Don’t use black backgrounds for editing photos

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 […]

Website copyrights – the actual truth

At the start of each year, a vast amount of misinformation starts rolling about the “font of all wisdom” (aka “internet”) about copyrights. In particular, lots of folks change the copyright date on their websites. Actually, that’s not-a-thing, and is just security theater. Specifically, the US Copyright office does not accept website copyrights, (although some […]

8K video changes still photography forever

I’m said this before, but I think it’s worth repeating as 8K video is on the verge of ubiquity: it will change still photography and traditional photography skills forever. An 8K video image is 7680 by 4320. That’s a 33 megapixel image. It completely does away with the skill needed to press the shutter button […]

copyrights for one and all!

Right up front: if you have a copyright issue, get a lawyer. You may think copyright is simple, but you’re wrong. If it were simple, there would not be a lot of very rich copyright lawyers, eh? As a creator, you automatically have a copyright once your expression is in tangible form. That won’t do […]

Backups with APFS & Catalina, Big Sur and Monterey

Some anecdotal bits. Backups with Catalina, Big Sur and now Monterey ain’t the beast they used to be. APFS, amoung other things (like any-volume, any-time) also create a hidden partition for your OS. This is mostly for security, but for whatever reason, it’s there. In a normal sense of “backup” you cannot back it up, […]

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 your own spectrophotometer, or are printing a target sent to you by someone you hired to create the custom profile for you.) A target image is composed of hundreds or thousands […]

Alexa keeps dropping my wifi switches

“Your switch isn’t responding. Please check its power and wifi connection.” ARRGGGHHHH!!! I spent month trying to resolve this. There is all kinds of voodoo on the web, but here’s what worked for me.   1) Find the least used channel from 1, 6 and 11 in your 2.4 settings. Use that channel.  (6 is usually […]

8-bit or 16-bit prints: there IS a difference!

  So, you’ve just spent hours, maybe days, working on an image, carefully using a 16-bit depth, to keep the colors perfect and the tones smooth. The sky will be perfect printed at 2880, and the clouds sublime. You save the file as 16-bit tif, and send it off to the printer. And it is […]

Welcome back!… reloaded sites are missing images

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 […]

There are no web pages on the internet ! (Just instructions on how to build one.)

That subject statement is true, and if you want to understand how websites work, here’s the most fundamental thing you can learn: Web pages exist like ghosts, only in your web-broswer. When you visit a website, it is not like seeing a painting  thru a window. The webpage itself does not exists in finished form on […]

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