another day another break in into my car :(

I think I upgrade my insurance to anti theft insurance, it starts to make sense I think...

right now I finally start to work with OSX and after using it for 2/3 days I really have to say I will never ever buy a ppc again. I can run OSX/Linux/Windows on one system. It is very easy to use like a windows system, but give me the features of a unique system and last but not least it is very fast.

now I just waiting that you can install OSX on a IBM X60 some day and trying to find a good online source to get more out of it.

Another thing what I'm trying to figure out, how can I work on my pictures from different pc's and have a build in backup solution. My best idea is to setup a CVS server, but I'm honestly lacking HD space for this project. I got like 20GB of pictures right now and want to access them from any of our pc's at home. Maybe I can setup a mini mac to work as tiny server, but with a 40GB harddrive it is a little bit too limiting.

I'm also thinking to get rid of some pc's at home, right now we got:

3 x laptops
2 x desktops
1 x mini mac

and this for 2 persons is kinda much.

What we do with all this stuff?

2 x laptops needed to work at home
1 x laptop needed for lindsay to do her homework
1 x desktop so lindsay can play games or I can play once in a while

1 x old desktop collecting dust and to slow for everything (celeron 1GB, 64MB ram)
1 x mini mac, not in use since we got the third laptop, was used before as a mini database server for testing

after reading the first chapters in the book skin I decided to give it a go and took a couple of nice pictures of lindsay and started to play with them. And I must say, the book is really helpfull. For example how do you evaluate if the skin tone has a yellow cast or a green case?

For example in case of a yellow cast make sure that the midtones a related to each other like:

yellow is ca 10 units higher than magenta
cyan is arround 25 - 33% of the yellow value

So step one would be to define the white/black point using the curve function in photoshop and afterwards adjust the curve for blue to adjust the yellow/magenta ratio. In case of midtone adjustement you need to move the curve in the middle region till you have the correct ratios.

But before you start with this, it would be smart to calibrate your monitor. Cause right now the pictures are looking different on each of our systems :(

So I'm going to spent 70$ on a calibration tool and maybe I can share the cost with some friends who are most likley need the same tool. We will see

The pictures on the top are

(1) straight out of camera
(2) after lightroom adjustments
(3) after playing with photoshop a bit, like adjusting skin tones

The second series is basically a picture which was underexposed by 2 stops because my flash was out of battery so I tried my best to recover it. Which doesn't work very well in color, because It got to noisy so i tried to make a creative B&W out of it and I like the result so far, but some parts are still not perfect. Maybe I invest some more time later tonight.



(1) straight out of camera
(2) after lightroom adjustments to save the pictures
(3) after playing with photoshop a bit, like adjusting skin tones and converting to B&W