Archive for the 'Tech' CategoryPosts relating to techie things So, in my previous post, "Stupid Tone-Curve Tricks", I presented a few odd tone-curve presets for Lightroom that were of marginal utility. In this post, I present additional presets that are even more useless, if that's at all possible. (If you're not familiar with tone curves in Lightroom 3 beta 2, the aforementioned previous post has an introduction and useful links.) In the presentations below, mouseover the little tone-curve squares under each screenshot to bring up an example of the preset to the screenshot. All the screenshots for a particular section are loaded upon first mouseover in that section, so [...] View full post » The tone curve is one of the ways that Adobe Lightroom offers to adjust an image. It's basically a "brightness map" that normally indicates "dim parts of the image are shown as black, bright parts are show as white, and things in between are shown proportionally somewhere along the line between the two". The screenshot below highlights Lightroom's default tone curve, which is mostly a straight line (that is, "proportional") from dark to bright... The idea of a tone curve is general to photo-editing applications; if you're not sure of what one is, you might take a look at this [...] View full post » Adobe has released a second free beta for Lightroom 3 ("Lightroom 3 Beta 2" -- Lr3b2) with a lot of bug fixes and speed improvements, and a few new goodies not found in Lr2 or the first Lightroom 3 beta, including: Basic video-file support. Initial tethered capture support for recent Nikon and Canon SLRs. New rendering engine, new sharpening, new grain, new noise reduction, new tone-curve control, etc. I used the new point-curve tone control to create the freaky rendition above, of a photo from February's ski trip with Anthony. Unofficial support for Chinese (two flavors), Dutch, French, German, Italian, [...] View full post » For something a little bit different, here's a free audio book, "イノシシ" ("Wild Boar"), story written by seven-year-old Anthony Friedl. Unabridged reading for you today by the author himself. I'm really impressed with the quality of the recording, both in technical terms, and in Anthony's clear reading voice. More on the recording later in this post. The Story First, here's the story (unabridged! :-)), with my attempt at a translation: イノシシ イノシシが車にぶつかり タイヤがパンク 車もパンク ほかの車はびゅうんびゅうんはしり 自分だけのこってた。 Wild Boar A wild boar was hit by a car tire's flat car is totaled other cars go zipping by only [...]View full post » When I started to take photography somewhat seriously (circa January 2006 when I got a Nikon D200), a long-time friend who happened to work at Apple extolled the virtues of Apple Aperture, which had just been released. It was, he said, still a bit buggy, but even so was so much better than working with files one by one in Photoshop. He had a hard time constraining his excitement of the new workflow paradigm, even if the current implementation still needed the kinks worked out. I wasn't sold on the whole new-paradigm idea, but when Apple announced their new line [...] View full post » |