TidBITS#749/04-Oct-04
=====================
Charles Maurer continues his exploration of making better
digital images by focusing on how you and your Mac view and
work with color. On the music front, Apple releases Logic Pro 7,
Logic Express 7, and two new GarageBand Jam Packs. Adam discovers
ManOpen, a tool for viewing Unix man pages outside of the Terminal
application. In the news, Apple ups the storage of .Mac accounts,
registration for Macworld Expo 2005 in San Francisco opens,
and look for Matt Neuburg's sessions at the AppleScript Pro
conference.
Topics:
MailBITS/04-Oct-04
Save on .Mac Renewals
Logic Pro 7, Logic Express 7, and Jam Packs Released
ManOpen Opens Man Pages
Colour & Computers
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/04-Oct-04
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Copyright 2004 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
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MailBITS/04-Oct-04
------------------
**Apple Increases .Mac Storage to 250 MB, but Still Lags** -- In a
bow to the decreased costs of storage and competition from free
Web mail services, Apple has increased the storage included with
a .Mac account for combined iDisk storage and email from 100 MB
to 250 MB. Of that, you can choose the ratio of storage used by
Mail and your iDisk, which starts at 125 MB each by default.
Apple has also dropped the price tremendously for additional
storage: 1 gigabyte (GB) total is now available for $50 per
year. The maximum email attachment size is also now 10 MB.
<http://www.mac.com/>
The previous storage size for .Mac was appearing increasingly
paltry in the face of Google's Gmail service - still in beta
testing - which upped the ante for free Web-based email to 1 GB.
Services like Yahoo and Hotmail only included a few megabytes
of storage with their free accounts. One gigabyte has now become
a magic number for email services. [GF]
**Macworld Expo SF 2005 Free Registration** -- IDG World Expo
has opened up registration for the upcoming Macworld Expo in
San Francisco from 10-Jan-05 through 14-Jan-05 (the exhibit
hall opens on Tuesday, 11-Jan-05). If you register now through
05-Nov-04 using priority code B0201, you can receive a free
exhibit hall pass; such a pass costs between $20 and $40
afterwards (although we can often work with Peachpit to
make free exhibit hall passes available to TidBITS readers
later on). If you're also planning to attend the conferences
at Macworld, make sure to register with the same priority code
before 10-Dec-04 for the lowest price. [ACE]
<http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/register///CC961706>
**Learn Some Serious AppleScript in Newport, RI** -- Having
written a book about AppleScript (AppleScript: The Definitive
Guide from O'Reilly), I like being asked to do cool AppleScript-
related things; and having been a college professor for many
years, there's nothing I enjoy so much as live teaching in front
of a classroom. So I'm really looking forward to November 11th
and 12th, when I'll be teaching a minor session on scripting
Microsoft Word 2004 and a major session on AppleScript Studio,
in Newport, Rhode Island, as part of the AppleScript Pro
Sessions. (I participated once already, back in May, in Monterey,
CA, and had a great time.) There will be lots of other great
teaching and learning going on in other sessions too; check
out the AppleScript Pro Sessions site for more info. [MAN]
<http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1129>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005571/tidbitselectro00/ref=nosim/>
<http://www.scriptingmatters.com/aspro>
Save on .Mac Renewals
---------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Like many people who subscribed to .Mac back when Apple morphed
the service over from iTools, I recently received an email message
reminding me that my .Mac membership would automatically renew for
$100 plus tax, making the total cost nearly $110. On the same day,
I happened to notice that Small Dog was selling .Mac membership
boxes for only $80, and even with $7 of shipping, it was a savings
of about $20 over renewing through Apple. The Small Dog folks
confirmed that their boxes were good for renewals, so as much
as I don't really need a box and CD-ROM with .Mac software on
it, there seemed to be no advantage to renewing through Apple.
<http://www.mac.com/>
<http://www.smalldog.com/product/12653455/>
When I received the box from Small Dog, I opened it up and typed
in the URL on the CD-ROM's activation sticker. That brought me to
a nice form asking if I was creating a new membership or renewing.
I clicked the Renewing radio button, entered my activation code,
and then was presented with a form asking if I wanted to upgrade
my account with more email accounts, more email storage, or more
iDisk storage. Answering no to all of the above, I then hit a
credit card information screen, which bothered me a bit, since I
saw no reason I should be asked for credit card information while
renewing an account with an activation code. Figuring that the
credit card information might be used just for iPhoto and the
like, I submitted, and got a Review Order screen that said my
total was $0.00. All well and good, so I submitted the order,
only to see on my Account Settings screen that my account was
still set to renew on 13-Oct-04.
There was absolutely no indication that the system had taken my
activation code, short of the zero-dollar total on the Review
Order screen. So I turned off the Auto-Renew option in the credit
card screen, and we'll see what happens when October 13th rolls
around in a few weeks. The moral of the story? Everything points
toward this being a perfectly good way to save $20 on renewing a
.Mac membership, but Apple needs to work on the account interface
to eliminate the confusion on whether an activation code-based
renewal actually happened.
It's worth noting that deals on .Mac are available from other
Internet retailers too, as discussed in TidBITS Talk, and the
approach may not work for Canadian orders.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2331>
Logic Pro 7, Logic Express 7, and Jam Packs Released
----------------------------------------------------
by Jeff Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Apple's music focus lately has been on the iTunes Music Store,
but the company sang a different tune last week when it introduced
Logic Pro 7, Logic Express 7, and two additional Jam Packs that
can be used with those applications as well as GarageBand.
<http://www.apple.com/software/logic/>
<http://www.apple.com/software/logicexpress/>
<http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/jampacks/>
Logic Pro 7 adds three new software instruments: Sculpture, a
"component-modeling based synthesizer;" UltraBeat, a drum machine;
and Guitar Amp Pro, a guitar amplifier simulator. (Apple previewed
these components at the NAMM exhibition last January; see "Apple
Clarifies Logic at NAMM" in TidBITS-713_.) Logic Pro 7 also adds
support for Apple Loops and features distributed processing,
enabling other networked Macs to work on audio files concurrently.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07510>
Logic Express 7 is a streamlined version of Logic Pro 7, much as
Apple's Final Cut Express is an intermediate version of Final Cut
Pro; see Apple's comparison chart at the URL below for specific
differences between the two Logic applications.
<http://www.apple.com/software/logicexpress/comparison.html>
For GarageBand users who have now played every instrument and loop
available in the program, Apple also released two new Jam Packs.
Jam Pack 2: Remix Tools adds beats, bass lines, and synth hooks
for your next dance party. Jam Pack 3: Rhythm Section expands
GarageBand's lineup of drum kits, percussion, and other
instruments.
The full version of Logic Pro 7 costs $1,000; upgrades from Logic
Gold/Platinum 5 or 6, or Logic Pro 6, cost $300. Logic Express 7
sells for $300, with upgrades from Logic Express 6 priced at $100.
The new Jam Packs are $100 each. Both Logic applications require
Mac OS X 10.3 or later.
ManOpen Opens Man Pages
-----------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
As much as I'm perfectly capable of getting around via the Unix
command line, I won't pretend I'm fluent or comfortable in that
environment. Usually, I just spend some time figuring out the
syntax and all the obscure little switches for some command, then
record it in NoteBook so I don't have to go through the process
again if I don't remember everything the next time I need the
command.
In that process of learning how to express a particular Unix
command, I rely on the Unix man pages, like everyone else. Just
type "man commandName" at the command line and you're presented
with documentation that at least approximates helpful information
on the command in question.
Unfortunately, since the man command uses another Unix tool called
less to display the information, if the man entry fills more than
a screen, you can't easily scroll back up in the Terminal window
to refer back to something at the beginning. Although you can of
course scroll around in less itself using the d and u keys - refer
to the man page for less for details - I prefer to stick to
Macintosh programs and interface conventions whenever possible.
I also find myself jumping in and out of a particular man page
while I'm figuring out a command, at least until I realize what
I'm doing and open another Terminal window.
**Fixing the Man** -- So, if you're like me, and occasionally need
to refer to a man page but are annoyed by the user experience
of working with man pages in a Terminal window, check out Carl
Lindberg's ManOpen 2.4, which is a free Mac OS X application for
viewing man pages in normal Macintosh windows. It's a simple
program, but has a number of useful features, including:
<http://www.clindberg.org/projects/ManOpen.html>
* A list of all available man pages, presented both as one big
list and broken up into a number of categories. This is helpful if
you're not exactly sure which man page you need and want to browse
through the possibilities.
* An Apropos menu item that lets you search across all available
man pages. If you're really not sure which man page you want,
the Apropos command can help you narrow the choices.
* A nice remapping of Command-O from Open File (which opens any
text file) to Open Man Page, which lets you type the name of
the man page you want to open.
* A hierarchical Open Recent menu that lists man pages you've
examined recently.
