July 11, 2017

Using ACDsee for Photography

For the past few years, I’ve been interested in a more powerful digital photography workflow solution than the brutish practice of shuffling JPG files around on my hard drive and hoping for the best. I have really been seeking one (or more) specialized programs which can handle the common photography tasks of organizing photos from the moment they leave the camera to their final resting place on my hard drive (and/or backup server), and performing common photo editing upon them like curve adjustments and blemish removal. These solutions also needed to work natively on Windows, integrate well with NAS solutions, and be capable enough with RAW files. I was willing to pay for the software, but I didn’t want to have to spend more than $75, and certainly not over $100, considering I am at best an amateur photographer. I’m also mindful of my privacy1. After spending several hours researching the options available to me, I have decided to use ACDSee Pro 10 as my one-stop shop. ...

June 26, 2016

I'm Impressed by iPhone Photography

My wife and I got back from our honeymoon in Italy a few weeks ago (which you can read about here), and I need to remark on how impressed I am by the performance our iPhones. Both my wife’s iPhone 5S and my iPhone 6 performed spectacularly, taking hundreds of photos for us during our ten days on holiday. I know there’s a lot of marketing hype about how good the iPhone camera is, but this was my first time relying exclusively upon a smartphone camera for pictures of a momentous chapter of my life, and I now buy the hype. The iPhone really punches above its weight class in terms of performance and cost efficiency. Because we were using smartphones, we were also able to rely on Google Photos seamlessly backing up full quality copies of our photos every night, to ensure we didn’t lose any photos while we were trekking around. ...

November 21, 2013

Bitmap Graphics vs Vector Graphics

One astute reader of a previous post observed that although I seemed to imply that only bitmaps can be digital images, there also exists such a thing as vector graphics which are also considered digital images. At the time, it was not clear in context what was meant in describing an image as digital. While I conflated digital images with bitmaps, which is inaccurate, I was only discussing bitmaps in that post, and the conclusions therein are still valid. ...

November 4, 2013

How to Smooth Out the Curves - Understanding Digital Image Filtering

In a previous post, I discussed the physical interpretation of digital music (and all digital audio) as both a time-varying signal and a frequency-varying signal. This, of course, makes intuitive sense - as we spend three or four minutes listening to a song, we can hear the guitars and horns coming in and fading out, a singer intone the chorus of a song, etc. At the same time, we appreciate the frequencies changing as well — the singer hitting different notes, the instruments forming different chords. Understanding the time and frequency behavior of auditory information is fairly intuitive - in fact, one could even argue that visualizing the frequency-based content is more informative than visualizing the time-based content. ...

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