when tapped, and an indicator of current Bluetooth status which toggles Bluetooth on or off when tapped. For me, the main thing BTT has enabled is total nerdery. In part 1 I described how I set the lights in my study for my nights on call. That process has changed a few times and currently does this. 1. Turn off the canvas light panels. 2. Set all of the room lights to bright green for 4 seconds. 3. Set all of the room lights to bright orange for 4 seconds. 4. Set all of the room lights to bright red for 4 seconds. 5. Drop the brightness of the room lights to 10%. 6. Set my max screen brightness to 10%. And 7. Set the stream deck brightness to 10%. This takes a total of 26 steps, mostly calling a shell script I developed as a wrapper for very long home control URLs. My current stream deck configurations include the lighting group with 5 buttons for room light control, 5 to set scenes on the canvas and 4 to set the canvas brightness to fixed levels including off, the Microsoft Teams group with 9 buttons, a laptop battery level indication. This button doesn't do anything but its appearance is set by a shell script so it shows me the current battery percentage. 7. Find a tag buttons, 6 colours and a clear, that appear only when Finder is focused. These run on Apple script which in turn calls a shell script. A group of 10 buttons that appear when DxO Photolab is focused which give access to commonly used tools. An additional group of 8 buttons for Photolab for its local adjustment mode. A button for the Citrix Viewer application that presses a special key to invoke the Windows Insert key which is not present on Mac keyboards. And a button for Terminal that enters the SSH command to my web server. That's 51 buttons in total, not counting the group buttons, using a variety of action types. I think I've only just begun. Next, Allison sneaks in again for a chat with Stephen Goetz about Stephen's journey through software for his photography. Well hey, I'd like to interrupt your regularly scheduled programming here. This is Allison and I want to do this to introduce the NoCillicast audience to one of my best friends I have never met, Stephen Goetz. Welcome to the show, Stephen. Hello. How are you today? I'm doing pretty good. So you have heard Stephen in a review or more than one that he has done over the years but this is the first time he and I have taken the time out to actually have a conversation. And if you've lived in the show for any length of time, you know that I get advice and help from Stephen all the time. He lives in Ontario, Canada, and I live in California, which is why we've never met. But in a very odd turn of events, my daughter Lindsey and her husband Nolan were vacationing near where Stephen lives so the three of them met up for a beer and I am still jealous that you got to meet them, Stephen. Yeah, that was seems like forever ago because it was the before times. Yeah, but hey, they got to meet you and I didn't, it doesn't seem fair. Well, in any case, I asked Stephen come on the show to talk about his ongoing personal struggles with his relationship with Adobe for photography. He's a pretty serious photography guy shooting with a big girl Canon DSLR. So it's a funny conversation, I think, because it has to do with trying to divorce himself from Adobe and yet coming back over and over again. So can you start at the beginning of the story? Like, why did you leave Adobe Lightroom? What is Adobe Lightroom? What is it used for? Start at the beginning of the story. So I guess I'll start out with Lightroom and Lightroom is a software for organizing and editing and tagging and sharing your digital photo. And it's been around for a very long time. I started out using iPhoto back in the G4 iMac day. And then I moved on to Aperture, which was a more pro tool. And I loved Aperture because it would organize my library and it had the really good editing tools. And it just works the way I work. But you can actually do like brush level editing, like you could brush in a burn or a color change and things, right? Yeah, and the tools worked how I liked, wanted them to work. When I moved the adjustments like the black and the highlights and shadows, they moved how I expected them to move, if that makes any sense. But Aperture abandoned that product. So I had to or Apple abandoned Aperture. So I had to find an alternative. So back then this is probably five years ago, maybe longer, I moved to Lightroom, Adobe Lightroom. And it was it was a tool that worked really well. It organized photos very well and tagging worked the way you would expect it to work. And the tools were at the time state-of-the-art tools for noise and editing and changing how you're raw processing. I mostly use Lightroom for almost entirely raw photos from my Canon DSLR and anything like from my iPhone, I just use photos, Apple photos for. So I keep those two lives separate. But so Lightroom didn't I wasn't as happy with Lightroom as I was with Aperture, but Aperture was dead. And I've always learned that once the product dies to move on from it, instead of trying to make instead of trying to make it work for me longer than it is intended to, if that makes sense. Right. Like Dan Moran