resurrecting the dead: epson perfection 2450 on win7 x64

No drivers from epson, but I found this thread
http://www.w7forums.com/windows-7-64-bit-driver-epson-perfection-1650-photo-scanner-t3459.html

which lead here http://uploading.com/files/get/3214affd/.

Yes they’re the drivers for the 1650 in vista x64 (yikes)

open device manager, click on the ! device. Right click and chose “update driver”

Browse >let me pick from a list> have disk

find the ES27.inf and install. I’ve only run it so far from the “Epson Scan” Utility – no twain support. It saves a jpeg into you “my pictures” folder

Its time for a new scanner, but this will keep me limping along

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This week I haf been mostly…

Shooting landscapes. A trip up the hill to New England, but these are some of my Tasmania trip from earlier in the year.

This lot is unusual in that everything here has been processed in lightroom only (nary a pixel has been prodded in Photoshop).

Very much darker than my usual style…

mg 3821 2

mg 3833

mg 3842

mg 3850

mg 3858

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mg 4249

mg 4520

mg 5171

mg 5221

lightroom 3 – f@$% me!

First Impressions of Lightroom 3’s noise reduction and new imaging engine. Shots Taken on 7d, auto profile lens correction and chromatic abberation. I deliberately picked an underexposed file to see what could be done. Real estate work often involves mixing 3 exposures – especially if you use natural light as I do. Its not uncommon to have 12 or more stop range. THe more dynamic range I can squeeze out of the camera the less work I have to do in photoshop. Lightrrom 3 is getting close to the point where you can do all your gross image processing in that app, and leave photshop for the retouching and “artifying”.

no settings (no highlight clipping in the sky)

fill lit the beejesus out of it:

But what about noise… (1:1)

Its still noisy but its darn tooting usable, especially at the sort of size needed.

or you can loose more and go a bit creamy:

So then, its a shame its a slow as a dog (with no legs)

(The last line should be spoken like Jermemy Clarkson)

another typical day in windows 7 land

If i’d wanted to spend $4000 to work slower I would’ve had my arm amputated.

EDIT (September 2010) : After 9 months of major and minor glitches i can finally say that my system is running relatively sweetly.

Righto: it seems its not just adobe that’s not up to speed yet.

Font agent pro 4 is “a few months away” from having an update that works sweetly.

Epson print drivers crash my display driver (although this is most likely an nvidea issue, it still leaves me wondering why I bought a new computer)

I bought a new plugin today – Portrait professional – promised to be a quick way to retouch portraits. The plugin doesn’t work however, and the standalone app was spitting the dummy at the supposedly supported 16 bit files. Their support page had wording to the effect of “tested on windows 7 RC”. Filling me with confidence. It ended up taking me 6 hours to retouch 2 portraits. 6 hours! As Hank Azaria would say: “OH my god I don’t even believe it”

I spent about 4 days last week and over the weekend attempting to get my raid working properly.

Not a day goes by without me emailing tech support or piddling around on forums. My 12GB of ram arrives tomorrow – supposedly. If its still rubbish I’mm going to sell it and buy a mac.

windows 7 64 bit and adobe cs4

If any creative folks out there are thinking of jumping into windows 7 64 bit with their adobe cs4 apps – dont!

I have had enough small and fundemetal problems now that I wish I’d waited 6 months for saps like me to find the issues and for patches and fixes to be written. Some issues are in windows 7 itself, some are with adobe.

Photoshop 64 bit: doesn’t recognise type one fonts unless installed on te system. (I use font agent pro, users of extensis suitcase fusion may have a different story)

Photoshop: Screen redraw issues (zooming in and out shows previous image states)

Acrobat: Crashes on opening several documents, crashes on exit, crashes on export from indesign

Bridge: crashes – especially with 2 windows open.

Dreamweaver – small bugs including on setting up a new site you must specify a folder below the one you want as your main site folder (so if you want e:/websites/mysite/www you have to go to e:/websites/mysite/www/another, or add the www manually

ALL aps that have a “reveal in explorer” function dont highlight the file in the explorer window that opens – unless you’ve previoulsy visited that folder. (Go figure! This is a windows issue it appears)

Photoshop disasters

from the site of the same name:

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html

Snippets: Noise reduction and sharpening

Photographer  Michael Almond compares many many noise reduction tools: http://www.michaelalmond.com/Articles/noise_print.html

(this is the printable version but I think is easier to read than the online version)

His verdict is that Noise Ninja does the best job overall, but that there’s not a lot in the top 4 or 5 programs or plugins.

I’ve used Noise Ninja and Neat Image. I prefer Neat Image, but their licensing is a bit crazy, requiring a separate licence for 32 and 64 bit – meaning that I would have to chose which version of photoshop I’d want to use it in, or pay for 2.

Noiseware is one I’d not heard of, I’ll give it a try in the next few weeks.

Also whilst researching came across this bunch: http://www.softwhile.com/index.html

They have a image sharpening tool, which I’m looking forward to comparing to photoshop’s (and lightroom’s)

Now all of these may be moot in a few months if what I’m reading about Lightroom 3 turns out to be true:

Have a look at the pixel comparisons here:

http://www.seriouscompacts.com/2009/10/adobe-lightroom-3-beta-noise-reduction.html

Lightroom 3 appears to produce crisper, less clumpy-grained & more film-like images.

Also a nice post here: http://davidnaylor.org/blog/2009/10/lightroom-3-beta-review/ describing some of the high and lowlights of the beta (although were is the purple fringing in his 1st example?)

Somewhat disappointed to read about the grain module – being a huge fan of grain (coming from using Kodaks high speed infra red film pushed to 1600 ASA and developed in neat HC110 – old photographers will know what I’m on about) – David Naylor makes a good point that we’ll be seing a lot f grainy photos in the near future. His wish list includes automatic lens correction. (Barrel/pincushion distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting.) which I heartily agree with: I want lightroom to be my digital darkroom – I want to use it to get the perfect starting point for any creative work I want to do in photoshop (which generally means I work hard to get a crisp, high detail full dynamic range shot only to mung it in photoshop).

The beta is available here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/. I’m resisting the temptation to install it – version 1 and 2 took a year to iron out the kinks – version 2.6 addressed the woeful speed problems on my setup – and the 3 beta was released shortly after. You can’t expect to use the beta commercially.

quick and dirty cross process

All you need is curves, bra da da da dah.

Put some CYAN in the shadows:

Put some Blue in the shadows and yellow in the highlights:

You can leave the green alone (or put a little magenta in the shadows – ie remove some green like this…)

Take away some contrast:

Before:

and after:

hang on, lets make those highlights blow out a bit…

duplicate the layer and set the layer mode to screen:

Blur it a bit (or a lot)

The clever bit: Double click on the layer to bring up the layer style
See where it says “this layer”: Use the layer blend slider things and separate the shadow end (press alt whilst cliking on them). This create a soft falloff, and means that the blurring is only applied to the highlights.

outlook8

outlook9

Curves is all you need.

a visual guide to using AUTOPANO to create painting stiches

When 18MP isn’t enough. Take 4 or 6 images of your artwork and get AUTOPANO to stitch them together:

This technique is designed for when the camera does not move – ie you move the painting and keep the plane constant.

The only change I would make is the final slide: set the focal length to 1000mm to get no distortion of the final render.

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Whose knicked your stuff?

Another tool every photographer should have in their arsenal:
http://www.tineye.com/

Reverse image search engine – you enter your image, it returns all the sites that are using it. I tried it on an image I had on the stock xchange for a while, and found it (albeit horribly mutilated) in 6 locations.