My Web Presence

Here is a summary of my presence on the Internet, as of Oct 2009.

www.davebartrum.plus.com
My default web space at my PlusNet ISP account.  Nothing here but an almost blank index.html

www.bartrum.me.uk
My domain hosted at PlusNet, with these subsections:
    Bookmarks - PHP to maintain useful links for Dave, Maureen, Tim and Emma.
    PhotoGallery – First attempt at a photo gallery, using XML, XSLT and CSS.  If nothing else, this is pretty neat use of the technology.  Very simple XML data (containing no formatting information) is sent to the Browser, which then retrieves a separate XSLT stylesheet to translate the XML into standard XHTML, which itself references a CSS sytlesheet.
    PhotoMagDatabase - Partial built MySQL database of Digital Photo magazines.
    PhotoBlog – Some useful info about digital photography, in an editable page.
    Photos – More recent attempt at photo gallery using the powerful WordPress Blog software (based on PHP and MySQL).

www.upaheight.com
Website for Joe Embleton’s window cleaning business.  I built it with mostly HTML and some PHP.  It is also hosted at my ISP account on PlusNet.

davebartrum.wordpress.com
My most recent WordPress Blog at WordPress.com.
This contains various techy articles of mine.  You’re looking at it now!

www.davebartrum.co.uk
My most recent domain, hosted at FreeVirtualServers.com.
I plan to try out a Wiki at this site.  Perhaps DocuWiki.

www.flickr.com
Selection of my photos under Dave Bartrum at Flickr.

Full image after Photoshop

Posts To Do

Here are some topics I’d like to cover:

1. My experience of using C# for my photo uploader
2. CoolIris rant
3. My new Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet

Printing CD/DVD Labels

I recently tried to print a label for a DVD and here’s what I learned.

Printing directly onto the CD/DVD

My Canon iP4500 printer supports printing directly onto CD/DVDs, via a special tray, so long as the CD/DVD is printable. So I tried one option of taking a blank label, sticking it onto the DVD and then used Canon’s CD-LabelPrint software to print directly onto the DVD. This worked, however, the image came out a little pale and more significantly, it didn’t print on the inner ring, so I lost some of the JPG image I’d imported.

Update 4th Feb 2010

A newer version of CD-LabelPrint is now available, version 1.4.1.  This version now supports a new CD Type under “Select Paper” and Print Genre of “CD Label Print”, called “Wide Printable CD (12cm)”  This appears to extend the printing area to include the inner ring.  So this option is probably slightly easier than the Photoshop option below.

Printing to Labels on A4

My successful attempt just used Photoshop as follows:

1. Import JPG file into Photoshop.
2. Resize image to 120mm wide at 300dpi
3. My label paper has two CD/DVD labels down one side.  So I insert paper with labels on right side.  Actually this looks upside down, because my current settings have the paper in the rear loader with top of paper into the printer first.
4. In the Photoshop Print dialog, to print the top label (first into printer) set position to 21.93mm from top and 8.38mm from left.  For the bottom label, set position to 151.98mm from top and 8.38mm from left.  Oops I had Print Space Profile set to “Printer Color Management”, should probably have set something else like “Canon iP4500 series MP2″.
5. In the Printer Driver’s window, set paper to “high resolution paper”, Quality to high and let Photoshop do colour management, but increase intensity by 20.

Photoshop Tutorials

Photoshop tutorials

http://www.popphoto.com/photoprinters/4932/inkjet-printing-20.html

tv.adobe.com/product/photoshop/

Colour Management on my iP4500

This is an article of my experience with Colour Management on my Canon iP4500 inkjet printer.

Generally I use Photoshop to do the Colour Management and turn off the colour management in the Canon Printer Driver.

Some advice says using
RGB-sRGB IEC61966-2.1

Kirkland glossy photo paper from Costco.

http://www.elementsvillage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33966

http://forums.steves-digicams.com/photo-inkjet/147353-canon-ip-4500-printing-photoshop.html

I want to use Kirkland paper and some 3rd party inks (much cheaper than Canon original inks). I realise the results may not be quite as good as Canon inks with Canon paper, but I just want an ICC profile (or create one myself) for this combination, so I can images knowing what they’ll look like printed.

Looks like CS4 allows a Custom CMYK to be chosen in the Print Preview dialog. Or you can choose Working CMYK space. Either way, this should let me use a new CMYK profile that matches my paper and inks on my iP4500 printer. I just need obtain or to create an accurate ICC profile for my cheap inks and Kirkland paper.

Rotating and Clipping Video Files

How to easily rotate and clip short video files.

