View Flickr Photos in Google Earth: http://kmlphotos.metaltoad.com/
Now that is a great timewaster, although given my new-found amazement at just how close Cairo and Luxor city boundaries are to the Great Pyramid and the Valley of the Kings, it’s also educational.
Aperture seems to have a pretty good set of defaults in the main – it certainly doesn’t get in my way for simple things, but recently I’d been getting upset with the performance of the EOS 350D kit lens (Canon EF-S 18-55mm) where my images just simply looked poorer than I expected. Until recently I’d not been able to use Adobe’s raw convertor, but after a terrible shot of a climbing wall I was really annoyed and on a whim tried the image in PSE3 as well as Aperture.
The difference was night and day: the lens isn’t great, but the image was certainly acceptable and nowhere near as poor as I’d first thought, so I started going through all of the Aperture options in more detail. It turns out that the default 350D raw conversion settings have a chroma blur of 2.00 applied, and whilst this gives a gorgeous blend for the blue tones in the sky, it exacerbates any chromatic aberration that might be present. Take a look at the following 100% crop examples:
Chroma Blur = 2
Chroma Blur = 0
Just in case you couldn’t guess, the first image has a chroma blur of 2, and on the second it has been turned off completely. The yellow hold is now bearable in terms of sharpness considering the lens, and the wall itself has much more edge detail, but looking closely at the sky shows that the lack of blur can be a bad thing too…
For this image, I found that chroma blur of 0.43 gave an acceptable result for viewing on screen, but this is more of a warning that the default settings are not perfect, so do bear this in mind when shooting anything that may contain a high contrast edge. Adding a blur/sharpen slider to the colour editing tool would be a great compromise, but the answer is that region selections would make this problem vanish.
Here’s hoping for an updated colour tool in 1.6, or region selection in 2.0…
For about 3 months now I’ve not been able to use Photoshop Elements 3 for no reason that I could find. I tried erasing preference files, repairing permissions, deleting plugins, emptying caches, uninstalling TWAIN drivers, removing over 300 fonts and re-installing all to no avail. The Adobe PSE support forums were of no use and I had resorted to either PSE2 or just making do in other software and hoping the problem would fix itself…
In the end, I tried running the software as another user on my Mac, and the program launched without issue so I knew that the installation and plugins were fine: it must be something specific in my personal Library directory that was the problem, so I checked for all the files that had been touched in that new users’ Library in the last 24 hours with:
find ./Library -atime 1
and there it was: Elements 3 uses Opera to drive the help system, and this also has a cache directory and preference settings which I had never touched before, so after:
rm -rf "~/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences" rm -rf "~/Library/Caches/Opera Cache" rm -rf "~/Library/Preferences/Photoshop Elements 3.0 Settings"
I tried it again, and it worked. Obviously, I can’t be 100% sure that it didn’t need re-installing, and perhaps I do have a dodgy font somewhere that is the root of the problem but if you’re trying to debug inexplicable PSE3 crashes do have a dig around for anything that Opera might have left behind, just in case that helps you too.
This is a Ginger Bread, and not Gingerbread (not that I’d try to confuse anyone intentionally of course…)
1/2 tsp Yeast 200g Strong White flour 200g Strong Brown flour 15ml Virgin Olive Oil 1 tsp Salt 1 tbsp Sugar 2 tsp Ground Ginger 30g Crystallised Ginger 100ml Semi-skimmed milk 170ml Water
Bake for 4 hours on a standard raisin bake, and make sure that the crystallised ginger is finely chopped before placing in the nut dispenser. It’s possibly worth increasing the 30g a little if you really like ginger, as the baking does reduce the intensity of the flavour somewhat, and it might also be possible to add an extra 1/2 tsp of mixed spice, or replace the 2 tsp of ground ginger with 1 tsp of ginger and 1 tsp of mixed spice.
I am completely obsessed with the colour tool in the latest point release of Aperture, but it’s got to the point where I’m not sure if I like the results, or clicking the change button on and off and looking at the before and after results… Have a look for yourself and see what you think. The index pages have some description of the images, but looking at the full page views allows a simple before/after click to see the differences.
Oops, busted link fixed
I’ve got a new favourite – it’s s slightly modified version of the Orange loaf from page 25 and smells amazing once made. I’m not sure what I might put on it, as half the loaf had to be ‘tested’ whilst hot, and was great just by itself. Place the ingredients in the pan according to the manual; the cranberries into the raisin/nut dispenser, and then set for a 4hr basic raisin bake.
300g Brown strong flour 200g White strong flour 1tsp Yeast 1tbsp Sugar 1 1/2 tsp Salt 15ml Virgin Olive oil Grated rind of one whole Orange 120ml Orange juice 150ml Semi-skimmed milk 70ml Water 100g Cranberries
The milk was semi-skimmed because that’s simply what happened to be in the fridge and I’ve found that dropping the dried milk powder and using fresh milk does alter the smell of the loaf more than the taste (thanks for pointing this out Mum, and thanks for Carson for the water suggestion). In this case, I think that I lost about half the rind anyway due to not having a very good grater so that’s something to improve next time, and watch out when removing the loaf from the tin, as the cranberries do tend to shoot off and are rather hot at that point…
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