* A button in every window that, when clicked, tries to open a man
page whose name corresponds with the selected text. Since a lot
of man pages contain a See Also section listing related man pages,
this button simplifies following cross-references.
* A basic Find function that locates specified text within the
open window, which is quite handy on longer man pages.
* A Unix command line utility called openman that you can use at
the command line to open man pages in ManOpen. Since you're often
working at the command line when you want to refer to a man page,
it can be more convenient to use the openman command than to
launch ManOpen manually from the Finder.
**Improving the Man** -- As much as I appreciate how ManOpen
improves the experience of working with man pages, there's plenty
of room for improvement, should anyone be interested in working
with the source code that Carl Lindberg provides. A few thoughts:
* I'd like to see ManOpen automatically build links for words in
man pages that correspond to the names of other man pages. That
would make moving around within the document space of the man
pages even easier.
* It would also be nice if URLs were made clickable in the man
page text; this is apparently already the case in the OpenStep
version of ManOpen.
* A drawer listing all the commands, with controls to switch
between the full alphabetical list and a disclosure triangle-
enabled categorized list, would make browsing the list of man
pages easier.
* Including a permanent Search field at the top of every window
would simplify the process of searching within a man page window.
* Although you can change the font and set the window size for new
windows, ManOpen could be smarter about making sure the window is
large enough to display its contents.
Despite these desires, ManOpen is plenty useful in its current
incarnation, and I've installed it everywhere I find myself using
man pages. It's a great example of how using a graphical interface
can improve the Unix experience for those who prefer a graphical
approach. For other opinions about the process of viewing man
pages, check out the TidBITS Talk discussion on the topic.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2320>
Colour & Computers
------------------
by Charles Maurer
A cynic might be tempted to say that there are two categories
of photographer, those who admit they have problems matching
colour, and liars. Matching colour ought to be simple, according
to the ads, yet it rarely seems to be.
The problem is not you, the problem is that colour is
astonishingly complex. Controlling colour is a minefield.
You need to know where you can walk, where you cannot, and
where the path is uncertain. In this article I shall map the
minefield and suggest one safe route through it.
**Colour Basics** -- We learned in school that all colours are
formed from combinations of red, green, and blue. Unfortunately,
this explanation is a distortion of reality and is so overly
simple as to be wrong.
Colours do not exist in nature, colours exist solely within
an observer's head. Colours are perceptions. Light striking
the eye triggers a chain of neurochemical reactions that end in
perceptions of colour. Light has no colour itself, it is merely
electromagnetic radiation. Different wavelengths of light induce
different perceptions of colour but the relationship between
wavelength and colour is neither simple nor straightforward.
Consider:
* Any number of different wavelengths can induce the same colour.
* The same wavelength can induce different colours in different
circumstances.
* Two people viewing the same wavelength may see different
colours.
All of the eye's colour receptors respond to a broad range of
wavelengths but they each respond to some wavelengths more
readily than to others. The receptors fall into three groups
with different ranges of sensitivity. If you look at the light
that each group is most sensitive to, you will perceive red,
green, and blue: that is why red light, green light, and blue
light can induce any colour. However, although there are three
primary colours of light, there are actually _four_ primary
colours. Red, green, yellow, and blue are perceptual primaries:
all other colours can be identified as variants of them, even
in cultures that do not distinguish any colours by name.
In short, three sets of wavelengths will induce three colours of
light and mixtures of those wavelengths will induce variants of
four colours. Moreover, the colours induced by any particular
combination of wavelengths may differ from one circumstance to
the next or from one person to the next.
This is the reason that everyone has problems matching and
balancing colour. The transformation is not a straightforward
mathematical function nor even a constant one. Balancing colour
is like cooking fudge that will be sweet enough for all and
overly sweet for none.
Engineers can deal with wavelengths but they cannot deal with
mathematical functions that change in shape like an amoeba. To
get around this, to relate wavelengths to colours, a group of
scientists and engineers have got together to define the shape
of those amoebas. This group is the Commission International de
l'Eclairage (CIE). The CIE has defined several amoebas suitable
for several purposes. Standard Observers they are called. All of
the CIE's standards are based on them, as are most instruments
that measure light, including exposure meters and
spectrophotometers.
