OT Whinge

If you still have your slides, have you checked them for a colour cast? I used Agfa CT18 in the early 80s as - like you - I liked its treatment of greens (and most of my photography was of plants). A few months ago I had a look and all the slides they had a purple/reddish cast; greens were almost entirely absent. I have been told that if I scanned these slides there is a Photoshop filter(?) which could normalise them. I don't however, have Photoshop (or Windows for that matter. I wonder if there's anything that Gimp could do with them).

In the mid 80s I changed to CT100 and then CT200. The colours in those are still ok.

Do not include me in that group. My mobile 'phone is brought out if I think I might need it, such as for safety when I am driving. It is rarely turned on, though. I will not be beholden to it at all times.

I had for a long time had a Pentax, but it became difficult to find suitable lenses, so I bought an Olympus OM-2, which did me well. I settled on a zoom lens, which gave me very useable pictures in many situations. This would have been in the 1980s. The Pentax now sits with a 300mm zoom lens permanently attached, good for wildlife.

My first digital camera was an early Canon, which used batteries rather as US Gas-guzzlers used fuel. I progresses through a couple more models, though. I now use a Canon compact camera, which has many more features than I need. I do appreciate the in-built Image Stabilisation technology, though. It lacks, of all things, manual focus, however. Oh well. I did buy a DSLR, but it has all the disadvantages of an SLR, with few advantages.

See above first paragraph .

Some 20 years ago I discovered that a number of my slides had something growing on them. I took the affected ones to a lab that developed slides via the E-6 process. There they suggested I have them unmount the slides and run them through the final bleach step of their E-6 process. They did this and by and large that was successful.

The slides (some of which are now more than 50 years old) appear to have retained their colours.

I regret the fact now I only ran a few reels of Kodachrome 64 through my cameras.

LOL. I am occasionally scanning them to digital

I went on holiday some years back and took my old film kit with me. To my surprise one camera back still had some kind of film in it. Probably around 15 years old. I shot the film and took it in for processing. It was terrible. I cant remover whether it was all green or no green. I took it to the local photo booth place and they scanned it and I set to work with Corel Paint. Result was acceptable.

I have found that the reds vanished years ago from all my cheap slide film, but Agfa and Fuji seem OK.

Gimp can and will do what you want, bit I never learnt enough to learn exactly how.

Exactly. It is a marvellous tool, but it has a steep learning curve, and I forget what I last learned after a few weeks/months, and have to do it all over again.

And they follow Microsoft's lead when updating it, moving things around, changing defaults. It took me a while yesterday to find how to remove the hard edge from the eraser, which never used to default to 'on'.

For beginners, this is a free course (7 hours). It includes a PDF of the accompanying book (which is about 16 quid if you want a hard copy).

I found it pretty good.

I'm sure it is, but I would still forget any lesson after a couple of weeks of non-use!

On 21 Sep 2024, Jethro_uk wrote

I read a lot of online news sites, but rarely click on the video reports even when they give the runtime. I really dislike the enforced linearity of video compared with text.

Undoubtedlyl, that's what reporters love about video -- it gives them control over the speed and sequencing of the story, as it's difficult for the viewer to scan ahead to find the interesting bits like you can do with text.

Reporter: "Let me tell you a story..."

Me: No thanks; just put it down in print so I can decide which bits I can skip through to reach the bits I'm interested in.

That's the same reason I hate tutorials on Youtube. I want to be able to jump back and forth as I might require, rather than be locked into the enforced sequence of a video. Give me a book format any time.

I have tried Gimp, but found Paint.net to be more intuitive (and just as free).

Paint.net is quick and easy for cropping, painting, repairing scratches and general cleaning up (freehand), re-sizing and changing the overall "canvas" size.

Changing colours is easier in Photoshop, but it's now very expensive for a low volume user.

I find that the second most common use I have for Gimp is merging two documents, to make one that is a combination of the two. And that is what I have to learn how to do each time, using Layers and things that I do not use anywhere else. The most common use I have for Gimp is to crop and resize images, and that is easy to do. Sometimes I need to rotate and change perspective, but they are all simple and easy to invoke.

I remember when the firm bought a legal copy of corel draw and I borrowed the videotape!

Learned more in 2 hours than the previous 12 years.

If you thin the GIMP is weird try Blender...

Similar here.

I go a bit further using the curve tool to set grayscale scans to black and white and generally increase contrast, and I have played around with color changing tools but it really is arcane.

I dislike videos that take 10 minutes to answer "what is 2+2".

The answer is "it depends"; it could be 11 or 4.

Paint.net does layering!