Today’s Twitter Activity for February 7, 2012

Today’s Twitter Activity for February 6, 2012

Today’s Twitter Activity for February 5, 2012

A Lightroom 4 beta experiment

 

So I decided to give Lightroom 4 beta a whirl and process a few images. I was curious about the new processing engine.

Of course, I immediately ran into a problem. That’s life with beta software. LR4 would import my images fine, but any attempt to bring up the Develop module on them crashed. I do a couple of not-quite-standard things with my images, which are stored as .DNG, but I embed the XML sidecar in them and have LR3 set to update them on any changes, and my .DNG also has an embedded .CR2. I’m guessing the latter is what’s giving LR4 indigestion at this time. I used Adobe’s DNG converter to extract the .CR2 and import it into LR4, and it worked fine. I expect that variation of a file format isn’t too common so I’m not surprised or annoyed it’s causing a burp, and it’s the sort of thing I expect will be fixed in a later beta. and yes, I sent along some crash reports…

(why do I do this? because if I ever need, for some reason, the original .CR2 before it was converted to .DNG, I know where to find it and it’s easily extracted — disk is cheap, and this really simplifies file management; it’s my emergency storage for “we finally found a case where DNG conversion screws the pooch”, or “.DNG isn’t good enough, we need the original RAW file” — and yes, this is the first time I’ve actually NEEDED to extract the original raw. Which worked fine. And disk is cheap, so I actually had it without mad thrashing around looking for it. See, that’s why…)

Below are some 1:1 looks at an image I experimented with. The first one is Lightroom 3, the second is Lightroom 4 beta.

I chose this not because it’s a great image, but because it was a difficult image. My initial reaction was that the imaging and preview work done within Lr4 is much improved and the images “out of the camera” looked noticeably better in LR4 than LR3. There’s a slightly different color tone, but I was tweaking the color balance and didn’t explicitly set them the same. What impressed me most was that the detail in the cliff along the front of that rock, which is in heavy shadow, was rendered very nicely and a big improvement over LR3, without any significant addition of noise. The image in general seems a bit sharper (look at the splash of water lower left), and places where the whites could blow out seemed better managed. Places where you might see a color case sneak in (the heavily shadowed stream water lower right) seem well controlled (and if you pixel peep beyond 1:1, you see more detail in the water sprays).

The early response to the new develop module has been pretty positive, and I’ll echo that. It’s going to take a bit of getting used to, but they’ve looked at what photographers are doing to offset some of the defaults in LR3, and created a pretty solid blank canvas and the tools make it easier to manipulate that canvas quickly. I’m unlikely to spend a lot of time with LR4 until it’s later in beta, but it definitely looks like the step forward I was hoping it’d be. (what this really means is that I’ll defer my planned library reprocessing death march until LR4 is available, because it makes sense to wait for the new, final engine to be available before I do any mass reprocessing…)

Lightroom 3

LightroomScreenSnapz003

 

Lightroom 4 Beta

LightroomScreenSnapz002

 

And yes, I’m pushing my image all over the side of the blog. That’s one reason I’m working on a redo of my site, to allow for larger, better rendered images than the current format allows.

 

Today’s Twitter Activity for February 4, 2012

Today’s Twitter Activity for February 3, 2012

I got a rock.

HP proxy: Ray Lane’s $10 million plus comp and other fun facts — Tech News and Analysis:

Lane, who became executive chairman of HP on September 22, 2011 (he had been non-executive chairman since November 1, 2010, the start of HP’s FY 2011)  logged more than $10 million in total compensation — the bulk of it in stock and options — for the fiscal year, according to the HP proxy.

Other highlights from the proxy:

 

 

 

Meg Whitman who famously took the HP CEO position in September for $1 in salary, gets $16 million in stock and options. Former CEO Leo Apotheker walked away with $30.4 million when he was fired by HP last September.

 

Igotarock

Except for my first year tenure, when they couldn’t even afford that. (but don’t feel bad for me, according to them, I was very well compensated).

 

 

WOULD 4-ON-4 BE BETTER?

Dallas Stars Blog:: WOULD 4-ON-4 BE BETTER?:

No sport seems more at war with its playing surface than hockey.

The players get bigger and faster. Coaching keeps getting smarter, deeper and tech-enhanced. Yet the rink remains 200’x 85’. And because of this scoring, offense, and creativity is suffering.

So what should be the strategy to counter this? Make the rink bigger? Not gonna happen, those seats with fannies in them are the lifeblood of the individual teams. OK, what if they eliminated a player per side and played four on four?

Noted stick and puck sorcerer, Mike Ribeiro is in my camp on this and I’m-a go ahead and say many of his ilk would concur.

If this radical change were to be implemented me thinks the impact on the game would be both positive and profound.

At first thought, I can see the attraction of shifting the NHL to a 4 on 4 league full time. I’ve wondered at times whether the league should expand 4-4, or go to it full time myself.

Well, unless you’re a player or the player’s union. It’d likely mean losing 3-4 roster spots per team, or 100 player jobs. I can’t see the union buying into that any time soon.

But I think back to the wonderful days of Roller Hockey International, which for a few fun years was a summer distraction in NHL arenas (“Let’s Go Rhinos!”). It was summer fare populated with a few IHL/AHL caliber players, but mostly European and ECHL caliber athletes.

And it was four on four full time. And the more I think back to the style of play we saw watching the RHI for a few years, the more I remember thinking that it was hockey, but it definitely wasn’t what I’d call “real hockey”. And that there was a reason the NBA outlawed the zone for those many years….

I think the four on four discussion is a lot like the international rink discussion. It seems logical and like a good idea, but in both cases, the answers to what’s going on with the NHL is a lot more complicated, and you might solve some problems shifting the league to four on four, but you’d definitely create new and different problems, and it’s not at all clear to me it’d make the league better, just different.

Having watched RHI hockey and full time 4-4 for a few seasons, I don’t think that’s the kind of hockey I’d want to watch every night in the NHL. I don’t think it’d be better. Just different.

 

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