Archive for the 'Software' Category
Well, the upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard went smoothly, as Wooley predicted in his comment on my previous post.
The whole upgrade took about an hour and 15 minutes (which included verifying the install DVD) on my MacBook. I now am running the latest and greatest version of Apple’s OS, a certified flavor of UNIX, and am, so far, extremely impressed. The dock is beautiful, Stacks look extremely useful and efficient, there are a lot of desktop customizable features, Spaces (which I am looking forward to setting up soon), and more.
I look forward to getting a bit more intimate better acquainted with Leopard in the upcoming days and months. Anyway, the upgrade went smoothly. If you’re scared, don’t be. Mine was a breeze! I just wish I had upgraded the day this package arrived on my doorstep…
uname Output:
% uname -a
Darwin xbook 9.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.0.0: Tue Oct 9 21:35:55 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1228~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Until next time…
I have had Apple’s latest release of Mac OS X, Leopard, since it launched a couple of weeks ago. I used my in-store credit from my iPhone purchase reimbursement from when I purchased my iPhone 45 days too early for the price drop… or something… Anyway, I got Leopard and tonight I’m gonna install it!
Backups are running as we speak… I’m jonesing as we speak… I’m ready to install this new OS!!!! I’ll let you know how it goes…
Until next time…
I have really been digging the photography stuff. I recently decided to start another Flickr page under the name Fruitful Studios. You can access this page at any time by going to www.fruitfulstudios.com. When I have some time to build my own photography Web site I will do it and it will be accessible via the same link (www.fruitfulstudios.com).
I am really having a good time shooting different things and then processing the images with cool effects in Photoshop CS2 and soon, Photoshop Lightroom.
I have a number of appointments setup over the next few weekends. This weekend, I will be one of two photographers at the CAF Celebrate Freedom airshow in Tulsa, Oklahoma, thanks to a buddy of mine, Scott, who is an extremely good photographer.
The weekend of the 17th and the 24th, I have a number of family photo shoots setup with some co-workers from my day job employer. The shoots will take place around Texarkana, including downtown, Bringle Lake, and Grady T. Wallace park in Liberty Eylau. I will post pictures of these 3 shoots as soon as I have them taken and processed. I’m looking forward to it.
Here are some of my latest photos/processing that are in the Fruitful Studios gallery on Flickr.
As always, click on the images above for a larger view. I hope you enjoy these shots and the ones to come!
Until next time…
After browsing some photos on Flickr and seeing some of these interesting looking, vintage, trendy effects that people are applying to their photos, I decided to do a little research and determine how these photographers were achieving this look. I wanted it bad!
I quickly found out that these photos were shot in Camera RAW format originally and then processed after the fact. Shooting in Camera RAW basically means you take the image exactly as it was seen by the sensor without and formatting or compression. I decided to do a little messing around with this using my Canon Digital Rebel XTi.
I first had to determine how to get my camera into RAW mode. I quickly learned that you have to be using one of the manual modes, not any of the automatic modes like Full Auto, Sports, Portrait, etc. to change the quality to RAW in the menu system. Once I had this down, I set my camera to Aperture mode, chose RAW + JPG for the quality and storing option, and grabbed the tripod and my RC-1 wireless remote for my camera. It was time to do some shooting.
I stepped outside and as the sun was setting, I struggled to get a decent shot. most were blurry, inculding the one I am about to show you below. There just wasn’t enough light to make things happen. The shutter had to stay open too long and, of course, I moved making the images blurry. Just the slightest amount of movement will send an image in to a blurred frenzy. Oh wel, it at least gave me something to work with.
Once I was done shooting, I imported my photos into iPhoto as usual and then quickly found one I wanted to edit. I quickly fired up Photoshop CS2 (this link points to the latest version of Photoshop, which at the time of this writing is CS3). Once I opened one of the RAW images, I had a ton of settings to play with. You can get some interesting effects and probably even make a lot of corrections to things you didn’t notice during the shoot. Anyway, my first attempt at making a “trendy” photo is below:
Click on the above image for more information and larger versions.
I have a lot to learn and have purchased the UNDERGROUND set list RAW which has a lot of presets for doing really cool processing of RAW images but I haven’t received it yet. Anyway, maybe when I get those presets, I’ll be able to do even more nifty things with my RAW photos…
until next time…
I am working on a Web site and needed to use part of the client’s logo for the site’s Favicon. Since I work on a Mac, I needed something that was quick and easy without a lot of fluff… I mean, come on… I just need to convert a A
I stumbled upon this nifty command-line tool called png2ico. Did you hear me say “command-line”?! You know what that means, right?! Just issue a simple command on the command-line and you’re in business. This is exactly what I needed!
I downloaded the source and was about to compile it when I decided to see if it was already in the MacPorts collection of third-party Unix applications. GUess what?! After running % sudo port selfupdate to get my MacPorts up to date, I ran % port search png2ico and this was returned:
% port search png2ico
png2ico graphics/png2ico 2002-12-08 Converts PNG files to Windows icon resource files.
Great! After running % sudo port install png2ico I was in business. I quickly ran % png2ico favicon.ico favicon.png (where favicon.ico is the output file and favicon.png is my input file) and I had my conversion done in a matter of milliseconds…
If you need to quickly convert PNG image files to ICO image files on a Unix or Mac system, give this utility a try. No bulky UIno , fancy command line switches, just the basics to convert your file. Nice!
Until next time…
Flickr Updates
