December 8, 2003

I admit it. I spent the last three days buried in my office - chained to my computer, deeply entrenched in the bowels of Photoshop, and enchanted by my new camera.

I found out about the power and flexibility of a Photoshop function called "curves".

I delighted in the never-seen-before sharpness of a 8 x 10 print from my camera. At 400 ISO, there was zero (and even my discriminate eye had to admit - really ZERO) grain. Without having to even apply a sharpening filter, I could see the fine lines of a person's facial faint wrinkles, the individual eyebrow hair - and yes, every skin blemish too. The truth can be cruel.

And yet I also faced a darker problem - the quirk that some of the images I downloaded from the 10D's memory card opened up very very dark in Photoshop. Almost indistinguishable, as a matter of fact. Yet all the while, they looked just perfect in the camera's LCD display. And most disturbingly - they were all shot under controlled studio conditions, with the exact same amount of flash, the same f-stop and shutterspeed, even the same ISO. Very, very strange ...