At Home with Tech

Unlock the power of all your technology and learn how to master your photography, computers and smartphone.

Tag: Aperture

Those Pictures on Your Fridge

People love to look at photos and art on your refrigerator.  But if the imagery isn’t current, it’s probably time to give your family ‘monolith’ an artificial time-warp update.

People love to look at photos and art on your refrigerator. But if the imagery isn’t current, it’s probably time to give your family ‘monolith’ an artificial time-warp update.

We had a small family get-together yesterday. A little holiday brunch. Nothing crazy…

As my wife and I were doing some prep work earlier in the week, we noticed our refrigerator needed some refreshing.

No, not the food on the inside. My wife had that covered. (yum)
I’m talking about some of the items affixed with tape and magnets to the outside!

A lot of the pictures wrapping around our fridge were a tad out of date, and so my new mission was to bring the general imagery of our son’s adventures with his cousins and friends up to a more current state.

So how easy is that?

Normally, pictures, postcards, and your children’s drawings evolve onto your refrigerator. It simply takes time… just like good wine, right?
You can’t just snap your fingers and suddenly give the outside of your icebox that ‘look.’

Well, of course…you can.
Actually, tapping your fingers on your computer’s keyboard is the way to do it.

How to Refresh Your Fridge Photos
With a little thoughtful photo organization using software like iPhoto or Aperture, the pictures you need are waiting patiently for you in digital form.

And with your trusty home photo printer,
(You do have one of those?)
…it’s super simple to print up a fresh batch of refrigerator pics!

In less than half an hour, my-four-year-old son and I were busily taping a fresh batch of photos onto our refrigerator.

Problem solved.

HAL, Open the Refrigerator Door
But I find it interesting how such an old-school, analog activity centered around the family refrigerator is still alive and well in our high-tech lives these days.

There are lots of forward-thinking ideas surrounding what a ‘smart’ refrigerator should do for you, such as letting you know when you’re out of milk.

I know I’m not the first to acknowledge the fridge as the ‘bridge’ in the starship of your family’s household. It’s like the ‘memory central’ for the Borg of your little population.

It sits there, not unlike the black ‘monolith’ in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
And people are compelled to tape important strips of paper to it.
So be it.

Bringing Your Icebox into the 21st Century
So what about a fridge that has a digital workspace or interactive whiteboard on its entire door? Then you can take all that taped clutter away and clear the space for a rotating digital photo montage managed from your computer.

Now that’s a concept I’d be interested in paying for!

How expensive could it be?
With flat-screen monitor prices crashing, popping one into a refrigerator door shouldn’t be that costly!

And of course, one that’s ‘connected.’
Okay, so that would jack the price up a bit.

But it would be so sweet…

The 2015 holiday shopping season begins in just a few more days.
(unofficially)
I’m ready to start saving up!

Cure the Cause of Your Computer’s Crippling Coma

Does your Mac get a headache keeping up with all the programs you’re running? It’s time to dial it back. Activity Monitor can help you decide which programs to close down.

Does your Mac get a headache keeping up with all the programs you’re running? It’s time to dial it back. Activity Monitor can help you decide which programs to shut down.

My iMac has been slowing down lately.
Slowwwwww…

Its spinning beach ball shows up whenever you click on the simplest task…
And then you’ve got to wait around like it’s 1999.
You look up…stare into space.
Yup…
The moon’s still there.

Suddenly, you hear the whir of the computer’s fan grow louder.
It really shouldn’t be working this hard.

Hmmm.
Well, my Mac is a few years old…

So I wondered if it was time to think about a new one.
But it’s got 4 GB of RAM and the i7 processor.
It shouldn’t be hurting that badly.

Doctor Barrett… what’s the problem?!

Activate Repair Disk Permissions
One good maintenance check is to run ‘Repair Disk Permissions’ in Disk Utility.
That can speed things up a bit.

Unfortunately, that fix didn’t improve the health of my panting processor this time.

Of course, the big question is…

  • How much software do you have running simultaneously?

No computer is a bottomless bottle of beer.
So I sat down with my Mac and we began some self-reflection.

Billions and Billions of Programs
Well, first off… I often use Adobe Lightroom to edit and organize all my photos.
(Everyone talks about what a memory hog that program is.)

Then, you might recall I added Backblaze a while back for automatic cloud backup, in addition to my Time Machine drive.
(You can never be too careful.)

Do I have lots of Safari windows open?
Guilty as charged.

Plus I see, Dropbox, Word, Outlook….

Already, it’s getting to be a pretty large list.

Maybe I’ve been maxing out my Mac after all.
(And I haven’t even mentioned iTunes or Final Cut Pro.)

