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TIME – The Year In Review
my photo in TIME – once again… Spread in “The Year In Review”. Steve Jobs memorial, Apple Store @ 67th & Broadway, New York City
resizing film grain vs digital noise
Oh I’ll bet this has been asked and answered a billion times, but has anyone ever seen a good explanation between the difference between film grain and digital pixels.
What I mean by that is that you can take a nice “clean” digital image from a good sized noiseless sensor and with some interpolation you can go very large with it even though you are beginning with a file that is actually much smaller than a full 35mm scan which is about 78 MB (or somewhere in that area if it’s RGB and 16 bit).
But as I say – I can take a much smaller digital file and easily go to that size with an interpolation program without seeing any noise or artifacts.
I’m not really saying it clearly but I remember when I began the switch from film to digital I had an idea that those grains corresponded to pixels and they just don’t. Anyone ever go through the same conceptual enigma?
film grain is somewhat organic and random, where pixels are ordered in a rigid grid and normal linear (or cubic, bicubic) algorithms just work better with that sort of “order”.
if you take a film scan with organic grain, it pretty much interferes with the pixel pattern and your imaging software doesn’t know exactly what to do with that seemingly random mess.
also, film grain looks differently in the highlights, midtones and shadows and that makes it even harder to compensate.
digital noise on the other hand is somewhat ordered and repetitive, hence makes sensor specific/heat map noise reduction in camera possible… it also explains why noise reduction algorithms (there, math again) work so well with digital, but fail miserably with the randomness of film.
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Julia Dean workshop, New York June 24th to June 30th
thank you all & happy New Year
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crashplan boot disk space
one of the 4 internal HDDs (presumably the one with my user folder) in my MacPro tower has been extremely chatty for the past week – no wonder after two consecutive power failures and a bunch of itunes match downloading…
finally, I had the time to track the issue down… and I also noticed a suspicious decline in available space on the machine’s small-ish 120GB SSD boot disk with only 7GB available, I remember it being much roomier – 120GB is just about right for OSX, a bunch of applications and some room to breathe, but I think the last time it had like 50GB available… and all my other data is scattered around a bunch of HDDs.
first I thought it may just be a temp/scratch disk issue and I deleted some dormant apps (can you say flex and flash) and performed a deep cache cleaning, which gave me a gig-and-a-half back. only 8.5GB free? no way! sort by size revealed the top spot… something occupied 40+GB in the library
crashplan has the ability to do a remote backup from another machine (my laptop) and automatically occupies a space in the library on the boot disk (library/application support/crashplan). I always wondered where they stash their data… fortunately, crashplan’s software also has a setting (settings>general>inbound…) to place those inbound backups to another place, so I directed that to an external HDD instead, quit crashplan – reboot… and everything is quiet again… for now & back to listening to music while working…
well, I still have to track down RIMAlbumArtdaemon
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resizing film grain vs digital noise
Oh I’ll bet this has been asked and answered a billion times, but has anyone ever seen a good …
