I was in the worst movie of 1987. It was called Leonard Part 6, it starred Bill Cosby and I’d offer that it was perhaps the worst movie ever made for $40 million dollars. But what stuck out most for me from this time was something a stunt guy had said to me when I was inquiring about the whys and wherefores of stunt work and whether there were any schools he could recommend. He looked at me soberly and said with a sad smile on his face, “only a fool goes to school for this.” And so it is, long-way around style, that after two years of actually working at Adobe (as I did) and ample opportunities to take classes to figure out photo format action, I demurred and enjoyed then, and now, doing things the old-fashioned way: through trial and error. No directions. No help guides. Call it being spoiled after living so long in the Apple Universe Intuitive, but it seems a much cooler way to learn stuff.

Which is where I found myself when faced with two disks of photos sent to me by photo genius Tom Millea. Over 200 photos…all DNG, or Digital Negatives. Designed to be a salve for the explosion of different image formats for some of today’s high-end cameras, DNG is supposed to be some kind of crazy Rosetta stone that gets the photographer a little closer to what goes into their camera. (JPEGs and TIFFs are what you have after your digital cameras have converted their sensor data.)

Perfect. Now I’ll just open them with Photoshop…whhhiiccchhh doesn’t seem to work so well. And then the cavalcade of misery begins…I bounce from Gimp to Ping. From Ping to Adobe DNG SDK to Real Converter Pro (for Windows. Oops). Still: no pics. Supposedly there’s some element in Mac OS X that’ll let me see them but this requires some X11 thing. Rage at this point is my handmaiden. And 200 pics in Photoshop is clearly going to take hours to view. And I’m not paying $299 for Lightroom. All of my misery would, for sure, be alleviated were I to deign to read something or talk to someone but like asking for directions while driving I am constitutionally incapable of acting like any of this is hard at all.

But Adobe’s Lightroom…this rings a bell though, and I remember this was the app that Tom had suggested I use, and scuttling off to the Adobe site I see that I can get a 30-day trial offer for the magical price of FREE. Thirty days, which is significantly longer than it’ll take me to view the 200 pics, I now want to see them more than almost anything in the world. So I download Lightroom. I open Lightroom. I open the pics.

Elapsed time thusfar: 48 minutes.

Give or take an hour.

And the pics, when I finally get to see them, are, finally, fantastico, and I am much pleased. And when seeing pics online is as easy as opening my eyes? Yeah, I’ll be pretty much pleased when that happens too.