cjdnzl

Likewise here. I have had several attempts at getting to grips with LR, but I just don't like it. It's fussy about the source files, doesn't like me taking them straight off the card, wants to put them into some sort of index, etc. and the controls are all sliders which I don't like all that much. My usual modus operandi is to process raw files through DxOptics which identifies the camera and lens from the exif data, and applies the appropriate linear, sharpness, tonal, noise reduction and exposure corrections automatically. With, I might add, excellent results. After that, tweaking and cropping in Photoshop completes the image work. Finally, if I am printing for exhibition, I use Qimage for superior printing. Nowhere in that chain of processing can I find a slot for what LR does, so basically I bought LR on reputation which hasn't lived up to my personal way of working.

Hello Peter, Oops, I hadn't realised the changes there, as I haven't the need to make DVDs, and just upgrade as improvements come along. I shall do a bit of catching up, just to remain au fait with the program. Apologies, Colin

The de luxe version requires a separate key to activate that part of the program. The key you received was to activate PTE for making slide shows in executable format (.exe files) which will run on any PC, but if you want to make DVDs you need the key to activate the de luxe facilities. The basic key to activate PTE is a one-time purchase and will activate all future PTE versions, but the de luxe key needs to be purchased anew whenever a new version of PTE is released.

If you still have the Project.pte file, you can with a bit of work, recover all the information you need to rebuild the show. It's fairly simple to recover the filenames of the images in the order that they appear in the show, and with a calculator you can recover the duration times for each slide. Things like fades, zooms etc. may be more difficult, but if you have the images in order and duration times the you will probably remember those. Good luck, Colin

Fantastic show, Deepak, and your photography is first class. Hugely interesting images, putting the viewer right into the scene. I felt I was actually there, could almost hear and feel the ambiance, the atmosphere. Nothing short of dramatic photography! I know exotic places lend themselves to exotic photography, and I have been to a few exotic places as well - but I have never imagined or gotten anywhere near your expertise with a camera. I agree with the comments about zooming, but that is simply a matter of technique with PTE that you will pick up easily, I should think. My overall impression? BRAVO!!!

Davy, I have to support Xaver here, as his reply to your first post was implying that Audacity would be sufficient for the kind and quality of the sound tracks on shows of yours that he has seen. He may or may not have been 'taking the mickey', but in any case he wasn't referring the the video part of your shows. For the record, Xaver's English is very good indeed. I wonder whether he may have spent time living in an English-speaking country. I have a German friend here in New Zealand who has lived here for more than 30 years, and his English, while good, is not as good as Xaver's.

Not to mention downright dangerous to your internet health!

There is a big difference between downloading a show for personal viewing and downloading a show for subsequent club or even public use. I think permission for personal viewing is implicit with the posting of a show, but permission to show somebody else's show is not necessarily implicit, and permission should be sought, along with the circumstances under which you intend to use the show. Although not usually mentioned, copyright exists for every show, and public showing of someone else's work could be said to be infringing their copyright. In every case where I have used another's show at club level I have sought permission along with how I wish to use their show. I've never been refused, and the authors have been very pleased that I did so. And I always tell the audience that the show is the work of the author and not mine, so I don't get embarrassing questions about where the shots were taken or how I did such and such an effect.

Hello Lin, Forbes may well be correct, but if so it's an incredibly stupid move by Adobe, I should think. Yes I have downloaded CS2 and others with no problems. Adobe do not ask for any ID whatsoever, just click and download. Surely, if Adobe wanted to restrict it to legit owners of the program(s) they would have asked for ID or registration details. They must realise what will happen with absolutely no checks, so maybe they don't mind. Maybe they hope that by allowing people to experience the software they might generate sales of the current versions? Regards, Colin

Adobe are offering free legitimate downloads of their older software here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?loc=en&e=cs2_downloads You might have to try a couple of times as the website is getting heavy use. I have downloaded CS2 and Creative Suite CS2, and will get some others as well. Regards to all, Colin

This is another argument against the call for Igor to improve/expand/add features to image editing within PTE as a recent thread was about. I believe that advanced editing of images - and sound, for that matter - is best done in image and sound editing programs rather than trying to do it all in PTE, as Barry has said above.

Geez, Lin, that's gotta be the broadest question I've seen yet! What program are you wanting the keystrokes for? I'll hazard a guess at Photoshop - in which case there is a fantastic plug-in that allows you to individually control the conversion of all six primary and secondary colors, or alternatively you can select from a range of black/white film emulations. I use this whenever I do a 'desaturation' - but it's far better than just a simple desaturate. Have a look at http://www.photo-plugins.com/Plugins/Plugins/B-W-Conversion.html Download is available at the bottom of the page. Regards, Colin PS: Duh! I didn't think about PTE having a desat function. But, true to my beliefs, I think all manipulation of images (and sound) should be done in the best program for the job, instead of Igor having to reinvent the wheel in PTE. Just my $0.02 worth