Even though I now have a nice Canon 450D Digital SLR, I still use my old Canon PowerShot A620 for family snaps and video clips. It takes nice video clips at 640×480 and 30fps. However, a common problem is that I take a video with the camera oriented in portrait. The resulting AVI file, when played with RealPlayer and other players, appears on its side, i.e. in landscape.

I use Picasa for managing/browsing my photos, so an easy way to fix this problem is to put the file into a folder that Picasa is “watching”. Start up Picasa and the new video file will quickly appear in the “Recently Updated” album. If you open this album you should see a thumbnail of the new file. Double-click on this to open Picasa’s video player. This is a nice utility for playing the video and making adjustments. See screenshot below.

You can easily rotate the video, truncate it or take a still image from it. I’ll not explain this any further, it’s quite intuitive. Once rotated and clipped, just export the file to save the new video. Note that it saves it under My Documents\My Pictures\Picasa\Exported Videos as a WMV format video.

Printing B+W

This is a short article on my experience of printing a b+w image.

I wanted to put four b+w photos into a frame for Christmas. One each of the kids and the dogs. Once selected and printed (at TESCO), three of the four pictures looked good, but one of Tim looked a bit goofy, so I decided to take a dedicated photo to replace it.

I got Tim to sit by the window with a silver reflector and I took a number of shots from my Canon 450D on a tripod. The images were taken in RAW, which after a little tweaking in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software, opened up Photoshop 7 with a TIFF file. This is the best of them:

Next, I used Photoshop to tidy up the image and turn into b+w. I used a combination of Channel Mixer adjustment layer, blurring and sharpening, to get to this (as it looked in Photoshop):
…add image from SD card…

I tried to print the image onto Photo Glossy paper, but this is notoriously difficult with an inkjet printer at home and I ended up with a blue/green cast. However the contrast and general look of the printed image was good. I was going to take the image into ASDA to get printed, so saved it as JPEG file (with max quality setting). Here is that file (without white border):

Without opening the this JPEG file, I took it to ASDA. They printed on semi-gloss (satin) paper for £1.20. But the print came back very dark. Here’s a photo of that print (now framed with the other three prints):
…take picture and insert image here…

I assumed at the time that this was a side effect of the fact that as a JPEG file with 8-bits per channel, since this image was b+w, this effectively meant the JPEG file had only 256 shades of gray per pixel. However, the printed image was even darker than the JPEG file viewed in InfraView, Picassa or Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Interestingly, Photoshop displays the image more brightly than these other viewers. Perhaps due to dot gain! I need to explore more…

Check out this Yahoo group

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint/message/51142

Good SingStar

Rocks – Some good ones
Singstar – Mix of good and tacky
Rock Ballads – Lots of classics here, good for mum and dad
Legends – Mostly cheesy, couple of good ones
Queen – Brilliant of course
80’s – All the classics, bit cheesy
90’s – Not bad, lots of well known songs
Anthems – looks too tacky
Party – well cheesy, naff
Pop Hits – Just what it says, good for Emma

Links to try

www.measurementlab.net – google’s broadband monitoring tool.
www.thegamehomepage.com/play/scriball – line drawing game
tinyurl.com/illusion207 – optical illusions
tinyurl.com/patrese1 – F1 driver takes wife for spin
www.ibood.co.uk – e-tailer sells just one type of product per day.
www.101holidays.co.uk – Inspirational holidays
www.myvouchercodes.co.uk – Vouchers
www.topgear.com/uk – good clips.
www.whatdigitalcamera.com – many reviews of cameras
www.leapfish.com – new way to search?

Sites showing how much of your personal info is avail online:
www.yasni.co.uk
www.pipl.com – best?
wink.com/uk-people-search
www.yoname.com

tinyurl.com/dolphin207 – nice backdrop for Emma

tinyurl.com/pyr207 – nice backdrop for Tim

www.fotosketcher.com – Nice utility for producing artwork (pencil, pen and ink) from photos.

www.gmx.com – Award winning email

www.moonfruit.com – Good website builder.

www.extensoft.com/?p=free_video_converter – simple editing of home videos.

Photo manipulation
www.debugmode.com/winmorph
www.popims.fr/en
www.vicman.net
www.gimp.org

www.teamviewer.com – simple no-install remote control

Video Links

The Time Machine – Short interactive video story about some blokes and an unusual time machine. Web User Magazine Feb 2009.

Lucky Escape – Short story. Web User Magazine Feb 2009.

The Formorian – Short story. Web User Magazine Feb 2009.

Tyne at dawn

Tyne at dawn, originally uploaded by Dave Bartrum.

Created this blog entry from flickr.com

Using Picasa and Flickr

This post covers how I’ve been using Photoshop, Picasa, Google Web Albums and Flickr.