Adobe Lightroom Classic's New AI Assisted Culling Too

Adobe Lightroom Classic's New AI Assisted Culling Too

Lightroom Classic's new AI Assisted Culling tool is the first AI feature Lightroom has launched in the Library module. All the others are located in LR’s Develop module and assist with masking, generative removal, and de-noising.

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Backup vs. Archiving vs. Legacy

Backup vs. Archiving vs. Legacy

Summer is almost over, and as we head back to work and school, we are all entering other types of seasons. It depends upon your region, but out here in Los Angeles we are entering peak wildfire season. In the Gulf states, hurricane season is underway, and soon heavy rains and storms will bring flooding to many parts of the country. Honestly, it seems like these weather-related disaster seasons are becoming year-round. The important thing is that our homes, belongings, photos, family history, and memories are at risk.

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The Palisades Fire

The Palisades Fire

The Tuesday the Palisades wildfire started was a typical, beautiful, blue-sky day here in Los Angeles. In the morning, I took a walk to the gym with my son who was home from school for winter vacation. The winds were already blowing quite strongly, and we had to dodge a few palm fronds and other debris falling from trees as we made our way along the sidewalk. There was a general sense of uneasiness as we walked, but nothing could have portended what was to come.

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Negative scanning - When and Why?

Negative scanning - When and Why?

One of the services I perform for clients—and enjoy the most—is scanning old prints, negatives, and slides. This process can bring new life to images that have been sitting in boxes or albums for years. In some cases, it allows people to see photos they may have never seen before.

Not only is it a wonderful way to revisit and share old family photos, but it is also the best way to ensure their preservation, especially when it comes to unique, one-of-a-kind prints, slides, or negatives.

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My Legacy Project - My Grandfather Boris Lenoff

My Legacy Project - My Grandfather Boris Lenoff

Permanent.org is a personal legacy archive platform created to enable people to preserve family history, tell their stories, and most importantly, ensure that it is safely passed on and available to others for years to come.

They recently launched a project they called the Legacy Lab, which encouraged participants to do a start-to-finish archive on a particular family member. I’m still in the process of doing mine, which is on my maternal grandfather Boris Lenoff, who was a portrait photographer who had his studio on the Coney Island boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

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Slide and Negative Scanning

Slide and Negative Scanning

I just finished a large slide scanning job for a client of over 4500 slides. The camera scans I did on the 50-70 years old slides made them look like they are taken yesterday, the camera scanning quality is that good.

I can’t show you my clients work, but here are some slides and negatives of mine I recently scanned. Some of these I haven’t seen in decades, but all wonderful memories.

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Lightroom Update and New Features

Lightroom Update and New Features

Adobe just updated Lightroom Classic with some interesting new features. I’ve had a few clients call me as they were confused about some changes in the way the tools in Develop mode now display. If you wish to set up a session to go over these new tools, or anything else, let me know and we can go through them.

Here are the basics of the new changes.

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How they steal your money

How they steal your money

I’m going to write today about a topic I don’t usually cover, unfortunately it’s one of those topics you don’t think about until you have to. I’m talking about identity theft and bank theft, both of which happened to me several weeks ago.

Getting your online bank account hacked is not something I ever thought would happen to me, but when it did, it was not only dealing with the shock of what happened, but also a growing awareness of how easily it can happen, and how easily it could happen again.

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Apple discontinues My Photo Stream

Apple discontinues My Photo Stream

On July 26th of this year, Apple will be discontinued something called My PhotoStream. My PhotoStream was a feature that iPhones used before there was iCloud to sync photos and videos from your iPhone to your computer. Its now basically obsolete so nothing to worry about unless you might be still unknowingly using it to transfer images from your phone. That might be the case if you are not logged into your iCloud account.

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The Photo Managers annual conference – looking forward Part 1

The Photo Managers annual conference – looking forward  Part 1

I just got back from the annual conference of The Photo Managers in Orlando which brings together photo-organizers, archivists, tech companies and all professions and services related to family photos from all over the world. As usual it was a fantastic time to hear and talk about the latest trends in our field and find out about all the new products and services that will be enhancing the work we do with our clients. I can’t go through all of them, but will mention a few in this newsletter in Part 1 and some more soon in Part 2

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Lightroom – setting up view options

Lightroom – setting up view options

Lightroom – Information is everything

One of the most common things I come across when I first see my client’s Lightroom catalog is this generic display on their thumbnails, displaying absolutely nothing of importance. So one of the first things I do when helping to set up a catalog for a client is to show them how to display important and helpful information in the Grid view of their catalog

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AI restores old photos

AI restores old photos

Maybe you’ve heard or read about some of the new AI software that can create crazy surreal images by simply writing some descriptive text. I will put aside my opinion of these things for now and instead tell you about some of the really cool and helpful abilities AI does have when it comes to restoring scanned photos that may be damaged or faded. There are a number of products out there, but I used some easy-to-use features and tools in Adobe Photoshop to achieve some really good results with just a few clicks.

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Should I scan my old albums?

Should I scan my old albums?

Albums have traditionally been the place we put our favorite prints to display our most memorable events, trips, and family and friends. Ironically, placing our prints in albums puts our favorite prints way more at risk than if we just stuck them in a dark box and never looked at them.

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