Let the Photoshop hell begin...

[tugrik]

The downside of shooting all-digital with E-TTL multiflash metering is that my exposure settings are all over the chart. The advantage to this is that I can catch much more detail out of super-dark or super-bright suits at the expense of the backdrop being at different brightness levels. The downside is the immense amount of fiddling-with-levels that's required to yank data out of the dark-black regions of my D30's dynamic range. With nearly 1,000 frames shot during the FC2003 photoshoot, I'm going to be doing after-work photoshop until my eyes fall out of my skull. A few weeks' worth, at least.

The process is rather simple. It's just a quantity issue.

• Sort images into blocks of each subject and correlate them with the paperwork Revar did


• Mass triage: throw out frames in each block that just aren't salvagable


• Subjective sort: Pick the 'best image' of each block and put it first. Sort the rest in order of decreasing quality


• Crop, Sharpen and Level each 'best image' (herein lies the 2nd worst part, timewise)


• Provide this list of Best Images and Names to the FC2003 website (for those who allowed public posting)


• Crop, Sharpen and Level all the rest of the images (and here's the part that will take forever, aieeee)


• Assemble the 'private web site' for the photo participants and post all the photos, password-protected


• Create 'email packets' of photos for those who wanted their images emailed


• Send out all the emails with site passwords and photo-packets


• Assemble the CD-ROM that gets sent to all the photo participants, and burn 'em (about 45)


• Assemble the CD-ROM that goes to the FC/AAE Staff for their DVD person to use (they'll import the data into the DVD)


• Burn and file a master set of CDs and/or DVD for my own records


• Snail-mail the CD-ROMs


• Bill FC/AAE for the CD-ROM blanks and postage. All done!

And to think I do this for free... aieeeeee.....



Lindz brought a sample of magnetic core memory to show around. It was about the size of a PCI card and looked like super-tiny macrame threads. He had a telescope eyepiece he was using as a magnifyer to show it around. On a whim I had him bring it over to the desk. Revar threw a dime on the board, and I had Lindz, Kreggan and one other fellow hand-hold three flashes around the board to get Ungodly Amounts of Light so I could crank the aperature down to 1/32 F-stop. This makes the depth-of-field on Reality_fox's lovely 100mm Macro Lens of Doom go from sub-millimeter to about 1.5mm, allowing me to just barely pull off a hand-held shot at 1/45s. Macro shots hand-held are a PAIN. But anyways, here it is. The dime gives a good sense of scale. Click through for the 'full sized' image:

Comments

[noressa.livejournal.com]

You looked wonderful while you were doing it. ^___^ Glad everything else seemed to go well.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I suggest using Photoshop's batch processing capabilites - yes, there is human judgement required, but you could also try this: do a few images selected at random, noting down the levels settings you used for each, then make macros to apply each of these settings. Now, run each of these actions on each photo you want to abuse, saving each run into seperate directories. Load in the variants of each photo, pick the best; you may well be able to presume that the same settings apply to other shots of the same subject?

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Can any of this be outsourced, even by having a person sitting next to you grunting along with a question every 10 minutes or so while you do Something Else or Fiddley Stuff?

I am unemployed at the moment yannow.

Core memory.

[(Anonymous)]

Ahh, memories };>. We had a core memory board collecting dust at my old high school, though it was larger - cores were the diameter of a pencil, if I remember correctly (maybe smaller; it's been a while).

I'm tempted to try building some, for a lark, but that would require looking up the details of how they work (I'm hazy on how a non-changing magnetic field is read electrically).

-Deuce