peterdesmidt.com

Here are three pictures of Sophia from this morning. Which do you like better?

Sophia at the Window 3

Sophia by the Window

Sophia by the Window 2

And here’s one of Lauren.

Sunday Morning Lauren

Lone Tree, February Snow

I took the above photo while sitting in my car.

Danger Thin Ice

I was on the sidewalk for the one above.  After Jacob, Bernese Mountain Dog #2, jumped off a pier and through the ice on Lake Winnebago a few years ago, I don’t go on iced-over bodies of water any more. Jacob was ok, btw., but it was a close thing.

Receding Posts

Snow Storm Time

They installed this nice clock at Lakeside park not that long ago. This is the photo I left the house intending to get. I tried a day earlier, but by the time I arrived at the park the snow had stopped. Not this time!

Ice Crystals

When I took Lauren to school, I noticed that the windows on our garage were iced over.  Using the neat macro bellows that I traded Bill Stoddard for, along with a 80mm Rodagon, I took some closeups.

Snow Boy

At least Murphy likes the current weather.

My friend Bill and I did a little photo equipment trading.  I came away with a great Nikon PB-4 macro bellows.  Here’s my first picture taken using it.  The subject is a colony of coraline algae growing on our aquarium glass.

Coraline

Thanks Bill!

Chubber

We’ve had a 55 gallon salt water aquarium for a few months.   So far, we have a bunch of live rock, some soft corals,  a bunch of snails and crabs, and two clown fish.  Our biggest snail, Chubber, has the blingiest shell by far.

Chubber Chowing Down

A few days ago, I noticed some 1-2mm diameter white spots on the glass.  Now there’s a bunch of them.  Look’s like someone (Chubber?) has been getting busy.

Snail Eggs?

We also have two clown fish, Bella and Clowny.  (Each of the girls got to name one of the fish.  Guess who named Clowny.)  A few days after we bought her, Bella came down with Black Ick, a protozoan infection.  You can see the black spots in the picture.  She’s been in a hospital tank for a few weeks, and she’s looking much better.

Bella's Got the Black Ick!

Bella’s illness highlights an important point.  Starting and maintaining a reef tank is a very complicated and time intensive endeavor.  Things can go wrong very quickly. Make sure to do a lot of research before setting one up!  If we were to do it again, we’d start with freshwater fish.

Judo tournament time is upon us again.  Our first tournament of the year was in Minneapolis a few weeks ago.  To save some money, I used Priceline.com to get a hotel.  I bid $68, and we were given a room at the very nice Marriott Minneapolis City Center.  We check in at about 9 at night.  The young lady at the counter was very friendly, and asked us if we wanted one bed or two.  We said two, as Sophia is quite proud of her kicking ability.  Just ask her.  In any case, the receptionist said. “Would the girls like a toy?” And she proceeded to pull out a big box of new in the box toys.  Lauren chose a Barbie Doll, and Sophia picked out a play microphone.  This is the first hotel we’ve stayed at where children are given brand new toys.  (I don’t know if this only applies to “elite” guests.)  She gave us our keys, and we headed to the elevator, which, alas, was full of people in Viking’s jerseys.  Luckily, Sophia had a Packer cap.  Up we went…right to the top floor. We were a little surprised when we opened the door to our room. It was a multi-level suite, complete with 20 foot windows and three flat panel tvs.  The rate listed on the door was $575 a night.  Maybe the receptionist was a secret Packer fan?

Night View

The Girls in Bed

Lauren's Jack-o-lantern

Lauren did all of her own carving this year.

I have a Dainippon Screen Cezanne FTS-5000 professional pre-press scanner, a five foot wide, 150 lbs. monster of a scanner.  Occasionally, I get questions from other users about the software.  I have version 1, which is only compatible with Apple OS9.  For the measly sum of $1000, I could upgrade to software that would work under OS 10.  Well, that’s not going to happen.

I apologize about the water mark in the pictures, but screen captures on OS9 are in the antiquated  PICT format. This is the only way I’ve been able to convert them to a usable format on the cheap.

