Schinckel.net

I’m really loving Adobe Lightroom. It’s only a beta, apparently, and there are still some features missing. I’ve only had one photo I’ve taken with the Pentax *ist D Digital SLR that has had any red-eye (I have been mainly taking outdoors photos, or working without the flash), but there is no way in Lightroom to quickly and easily remove a red-eye.

iPhoto does this reasonably well, although not excellently, and I haven’t been able to install Aperture to see how well it does it.

Lightroom kicks some serious arse, though. I’ve taken a heap of photos that are under-exposed (ie, too dark), and it works wonders with these. It can’t do that much for over-exposed images, as there really isn’t enough detail in these to work with. You can also do a whole lot of other corrections. If one part of the image is over-exposed, and the other part under-exposed, you can correct, to some extent, and end up with fairly reasonable results.

You can also fix up (or create!) lens vignetting, which is the darkening around the edges of a photo you sometimes see. There is a whole lot of flexibility regarding the stuff you can do – for instance, you can make a greyscale image, but control which tones are lighter, and which are darker, resulting in a whole lot of variables that can make a photo appear drastically different.

I’m not at my preferred machine right now, which makes doing some stuff difficult, but here are some photos that have been manipulated a bit to make them cool.

I’ve heard of BookCrossing.com – lost of people have. The idea is that you find a book somewhere, read it, and leave it somewhere else. Until tonight, however, I’d never actually come across any BookCrossing books. I suppose I could have just printed out the stuff for one of my own books, but I’ve never been one to give books away. I like keeping them. So, the book I found tonight is Tall Poppies: Successful Australian women talk to Susan Mitchell. Not exactly standard fare for what I normally read, but I’ll give it a whirl. It was first registered by crossword, in Adelaide, SA. I might have to leave it somewhere a little more exotic. Perhaps in Hamilton.