Mostly, I use this blog to write about photography related issues, but today I'm making an exception, and writing about email apps. Apologies to regular readers, but never fear, normal service will resumed soon.

Email is important to me. As a consultant and entrepreneur, I get a lot of email, and have to process it efficiently. If I didn't, I could easily spend a large proportion of my day just dealing with email. I might add, I don't actually like email. Given the choice, I'd abolish email, and move to a messaging-style system such as Slack or one of it's competitors. But given that 90% plus of the communicating that I do is "external", rather than to people that work with me regularly, that's not an option.

My way of processing email efficiently is "Inbox Zero".

CornerFix was one the the first imaging apps that I wrote. Written originally for the Leica M8 to fix the M8's "pink corners" problem, it corrects for vignetting, both in luminance and in color dependent form. In photographic circles, this is known as "flat fielding". Later updates made CornerFix more versatile, with the ability to deal with many other vignetting-like image problems, such as the Leica M9's "Italian flag" syndrome.

I've just found out that, to my regret, Photosmith has ceased development. In short, Photosmith allowed images to easily be uploaded to an iPad, sorted, rated, and the ratings etc transferred to Adobe's Lightroom.

Photosmith was somewhat of a competitor to one of my own products, PhotoRaw, so it might seem surprising that I'm sorry that things turned out this way. But I am genuinely disappointed to them go.

A number of people have contacted me to ask how much lens correction there is on the new Leica SL. Or, more accurately, how much lens correction there is on the new SL lens, the VARIO-ELMARIT 1:2.8-4.0/24-90mm.

Below are the comparisons for an image shot at 24mm - the uncorrected image is from AccuRaw. (The original image is courtesy of PhotographyBlog).

I'm sure you won't need me to tell you which is which(!).
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(Edited 23 October to include information on how M lenses are handled.)

As usual when new Leica cameras come out, I took a quick look inside a DNG from one of Leica's new Leica SL (Typ 601) cameras, using one of the new Leica L mount lenses:

The camera is using what appears to be production software - version 1.10. The camera name shows as "LEICA SL (Typ 601)" The image data is 14-bit. There is no compression used in the DNG I looked at.  The DNG version is 1.4, with a "backward version" of 1.
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Affinity Photo isn't one of my products, but I have been following it closely, and trying out the betas as they came out. It is now out of beta, and I know that a lot of readers of this blog are looking for alternatives to being forced onto the Creative Cloud model.

Affinity Photo is worth taking a look at. It's loosely a Photoshop competitor, but much, much cheaper.

As usual when new Leica cameras come out, I took a quick look inside a DNG from one of Leica's new Leica Q (Typ 116) cameras:

The camera is using what appears to be production software - version 1.02. The camera name shows as "LEICA Q (Typ 116)" The image data is 14-bit. There is no compression used in the DNG I looked at.  The DNG version is 1.4, with a "backward version" of 1.3. There is a reason for this - DNG 1.3 allows for opcodes, which Leica use for lens correction.
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As usual when new Leica cameras come out, I took a quick look inside a DNG from one of Leica's new Leica M Monochrom (Type 246) cameras:

The camera is using what appears to be production software - version 1.0.0.4. The camera name shows as "LEICA M MONOCHROM (Typ 246)" The image data is 12-bit. There is no compression used in the DNG I looked at. The data is packed, four 12-bit values in 6 bytes, as is the case for the Leica T. The DNG version is 1.3, with a "backward version" of 1.1.
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I don't often talk about pcdMagic because, well, there's seldom much new to say about it. For those that don't know, pcdMagic is my software package for converting old Kodak Photo CD images to modern formats. It's available for both Mac OS X and Windows, and runs on the latest 64-bit versions of both OS's. Photo CD was very popular in the early 90's and a LOT of images were converted back then. Unfortunately, Kodak subsequently abandoned the format.

PhotoRaw version 4.2.1 is now available on the Apple App Store with new camera support including the Sony A7 II (ICLE-7M2), Sony QX1 (ICLE-QX1), Panasonic DMC-CM1, Pentax K-S1, Olympus E-PL7, Fuji S1, Kodak C330, Leica D-Lux (Type 109), Leica V-Lux (Type 114), Samsung NX300M, Samsung NX3000
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Author of AccuRaw, PhotoRaw, CornerFix, pcdMagic, pcdtojpeg, dcpTool, WinDat Opener and occasional photographer....
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