BTW … I’m running (well, trying to run) version 12.50 on 64-bit Windows 7 on a Dell PC with an Intel Core i7 CPU running at 2.8GHz with 8 GB of memory. The platform is most definitely NOT the problem … everything else (and I run a lot of other programs, like the GIMP 2 Graphics Editor) runs just fine.

Just about ready to give up and chalk it up to a really bad investment.

I also have found the MySQL results curious - so if I get a contract that I am bidding on then I will download the latest MySQL and do some additional benchmarking.

The hard drives themselves will make more of a difference than the OS, as will RAM latancy etc.

And those MySQL results look veeery strange, I can’t believe it’s 23x slower at anything!

In Firefox right click-go to “This Frame”-”Show only this frame” this will show the site out of the frame.

Thanks again.

My name is Freddy and I’ve wasted nearly a month of my life on this place I found it after being recommended by a few friends who have been hanging out here for quite some time.

I am a writer, graphics artist, photographer and just about anything else that comes up around the office. Aside from the above interests i’m really into scifi as I know that is so much more out there to be discovered, and a feeling that the universe is just teaming with life.

Well, I hope that I get to know more people here, share some experience and start learning. Have a greay day!

* To toggle Organizer, Select View > Palettes > Organizer or just Ctrl+B. That turns the thumbnail display on or off. Whether it stops PSP form scanning all your folders I can’t say, but it’s worth a try as KJPDude suggests.

* My problem is PSP crahses most of the time when I select File > Import > Twain Acquire. I am using an old Mustek 1200 UB Plus scanner that really isn’t XP compatible but I can limp along. PSP used to work with that scanner, not sure why it doesn’t now. If I weren’t so cheap I’d by an modern scanner but it woudl be nice to make this one work with PSP. I’ll Google aroudn for more answers…

I could not find any mention of photo editors or their reviews on your website, can you supply a link??

Jack

Could you tell me how did you change the colors in PSEL ?
I’ve got alsways blue stripes around the gallery, and I can’t find where to change that even into html or xml generated files.

Vanessa

exellent…

wow…

Shannon
My Digital SLR

I have been using Paintshop Pro since Version 2.0, and I have always been happy with it, but not it wont run.

I have uninstalled it, reinstalled it (multiple times), added all the updates, and still no problem.

I have 4gb of ram on an Athlon 64 3500+ processor.

I guess now its time to shell out the cash and give Adobe CS3 a try.

I’m kinda curious of the image quality of the EX-F1.
I’m a real newbie at photography!

Thanks for an interesting read!
/Robin

Regards

Gabriel

I’m a computer programmer and photographer, with an interest in geometric art. For the past four or five years, as a hobby, I’ve been experimenting with ways to create interesting and attractive geometric patterns from photographs. Many of the patterns repeat. Recently, in order to draw more attention to my work and to find new uses for these patterns, I made 115 of the repeating patterns available for free use at http://patternsofreflection.com/index.php/free-tiling-patterns/

Your readers may be interested in using them for textures, background patterns, poster borders, surfaces in 3D models, scrapbook themes and personalized gift wrap. A HowTo on creating and labeling gift wrap in some popular paint program would likely prove a popular item. If you do write a HowTo, please contact me so I can feature the link.

ex-Beach Photo Club member
Janice

Did not find a way in the settings to stop this.

Just me two pence.

Final Cut was a Premiere Killer, it was so successful Apple killed Windows development for it, so that you have to run it on Mac Hardware. Premiere’s marketshare on Mac goes into a tailspin. It still survives on PC, but it still has severe problems. Also in the PC world, Sonic Foundry had developed Vegas Video (now Sony Vegas Pro) which is more stable, more powerful and starts gaining converts.

Adobe now has stiff competition on both platforms, so it abandons the buggy Premiere code and rewrites it from scratch and introduces the software as Premiere Pro. Premiere Pro is when Adobe dropped Mac support. There were a couple of reasons for this. One, they were not going to win back Final Cut Users. They loved FCP, they loved Apple software. Two, they were not going to make their money back if they developed for Mac, Premiere had left a bad taste in people’s mouths. On the PC side, they could present Premiere Pro as a substantial upgrade for Premiere users, however, on the Mac side, they were playing catch-up.

