I have been a fan of Lightroom since day 1. I've never been much into bridge, but I shoot everything in RAW and Lightroom seemed to be THE perfect tool for someone shooting many pictures in raw: one of the best if not the best software to organize/compare your photos, but also to retouch them, in ways that photoshop couldn't (haaaa, "vibrance"... you killed saturation for ever)... all that, in a non destructive way. You may not understand why non destructive manipulation is important, but when you take photographs for a long time, sometimes you just come back to something you did years ago and suddenly see it with an all new eye. Then, you're glad to still have your RAW shot, untouched.

Then, there was Lightroom 2. Lightroom 2 was beyond my wildest dreams: the ability to retouch a raw picture with gradients and photoshop-like brushes were a blessing. Also, the "clarity" filter is, I believe, one of the best way to make your picture sharper.

Because of that, for the past year I've used Lightroom way more than I used Photoshop, which I opened only to do some skin retouching, or heavy manipulating. This was a big mistake from me.

While Lightroom is awesome, it still lacks some key features: for example, the curve panel in Lightroom is ok, but really needs different curves for the R, G, B channels. Also, there is no layer whatsoever in Lightroom, so no blending modes, or masks, or stuff like that, and when I come to think about it, they all come very handy. Also, while I don't use it very often, the LAB mode on Photoshop is a real treasure sometimes.

For the last retouching I did with Photoshop, I used some plug-in filters, which supported 16 bit ProPhoto pictures, giving truly amazing colors. Alas, one thing I learnt the hard way: there are so few softwares that can read ProPhoto correctly. My wallpapers therefore had totally washed-out colors on my desktop (mac or windows...) and on the internet too. Turned out, if my colors were great, they didn't exist in a 8bit sRGB environment... Any attempt of good translation into RGB pretty much failed, until I found a way, using the "save for web" option, that optimized my pictures quite correctly (WAY better than just putting your picture on sRGB again on the "edit" menu...).

I am now teared apart: I obtain the best colors and retouching using 16bit ProPhoto pictures, but the colors can only be seen by me... I should learn more about printing...

Maybe some of my readers actually have no idea what I'm talking about, I am very sorry about it. I'm on holidays now, so I have time to think about that kind of stuff Talking about "that kind of stuff...

Yesterday was my last exam. In periods of stress, I tend to have a great imagination, especially in subjects totally irrelevant to what I'm supposed to think about. Yesterday, my brain decided to wondered in my philosophy field to answer this question: is art the capture or the creation of beauty?

Quickly a thing came to my mind: it depends what medium you're talking about. Having thought about it previously, I had in mind than illustration was creating beauty, while photography was capturing it. But, somehow, I was wrong.

Illustration obeys to some rules to create beauty, whether it is a sens of composition, colors, subjects, etc. Rather than trying to create beauty, it tries to recreate it, or, to be more precise, the essence of what beauty is (that is how illustration can "create" something beautiful that actually doesn't exist: that thing that doesn't exist however obeys to some existing standards).

Photography, therefore, doesn't try to capture beauty, but rather to translate a real, physical subject, to beauty, using basically math and physic rules (understanding of light, aperture, chemistry, etc). However the real translation is from the subject in its (our) reality, to a new state, the world of "spirit", of the mind, (the "cosmos", would say my philosophy teacher), to this other dimension where lies, again, the essence of what is beauty.

The reason why beauty is so hard to define is because its definition, its substance, lies in an other dimension than the common one, the one we live in, the dimension of what we call "reality", that is in fact the "scientific", the rational dimension, while the essence of beauty is in the irrational dimension. The question is, what is the bridge between the two? The simple answer would be the human mind, but what's really interesting, is to study how men, in the history of art, is trying to join the two dimension by always trying to bring elements from one dimension to the other. The whole history of art is about trying to translate the beauty of the irrational dimension into the rational dimension, by creating something physical (whether it is a medium that reflects light, or waves in the air to create sound, etc) that is a "gate", a bridge, from the rational world to the irrational dimension, and vice versa. The body (rational) of the viewers then have to contemplate the piece to send it to the mind (irrational) to find out whether it is beauty or not.

The question is now, is a good piece of art something that permit to access the most people to the irrational dimension? Or does the fact that we appreciate beauty differently comes from elsewhere than the different path each of us followed? Or, are there different, nonparallel irrational dimensions?

At this time I had to go to my exam, so I couldn't answer those questions. Sorry! Feel free to give me your insight, though.

The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.


Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.


Every year approximately 2,500 left-handed people are killed by using object or machinery designed for right-handed people.


The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

[link] ISO50 blog. Great inspiration, for many things.

[link] Either you'll feel very good about yourself for being so smart, or you'll hate humanity, or both. But you'll love clerks.

[link] Saturday Morning Breakfast. Daily web comic, fun!

[link] Xkcd. Bi-weekly web comic, fun!