ChromaSoft: October 2010

Using CornerFix with the Fuji IS-Pro

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.

Oct

Revised and refreshed Chromasoft website

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.

Oct

Solving the dreaded Gigabyte "Won't boot from USB" problem

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.

Oct

Installing Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat"

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.

Oct

New version of CornerFix and a new website

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.

Oct

pcdMagic for Windows is out

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.

Oct

dcpTool and the dangers of tables

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.

ChromaSoft