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Hello all, I have just - somewhat belatedly - downloaded and installed version 8. I originally purchased an early version of 5, and subsequently downloaded the versions of 6 and 7, all of which accepted the lifetime license that came with 5. It appears that 8 does not accept that license key in registry, so my question is, will ver 8 accept my current 'long' license key, or do I need to purchase a new key? Regards, Colin

That is correct, and you can save the sized images into another folder ready for PTE to access and use as the exclusive folder for that show This is how I do it, and I once again air my belief that PTE should not try to emulate existing programs that already do the job. Colin

Hello Lin, Well, I am feeling very pleased with my 7-year-old Dell laptop. With its nVidia 8600M-GT gpu it ran your show as smooth as. What a hell of a lot of work that show must have been, Regards, Colin

Hello Colin et al, I have no trouble opening your files, I use a file manager - like Windows Explorer but infinitely better, called Directory Opus, an Australian-authored program which does everything, including a file viewer. However, I do have one small niggle with your shows, more so with part 1, but still present in several frames of Part 2, which is a tendency for your images to have tilted horizons and sloping verticals, by a few degrees. They are always tilted to the left, which may indicate a tendency to have the camera rolled to the right when taking the shots. Please take this post, not as negative criticism but as a critique meant to help. Otherwise, I do enjoy seeing high quality images of England, as like most New Zealanders I have grandparents who hail from England, Ireland, and Scotland, but I have never been there ( and probably won't now at my age) Regards, Colin New Zealand

Strewth Eric, that's pretty p*** poor service, I don't blame your wife for hiding in the corner, best to make oneself scarce, and she knows it. Nothing doing here either, courier didn't call today, so it'll be Monday here too before I can do anything. One thing from a long-time tech, you can't get killed from a PC motherboard, the maximum accessible voltage is only 12 volts, in fact you're more likely to kill the board than yourself - that's unless you open up the power supply, where lurks a huge capacitor charged up to 325 volts, the peak voltage from the 230-volt RMS mains voltage. It's a pity I don't live closer, we could drown our problems at the local watering-hole. PS: I hope you use a grounding strap around your wrist when working on your computer, with the other end properly earthed. Commiserations, Colin

Geez Eric, what a let-down for you. There'd be some flowery language around here if that happens with my build, which I am doing myself. I hope you get it sorted asap. Regards, Colin

Ok, thanks for the heads-up on that, my power supply is about 7 years old anyway, so will investigate. Seasonic seems a good brand. Colin

Hello Eric, Well, your upgrade enthusiasm got to me, I am now upgrading my desktop from an Asus P4-800E motherboard and P4 Pentium 3.00ghz with 4 GB memory to this: 1 x Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H Intel Z87 ATX Haswell LGA1150. 1 x Intel Haswell Core i5 4670 3.40GHz 6MB LGA1150. 1 x Kingston HyperX Predator 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1866 CL9 (KHX18C9T2K2/8X). 1 x Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit (Full Version) The bits are due any day now, and will be built over the weekend, using my current case, 500GB WD Black HDD and 400-watt power supply, and two 1TB outboard drives. I haven't ordered a graphics card as the on-board graphics are supposed to be adequate, but time will tell on that. I don't know at this stage whether the onboard graphics will allow a monitor profile from my Spyder2Pro calibrator - if not, then a graphics card will be needed, as I need a calibrated monitor Cheers, Colin

Further to the macbook/projector problem, I have just perused Google, and found the answer. macbooks employ a feature called 'mirroring' which allows an unmirrored computer to show a different image on the computer from that on the projector, and for the lappy and projector to show the same image the computer has to be in mirror mode. The macbook owner clearly didn't know that, and neither did anybody else in the meeting. I would have thought that being mirrored would be the default setting, but apparently not. Well, that's the answer, and it may be a useful capability in some situations, like having notes etc showing on the laptop, but the show presented on the projector.

