RawTherapee

Published by wjl on January 20, 2010 in fun. 0 Comments

Today I read the RawTherapee manual again, and decided to give the described workflow another try (see Q & A in their manual). For those who don’t know, RawTherapee is a free and now also open source (GPL) RAW image converter for Linux and also for Windows.

It’s really nice. And since all the steps you do until the final conversion into a jpg file are done in 16 bit, you are not losing any detail. You *could* even avoid that last 8 bit conversion, and save the result as a 16 bit TIFF file - but even print shops mostly expect 8 bit jpgs today, so it’s pretty pointless IMHO.

An example:

From selfmade

I took this shot using a tripod, and my Olympus E-520 with the 40-150mm kit zoom at an EFL of about 200mm today. Since I worked with the raw file, I only applied a standard USM (unsharp mask) to the image - all white balance, color, and other things weren’t changed at all. No noise reduction. Saved as a 16 bit TIFF, and the final crop and conversion to 8 bit jpg were done using the Gimp. Since I still have the RAW .orf file from the camera, I threw away the TIFF afterwards.

I will definitely try this with more of my pictures from now on. Highly recommended.

Update, from short before midnight local time:

From selfmade

Shot Snow White again, and this time with only the relatively dim lights from the dining room, and at an EFL of 300mm (150mm for 4/3rds cameras). Here I had to adjust the brightness of the picture a bit, and now everything including the conversion to 8 bit jpg (at 100%, so it’s about 1.2MB) was done using RawTherapee.

The more I use it, the more I like it.

The small self portraitist

Published by wjl on January 9, 2010 in family and fun. 0 Comments

Zuleikha really loves my camera remote, which I got yesterday:

If you don’t use flash and cannot see this, or if you want higher resolution pictures, have a look at the Picasa album

A new year, new challenges

Published by wjl on January 2, 2010 in family and fun. 0 Comments

Less than two months ago, I bought a new camera. Or rather, I bought two. The first one was/is a Panasonic Leica TZ-7 for Mitchie, then a few days later I decided to get an Olympus E-520 for myself, which together with the two “kit” lenses was quite a bargain at that time. Now Mitchie has an EFL (= equivalent focal length) of 25-300mm in a small pack, while I have 28-84 and 80-300mm EFL in two lenses.

The quality of those is exceptional, if you keep in mind the price at which they came. But of course not everything is perfect: with maximum aperture openings of 3.5-5.6 for the smaller and 4.0-5.6 for the longer lens, they aren’t really meant for indoor available light shootings, so you either need a flash or a tripod, or you need to keep shooting lots and lots of pictures, hoping that some of them are sharp, and your object didn’t move. Also, you have to use ISO 1600 when not using a flash, and so your images will have some “noise” (with film, that meant “grain”).

From selfmade

Since my preferred things in photography are portraits, especially using the available light, I have to get some glass with bigger openings. Olympus have a somewhat famous macro lens with 50mm and f=2.0, which compares to 100mm on full frame (or, in the film days, 24×36mm picture size). Sigma even has one with f=1.4, tho this isn’t as sharp as the Olympus, and probably double the weight (but cheaper). So since after yesterdays fireworks, I took my tele, set it on a “fixed” focal length of 50mm, where it has f=4.2 as its largest opening, and fired away some 250 shots. No flash, and - with the exception of this evening - no tripod. The picture above is one of the better ones from this morning.

For indoors, and even for small kids, 50mm is a bit long already - 42 (equals ~ 85mm) would be better. Hm. Sigma also has a 30mm f=1.4, but with an EFL of 60mm, this is more a standard than a portrait lens. So I guess I want the Oly one. According to dpreview, “every E-system user should own one“…

Oh, and before I forget it: a shot from the fireworks is here:

From selfmade

For more pictures taken since Nov 10th, 2009, see the “selfmade” link above.

Time to search for search alternatives?

Published by wjl on December 7, 2009 in @home, @work, computers and security. 0 Comments

While the media is full of it, like for instance the German heise online, or Tom’s Hardware, Debian developer Joey Hess actually lists an alternative to saving-everything-Google: it’s called “Duck duck go“. I’ll try it…

playing around

Published by wjl on November 28, 2009 in Greetings. 0 Comments
From

This is yours truly, playing around with his camera. No flash of course, only the light from over the dining room table.

