If you’re working with images straight from a decent camera then yes, you do need raw processing – which some image editors don’t support, or support badly. You could use the raw utility supplied by your camera maker for initial processing instead, but that’s an extra step to waste time on.Most non-raw images are stored with 8 bits per channel (RGB) for 24-bit colour (16.7 million colours). That’s plenty for human vision, but there’s an argument for using more bits per channel when editing, to avoid losing detail to clipping. More image editors these days support 16 bits per channel.Photoshop’s 32-bit mode also enables the creation of high dynamic range (HDR) images – not to be confused with mere HDR effects, which try to force extra detail out of standard pics. Using HDR, you can combine multiple exposures into one perfected shot. Other image editors don’t offer this.Install almost any modern graphics app under any modern OS and you should get basic colour management, so what you see on screen is reasonably “correct”. Most apps also let you apply a colour profile supplied by your printer manufacturer (or commercial press) to “soft proof” how final output will look. Photoshop offers more detailed colour management options, but most users won’t need them.In the past, CMYK sorted the photo-editing wheat from the chaff. Print pros like me had to convert images to this subtractive colour format, from additive RGB, before they could be used in desktop publishing software.

Today, even those of us who still work in print rarely convert to CMYK in Photoshop because modern DTP workflows are RGB – everything gets converted to CMYK only on final export from InDesign or QuarkXPress.The ability to save an image in CMYK TIF format is only really useful if you’ve edited it in CMYK mode, setting colours to the exact ink values you want. Most image editors support CMYK output but not CMYK editing, which is pointless – and another reason to stick with Photoshop.
On arrival at the event, the tablet got into a huff with the keyboard and they refused to speak to each other for the rest of the day. After downloading 300 photos to my iPad using my SD adapter and subsequently downsampling, cropping and colour-correcting a selection of them, I discovered that there was no means to get the bastards back onto the SD card again in the other direction.Nor would the iPad let me upload selected shots anywhere. They would have to sit inside my iPad for evermore. My only option was to sync the whole lot to iCloud. Over the hotel Wi-Fi, it took two hours to sync the first photo; the estimate for syncing the remainder was three days.

While I was running about trying to book time on an expensive hotel business centre computer (which took my credit card details and promptly switched itself off, spurning all attempts by staff to allow itself to be rebooted), my tech blogger colleagues were sitting crosslegged on the hotel lounge floor, optimising their videos on their chunky laptops and uploading to their channels with ease.So I have been forced to concede that tablet computers are utter crap for everything except playing games, reading books and magazines, and watching TV shows. They certainly aren’t any use for work, and they are pretty shit at browsing websites too.This didn’t stop me from trying a bit of tech blogging action for myself. Unfortunately, it’s harder than you think. Manipulating a gadget you’ve only just seen, in front of a tiny camera while talking continuously into a tiny microphone, is tricky.OK, it isn’t, but sod’s law dictates that the kit will misbehave, which is a no-no for tech blogs.

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It’s the same whenever I try to record a software training video. The package will work exactly as designed 100 times in a row, but as soon as I click the ‘record’ button, it’s guaranteed to fail or freeze at some point – not straight away, of course, but some 10 minutes into the video when it’s least convenient and most destructive.If I ran a tech blog, it would be full of me cocking things up and products misbehaving. I know this for a fact because, inspired by my younger and more talented colleagues, I tried it out for myself. Here’s me practising a demonstration of how easy it is to detach and re-attach the tablet display of an Acer Switch 10, and I hadn’t even got around to trying a voice-over:
Bugger. This is not what my millions of potential followers want to see. They expect a slick presentation where everything works as described in the press release. Let me try again, this time also demonstrating the extra-wide display hinge action:
Shitfuckarse. I’m never going to be a YouTube superstar at this rate. The kit keeps acting up like ... like ... well, like it does in the real world, which will never win me any "likes". The last thing the buying public wants to see is a product reviewer being beaten by the very products he’s testing. There’s no market for this kind of thing. I think I’ll leave it to the professionals.