These standards are designed to facilitate repeatable and precise
measurements of mechanical and electronic devices, of sensors,
dyes, pigments and the like, and to standardize information. Thus,
engineers create an image sensor that corresponds as closely as
possible to the latest CIE standard amoeba in terms of how it
matches wavelengths of light to specific colors. They measure
how their sensor deviates from the standard, and they note those
deviations in a profile. Other engineers create a printer, trying
to make its output correspond as closely as possible to the
standard amoeba. They also note the deviations between their
printer's output and the standard in a profile. Then, when a
computer sends the image file captured by the sensor to the
printer, it adjusts the image according to the two profiles. The
resulting picture comes out of the printer using colours that more
or less match the relationships between wavelength and colour
defined by that standard amoeba.
This approach to matching colour would be all you'd need if you
invited the Standard Observer to dinner and wanted to impress him
with your photos. However, if he came, he would not deign to look
at them hanging on your living room wall without repainting the
wall a particular shade of grey. He would also insist on drawing
the curtains to block out the sun and installing a special lamp.
Moreover, this would not be a normal social experience. He would
not view them before dinner when he was hungry, or during dinner
when he is distracted, or after dinner when he is relaxed.
Put bluntly, it is never practical to match colours based solely
and precisely on CIE specs and the Standard Observer. Realistic
calibration is imprecise at best, and more an art than a science.
The specifications (ICC.1:2003-09) for International Color
Consortium (ICC) profiles - the profiles used by Apple's ColorSync
technology - make this clear:
"Clearly, there is considerable art involved in shaping the tone-
reproduction and color-reproduction characteristics of different
media and much of this art is based on subjective, aesthetic
judgments. As a result, the substrate and the colorants used in a
medium will be exploited to impart a particular personality to the
reproduction that is characteristic of the medium. In reproducing
an image on various types of media, it may be desirable to adjust
the colorimetry to accommodate the differing characteristics of
those media. In any case, it is necessary to accommodate the gamut
differences. Such considerations go beyond the simplistic matching
of color stimuli or even of color appearance. These adjustments
need to be incorporated in the color transforms of the device
profiles."
<http://www.color.org/ICC1-V41.pdf>
The reality is that matching colour is a chimera. The colour of
a person's face as you perceive it may change with the background
or a hat. When different pigments and dyes are involved, matching
colour becomes a game spread across two ballparks. Except by
accident, flesh tones on a monitor will never look just like
the flesh tones in a print when the two are compared directly.
On the other hand, it does not matter if the monitor and
print do not match. These two versions of the picture will
never be compared under normal circumstances. What matters is
that the flesh tones (or whatever) always look appropriate
_within_their_context_. The flesh tones on the monitor need
to look natural within the photo. The flesh tones on the print
need to look natural within the print and next to the other
portraits on the wall.
Your task is to calibrate your monitor and printer not so that
their images match, but so that when a picture looks good on the
monitor, it also looks good printed out. How the two compare side
by side is immaterial.
**Colour Profiles** -- It is possible to spend a lot of time and
money calibrating equipment to absurd levels of precision. Since
fudge is a basic ingredient of profiles and colour-matching, ICC
profiles from different sources will give different results, and
there is no way to tell whether you will like a profile without
buying it and trying it. Fortunately, most people don't need to
profile their printer at all and can get by fine with the default
settings. Long ago Microsoft and HP proposed, and the computer
industry adopted as a formal standard, a colour-matching
technology that's simpler than the full ICC standard while
still being sufficient for most people outside the graphics-arts
industry. All devices are assumed to be able to produce a range
of colours that will fit within a range or "colour space" called
sRGB. A standard set of numbers defines every colour within this
space. All devices are supposed to interpret those numbers
sensibly. It is the norm for photos on the Web, and most
commercial printing services use it, so I've set my Mac to use
sRGB by default (ColorSync Utility > Preferences pane > Default
Profiles tab > RGB Default pop-up menu).
Most inks on most papers are limited to the range of sRGB,
although some do exceed sRGB's range. From some inks a larger
colour space defined by Adobe, called "Adobe RGB," allows more
vivid colours. The difference is likely to matter in print
competitions and some corners of the graphic arts trade, but it
not clear to me that it would matter elsewhere. Using a larger
colour space incurs a cost: it is likely to require 16-bit colour,
which requires more storage and processing time. A good
description of those and other colour spaces is at:
<http://www.babelcolor.com/download/
RGB%20Coordinates%20of%20the%20Macbeth%20ColorChecker.pdf>
The sRGB standard ought to make colour-matching simple and
invisible but Microsoft is not known for support of standards,
even its own. When I was exploring some of Photoshop's
preferences, I noticed some curious results. The pure green on
the Macbeth ColorChecker showed up with these different amounts
of red using different programs and different versions of the
sRGB profile:
Profile
sRGB sRGB IEC61966-2.1
----------------------------------------------------------------
Photoshop using ColorSync 0% 11.0%
Photoshop using Adobe Color Engine 0% 5.9%
Preview and GraphicConverter 0% 5.5%
The first profile was supplied by Apple as part of Mac OS X.