said, quit it before it quits you. Yeah. Well, especially with Apple, because once they abandoned things, they they'll update the operating system and then you're like doing like hacks to try to just get to work with the newest version of the operating system. The other problem is if you do it late, I found that you end up being one of those people asking a question about how to migrate when everybody's forgotten how to migrate. Oh, exactly. And all the all the information you'll find is two years old. And they've changed how it works or because they don't need to worry about that because but so I moved on to Lightroom and Lightroom met my needs. But the the niggles with Lightroom for me are the subscription. They're a subscription model. So you have to pay monthly for Lightroom and pay for just Lightroom. So you can but it's actually it's more makes more sense to pay for they have packages for the creative cloud. And it goes all the way up from every single piece of software they make in one subscription price to to like individual software programs. But I used the photography bundle, which there's different versions of it that give you online storage, which I don't use. But the plan I have, you get what they call now Lightroom Classic. And you get Lightroom, which works, which is on the iPad, and on macOS and Windows and all the operating systems you could think of. I just use Lightroom Classic. I don't use what they would call Lightroom now. Interesting. So you have like you get Lightroom Classic and Lightroom. Correct. Yeah. And Lightroom works more. It's better. It's designed to use on the iPad. So it works differently than Lightroom Classic, which is more mouse-oriented, I guess. Oh, okay. Is that how I would describe it? Okay. So you don't you don't rent Photoshop? Oh, that does have Photoshop too. Yes. Oh, yeah. Okay. Sorry. I don't use it very often. I use I use affinity photo if I'm going that nitty gritty. But anyway, but yeah, it does So it's Lightroom, Lightroom Classic in Photoshop in a photography bundle. And it's like $12 Canadian a month, I think is what the subscription is right now. And if you buy at the right time, you get a deal on it and it can be cheaper or more expensive if it's not the right time. But so I I don't know. I don't remember exactly how I found a product, this company called DXO, which I've read their camera reviews for a very long time because they they take cameras and they like review the sensors and give them like a score. Wait a minute. That's that's not the same. Yeah, that's a DP review. No, DP review is a website, but the XO does lab testing. They're super pissed pixel PP people. Right. Exactly. So I've heard I've heard a DXO before. And they make software for they make software for a processing of raw photographs. And so Grimm Shepherd just talked to us about DXO something recently. And Alistair's talked about. I think what he uses is pure raw, I think. And that is that is what that is their engine for rendering raw files. Okay. And the software that I use is photo lab, which is by DXO. And that matches their rendering with library modules. So you can organize and edit your photos at the same time. Okay, so it's a Lightroom equivalent. Yeah, or or photos, Apple photos, the the Mac app, just think of it as a more just like aperture, a more pro version of that. Okay, so the main reason that you looked at DXO, sorry, photo lab was because you retired at paying the subscription for any other reason. I thought I always felt that Lightroom, the editing was a little clunky on it. And this was before they they've they've added a lot of features since I had switched away a couple of years ago. So we'll go back to that later. But I just the editing was this clunky feeling. It just felt the feel felt more like a Windows piece of software that I was writing on my Mac, because it's interesting. It's a multi platform, right? So I'm going to interrupt really quickly here, because we haven't necessarily defined for non photographers that that raw photos basically contain more information. They they, I'm not going to get into depth and that sort of thing, but they contain more information that you can do more editing to get higher dynamic range within your photos. And then you can compress them down into a JPEG, what you would standard see or like like HEIC sort of on the on the iPhone. But it's basically just more information, big files, you edit that you can do a lot more to edit them, bring out shadows, bring down brightness and and get a better picture. Just wanted to exactly interlude that. So I ran into DXO photo lab, it was full up for at the time. And it was probably around, I want to say it was the fall. It was in the fall, because I tried the trial photo lab for and I ended up finding photo lab five on sale and I purchased four left five, because it was cool. If you wait till it's on sale, you can get it like for 70 US dollars for and it's no subscription. So you can use it forever for that $70. So that was less than a year of like, so I thought, you know what, I'll try it for a year and see how I like it. Oh, that's a good idea. Okay, because I saw that the it makes nicer looking and renders the photos