Status-Q

Some patent lawyers sent me a few bits of paper this week.

I reckon there's well over 1000 pages here, shipped at, I imagine, vast expense all the way from Atlanta to my recycling bin here in Cambridge. The big box in the foreground brought them here. The slim envelope in the background is for returning the half-dozen pages that actually need my signature.

I'm not blaming this particular firm for this foolishness: they are probably obliged to provide me with hard copies by some outdated regulation kept in existence by extensive lobbying from FedEx and Xerox. But you'd think they could find an alternative. Like emailing PDFs. Especially since (a) I don't need to read them to sign the bits of paper and (b) their client is Google...

Anyway, now you know where the trees have gone.

One thing for which the Fujifilm cameras (such as my beloved X-Pro1) are known is their impressive on-board JPEG converter, which can produce sufficiently yummy images that many people who would otherwise shoot RAW just stick to JPEG with these devices.

I, however, want to stick with RAW, and I found that getting the best out of it takes rather more initial tweaking with the Fuji cameras than it did, say, with my Canon. I eventually settled on a small boost to the saturation (+13), and quite a large amount of sharpening (+60), and saved that as a Lightroom preset which I now apply as I import any images coming from the X-Pro1.

However, the biggest improvement came, I think, when Adobe Camera Raw (the engine behind Lightroom & Photoshop imports) was upgraded a couple of months ago. One of the easy-to-miss features was the inclusion of Fujifilm camera profiles which mimic the film emulation modes found in the camera. Even when I had upgraded and knew it was there, it was still a little tricky to find, but it's under the Camera Calibration section of the Develop module:

(click for full size)

I've found that experimenting with these profiles, and particularly using the VELVIA emulation while reducing my previous saturation setting a little, can bring much more richness to the colours.

Mrs Beltane ... was an elegant blue-haired, stiffly-moving woman of about sixty, who imagined herself to have seen better days.

I do like Barbara Pym.

There are three different organisations that send me their publication, called 'The Ring', from time to time. Yes, three different publications.

Each of them no doubt had a witty and original reason for coming up with the name, but I also can't help feeling that some classic text on "how to run a successful development office" must emphasise the need for names that make your members feel part of an elite circle, an inner ring...

Anyway, since these three are amongst the very few things that come through my door and don't go straight to the recycling, I must just get used to the fact that all my reading matter has this somewhat toroidal flavour.

But perhaps I need one ring to rule them all...

Wandlebury, this morning.