Archive for the 'Tech' CategoryHigh-dynamic-range – HDR – is an image-processing technique that's been gaining popularity over the last few years. HDR can be used to create some amazing, impactful, stunning images. For some eye-popping examples, see this page, which is just one page of many that are linked from this HDR roundup. I haven't created anything amazing with HDR, but I utilized HDR in whipping this image together, just for this post... (IMAGE: HDR Example) boring, but illustrative HDR attempts to overcome a limitation of current camera technology... a limitation that disallows a camera from picking up fine detail in the dark shadows and bright highlights of a scene at the [...] 
View full post » Timelapse Panning Video one hour compressed down to 12 seconds · no sound by Sean McCormack ( larger high-def version is here ) At right is a short timelapse video (12 seconds, no sound) that Lightroom expert Sean McCormack made from the collection of 300 images he ended up with after setting his camera up on a tripod and having it take a shot every 10 seconds for 50 minutes. To see the high-resolution version, go here and look for the “four arrows” icon at the lower-right of the video. Click that to put the video into full-screen mode. Then, click the “scaling is on” [...] View full post » (IMAGE: Schweeeeet!) A bad photo of my new multiple-monitor goodness I found myself suddenly lusting for a second monitor (Lightroom 2 supports two monitors), and with visions of a tax writeoff dancing in my head, I opted for the mid-level Eizo FlexScan SX2461W, a 24" widescreen that offers a 1,920 × 1,200 desktop in luscious relatively-wide-gamut color. (If I'd had visions of hitting the lottery dancing in my head, I'd have gone for the $6,000 Eizo ColorEdge CG221) I had trouble setting up my XP box for dual monitors until I installed the latest drivers for my ATI graphics card — ATI's new “Catalyst Control Center” made it [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: Surplus) Parts left over after performing surgery on my old laptop computer As I mentioned yesterday, my 18-month-old MacBook died yesterday. I think the disk controller went bad, taking out the hard drive as well (the big disk that I'd installed myself early on). Apple's products are wonderful when they work, but their laptops have a history of “longevity issues.” I guess that's what happens when you push the envelope as far as they do. I wholeheartedly recommend their laptops, but be sure to build into the cost the extra few hundred dollars for the extended warranty, as I did when I bought mine. Apple is [...] 
View full post » I published an updated to my Photoshop calendar-template-building script today. The script, which runs on Photoshop CS2 or CS3, creates the components of a calendar as a many-layered PhotoShop document that you can then change and tweak (adding photos, etc.) as you like. The upgrade is from Version 3 Beta 1 (a major upgrade released a month ago) to Version 3, and incorporates these enhancements: The “February becomes March” bug has been fixed. You can now have weeks start on any day of the month, not just Sunday or Monday as before. Apparently, a calendar starting on Saturday [...] 
View full post » I've just pushed a major new version of my Photoshop calendar-template-building script, which creates the components of a calendar as a many-layered PhotoShop document, that can then be changed and tweaked, have photos added, etc. The version history shows lots of new things since the previous version: Can now create calendars in 58 languages. Added ability to display week numbers. Added ability to change annotation font name/size/color/opacity. Added ability to force linebreaks in annotation text. Added import/include/<context> support to annotation file. Annotation filename specifications with “YYYY” auto-convert to the calendar's target year. Can now include the year in an annotation's date, and have that entry be safely ignored for [...] 
View full post » A book written by a friend of mine at Yahoo!, for which I did a technical review last summer, was published earlier this month. High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders is just crammed full of real-world, practical information on how to present a web site so that it loads faster for the user. The main thrust of the book are 15 rules for better server↔browser performance. Although I've been doing web-related engineering since 1994, many of the rules were new to me. Some of the rules are completely common-sense, such as to include an expires field in the response header where you can, such [...] 
View full post » When programming scripts for Photoshop, you sometimes need to know Photoshop's internal name for a font. That name almost always differs from the name presented in the drop-down list of fonts. For example, the internal name for the Arial font is “ArialMT.” A simple way to find out the internal name of a font is to create a text layer using the font, then invoking this Show Font Name.jsx script from within Photoshop. When executed, an alert will pop up showing the internal name of the font. If you don't know how to install a Photoshop jsx file, mimic the install instructions provided on the page [...] View full post » It's been a year since I bought an Apple MacBook to replace my older Apple iBook. It has a trackpad that you can move a finger around to control a mouse, but I found out by accident this morning that by dragging two fingers on it, you can scroll. It's amazing. You can scroll quickly with a flick of your fingers (or a flick of one finger while another rests elsewhere on the pad), or slowly move the page around as if you were shoving a paper around on a desk. The up/down scroll is really useful for web pages, but all four directions are nice [...] View full post » About a month and a half ago I was futzing around with night exposures and took this 30-second picture of the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. I was wondering whether I might get the really interesting results as I did during cherry-blossom season, but in this case the result was thunderously boring. (IMAGE: Boring) Maxed out sharpening controlsin Lightroom 1.1 However, it was about this time that I decided to finally start playing with the new sharpening controls in the betas I was testing for Lightroom 1.1, and for whatever reason, I used this image as my first test. Proper sharpening seems to be more an [...] 
