Images of the quarry at St Peter's Village in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
My sister has been talking about St Peter’s Village for some time now, and with the kids just starting vacation, I was looking for something quick and easy to do.
After taking a scenic 30 minute drive, we parked and walked up the small little hill to the quarry, and from there I took these quick images.
Images of the quarry at St Peter’s Village in Chester County, Pennsylvania.Images of the quarry at St Peter’s Village in Chester County, Pennsylvania.Images of the quarry at St Peter’s Village in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
In image processing, I went with a higher saturation and vibrancy then normal, to emphasize the colors from the paints and chalk that have dripped down over the rocks from the graffiti art, but the greens of the trees became to “hot”.
I took the color image and converted into a Black and White layer, and from there I cut a mask to enhance the colors of the rocks.
Certainly not the image I had in mind when I stood there, but I kind of like it.
This morning, I started to “stitch” together a panoramic photo that I had taken the other day in Dowlin Forge Park, right here in Downingtown.
It is a series of (28) Canon RAW files (cr2) that were taken with a Canon T5i/700D, imported into Lightroom 5.3, and merged into a straightforward panorama image in Photoshop CS 6.
The actual merge of the (28) 16-bit files took about 3-4 minutes, which was A LOT better than last time, where I had to break-up the (42) files into groups of 10, merge them into one file, and repeat until all the files were merged.
Once the merged file was in Photoshop, with all 28 layers showing, my new machine was not even breathing too hard. Even with Lightroom and several Chrome instances, I was still only pushing 85% physical RAM and the CPU spiked at 15%!
From there, I tried to “Save As” a Standard Adobe PSD, and got the standard error dialog, showing the 2GB file size limitation.
Nothing new there…
Then I tried a “Save As” as an Adobe TIFF file, and this time the computer took a great deal longer, 5+ minutes, before there was an error, and during that time, Photoshop created a 10.6+ GB file tmp!
10.6 GB Adobe TMP file
To date, this is the single largest file that I have “Saved” in Photoshop!
Finally, I tried saving the file as a Standard Adobe PSB file, which is still a large file at 3.3+ GBs!
Main Adobe PSB file w/o Flatten
Time to Flatten some Layers!
With the Main PSB file open, I Flattened the Layers into 1, and did a “Save As” a PSB and then Re-Opened the Main PSB file, Flattened, and “Save As” again as TIFFs, and was very happy to see both files sizes were nearly identical at 638 MBs!
Comparison when Flattened
Conclusion
I conducted this test mostly out of personal curiosity and to see if files have remained consistent since the last time I did this experiment.
I expected the file size to go up, mainly because I was using 27-28 MB files created with the Canon T5i/700D vs 8-9 MB files with the Canon XTi.
If I were to estimate, the same 46 shoots done in 2011 could easily reach 6 GBs as a PSB file, and maybe create a 20-30 GB temp file at the same time.
Be sure that you have enough scratch disk space before you start.
It should be obvious that if you know a file is going to reach over 4 GBs, save it out as a PSB and go from there in the rest of your workflow.
The current maximum file file for an Adobe PSB is 4 exabytes – 300,000 x 300,000 pixels – 350 x 350 feet, which should keep you.
It is also nice to see that after Flattening, both PSB and TIFF files appear to be the same size.
Personally, I would keep the TIFF files, mostly because TIFF is NOT a proprietary file format, and in the future, if I want to move the file into another program, it will be easier.
Although I wrote my first post on PSB vs TIFF several years ago, I have yet to find out what IS all the Un-Saved data?
Duplicate “colors?” Non-Human readable code?
If you happen to know, please let me know.
I’m just very curious!
And finally, it should be noted, just like last time, the 2 PSB files do NOT show up in Lightroom, so you have to remember that they are there.
The TIFF file that was created, after Flattening all the Layers, DOES show up in Lightroom.
Adobe Bridge CS6 (5.0.2.4 x64) is able to show the Flattened PSB and TIFF, but NOT the larger Un-Flattened 3.3+ GB PSB file.
Hope you enjoyed my little file size observations.
If you have any questions or answers, please let me know!!
I was contacted by the nice folks at Kea Sigma Delta in Wellington, New Zealand, to do a review of their product SCRAP Photo Editor 1.2, which is currently only available on Windows XP, Vista, 7 & 8, and appears to be only a 32-bit application.
When I arrived on the site, keasigmadelta.co.nz , to download my free version of SCRAP Photo Editor 1.2, I am immediately told, that SCRAP is an acronym for Scale, Crop, Rotate and Publish, along with a very flashy 50 second YouTube video, extolling the virtues of the program.
Downloading the application is simple enough, but when I got to the point of Installation, I had to be especially careful, because of all the additional “Special Offers” that are included during the installation script.
When the First “Special Offer” window popped up, my security concerns were raised immediately, especially when the offer is for something called “SpeedyPC”. I do not wish to knock down this product, but it is not one that I normally run across. I did selected the Skip button to continue.
I was immediately confronted with the Second “Special Offer” for “blindbat”, again an application I’ve never heard of, that was even more forceful, in the sense, that it popped up a secondary window asking if I was sure that I wanted to skip the installation. Needless to say I declined.
Then there was the Third “Special Offer” (TidyNetwork) at which point I was seriously considering jettisoning the whole installation process, but I continued to the Fourth “Special Offer” (YAC (Yet Another Cleaner)), and finally into the main installation, which eventually launches your browser to a final “Congratulatory” page, thanking you for the installation.
Initial user experience – Very Poor
Once I was in the main program, I took a look at Task Manager and noticed that SCRAP had a small footprint of about 55 MB.
From there, I opened up a simple PNG file that I had recently done from the screenshot, to test out the basic capabilities of SCRAP.
Scale – In my current task, I did not need to do any scaling, but I did double-click on the scaling tool and was pleased to see an advanced set of tools presented in a simple dialog box.
Crop – Since cropping was the main nature of my task at hand, this tool was immediately put to use. I found it to work very similarly to those provided by other programs, but it was pleased to note, that after the cropping has been performed, the original image has not actually been cropped, i.e. non-destructive, until you save out the final file. A simple double-click of the crop tool, will also bring up the advanced dialog box, filled with numerous easy controls.
Rotate – I did not mean much use of the rotate tool during my testing, but the illustrations done in the video tutorials offer some very helpful tips on using the tool.
Publish – The most observable Publish tool, directs one to the Zazzle website, that offers photo based gifts, such as mugs and T-shirts. The Secondary publishing, is done by being able to saving various file formats (BMP/DIB/RLE, EXR, GIF, HDR, JPEG (2000), PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM, TARGA, TIFF), which still needs to be attached to a Posts or email, i.e. No Right Click and a Context menu pops-up to allow you to do whatever.
Conclusion –
After the initial irritation of the installation, SCRAP does what it sets out to do.
It can open up some 30 different file formats, perform very rudimentary geometric edits, and then quickly saves files back out, in a variety of formats, to be used by another application.
Will I keep this application on my computer after this review, very doubtfully.
Why?
I am already at Adobe software user, and I normally have either Lightroom or Photoshop open at any given time, so for me to have something like SCRAP, involved in my workflow, seems rather pointless.
If you need a quick utility to convert one file format to another and don’t have money to spend, then SCRAP may be of interest to you.
If you’re scanning software does not provide these fundamental functions, then definitely you should investigate further usage of this product.
I hope you enjoyed my review, or found it at least interesting, please feel free to leave me a comment in the section below.