Premiere Pro has gotten better and better and version 2.0 is a very nice editor. It’s taken a while for Adobe to rebuild a good reputation in the editing game and that is why they have decided to get back into the Apple market. They also have developed really tight integration between Premiere Pro, Photoshop and After Affects. That feature alone could be why some Mac Editors would switch to Adobe. It wasn’t only the switch to Intel chips that brought Adobe back to the Mac.

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Pro

Randy Ubillos created the first three versions of the first popular digital video editing application Adobe Premiere [1] before being given a team. Before version 5 was released, Randy’s group was hired away by Macromedia to create KeyGrip, built from the ground up as a more professional video-editing program based on Apple QuickTime. Macromedia couldn’t release the product without causing its partner Truevision some issues with Microsoft as KeyGrip was in-part based on technology licensed from Microsoft to Truevision and then in turn to Macromedia. The terms of the IP licensing deal stated that it was not to be used in conjunction with QuickTime. Thus, Macromedia was forced to keep the product off the market until a solution could be found. At the same time, the company decided to focus more on applications that would support the web, so they sought to find a buyer for their non-web applications, including KeyGrip; which, by this time (1998) was renamed as Final Cut.

Final Cut was shown in private room demonstrations as a 0.9 alpha at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) exposition in 1998 after Macromedia pulled out of the main show floor. The day before NAB the desperate team loaded a U-haul all evening after the janitor had tossed their packing boxes into the trash and then they drove all night to get to Las Vegas. One driver stated they almost crashed the van crossing the desert due to lack of sleep. At the demonstration both Mac and Windows versions were shown. The Mac version was working with a Truevision RTX dual stream real time card with limited real time effects. *1 When no purchaser could be found, Apple purchased the team as a defensive move. When Apple could not find a buyer in turn, it continued development work, focusing on adding FireWire/DV support and at NAB 1999 Apple introduced Final Cut Pro. ProMax was the first vendor to demo FCP on the show floor. Apple had only a small booth nearby when compared to their NAB booth in 2006.

With the introduction of Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere’s market share remained strong on Windows but began to decline on the Mac,[2] since its older codebase was more difficult to maintain and enhance. In 2003, Apple announced a program for Premiere users to trade in their discs for a free copy of Final Cut Express or a $500 discount on Final Cut Pro [3]. Later that year, Adobe introduced the successor to Premiere, Premiere Pro, a Windows-only product with a modern codebase.

From the article “Why Apple Bounced Back”
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/8F4B780E-674F-4421-A44D-7B1EAE9C1BA6.html

In the same late 90s timeframe, Macromedia hired the development team of Adobe’s Premier, lead by Randy Ubillos, in order to develop a rival new professional level video editing application based on QuickTime. The product was tentatively called KeyGrip and then Final Cut.

Shortly after starting work on its “Premier killer,” Macromedia decided to stop competing directly with Adobe. Instead, it would target the market for web development tools, and leave the video and print markets to Adobe. Macromedia put the unfinished project up for sale, but couldn’t find a buyer.

Apple bought the product from Macromedia in 1998 to prevent it from simply being abandoned. After being unable to find a developer interested in continuing work on it, Apple completed the project itself, releasing it the next year as Final Cut Pro.

What began as a fortunate accident would become Apple’s new killer app for the Mac.

Final Cut Pro Cleans Up
Final Cut Pro quickly destroyed Adobe’s Premier. Apple’s new product was essentially an entirely reworked new version of Premier, while Adobe had let its Premier languish as it focused on graphic design and print production.

The desktop market for video editing was still small, so the challenge hardly mattered. It was an easy victory. Apple really broke ground with Final Cut Pro when it took on industry leader Avid.