View full post » Metadata Viewer in Adobe Lightroom 1.1 As mentioned in my previous post, Adobe has just released Lightroom 1.1, a free upgrade to their wonderful photo-workflow application. Correspondingly, I have upgraded my Custom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder, a web application that allows you to create custom metadata display configuration templates for use within Lightroom. This description is presented with Lightroom 1.1 as an example, although the config files should work in any version of Lightroom 1.x, including 1.3.1. Data Presets are selected by this control, and are unrelated to the viewer presets this post is about. This post is the introduction and documentation for my template-builder application. If [...] 
View full post » Adobe Lightroom Version 1.1 Adobe has officially announced the highly anticipated “Version 1.1” upgrade to their Lightroom photo-workflow application, four months after Version 1.0 was released. Lightroom creates a whole new world of organization and expression for photographers, one that fulfills many needs the user might not have even realized where there. Yet, once the user settles in, they find themselves invigorated into wanting even more organizational and creative functionality, and this free upgrade is a step in that direction. There are many new features in 1.1, some of which have been previewed already (including the new sharpening controls released in Adobe Camera Raw 4.1.). I'm sure there [...] 
View full post » It's been just over six months since I released my long writeup on digital image color spaces, and it seems to have been very well received. I appreciate all the wonderful feedback I've gotten about it. However, I've recently realized that it contained a relatively big mistake. I've corrected it now, but in the original version, I repeated the “conventional wisdom” that most applications on Windows blindly treated color data as being sRGB color data. I called these applications “Color Stubborn.” However, it seems that was wrong. Today I tested IE6, Firefox, and the popular IrfanView image viewer and found that they were “Color Stupid” in that [...] View full post » When I write for public consumption (book, magazine article, blog post....), I try to be a bit careful with how I present myself. I have the most difficult time with misspellings because they could bite me on the nose and I still wouldn't sense them. I tend to be okay with grammar, and I pick up most typos because usually I read and reread many times before publishing. Some often sneak through anyway. Part of this carefulness is evident in the first example I give in my book on regular expressions. On the first page (First edition, Chapter 1, Page 1) I describe how regular expressions [...] 
View full post » Another Sunset Viewfrom our New-Year's trip, from the set shown in the post the other day When a digital camera produces a standard JPG image file, it does so after internally processing its sensor's raw data. This processing includes the mathematical application of various settings for exposure, white balance, sharpness, color saturation, and other algorithms that massage the image data in an attempt to achieve a particular look. Many cameras offer “scene” settings that can impact how this processing is done. For example, a “portrait” setting may reduce the amount of sharpening applied. Raw When shooting in a raw format, this processing is taken out of [...] 
View full post » One of the tenets in designing large multiuser systems like Yahoo! Messenger is that one user should not be able to overly disrupt another, or force another to take some action. Yahoo! Messenger generally does a good job with this, but has long had one failing that really bothers me. For whatever reason, I seem to be a popular target for random people wanting to add me to their “friends list.” I wake up in the morning to find a Yahoo! Messenger dialog on my screen that looks like this: 99% of the time, I have no idea who the person is, and [...] 
View full post » I finally solved a problem I was having with Japanese input into emacs, and thought I'd report it for the benefit of others that might be searching for a solution. A month or so ago, emacs stopped accepting kanji in Japanese input, and stopped displaying kanji in files. Hiragana and katakana continued to input/display fine, but kanji no longer worked at all. I spent a month testing all kinds of things (including some printf-debugging of the emacs source code!), but to make a long story short, it seems that all I needed to do was to add (require 'un-define) to my .emacs [...] View full post » I just realized that with Vista™, there are now enough major releases of Microsoft® Windows® for the desktop (as opposed to PDAs and servers) to put out a “Top 10” list, so without further ado.... The Top 10 Worst Major Releases of Microsoft® Windows® for the Desktop: 10.Microsoft® Windows® 1.0 10.Microsoft® Windows® 2.0 9.Microsoft® Windows® 3.0 8.Microsoft® Windows NT® 7.Microsoft® Windows® 95 5.Microsoft® Windows® 98 4.Microsoft® Windows® 2000 3.Microsoft® Windows® ME 2.Microsoft® Windows® XP 1.Microsoft® Windows Vista™ As one would expect in a “top worst” list for Windows®, it includes all the major desktop releases. The list is in [...] View full post »
Preface
As I discussed in a previous post, Adobe's new photo-workflow application, Lightroom, has the sometimes-unpolished feature set one might expect in a “1.0” product. The main core functionality is great, more than I think one could expect from a “1.0” product, but it lacks a lot of user-customization abilities that you know will be added eventually, once the “to do” list of must-have features gets down to terrestrial levels. (Update: this still works fine for Lightroom 2) Nevertheless, as one might expect from a mature software house like Adobe, they designed Lightroom's internal framework with the future in mind, and as such, it holds hidden configuration hooks [...] 
View full post »
This version has been superseded by the version for Lightroom
1.1
Adobe Lightroom's Metadata Viewer Metadata Viewer Closeup As I noted in my previous post, three weeks after having been officially announced, Adobe has released Lightroom Version 1.0 (a free 30-day trial can be downloaded from Adobe's Lightroom page). Especially considering it's only a “Version 1” product, Lightroom offers a lot of things that can be customized. The subject of this post is the list of image metadata shown by the Metadata Panel in Library mode. The metadata panel can show much more for an image than anyone's likely to want to see at one time — [...] 
View full post » | 
Jeffrey Friedl You are currently browsing the archives for the Tech category. Blog Basics Index of Photos Post Categories
(Not counting recent posts)
(Popular six months ago)
(Most popular posts, ever)
|