1. David Kennard has posted an interesting article and mini-tutorial on using CornerFix with the Fuji IS-Pro camera. The IS-Pro is a specialist camera that is sensitive to both infrared and ultraviolet light - in fact, rather than the usual four channel Bayer array sensor, the IS-Pro's sensor has eight channels in a 2x4 arrangement, requiring that DNG files be in linear raw format before CornerFix can correct them. What David is doing is using a combination of filters and CornerFix to make the Fuji IS-Pro usable for normal photography as well. David goes through the process step by step, discussing settings in detail, and provides some really good examples. The article is here.
    0

    Add a comment

  2. Google recently converted my Chromasoft website (as distinct from this blog) from the old Google Pages format to Google Sites, as they are doing for all Google Pages sites. The website is where all the reference material for the various things I blogger about here are. So, for example, there is:

    • Calibration test image (synthetically created "perfect" versions of the Gretag Macbeth 24-patch test chart);
    • A spreadsheet with color space information;
    • More information about dcpTool;
    • Some papers I wrote on color spaces.

    The automatic conversion was reasonable, but messed up formatting a few places. So I've taken the opportunity to refresh the site with a new, cleaner format, and also to make use of some of Google Sites features that weren't available in Google Pages. E.g., the navigation widget, which replaces the previous "hard coded" navigation links.

    The site is here: http://sites.google.com/site/chromasoft/
    0

    Add a comment

  3. As mentioned in this post, I just did a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 "Maverick Meerkat". I mentioned two fairly major problems I had with the Ubuntu installer in that post. I also had another problem, but this one isn't Ubuntu related.
    I had chosen to install from a USB key, but what I had forgotten is that the motherboard in the PC is a Gigabyte motherboard, and it doesn't like booting from USB. This is a common problem with Gigabyte motherboards - just Google for Gigabyte and "boot from USB", and you'll see many variations of "can't boot from USB", "won't boot from USB", "unable to boot from USB", etc, etc. What happens is that the motherboard just completely ignores the USB key; effectively, it's like it isn't there.

    Unfortunately, there isn't a solution to be found in any of those posts. Or at least I ran out of patience before I found one, although it's clear that the problem is to some extent USB drive dependent - Gigabyte motherboards seem to like some drives, others not. So rather than continue to go through endless posts that don't offer solutions, I started playing around. What I found was:
    • With any other drive in the machine, even if the boot from the drive was disabled in BIOS, the Gigabyte motherboard would still ignore the USB key and boot from the other drive;
    • With all other drives physically unplugged, boot would fail with a "Insert boot disk and press enter" message. The light on the USB key didn't even flicker at any point in the process, indicating that the USB key wasn't even being seen;
    • However, that was where things got interesting. What I found was that if I then unplugged the USB key, and plugged it in again, then pressed enter, the USB key was recognized, and the machine booted.
    Now this is a step in the right direction. If you don't have any other bootable drives in the machine, then you can just follow that procedure.  Problem is what if you do have other drives in the machine? In my case, the intention was to install Ubuntu on a dual booted drive, so having a bootable drive in the machine was required, and the there wasn't any way to get to the "Insert boot disk" prompt - the machine just booted from the drive I wanted to install Ubuntu to.

    The Solution

    Thinking about this, the USB key only being recognized if it was unplugged and then plugged in again suggests that somehow, if the USB key is inserted at the time the machine is powered up, the motherboard gets into a mode where it doesn't recognize the key and it gets ignored until a operating system driver starts up. But later in the boot cycle, the motherboard does seem to be able to recognize it. So what I did was simple:
    1. I started the machine with the USB key unplugged;
    2. Once the machine had got through the first parts of its boot sequence, I plugged the key in, then hit the F12 key to bring up the boot menu. And on the third try, there the USB key was, on the list of hard drives. And it booted fine!
    Two thing to note here - what I found worked, for me anyway, was to plug the USB key in just after the BIOS displayed the list of PCI devices, and just as it gave its "Verifying DMI pool" message. Secondly, note that the USB key appears on the list of hard drives.

    Now I must admit, plugging the USB key in during the boot sequence is neither elegant or reliable - you'll probably have to try it a few times - but it worked for me.
    85

    View comments

  4. So I use Linux occasionally for software development stuff e.g., pcdtojpeg will run on Linux. I'd skipped Ubuntu 10.04 because (a) the release got a pretty bad name for reliability and (b) I was busy professionally, and with pcdMagic and CornerFix, so anything on Linux wasn't featuring anyway. But having gotten both pcdMagic for Windows and V1.4.0.0 of CornerFix out the door, I decided that an upgrade was called for. I decided on a fresh install, as Ubuntu's upgrade process can't skip releases, and I wanted to change the drive format to EXT4 anyway. Well, it wasn't an easy process - I ran into two fairly major bugs in Ubuntu's install mechanism:

    Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" install bug 1

    Problem one was a "SYSLINUX – Unknown keyword in configuration file" error.What I'd decided to do was to boot from USB. So, as the Ubuntu download page recommends btw, what I did was to use the the Ubuntu "Create bootable USB Key" feature. Only I used it under my existing Ubuntu installation, which was 9.10. There's an Ubuntu bug description here, but in summary the problem is that the version of Syslinux (which is what actually boots the USB key) that old versions of Ubuntu place on the USB key isn't compatible with the configuration file that comes with the 10.10 ISO image. So instant crash. Irritatingly enough, looking at Ubuntu's own bug tracker, this was identified as a bug back in July, but nobody bothered to fix it, although I'd rate it as a showstopper. So far as I can tell, there are two solutions:
    • Create your Ubuntu 10.10 bootable USB key using Ubuntu 10.10. That's a bit of a catch-22 situation, but it may be an option for people with access to a friend's Ubuntu 10.10 installation or whatever.
    • Edit the /syslinux/syslinux.cfg on the USB key to remove the "ui" keyword, which is what causes the problem. This is the solution that I used.
    Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" install bug 2

