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Trying out the Neewer NK002 camera and lighting mount for desks.

In this article I set up my desk with a new overhead camera mount rig from Neewer, the NK002. I’ve been using a standard monitor arm with additional mounting hardware to hold my camera for years, but I wanted to see how this mount works in my creative computer workspace instead. Keep in mind that they sent me this mount at no cost with the expectation that I produce a few videos about it based on my standard collaboration terms . The were not allowed to give me talking points or preview anything that I created.  Check out the full video on YouTube :  Check it out on Neewer's official shop (not affiliated).   Or through my links:  Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4g3I2GI B&H Photo: https://bhpho.to/3Ce6I1u   As an affiliate of Amazon and B&H, I earn from qualifying purchases!  Unboxing and First Impressions The main box with accessories. The NK002 comes in a big, solid box. It was shipped with dense foam support around the rails to keep everything prote...

Linux Photoshop, Lightroom, and Apple Aperture alternatives (Bibble aka. AfterShot)

I’ve used Linux on and off for many years. Although, the last few years my primary desktop computer is Linux only (On Kubuntu at the moment). The big issue with Linux is that many large commercial applications (and games) don’t offer a native build for Linux or even acknowledge that it exists. I spend a good deal of time producing content such as photos or videos. This is a problem.

I’ve settled with Kdenlive for video editing. It’s good enough for what I do at the moment and my experience with commercial NLE was not that extensive, so I don’t know what I’m missing (I own a copy of premiere 5.1 and Sony Vegas Platinum). The biggest issue is Photoshop, because I can’t find anything to replace it. What I do now is open up batches of RAW files in Adobe Camera Raw, tweak them by hand and save the changes, and then run a batch process in Photoshop itself. The whole process works alright. I would use Bridge for the editing step, but that doesn’t work well at all in WINE (Windows emulation). Photoshop is also a bit slow and some aspects like the “File Info…” window doesn’t even function at all.

I noticed some users on PentaxForums.com mention a piece of software called Bibble (now known as Corel AfterShot). It sounded good except for one flaw some of the users mentioned.

The Pentax k5 Corel AfterShot (Bibble) Highlight Issue…


Issues with RAW processing...


As you can see, those red highlights are a big problem. I tried some minimal tweaking, but that didn’t seem to help remove the odd coloration.

The frustrating thing is that the program seems very functional and fast. Besides the other issue of it being unable to load Adobe created DNGs (I converted many of my old Fuji RAWs and *ist DS RAWs to DNG), I think it would be worth picking up.

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