Batavia Fails

I saw this while walking my dog down Main Street Batavia. I call this an educational fail!

Another cool Photoshop trick

Credit again goes to Maciej for bringing this one to my attention. Here are the three steps that I tried and Maciej recommended:

1. Ctrl+J
2. filter> other> high pass 1.7 pixels
3. Change blend mode to "hard light"

It looks like it gives a nicer high contrast picture without using the contrast tool.

Normal - without these steps:

With High Pass filter:

Further Power Saving Studies (Monitor)

Continuing my previous power study I tested out my two work monitors today to see what differences are between power saving mode, active, black, etc. for both LCD and CRT monitors. Both are 20" monitors so they are a fairly good comparison.

Monitor Type	Action	Wattage
CRT	Regular Background - ON	103W
LCD	Regular Background - ON	43W
CRT	Black Background - ON	79W
LCD	Black Background - ON	41W
CRT	Off	0W
LCD	Off	0W
CRT	Power Saving Mode	0W
LCD	Power Saving Mode	.6W
CRT	Using Blackle - Black Google	82W
LCD	Using Blackle - Black Google	40.9W
CRT	Using Regular Google	104W
LCD	Using Regular Google	43.4W

Clearly LCDs are much more energy efficient, and Blackle actually makes a little difference. I guess I shouldn't leave my CRT (2nd monitor) on all day with just my email client in it.

Another Picasa3 oddity

Pulling up the same jpeg file in three different application should render the same image on screen I would expect. But after testing I realize that this is just not the case unfortunately. And it looks like Picasa3 does something funky to the saturation for some reason.

A case of over saturation

My good friend Maciej pointed out some weird artifacts on a previous post so I took a look into what is going on. The first shot here was (over) saturated in Picasa3 and posted in a previous post. I tried processing the RAW file in PS-CS2 to see if I got the same results. The CS2 version came out much better. This is to be expected as I saturated the RAW file in the CS2 version, but saturated the JPEG in the Picasa3 version.

Power saving modes WinXP

I'm borrowing the Watts Up? PRO from a friend at work so I figured I'd test out all the various options that WinXP gives for saving power. I have a WinXP Pro box with 3 internal hard drives, a DVD-ROM drive and a decent video card. Here are my results:

Computer off: 3.7W
Computer booting: 120-160W
At the login screen idle: 115W
Logged in to an account idle: 115-160W
Turn off Hard Drives (XP Power saving mode): 107W
Standby mode: 66W
Hibernate mode: 3.7W

The turn off hard drives mode really didn't save as much power as I would have expected.

Depressed Sunflower

RebelXT 10-22mm @ 22mm f/4.5 @ 1/50s

Depressed sunflower

RebelXT 10-22mm @ 22mm f5.6 1/30s

PTgui/CS2 pano compared

Below are two panos using the same original images. The first one I stitched together using Photoshop CS2, the second pano was stitched together by my esteemed photographer friend Maciej.

CS2 Pano stitch

PTgui Pano stitch



And here is a 100% zoom of a pretty obvious seam in the CS2 version, not so obvious in the PTgui version:

XXX Carrots

I picked some carrots today from the garden and pulled these two lovers out of the dirt. Shot @ 200mm f4 1/2s.