Sounds about right for relative value

Hello Ron, In defence of my PC I have to say that it, too, 'just works'. Windows on both of my machines is rock stable, and quality in terms of the display is more than adequate - but they are both hardware calibrated. Last night at our camera club a member was set to show a Powerpoint presentation with his Macbook through our Dell DLP projector. The mac insisted on pulling an image out from some folder and showing that on the screen, while the mac's screen showed the Powerpoint start screen. Several mac owners tried to help, to no avail. End result, his Powerpoint show was abandoned. What really rubbed the salt in for the poor bloke was that the next item was some competition images shown from the club's Dell PC laptop. Plugged the projector into the Dell lappy's vid port, turned on, picture came up, perfect. Seriously, There are a number of club members with mac laptops, and more than once there have been problems with connecting to the projector, giving rise to somewhat veiled comments about the projector not being right. Of course it can't be the projector, it just shows what it is given. It is a problem for the mac users to solve. Regards, Colin

Eric, That's right if you find that memory errors are the problem. But to do a yes/no check as to whether memory IS the problem, an overnight run will either exonerate or prove the memory. If it finds a memory error, then of course you have to take further steps, like shuffling the memory cards around to isolate the problem one. The reason I offered that program was simply to prove or exonerate the memory. After that, what you do is up to you. Regards, Colin

haha, no - touché ! Regards, Colin

Hi Lin, Actually I was trying to be tactful by way of example that Dave's image, while having reasonable verticality has considerable distortion still, particularly in the left side tower, and is not really acceptable as an image of the building. Perhaps I'm too particular, but I have to say I would not find his image acceptable. As an experiment with PTE it is interesting, but I can't say that "it did the job", that's all.

Hello Dave, I use a program called DxO Viewpoint for perspective correction, it's a companion program to DxO Optics, IMO both are excellent programs for photographers. I ran your original image through Viewpoint, with the result shown below. What do you think? Regards, Colin

Download and run Memtest86. It cycles through memory with all possibilities of bit settings for each byte of memory. Leave it running overnight to verify - or otherwise - your memory.

Aaahh Barry, Nowhere in your original post did you mention that you were working in PTE, and the term Color Picker led me to think you were talking about Photoshop. So my post was irrelevant, apologies for getting that wrong. In hindsight, I ahould have guessed your knowledge of PS was better than I surmised, but I thought that maybe CS6 or the cloud version might work differently. I'll get back under my rock now, Regards, Colin

Hello Barry, I just had a play with Photoshop CS2 (being a bit impecunious I haven't afforded a later version!). With an image on the screen of a park in town with a church tower in the background, I select the Type Tool, and on the top line of the screen I get the color patch that the type will use. Clicking on the patch opens the Color Picker window and gives me an eyedropper cursor that I can place anywhere on the screen. I placed the cursor on the church tower to get a brick tone, which immediately changes the gradated color in the picker window and puts a small circle in the window to indicate where the selected tone sits in the gradated area. Now, if I type text, it appears in the selected color, and for good measure I selected an ares on the grass foreground with the marquee tool, and filled the rectangle with the same brick color. As far as I can see this all works exactly as expected. See images below: Regards, Colin

Hello Paul, I understand from earlier comments in this forum that PTE expects images with an sRGB color space. If your images are sRGB and properly color-balanced and the show is presented with a computer and (hopefully a DLP) projector also calibrated to sRGB color space the color will be as near 'perfect' as you can get. I am mildly surprised at your comparison with slides and slide projectors, where there was no opportunity to correct the color at all - the slides are what you get out of the camera and the projector with its incandescent bulb is what it is, take it or leave it. I do not think that old-fashioned slides and projectors have ever produced anything like 'exact color' in any way at all. Color-balanced images shown through a calibrated set-up are streets ahead of any possible slide/incandescent lamp based presentation. Just speaking from my 60 year's experience in photography.

