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October 30, 2007
Glenrock with Dorje et al
Just back from another weekend up at Glenrock with Dorje, Keryn, Tashi, and their friends Richard, Liz & Caitlin. We stayed in the other house available at Glenrock which again was very comfortable. We had a stunning day out on Sunday, finally getting to the top of "mighty" Double Hill (with Evie walking the whole way up and down!), this time getting to appreciate the expansive views up the Rakaia.
Posted by conor at 1:16 PM
October 24, 2007
Quick trip to Quail Island
An active and enjoyable Labour Day long weekend culminated in a quick trip to Quail Island in Lyttelton Harbour (we also went to Lauren's 4th birthday party, Willowbank, and up in the Gondola). Beautiful sunny days over the weekend, although it was cool out on the island.
Posted by conor at 1:07 PM
Getting a reasonable workflow in Photoshop now
I finally feel as though I'm building up a reasonable workflow for dealing with RAW images from my Canon 350D. And I've also managed to automate most of it which takes the grunt out of easily getting an initial set of images good enough (by that I mean there's no point in having a reasonable DSLR if the images at the end of the process don't do it justice) to upload to the website (we don't print a lot of them out, and get most enjoyment out of our photos by seeing them popping up on our desktop/screensaver via my Gallery2 screensaver GLoSS).
The advantages of adopting a workflow like this are:
- reducing visible noise,
- minimising filesize while maintaining quality,
- maximising sharpness, and
- minimising time processing multiple images.
- Manually use Adobe Camera Raw to set RAW processing parameters (exposure, white balance, saturation, contrast, etc) for each image.
- Batch process all the images using the following steps.
- Open image.
- Automatically run PTLens to correct lens aberrations (mostly barrel distortion with my current lens)
- Automatically apply default Capture Sharpening from the TLR Professional Sharpening Toolkit (free, although definitely deserving of a PayPal donation) to reduce initial out-of-camera softness.
- Automatically build a Surface Mask using TLR Professional Mask Toolkit from the same place as above.
- Automatically apply Neat Image Pro+ noise reduction on the image masked by the Surface Mask. This step relies on a reasonable number of pre-made custom "noise profiles" which I've created for my camera using Neat Image.
- Resample the image to fit 1280x1024.
- Automatically apply Output Sharpening from the TLR Professional Sharpening Toolkit.
- Drop the bit depth from 16-bit to 8-bit.
- Save the image as a JPEG.
Batch processing time on our old Dell takes about 5 minutes per image; I just use ACR to set the RAW processing parameters, and then leave the PC to chug away overnight churning out all the JPEGs. Alternatively, if I want a Photoshop PSD I can do further processing on, I've got a similar script which just performs Steps 1-5 and saves the result as a PSD file.
Now all I need is to find some time to actually take some photos worth processing!
Posted by conor at 1:05 PM
October 9, 2007
Glenrock Station with Bernadette, Shane, Lauren and Ella
Just back from a weekend up staying at Glenrock Lodge. Glenrock Station is a working high-country farm with a couple of very comfortable cottages available for rent. It was a wild and windy weekend, with gale-force winds and torrential rain on the way in on Friday afternoon, and a deafeningly impressive 6 hour thunderstorm on Saturday night (where the shockwaves from the thunder rumbling up and down the valley continually rattled the windows and indeed the whole cottage). However, both days were blue and sunny, if still windy, and we had a very relaxing weekend with a couple of wanders round the farm, and up the valley, plus getting to feed a couple of well-fed lambs and calves. And we won't mention the rugby (watched over breakfast on Sky in the cottage), since the shock loss for the All Blacks is obviously a National Tragedy... ;-)
Posted by conor at 12:44 PM