nicer, the more to me anyway, the with less work, if that makes sense. Like you have to do is a lot less fiddly to get the pictures to look the way you want or the way I like them. Anyway, everyone has their own preferences, but but it's got some it's got some advantages over Lightroom, like it's no subscription. They update it all the time. So they're doing bug fixes and adding features in the year, the after you've bought it. So a lot of software once you buy it, they don't update it, but photo lab is very good at tweaking things that don't work properly. So it looks like they do paid up upgrades pretty often though DSO photo lab six is out. It comes out about what's the year. Okay. And so you're you get bug fixes, but maybe you're tempted by the next one. Correct. Yes. So you might end up with the same cost that you did if you did Lightroom. Exactly right. Especially if you don't if you just if you don't wait for when that's on sale. Now they put it on sale quite often. But if you're like, at the wrong time, and then you don't know that do the sales, then you end up paying a lot more for it than you needed to. That's $139 for the essential edition right now. And you don't want the essential you want the other one because it's good grief. You want the higher the more expensive one. Yeah. But if you buy it on $219. Yeah. So if you buy it on sale though, you can get it that the you can get the the non the what I forget what they call it now, but you can get the full package for like 70 or $100 I think. So elite. Yeah. Elite. That's what they call it. Okay. So but it's killer feature to me is it's it has very, very good lens correction. And that comes from their camera testing. So they because they test every not just the camera body. They test the camera body with specific lenses. And then they I don't I don't know exactly the secret sauce to how they do it. But they have profiles for body and lens together. So this is correcting like for lens distortion on the edges. Yeah. And then it does it does sharpening in spots that it knows that lens is soft. Because some lenses have like they'll have a spot that at certain f stops and focal length are soft and certain spots in the frame. And it it will magically apply sharpening just the spots that it needs it. So it doesn't over sharpen the other spots. That's cool. It's very it's very smart. Their lens correction is very good. And it's again it's not just like oh it's because it's a it's an ADD or whatever it's right down to that lens and the camera together. So and it they also have very very good noise reduction. They call it deep prime. And they iterate it probably once a year or two I think it's like deep prime plus or something now. So is that a separate package you can buy standalone? I think they have a standalone tool because they they bought Nick. I don't know if you remember Nick. Nick plugins they bought Nick. And some of the Nick stuff shows up in there in in in photo lab. You just don't know that's where it's from. Okay. Like I recognize controls from the Nick plugins that I used to use with Lightroom like forever ago. But it's it's noise reduction is very good. I think it uses AI but everything uses AI eight hours. Stevens had me send him a couple of photos of my own where I know I've done everything I can to fix the noise and he sends it back and I've just been blown away. Those are that's that's pretty cool. So that's something to look at right now $129 for Pure Rod. Yeah. So Pure Rod gives you deep prime and the lens correction but without the organizing bit if that makes sense. Okay. And so you can use it with if you are comfortable with photos but aren't Apple photos but aren't happy with the editing tools which is I did try photos but I don't like I can't I can't edit with it I tried I gave it a really good shake is why buy software if I have if I'm already paying for software why not right but I just couldn't yeah sadly they don't support Apple Pro Raw and they're saying because Pro Raw is not a true raw format it's an Apple proprietary format so yeah it has something to do with having to use Apple's Apple's software to do it and that they don't have that built into there or something. Okay. Lightroom does it so I don't know about Adobe's also a lot bigger than DXO. Right. Okay. So you're happy now you're in your DXO photo lab you've got this great organizing tool you've got great software tools for editing your photos but yes then you went back. Yes. So I wasn't happy with the I will say DXO still has a lot of work with the organizing tools part of their tool. It just didn't it's really hard to explain it just didn't I just found myself always looking for photos when on Lightroom I could find them a lot easier even tagging tagging tagging tools are not great in DXO again they're getting better and they're a lot at six apparently is a lot better than five and five was a lot better than four but I just thought if I before I bought six I really thought I'm going to give Lightroom another chance because they have a trial so I thought try the trial I just find Lightroom's organization more natural to how I feel like you were coming home when you went back. Yeah I almost did yeah like it