This Space for Rent

Impressively crisp bee you’ve got there.

Thanks!

But I will point out that there’s some impressively scary purple fringing on some of the out-of-focus areas. It’s the curse of a moderately cheap macro lens and having the camera save all the photos as jpegs.

Well, yes, there is some purple fringing, but in a way that makes it more impressive; one can be certain you got the bee dead center in the original.

As for saving everything as jpegs, forevermore, why? (Says the guy who bought a raid card so he could have somewhere to store lots of raw files, and who admits he might not be completely rational about his aversion to lossy formats.

Why jpegs? They’re a lot smaller, and they’re better supported than Pentax raw. iPhoto could spoil me, but when I used W*nd*ws I didn’t have any good choices for handling that format (either the staggeringly horrid Pentax software or a slower than molasses plugin for irfanview.) And, even in the cases where it might be useful to have the bit depth of the raw format, I could never really tell much differences between raw and jpeg.

And it’s really a bonus that the jpegs are ¼th the size of the raw files. /home/Images is already 62G, and I want to put off the day when I have to dump those 150gb disks and buy a pair of 300gb notebook drives (I already need to buy one so I can have a disk to do time machine backups of the notebook as well as backups of downbelow, pell, and gehenna.)

I’ve never tried the Pentax software (would have to get a Windows machine) for raw conversion; will admit I’ve heard chiefly mixed reviews.

I use (and kinda like) ufraw; I use it mostly as a gimp plugin, but there’s a standalone. Based on dcraw, which is pure command line.

I would expect you’d approve of dcraw just on principle; written in puritanically pure C, no shared libraries, and so forth.

Can’t argue about size; I find that being able to fiddle exposure and saturation afterward is just insanely useful, though.

Well, you can still fiddle with exposure and/or saturation with a jpeg, just as long as you only do it once (or save the thing into something non-lossy between intermediate steps.) A bit of the detail is lost with the first compression, but that’s the last lossy compression that happens before I make the low-quality web pictures.