According to the early reviews, the new Superman is really good. If that's true, the company that made the movie should fire their advertising department—the trailer is a stink bomb.
I saw Cars on opening night, and thought it was excellent. Then I saw A Prairie Home Companion the next day. That's a very different film, so it was hard to gauge. It seemed surprising how they played up the musical performers Robin and Linda Williams, and Jearlyn Steele. But whatever, it worked out alright.
I've continued to play with my camera, though I'm feeling a bit restricted by the graphics tools in Linux. The Gimp only handles 8 bits per color channel (24-bit graphics), which is normally fine, but it can cause images to turn out rather grainy if you start tweaking the brightness or whatever. Supposedly my camera can do something like 12 bits per color channel (36-bit graphics or thereabouts), and it would be really nice to have all of that color range used at least in the background while editing.
I know, I know, Cinepaint is supposed to let you do that, but there are two problems with it—it's a fork of the old 1.x version of The Gimp, and it's one of the buggiest pieces of software I've ever tried to run.
I occasionally try to get into an open source project here or there, but always get stuck because of the complexity. This case will probably be no different, but I'd like to take a shot at working on The Gimp to get it to handle higher bit depths. There's been some backend work already for GEGL, but that project has not yet reached a point where it can be integrated. I seem to recall hearing about that years ago, and it's not done. Well, software development takes time...
I've also tried to get some high dynamic range tools to work, where you combine multiple images into high bit depths using command-line tools, then convert that image into an 8-bit-per-channel image using special algorithms that mimic or trick the human visual system. Done right, you can get images of amazing color and detail. Here are a few examples: one two three. Well, those were actually made with a Windows program called Photomatix, but the same thing is possible on the command line. Unfortunately, one of the programs just doesn't work on my system. I point it at the JPEGs from my camera, and it says "no image found". I suspect that might be happening because my camera puts a bad string in one of the EXIF data fields...
Well, I finally wrote something after a month or so, but I've got to get ready for work.
Posted by mike at June 20, 2006 08:42 AM | Movies , Photography , Software