![\"itunes\"](\"https:\/\/podfeet.com\/NosillaCast\/artwork\/itunes_subscribe_button.png\")
<\/a>\nmp3 download<\/a>
\n
\nHi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Sunday September 22, 2013 and this is show number 437. WE have a HUGE show today as you can imagine. I’m going to tell you first about a really fun thing Steve and I are working on, then I’m going to talk ONLY about what surprised me in iOS 7, not droning on and on like others have been. Then Yadiel Sotomayor will tell us about some cool blind accessibility improvements in iOS 7. I have a cool app review and George from Tulsa has another recording for us – but there’s just no time for them this week so we’ll leave them as a teaser for next week. in Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart takes us through explaining processes in Taming the Terminal Part 8, and it was so much fun we didn’t stop at our usual time. Let’s kick into gear then!<\/p>\n
Smartphone Camera Shootout<\/h3>\n
This weekend Steve and I had a BLAST working with Robert Lachman, staff photographer for the LA Times on a smartphone camera shootout. I can’t tell you exactly which phones we compared yet, and I definitely can’t tell you the winner, but I can tell you that we spent 7.5 hours on this project so far – and we’re going to work again on it on Wednesday! It turns out that to do a reasonably good and fair job of it takes a heck of a lot of time! One of the questions we’re hoping to answer with all this work is if you have an iPhone 5, is the camera in the iPhone 5s enough better to warrant an upgrade? <\/p>\n
The first thing we had to do was make sure that we actually knew how to get the photos off of Androids and Windows phones into our Macs. Between Apple’s Image Capture, Android File Transfer from the Mac App Store, and a few vendor-specific apps, we got it all working. That took us more than an hour testing the process on a few Macs and five phones. <\/p>\n
Then we story boarded out what we hoped to accomplish in the end game. Robert had the vision that we could have a video with him and me discussing the phones a bit, showing some photos in the background of the video and explaining our findings. He also envisions this video being 2-3 minutes long, which makes it WAY harder than a long drawn out wandering video. He brought a giant green screen as big as the width of my living room, some stands and a cross beam to hang it, and some giant standing lights too. Steve did some test video with the green screen, and Robert showed him how easily he could remove the green background and insert anything he wants instead. It turns out you can drop a picture in, and have it be an insert (not just as the entire background). You can put a video behind you but that’s pretty distracting and that’s not what we’re looking for. It was super fun for Steve to learn this and I think Robert enjoyed revealing how fun it is to Steve.<\/p>\n
Now we had to figure out what to shoot. The hardest thing to photograph in my opinion is red flowers. Ok, toddlers are probably harder but in terms of static images, red flowers always always always over saturate and lose definition when shot with a camera phone. We found some bougainvilleas, the brightest flowers around. Then we went to the marina to find some high detail with challenging reflections and high contrast. We found some brightly colored kayaks that looked like they’d provide a nice challenge too. Finally we tested the low light performance with and without the flash.<\/p>\n
Now picture us walking along and we find something to photograph. Robert and I have pockets full of cell phones. Steve is doing b-roll video the whole time. Robert let me take all the shots, Steve did a lot of the directing and Robert was delighted to add advice on angles and to have help with this whole idea. He’d hand me phone after phone, and EVERY time I would fumble trying to figure out how to turn each phone on, and find the camera. After a while I got better at it, but it was really hard! <\/p>\n
When we got back to the house, Steve and I dragged our computers and monitors downstairs. We lined up on one side of the dining room table, with Robert between us. Steve on the right with video, me on the left doing photos. Robert convinced me to FINALLY buy Photoshop Elements again (i’ve been away for about 5 revisions, using Pixelmator, but it’s only $80 in the Mac App Store so I can share it with Steve who never really took to the alternatives). So remember how I told you Robert was teaching Steve green screen? Well he had me on the other side teaching me keystrokes to speed up my work in Photoshop elements.<\/p>\n
Now think about what we’ve done – we’ve got 2-5 photos each of about 7 different scenes, on 5 cameras – that’s nearly a hundred photos to compare! We pulled all of the photos into folders by phone name. Then I used filewrangler to rename the photos with the camera\/phone name. Next, using Quicklook we went through the photos of each scene on each camera and picked the best for each camera. For example, we opened all of the bougainvillea photos for one phone, and picked the best, deleting the rest. Now for a single scene, we have five photos to compare. <\/p>\n
This is where Robert’s talents really started to come into focus. He started pointing out scenes we’d shot that he could live without which as I realized how much work we’d need to do on every photo! We narrowed it down to 5 scenes but how do we work with them? First we opened them all up in Photoshop Elements and cropped the photos that were 16:9 down to 4:3 so they’d be more comparable visually. Robert got a great idea – he suggested we create a long film strip for each scene, with high enough resolution photos that people could understand our conclusions, but not so big that we’d never be able to post it online. Robert suggested a long black strip with five photos at 600px wide. Then he suggested that dropping the name of the phone on each image. <\/p>\n
Then we got stuck because the text wasn’t standing out enough, so we needed a drop shadow. I started mucking about in the menus, but Robert said that one of the joys of using Photoshop Elements is that ANYTHING you want to know, someone has made a video about it. He said to search for Photoshop Elements text drop shadow. We found the FUNNIEST video telling us how to do it. We found InfoPuppet. You have to watch the video to believe it – it’s an animated puppet teaching Photoshop Elements. And the video is good, it taught us exactly how to do a drop shadow, laughing the whole time. <\/p>\n