A CF Card Dies!

I recently came back home from a full day taking some shots of the Avon Region. I put the CF card into the card reader ready to upload and enjoy the viewing, but my Mac told me it couldn't read it. After reattempting a few times, I didn't waist any time in plugging my camera directly into the Mac to read the images. Once I was happy that my images were safely on my HD I tried to reformat and/or repair this low budget CF card. Ive reformatted this card about eight times but it didn't make the journey to the ninth. Time for a new CF card.

At this time of year everyone is sharing time with family and friends, and taking photos at family gatherings. So some take home lessons for me:

1. Memory cards die as do hard drives.... I keep multiple copies of all of my important images.
2. Don't keep all of your work on a 16Gb card - it's not a long term storage device. Use a number of smaller cards just in case one dies and transfer them after each photo trip or project.
3. Learn how to read images directly from your camera - just in case you need to.
4. Family gatherings are important times of the year, don't keep important images stored on your memory card - copy them to a safer place. 

Here are the images I could have lost. 

have fun! ☺

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Improving Your Images Step 7: Sharpenning the Image

We are finally here. After adjusting the WB, tweaking the colour space, removing noise and dead pixels, and adding pop and a vignette, we are ready to sharpen the image.

Sharpening is always needed because an image is a digital composition and so lines will rarely be sharp.

There are 1001 ways to sharpen an image. I will show you one that is quick and painless.

step 1: double click on the zoom button to increase zoom to 100%
step 2: with the background layer selected, go to "filters", select the "sharpen" option then locate the "unsharp mask" option.
Step 3: a dialogue box opens, set the amount to around 200, the radius to around 1.5 (but adjust to suit your needs) and the threshold to around 20% (the higher the value the softer the image). Experiment with these setting to see what works for your image.


that is it, we are done. All that is left now is to save the image as a TIFF.


We started with this image:

and finished up with this image:

What  do you think of the result? Id love to hear your thoughts.

have fun! ☺

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