I’m not a vindictive person but I really was quite happy to read this story earlier in the week. Bill Lerach has been the bane of many a high-tech company for at least the last dozen years thanks to his law firm’s dubious modus operandi – suing companies whose stock price drops, claiming some form of illegal activity. These trumped up suits left companies spending their resources fighting legal battles when those resources could have been far better put to use running the company.
When I worked for Brooktree before it was acquired by Rockwell (before it spun off Conexant), Lerach and his cronies slapped a frivolous suit on us and I remember it causing all sorts of hassle.
It really feels good to find out that the impression many of us had of the guy turns out to be verifiably true – he is a crook.

Just before the exhibition opened last month, I uploaded all the images to ImageKind for sale. After the hassle of printing and framing the exhibition set, a one-stop-shop for the same thing struck me as a great idea. I had heard good things about ImageKind but had never actually seen the results of their printing. Yesterday, however, I received two prints that I ordered just to check out the quality and am pleased to say that they are outstanding. Even from the lower resolution images (4MP), the 11″x15″ prints are crystal clear with fabulous colour saturation. I strongly suspect I will be using them for any future framed prints based on this experience.

As you will probably have noticed, I’ve been playing with Photomatix from HDRSoft for a month or so now and I’m happy to report that I’m hugely impressed.

I originally bought the software to take some of the donkey-work out of creating blended pictures. In the past, I had used Photoshop layers and masks to blend together multiple exposures to give a single image with detail in both the darkest and lightest areas (like the Hamilton Pool image to the left). This manual process results in great pictures but is hugely time-consuming. Photomatix, however, will perform this magic automatically – merging multiple exposures of the same scene into a single 16- or 32-bit per sample image and then allowing you to remap the tones back into the usual 8-bit per sample range.
Although Photoshop CS3 also allows you to do this, for some reason, the results using Photomatix appear to me a great deal better. Contrast is higher, colours are more saturated and the overall image is generally just a lot more interesting looking. For comparison, here are two HDRs, one generated in Photoshop (on the left) and the same thing from Photomatix (on the right).

In this case I did, admittedly, set out for a more contrasty feel in the Photomatix version but it took a lot less effort to get where I wanted to go than using the Photoshop HDR tools.
Aside from doing what it is advertised for (and what I bought it for) extremely well, I discovered another ability of the software that so far has really proven most useful. The problem with true HDRs is that you have to (a) plan in advance that you want to create this kind of picture and take multiple exposures of the scene and (b) carry a tripod with you so that you can do this. However, if you shot in RAW format, Photomatix also allows you to open a single RAW file and perform some serious mucking around with the image, generating some quite startling results.

I had heard about this ability before but had not really comprehended how useful it would be. One thing that didn’t dawn on me at all, however, was that the same ability could be used not only to create somewhat outlandish, dramatic results but also to perform more subtle fixes to subpar images. The first image here, I had written off as unusable until I started playing with it in Photomatix. The second was a reasonable image to begin with but the tool brought out the detail in the sky, improved the general saturation and contrast and generally improved it a great deal.

Overall, then, I end up getting three tools in one at the bargain price of $85. The nice folks at HDRSoft are also offering a 15% discount to readers of this blog. Just enter coupon code “DaveWilson” when you buy the software from here. By way of full disclosure, I should point out that this is a win-win since I get a small commission on all sales using this code too.

By the way, if you think any of the images here are good, take a look at Trey Ratcliff’s site for some of the most outstanding examples of what you can do with Photomatix if you really know what you are doing.

After several years of using the default pMachine style sheet, I’ve finally got round to fiddling with it and changed some of the look and feel of the blog. I tend to feel that photos look better presented on a black background and, since I’m hardly ever blogging on the subject of PC video any more, I’ve dropped the obscure FOURCC references (which relate to video compression/decompression software in case you didn’t know). I hope you like the new look.

By the way, please let me know if you find anything weird (black text on a black background, that sort of thing) since it’s more than likely I’ve missed some changes that are necessary to finish the restyling job!

Culross Street 2, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Another of the summer holiday shots. This was taken in the picturesque village of Culross in Fife.

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Falkirk Wheel HDR, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

I’m still working through some of my images from last summer seeing what I can do with them using the new Photomatix software I got. I originally didn’t have much hope for this picture as a colour image since the day we visited, the weather was mostly dull and gray and the lighting very flat. I am very impressed, however, at how much colour Photomatix managed to coax out of the original dull image and I love the way that the contrast boost has brought out the pattern of the steel plates in the wheel.

If you are keen to see another take on this, you can click the image then look in my Scotland set on Flickr or take a look at a previous post here.