Gary_Yngve

I'm only explaining things on a really cursory level and not providing any examples, so please reply if you want more detail or have any questions.

Photoshop-specific tools: Autolevels: Sometimes this helps, sometimes it doesn't. Often on images, I try it and undo it if I don't like it. It's really quick to test. (ctrl-shift L, ctrl-Z) Autolevels can be nice and remove the blue cast from snow on cloudy days, but it may also remove alpenglow. Match colors: This is a really neat tool that's pretty hidden. Click neutralize, and watch how it tries to remove the color cast. You can use the slider to adjust how much to remove. Often for the blue casts, I keep only 25% of the original blue. Layers and blending: More complicated topic. But you can copy an image into multiple layers, do different things to the different layers, blend them by erasing parts of the layers (with a really large soft eraser brush), and finally flattening the layers into one image. Healing brush, cloning brush: Great for cleaning up little things: twigs, powerlines, etc.

Good software to use: Irfanview - free - does resizing, sharpening, saturation, etc. - does batch-style processing for lots of images at once - not the best interaction Photoshop - pricy - does most anything you'd ever want - very interactive, great undo capabilities Common operations in both: Gamma (sliding mid-gray around in Levels for Photoshop): Adjusting gamma brightens or darkens the image as if the exposure time had changed. This is different from a "brightness" adjustment, which gives a worse result (linear adjustment). Gamma won't be able to salvage anything that's completely over/underexposed, but it works well. <1 goes darker, >1 goes brighter. Be careful to take into account the brightness of your monitor and the surrounding light in the room when deciding on the right gamma. Saturation: Saturation enhances the richness of the colors. If you saturate too much, the colors will lose their smoothness and look bad. In general, I find that digital cameras undersaturate their images. Contrast (also by sliding black & white in Levels in Pshop): Exaggerates subtle shade differences - makes the darks darker, and the brights brighter. Unsaturate (monochrome): Makes the image B&W. To go Sepia, you can then pump up the red channel by a gamma of 1.1 and the green by 1.05. Sharpen: Sharpens the image. Unsharpen: This actually sharpens the image by producing a difference image that contains the high-frequency components and adds it back in. For both of these, be on the lookout for making the image too sharp. Look at hard edges and make sure there is not a halo forming around it. Also make sure that the image isn't becoming too noisy from the noise getting sharpened.

1) What size/compression/settings do I use for the camera? I recommend taking pictures on max settings. Largest non-interpolated resolution, highest quality jpg compression. Unless you know what you're doing, you probably don't need RAW or Uncompressed. My reasoning for this is you don't want to regret not having better data later. What about space? The good news is you can now find 1G Flash cards for $20 or so if you look in the right place. That's a lot of pictures. Need more harddrive space? You can find 250G harddrives for under $100, perhaps even with enclosures (so you can carry them from computer to computer and not have to open anything up). 2) What size/compression/settings do I use for web images? The most important thing is to get the images to the right size. A 6MP image won't fit onto anyone's screen. For photos on an online essay, you probably want them smaller than the screensize. Remember that other frames of the webpage also take up screen real-estate. An inset image can probably be around 320x240, and a thumbnail around 160x120. A fullish-screen image around 800x600. If you're writing html code and set the size of the image in the code, beware that if you're not careful, the user could be downloading a large 1600x1200 image that's just going to be squished into 160x120. For quality, around 75% should be good, unless you're trying to get flawless results. Less than 75% may introduce blocky or noisy artifacts or banding (when colors don't transition smoothly). Also, if you're emailing pictures as attachments, many email services don't allow more than a few megs to go through. 3) What size/compression/settings do I use for printing? The important part here is to set the pixels per inch or otherwise tell what physical size you want the print. Use your original image dimensions. The printer will take care of the rest. One thing that does come up with printing is how it looks on the screen vs paper. Sometimes there are issues with brightness or color casts. A trick I do is I print the image (or several) really small (and not on my best paper) and look at them, perhaps doing more than one pass of adjusting colors. That saves paper and ink.

First, some jargon. Pixel count, physical size, resolution... dpi, ppi... The link below describes things well. http://www.photo.net/learn/resize/ Basically, when displaying on a screen, only pixel dimensions matter. Most monitors these days have resolutions somewhere between 800x600 and 1600x1200. 1600x1200 is about 2 megapixels. For printing, you want a higher pixels-per-inch than the ppi on a monitor (around 72 ppi). Probably upward of 180 or 360 . You'll need higher megapixels for better printing. For example, a 16"x12" print at 144 ppi would need 4 megapixels, and the same size print at 180 dpi would need 6 megapixels. So now the questions... what size/compression/settings do I use for the camera? what size/compression/settings do I use for web images? what size/compression/settings do I use for printing? More on these later...

I've had requests from time to time for advice on how to process digital photos, so I'll write about them here. Please keep this thread spray-free.

Sometimes when taking low-light shots, I take two or three in a row. Often one of them has less shake than the others. There's also the technique of exhaling when you shoot.

Which is better? If you neanderthal fuckers don't give a damn, then fine, keep on flaming me when I try to offer tactful, positive criticism and assistance to improve someone's images.

Get well, Kurt!

Nice pics! Did you use a tripod? Your 3rd pic (zoomer in twilight) isn't as sharp as the others.

A dominating 3-0 win over Ecuador today!

Ah, I posted the data but not my opinion on it. My opinion agrees with yours, that an overhand on a 10mm rope and an 8mm rope, properly dressed/tightened, is plenty strong.

http://www.xmission.com/~tmoyer/testing/EDK.html see #15 and #17

Woah, that's a Klenke word!

Does she have a car?

Would it be funnier if I already had plans to go to Index with three women?

That won't be the only thing that's too hard there.

I didn't mean to cause distraction on tanstaafl's thread, just wanted to offer an alternate destination (and the notion that climbing and women and beer is better than women and beer). There's several responses that are just begging for a retort, so here it goes...

DMM. don't know when.

Whatever. I just think it would be fun to have an Index Pub Club. It feels like I haven't been to a Pub Club in over a month.

I'm just kidding around, as are the other people. Welcome, and hope to see more reports (and pictures!).

How about Pub Club at Lower Town Wall? I already have plans to be at Index (with two women) that evening.

You fucker, I was going to do the route next weekend, but now it will be the crowded CC flava of da month!

Here's another bold/creative idea. Let people get hurt/killed on the route. Eventually the bad reputation will keep people away.

Because they don't want to be accused of slander or libel. For example, see http://www.komotv.com/stories/43988.htm