Tag Archives: photography

Just Odds (no Ends today)

Luna thought that Ron might suffer from a variety of this problem.

Awe-inspiring: a type II-P supernova caught in mid-burst. The explosion takes months, then hours, then no time at all. (Kind of like Hemingway’s character’s bankruptcy.)

An MIT course in how to make your own videos to publish on YouTube. (Ignore the headline.)

Finally, a beautiful video of undisturbed places. Trust me.

Photo Manipulation Tools

Here are some of my favorite tools for working with digital images.

Pixelmator. This is my go-to program for digital images, and someday they’ll ship 2.0 and it will be awesome.

Xee calls itself “a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser.” I agree. The best feature, for my money, is that it lets you losslessly rotate and crop JPEG images. You can do that with jpegtran too, but that’s a command-line tool. Those are great for batch jobs, but image cropping is almost always better done using an interactive GUI front-end.

Acorn is my second-favorite image editor. If Pixelmator wasn’t so darned good, this would be my favorite. Usually what brings me to Acorn is when I need to do something with filters and I can’t figure out how to do it in Pixelmator. The tech support is great, too.

Speaking of filters, I like to goof around with FX Photo Studio, too. MacPhun, the maker, also makes a cute one-trick-pony called Color Splash Studio which is worth the $2 I paid for it.

I also use a ton of different command line tools. I’ll write about those someday Real Soon Now.