The second was supplied by Microsoft, was installed as part of
Photoshop, and is built into some other applications as well.
I don't know which of these is correct but it appears to be
the profile that Apple supplied. In any case, that profile
is consistent, which is more important.
**Calibrating Your Equipment** -- Before you can use a monitor to
balance the colour of photographs, you need to calibrate it under
its normal ambient lighting. I work with my PowerBook sometimes
under incandescent lighting and sometimes under fluorescent
lighting, so I have calibrations for both and switch between them.
Apple's calibrator, accessible from the Display preference pane,
is adequate to set up a computer for ordinary purposes but it is
not good enough for editing photos. I suggest instead the $20
shareware package SuperCal. However, do not use it with the photo
built into the program. Instead use an electronic version of the
Macbeth ColorChecker (free from the second link below). If you
are taking the sRGB route and using only a single printer, then
it would be reasonable just to compare your monitor directly
to a printout of that file, but if you are using a different
colour space or want to use multiple printers, compare it to
a real Macbeth card. In any case, be sure to set the gamma to
2.2. That is the de facto standard for working with colour.
The Mac's standard of 1.8 was intended to make a grey-scale
monitor look like a printed page.
<http://www.bergdesign.com/supercal/>
<http://www.drycreekphoto.com/images/Charts/MacbethCC-sRGB.jpg>
Your goal in calibrating the monitor should be to make the two
images of the ColorChecker match as closely as possible overall
and to fudge the inevitable differences so that none of the
colours is further off than any other. From such different
technologies any kind of real match is impossible; you are
after the best approximation.
To compare the target photo to the monitor, and to assess the
colour of prints, you don't need fancy instruments - you are
pleasing your eye, not the Standard Observer - but you do need
a suitable lamp. Ideally this will be the same kind of lamp you
always view your pictures with, but since most pictures are viewed
under a variety of conditions, you really need an average lamp.
Although there is no such thing as an average lamp, there is a
graphic-arts standard for judging colour. It is an arbitrary
standard that has proven to be functional. Ordinary light bulbs
are redder than this and most fluorescent tubes are too green.
A reasonable compromise is a desk lamp that combines a 60-watt
incandescent bulb with a circular fluorescent tube. If you need
to buy something, you might find a desk lamp that uses a compact
fluorescent tube and replace the tube with an Ott-Light TrueColor.
<http://www.ottlite.com/productsview.asp?product_type=bulb&;
product_phosphor=truecolor&category=truecolor>
If you want professional-looking 8" x 10" prints that are tough
and durable, and if you want to keep things simple, then you might
take the sRGB approach with a $500 Olympus P-440 dye-sublimation
printer. That's what I do. If you use the P-440 from a Macintosh,
all you do is switch it on. It needs no special set-up and, to my
eye, its native colour management works better than any ColorSync
profile I have found for the machine, including a couple from the
QImage folks and the one supplied by Olympus themselves. The
printer requires no cleaning and uses no liquid ink that can dry
up. The running cost is $2 per 8" x 10" print, which is less than
good ink-jet paper and ink work out to be if a print head ever
dries out. Its range of colours is not the broadest - it lies
completely within sRGB space - and when I compare prints of the
Macbeth ColorChecker made from it and from my darkroom, the tones
from the Olympus look a bit more restricted. However, this is not
a comparison people normally make and the P-440's prints on their
own can be stunning. The prints I get from it do not look digital
even under a loupe. (Do note, however, that I use special-purpose
scaling software, I do not merely send the printer a file and
have it fill the paper. Pictures scaled by PhotoZoom Pro are
sharper than pictures scaled in the usual ways, even with
PhotoZoom's sharpening switched off. See "Editing Photos for the
Perfectionist" in TidBITS-748_ for more details on PhotoZoom Pro.)
<http://www.olympus.com/cpg_section/cpg_product_lobbypage.asp?l=1&;
bc=23&p=19&product=935>
<http://www.trulyphotomagic.com/products/photozoom/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07832>
[Editor's note: I can vouch for the quality of these prints.
