May 11, 2025

Chapter 18: Finally, a Paul Reid video on editing monochrome.

The Leica Q2 Monochrom journal.

One of the worst parts about shooting images with a monochrome camera (like the Leica Q2M) is that there were no decent videos that teach you how to edit black-and-white RAW files in Lightroom. The YouTube videos all focus on converting color files to monochrome. Useful for most, but it doesn’t help those of us shooting with a black-and-white sensor. A pure monochrome file is a different beast since the color controls don’t apply.

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Photography Leica Q2 Monochrom
May 3, 2025

Chapter 17: HD glow? Or no?

The Leica Q2 Monochrom journal.

The glow in the sky at the horizon or at the edges of a subject is a natural phenomenon. However, it can get out of hand in editing. Some look at this phemonon as a curse. Others see it as an effect. And you’ll commonly see gaudy Instagram photos where the hi-def is overdone creating unnatural halos around subjects. Heck, for that matter you commonly see it on fine art prints too. My personal thought is that the glow is not a sin and can be tastefully enhanced.

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Photography Leica Q2 Monochrom
April 24, 2025

Current Pedal Obsession: J Rockett Boing Reverb.

The “I just want reverb dammit” reverb.

Boing is not so special. And that’s why players seem to like what it does: No drowning your signal in reverb soup. No ambience that wears out its welcome. No artificial shimmer. Just sweet, amp-like spring reverb as Leo Fender intended it.

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music Pedalurgy
April 20, 2025

Current obsession: Discomfort Designs Phantom Limb pedal.

The long-awaited return of deja vu.

What’s Phantom Limb? The tl;dr: version: An always-recording, 15-60 second memory loop that feeds a menagerie of randomly-triggered, harmoniously-pitched, forward-and-reverse microloopers that then feeds into a long delay. The result? You play a riff and incidental cinematic music back at you.

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music Pedalurgy
April 19, 2025

Chapter 16: What the heck is Lightroom for iPad doing?

The Leica Q2 Monochrom journal.

A big problem is that software gets updated, but the Internet doesn’t. There’s a lot of content out there about older versions of software that’s no longer correct and near impossible to weed through. And while the intent of Google AI is to eliminate this, at times it just makes it worse: Often there is no trusted source to go to.

Information about Lightroom for iPad is one such victim. How does it handle images imported from Photos or directly from your camera roll? Why is Lightroom auto-enhancing DNG files? And why do images look different than those imported to iPad Photos? After some experimentation, I think I have some actual answers.

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Photography Leica Q2 Monochrom
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