On power up, things were haywire, software didn't work, PhotoShop seemed to have reset itself, colour management seemed to have lost contact with ColorSync, permissions seemed to have re-set - basically a whole PILE of stuff which I had no idea could result from a simple power-cut !
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| "The Plumber, plumbing" :-) © Glyn Davies 2011 (iPhone) |
I ran AppleJack, I ran Disc Warrior, I re-installed PhotoShop, I ran Disc Utility etc but I was then seeing loads of additional users groups in Account Settings and so on. I couldn't even get past the Log-In screen most of the time, and so I called Paul Ellis, "The Digital Plumber" a colleague I met through the Association of Photographers in London, and we went through some root-level administrative over-rides just to get me back into action, and I created a brand new OS hard drive and used Mac Migrate.
It was then I noticed that my original 300GB hard drive only had 4GB of free space left, 116 GB less than the day before ! We managed to fire up a working Mac again but nothing was 'quite right' so I booked Paul to come up to North Wales from London, to troubleshoot and restore the whole system.
This he did, and we have even installed a brand new, bigger HD with loads of free space to ensure everything runs more smoothly. We have created a new external bootable back up disc. We have finally installed the UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) so that I have at least 15 minutes of power to run my Mac, monitors, scanners and external drives for at least 15 minutes after a power cut. We have installed extra RAM into both the G5 and Mac Book Pro. We have updated software, installed troubleshooting software, tidied up the mess of connections, tidied up a chaotic system folder, sorted permissions and renamed accounts. We have even removed a spare G5 and my Sonnet 400 Fusion RAID box, which are now up for sale at sensible offers. We re-profiled the screens using both ColorNavigator and basicColour, to make subtle decisions about which is the most accurate, ColorNavigator won, unsurprisingly on an Eizo screen.
In the last hour or so of his time we even tried setting up a two monitor system but the Eizo hardware LUT didn't seem to like switching between profiles when viewing RAW files (jpegs fine, but not RAW), so that idea has been shelved pending further investigation.
So all in all, I now have a faster, cleaner, smoother and more powerful system running, with what I am convinced is even more accurate colour than before, and also safety measures in place to prevent some of the disaster I faced this time. It's not cheap bringing up an expert from London, but I tell you, he's worth every penny (and in addition, he is a serious fighter for artists copyright which sort of makes him a great guy to know for other reasons than Mac issues :-))
The Digital Plumber can be contacted here http://www.thedigitalplumber.co.uk/index.html
7 comments:
That there plumber certainly gets around!
always just when you want him too!
Good On You Paul
And he gets down Hugh :-)) He ended up covered in dust fighting around behind those units to simplify connections, and was off back to London then straight to meetings in Central London, don't know where he gets his energy, but we had a fab time, and spent much of it discussing the awful government plans to 're-write copyright' which Paul and his team are actively fighting against. The guy is a hero ! :-)
Hi Glyn,
I was interested to se your comments about a two screen setup. You may want to investigate Coloreyes Display Pro from Integrated Color. I am hooking up an Eizo screen to my MacBook Pro (early 2011 version which frankly outperforms my Mac Pro with 20Gb RAM in it!!). Whilst ColorNavigator is the obvious choice for the Eizo, it won't work for the MacBook Pro screen. Coloreyes Display Pro, however, works with both and even includes White Balance tuning for getting as good a match as possible to prints. It's not cheap, but it's the best solution I've found for this setup. Hope this helps.
Hi Si
Many thanks for the input. We managed to calibrate both displays accurately using basicColour and when you swiped a jpeg from one screen to another it looked near as dammit the same (I was only going to use the RH monitor for palletes anyway but when I moved a RAW file from one screen to another, you could see it struggling to decide which profile to apply, and then it just 'snaps' to the 2nd monitor and displays very vivid green casts on the main Eizo. It would appear that the 'on the fly' profile converter for displaying RAW files may be the issue - but, would you do me a favour please, would you mind telling me what happens when you slide a RAW file from your Eizo to your second monitor ? You may do this already ? I'd be interested to know. Thanks again Si, Glyn
PS I did think I was goingto have to have two Eizos so it would be great if I don't need to do that :-)
Hi Glyn,
Sorry - I've been of line for a coupel of weeks for various reasons and so have only just seen your comment. Will certainly try this for you. When you did this yourself, I'm presuming that you had the image open in Photoshop, or ACR? Or were you just using the Mac OS Preview?
Hi Si,
Thanks for getting back to me, appreciated. In the meantime, we have discovered that the issue lay with the fact that the MacOS preview is NOT capable of handling RAW file colour data correctly, so when we opened up in PhotoShop itself and copied across, there was no problem (other than slight variation to the cheaper monitor, but not critical).
So hopefully, problem solved, and thanks so much once again for your input
Best wishes
Glyn
Thanks for the update Glyn and good to know you got a solution. On an unrelated matter, I shall be on Anglesey for a friends/family trip over the New Year period (27th Dec - 2nd Jan). I'd love to pop in to the gallery whilst there. Will you be open at that time?
Regards
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