Charles passed through Ithaca recently while on a trip and brought
me pictures he'd taken while on a trip through the Himalayas in
July. He used a Sigma SD-10 camera and the Olympus P-440 printer,
and the prints were utterly gorgeous. -Adam]
I have found only two glitches with the P-440. The first is
trivial: the printer driver will not accept images at the
advertised spec of 3200 pixels, it requires them to be three
pixels shorter. The second is more serious: if the line voltage
in your house fluctuates too much, then the printer will produce
random blotches and lines. Fluctuating voltage is not common
in cities but it can happen in rural areas. I need to plug the
printer into a voltage regulator. (The computer's UPS would have
done but I happened to have an old voltage regulator in the
basement.)
Last-minute addition: Kodak just announced the release of a
comparably priced dye-sublimation printer that prints pictures
up to 8" x 12". Kodak is aiming this printer at professional
photographers, which is an important market for them and one that
it has always served well. This printer looks very interesting.
<http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/products/printers/1400/
1400Index.jhtml?id=0.1.18.22.9.14&lc=en>
**Balancing Colours in Photos** -- Once you have a system that
is calibrated, you need to get to work balancing the colour of
individual photos. The easiest way I know to do this is to relate
everything in the picture to some spot that is some shade of
neutral, colourless grey. There is one such spot in just about
every photo. It may be merely the reflection of a lamp on a
metallic surface, it may be only a few pixels across, maybe just
the glint off a ring, but it is almost certain to be there
somewhere. Once you've found that neutral spot, adjust the overall
colour balance so that the red, blue, and green values for that
spot measure the same using DigitalColor Meter or the equivalent
function in Photoshop or your raw converter. (The raw converter is
the best place to do this. In Photoshop you can just click on the
spot with the eyedropper.)
Now every colour of a similar brightness ought to be properly
balanced. Find a colour that is particularly sensitive to colour
casts - most likely skin tones - and look for differences in that
one hue between highlights and shadows. Those differences indicate
colour casts that vary with brightness. In Asiva Shift+Gain
(again, see the previous article in TidBITS-748_ for details) it
is easy to select the range of brightness that is off and correct
it by nudging the hue slightly warmer or softer. If that one tone
is corrected so that it looks the same at all levels, then other
tones ought to be similar as well, although there may be anomalies
if the picture was taken in mixed or fluorescent or high-intensity
lighting. If some specific tones show an anomaly, select just
those tones in Asiva Shift+Gain and fix them.
<http://www.asiva.com/products/plugins/ShiftGainTrial.php>
**The Eyes Have It** -- The approach to controlling colour that
I have outlined here is the simplest and cheapest I know of.
It would be a sensible approach to start with and would be a
good one to retreat to if you are having problems doing it another
way. However, this is certainly not the only way to control colour
nor can it achieve the highest quality possible. Enough time and
enough money can buy better results. If you decide to aim higher,
though, do always keep in mind that colour is a variable
perception; it is not a stable, objective phenomenon. There
is rarely an intelligent way to answer the question, "Does this
profile (or printer) give better colour?"
Perception also ought to be kept in mind when buying a digital
camera. The specifications of digital cameras are not what they
seem to be if you consider them from the perspective of the eye.
My next article will examine cameras from this angle. Among other
things it will calculate a finite and surprisingly low answer to
the question, "How many pixels are enough?"
PayBITS: If Charles's recommendations for matching colours
helped, he asks that you make a donation to Doctors Without
Borders: <http://www.doctorswithoutborders-usa.org/donate/>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/04-Oct-04
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The second URL below each thread description points to the
discussion on our Web Crossing server, which will be much
faster.
**Digital Negative archival photo format** -- Adobe has just
released a new digital file format, Digital Negative (DNG). Learn
how it differs from other lossless image formats (such as TIFF),
and why the RAW format is a good basis for DNG. (5 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2326>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/188>
**Using remote control software for support** -- Is it possible
to use remote control software such as Apple Remote Desktop
or VNC to troubleshoot a family member's Mac remotely? Or more
accurately, is it easy enough for anyone to implement?
(7 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2329>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/190>
**MacOS 10.3.5 - error when trying to play a DVD** -- Watching
a DVD on an external monitor brings up an unexplained error - but
is easily solved by switching to display in thousands of colors.
(3 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2330>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/192>
**Save on .Mac Renewals** -- Apple wants to charge $100 to renew
.Mac service, but you can purchase the boxed version for less
and save some money. (5 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2331>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/193>
$$
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