I was chatting just yesterday by e-mail with a friend about how everyone is an expert on everything these days. It seems to be a deep-rooted psychological feature of American culture. Votes count equally. So do opinions, it seems.

Another American cultural trend is talk radio and talk TV, where strong opinions expressed with a menacing tone are good substitutes for facts, it seems.

I was reading Matt Kloskowski's latest blog from the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips site this morning. Some blowhard shot his mouth off like an expert, caused a stir and a panic, and a useful tool for Lightroom disappeared.

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2009/is-it-wrong-to-steal-lightroom-presets/

To call this program a preset "stealer" or preset "ripper" seems a stretch. Unless I've missed something, the program reads metadata to see what settings were applied by Lightroom to a photograph. Settings and presets are not the same at all. A preset is a tiny XML file that is stored on the computer. It is not stored inside any photos. What's copyrightable about settings themselves in Lightroom, Photoshop, or the Web broswer you use to read this forum?! Nothing of which I'm aware.

Like Matt, I'll disclaim, I'm no lawyer. But I do produce actions, presets, etc. and it's my understanding that under U.S. law and most of the civilized world through things like the Berne Convention, any preset file you make or Photoshop action or script is copyrightable. The settings inside the script are not. They are data, and data is noy copyrightable. The format of the data is what's copyrightable, and that's the preset file itself. I'll not claim this is universal (I have not the remotest idea what copyright law says in the Turkmenistan) or even that my knowledge of U.S. law is perfect on this point. But I digress . . .

My point was one comment by someone who is not a lawyer but who expresses that point with a lot of conviction scared someone into withdrawing a useful tool. A tool that can be very legitimately used within the boundaries of anyone's sense of respect for intellectual property rights. I have a lovely photo and I forget the settings. Let this little tool extract them for me. No one is hurt. I can't rip myself off.

I posted a thread on Luminous Landscape this week. First in a long while. I stay away because the forums there are habituated by a handful of poeple who consider themselves experts on every and any topic relating to digital photography. (There are worse forums, if you want loud opinions expressed with verve, like those on Adobe.)

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=35622

This question came soon: "My main question would be - how many stops of actual noise reduction are we getting here as opposed to end-result (effective) noise reduction? "

As soon as I saw this question in a reply, I bet myself that the resident experts at Luminous Landscape would rould rush in. I won my bet with myself. Someone, not an engineer, reads the Wikipedia (itself an encyclopedia assembled by non-experts) and proceeds to talk like an expert. All well-meaning, I'm sure.

My point -- and I thank you for your patience as I've circled around it -- is that no one defers these days. Everyone seems to be an expert on everything.

I work with people with Ph.D.'s and MANY are convinced that a Ph.D. in one narrow discipline on a topic even more narrow is a license to profess on anything and everything. The defer to no one on anything.

Deference means substituting the informed judgment of another when their judgment is superior -- owing to training or experience -- to your own. That's a good thing. It doesn't make experts infallible. But it does mean their opinions about matters related to their expertise should have more persuasive weight than an non-expert's opinions.

I work with colleagues daily in the area of mental health and aging who arepsychologists. I will, as a matter of routine, tell them that I am not a psychologist and all I could add is a layman's uninformed judgment and then sit back and listen and try to learn. Do they reciprocate on matters where I have years of training and expertise, like statistical methodology or policy analysis? No. Not at all.

My students think people like Bill Maher and Bill O'Reilly are credible sources of political and historical analysis. Both are entertainers who are ill-informed (scratch that -- largely ignorant) of even the basics of American government and who try to intimidate anyone who disagrees. Kinda like a number of digital photography forums where a few people hold court and pretend to be universal experts. ;)

We live in a democracy. It's a cultural norm here that votes are supposed to count equally. It's also part of our legal and historical tradition that governmet should not try to suppress unpopular opinions. That imples everyone is equally entitled to express an opinion. None of that means each and every opinion is equal or should be treated with equal credibility. Uninformed opinions, no matter how forcefully they're expressed, are not the equal of informed judgments.

I agree with Matt. It's a shame a useful tool is lost because one or two blowhards decided to mouth off in a forum and sound threatening when their crap was labeled as such. There are unintended consequences sometimes, when people jabber about stuff they really don't know.

Thanks, Matt, for giving this a public discussion.

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