Daily Archives: Sun, 22 July, 2007

New Theme Time

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New Theme ScreenshotIt has been a quiet weekend here on the blogging front, but we have worked on a new theme – returning to a Stonehenge header picture and blue colour scheme. The site should now look like the screenshot. If it is radically different there is a problem or we have removed the theme 🙂

As always, there may be a few teething problems early on, so we really do appreciate it if you can take a moment to let us know if you encounter any problems. No matter how trivial you may think a problem is, if you tell us, we can try to fix it! One thing we will try to look at is page loading time. Our initial work around for this, is to increase the use of “read more” breaks in the content of posts on this page, but I am aware some people don’t like this, so please take a moment and let me know what you think.

[tags]General,Site Admin, Theme, Whydontyou, Blog[/tags]

HDR Photographs

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Still in a holiday mood, I have been playing with Photomatix trying to convert “normal” pictures into high dynamic range pictures (HDR – read more here and here). At the moment, I am certainly not even up to the beginner standard but I have learned a few things in the last couple of hours. Simply put, HDR is taking multiple pictures of the same scene at different exposures, then combining these exposures to make a single image.

For simple HDR type images, the most common methods (on windows, Linux users get a different set of joy and I have no idea about Macs) are to use Photoshop or Photomatix. In newer versions of Photoshop you have the option to either play with layers and blend your images (can get fantastic results but can also be very hit and miss) or use the Merge to HDR option (File -> Automate -> Merge to HDR in CS3). Sadly, personally, I have never had much success with the automatic option but you might manage it.

Alternatively there is a bit of software called Photomatix (Pro costs $99, Basic is Free) which does a similar job but includes “Tone Mapping.” Peter Hasitschka’s page gives more details (along with some fantastic images) so I wont go into detail here. Needless to say, the tone mapping can give you some amazing results, although I have only been playing with this for the last 30 minutes or so. So far it is worth every penny. Continue reading →