The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Category: General

  • Lightroom 2: Output Sharpening

    Since installing version 2.0 of Lightroom, I’ve been ignoring the new export option for Output Sharpening.  It has been sitting there on the screen but I’ve always been in too much of a hurry to try it out and see the results.

    Over the weekend I decided to change that.  What it does is allow you to select how your photo will be displayed/printed and the level of sharpening you want applied when the photo is saved out to disk.  Ana and I were going to be getting the family portrait I took printed, so I thought it would be a good time for a side-by-side comparison.  I quickly exported two copies of the same photo, one without sharpening and one with Matte Paper, Standard as the sharpening options:

    I print our photos with Shutterfly, and by default they’ll print the filename on the back of the photo.  So I named one ForMatte and the other NoSharpening; now I can compare side-by-side without bias once I receive the prints (8×10, btw).

    Here are a pair of 100% crops from the two images.  As you can see, the ForMatte version looks less than desirable so I didn’t get my hopes up.

    ForMatte:
    		 NoSharpening:

    The prints arrived yesterday, and I was able to tell a very distinct difference between the tho photographs.  One looked a little fuzzy, something I had come to expect from matte prints and one of the reasons I have started leaning toward glossies.  The other looked very nice and sharp.

    Flip them over, and sure enough, the one with the Matte sharpening applied is the one that looked better.  Lesson learned. I’ll be applying that on all of my prints from now on.

  • slotMusic?

    I heard about these yesterday, a new media format some of the big labels are trying to push now.  It’s a microSD card “loaded” with an album.  Give me a break!

    What morons thought this was going to sell?  Apparently some major record labels that still just can’t wrap their head around the idea of digital distribution.   These things are tiny, who wants to shuffle these around all the while trying not to lose them?  No thanks, I’ll stick to MP3s sitting on a nice big hard drive.  Nice try.

  • When Good Cats Attack!

    I’ve got a couple of little stories today, about some cats on attack!

    A couple days ago we had the house opened up to enjoy the beautiful weather.  It was roughly 11:30pm, and I was sitting here at my desk working on the computer.  Ana and David were sound asleep, and I was starting to get a little tired.

    All of a sudden, World War III breaks out in the adjacent room – I hear cats attacking each other, and I don’t mean play-fighting.  I mean all-out, screaming at the top of their lungs, I’m going to kill you attacking.  I jump up to find Ana’s cat Neo mid-air and tackling my cat Dozer in the open window.  I then hear a third cat, out on the porch – I’ll refer to him as Mr. Instigator.  I have to throw our cats apart, then sit between them growling/hissing/screaming at each other in the hallway.  Ana wakes up and runs downstairs, at which point I tell her to grab Dozer and get him out of there.  Neo keeps trying to get past me to attack him, but I was able to keep him at bay.

    Completely insane, I’ve NEVER had them act like that.  Neo growled anytime anyone got near him for hours.  Dozer was freaked out and a little scared for the same amount of time.  I kept him in our room over night with the door closed to prevent any further damage, but he wanted out bad.  It got to the point where around 3:30am I had to take and walk him around the house to show him everything was a-OK.  Neo was sure to keep his eye on him the entire time.

    Upon further inspection of Dozer, he had Mr. Instigator’s white fur in his claw and a bit of a busted up claw on his back foot.  Pretty impressive considering there was a screen (which he looks to have ripped through a little bit) between him and Mr. Instigator.

    Later in the morning, I got the two cats together and they’re all fine – as if nothing at all happened.  BUT, I had the window open, with both cats sitting my desk when I spotted Mr. Instigator outside again (along with a sidekick, and a dead mouse in his mouth).  Luckily I was able to close the windows and shades before our cats spotted them again. GEEZ!

    And on a completely unvicious, unrelated incident.  David got a little scratch when playing with a family cat (Peanut, for those in the know..) yesterday.  He just doesn’t quite know yet when the cats are done playing.

  • Good Bye Summer

    Well it has been good, Summer 2008. In honor of your passing, I’m firing up the grill for one last summer-Sunday grilling.

    And with that, my favorite season of the year begins tomorrow!

  • Wobbly When Tired

    http://www.motionbox.com/external/hd_player/type=hd,video_uid=a79eddb71e12ed2e

  • Photo Hosting

    I have hosted my own photo gallery for around 7 years now and have been perfectly happy with my arrangement.  I first started with a homegrown php photo album and used that for a year or two before moving to Gallery, which I have used since.  In addition to using Gallery to display and share my photos, I used it as my archive of sorts – every photo was stored and backed up from there.

    That changed last year when I purchased Lightroom and my Canon 30D.  It quickly became the home of all of my photos and I’ve since only uploaded select ones to Gallery.  Backups are all handled directly on the Lightroom catalog and managed directories, and Gallery has pretty much turned into a mess.  Disk space has also become annoying as I’ve moved my Apache web server into a virtual machine.

    These things, in combination with my recent purchase (rental? lease?) of a MotionBox account for videos has gotten me thinking more and more about how I want to handle pictures.  Primarily I want more bandwidth, to ignore disk space concerns, prettier photo galleries, room to expand (customization, maybe even selling photos?, I don’t know yet), and a stable provider with a good history.

    So I’m trying out SmugMug.com.  They seem to fit the bill for all of the above, at a reasonable price.  It’s a 14 day free trial, so be looking for an announcement about my Gallery being shut down and some things moved to my SmugMug account.

    Stay Tuned!

  • Internet Explorer 8 Beta

    Late this afternoon I decided to download and install the beta of IE8.  Total usage time since I’ve installed it has been maybe 5-10 minutes, and I’m going to uninstall it.

    Why?  I downloaded a zip file, but when it completed it was deemed corrupt.  Tried 2 more times with the same result.  Fired up FireFox and as expected, it downloaded just fine.  I’m not going to waste time on the beta if it can’t even download a file correctly, that’s sooooo 1998.

    Thanks Microsoft.

  • DNG Codec for Windows Vista

    Last night I came across a DNG Codec for Vista by Adobe Labs. If you’re wondering what the heck this is, it’s software that will allow you to view thumbnail previews of your .DNG (Digital Negative) photos. Pretty handy.

  • Mit Romney

    Anyone else notice that the Ashley Furniture commercial guy sounds like Mit Romney?  If you haven’t, you will now!

  • Toy box

    A couple weeks ago I used Google SketchUp to layout what I wanted to do for the toy box I wanted to make for David.  Saturday morning we made a quick trip to Lowes to purchase materials and decided to give it a shot.

    What do you know, it’s Sunday evening and the box is sitting in the basement, essentially completed.  All that remains is a piano hinge, some sanding, and I’ll hand it over to Ana for some decoration (ie. paint/staining and whatever else she seems fit).

    I think I used just about every tool I have at my disposal to finish this thing, and I did so without any extra trips to the hardware store for more wood.  That’s definitely a first!

    Anyway, here it is.  Notice the pretty cool little inset shelf for some of his books.  I can’t wait to see the finished product!

    Use your imagination and picture a hinge there:

    Here’s the inside, sans lid: