I have decided to try out Picasa photo edit capabilities for Iris & Gary’s set of wedding photos. It has all the tools that I need to create that washed out tinted and grainy feel. Editing was swift and it only took me about 2 hours to finish editing over 250 photos. Unfortunately Picasa does not support Adobe RGB color profile and had displayed all the photos in much less color saturation than the files exported after edit.
As I didn’t want to waste all that editing, I used Photoshop to batch convert all the files into sRGB color profile and made them less saturated. I then returned to Picasa and copied the filter settings from my last edits and applied them to the sRGB profiled files. A few photos still didn’t come out right after the export so I just bring them back to Photoshop for some fine tuning.
It was then that I have discovered another problem with Picasa. The more editing applied to a photo and more deviated from the original photo, the larger the exported file despite being much higher contrast and monotone. My original photos were about 1.5MB to 2MB each and I tried to export the edited photos into JPG 10 - the maximum quality in JPG format. Some of the edited and exported photos came to as high as 27MB in size! More than half of the total number of exported photos came out to be over 7MB. So back to Photoshop and re-save them into JPG 10 with a few very large files in JPG 8 to bring them back to a relatively more manageable size of below 9MB. Such a task would degrade the JPG further but with the washed out tinted feel that I had aimed for, this does not affect the photos visibly.
The final count of photos came to just less than 200 after careful selections. It took the flickr uploader about 3 hours to upload all of them which is not too bad.
Despite all the bumping into different problems, I’d say that it was quite fast in getting all that editing done for so many photos with Picasa.
I have also looked into Nikon Capture NX and it has similar save filters for applying to other photos capabilities as Picasa does. So one can edit one photo, save all the edited filter settings, select a set of photos, and apply the same edited filter settings to the selected photos in one go. While Picasa is good for a more crude editing job but good for those special effects, Nikon Capture NX is good for fine turning photos but it takes more steps to get the photos into those special effects that’s built into Picasa.
It would have been good if Picasa would support Adobe RGB color profile as most digital SLR cameras do. I will look into Nikon Capture NX more closely as to getting the same effects for my photos.
Published by James at 2:19 HKT Sep 26, 2006
in News.
Wish them a wonderful life together.
More photos here.
Published by James at 10:44 HKT Sep 23, 2006
in News.
Last night was the 25th Anniversary class reunion of our class. There were over 80 Alumni and over 20 teachers there at the Holiday Inn. Since I went to study in Canada after my F.3 class, it has actually been over 27 years since I saw most of my classmates. We never did have any formal reunion before so naturally it took a little name tag reading before we recognize some of us. It was nice to be able to catch up with several very close friends and a few teachers who had taught me after all these years. Hopefully, with a hand full of name cards we would get together more often.
Many thanks to Cheung, Yik, and Cheng (whom I knew very well) and others (whom I did not know so well) who helped organize such a great gathering.
Published by James at 15:57 HKT Sep 19, 2006
in News.
Some broad called and identified themselves as some “Fire Prevention Society” and that they’ll schedule a free training course/seminar for our staff. I remember that they had called several months ago and I had passed them on to our property manager and never heard from them since. Once again, I passed them on to our property manager and this time around I called my property manager to warn him about the call. He said they have been had several times at other sites where companies pretended they were some kind of organizations giving out free seminars yet in fact they are all sales presentations where they all made it sounded like we were bounded by laws that we must let them setup the seminars for us.
I told my property manager to insist callers such as this to send us literatures by post instead and to tell them that we would never sign-up for anything over the phone. Scammers usually wouldn’t even bother sending out anything.
I use Avent Browser on top of IE 6 for my regular web browsing. This morning, as usual I was web browsing with AB and all of a sudden some websites showed a much larger font size then they normally would. Preliminary findings indicate that only all sites which are default to Unicode (UTF-8) were affected, the rest showed up fine.
Upon further investigations reviewed that it was in IE where the view->font size menu was somehow set to largest font. When I change it back to normal size font, everything in IE and Avant Browser showed up fine again. This is very odd since IE was never up running before the problem and that there is no way in Avant Browser that could have this option changed.
