Windows – CanonBlogger

After some serious burning of the night oil, I’ve got the last Newsletter of the year ready for release – if you want to get it, the push goes out at 10:30am eastern time. This means subscribers will also get a sneak peak of the final 5 items on the 25 for $50 gift guide list for 2010. That final list will be released here on the blog tomorrow with full photos and write-ups of each, so if you miss the newsletter, be sure to stop in on Wed. for that.

The final podcast for 2010 is recorded and in the gates, ready to be run on Thursday too, so this is going to be a week with lots of multimedia and distributions for everyone to download and enjoy as we head into the holiday season. On that note, I’ll be enjoying the rest of this week off (so no blog post on Friday), and hopefully get the rest of my own family and friends shopping completed in short order. What is it – ten shopping days left? If you’ve not started yet, time’s a wastin!

And, oh yeah, one last item to note…Lightroom has had it’s latest update to 3.3, and Camera Raw (for CS5 users) to 6.5! You can grab the downloads here for Lightroom, and on the Raw Converter the downloads are Windows and Mac specific.

So, on that note, I am going to let the powers of scheduled posts and media distribution do their work while I catch up on a few Z’s and other things! I will check in periodically for comments, questions, and other feedback items, but for the rest of the week, this baby’s on auto-pilot! Happy shooting, and we’ll see you next week…..unless of course anyone has any questionszzzzzzzzzzzzzzz?

As promised earlier this week, I finally have some photos to share. In the middle of the drive across country from SC to CO, I stopped a few times and saw some possibilities for panorama shots. Keeping in mind a couple tips, I switched my camera from landscape mode to vertical (a.k.a. portrait) mode, and captured several scenes on my 40D. Here is the first installment of my attempts at panoramas:

So, you’ll notice that the color on these is a little off, and the exposure is a little dark. I realized that I would have issues though, if I tried to expose for such a wide scene and range of colors across the entire panorama, most especially when trying to use the Photomerge function of Photoshop. So I set my White Balance to cloudy, my exposure to one frame, and just snapped across the image.

Here’s where it gets fun…I am running CS2 on my Mac laptop which cannot read my 40D files. My CS3 was set up on my Windows desktop. The Dell only has a 2.3 Ghz Celeron processor with 1.5 GB of RAM (I never got around to adding that last 512 before the move…). Needless to say, without being set up right, I really couldn’t process 8 shots each at 10MP (that’s a grand total of 80 MP in the final pano)! Even now with the portable AC on the Dell, it was screaming along as I ran the Photomerge utility through Bridge. Once I got the photomerge done, I stamped the layers (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E) and converted to a smart object.

I then double-clicked the smart object to edit in it’s own window. This image file was now at 480 MB! Needless to say, I did some layer adjustments for exposure, and curves, then saved the file. I was now back in the full pano composite. I saved the full pano as a PSD file, then flattened before making some downsizing. For the curious, the full size pano is over 8000px on the long side. For the purposes of the web, I did have to downsize it a little. Clearly downsizing to allow the blog to show it would be out of the question, so here’s links to a large sized version (1600px long side), and a xl sized (3200px long side).

Large Pano

Extra-Large Pano

So, here’s the question: was it worth it? 🙂

Tag: Windows

Some Friday Photos