Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
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I like it :) I've only spent a few hours using it, so take my comments with a grain of salt...or maybe one of those salt licks. The cropping shadow is fantastic. I don't know what it's really called, but it darkens parts of the image outside of the current cropping area. It makes it really easy to see what's in, and what's out. Preview on the unsharp mask filter - thank you thank you thank you! I started fooling around with the Channel Mixer filter, I would like a way to zoom in / out of the preview as well as panning...A simple way to enlarge it would be great too.
I was writing a tool in python to automatically move images into a directory hierarchy based on the stored EXIF date...Everything was working great until I decided that I should run it on ALL of my images, even those which were already in the correct location. The program as written did something like this: - Oh, you want to move file /pics/2004-12-21/dscn001.jpg? Ok, where should it go? - Based on the date, it should be renamed to /pics/2004-12-21/dscn001.jpg - Does that already exist? Yup! - Do the SHA-1 sums match? Yup! - Therefore I must have copied the file there before, delete the original! That last step, by the way, was added to prevent duplicate images from accumulating all over my hard drive. It works great when the "source" and "destination" files are actually different! Good thing I've got backups. The only problem is that it takes forever to recover as they're all on CDs.
A recent Ask Slashdot story, Professional Photographers Using Linux?, got me thinking about what I'd like to see on Linux in terms of image editing. I use Linux 99% of the time (the only time I boot into windows is to do my taxes...maybe I'll see if QuickTax will work with wine this year), and although far from being a professional photographer, I'd still like to see Linux become a viable platform for professional image editing. In no particular order:
So Pentax's latest offering is out. By all accounts it is a great camera, priced between Canon's Digital Rebel and Nikon's D70. One thing I like about dpreview.com is it's side-by-side comparison: D70 vs. *ist DS. Very similar specs. The D70 has some advantages in some areas, the DS has some advatages of its own. One big thing that doesn't show up on this comparison is the fact that the DS's RAW files are not compressed. They estimate you can fit 90 RAW files onto a 1 GB SD card. Compare this to the D70 (and the 300D?) which uses lossless compression for its RAW files which means that you can get somewhere in the neighbourhood of 190 pictures on a 1 GB flash card. Using compression lowers the bandwidth load between the camera and the flash card, so the D70 is also able to get images onto the card faster and clear the buffer faster so that the next picture can be taken sooner. The D70 or 300D give me more bang for the buck in terms of memory cards. The D70 has an orientation sensor (a nice feature that I would have expected to see on any camera made since 2003), faster max. shutter speed, faster shot rate, can have more images in the buffer before having to wait, wider range of exposure compensation, and probably the best metering system out there. On the other hand, the DS uses regular AA batteries, which is great. You can get decent NiMH batteries that last a long time, and in an emergency, AA batteries can be found pretty much everywhere. It looks like it's got a better viewfinder than the D70, has a larger LCD (although that can mean it uses more power), and is smaller and lighter than the D70. I guess the proof is in the pudding - can the DS take great pictures? I'm going to wait until some more complete reviews come out before making any judgements...