malcolmdwyer

<p>Another nice review:</p>

<p><a href="http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1109600/">http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1109600/</a></p>

<p>Just passing on this link to a <a

href="http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/aperture.ars">review of

Aperture at Ars Techinca</a> [arstechnica.com].</p>

<p>Definitely not a favorable review... problems in several areas,

mostly notably the actual RAW conversion which is, of course, the

reason the tool exists.</p>

Kevin, The Shadow Highlight tool is in PS-CS as well. I've used it (and probably over-used it) many times, and I don't have CS2.

Malcolm

Thanks everyone for the responses.

I decided to not get a bracket. Instead, I ordered a Lightsphere PJ from Gary Fong. I hope it ships today, because that wedding I'm shotting is next weekend and they only ship USPS or UPS ground.

<p>I'm an amateur and I'll be shooting my first wedding next weekend.

It's my wife's cousin's wedding, and I'll be doing reception only.</p>

<p>I'm thinking of getting a flash bracket. I'm not looking to spend

a lot of money, but the following set up seems reasonable. I have a

10D and the 580EX flash. I'll need the off-shoe cord right? Can

anyone confirm for me that this is all I will need? I'm not

forgetting anything am I?</p>

<p><a

href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=105119&is=REG&addedTroughType=categoryNavigation">Stroboframe

Bracket - Camera Flip</a> [$69.95]<br>

<a

href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=12972&is=REG&addedTroughType=categoryNavigation">Canon

Off Camera Shoe Cord 2, 60cm (2ft.), TTL Off-Camera Flash Cable for

All EOS Cameras (Except 630 and RT Models)</a> [$49.95]</p>

<p>Any other models I should consider that are in that pricerange?</p>

<p>And... just to throw a totally unrelated question in here... will I

love the Canon 28mm/1.8 for an available light "normal" lens with my

1.6 crop 10D? (I currently have 17-40/4L, 50/1.4, 70-200/4L).</p>

<p>Thanks,<br>

Malcolm</p>

<blockquote>Rich: What camera and bag do you use?</blockquote>

<p>I have a Lowepro MicroTrekker 200. I carry a Canon 10D w/ 17-40 attached, plus a 70-200mm f/4, a 50mm f/1.4, a 420EX flash, and the PNY card reader in the main compartment. The card reader stands vertically in a tiny slot between two pads next to one of the lenses.</p>

Malcolm

If I may also suggest...<br>

<p>I've got this one (or one very like it)</p>

<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00007F55L">PNY USB Multi Slot Digital Card Reader (PALFMTUSB2P)</a></p>

<p>It reads all the formats, like the ones you posted. The reason I really like this one is the form factor. Specifically, it has a very short USB cable and plug that can nest within the box shape of the reader. I found it to be a perfect fit for the camera bag. And when I'm using it with the laptop, I don't need a long cable anyway. It does come with an extension cable though, if you need to get around to the back of a desktop machine.</p>

<p>I've found most other readers have clumsy wires that are messy in a camera/computer bag. If you're looking for a reader strictly for desktop use, then this one doesn't have any advantage.</p>

Malcolm

Paul,

No, I never resolved it. My dad and I shared the cost of the scanner, and after I did my initial batch of slides he took it, so I haven't messed with it any more. At some point I will probably try again, and I'll post an update to this forum if I figure anything out (No ETA on that).

