better way of seeing noise before image is printed?

Chris L Peterson:

Is your monitor reasonably calibrated with a gradient scale...

Gotta love what passes for display calibration in the Windows world,
what?

Don't bother to reply; I'm busy re-installing XP Pro and don't have
time to read much. "Fatal error" in a popular astronomy app which I
decline to name destroyed the system. My favorite MS Engineer sez there
is no fix but to reinstall from scratch.

Could this happen to OS X? /Absolutely/ . Usually reliable sources
report that an OS X installation crashed in Roswell, NM, back in '02.
But the report out of Mongolia last year turned out to be false; it
seems that a bad Internet connection caused a message to read
"...crashed my Mac..." when the sender actually wrote "...washed my
yak..."

Davoud

"Before you begin, gather your Windows and application CD-ROMs. Back up
your data files (just to be safe), and then clear two days off your
calendar."
PC World

"That's BS. I've done a lot of reinstalls in under 12 hours.
-My neighbor

"You always hear how Maczealots hate Windows. They don't know what
they're talking about. Only dyed-in-the-wool Windows users truly hate
Windows."
- IT Manager

--
usenet *at* davidillig dawt com

On Mon, 05 Mar 2007 02:42:35 GMT, Davoud wrote:

Is your monitor reasonably calibrated with a gradient scale...

Gotta love what passes for display calibration in the Windows world,
what?

Well, this is exactly how you do a cursory test of basic calibration on
a Mac, too. If you want a first rate calibration, you use a colorimeter
(on a Mac, or a PC). However, I assumed the OP probably didn't have one
of those, hence the suggested test.

BTW, for all I know he's using a Mac. They aren't intrinsically
calibrated any better than a PC running XP.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

Chris L Peterson:
Is your monitor reasonably calibrated with a gradient scale...

Davoud:
Gotta love what passes for display calibration in the Windows world,
what?

Chris L Peterson:
Well, this is exactly how you do a cursory test of basic calibration on
a Mac, too.

Bzzzzzzt! Waaaay wrong. There ya go again, talking about that subject
about which you have demonstrated -- time and again -- that you known
nothing whatsoever. Nothing wrong with that; none of them things in
Colorado, anyway.

I said you didn't need to reply, but you had to. OK. I'm yielding the
last word to you, because you always have it by wearing your
interlocutor down one way or another. And I really am busy with what I
said I was busy with. I /do/ know something doing that because I've
done it a lot, for myself and for others!

Davoud

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/colorsync/

--
usenet *at* davidillig dawt com

On Mar 4, 1:43 pm, "Jason Albertson" wrote:
I can't seem to see the noise very well until after an
image is printed.

Jason, tell us how you are printing your images. Do you have your own
photo printer? Do you take them down to the local photo shop? -
Canopus56

In article et,
"Jason Albertson" wrote:

wrote in message
ps.com...
Some of the soft ware routines, (i.e. Max DL or AIP4WIN?) alow you
to measure the statistics in a specific and controlled region of the
image. Pick a region of the dark sky and measure the std. dev. Hope
this helps.


Can Photoshop show noise statistics? I can see how a certain level of noise
in the form of a number could be beneficial for printing purposes.

Not as such AFAIK, but the Histogram palette gives pixel counts &c. for
each brightness level.

--
Odysseus

"Davoud" wrote:

Gotta love what passes for display calibration in the Windows world,
what?

Agreed. The built-in display calibrator is much easier to use than having
to download arcane third-party calibration utilities on Windows.

Don't bother to reply; I'm busy re-installing XP Pro and don't have
time to read much. "Fatal error" in a popular astronomy app which I
decline to name destroyed the system. My favorite MS Engineer sez there
is no fix but to reinstall from scratch.

Is that XP installation on your MacBook Pro, the one where you can't
use OS X because the Finder doesn't start?

rodrian wrote:
"Davoud" wrote:

Gotta love what passes for display calibration in the Windows world,
what?

Agreed. The built-in display calibrator is much easier to use than having
to download arcane third-party calibration utilities on Windows.