and again DXO is not bad and I would definitely recommend it if someone wanted to try something other than Lightroom but it's just it was again it was like coming home to how it worked and the same with the editing tool again DXO's tools are very good they just I don't know it's hard to it's just they work Lightroom works the way I like it to work and the way I would expect it to work and in the time I have available to sit down and work on my hobby Lightroom let me do more in less time. So are you nutty with your tagging the way Alastair is? No I'm not Alastair is massive architecture. I'm not sure anyone else on earth is as nutty as Alastair is about the tagging. I really hope this plays during Alastair's show so he can do the rebuttal. I just tag usually take like the event like like son's birthday or and the people in it and the place because my camera doesn't have a GPS on it so not all my photos are geotagged so it might be like Walt Disney World Jack Dumbo or something like that just so that if I'm looking for something like specific that I could find it just by typing out Magic Kingdom or Walt Disney World and I don't worry about I just I just do that with in photos I started doing a little bit of tagging but for just a very specific couple of categories but I I just create an album for the event and I name it with that and and by the way folders are not searchable just so you know in photos but album names are so I create folders by quarter by year and then within that I have albums and I just drag all the photos from you know Sienna's birthday go into into a folder or into an album and then of course most of my photos have geotagging but you can now in Apple Photos you can actually add the geotagging you can select a bunch of photos and say this was a Disney World yeah and I could do that in Lightroom just like don't I don't I should I should take more time and do it because you can do it when you import them but I don't I just import them maybe because I'm too impatient to look at them or something when you when you say tagging is that the same as keywords yes yeah yeah okay okay yeah because I knew that's where Alistair had is in fact they probably even use them call them keywords in here I just I just called egg I was getting confused of the difference between the two when you switched from Lightroom to DXO and back to Lightroom did it retain all of your keywords it does because DXO and Lightroom store a lot of their information in what's called a sidecar file so it'll be a little file of both of them leave your files on your on their drive like they're not in a package like photo okay like photos okay database no so it's it's like you can move pictures and stuff out in and out of them and so they store all the pet of the keywords and both of them will store even edits in sidecar files so you always have the original file yes and in fact I'm now running across um since I moved back to Lightroom and I stopped using Lightroom for a couple years their older files that the edits are still there even though I like don't even have that old library I like made a new library but it's kept it kept ratings and keywords and even the edits like I could go in and see though I I redo edits a lot but I could go in and see the old edit and I had that on that and tweak it a little bit because it's all in the sidecar file it's not in the library file that's pretty cool so this is this is kind of interesting what I enjoyed about listening to you in we text chat all the time we were actually looking at each other in video which we're pretty sure we may never have done before maybe once yeah maybe once but we text chat eight times a day I think um but what was funny was you it was almost like you felt dirty going back to doby well yeah because everyone like again at the subscription model I really like I like the subscription model and I don't like subscription model I like the subscription model because I it allows developers big ones and small ones to keep bringing updates to their software and know that they have a steady income to do that right like and there's a lot of like smaller people that have gone on the subscriptions and they explain why like one password for example is a good one um and it makes sense to me right because if that steady income allows makes it less of a risk to bring on staff and help you develop your software but I also like it's also can be depending on the software like for like for me and a lot of other people $13 a month is a lot of money to spend on their like their hobby right I guess what you've learned though by by your experimental um path was that it's a fair price because DxO is doing much of the same kind of work and it's the same price in the end because you have to you essentially have to buy it once a year I can yes and that's what I that's what I've come that's what I found because it was when I was looking into buying uh photo lab 6 I'm like what's the difference if I'm going to spend $100 a year on photo lab 6 or on photo lab where am I going to spend $120 a year on lightroom like $20 it's not a big difference over a whole year so right you know like so that's and that's what I'm like you know what I'll try