So how are you supposed to know how much weight your Mac can bench press?

X-ray Vision into Your Computer
Yes, Apple has, of course, thought of that.
The answer comes in the form of a little utility called Activity Monitor.

It lists all of your open programs, charts the drain and graphically displays the ‘memory pressure’ your poor computer is enduring.

There’s lots tech jargon to consume, but it’s immediately clear which programs are depleting your digital companion.

And then you can close down the particular offenders directly in Activity Monitor.

Time to Tidy Up
I’ve opened Activity Monitor before, but it was more out of curiosity than need.

This time, I went in and saw some Safari pages ‘not responding’ and putting a pretty big drain on the system.

Click…. See you guys later!

That seemed to do the trick… but then I didn’t close out of my nifty new window into my Mac’s brain.

I left it open and positioned it in the top left corner of my screen.
And that was a few weeks ago…

Now, it’s always there to help me see what’s going on and which hungry programs are grabbing more than their fair share.

Yes, a newer Mac or more RAM would also solve the problem, but really, how many programs do you need to have open simultaneously?

When I was a kid at home, my mom always pestered me to turn off all the lights in the room I just left.

“That’s just wasting electricity,” she’d say knowingly.

Decades later, I finally get it…

Happy Computer, Happy Human
…What’s that, you say?
And how much memory does it taken to run Activity Monitor 24/7?
Good question…

Could this reveal a circular logic flaw…?

As I write this, Activity Monitor is sipping a miniscule 14.7 MB.
By comparison, Word is consuming 148.3 MB.
And my cloud backup is gulping 698.3 MB.

The price we sometimes pay for peace of mind…

By comparison, Activity Monitor is a welcome dose of aspirin to clear up your headache and keep your computer focused on what really matters in the moment.

How to Reanimate a Dead Eye in Your Photo

Sometimes a perfectly good-looking eye won’t reflect a camera’s flash like its twin. That can really ruin a picture. But with a little photo-editing voodoo, you can bring it back to life in seven easy steps!

Sometimes a perfectly good-looking eye won’t reflect a camera’s flash like its twin. That can really ruin a picture. But with a little photo-editing voodoo, you can bring it back to life in seven easy steps!

They say the eyes are the windows to your soul.
So you’ve got a lot riding on how they look when you’re trying to snap a great shot of somebody.

We all know how ‘red eye’ is a common problem with flash photography.
And how that devilish defect tends to occur in low-light situations when someone’s pupils are wide open.
(Blue-eyed people have a greater problem with this than brown-eyed folks.)

But barring this complication, eyes normally tend to simply reflect the flash in the form of a glint or sparkle.
Totally normal…

In certain circumstances though, one eye may reflect the flash less than the other one. Or sometimes not at all….
Now that can look really weird!

And the otherwise best photo you’ve taken in years can make somebody look like Frankenstein’s monster.

This ‘Dead Eye’ Syndrome is definitely going to ruin your photo…

Time for an Eye Job
Red eye is so easy to fix these days; both cameras and computers have simple tools to magically turn all that red to black.

But what are you supposed to do with a dead eye?!

Well, to bring it back to life, you’ve got to give it the similar glint of its partner.

And that’s going to take a little tech voodoo…
The good news is you don’t have to have access to a serious photo-editing program to do the surgery…

Eye Surgery in Seven Steps
The basic task is to clone the glint from one eye and place it on top of the sickly-looking pupil in the other eye.
Effectively, it’s a copy-and-paste maneuver.

Here’s how you do it using Adobe Lightroom:

  1. Click on the “Spot Removal” icon
    (I know that doesn’t sound right, but keep going…)
  2. Click on “Clone”
  3. Adjust the size of the “Spot Edit” circle to just larger than the bad eye’s glint
  4. Hover the circle over the bad glint
  5. Click it
  6. Then move the circle to hover right over the glint of the good eye
  7. Click to replace the bad reflection with the good reflection

Voila! Both your eyes now have matching reflections.
Normality has been restored in your picture.

Take a look at this example:

Original photo - I think Barrett’s been replaced by a pod person.

Original photo – I think Barrett’s been replaced by a pod person.

After surgery - No more Frankenstein creature…

After a little surgery on my left eye – No more Frankenstein creature…

Illuminating the Darkness
I know there’s lots of debate about the appropriateness of touching up a face in a photo.

I don’t think this falls under the same category of concern.
You don’t really have a dead eye.
(Right?)
There is no darkness in your soul.
(I hope.)

The ‘darkness’ is more of an aberration created by technology.
(Unless your evil eye always photographs that way…
if so run to your ophthalmologist…!)

We’re just reversing a little tech error and
letting your true beauty shine through…

You’re welcome.