Don't bother to reply; I'm busy re-installing XP Pro and don't have
time to read much. "Fatal error" in a popular astronomy app which I
decline to name destroyed the system. My favorite MS Engineer sez there
is no fix but to reinstall from scratch.

Is that XP installation on your MacBook Pro, the one where you can't
use OS X because the Finder doesn't start?






I actually have to laugh here
Kinda funny seeing Davoud having fun
with windows, very funny !!
(I mean, here is mr. mac using an OS he
cant stand, and obviously having fun at it)



And the irony in that he is fighting it
out with winbloze, and I am actually using
a mac to get here.

Whats this world coming to.........




-- AM

http://sctuser.home.comcast.net

Davoud
I'm busy re-installing XP Pro and don't have
time to read much. "Fatal error" in a popular astronomy app which I
decline to name destroyed the system. My favorite MS Engineer sez there
is no fix but to reinstall from scratch.

rodrian:
Is that XP installation on your MacBook Pro, the one where you can't
use OS X because the Finder doesn't start?

That's the one. And, I believe that I was frank in saying that it was
embarrassing that XP Pro was working nicely while OS X would not finish
booting. Curiously, people recommended re-installing the Mac OS! Turns
out that a couple of more runnings of Disk Utility in target disk mode
fixed the problem. Total time spent fixing the problem was about an
hour (including time spent posting to CSMS.) Since I had never seen
anything like this I was keen to learn what caused it. I didn't need to
be embarrassed at all. It turns out that the latest release a piece of
pre-release software that I am testing for a developer (astronomy
software, if that helps keep this on-topic) had a regressive bug that
corrupted a startup item and prevented Finder.app from starting. This
happened to a a couple of other testers at about the same time that it
happened to me, and they fixed their systems with the DU as well.

I didn't tell the whole story on CSMS because astronomy is somewhat OT
there. Here's what happened: Friday night, the night /before/ the
eclipse, was one of the clearest I have seen in this part of MD for a
/long/ time, and it wasn't very cold. So I went into my zerbatory and
got ready to photograph the eclipse. Mini DV mounted piggyback, the
whole shebang. When all was ready I took the opportunity to test the
latest pre-release. It seemed to work OK, so I closed the MB Pro
without shutting down and came inside. I had failed to disconnect the
remote device. It seems the software responded in an ungracious manner
to the computer sleeping while it was connected to the remote device. I
discovered the problem Saturday afternoon as I was preparing to take
the MB Pro back to the zerbatory (in hopes of good weather.) No big
thing in that regard; there are also three PowerBooks in the house that
are capable of controlling the mount and the camera. After I fixed the
problem the developer asked me if I would be willing to try to crash it
again by repeating what I had done so that he could compare the log
from the second crash (if there was one) to the first. Sure enough, the
same circumstances produced a second OS X crash. This one was easily
fixed by DU. Then I disabled a suspect 3rd-party startup item and tried
to crash the system again in the same manner, but it did not crash in
repeated tries. By yesterday afternoon the developer had fixed this
truly nasty bug and sleeping or shutting down without disconnecting is
now handled gracefully. On to the next bug...

In the interim, the XP Pro installation headed for the deep south when
a piece of well regarded astro software crashed.

/Saturday/ night the weather was lousy. We got a brief, fuzzy look at
the moon near the end of the partial eclipse and that was it.

In the current event, I called an acquaintance who lives not far away
and who is a software engineer with MS. He came over yesterday with
some system repair software and could do nothing, so recommend a
complete re-install. At least he sighed! Haven't seen a case yet where
mature retail software could corrupt OS X, especially to the point of
requiring a re-install. As I said, it certainly /could/ happen. But I
haven't seen it, and I see a /lot/ of systems.

This long-time MS engineer, by the way, is the one who likes to say
something like "Mac users don't know s**t. Only dyed-in-the-wool
Windows users can truly hate Windows."

Davoud

--
usenet *at* davidillig dawt com

AM wrote:
I actually have to laugh here
Kinda funny seeing Davoud having fun
with windows, very funny !!
(I mean, here is mr. mac using an OS he
cant stand, and obviously having fun at it)

And the irony in that he is fighting it
out with winbloze, and I am actually using
a mac to get here.

