Tag: Photography

  • Dip Pens for the Backs of Photos

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    Quick Recommendation Speedball B-5 nib Rapidraw 3084-F or Reeves & Poole India Ink The best solution I have found for writing on the back of plastic-coated photos, like those from Costco or most modern developers, is drafting ink. It would seem the inks are usually archival even though the paper is not. The writing is…

  • Zoom Lens Comparison

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    Firstly, credit where it’s due; the pictures were taken by my friend Robert Hohlfelder.  The pictures were taken of a dollar bill from about 15 feet.  The camera was tripod-mounted, and the lenses with VR had it turned off.  The three lenses are the Nikon 55-200 VR, Nikon 18-200 VR, and the Nikon 70-300ED.  Photos…

  • PaintShop Photo Pro X3

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    The latest version of Corel Paint Shop Pro is now apparently called PaintShop Photo Pro X3.  Perhaps they’ll eventually regret their ridiculous naming. Many things are the same since the previous version.  The obvious differences are that the menus have been re-colored to be higher contrast.  I find it overdone and a little garish, but…

  • Corel Releases New Paint Shop Pro

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    Despite Corel’s dreadful marketing, it appears today’s quasi-clandestine webinar was to unveil a new version of Paint Shop Pro, now with the awkward name Paint Shop Photo Pro X3.  For pity’s sake. However, it appears to have included at least two things I care about: Better speed by multithreading (though there is no indication of…

  • Old Family Pictures

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    For Christmas I received a box of slides that had belonged to my grandfather. The slides were 35 mm taken between 1955 and 1961, in a mixture of black and white and color. I do not own a slide projector, and some of the film was starting to deteriorate, by yellowing or showing blotches where…

  • Focus Stacking and a Moth

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    We found this really neat moth on our porch several days ago. It had already departed. It was in immaculate condition, and seemed the perfect opportunity for some focus stacking effort. As usual I used CombineZM for the processing, and my Nikon D40 with el cheapo Phoenix 100mm f/3.4 macro lens. Combination of about 20…

  • Canon MX850 with Canon Paper

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    I revisited printing with the Canon MX850 this weekend. I printed a 4-image collage on a sheet of 8.5×11 inch Canon Glossy Photo paper. I had the printer settings for optimization and enhancement disabled, since this gave the most accurate printing in previous trials. The results are shown below. Note that my scanner pooped out…

  • Vibrance

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    Photoshop’s Camera Raw tool, for importing RAW camera images, provides a really delightful little slider called “vibrance”. Paint Shop Pro does not. I read one post suggesting that vibrance was effectively increasing saturation on low-saturated areas. I decided this would be worth trying to emulate in Paint Shop Pro with some layer magic. The results…

  • Canon MX850 and Home Printing Foibles

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    I had no interest in printing at home due to early versions of a study that showed home prints would fade, run, and fail to impress in almost no time at all. That study was updated, and the result made it look like home printing might not be a waste of time. Also, I was…

  • Color (White) Balance

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    A friend of mine suggested my first two posts were pretty difficult to follow. To address that, this is the first in a series of posts which will ramble on about other interesting digital photography topics in a more accessible way. Feedback is appreciated. There are lots and lots of tutorials on the net, so…