WD My Passport SSD vs Sandisk Extreme SSD

A brief look at the WD My Passport SSD and a comparison with the Sandisk Extreme SSD.

Link to WD My Passport SSD on Amazon: https://amzn.to/39KY21W

#SSD #Sandisk #WDMyPassport #Mac

SanDisk Extreme SSD – A Brief Look!

This SSD is good enough for all practical purposes excepting for editing 4k, or higher, video.

In practice, you will not notice the difference between the 4 times faster internal SSD on the MacBook Pro vs this Sandisk Extreme SSD.

The SSD link at Amazon: https://amzn.to/39Qw6Kl

Type C to Type A Adapter at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3mQZX9a

#SandDisk #SSD #Mac #MacBook

How to rename “EFI Boot” to “Windows” on the Mac

This is an irritant for some people like me who use multiple drives and partitions. Since all Windows and/or Linux boot partitions show up as “efi boot” on the Mac startup, it is desirable to change the name on startup so we can easily figure out which partition is which.

For some, it is merely the aesthetic value, but, in either case, being able to change the EFI boot name is generally desirable.

In this video, we will see how to do this on the Mac for installers and then how to change the same once we are booted into Windows on the Mac.

Generally, since we would format the Windows partition to NTFS, we have to use a small workaround in Windows to change the boot name for the Mac.

In this video, we will see how to go about the name change…

Windows 10 on Mac – Without BootCamp limitations!

Once upon a time, the Apple BootCamp worked as expected for the most part. In recent times though, that is no longer correct as many might already know.

There are occasions when I need to use native Windows and I would like that to be on an external SSD to be used and re-installed as and when needed.

There are 2 main issues when trying to install Windows on a Mac if you do not have a Windows system around.

1. Keyboard/Mouse/Trackpad does not work
2. You need Windows to get a NTFS formatted drive

There is a lot of material on the Internet that seems to be more in the legacy domain now.

I will discuss how to create a bootable USB drive for Windows 10 on the Mac using simple tools that anyone can deal with. The bootable USB I create works fine on both my iMac and MacBook Pro since I get the keyboard working in both cases and that allows me to install the Apple BootCamp drivers and application without any external requirements.

Let us see how this can be done…

Download Windows 10 ISO from:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO

Download UNetBootIn from:
https://unetbootin.github.io

Download Extramagic from:
http://extramagic.forbootcamp.org

Download the AutoUnattend.xml from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxoQk3YAeWOqJYuRTtIHQU0_dsrywKTI/view?usp=sharing

Mac OS – How to create a USB installer and downgrade

Given the fact that there are applications that are yet to be updated to be compatible with MacOS Big Sur, quite a few people saw a need to downgrade back to their older MacOS versions.

I will discuss how to create an external USB bootable drive for multiple MacOS versions and how to use this drive including on systems which have a T2 chip on them.

The Apple support links are as follows:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

The free archiver Keka can be found at:

https://www.keka.io/en

Let’s see how this works…

Luminar 4.3.2 (8095) Update Released

Skylum just released an update for Luminar 4 and hopefully, it fixes the issues with Big Sur.

Since I downgraded back to Catalina, I cannot really comment on if it does fix the export issue on Mac OS 11.

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…