Whats this world coming to.........

The irony is not entirely lost on me, but a cumulative history of my
posts would reveal the following:

- I don't hate Windows or MS. I have said that Windows is a third-rate
rip-off of the Mac OS. It lacks the aesthetics, the usability, and the
stability of the Mac OS. This is a milder criticism than those from
hard-core Windows users that I read practically every day -- and I
don't go looking for these remarks. I got an eyeful while Googling for
fixes for my Windows corruption problem, though! When
Windows-development chief James Allchin told Steve Ballmer and Bill
Gates "I would buy a Mac if I didn't work for Microsoft" he revealed
that he knows which OS is the better one. He now says he was only
dramatizing a point about Longhorn/Vista development getting off-track.
Why didn't he say Atari/Commodore/Linux/OS 2?

- I've been using one version or another of Win for a long time, I
didn't begin using it at home until '98, when /Apple/ bundled VirtualPC
and Win 98 with a PowerBook G3. I installed it for a lark, used it a
few times to see what my Mac-made web sites looked like in MSIE, found
they looked fine, found that Win 98 was a /dog/ compared to Mac OS 8.6,
and deleted it.

- Bought a 2.6 GHz Vaio laptop w XP Pro a couple of years ago to run
astro apps. I could nitpick, but to be fair, it worked fine -- for what
it was. For /my/ purposes I didn't find anything it could do in amateur
astronomy that I couldn't do better with a Mac. While I only used it
occasionally, I kept it until I bought my MacBook Pro and, at about the
same time, an SBIG camera. Equinox 5, the excellent Mac all-in-one
software for controlling a 'scope and an SBIG camera, wasn't reliable
on Intel under Rosetta. But then came Equinox 6, a Universal Binary
planetarium app. The developer, Darryl Robertson, wisely separated the
SBIG control function into a new app that has just been released today
-- Equinox Image. I've been beta testing it and it will nicely serve my
needs. (Equinox Image is /not/ the beta app that brought my Mac down
over the weekend!) Meanwhile, I've been using CCDSoft. I would be
hard-pressed to criticize Software Bisque apps running under XP Pro.
TheSky 6 is showing its age, but Bisque knows that and is undertaking a
complete re-write for Mac and Windows. I once said that Bisque are the
/slowest/ developers anywhere, and Daniel Bisque said "Ouch," but I
stand by my assertion. Still, their stuff is good enough to be worth
waiting for, and the Bisque family are likable people.

- I have often chastised Mac users for refusing to use anything from
MS. IMO MS Excel and Microsoft Excel are, respectively, the best
spreadsheet and the best e-mail client in the galaxy. And I've tried
many brands of mice over the years, but I can't find any that I like as
well as the various MS wireless mice. I understand how personal such
choices are, but I also understand that it is foolish to cut one's nose
off to spite one's face.

What I haven't talked about publicly is that I don't much like
computers in general; It's what they do for me that I like. (I'm not
crazy about cars, either, but I like not having to walk or ride a horse
everywhere I go.) I'm not a computer expert /or/ an automobile expert,
and I don't want to be; I gravitate toward things that "just work," and
the better they work the more I will like them. Ergo, Mac.

This all started from a snide remark I made about people calibrating
Windows displays with a grayscale. I stand by that. What's the Windows
equivalent of ColorSync?

Finally: you want irony? I'm still rebuilding my Windows machine. A few
minutes ago Windows decided that one of my Bisque install CD's is not a
Windows disk. Workaround: put the disk into this 17" PowerBook, which
/does/ believe that it's a Windows disk, and copy the installer to the
MB Pro over the network.

Regards,

Davoud

Davoud wrote:
IMO MS Excel and Microsoft Excel are, respectively, the best
spreadsheet and the best e-mail client in the galaxy.

Oops. Make that read "...MS Excel and MS Entourage..."

Davoud

--
usenet *at* davidillig dawt com