Adobe Lightroom

Attn: Lawrence and other photographers! This is the tool for yous (if you haven’t got it already)! We finally got raw camera files working yesterday and have been playing around with them in Photoshop. Adobe has a new tool called ‘Lightroom’ in open beta right now – free download good until March or so.

Turn up the good,
turn down the suck! As the name suggests it’s meant for digital photo ‘development’, especially of raw files. Tweaking colour balance and lightness and such that with film would be done in the darkroom. So, I (Sarah) didn’t know this, but most fancyass digital cameras give you a choice to save images in a raw format that is unique to just about every model (and proprietary – grumble), but has a lot more information than the usual JPGs. It isn’t lossless bitmap quality, it’s more like.. well I can give you the best example:

You know, when you take a picture of a person’s face when the sun is behind them, the sky is all white and washed out? Even a lossless bitmap would have big patches of #FFFFFF in the sky and the best you can do is turn them into big patches of grey-blue instead. If you have the raw file, you can actually turn the exposure down, and suddenly clouds and hues appear – magic! The rest of the image would now be overexposed but you can easily adjust for that. Lightroom can do it all with a batch script, though it takes awhile to process each picture. It’s too much for our camera to do itself, so it uses a faster, dumber algorithm that sometimes results in big white splotches where the sky should be.

So – Lightroom has a nice interface, and really puts everything right where you can see it. Much easier to learn than Photoshop, in part because of the much smaller toolset. It does have its limits; you can’t fine tune curves enough or crank things up to 11, and there is no masking at all. But I just found a nifty dial to straighten photos without having to crop, and a crop tool that maintains the image ratio. Heaven!

We’re having fun with this, so please excuse if the next few pictures look a little oversaturated or surreal. Hell, there’s a vibrance dial: Vibrance = lots please!

Best Thai movie ever! (note: pool consists of 3 movies) You must all seek out and watch Last Life in the Universe when time allows. Amazingly beautiful. Not at all surprised to learn that the cinematographer was superfamous Christopher Doyle. I wonder what you have to do to get a guy like that for your film?

Director/writer Pen-Ek Ratanaruang made a second movie with Doyle called Invisible Waves that we’re downloading presently… or will be again once I relinquish the connection to BitLord.

Snorkling continues to be wonderful. We’ve been exploring the beaches up north from here and the visibility has been good. I’ve really grown an appreciation for the beauty of coral; the term “underwater garden” often comes to mind out there.

Put some new pics up, including more of puppies! Colin is busy taking pictures that contain both longtail boats and puppies. Hold on, I said something to Weas about it last night that sounded good: “noone can be frustrated with a puppy chewing her nose”.

Okay no, that wasn’t witty, I was just tired. And frustrated with Visual Source Safe, which as anyone who has ever used it knows is a sack of crap. But… ahhhh, puppies.

Okay so the yoga place up the street, in addition to offering courses on clairvoyance and astral projection, this spring will be hosting a week long workshop on Tantric Sex. You know, for those of you who needed another reason to come.

Those crazy yogans.

Today we continued our treck around the beaches of the island. This time we hit up the beach between Thong Sala and Ban Tai. It’s a big one. Pretty much covers the whole south coast.

There are alot of resorts along the beach but the beach is so long that it doesn’t feel crowded like Haad Salad.

We didn’t manage to treck the whole beach. In fact we didn’t even make it to Ban Tai before we hit a point where the beach, the tide, and the land didn’t really all get along. So being hungry we wandered up to the road to find some lunch. We found lunch in a seafood restaurant (redundant) that was very nice, overpriced and served bad food. The people running it where very nice though.

I have discovered that in Thailand the dumpier a place looks the cheaper the place is and the cheaper the place is the better the food is. Works for me!

mmm I smell lime. Sarah’s making coconut shakes with lime and the coconut we drank for breakfast (thanks beeya!).

We walked in from the beach and stopped by a little art gallery. They had a limited, but interesting, selection of local art. They also do copies of any famous canvas you like! They even have art books on hand to help you chose. Or they will turn a photo into an oil painting!

I would rather have something original that the artist thought vibrant. Although the picture into an oil idea is so crazy it might be cool.

Then we bought some food and a new bathingsuit/shorts (bottom fell out of the old ones at Haad Salad. awkward). On the way out of town we stopped by a little hidden beach we found last time we where in town (where the flower and ‘pede picture where taken) and did some swimming.

It is a beautiful beach. Small, empty, and surrounded by granite washed and sculpted by the sea.

Very nice.

I got some pictures I quite like. Mostly of thailand’s gift to photography: the longtail boat.

God damn crappy connection! Either you won’t see this at all or it’s going to be posted like ten times.

We watched a Korean horror movie last night – “The Ghost”. Like the name, the screenplay was terribly derivative of “The Ring”, “The Curse”, “The Eye”, etc. But the film was beautiful to watch and some of the directing was pretty cunning. Maybe they’re just trying to perfect the “The Something” movie then they can finally move on to something more original. How can a horror film be scary when you’ve seen it all before?

“The Ghost” – most likely coming soon to North American theatres in a scene-for-scene US remake.