Malcolm

<p>I've been pretty happy with mine... For the price it's good. However I did have one problem which I asked about <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=008u6n">Here</a>.</p>

Malcolm

<p>Probably not what the original poster is looking for, but POV-Ray is a free ray-tracing program available on every platform with a large comunity of artists. <a href="http://www.povray.org">Povray.org</a>.</p>

<p>Pov-ray uses text-based input files, but there are GUI modelers available for it. (Getting used to using text-descriptions can be very powerful though — so don't be afraid of it).</p>

<p>For someone that wants to learn the tool, it would be a fun and not too difficult project to make a macro that will animate a photograph flying into view. As mentioned above, the crumpling would be much more challenging.</a></p>

Good Luck,<br>

Malcolm

<p>This is just a guess, but I think your system probably has 256MB, with an integrated video card borrowing 8MB from main memory to use as video memory. If that's the case you can probably adjust the amount of video ram in the BIOS settings, but I doubt you'd want to set it less than 8.</p>

<p>Whatever the reason, the 248 versus 256 shouldn't matter much for Elements (unless it specifically checks at startup -- which I doubt -- someone else can probably verify running PSE3 with less than 256).</p>

Anyay, as others have said, more RAM is better, and it's pretty <a href="http://www.crucial.com">cheap</a> [Crucial.com].</p>

<p>So why is there such a huge difference between LCD and CRT here? I was intially looking at this with CRT and I couldn't even detect the checkerboard at all without zooming in. On the LCD it is completely obvious.</p>

<p>Is it just my CRT? I'm comparing a 21" CRT at 1600x1200 to a 15" laptop LCD at 1024x768. Is the CRT really losing that much of the high frequency information that it gets completely smoothed out? It is being driven through a KVM switch, so I'm probably losing some detail there.</p>

<p>Anyway... For those who are still wondering what's going on here... The two images reside in different parts of the histogram, with the main image dominting the middle and low values, and the hidden image in the brightest values. The entire range of brightness in the hidden image is also compressed into only the few highest values. By bringing the brightness way down, you push the main image into black, and bring the hidden image down into the middle range (but it's still just a few values around middle gray). Then you crank up the contrast and that expands the values in the middle of the histogram out to the full range from black to white.</p>

Malcolm

It's hard to tell for sure... but it sounds like the problem is with the card or card reader. I doubt Elements has anything to do with it. You said it was working with Elements for some time before you started having the problem today. Can you try a different CF card, and try the card reader on a different computer? Maybe you have a USB hub with problems(?). Good luck.

Malcolm

Two points of info...</p>

The auto dust brush feature seems to only appear in the Windows version of the software. I used it briefly on my dad's mac and that tab in the tool was grayed out (could be user error -- or it could be included in a newer version of the software).</p>

When I did use the auto dust brush (on Windows - as a plugin to Photoshop), I noticed it ate some text in my image that it thought was dust. I don't have a blown up version handy... but in <a href="http://www.photo.net/photo/2534848">this</a> image, the yellow text on the sign in the foreground was partly blocked out by the Auto Dust Brush software. The text completely filled the sign, so the few spots of solid yellow were words that got elminated as dust. No big deal... but interesting.</p>

Digital ICE may have done the same thing -- I don't know.</p>

<ol>

<li>I'll leave this one for someone else...</li>

<li>For the full list, see <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop">Here</a>.</p>

In my opinion the key things are:</p>

<ul>

<li>Curves adjustments. When adjusting the light and

dark areas of a pictures with Levels... you are limited

to a linear transform. Curves will let you open up the

midtones without clipping the shadows and highlights... and

lots of other adjustments.</li>

<li>Layer masks. In Elements you can do an adjustment layer such

as Levels, and then mask parts of that layer out. In PSCS

you can do a mask like that on any kind of layer.</li>

<li>Channels -- Lots of control over color balance.</li>

</ul>

</li>

<li>See #5</li>

<li>No idea.</li>

<li>

PSCS costs $649 for the full version, $169 for the upgrade from

any previous full version of Photoshop (not Elements). There

are of course people selling illegally for less, but I doubt

you'll actually get the software from them. It's possible

someone would legitimately sell their copy to you, although

with Adobe's product activation, I'd be careful with that.<br>

If you got elements bundled for free with a camera or scanner

you can upgrade to PSCS for $300. See here:

<a href="http://store.adobe.com/store/products/master.jhtml?id=catCanon">http://store.adobe.com/store/products/master.jhtml?id=catCanon</a><br>

(Change 'Canon' at the end of that URL to any of the other

companies who bundle elements with their products to the see

the appropriate page).

