Jeremey's Weblog

Sea of Glass

Color vs. B&W, you decide (click links for larger versions... turns out my blog editor doesn't preserve ICC profiles when it resizes thumbnails, so I had to do things manually) ...

Larger version

Larger version

Gabriel At Play

A gallery: http://homepage.mac.com/jeremeybarrett/gabriel_at_play/

Good Morning, North Carolina

Christmas Morning

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! Here's a lovely winter scene from yesterday, Christmas Eve... oh wait... that's more like autumn... oh well.

RAW Conversion Comparison: Capture One PRO vs. Adobe Camera Raw

I've been spending some time looking at digital photography workflow "environments," notably Capture One PRO, PhotoMechanic, Aperture, and "just Photoshop". Since there isn't a demo/eval version of Aperture (to my knowledge), my research into it is limited to other people's opinions. So there are two things I'm looking at: workflow, and RAW conversion. This necessitates some comparing of apples to oranges, but so be it. I'm looking at tools for me. I'll save the workflow discussion for a second post, my focus here will be on RAW conversion.

So far the verdict on Aperture seems mixed, but several reviewers have made detailed postings on the shortcomings of its RAW converter. That seems to be the largest negative right now. Again, without an eval, I'll take their word for it. So noisy RAW conversion is unacceptable, leaving Capture One PRO (C1 PRO hereafter) and Adobe's Camera Raw Photoshop plugin (ACR hereafter). I read many "people swear by Capture One PRO" comments in different reviews of Aperture and other products, so I was expecting good things. But I was puzzled by my own experiences with it.

In particular, the RAW conversion seems "less accurate" than ACR. Sections of out-of-focus detail (such as a sweater) appear very "digital" and distorted. Here's the first example comparison (C1 PRO on left, ACR on right):

[full screenshot]

Click the full screenshot link to see a screenshot of the two images side-by-side in Photoshop. These are very nearly exactly the same section of sweater, at 200%. The ACR version is smoother and doesn't look digitized. First, I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong. Both conversions were done with similar sharpening (not very much). C1 PRO has a noise suppression option (which is very nice, I'll discuss it later), but variations on that made no difference.

Here's another example, notice the artifacts around the letters. Please note that this is not due to JPEG conversion. Those were there in the original processed TIFF (click for full size):

Another thing I notice is that Unsharp Mask seems to have a "better" effect on the ACR image than on the C1 PRO image. An example (notice the eyelashes and such):

Finally, some words about color and tone. I prefer the ACR version, again. C1 PRO attempts to use profiles for your camera where as ACR is just converting from the shooting profile (Adobe RGB in this case). This is very subjective and could probably be fixed, but anyway, I prefer the ACR look:

So I guess I'm a bit confused about C1 PRO. It seems to have issues, at least for my camera's RAW ouput (Canon 10D). Since it was probably originally intended for PhaseOne's digital medium format backs, maybe less work has gone into the other converters? I'm not sure. But I think I'll stick with Photoshop's conversions for now.

Calendars

The calendars are done, woohoo! We always do calendars of the boys for family... it's always agonizing selecting 12 images. Anyway, here's this year's cover:

My Mac is Back

...and has been for a week or more, now, but I've been so busy... well, you know. I think I'm going to write a Dr. Seuss-like book about my Powerbook repair saga. To Apple's credit, they've been very prompt at fixing things, no questions asked... unfortunately, they've haven't always fixed things, and when they have, they've also un-fixed things that weren't known to be un-fixed, such as the main logic board (aka motherboard). So here's the executive summary of the saga: my hard drive dies, frustrating, terrible, but not surprising, given how much I beat it up and how old it is (18 months). Drive to Apple store. Hand over Powerbook for repair. 48 hours later, new hard drive installed and Powerbook ready to pick up. Drive to Apple store. Get Powerbook. Re-install everything I've installed since 18 months ago. Yay. 1 week later, hard drive freaks out and starts behaving weirdly. 1 week later, hard drive dies. Yell. Drive to Apple store. Hand over Powerbook for repair (under warranty from previous, yay). 1 week later (they had to wait for a part), Powerbook arrives at house (hey, they can ship it to me... much better). Has Tiger on it this time... woohoo, less installing to do. And a new main logic board. Interesting. 2 weeks later, Powerbook begins to freeze up. Pretty soon it won't last for 5 minutes, it just stops and goes into a CPU tailspin. Yell. Alot. Drive to Apple store. Hand over Powerbook for repair (under warranty from BOTH previous repairs). 48 hours later, Powerbook arrives at my house. New main logic board, new some other electronic part. Yay. It works.

So they replaced my dead HD with a bad HD, and then in replacing the bad HD they decided there might be a problem with the MLB, so they replaced it... with a bad MLB... so then they replaced the MLB they had replaced before... and now, with a bonus battery replacement thrown in, only the case, CPU itself, and screen are original. I hope that's the end of it.

Boys

A small gallery of black and whites of the boys: http://homepage.mac.com/jeremeybarrett/boys/