TOPIC: FILTER
Getting Adobe Lightroom Classic to remember the search filters that you have set
23rd April 2023With Windows 10 support to end in October 2025 and VirtualBox now offering full support for Windows 11, I have moved onto Windows 11 for personal use while retaining Windows 10 for professional work, at least for now. Of course, a lot could happen before 2025 with rumours of a new Windows version, the moniker Windows 12 has been mooted, but all that is speculation for now.
As part of the changeover, I moved the Adobe apps that I have in an ongoing subscription, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop are the main ones for me, to the new virtual machine. That meant that some settings from the previous one were lost and needed reinstating.
One of those was the persistence of Library Filters, so I had to find out how to get that sorted. If my memory is not fooling me, this seemed to be a default action in the past, and that meant that I was surprised by the change in behaviour.
Nevertheless, I had to go to the File menu, select Library Filters (it is near the bottom of the menu in the current version at the time of writing) and switch on Lock Filters by clicking on it to get a tick mark preceding the text. There is another setting called Remember Each Source's Filters Separately in the same place that can be set in the same manner if so desired, and I am experimenting with that at the moment, even though I have not bothered with this in the past.
The power of pipes
12th July 2007One of the great features of the UNIX shell is that you can send the output from one command to another for further processing. Take the following example for instance:
ls -l | grep "Jul 12"
This takes the long directory file listing output and sends it to grep for subsetting (all files created today in this example) before it is returned to the screen. The | character is the pipe trigger, and you can have as many pipes in your command as you want, though readability may dictate how far you want to go.
Two versions ago…
26th March 2007With all the focus that there is on the current version of a long-established piece of software, it is often intriguing to see what it was like a few versions back. And it was with that curiosity that I had a look at Photoshop 7. Needless to say, a lot of the functionality of the current version is there: adjustment layers, saving for the web and so on. That said, I did spot some absences, as one would expect. For instance, the file browser, dropped down by a tab on the main interface, had yet to morph into the standalone Adobe Bridge. Another change has been the resampling choices for resizing; there is no sign of the now prevalent bicubic smoothing and bicubic sharpening. On the Filters menu, there is no sign of Smart Sharpening, the now recommended sharpening technique that upstages the one-time favourite Unsharp Mask. These may appear little things, but little things are often the very items that persuade you that an upgrade is an excellent idea.