Avid started out on the original Macintosh II in the late 80s, and had since become the leading vendor in delivering video editing workstations. Initially, Final Cut Pro wasn’t seen as much of a threat. The film industry was strongly entrenched behind Avid solutions, and Final Cut Pro only offered a limited subset of its features.
What Final Cut Pro did offer was easy access to the power of QuickTime. It allowed both large and small studios to set up a relatively inexpensive Mac to do their simple post production tasks at much lower cost than if they were to tie up their own Avid, or have to rent access to an expensive Avid studio.

After allowing Apple an entry into professional post production and broadcast graphics, Final Cut Pro has been able to grow into a serious competitor.

The Turnaround Discovery
Final Cut Pro was a great demonstration of the flexibility of Quicktime, and importantly for Apple, distinguished the Mac platform. Apple had canned the development of Final Cut for Windows, making Mac hardware the only way to run Final Cut Pro.

The new Apple suddenly discovered that the way to sell more Macs was to offer compelling new software that was only available on the Mac. This might seem obvious in retrospect, but the company had been cautiously avoiding the application software market for over a decade. Claris had even ported FileMaker to Windows.

The initial worry that bundled software would chill third party development had been overwhelmed by the much greater fear that the Mac would cease to matter unless Apple differentiated its platform with unique software, something that the big third party software developers saw no need to do.

Apple’s Software Explosion
Hot off the heels of Final Cut Pro’s emerging success as a new Mac application, the new Apple went on a buying frenzy to acquire other strategic software projects and their development teams.

In 2000, Apple bought DVDirector and the DVD technology portfolio from Astarte GmBH, and hired its entire development team. It released the product the next year as DVD Studio Pro.

Combined with Final Cut Pro, it supported an emerging new market of pro, freelance, and small corporate film studios producing their own DVDs.

There’s the problem. Minolta DiMage and digital Alpha have always been superlative in reviews from both industry and end users, especially for exposure accuracy and color fidelity, the Sony Alpha A100 even garnering “Camera of the Year” from PopPhoto, so you’re waay off the mark. The Sony Alpha A100 ALONE made Sony the #3 DSLR vendor against such formidable competition as Pentax and Olympus with entire LINES of DSLRs of their own (and against Panasonic, Leica, and Sigma, each with one DSLR). Now Sony has an adapter to run the Alpha Mount Camera lenses on video cams - a whole new market, and perhaps an end run around Canon and Nikon. Regardless, Sony appears hell-bent on getting back into the full line of profitable SLR sales that Minolta once had with the Minolta Alpha/Dynax/Maxxum 2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9-series cameras.

Look, every vendor has something unique to offer, and comparing as if they were going head to head, one on one, is unnecessary. Canon has … Nikon has … Olympus has … Pentax has … Leica has … Panasonic has … Sigma has … each has something to offer, and none offer crap. There is such a wide variety of photographic consumers that it makes sense for no company to be 100% appropriate for everyone all the time. The challenge is to help people find an appropriate match between their own photographic needs and resources and any vendor’s offering. Perhaps some personal preferences should precede any gear statements to help put those comments into perspective? I’ve never been able to marry a Canon or Nikon camera body, whereas Minolta cameras seem to just fall into place in my hand and facilitate composing and capturing the pictures I want. It seems that the marketplace agrees to the tune of millions sold. So I must add to your complimenting the Sony Alpha for outstanding “…image stabilization and sensor cleaning…” to also include outstanding ergonomics and controls.

Click!
Love and hugs,
Peter Blaise
Minolta Rokkor Alpha Dimage Photographer
http://www.peterblaisephotography.com/

Running Vista on a dual Core AMD with 3 gigs of memory and it loads in 6 seconds.

it loads in less than 30 seconds…

just toggle the “organizer” off.

yeah…

First, many images require extrapolations to get to 1600DPI. For example 6 x 4 inch = 6 * 1600* 4* 1600 = 61.4 Mpixels image where as 10-12Mpixels is currently top end performance for most 35mm Digital SLRs. So printer drivers extrapolate bigtime. Now can a graphics processor at 64byte ops runnning at 1GHz or ops/second do a nearest neighbour color transform requiring say 320 ops per pixel plus 500ops to feed and print one array nozzle. Estimate = sqrt(64 /8 * 1G ops/sec/(320 ops per color + 500ops to feed & print))= 3.12 Mpixels per side image. Divide this by 1600 dpi (or Pixels per inch)= allows for the processor to print an image 1950 inches square in one second. So the processor is fast enough.