Many of us own 2 different sizes of iPods for different situations and/or occasions. Since Apple has just introduced, among other versions of new iPods, the new iPod Shuffle that looks just like Apple’s Radio Remote for iPod, I suggest Apple merges the two products into one which the user can double the new Shuffle as a Radio Remote for the full size iPod as well as being able to select the songs to be downloaded from the full size iPod on to the new Shuffle. This would come in handy especially for those on-the-go moments when we needed an “escape” say a night out on a business trip.
Hence the name iEscapePod.
Published by James at 22:00 HKT Sep 10, 2006
in Sports.
Replaced former F1 Champion Jacques Villeneuve just 3 races ago with zero F1 racing experience, Team BMW newest driver who was just brought into F1 by BMW this year, Polish driver Robert Kubica won his first podium position coming in 3rd at Monza Italy today after the champion Team Ferrari’s Michael Schumarcher and Team MacLaren’s Kimi Raikkonon. Kubica has been very strong in all his first 3 F1 races and certainly has won a new hugh fan here.
Michael on the order hand, here at Monza today after a record of 90 F1 race wins in a career, has just announced his retirement for the end of this season. F1 would never be the same without Michael and we wish him all the best.
Current championship leader Fernando Alonzo has an exploded engine and therefore handed all of he 10 championship points to Michael who is now only 2 championship points away from Alonzo with 3 races left this year.
Ferrari has just passed Renault here at Monza as F1’s constructor championship leader.
愛得太遲 - 古巨基
曲：楊鎮邦＠宇宙大爆炸
詞：林夕
編：雷頌德
監：雷頌德
唱：古巨基
我過去 那死黨 早晚共對
各也紮職以後 沒法暢聚
而終於 相約到 但無言共對
疏淡如水
日夜做 見爸爸 剛好想呻
卻霎眼 看出他 多了皺紋
而他的蒼老感 是從來未覺
太內疚擔心
最心痛是 愛得太遲
有些心意 不可等某個日子
盲目地發奮 忙忙忙其實自私
夢中也習慣 有壓力要我得志
最可怕是 愛需要及時
只差一秒 心聲都已變歷史
忙極亦放肆 見我愛見的相知
要抱要吻要怎麼也好
偏要推說等下一次
我也覺 我體質 彷似下降
看了症得到是 別要太忙
而影碟 都掃光 但從來未看
因有事趕
日夜做 儲的錢 都應該夠
到聖誕 正好講 跟我白頭
誰知她開了口 未能挨下去
已恨我很久
錯失太易 愛得太遲
我怎想到 她忍不到那日子
盲目地發奮 忙忙忙從來未知
幸福會掠過 再也沒法說鍾意
愛一個字 也需要及時
只差一秒 心聲都已變歷史
為何未放肆 見我愛見的相知
要抱要吻要怎麼也好
不要相信一切有下次
相擁我所愛又花幾多秒
這幾秒 能夠做到又有多少
未算少 足夠遺憾忘掉
多少抱憾 多少過路人
太懂估計 卻不懂愛錫自身
人人在發奮 想起他朝都興奮
但今晚未過 你要過也很吸引
縱不信運 你不過是人
理想很遠 愛於咫尺卻在等
來日別操心 趁你有能力開心
世界有太多東西發生
不要等到天上俯瞰
Let’s face it, air conditioners simple can’t stop you from sweating. Only a fan can. We have one 12″ table fan in the living room which is not enough when we dine. So I bought a 16″ standing fan.
Midea FS-40-P5R remote control standing fan for HKD$299 at Japan Home Centre.
16″ standing fan, 3 speed, oscillation, 7.5 hr timer with 1/2 hour increments, remote control, “RHY” and Sleep mode. This particular model is not listed in the Midea website. The best thing with this fan is not its remote control. It is its “RHY” and Sleep mode. With either of these two modes, the fan randomly switches between the off-low-medium speeds simulating an outdoor natural breeze. However, I have yet to discover the difference between the “RHY” mode and the Sleep mode.
Make sure they grab you the correct model. I was going to buy it at their Kowloon City shop but they tried to switch the model on me. I had to buy it at their Tai Kok Tsui shop.
WhaUSay?!