lightroom again because like I don't think photo lab 6 progressed enough to be worth the for the tools I use anyway it's good to be worth the extra hundred dollars I guess one of the nice things is now you have a little bit of the best of both worlds because you have the subscription for lightroom where you're more comfortable with the library but if you ever want to go over and use the noise reduction tools in DxO you've still got DxO 5 well what's really nice is DxO does have a plugin for lightroom where you can round trip photo so I can in lightroom I can choose a photo let's say it's a photo that's noisy for example or how I use that a less good lens so it has like distortion or something I can send it to the DxO software and just use the lens correction and the noise reduction and then it will spit out a DNG file back into lightroom where I can do all the other editing I like to do but so that I get the really good noise reduction and lens correction from photo lab but then get the tools in the organization I like from lightroom. Oh that's great that's really cool well I don't think you should feel dirty going back to to lightroom it sounds like you did a good experiment you considered it and I will try really hard to not mock you for paying them. Wow yeah that I appreciate that. Mocking is basically the the central core of our relationship so that's a big statement I'm making there and it goes both ways right tell the people it goes both ways sometimes yeah it's not all right well for that I'm gonna wind you up if people want to talk to you online now what would the best way to do that be? Probably just my twitter at goatland I'm also on the Slack it's uh I don't remember what my name on the Slack is. I looked it up your Stephen Getz. Stephen Getz on the Slack there you go look at that yeah he's pretty active in there and like all the other lovely no-cellic castaways so it's a lot of fun well thanks for coming on it was it was a treat for me to get to see you and talk to you in real life well as real life as nerds believe in anyway. Thanks for having me on. Thank you for that Stephen and Allison I would just like to make a few clarifications. DxO's two products share some DNA but serve very different purposes pure raw is a raw converter it does lens and camera corrections and noise reduction these two features are DxO's secret source pure raw is a drag and drop application raw files in and processed images and dng tiff or jpeg format out there are very few controls over the processing done photo lab is a full featured application like lightroom classic or aperture it has the same raw conversion engine as pure raw but you get more control over how it works then there are the library and usual processing features as Stephen described it is worth reiterating that the more expensive elite edition is the one you want because the essential edition does not have the best noise reduction technology amongst other things also apple pro raw isn't really raw it is synthesized from multiple lenses and already converted from the sensor data into a full rgb image it does contain a lot more information than the he ic files but DxO's secret source is decoding raw sensor data so even if it supported apple pro raw it would just be like using lightroom when it comes to sharpness and noise reduction my journey in photo processing software has so far been nothing lightroom aperture lightroom again luminar photo lab and most recently photo lab and lightroom keywords are lightroom's superpower Stephen called me nuts for my keyword prowess and who am I to disagree as an example of why I use lightroom for keywords I noted the stats of a recent session I had 293 photos to which I applied 64 unique keywords an average of nine per image and I did it in only 20 minutes including defining three new keywords it is worth noting that lightroom classic can be used as a photo library manager including keyword management for free if you have any questions about this hit me up in the pod feet slack well that's going to wind things up for this week if you like the content I created here please consider checking out my photography and writing at zkarj.me I'm an active participant in the pod feet slack usually adding fun content to the delete me channel and you can also follow me on twitter at zkarj did you know you can email allison at allison at pod feet dot com anytime you like if you have a question or suggestion just send it on over you can follow her on twitter at at pod feet and you can find her on master on at at pod feet at chaos dot social if you want to join in the conversation you can join our slack community at pod feet dot com slash slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely no silica aster ways remember everything good starts with pod feet dot com you can support the show at pod feet dot com slash patreon or with a one-time donation at pod feet dot com slash paypal and if you want to join in the fun of the live show you're going to have to wait until sunday february 5th when you can head on over to pod feet dot com slash live at 5 p.m pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic no silica aster ways thanks for listening and stay subscribed