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It’s safe for work, I chuckled.

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Good to hear that. I’m looking forward to having something other than Krita’s instability and very limited toolkit.

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It’s been going on for a few years, actually, but it’s just been in the last year they’ve been scrambling to buy time with their IP portfolio. She’s got a master’s in IT, her husband’s been working on a doctorate in imaging/sensing, and another HS buddy of mine’s been a chemist with them since 85. Normally I’d say that with them being as educated and experienced as they are that they’d have little trouble relocating, but I think we all know what the employment opportunities look like these days.

I still can’t believe that Kodak sold off their imaging sensor group to an equity firm. You’d think that would be the last thing they’d want to part with.

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oh, wow! That’s a very nice twist on the water drops theme (something I’ve yet to pull off…I should make it a goal)… Beautiful!

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So it basically boils down to GoDaddy lobbying to give themselves an unfair market advantage. That’s enough reason for me to never let them see a dime of my money.

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I can’t for the life of me understand why a hosting service would shoot themselves in the foot by supporting a measure that guts the safe harbor provision of the DMCA. Public backlash aside, that really stands to make a host’s job much more complicated and expensive.

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Good for you!

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Now THAT’s cool. It’s got my geek jonesin’.

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hmmmm…. I’m not at all shy about a roadtrip under 1000 miles… plus Tuba City’s like 1/2 hr south of the Grand Canyon. Now, if there’s a need for off-road, I would gladly roll out there in the jeep…

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The biggest advantage to RAW and its additional color depth is the amount of levels stretching that can be done while still maintaining smooth gradients across the dynamic range. As an example, take an 8-bit image (24bit color) and pull up the levels dialog in your editor of choice and move the gamma slider about half way or more towards the left. This brightens up the shadows quite a bit, and recovers a lot of image data. Close the levels dialog and re-open it then look at the histogram. The left side of the histogram now looks like the teeth in a comb or similar, where the gaps represent now-missing intensity information; ie you now have the original 128 possible values below the midpoint being occuppied by only 64 or 32 (or some arbitrary lower number depending on how far you moved the gamma). Those gaps lead to sharp changes in color where the remaining values meet in the image and you wind up with an image that has obvious, visible banding or posterization.

For each one of the intensity values in an 8-bit image, a 16-bit image (48-bit color) doesn’t have just twice the number of possibilities, but 256 possible values. This allows for some very aggressive levels tweaking without introducing the gaps in the histogram. Things that would destroy an 8bit image still look smooth with a 16bit image. White Balance, EV, gamma, contrast (which ties in with sharpness), HDR and any other level adjustments all depend on color depth information so the more, the better.

The catch is obviously software… GIMP doesn’t handle 16bit natively (although it’s in the works), but PS users have the ability to do full editing in 16bits/channel. If you’re using open-source, KRITA wil do basic levels and adjustments in 16bit, but doesn’t have the editing features of a full-blown image editor like PS or GIMP. I do levels tweaks and corrections in KRITA after running my images thru whatever 16bit CLI processes I need then export to GIMP for final editing if needed or *minor* level corrections.

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Ansel Adams did all sorts of shit in the dark room to adjust his images and no one thinks less of them for that.

…and that right there is why I consider the perfect shot in-camera to be a fool’s errand. Modern film cameras may automate most of the variables of exposure and other cameras may be digital, but that does not remove the need for processing of the resulting images. Most (if not all) of his work would fall foul of the rules in a contest here were they processed via the digital equivalents of his methods.

…

I typically leave the white balance set for daylight and adjust as needed during processing (you would be doing this in 48bit color, yes?). This is one of those personal preference things, IMO; auto would ideally just leave you with less adjustment to make during processing.

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ooooohhhh…. that is some very cool blur!

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I can share what I know, if there’s anything in my little bag of tricks that you don’t already have figured out.

Was that a single 90minute exposure? if so, consider multiple subexposures combined in post. You have to have exceptionally dark skies to run exposures over say, 10-15 mins without saturating the sky. I’m surprised that there was anything to retrieve at all from a 90min exposure; just points out how dark the skies were where you took the image.

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wow, tonemapping recovered a LOT of info on that.

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Either way, what a demo! I always enjoyed super high framerate vids, but this is well up beyond the HFS class… that’s some stunning trickery right there…

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