Well, I vote "no" for this idea. Basically, I am opposed to adding virtually endless 'features' to a piece of software where the add-on is not part of the fundamental program design. In particular, there have been calls for PTE to handle complicated audio functions which are already handled by more comprehensive software like Audacity or GoldWave, both of which are ahead of anything that may be built into PTE, and the same goes for handling images as well. Photoshop and Lightroom, along with freebies like Gimp and Irfanview can do far more with images - including auto-resizing - than could be done with any reasonable addition to PTE. I think we should not ask Igor to spend time on peripheral issues which will take him away from continuing development of PTE. In my own case, I assemble the sound track in GoldWave, with fades and changes, and accommodating voice-over where needed, all into one composite sound track, and import that track into PTE. I process my images out of the camera through DxOptics Pro, then titivate any images that require individual treatment in Photoshop or Irfanview, then batch resize, converting to DNG images at the same time before importing them onto PTE. I keep a folder for each show holding all processed full-size images. Then I resize to fit the chosen screen ratio, and proceed to assemble the show itself. If I decide to alter the screen ratio, all I need to do is to resize the original images to the new size, drop them into PTE, change PTE's ratio, job done.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here, but realise that a calibrated monitor has its profile stored on/in the graphics card. The purpose of the calibration is to make an image on the monitor show the correct colors for the chosen color space, in PTE's case sRGB. This is because the bare unprofiled monitor may/will show inaccurate colors due to spectral characteristics. When PTE - or any other program that is not color-aware delivers an image to the computer, the monitor always uses the profile to correct the monitor deficiencies, so all images shown should be correct. If your images use a less common, e.g. AdobeRGB profile, or way-out like prophoto, then your sRGB-tuned monitor will show you relative garbage. Stick with sRGB unless you really know what you are doing. sRGB is the standard for good reason, and it was not designed by dummies. And, for what it's worth, even if you are erudite enough for that, your audience most probably isn't, negating all your work. When all is said and done, the aim is for pleasing color and not necessarily accurate color which may not be so pleasing.

I just downloaded the image from your second post and looked at in PTE 7.07. Image was normal in preview, and normal when running the resultant exe file. Running XP here. Photoshop said the image is in AdobeRGB, but that should make little difference for this purpose.

It seems the colours are inverted, i.e. the orange colours of rust are turned blue, and the blue writing on the back wall has turned orange. These colours are spectral opposites, so I think your problem is the colour space the images are in. You need to load the images into Photoshop or similar and ensure that the colour space is sRGB, which PTE is set up for. If you are shooting for slide shows you should be taking the shots in sRGB, not AdobeRGB To help you further, could you tell us how the shots were taken, and what afterwork was done to the images?

The De Luxe product key unlocks another part of PTE to allow the making of DVDs for showing on TV sets. The Standard program contains the full program to make slide shows for showing on a computer and through a digital data projector. The Standard program is a one-time purchase with free upgrades for life, the Deluxe needs re-purchasing whenever an upgrade happens the the Standard program.

I think you've cracked it. That garden shot is much sharper, and the detail right under the bushes is very good. I'm reminded of an old adage I learned 50 years ago - "Always keep your lens clean. This does not mean always keep cleaning your lens." Good work, Regards, Colin (New Zealand)

I copied your tree image into Photoshop and had a good look at it. The first thing was that the shadows were too bright, but restoring the tonal range to put the dark tones where they should be was not entirely successful in terms of the image. There might have been an element of overexposure due to the dark trunk fooling the camera into overexposing, but that's not the whole story. There is an overlay of flare, or uniform light over the entire image. Flare is usually caused by shooting into the light, but in this shot there really isn't enough back light to cause much flare. I have concluded that there was something wrong when you took the photo. Perhaps the atmospheric conditions caused some condensation on the lens - was the camera cold, did it come out of a cold trunk in the car? in which case it could be condensation. Or, is the lens clean? It doesn't take much grease on a lens to produce rampant flare. Lastly, the images appear none too sharp. Perhaps you have reduced the image quality a bit too much with jpg compression. I'm hoping so, otherwise you could have sharpness problems. Perhaps you could set up some controlled shots, frontal lighting, side lighting, and back lighting, checking the lens to be sure it's clean, and make a judgment about the camera after that.

Just a small correction, Eric. Compacts are generally 4:3, as are the odd-ball Olympus Four Thirds system cameras. Regular DSLRs - Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, etc., specially the high end versions, are all 3:2 ratio, and I don't know any that has variable ratios. A 3:2 ratio image is 16:10.6, so a crop to 16:9 isn't all that drastic, much better than cropping a 4:3 image. Regards, Colin.

When you upload a file the data is sent in packets of typically 1500 bytes, with header, numbering, and address information added. These additions have probably taken your file to >6MB. A 9% increase will take you over 6MB, and some transmission protocols can add up to 30% to a file. Colin

Check the metadata for the image and ensure it is set for sRGB. There is another thread in this forum with a similar problem and they found their images were unspecified. Colin

Beautiful black&white images, Barry. You say you spent some effort on the BW conversions, It looks like a lot of work was done there. There is a free plugin for Photoshop from Photo Plugins that does BW conversion, emulating various different BW films like FP4 and others. If you're interested, look here: http://www.photo-plugins.com/Plugins/Plugins/B-W-Conversion.html Colin

My camera club recently bought a new projector, a Dell 4320 DLP machine, was lucky to get a $700 discount, about a third of the price! Native resolution is 1280 x 800, brightness 3,600 lumens - it's BRIGHT! I think it can handle 720p images, and will handle 1080p with good quality. The colors are miles ahead of our earlier Epson LCD machine, and one can select from several colour options, including sRGB which is standard in this country for New Zealand Photographic Society functions. No-one in the club can see any fringing reputed to happen with DLP machines, so I don't think that would be a problem. We are very happy with it.

A great show, and congratulations on both the model and the photography. Could I be forgiven for pointing out two typo's in the text? First, the second slide mentions "old photograph's" - but there shouldn't be an apostrophe in 'photographs'. The second, which is unfortunately becoming common, is in the second-to-last slide, the word 'sunk'. In the context of the words in that slide it should be 'sank'. Sank is a verb, the past tense of 'sink', Sunk is a past participle of sink, e.g. The ship sank, the ship was sunk. Now shoot me!