Finally, I’ve upgraded my Canon 10D.  I recently purchased the Canon 7D with Canon 10-22 lens.  The 7D camera is awesome.  I would like to have purchased the 5D, but the price difference was too high.

My 10D raw conversion workflow is no longer sufficient with my new camera.  So, I set out to determine which popular software can meet my objective:

* Produce the best possible jpg images, with minimal effort, as fast as reasonably possible.

A little web research and I had decided the top 3 software packages for me were:

1.  Aperture 3 (Mac only)
2.  Bibble Pro 5 (Windows, Mac, Linux)
3.  Lightroom 3 (Windows, Mac)

This comparison is not scientific and the results are subjective.  I’m sure I could get better results from all 3 packages with more tweaking.  But, that would defeat my objective of minimal effort.  If I really want to get tweak happy on a single photo, I’d probably use Photoshop anyway.

If you’d like to run your own tests … here are links to my original Canon 7d raw images.

original-girl.cr2
original-noise.cr2

I prefer the skin tone and detail I got from lightroom.  Aperture looked blown out and bibble looked washed out.

Here is the 1:1 pixel detail from each raw converion.  Aperture created extra noise.  Bibble looks too soft.  Lightroom looks best.

Lightroom is the clear winner when it comes to noise reduction.  This photo was shot in low light at 1250 ISO and had plenty of noise.  Lightroom makes the image look as if I had shot at 100 ISO!  Bibble’s noise ninja did a good job, but has fewer controls.  Aperture didn’t improve noise much at all.

Conclusion:

For me, Lightroom definitely produces the best images with minimal effort. When speed is most important and your willing to sacrifice some image quality, Bibble is the fastest by a wide margin. Aperture can produce great results, but I think it takes too much tweaking and the interface feels slowest.

I found a good deal through craiglist on a woodworking drum sander.  It was a long trip from Michigan to Indiana to pick it up, but well worth it.  The sander was being sold by a really nice lady whose husband had passed away.  I was surprised to see that his main hobby was machining (my passion as well).  His shop was the most amazing home machinist shop I have ever seen (that includes the web).  As you can see by these photos… he spent quite a bit of money on his hobby, but he was able to pay for it all by doing paid machining jobs. I wish I had known him.  Enjoy!

Huge automated bandsaw, makes my $200 bandsaw look tiny.

I wish I had brought a wide angle lense to get better shots of the shop. I had to use image stitching software to combine multiple images so that I could show complete images of some of the machines.

This chuck was massive!

The amount of tooling and such was astounding to me.

A Fadal VMC 3016 CNC machine.

Okuma LB15 CNC machine.

Fellow tinkerer John Munno sent me these photos of his adaptation of my garage lift.  He created a garage boat lift.  Well done John!

If you plan on doing something similar for your garage, be sure to consult a structural engineer and properly calculate loads to ensure safety.

I went to the North American Model Engineering Society Expo in Southgate, Michigan on April 24, 2010.
Here are some photos of the awesome models created by some really talented people.