This is a common cause of confusion with the people at my camera club, to the point that I am producing a show called 'Pixels 101', which I can précis here in case it could clarify some things for you Using your TZ25 camera specs as an example, you quote the image size as 4000 x 3000 pixels, so fairly obviously that is an image size of 12,000,000 pixels, or 12 megapixels. (I'll ignore the fine point of megapixels being equal to 1,048,576 pixels due to the binary nature of computers where everything is handled in powers of 2. A 20-bit numerical value is 2^20 (2 to the power of 20) which is exactly 1,048,576. Mostly though the round 1,000,000 pixels is used.} However representing one pixel in a colour image requires three bytes in a jpeg image or an 8-bit TIFF image - one byte per primary colour - so the file size of your image is three times the pixel value, 36 megabytes. OK, this image is sometimes called 'dimensionless' because there is no parameter which tells us how big the image is, until we specify a pixels-per-inch (ppi) number. Once we say how many pixels there will be in an inch, we can then say how big the image will be if we print it. The camera will generally put some value of ppi on an image straight out of the camera, in your case 180, in your wife's camera, 72. At that ppi your 4000 x 3000 image will be (4000/180) = 22.22 by (3000/180) = 16.67 inches, which agrees with the figures from CS2. If, in Photoshop you change the ppi to, say, 300 and untick the Resample-Image box, your image will now be 4000/300 x 3000/300, or 13.3 x 10 inches, and that is the size it will print out at. If you wanted to size the image to print at, say, 8 by 6 inches, then, again leaving Resample-Image unticked and inputting 8 and 6 into the width and height fields respectively, the ppi will change to 500, and voila! you will have an 8x6 image if you print it. It may not look like 8x6 on the screen, but it will be an 8x6 image nonetheless. If you crop the image at all, then the pixel dimensions will change, but all the forgoing figures will still apply at the new size. Finally, Photoshop has a tool called the Crop-Tool that looks like two crossed set squares. If you choose that tool, the top line above the image will show three boxes for width, height, and resolution. (If you turn Rulers on - View/Rulers - you can right-click on a ruler to change the units of measurement.) Plug in the wanted dimensions and the ppi, drag the frame around the image to where you want (you can pull or push the four corners, or move the cursor outside a corner and get a curved cursor that will let you rotate the frame to straighten a tilted image. Then press Enter and it all happens. AS for 'ideal resolution', you have, unfortunately, no say if you are fitting images to a specified pixel size like 1920 x 1080. You can't fit more pixels in to improve resolution, because the image would then be bigger than 1920 x 1080. If you use a bigger image and let the projector downsize it you're back to square one - and probably worse, depending on how the projector does the downsizing. It's always best to adhere to the dimensions. Note that the Crop-Tool can be configured to size the image in pixels. Play around with the frame size and position till you like the result, hit Enter, and you have an image cropped to your taste and sized to the correct pixel dimensions all in one go. Love it! Sorry about the length, I hope it clarifies things for you. Regards, Colin PS: All the foregoing is using the term PPI, NOT DPI. Dots per inch is purely a printing term. My Canon i9950 printer prints at 9,600 x 4,800 dpi - dots per inch, but it is printing at 600 pixels per inch, which means it is printing a matrix of 16 x 8 dots = 128 dots per pixel. The reason for this is so that multiple dots of colour can be applied to each pixel to produce the required hue. (Almost all printers have a conversion algorithm built in to the printer driver. Regardless of the image ppi it will be converted to 600 ppi before printing.) Do not confuse dpi with ppi.

Hello Dave et al, I use Goldwave, a so-called professional sound editor - which does appear to be professional in its abilities - and it also will stretch or compress running time of music pieces, which it does without altering pitch. Given programs that do this already, I am not sure that I would want such a feature included in PTE. I am from the school that thinks PTE should do what it does well, without needing or having to provide capability that other programs already have. My work flow for AV productions includes DxOptics for RAW image processing, DxViewpoint for correcting perspective distortion, Photoshop for image handling, and Goldwave for editing and concatenating music pieces into a single audio file, all before the process of making the AV show starts. Do we want PTE to be able to do some or all of these things within the one program? Some might think so, to avoid having to purchase a number of programs, but the flipside of that is separate programs can be used where the result is not for an AV show, like compiling a music track for a gathering, or making exhibition prints, or even just holiday snaps. If it's all built into PTE then other uses are inhibited. I wonder what other forum members think about this? Regards, Colin

My camera, a Canon 40D, does not seem to record subject distance in the exif data. I think it is because with a zoom lens, the lens setting for a given distance varies with the zoom setting, making it difficult for the camera to figure the distance. My most-used lens is the Canon 17-85 mm lens, and I notice that the infinity mark in the window shifts with zoom setting. The mark is correct for the long end of the lens, but when the wide end is at infinity the focus scale indicates about the 10 metre mark, a linear distance on the scale of about 5 or 6 mm. I just tried focusing on a target about 5 metres away; at the wide end the scale indicated about 3 metres, while the long end indicated more like 5 or 6 metres. So it appears that the camera cannot derive an accurate distance from the lens, so - no distance in the exif. A point to consider: there are two types of variable focal length lenses, 'zoom' and 'varifocal'. A true zoom lens is one in which the focus does not change with zooming. They are very expensive, and used mainly for professional movie cameras where the focus must be maintained while zooming. Varifocal lenses change focus when zoomed, but for still cameras it isn't really a problem. What we call zoom lenses are in fact varifocal lenses, so the focus does shift when zooming, and I believe that is the reason your exif data doesn't show distance. I believe that some lenses, like primes, do show distance, but I haven't seen that. I don't own any primes.

That light you are seeing is coming from the screens of the Windows machines happily running PTE shows :D