Aegean Cruise

We were fortunate enough to go on a cruise from Istanbul to Athens last month, stopping at historic sites in Turkey as well as several beautiful Greek locations. The weather was great and we enjoyed the ambience of the ship as well. One of the fascinating things we envountered was the number of friendly cats… Continue reading Aegean Cruise

Focus Stacking in Photoshop, Helicon Focus and ZereneStacker

I began experimenting with a depth-of-field extension technique today called Focus Stacking. Analogous to HDR in some respects, this technique takes a set of images with overlapping zones of sharp focus and combines them into a single image exhibiting crisp focus throughout. Taking Images The first step is to take the set of images. Mount… Continue reading Focus Stacking in Photoshop, Helicon Focus and ZereneStacker

More Film Scanners

Further look at slide / film scanners: Flat Bed One of the big surprises in my current quest for scanners is that flatbeds have jumped up in quality to be serious alternatives in the scanner wars. They can do anywhere from 4 – 12 slides at a time and work with popular scanner control software,… Continue reading More Film Scanners

Slide Scanning

My CanoScan FS4000US has broken down for the second time and I am thinking of scrapping it. Unfortunately new, high-resolution slide scanners are very expensive, so I will first try some of the slide scanning services. Google search for “slide scanning service” yields these (and several thousand more): Fotobridge http://www.fotobridge.com/pricing_slides.php 250 slides – $89.95 (36… Continue reading Slide Scanning

Using HoudahGeo to Geocode Lightroom Images

I have a reasonably large collection of images catalogued in Adobe Lightroom (version 2.6 at time of this writing), but only a very few of them geocoded. After some looking around, I found a program called HoudahGeo which indicated it could geocode batches of images by reference to google maps or google earth. Additionally, it… Continue reading Using HoudahGeo to Geocode Lightroom Images

Resizing Images for Slideshows – Mac

In my earlier article, Slideshows in a Digital Age. I talk about the need to resize images down to something that resembles the projectors inherent resolution. The idea is that since a good projector can only handle 1024 x 768 pixels, embedding a picture bigger than that only strains powerpoint and your hard drive —… Continue reading Resizing Images for Slideshows – Mac

Digital Slideshows – 2

The earlier article on digital slideshows focused on some key differences between the old 35mm slideshows and today’s digital presentations, and spent some time on the importance of the resolution of the digital slide projector. Today’s piece looks at the software part. Now that you have your folder full of “right-sized” images, what do you… Continue reading Digital Slideshows – 2