    Problem two was a crash in the very early part of the install.The symptoms of this are:
    1. If you're in the graphical install mode (the full screen purple screen), the install just hangs. The little dots keep moving, but nothing happens.
    2. If you hit esc, you get a "getpwuid_r(): failed due to unknown user id (0)" message, as documented in this Ubuntu bug report.Again irritatingly, this bug is known. Even more irritatingly, as the bug report makes clear, the error message is entirely misleading - it can result from any number of underlying problems.
    3. So, what you have to do is to get a real error message. The way to do that is to keep Ubuntu out of the graphical install, and have it give text error messages. You do that by hitting F6 as soon as the purple screen comes up, then editing the command line to remove "quiet" and "splash". Then press enter to have your new command line run.
    4. What I then got was the real error: "Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0".If you know that fd0 is the floppy disk, this tells you what you need to know. Turns out that although the machine doesn't have a Floppy, I had "Floppy disk" enabled in the BIOS of the motherboard (which is the default), and Ubuntu just can't deal with a non-existent floppy. Disabling the Floppy in BIOS solved the problem.
    Comments on Ubuntu later.....



        3

        View comments

      • There's a new version of CornerFix out, V1.4.0.0. The new release extends CornerFix beyond M8s, M9s and S2s to allow images from just about any camera to be corrected - e.g., Sony NEX, Sigma DP series, etc.

        This is prompted by the many requests I've been getting from numbers of people for CornerFix to be made compatible with various new large sensor cameras, especially the Sony NEX series, for which there are now a lot of lens adapters available. However, given the size of the NEX sensor, and the characteristics of, for example, the Voigtländer (Cosina) 15mm f/4.5 lens, the same color vignetting as happens on the Leica M8 becomes inevitable. And of course, there's no Leica style "self coding" option on the Sony NEX.

        So rather to continue to respond to requests to update CornerFix to each camera, I decided to make CornerFix more general. Now in fact, CornerFix always was quite general - it was just set up to warn about "Unsupported camera model" if it came across any camera I hadn't tested on. But usually, CornerFix would get it right anyway.

        What the new version of CornerFix does is to look at the characteristics of the DNG file itself, and decide whether it can be processed. So it will now work with very nearly any DNG file, regardless of whether the file came directly from a camera, or was converted from the camera manufacturer's raw format with Adobe's DNG Converter. The only restrictions are that the DNG has to have either Bayer sensor or "Linear Raw", aka RGB, data in it. Which covers about 99.9% all cameras out there, btw. So, all you have to do to use CornerFix with a Nikon, Canon or whatever is to convert your raw image to DNG, then use CornerFix as usual.

        At the same time, CornerFix also has a new website. The website has detailed instructions on how to use CornerFix with converted DNGs, etc.

        Downloads are still from the usual place: CornerFix Files on SourceForge.net
        0

        Add a comment

      • So, pcdMagic for Windows is out. pcdMagic converts Kodak Photo CD images into more modern formats such as JPEG and TIFF. But unlike all the other solutions out there, it actually gets the color right.

        The original pcdMagic, which was Mac only, shipped back in February. At the time, I said there would never be a Windows version. Well, 9 months later, there is. The Windows version is a quite a bit different to what I built for the Mac, however. What I found with the Mac version was that there were two distinct groups of people using pcdMagic:

        First, there were the pro photographers, the high-end "art" print shops and advanced amateurs - folks that know their photography, and are using pcdMagic because it's really the only Photo CD conversion solution available that actually gets the color reproduction right. Probably a third of the users of pcdMagic for the Mac fall into that group, judging by the organization names. These are people that can talk about ProPhoto color spaces, etc.

        But there's also another group of users - folks who just want to get their images back the they remember them. These users neither know or care about color profiles, but they do know that the images as converted by the various free packages on the Web just look wrong. pcdMagic for Windows is built to make life easier for them, while still providing all the color profiles, etc in the background. So pcdMagic for Windows is built as a drag-and-drop application. All you have to do is to drag-and-drop any Photo CD file on the window, and it gets converted. Batch operations - just drag-and-drop a group of files. All the color profiles, etc, etc are done in the background. But pcdMagic for Windows is still a seriously powerful piece of software; although its a lot simpler to use than the Mac version, the only features it's missing relative to the Mac version are sharpening (easy to do later if you want), and the option to convert to DNG.

        For those interested in the technicalities, pcdMagic for Windows is a C# and WPF application. Reason being that WPF brings some useful color management capabilities to the table.
        0

        Add a comment

      • There's a good article by Marco Noldin on his blog where he discusses an issue relating to DNG color profiles with hue twists that I haven't touched on in this blog. I've pointed out the issues that you can get when trying to recover images that were for whatever reason badly exposed, or had their expose adjusted for purposes of ETTR. However, Marco points out an additional risk - in some profiles the HSL tables are quite coarse, and as a result can cause posterization.  dcpTool allows him to provide a really good before-and-after example, first showing posterization with a the standard profile, and then showing no posterization using the same profile just edited via dcpTool to remove the table.

        The post is in Italian, but Google Translate does a pretty good job, so it's well worth the read, as is his companion article here.
        0

        Add a comment

      Popular Posts
      Blog Archive
      About Me
      About Me
      My Photo
      Author of AccuRaw, PhotoRaw, CornerFix, pcdMagic, pcdtojpeg, dcpTool, WinDat Opener and occasional photographer....
      Loading