In amusing synchronicity, last night I had cause to look at some photos I had taken March 08, about 4 months after I got my K100. I was using DCRAW in a script to convert my images, and they looked "fine" on my linux box. I eventually learned about calibrating monitors etc. I was so shocked at how bad they were, I went through and reprocessed them. I also threw a lot more out as unacceptable, and even the decent ones don't look so good now. I hope that means that I've gotten a lot better:
The difference in processing(and editing): Processed then: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157604217770889/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157604219023999/ reprocessed now: decent: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157621773749228/ almost acceptable: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157621773771424/ I first started using Bibble which was a lot less expensive than lightroom and, for the most part, did a pretty good job. My biggest gripe was the lack of an "undo" button. They promised an upgrade to Bibble 5 when it came out in a month or two, almost a year and a half ago. Bibble 5 is in beta, and I've heard some good things about it. It turned out that I was able to get some adobe software on a friends employee discount, so it was worth giving lightroom a try. There are things that I should probably do in photoshop (noise reduction and sharpening) but I basically do everything I need in lightroom. I can rate pictures, move them to different directories and apply all the color and exposure correction, as well as cropping and rotating. I've been a Linux weenie for about 15 years, but I have to admit that my 24" iMac and Lightroom were well worth the investment for photo processing. I pretty much use Linux for everything else because the User Interface is so much more intuitive, but the mac works a lot better for image processing, calibrating the monitor (that was the breaking point, trying to calibrate monitors on linux) and so forth. Unfortunately, iPhoto may be the worst written program that I've ever had the misfortune of trying to use. I've heard rumors that the latest version isn't even worse than Apple documentation, and that it doesn't suck the smegma from the cankorous genitals of syphilitic zombies, but I'm not willing to spend any money or time to find out. -- The first step is learning to take great photos, the second step is learning to throw away ones that are merely good. Larry Colen [email protected] http://www.red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
