Quick highlight recovery from RAW files

On a recent trip to Yosemite to capture the waterfalls, I used an ND4 on my D300 to give a slower shutter speed. In some shots the mixed (full sun and shade) lighting caused the highlights to blow.

The RAW converter supplied, Capture NX has highlight recovery capability of up to 2 stops.

Here's the original jpg (I always shoot RAW + basic jpg).


and here's the detail of the blown area


photoshop levels shows the damage


Here's what it looks like in Capture NX


First save the file as .tif with no adjustment.

Then we need to recover the highlights and save as a different file. We'll combine them later.

Drill down into RAW adjustment


and move the slider to -2


gives the following result


Save as .tif, and then open both files in photoshop. On the file that was converted with no changes, drag the layer onto the the file that we converted with the recovery ie put the straight conversion over the recovered highlights layer.

Add a layer mask, and then paint on the mask to selectively reveal the recovered layer below. I use a brush with about 30% opacity and 30% flow. Zoom in and use a brush size to allow you to gradually build up the effect. I found 50 pixels about the right size.


And here's the final result

Slow motion / speeding up with Quicktime Pro

Usually if you want to slow mo or speed up a clip you need a full editor eg Final Cut. Thats expensive for an occasional requirement.

There is a way to do this usng only Quicktime Pro.

Say your movie lasts 30 seconds, but you want to stretch it to 1 minute.

1 - create a new empty movie from file>new player

2 - in your source, select all and the select copy

3 - swith to the new player and paste, and then paste again

this gives you a 1 minute movie, but everything doubled.

4 - in the new player do apple-j, click on the video track, and press delete

5 - switch back to the source and copy again

6 - switch back to the new player and this time from the edit menu select "add to selection & scale"

This causes your pasted movie to be stretch (scaled) to the length of the new player, which we made double.

Blackberry auto on / off problems

It seems people fall into 2 categories when it comes to Blackberries. Either use them 24/7 or can leave them.

I'm in the latter category so I use the auto on / of feature. But I was having problems, especially when I changed timezone. Basically it seemed that the Blackberry would turn on at some time of its own choosing, which if you are say 8 timezones away meant it was coming on at midnight, and then buzzing through the night.

After some investigation it seems that its the calendar application that does this, basically the OS overrides the on/off setting to wake you up for meetings you will not attend.

There is a way to avoid this, which is to turn off the reminder for these middle of the night events.

Or, you can have your Blackberry out of its leather case so it doesn't buzz.

Or, you can pull the battery, if you don't mind the 5 minute start up.

Bulk changing labels in Blogger

Say you decide to change the naming scheme of your labels, so you need to change one label into another.

You cannot directly do this, but what you can do is select all the posts with a given label, and apply a news label to them, and then remove the ld label. The help posting http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=50644 tells you how.

Dalton Computer Dead Reckoning 4A

Ahhhh finding one of these brought back some memories!

The Dalton Computer Dead Reckoning 4A Ref. 6B/2645 originally designed in the 1950s. I'm sure our had slower speed sliders ie that didn't go to 800mph? But my memory is fuzzy.

I could get a fixed depart out in less than 2 minutes.

Those were the days!

Microsoft - a Kurse?

Saw this in Zurich - someone seems to think so! A curse or kurse?

Apple OSX - securely erasing disks

Its well known that thee are techniques that allow the retrieval of data from supposedly "erased" disks.

If you use OSX and you would like to make the recovery of data harder eg you are selling or giving away a computer and you wish to make sure that all your credit card, medical and bank data really is gone, you would use have Disk Utility because it has 2 security options to help you.

You should choose either 7-pass or 35-pass if you wish to securely erase a volume. The complete list is:

• Don't Erase Data
• Zero Out Data
• 7-Pass Erase
• 35-Pass Erase

With the "Don't Erase Data" option, only directory information is erased, the data itself is left unchanged on the disk. The data WILL be recoverable and for some time. As noted in Apple article, this option is the quickest, but least secure.

The "Zero Out Data" option writes zeros over all data on the disk. The article claims that "this option provides good data security in a minimum amount of time" but this is not really true. If the only thing that matters to you is time maybe this will suffice.

The "7-Pass Erase" option is the first fairly secure option which conforms to DoD 5220.22-M. Of course this will take longer than the first 2 options. DoD 5220.22-M actually calls for 3 passes, but Disk Utility performs seven.

The most secure is the "35-Pass Erase" option which as you would guess writes data 35 times, not just zeros but using the Gutmann algorithm, which means 35 different patterns are written to the disk.