Cyberward.net

I came across some free presets some time ago, but didn’t really give them a try until a couple of days ago. They are the free presets by On One Software, called WOW. These were developed for On One by Jack Davis. There are two sets of presets that come in one installer. One set gives you a bunch of color correction presets and one click tone and other color adjustments. The other set gives effects like Antique and special gradients. I kind of like them. One thing that is nice with how presets work in Lightroom, is that the Navigator gives a fast realtime preview of the effect before it is applied. The downside is that the preview is really small, and I end up trying presets and then “undo-ing” a lot.

The image above shows the ‘Antique’ preset. I toned down the exposure a bit. Added a vignette, and voila.

There are also some adjustment brush presets. Those are really neat. Some of the brushes that come with this set are for skin softening, and teeth whitening. They work pretty well I think. Much faster than doing it in Photoshop. For me, anyway. I found that the preset for lightening the irises was too much on the pictures I was testing with. No problem, you can play with the brush settings yourself and tweak the look after you have painted the brush. Even better, you can “scrub” the adjustment. If you are in the edit mode, hold your mouse over the pin, click, then drag right or left to adjust. This works like magic. Watch the sliders and they will all move in different amount proportional to what is there when you start. This works to push up and down the effect very nicely.

The effect you see above is a brush. The Wow-Background Blowout brush. The brush does quite a good job around the hair and dress when the ‘auto mask’ brush is on. I think if I took more care it could have been even better, but with just a couple of minutes, it cleaned up the window shade background quite a bit. If you haven’t tried brush presets before, you should give them a try.

If you don’t know where the brush presets are… head over to the develop module, and select the brush tool. There is a label called ‘Effect:’ and beside it the effect drop down. There are a few that come with lightroom, but here is also where the Wow ones would show up.

 

First, to clarify, I don’t hate the two lovely girls in this picture, but they can be quite the pair. Second, my mother told me never to say hate, so maybe that was not a good title. How about “I detest pair programming.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be stuck in a cave for a couple of months and then crawl out bleary eyed and pronounce that I have created the perfect piece of code. I love collaboration. I go to others for help, input, guidance,¬†or to reciprocate for someone else.

What I¬†don’t like, is sitting¬†in a cube with two people where one person types and the¬†other looks over their shoulder all day.¬†Maybe I haven’t had the right person to do this with. Maybe¬†that is why the pair of kids in the picture works. They have their issues, but they get along well, and have similar goals most of the time.

When I am paired with someone, and they have the keyboard, I just feel like one of two things occurs. I am sitting there bored wondering why they just don’t let me type, or they are whipping through some material I have never worked with, and I am lost when I don’t get to “drive”. When I have the keyboard, I just find it annoying to have someone asking if the code could be done differently every 5 minutes. I don’t mind getting feedback, and code reviews are great. I have no problem working on a task, checking for ideas, implementing my approach, then getting feedback, and maybe refactoring. I just don’t like it in real time.

I don’t see the benefit. Luckily it only looks like we are doing this while several of us are new. It won’t last forever. Have you ever had to work for an extended time period in a pair? Did it work?

This is part of our series on building a NAS. In this article we will get the box set up with a static IP address, and get your drives set up for RAID 1.

We are assuming that at this point you have Ubuntu installed. We are gong to install software raid in a moment. The first thing I want to do is make sure we have a static ip address. Usually Ubuntu will start up with a dynamic ip address. This can make it more difficult to transfer files to this box, so lets make it static.
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I am not sure why I was acting to ridiculously. When version 2 came out, I was super psyched, then I found out that if you wanted to use the Dodge and Burn tool, Aperture would make a copy, and send you to the plugin. If you had made any adjustments before this, you couldn’t tell anymore, all the sliders would look reset. It bugged me that the dodge and burn plug in wasn’t non destructive. So… I ignored it.

Just recently I came across an image (can’t find it now) that was adjusted with this plug-in, and I had a “what the heck” kind of moment. I immediately fired up Aperture to re-check out this tool. To get to the plug-in, right click on an image, select Edit With… and pick Dodge and Burn.

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So, I have been thinking about getting some noise reduction software for sometime now. I always feel that my higher ISO pictures from my D90, such as 1600, were not quite as good as I would like, but I always seem to need to shoot at that speed.

Well, I jumped off the fence the other day. The wedding shot that I did had a lot of outdoor shots in the dark with some flash added. Turns out I didn’t hit my bride and groom with quite enough light. Lesson learned. But, I need to salvage this somehow.