Now the second question is can the PC deliver the image to the printer fast enough? Using a 2MB/sec USB port how fast can a typical 12Mpixel image be delivered to the printer - about 6 seconds assuming 32MB for image storage. So plenty of slack/surplus here too. Now every additional copy of the image after the first should come out once every 1-2 seconds, and I am convinced the paper strength and mechanicals are the limiting factor here.

Finally, HP has a similar array-across technology called Edgeline (see here http://h30046.www3.hp.com/product-detail.php?topiccode=EDGELINE) and it does 20 6×4 inch photo prints in two minutes. But remember the Edgeline technology is exactly that 1 row out of say a 72 times bigger array from Memjet.

In sum, with existing camera and PC technology it is more than feasible. But the next binding problems will be the speed of the PC-to-printer connection + printer memory versus cameras+photofinished images in the 32-120MB range and 32bit HDR color coded images.

Macro or Scripting is important for batch jobs where you want to apply a different watermark or filename or tag depending on the filesize or dimesnions or type etc. Currently Photoshop’s Actions are the easiest way to do this in Photoshop, Lightroom is harder yet through external OS scripting like VBScript, etc. I do not know the details of working with Apples Automator. Depending on what you want to implement it is easy (simple actions with conditionals) to very hard (read many external script files, perform loops, respond to error conditions, etc, etc).

Scripting can be quite helpful but also complex to program.

As for database Derby is quite fine - a bit large sized compared to SQLite (only 350KB runtime DLL + 350KB help) but quite fast and complete.

As soon as you a)a ready toa)have a plan for the next two updates AND the beta is rock stable then go to the Photo trade press/blogosphere. People will want a lot in reactions to what is a very solid Image Viewer/Browser and basic editor. So you have to have a good idea of what you can realistically promise.

In sum - good work so far.

I’m the author of blueMarine and I’d like to thank you for this interesting and inspiring review. I’d take chance of this for asking a few questions about point (1): indeed thanks to the platform I’m using I have a good choice of scripting languages that could be integrated in blueMarine (e.g. JavaScript and Ruby just to mention two). Since as a photographer I’ve got no experience of automating tasks with scripts, I’d be happy if you could point out a couple of scenarios - they would be helpful for me as a starting poing.

For point (2) I can say that I’m in in the early stage for integrating a RDF engine in the core of blueMarine. Do you think it would be a good integration approach or I should expose a direct access to the underlying database (blueMarine is using Derby, sort of Java equivalent of SQLite)?

For what concerns your forecast about the 1-3 years, I think it’s pretty accurate. But until now blueMarine has been primarily the effort of a single developer (with a friend helping for the very specific support for Grid Computing). If other people join and we’re able to create a community of developers, the evolution could be faster.

PS Another question. So far blueMarine has been only talked about in developers communities. I’ve got a list of photographers’ places where I could announce it, but I’m holding since it is still beta. Sometimes I fear I hold too much - do you think it’s mature enough for announcing it at large? Perhaps this could bring in some more contributors.

Thanks for your attention.

I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….

Great book. I just want to say what a fantastic thing you are doing! Good luck!

G’night

I have read several of your articlale/blogs/reviews. I would like to introduce two different color related tools that may be of interest to you. Pic2color http://pic2color.com extracts harmonious colors from any picture and these colors could be used to frame photographs to make the photo standout or set the mood for a web page etc. It also has a re-coloring tool that can apply the color scheme from a picture to a graphics and there are several other uses of it too. In addition we have a color tool called GenoPal, according to Layers magazine this makes the color wheel obsolete. You might want to check that out too. http://genopal.com

Hope you find them interesting