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Waiting for the skinny on the Intel Macs

Posted on 2006-01-15 by frank

Apple announced their first set of machines based around an Intel processor, the MacBook Pro and the iMac. They’re claiming both machines significantly outperform the ones they’re replacing. Very easy to believe for the Powerbooks, since those were running 6 year old processors at three year old clockspeeds. The iMac isn’t so clear. Since they’ve all gained dual core processors, concurrent applications or usage patterns will probably benefit, and the ATI Radeon X1600 will certainly help the case, but will we really see across-the-board performance improvements of 2 times or more?

The 2001 dual 500 Mhz G4 I’m using to write this post is long past the point of seeming dated, but I’m going to hold out as long as I can before replacing it with the latest and greatest. I had a strong inclination to pick up one of the new iMacs, but I’m worried about application compatibility early on, and quite frankly, Apple has had a poor track record with first-generation products. There’s also the drive issue — how long will I have to wait before I can get a good printer driver for my Canon Pixma IP5000 printer and my HP Scanjet 4670 scanner? I probably shouldn’t be so worried about the printer, because there’s always gimp-print, but the scanner is definitely something to watch.

Sure, I could always hook it all up to the old G4 and use file and printer sharing to solve the problems, but then I’d be taking up even more space with computer gadgets than I am now, and one of the upgrade rationalizations for an iMac is to save space and clutter.

Don’t get me wrong, I still want one, but I’m trying to hold out.

Tagged Gadget, Geek | 3 Comments

Lightroom, Core Image, Quartz Composer, and Channel Mixing

Posted on 2006-01-10 by frank

Lightroom has a greyscale mixer, similar to the channel mixer in Photoshop and the GIMP, and adds HSL Tuning with a similar user interface, but instead of the RGB values I’m used to, it also provides access to CMY. I’ve had a lot of fun converting some images from my archive in to black and white, and radically altering the color balance on others.

It made me realize that channel mixing, levels, and curves are probably the most common photoshop or gimp tool for me, with layers and masks coming in as distant runners-up, though that may be more due to my lack of skill with the tools than with their usefullness.

It also got me thinking, why aren’t there free image editors that aren’t the GIMP offering cool tools like that? Not that there’s anything WRONG with the GIMP, it’s just not nearly as pleasant to use as a typical Macintosh application. We’ve got Core Image and Quartz Composer on the Mac; how hard could it really be to do up a six-color mixer like Lightroom’s?

Scott and I are going to find out. After work today I started browsing around for answers and didn’t find any, but I did find an Apple example on RGB value transformation. I looked up how to compute CMY values from RGB, and in about half an hour, thanks to key value coding, I had added CMY selectors to the RGB Value Transformation example.

The images didn’t look right, and when Scott looked at it, he realized the CMY values were not masks like we wanted. The shortfall was I wasn’t finding the black point for each pixel, so my CMY values were actually intermediate values; other colors were showing up in my “mask”.

I’d never used Quartz Composer before, but with Scott’s help, we had duplicated the results of the RGB Value Transformation example in about half an hour, this time calculating CMY per pixel. The results look a lot closer to what I would expect.

I intend to learn how to access Core Image kernels from Objective C, so I can make a real app out of this once we’ve figured out the method. That way I should be able to add sliders to control the recombination of the channels/colors.

Tagged Geek, Photography | 1 Comment

Georgia gets Share the Road license plates

Posted on 2006-01-10 by frank

Today I’m headed over to my County Tag Office to apply for Share the Road license plates for both our cars. The state needs to get 1000 registrations for these plates before they can be produced. It’s been open for a week now and they have 112. I hope it’s just the bureaucracy is slow at entering the registrations, not that people aren’t registering!

Tagged Cycling | Comments Off

A first look at “Mastering Black & White Digital Photography”

Posted on 2006-01-09 by frank

I stumbled across Michael Freeman’s book while browsing for a copy of Tom Ang’s “Digital Photographer’s Handbook” to give to my mom for Christmas. It looked interested enough in the store that I couldn’t resist buying it.

So far I’ve only read about the first twenty pages. I tried to dive right in and use some of the techniques described, but discovered the accessible language hides the complexity of the topic very well. I’ll have to read it more carefully, then go back and explore the techniques Mr. Freeman describes.

I thought of making a post about it because I had just tried Adobe’s Lightroom, and was especially attracted to its color mixing features: in addition to your normal red, green, and blue, it lets you modify cyan, blue, and magenta. All six of these colors are available in the Grayscale Mixer, as well as in Hue, Saturation, and Luminance “tuners” for color photos.

Does anyone know of another tool that provides all six of color channels?

Tagged Photography | Comments Off

Aperture to see some competition from Lightroom

Posted on 2006-01-09 by frank

It’s nice to see that Aperture will be getting some competition from Adobe/Macromedia Lightroom, but there are a few things missing even from Lightroom’s beta.

Where is the crop tool? I almost always crop an image before I print it or put it on the web.

Where is red-eye reduction or basic retouching? Even iPhoto has these functions, and I often need them since my Nikon D70’s built-in flash often gives dismal red-eye.

I like how Lightroom is willing to use my photo files as I’ve laid them out on my filesystem; I like to organize my photos on disk by roll or shoot, but then I don’t have a good way to browse the whole library. Lightroom or Aperture, after a few much-needed patches, could help solve this problem.