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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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After publishing my writeup on Digital Image Color Spaces four months ago, I got into a discussion on color spaces and photo-hosting sites with one Chris MacAskill on a forum at Digital Photograph Review. I didn't realize it until today, but it turns out that this Chris MacAskill guy is the president of the popular SmugMug photo-hosting site.
Fast-forward a few months to earlier this week, and Chris posted his own comments on the Mac/OSX aspects of the issue. In just a few days, his post got over 100 comments, including some from the main players in this arena. I guess that's one benefit of, well, having [...]
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( If you're not familiar with MySQL, this post will be of no interest. )
I like that MySQL has its replace command, which acts like an insert except that if the newly-inserted data would cause a conflict with one or more unique keys, one or more pre-existing rows are automatically deleteed to make way for the new data.
However, it seems that most times that I want to use replace, I really want semantics along the lines of “update if already there; insert if not.” The only difference is in the value given to unmentioned fields: in normal replace semantics, unmentioned fields [...]
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I commented yesterday about the apparently great usability of Apple's just-announced iPhone, and now I have to ask “Apple, are you idiots?”
Someone else has had tha “iPhone” name trademarked for six years:

Of course, that someone sued Apple over it.
Apple, splitting the most infinitesimal hairs, said that because Apple's product is for a cellular phone and the current “iPhone” offerings from Cisco are VoIP (i.e. “internet phones”), Apple is not in violation because “they're different products.”
I'm not a lawyer, blah blah blah, but isn't this exactly what trademark law is designed for?
Quoting from this article.... “
The touchstone of [...]
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I've never had a cell phone that didn't totally suck. This is as true for you as it is for me, because they are all horrible. The only metric in which a cell phone can't rate “abysmal” is when compared against other cell phones, because there are different levels of abysmal.
For example, every phone number in America is 10 digits and of the form “(123) 456-7890”, so when you type in 10 digits on an American-market phone (or bring up numbers in your phone book, or receive a call with caller id), why do most of them display a big mash of numbers like “1234567890”? It's [...]
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Kodak just announced a new product, to be available in March, that has the potential to be really interesting. They announced new Wifi enabled digital picture frames that can apparently auto-update from an online source. This means that once you set it up for someone who is perhaps “techno-challenged,” you can update the pictures from afar.
For the only somewhat-challenged, they can perhaps pick and choose from among images in the online gallery themselves, but you can still add to the list of images from afar. I can imagine my folks having one of these, and my updating pictures from such-and-such an Anthony [...]
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The new Dell computer I ordered a while ago actually arrived ahead of schedule, two weeks ago, but I came down with a cold the evening it arrived, and am only just feeling good enough to write about it.
In short: it rocks.
Its processor actually has a slower GHz rating than my old computer, but it's a Core 2 Duo, and each of its dual processors is much faster than a similarly-rated Pentium. It's fast. My old computer's name was “WINFOO”. This one is “ZIPPY”.
It showed up one Wednesday at about noon. I pulled it out of the box, and while wondering what [...]
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I've released Version 2 of my Photoshop CS2 Calendar-Template-Building script.
Here's a summary of new features: Added the ability to populate the calendar with holiday/birthdays/etc data read from a file. Added an “auto save” feature, particularly useful when generating whole-year templates for distribution.
Summary of bug fixes: Fixed the “weeks start on Monday” option, which had been broken when building all months in one shot. Fixed the pre-set margins and such for Portrait mode actually work properly (see an example above). It now references only fonts that come standard with CS2. I thought [...]
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My sister keeps her photos on Yahoo! Photos. This is unfortunate, because it's a bad photos service.
I don't know when Yahoo! lost its way (although my first guess would be when they got rid of me *  :-), but they seem to spend their time now making things “flashy” instead of the “useful” and “intuitive” of the old days. Most recently, this manifested itself with a big screwup of their TV-listing sit.
With the current version of Y! Photos that debuted during the summer, they have perhaps added useful features, but in the process, made the site really inconvenient for its most basic use: it's difficult [...]
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