indiboi.com

Quite long time ago I realized to my horror that this persistent green spot on my Nikon’s images happened to be a hot pixel… and upon ‘testing’ for them (by taking a solid black photo) I found several more. This was when my camera was under warranty, but I couldn’t risk not having it for when davey was here, so I never sent it in for ‘remapping’ …and basically just forgot about the problem because they’re easy enough to fix in The Gimp or Photoshop if necessary. I also planned on ‘upgrading’ to a more professional Nikon Digital anyway.

The hot pixel problem became apparent again when photographing Patrick in January, and really annoyed me enough yesterday when looking at the photos of Jon that I’d taken on Monday.

While doing some research into using Image Magick to create a ‘one step’ shell script to resize, rotate, border, & watermark my images I stumbled upon this fab little app/script, Jpegpixi. I didn’t realize that it came with a ‘tool’ to map out the hot pixels automatically, so I spent a seriously pathetic amount of time doing it manually… whoops.

Geeez! My little Nikon has such a fucked up CCD! I really think I damaged it when I was doing “bulb” exposures one night outside… if that’s actually possible, I just don’t know. According to the automatic mapping tool I have nine (9!!!) hot/stuck pixels. Of course I’ve only visibly noticed about three, so the other six are (and according to the coordinates) pretty insignificant. I think I want to run the test on my brother’s Nikon and see if it has an equally bad CCD… might do Patrick’s Canon too, just for the sake of comparision.

The good news is that jpegpixi seems to perfectly interpolate around the bad pixels, with no apparent loss of image quality, the weird splurts of neon just vanish. Of course once a ‘full’ sized photograph is reduced down from 300dpi to 72dpi the hot pixels vanish anyway, it’s only a major issue when printing or viewing at full resolution.

Writing of Printing… I need/want to print some photos, of course my general idea was to just upload them to either Apple or Shutterfly, etc, and order them that way, because it’s considerably more cost-effective than replacing my ink cartridges, but definitely cuts down on the ever important instant gratification factor. Considering that decent-quality printers (like my Epson Stylus Photo 820) are practically disposable these days (actually, my laser printer, hah, it’s CHEAPER to buy a new one than it is to replace the toner cartridge!!). Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to do… I don’t like the idea of tossing a printer just because the ink has run out, but it’s not that much more to just buy a new one, lol. Example being, the two cartridges for my Epson cost $50, a new Epson C84 (though I don’t know about its quality) is $80 after a $20 rebate. Maybe I should have splurged when I bought my new inkjet and bought one where it’d be ridiculous to replace when the ink ran out? ;) There are also printers that cost the same as replacing the ink… mostly HP stuff, don’t know about them though.

I still want a new digital camera though, but I’ve decided to go the Canon EOS digital route, as a Digital Rebel is approximately $1000 now, not including a lense, but I already have two EOS system lenses from my film Rebel. The photographer at my brother’s wedding was using a digital rebel… of course I don’t think he did a very good job, lol — his metering was WAY OFF in pretty much most of the photos. I need to look at the EXIF data to see if he was on automatic though. Granted the ambient lighting would have made for very difficult metering… lots of backlight situations, so if one wasn’t specifically choosing where to meter, by way of metering on the manually chosen focus area, well, it’d mean bad results. It’s still a swank camera though. :) My main thing, I suppose, is that I want a camera that is able to take quality images in very low light situations without adding a lot of noise.

My little ‘make ready for the web’ script is still a bit lacking, as I’m having a very difficult time trying to figure out how to use Image Magick’s border functions… though I do have it doing pretty much everything else. I need to tweak it a bit so that it will still work if the image isn’t at the preset resolution, etc. I think my main annoyance is that The Gimp doesn’t preserve EXIF data, and since both my gallery on ALP and deviantart can read the EXIF data, it kind of sucks that it is missing after resize and watermarking.