Before starting, it’s a good idea to update your scanner’s firmware and software by using the updates available on Screen’s download page. Make sure to get updates for the correct scanner. The standard Cezanne is the FTS-5000.  The newer Cezanne Elite is the FTS-5500. The updates aren’t interchangeable between the two models. Read the release notes before making any updates, as you want to be sure how to do the update, and whether the update will be useful for you.  If you have version 1 of the ColorGenius software, there are free upgrades to version 1.4.

Before starting Color Genius proper, you must start Color Genius Server.

For maximum quality, you want to lay the negative such that the long side of the negative is parallel to the long side of the scanner.  This will maximize the available optical resolution.  The scanner has an 8000 element ccd sensor.  If you spread that 8000 sample over 5 inches, say, rather than 4, you will lose resolution.

Here’s the important dialog box in Color Genius.

“Reso” is the resolution of your final scan. Leave magnification at 100%.

Click on the “Setting Expand” button near the top, which will bring up the following:

Make sure the the preview resolution is at 288, the highest available.  The area button designates which part of the bed will be scanned for a preview. Choosing the different options will put a corresponding red rectangle on the bed representation, which will give you a good idea of what you need. Put the film as far to the left as you are facing the scanner as you scan, and choose the smallest pre-scan area that will include the negative.   This will speed up the preview.

Make sure the mode is RGB-16 bits.  This is not the type of file that will be outputted by the system. Rather, it how the data will be handled internally by the scanner. Hence, you leave this alone to maximize quality even if your scanning bw or if your output will be in 8-bit.

Now click on the “Manual Fine Adjust” button:

This will bring up the following dialogue box:

“HD” equals highlight density, “SD” equals shadow density, “MIN” equals the lowest RGB numbers that will be present in the file, and “MAX” equals the highest numbers that will be present in the file.  One way to get a quick scan that doesn’t clip any data would be to set the HD numbers to 0, the SD numbers to 4, the MIN numbers to 0 , and the MAX number to 255, using the tab key to move from channel to channel.

Alternately, if you click on the box that says “HD”, you can now set the highlight density with an eye dropper in the preview pane.  If you click on box that says “SD”, you can now set the shadow density with an eye dropper in the preview pane.  Be careful not to clip any image data.

At the moment, we’re in the “Retouch Color” tab.  Please Clip on the “Sharpness” tab, and click the box to turn off in-scanner sharpening. You will have to do this for every scan.

Now got back to the “Retouch Color” tab and click OK.  Make sure you have named the file appropriately and set the location where it will be saved.  Click “Scan”, and proceed to the fridge to get a beverage.  And maybe a sandwich.  And some pudding.  There might still be time for a nap if you’re doing a really high res file.  It helps scanning speeds tremendously if you max out the ram in your cutting edge G4 tower.  When I first started scanning, I had 256 mb of ram.  A scan could take 8 hours.  I now have 2 gb of ram installed, yes OS9 will only see 1.5 gb, and high res scans now take about 15 minutes for 35mm and 120mm films.

A very nice feature of the scanner is that you can load multiple pieces of film on the bed, and once a scan has begun, you can immediately set up another image. Thus, you can queue up a number of scans without having to sit around waiting for each to finish.

Unfortunately, if you choose to scan in greyscale, the scanner will only output files in 8-bit.  To get around this, scan the bw film as a RGB positive.  Pick the best channel in Photoshop, usually it’ll be the green channel, and throw away the others. Don’t forget to convert the file to grayscale.

To get the best color from slides, I recommend making an icc profile using an IT8 target from Wolf Faust.  Get one on the type of film you will be scanning.  Set the software to get the best scan of the target. You will use these settings for all scans of this type of film.  Now make an icc profile from the scan of the profile using Lprof, and put this in the appropriate folder for your operating system.  When you input the file into Photoshop, choose the “assign profile and convert to working space option”. Doing this will give you very accurate color.  Don’t edit the file in the scanner color space, since this space may not be very uniform, and you will probably go out of gamut when editing.  Adobe 98, Ektaspace, or ProPhoto RGB are better choices for editing.

Hutch Color has a very good scanning guide here.

I’ll fill out the scanning tips when I get some more time.