Yourself?

Well... let me just update everyone on my life. Been going out with Geraldine rather frequently. Its fun. She's funny. I'm totally neglecting work because of her. Haha... but its okay yeah? Its the holidays.

Anyway so what have I been working on.

I've been designing the R(A) webpage, but no work has actually started... gathering materials and stuff. What's the most popular website layout generating software anyway... I'm out of the loop.

Working on my digital darkroom workflow. That just means the pieces of software I use from scanner to nice image. There are a surprisingly large number of steps. First I scan the image with Epson TWAIN (scanner driver) into Paint Shop Pro (soon to be replaced with Photoshop 7.0 when I can finally stand the interface... doing mental preparation... because Photoshop unlike Paint Shop Pro can do 16 bits per colour channel. Meaning my tones can look smoother). Then it goes for colour adjustments (yet undone, cos I don't have a printer, only a monitor, and every monitor produces colour slightly differently, so I'm not TOO concerned about that.) Making the colours look livelier, (especially when using negative films) and making skin tones look more like asian skin. I can be quite picky here. Takes up most of my thinking time. The rest of the time I can spend away from my computer. Then I'll save the images as a uncompressed TIFF, about 10mb per image, and run it through a Neat Image(a noise removing software, due to my cheap lousy Epson Perfection 1650 Photo scanner, which does great work with slides, but horribly noisy scans with negatives). Neat Image produces a JPG (which is compressed, which I don't like but have no choice cos I can't pay for the home edition which gives me a TIFF) so I get a nice JPG. And at the end of all that work, all I get is a image that I can make 5R (at 300 dpi) or 6R (at 250 dpi) prints of. Blahz. What can I do with a lousy scanner, lousy computer, and NO printer. And the best thing of all, after all that work, the printing (if I use the Fuji digital printing service) will not have colours that match my screen. Yay~ so I'll probably have to spend money calibrating some printer I have NO control of. And then if THEY calibrate their printer then I've gotta do it all over again. YAY~! Now I know why photography's a rich hobby. And I'm not rich... just struggling along.

Thought of buying an Epson printer today. Saw an old model that was rather good at $139. Told the auntie I'd buy it if she sold it to me at $100. She said that's the lowest. I said no deal. Haha... making unreasonable cuts in the price does wonders at keeping your hands off new tech toys.

I'm somewhere between deciding to just shoot slide film and scan it, and cut down the noise filtering step, or buy negative film, bear with the horrible colour, and just imagine I didn't buy the scanner in the first place. Of course both cost plenty... film and developing. And I should have just spent the money on a nice digital camera. But that's a topic for another day. My heart weeps when I look at the 10mb raw files, and the 0.5mb JPGs... imagine all the detail I threw away through all that conversions.

Okay... after looking at the pictures in depth, I can't really tell the difference between the JPG and the TIFF so its probably fine.

posted by Downhere. @ 9:49 pm