Messing Around with the Macro Camera

[mbarrick]

This is a small (about 0.5 cm across) blob of silver that was in with one of valerian's orders of silver-plated parts for artofadornment. There must have been an impurity in the plating vat that the silver was able to adhere to in order to form this very small coral-like blob.

My new default icon.

Comments

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to ask -- what camera and editing software do you use? Though I prefer a photojournalistic style, I'm gradually coming to realize that a few subtle touches make the difference between ordinary and good, or good and excellent. I haven't got a Canon RAW editing program yet and am seeking input from those who might have suggestions.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I have nine cameras, each with a different purpose.

My primary camera is an Olympus E-300. For RAW editing I usually use the Photoshop plug-in that Olympus has for download. I expect Canon would have a similar plug-in available for free. Given the popularity of Canon I'd also be really surprised if there wasn't something for The Gimp if you don't have Photoshop.

BTW, these pictures were done with a very old Sony Mavica MCV-FD83. It's not even a true megapixel camera but it has a lens on it that can focus to about 1 cm.

[nocturnalmuse.livejournal.com]

Canon's software is called Digital Photo Professional, I'm not sure that it comes standard with all of their cameras, but it came with my Rebel XT.

Also (I don't know if this will be relevant to you), I found out recently that Photoshop CS2 wasn't able to natively process Canon's RAW files (CR2), and you have to download Camera Raw 3.7 from them in order to work with these files directly in Photoshop.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much the same as the way it is with my Olympus. There is a program that comes with the camera for managing photos and RAW editing, and to use Photoshop there is a downloadable pluging. The plugin is much more flexible than the software that comes with the camera. I imagine the same is true for the Canon plug in and would be the way to go if you already have Photoshop or want to buy it.

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

CS2 also requires a patch (made available by Adobe) to correctly browse and open RAW files. I found that without this patch, the program did some pretty creative colour interpretation (i.e. neon bands).

[nocturnalmuse.livejournal.com]

Good to know! I haven't installed Adobe's solution yet, as Digital Photo Professional has been sufficient for minor colour correcting, at which point I have been exporting JPGs to work with in Photoshop. I'll probably be looking into that route soon, though.

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

If you do have CS2, the patch plus the Camera Raw 3.7 means you've got what you need to handle your images in that program. I've been going the DPP --> JPEG --> CS2 route as well, but when I realized how much conversion to JPEG screws around with the colours...yeah. Sometimes I get some very nice results out of it (I like what happened here for instance) but it's enough of a crapshoot that I don't want to risk it any more.

[nocturnalmuse.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I was under the impression from your first post that you didn't have DPP. Seems I've taken this in a sort of useless direction. My bad.

PS - Great photos of the pillow fight, I missed the one scheduled for the same day here in Victoria.