The handlebars are too wide for city use, particularly if you are used to the narrowness of drop handlebars: squeezing between London traffic becomes a little more daunting. The grips however are deep and excellent.With assisted traction from the back it’s good that there is more weight to the rear, not just in the form of the motor but the mid mounted battery pack. The Li-ion 48V battery weighs 3.3kg and delivers 423Wh. The energy density is great but the laptop-style charger is a bit feeble, so it will take five hours to fully charge and there is no option to use a faster charger. It would be great if there was some way to use the Source London charging system. That said the range is excellent, Smart claim up to 62 miles and it took 13 miles before the gauge dropped from fully charged.Naturally this will depend on how much assistance is required but in a week of riding it proved to be very meagre in the charge use: something which is helped by the regenerative braking, albeit only on the front brake. We found that we tended to over-favour the front brake having put in some effort to get the thing moving we wanted to be able to harvest at least some of that when asking it to stop. The battery is removable – locked in place with a key – so that you can leave the bike out in the shed while taking the battery into the house to charge it. A handle makes the battery easy to remove. There is a mechanism to switch off trickle battery drain, to prevent the bike from becoming “bricked” if it has not be switched on for two months.

Electric bikes are cheating. You’ll never get as fit riding one as you will with a conventional bike, so you need to understand why you are cycling before thinking of buying one. I cycle both to improve my fitness and to get from home in North London to Vulture Central in Farringdon. There is a 130m height difference so riding in on my (excellent) Whyte Portobello takes me around 40 minutes and getting home, up the steep Archway hill takes an hour. On the Smart e-Bike it took 35 minutes each way. Not only that, I felt great when I got home rather than being shattered by the hill climb.For commuting it’s a spectacular way to get around. You can still pedal slowly in bus lanes to annoy the drivers and on every journey I felt “wow, am I here already”. It’s a vision of how I would find cycling if I was substantially fitter.Reg Editor Lewis however is substantially fitter and he felt that while the electric assistance was great for burning off MAMILs at lights, hitting the end of the assistance at 16mph almost immediately afterwards and having the MAMILs in many cases catch up and sail past as he struggled to push the heavy and now-inert Smart bike along manually was too annoying. Other countries get more watts and higher speeds for assistance: there is a 20mph cutout in the US, compared with the 15 mph here.

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I thought breezing past blokes with coke-bottle legs on uphills was a hoot and it reminded me of the second time I drove a 911. Porsche drivers drive like that because they can. Ditto super-fit riders.For a while I thought it would be good to have both a proper bike and an e-bike to use whichever I thought appropriate with the aim of getting fitter on the unassisted version, using the Smart when I couldn’t be arsed, but ultimately decided that I’d then never be arsed and so never get fitter and always want to take the Smart.The weight is also an issue when you arrive. Getting a 26kg bike into an overhead rack or lifting it into a bike store is hard work, and remember only 3.3kg of that is the battery, a lot of the weight is that heavy frame. You wouldn’t want to carry it into a house where you have to take it upstairs.If however you have a good, street accessible place to store a bike at home and work it’s an excellent way to commute. Hills feel as though you are on the flat and the flat feels as though you are going downhill. At £1,800 it’s expensive – and there is a £1,000 limit on the cycle-to-work tax breaks so it would take some interesting maths to work out how it compares against public transport.

As a commuting vehicle the Smart e-bike is unbeatable. By comparison the Vanmoof is more of a bike, it only has two speeds, provides less assistance, is a lot lighter and has no re-gen on the charging but it looks way cooler. It had long been rumoured that the MacBook Air was due for a high-res Retina update, but Apple chose to bestow that honour upon the humble MacBook instead. The 2304x1440 IPS panel doesn’t quite match the 2560x1600 resolution of the 13-inch MacBook Pro, but it’s more than adequate for a 12-inch screen.The image quality is excellent – clearly brighter and with stronger contrast than my MacBook Air – and the scaling options built into the Mac OS can mimic lower resolutions so that you don’t have to squint to make out tiny text and icons.The MacBook also marks the debut of Intel’s Core M processors in the Mac line-up. We tested the £1049.00 model, which includes a Core M-5Y31 running at 1.1GHz (2.4GHz with Turboboost) along with 8GB of memory and 256GB solid-state drive.

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