About Nitin Chandra

Highly skilled professional with almost 30 years of hands-on experience in software product development including business modelling, resource management, security, mobility and programming. Proficient in a variety of programming languages, frameworks and platforms. Well-developed organisational, planning, communication and process optimisation skills. Designed, developed and owned numerous software products like IAVT (Intelligent AntiVirus Toolkit), IntelliPrint (Indian Languages under Windows 3.0), Intelligent Hair Styler etc, at the start of my career. Have also authored two books; “A Date with a Computer Virus” and “Chipping In”. A reviewer for various magazines like PC Quest, PC Magazine India etc, besides having run the Solutions! BBS for over 5 years. Have worked in senior positions across a wide variety of companies including Adobe, Innodata, ACL, Beehive Systems etc. Other experience includes network and systems management, infrastructure disaster prevention and recovery, large scale software deployment and management as well as client support. Specialties: Product Concept and Design, Software Architecture & Design, Product Engineering, Embedded, Team Building & Mentoring, Network Infrastructure, R&D Based Projects, Cross-Platform Projects, Internet Technologies, Security and Mobility. Just like the Solutions! BBS, it is time that I start sharing my learning with others around me…

BEBONCOOL 4-Port USB3.0 Hub for Macs & PCs

After having gone through quite a few hubs for my new iMac, I finally settled on this one.

It has an additional input via a micro-USB for power which allows me to drive my external high capacity hard disk drives which would not be possible in a non-powered hub.

I used one of my old mobile chargers and plugged in the micro-USB power from there to this hub.

This is currently available on Amazon at the following link…https://amzn.to/32vzG83

Let’s take a look at this now…

Adobe Lightroom Classic 10 Bug – Masking broken?

I generally use Lightroom for all my raw processing and avoid Photoshop unless I am replacing a sky or a similar composite.

One of the tools I use a lot in Lightroom is the Adjustment Brush and the AutoMask feature in that for edges.

Although I have updated to version 10 and therefore cannot show a side-by-side comparison, but, the change from the earlier version is quite visible even in normal masking.

Let’s take a brief look at this issue…

Photoshop 2021 Sky Replacement vs Luminar 4

Let’s take a look at the all-new sky replacement feature introduced in Photoshop 2021 first since that is the most talked-about addition.

There are some other new features in Photoshop as well as Lightroom, but, we will get to those in later videos.

Sky is the replacement 😀

Photoshop – Remove specular highlights/shine/shadows for wildlife

This is perhaps more relevant for macro photography and flash, but, can also be used in other cases.

To demonstrate this technique, I will use a close-up image of a snail for the highlights and shine removal and a bird image for shadow removal.

Let’s see how we can go about doing this in Photoshop…

#Photoshop #Wildlife #Highlights #Shadows #Post

Lightroom 9.4 – Local Hue Adjustment for Macro Photographers

This feature was introduced in version 9.3 and I have found it very useful for wildlife macros. Of course, we do have similar conditions with birds at times, but, this is more useful for macros.

We often see a major green tint when we photograph insects in the wild on leaves and branches. Adjusting the overall image tint in the white balance does not work in these conditions.

Earlier, one would have to go to Photoshop to fix these issues, but, now it can be done in Lightroom itself.

Let us look at an example to see how this is done…

Lightroom 9.4 Import Bug – EXIF Date-Time Issue!

I ran into this major bug while re-organising my mobile shots and I consider it serious enough to share. In short, if you are using date/time functions in the Lightroom import, you have to be careful and double-check to make sure this bug does not impact your catalog.

Let us see what this bug is and how it can create chaos in our catalog.

Focus Stacking Using Lightroom & Photoshop

One of the ways of overcoming the current technology limitations in photography is called Focus Stacking.

This technique allows us to overcome the area of focus (DoF) in images. We can take multiple shots with different focus points and later combine these to get the entire image in sharp focus.

Let us see how this can be done using Lightroom and Photoshop.

Mac OS – Empty the Trash/Bin Fast!

This is a little known feature on Mac OS which allows you to clear the trash extremely fast compared to the normal “Empty Trash/Bin”.

For example, if you have thousands of files left by some application, or, just want to rebuild files for any application and delete the existing ones, just emptying the trash can take quite some time.

A typical example of this, in my case, would be to delete the preview files in Lightroom or ON1 Photo RAW cache which can have thousands of files.

This is far more apparent if the data is on a HDD, external or internal, rather than a SSD.

One way around this is to use the command line and delete the files and folders using the rm command. Fortunately, the trash/bin in Mac OS has an equivalent which just deletes instead of displaying the file count and its status while emptying the trash/bin.

Let’s see how this works…