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If you are already familiar with diglloyd.com, you know that it has some of the most comprehensive hardware and software reviews and comparisons available. The newly posted review of the 2010 Mac Pro Westmere 4,6,8, and 12 core models is no exception. If you are in the market for a new workstation, do yourself a favor and check it out.

You can find the review here.

Choosing which computer monitors to use in your digital imaging workflow is tricky territory for most of us. The tech landscape keeps changing rapidly and most of us are budget constrained. We want our monitors to accurately match our image files and for them to be a pleasure to sit in front of since that is where many of us are spending a great deal of our time these days. Finding the best combination of quality and price is key. Understanding the terminology can be very useful in evaluating monitors since there are many terms and acronyms floating around.

New from John Beardsworth, a plug-in that lets you copy the metadata from one file to another one of the same name (From a JPEG to a NEF for instance).  John’s hard at work on Lightroom Plug-ins, which is good for people who want to use the program and need extensions to the file or metadata handling capabilities.

From his blog:

People often ask, "What's more important for computer performance, RAM or the processor?" These two things are extremely important but the component that is often overlooked is hard drive performance. When working with large image files, software makes uses of scratch disks and if your hard drive does not perform well, you will experience a slower workflow regardless of your RAM or processor.

Having trouble using the X-Rite Color Checker Passport plugin with Adobe Lightroom? Well, if you are, X-Rite has put together a helpful set of instructions to get you up and running. Using the plugin with Lightroom, as compared to using the stand alone Color Checker software, is quick and easy and can save you some time in your workflow.

Adobe has recently released an update for Photoshop CS5. The update adress a number of high priority bugs with 64-bit Mac, Performance, User Interface, Type, Content-Aware Fill, HDR, 3D, Painting, GPU and Liquify implemented after Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended (12.0.0) were released.

To download the update, you can choose Help->Updates from within Photoshop, or here for Mac and here for Windows.

Seagate now offers a 3TB external hard drive. That's a lot of drive. The interesting thing however is that the drive is available with either USB 2.0, Firewire 800 or blazing fast USB 3.0. The price is also very reasonable at $249.

You can find more information about the drive here.

We’ve added quite a bit of material to the dpBestflow™ website describing the process of Camera Scanning (using a digital camera as a scanner for film originals). There are two pages that have been created. the first is a Best Practice page that outlines what the choices are for hardware, as well as the software for image manipulation.

One of our best practice recommendations is to use a reference light and a reference print to check monitor and printer profiles. In the past, we have pointed people to Neil Barstow's profile verification print, but now we are happy to report that we have our own dpBestflow™ branded kit.