Photo editing on the iPad

For editing photos on the iPad - the tablet surprisingly comes with no real options and the built in photo browser is good for only basic reviews of collections, not even cropping and rotating. I found a large number of free, limited function apps, but none compare to the paid (cheap) app, Photogene.

This app lets me edit, adjust curves, saturation, crop and more in a non destructive manner, leaving the original image intact and only permanently applying changes to exported images. The app is well worth the small fee for the functionality and is the go to editor now for me.

heading up the mountain

I took these as I started up the mountain across the Danube, so you will see shots looking back across as I go higher. More to follow though...

 

 

 

 

More from Budapest

 

 

 

 

Lunch time in Budapest

 

While wandering around down down, I ran across this little hole in the wall cafe that looked fun. I got some lunch from a woman who spoke basically no English and me with no Hungarian. I ended up pantomiming to get what she was eating which turned out to be essentially raw bacon, onion and tomato on a baguette.It was pretty good!

Budapest - Walking around photos

 

While in Budapest, I took a bunch of photos, some of which I just ran across again and will post.

A cathedral in Budapest

 

Roo in technicolor

Beach bird

Adobe Photoshop CS support for NEF

Surprisingly, Photoshop CS4 does not support the RAW format from Nikon out of the box. I did discover that if you update the RAW converter here, you can then open and edit the NEF files.

One minor note on that topic - I had to manually copy the plug in to each of the plug in directories, for both 64 bit and 32 bit and restart to get it working, the install did not do it alone.

Sea Critters

Helpful tools for image work

I enjoy photography, and I like playing around in photoshop a bit so I run into a need for a few additional tools

• I need a good batch editor that can copy my RAW files from my D-90 to JPG with a high level of control.
• Meet IrfanView, the most simple, powerful FREE tool I have found.
• Knowing what fonts you have and what they look like at a glance is a huge timesaver and I looked a while for this one.
• I settled on AMP Font Viewer, and you can check it out here.
• To browse my galleries of images and launch the target images directly in photoshop, I like the integration of Windows Live photo gallery.

There are a handful more I will post about later, but it's amazing what's out there for free. I have an older version of photoshop and am looking forward to one day soon upgrading to the latest suite, but for now, this is working great. Here is the latest work in progress, I am making a poster for my son who is a Lacrosse (LAX) defense man.

I got the quote from looking around the net for lacrosse terms, and I got the Wildcat logo using a logo from one of the U13 sites as a base, then cloning it and making it vector art so I could scale it, selecting the resulting skeleton and dropping in the red fill. If I was a better free hand artist like my sister, I am sure I could have whipped something cool up, but this will do I think.

Walkway for the garden

When we visited Tom and Amy, we brought home a load of stone in the truck from their property (years ago, my grandparents place). I made a little walkway / sitting area for one of Jessica's gardens.

Visiting Tom and Amy

We recently got a chance to visit Tom and Amy and had such a nice day. The weather was perfect and so was the company. It was relaxing and fun, even factoring in 8 hours of travel time in the car with the babies.

Old photos from my USMC days

I ran across these photos some time ago and scanned them in. I had them in a small album that I had tossed in a box. Now my son is looking to head off to join the Corps... 

Zimmer and I in our barracks

The interior of one of the LAVs

An LAV (light armored vehicle) at the shop

A comm rig in the hummer

The inside of the comm shop - tech bench

My old barracks at EFTS

A perfect day

This past fall we went down to my sisters place and Tommy (my brother in law) and I spent part of the afternoon fishing before heading to dialysis. It was one of the best times I have had in a long time, and this was the pond we were on. The fish were biting, the company was great and the weather was perfect. Sometimes life gives you memories that are worth more then anything you could ever buy, and this was one of them. Dialysis seemed a rude intruder on our time, but even that was time spent together and when I see him as little as I do, I'll take what we can get. I'm looking forward to many more summer afternoons on the water.

Flowers in Florida...

Roo the angel

Really, how can you say no to a face like that?

Little Mommy

A while ago, I caught a look at Roo feeding her baby brother. I think the way the kids care for each other is the best, even when we have to remind them to not climb on each other.

Roo and Rocky

I love her total lack of fear. She loves to play with Rocky and the goats.

The gadget fixation starts young

Ametheny left her ipod out and her sister found it. What cracks me up is that at 2, she knows how to listen to it and work it. The bar has been raised I see.