Hello everyone. Thanks for your patience while I rebuilt my blogs from individual posts. Took most of a day, but the text is back in place.Now I have to gather up the images, and re-install them in their posts, and finally try to indicate when the posts were originally written. (Some go back almost two […]
I bought my first Apple in 1978; sat down with Woz’s Red Book (which I still have) and taught myself programming. In December of that year, I was awakened by a woman, unidentified, who has seen my advertisement for “Apple programming.” She asked what I thought of Apple’s own accounting software. I replied that I was not […]
AI will not destroy humanity – our faith in it is what will destroy us. Computer technology is amazing: it can do trillions of simple calculations in a second. But speed is not wisdom. Computer and technology do only dumb, blind, simple calculations. Being amazed by this is just like watching a magician – […]
(Revised 1/17/2026 to emphasized the use of the system default printer preset) Welcome back! Here’s yet another swing at the Presets issue by Don Quixote. Next year, I’ll get a life (maybe…) This is a followup to my first posting, which has all the technical details, here at https://valleau.art/blog/printer-presets-no-longer-working-right/ My presets have (knock on windmills) […]
Yes this is Way Off Topic, but there’s so much noise about it, I feel I had to add my own additional noise. The “Tic-Tac” UAP (Unidentified Arial Phenomena) is a UFO famously recorded by US Navy airmen, and the subject of a recent full scale investigation by the US Congress. Lots of video, lots […]
Dear Friends, As I push toward 80, I’ll admit I find it easier to stay home and make prints than to go out and take photos. And, as many of you know, one of my joys is making prints on paper, whether my own images or those of others. To that end, I’m please to […]
I recent ran across someone who didn’t understand what a raw file is, and had it confused with an image file. So, let’s take a quick look at it. Perhaps you’re old enough to remember the Weston Lightmeter: It had a “photovoltaic cell” (don’t panic) which is simply some goop which when exposed to light […]
NOTE: as of MacOS Tahoe 26.3, the part below related to using Colorsync no longer works for me. Please use Print-Tool instead. Printing a correct color target for custom profiling Here is how to print a target of patches, for use in creating a custom color profile. (Note: this requires that you either have […]
While dark environments, such as Apple’s Mojave, or the default settings for Photoshop & Pixelmator Pro, may look fashionable, they are terrible for editing photos. Why? Because they screw up your ability to see tones properly. Using a dark background will trick your mind into producing a print that has clogged up shadows, and is […]
When “good enough” isn’t: canned paper profiles In my business (making prints for museums and galleries) the usual prebuilt paper/ink profile, often described as “good enough” really isn’t. Instead I make my own profiles using X-Rite’s i1Publish Pro 3. If that applies to you as well, here are some tips: Printing on expensive paper […]
Let’s say you’ve just made a print of your latest image, but how do you know what it -really- looks like? You would not take a flashlight and cover the end with blue cellophane, and shine it on the print, because it would trash all the other colors. To get a more rational view, you […]