</li>

</ol>

...I've never tried any of this... but I've read that you should also block the eyepiece as well

during the long exposure. This should be done on any long exposure capture including

the dark-frame capture. When you don't have your eye up to the eyepiece, some stray

light can get in there and cloud the captured image.

The neck strap that came with my Canon 10D has a clip built in designed to cover the

eyepiece for long exposures.

Malcolm

A comment on the notebook suggestion...

This camera will record virtually everything you need to know about how a picture was taken in the EXIF data embedded within the JPG.

In Windows, you can right-click for properties on the image file, then click Advanced (I think). Also, virtually any other decent photo editor will let you view the EXIF information, so you can mess with different modes, and figure out later what you did.

Have fun!

Malcolm

<blockquote>Mike: My license for photoshop states that I may install it on two machines at the same time.</blockquote>

<br>

I assume that's only on the education version... the retail version limits to 1 installation right?

I was just wondering what use people make of iPhoto in their workflow

if any. I'm making a gradual switch from Windows to Mac, and I like

iPhoto for previewing and showing slideshows to family, and so on...

but it seems like it would get annoying having multiple copies of

pictures around.

Right now (in Windows), I copy all the pictures to my harddrive in a

folder dated and named (e.g. 2004_12_07_Joes_Birthday). That folder

of originals gets burned to a CD. Then I make selections, and do

edits with Photoshop, and save fixed versions to another folder within

the original (called 'web' or 'prints' or whatever, depending on the

target).

Moving over to Macland, do any of you have a nice way of fitting

iPhoto into a flow like this. The attraction of iPhoto is usually

when I'm with family, to be able to immediately import the pictures

and show everyone what I've got. If I come back with edits later, I

want to replace the originals in iPhoto. Of course, that's possible,

but cumbersome.

It would be nice if I could drag files from iPhoto to Photoshop and

when they are saved, iPhoto automatically picks up the new version,

and shows that instead (but maybe still keeps the original around).

A lot of rambling, I know... but I wanted to get peoples thoughts on

this. How do you use iPhoto in your workflow?

Thanks,

Malcolm

By the way, you can substitute any other company that bundles Elements with their products in the end of that URL (e.g. Nikon, Epson, Konica...) and get the same deal. (Put Wacom in, and you get a deal to upgrade to a newer version of Elements).

Malcolm

And for future reference to anyone coming across this thread... drop the double quotes around the -e in the command line I gave above. It should be:

perl -e 'use Data::Dumper; use Image::Info qw(image_info); print Dumper(image_info(shift));' filename.jpg

Malcolm

Well... There's no one tag in there identifying the lens... but I found these tags in a picture taken with the 17-40.

'Canon-ShortFocalLengthOfLensInFocalUnits' => 17,

'Canon-LongFocalLengthOfLensInFocalUnits' => 40,

And then there's this one identifying how big a FocalUnit is...

'Canon-FocalUnitsPerMM' => 1,

Hope this helps. Let me know if you want more info... I've got a script I use for my personal webpage photo gallery that extracts a bunch of these tags.

Malcolm

If you have access to perl with Image::Info installed, you can try this:

perl "-e" 'use Data::Dumper; use Image::Info qw(image_info); print Dumper(image_info(shift));' filename.jpg

(Obviously, replace 'filename.jpg' with the appropriate filename).

Image::Info grabs all the EXIF data out of the jpeg, and data dumper prints a list of all key:value pairs for you. You should be able to match up the value given by Photoshop with one of the keys.

I don't have access to such a system right now, but if no one else gives an answer, I'll try it when I get home tonight where it should work, and I'll post again. (I've got the 10D, so I should be able to give you the exact key).

Malcolm