I did a bit of web research and decided on Noise Ninja. This plugin has been around for a while now, and there are some really good challengers. In the end I decided based on price, and that they had both a Phtotoshop and Aperture plugin to go with their stand alone app.

Here are the comparison images. First is without Noise Ninja.

Here is the same image with Noise Ninja applied in Photoshop.

These images are super zoomed in, and I wish that I had hit them with more light, but the second image is cleaned up quite a bit. The noise reduction has made them softer than I would have liked, but it is a good compromise with noise removal. This was done with a D90 user contributed profile that I found on their site. I don’t really know how to use it yet, but it was a good start.

I had all kinds of trouble getting Zenphoto to install on 1and1. None of which I believe are the fault of the Zenphoto project. I am blaming the difficulties on how you need to configure php on 1and1.

What problems did I have. It appears that there were tables that were not created correctly. The way I figured this out was that I was trying to save a ¬†guest user and password to¬†and album. The name wouldn’t stick. When I went in and look under the MySql admin¬†tool (phpMyAdmin), there was no user field in the albums table. Something was wrong right from setup.

So here are the steps that I came up with to get zenphoto installed properly. I can’t say that all of the steps I took were necessary, and some might even be suspect, but in total it works.

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I am not sure how I missed this. There is a plugin for WordPress called ZenPhotoPress. I even had ideas of trying to do this myself. Anyway, what this does, is allow you to get your photo’s from Zen Photo into your wordpress blog. It is built into the visual editor (tiny mce).

I have been working on a gallery with Zen Photo with my Cyberward theme. Still trying to decide what I want to do with it, but I think that I will move to migrate my family photos over to Zen Photo instead of Gallery.

Zen Photo just seems better in my opinion. Gallery (actually Gallery2) seems slow and burdened. Too many things activated and going on by default.¬† Zen Photo has fewer plugins, but that’s ok by me. It seems much easier to hack on too. I guess now I just need to time to do this.

I now have a first version of CwExif that can be downloaded. This is a new Wordpress plugin that will show exif data for an image uploaded to the wordpress library in the title tag. There is a button on the media admin screen that will take the exif data and put it into the title tag. On hover, the data will be displayed.

This is just the first version. There is much more that I want to do with this plugin, but you have to start somewhere.

Get it here.

I got an iPhone recently, and I have to say that I love the thing. I have used more minutes of data plan than I have minutes of talk time. I like checking email/flickr/facebook/rss feeds when I have a minute without using a computer, or without needing a wi-fi connection. I will document some of the other plug-ins that I am using later, but right now I want to talk about Wordpress and iPhone/iTouch devices.

I was amazed that I could read my blog on the iPhone. I had to zoom in a bit, but it wasn’t too bad. I was happy. Then I started to wonder about creating a theme that is more suited to the iPhone screen. Then I did what all good programmers do before they start cooding. They Google. Sure enough, I found WPTouch.

If you have an iPhone/iTouch, come back and take a look. You won’t believe it until you see it.

This plugin for wordpress intercepts when an iPhone is accessing your blog, and replaces it with a theme that looks like an iPhone application. Amazing. Using a little javascript, it even has menus, ¬†and the comments work just fine. It does make your site a little generic. It has the ability in the admin screen to adjust the colors, but I haven’t played with it yet. I would like to modify the header, but I’ll leave that for another day.

I installed version 1.7.5 from the plugin repository on wordpress .

So, what if you want to make a post? There’s a plugin for that too. I have installed an application on the iPone called Wordpress for iPhone. This app provides a simple interface to allow posting to your blog. There are lots of features available, but some things are left wanting. It would be nice to be able to add pictures from your wordpress gallery, but it looks like you can only add pictures from the iphone. Both your synched photo’s, and your camera. You can save drafts locally, but not edit ones from your site. The editor isn’t the “visual” editor from your site, it is the html editor, so links and images are in tags. I think it will be nice to have though.

So why didn’t I write this post from the iPhone? You type even this many words on that little virtual keyboard and tell me how long it would take you

Here is another plugin, Lameda, that uses the exif data that comes from the images as uploaded into Wordpress. Lets take a picture:

Here is the exif data when you put this tag in your post: [lameda_exif id=556]

The thing with this, is you still have to go into the post html and find out what the wordpress id of the image is. Still a bit of a pain. I like that it is pulling this from wordpress. Looks like wordpress stores this in the post_metadata table in an entry about the image. Not all data is saved, just some of the more basic ones like those shown. We just need a more automated, and visually appealing way to show it.