The model… and… action!

Published by wjl on November 14, 2009 in family and fun. 0 Comments

Today, we shot each other. No, not with weapons or in computer games, but with cameras:

The model…
…and…
…action!
That’s fun, papa!

Of course, her photos were at least as good as mine:

Counterstrike1
Counterstrike2

That was lots of fun, for both of us. Another portrait of our small one, taken an hour or so earlier:

From selfmade

bok bok bok Chicken Little cluck boooooook

Published by wjl on October 29, 2009 in @home, @work, computers, debian and humor. 1 Comment

Before I forget to mention it: Ubuntu 9.10, the Karmic Koala is out. Cheers, fanfare, and so on.

Now some people don’t like it a bit because of Mono. For those, Debian developer (and maintainer of Mono on Debian) Joseph Michael Shields has two answers:

1. It’s stupid.
2. Get Chicken Little Remix 9.10 – Karmic Kraienköppe instead.

What’s that, you may ask? A description can be found here, tho the original links to the pirate bay torrents won’t work anymore I guess. But the ones on Mininova do.

Great work, directhex, thanks. Tho personally I agree with you: without

  • SOAP
  • rlogin
  • PAP
  • COM+
  • traceroute
  • gopher
  • IP over ATM
  • ping
  • Kerberos
  • PPP
  • POP3
  • Appletalk
  • DHCP
  • SASL
  • TLS
  • LDAP
  • PPPoA
  • IPSEC
  • IPv6
  • PPPoE
  • 6to4
  • HTTP
  • PPTP
  • CIFS
  • Firewire
  • PXE
  • TFTP
  • IPv4
  • telnet
  • echo
  • FTP
  • SSL
  • DNS
  • SNMP
  • LPD
  • UPnP and/or
  • USB

it would be difficult to write and/or read something here. So let’s celebrate Ubuntu Karmic, like we will celebrate Squeeze soon. Braaaaaaaak bok boooooook bok bok bkaaawk bok bok bok!

How cool

Published by wjl on October 28, 2009 in politics. 0 Comments

Read this in Spiegel first, then later in Welt Online: Rob Savelberg, dutch correspondent of “De Telegraaf” in Berlin asked our chancellor how she can promote someone to becoming finance minister of a country with a population of 80 million, who formerly “forgot” that someone put 100,000 D-Mark into his locker (he was bribed and as such can be considered corrupt).

Rob became a video star on YouTube instantly with that one question, since all that Merkel could answer was: “Because I trust him”. Really awkward, isn’t it? See it on YouTube. And if you understand German, then by all means read the Spiegel and Welt Online comments as well.

Links for 2009-10-26

Published by wjl on October 26, 2009 in uncategorized. 0 Comments

A movie we saw in the cinema yesterday, and which we can highly recommend, is “Up“.
Debian developer Patrick Schönfeld took this case and this mainboard to build a 15W PC. He describes his experiences with Debian on his blog.
The Center for networked systems has an interesting lecture about Facebook. Almost the whole open source stack can be downloaded here.
Open Source is hot these days - even the White House is now using it for their web site.
Always wanted to build a media center PC? Read this first.
Still contemplating to run out to the stores and to get Microsofts’ latest and greatest? Think again. The German BSI wouldn’t do it. They think its threat level is “4 high risk” (out of 1-5, with 5 being “very high”).
But of course, Microsoft isn’t alone in this - after all, software is only made by humans. Seems that Sun’s Java System Web Server has a hole as well.
And in case you didn’t know: you can read the daily security warnings concerning Linux and truly open source software at LWN. More - and also more positive - news from them are in their archives. This is a weekly must read.
A monthly one would be the Linux Gazette.

Enough for today…

Links for 2009-10-23

Published by wjl on October 23, 2009 in uncategorized. 0 Comments

I’m writing this from work, and don’t have too much time, so without further ado:

About practical encryption, cloud computing, a Linux sysadmin book for (maybe) non-Linux experts, and HannahMontanaLinux.

Done. All found this morning via LXer.