RAW color space

A very interesting question popped up on Flickr: Is there any technical advantage of specifying AdobeRGB or sRGB in a Camera RAW file?

Almost all digital cameras obtains color by placing a color filter in front of identically constructed photodiodes. The RAW file just stores digitization of those monochromatic values. Color profile information on a RAW file is stored in the metadata, not applied to the file itself. So there is no technical difference between the two profiles besides hinting to your image processing applications your preferred color space.

There is a slight theoretical exception here: the RAW format isn’t a standard so there is no reason why a camera manufacturer couldn’t record different raw data based on the intended color space. This might be advantageous in a camera like the Nikon D200, which does color processing in analog space before digitization. The intended color space could theoretically provide hints to the camera so as to minimize interpolation to the resulting color space.

Of course, this doesn’t happen. If Nikon did such a thing, Adobe would probably have a conniption and call it “encryption.” Sometimes I wonder if Nikon’s White Balance code page in the D200 was intended to give Nikon engineers the flexibility to take advantage of this camera trait—I know of no other camera that uses white balance information to modify digitization—in a future firmware release…and corresponding Capture NX update.

Now we’ll never know.

[Adobe Camera RAW and color profiling after the jump]Continue reading →

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Javascript monitoring

Yesterday my friend Dave added his blog to Technorati, he sent me this e-mail:

Rank: 2,357,164 (0 links from 0 sites)
That would put me in last place. You can help.

Hopefully this blog entry will fix that. 🙂

To not be a completely friend-serving post, I’ll mention that Dave has a short entry on Javascript watch(). A few months back I wanted to write a short blog entry on this little-known, highly-useful feature, but linking this blog entry saves me the trouble (and ups his vanity rating).

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Book Review: Tuesdays with Morrie

As the BART pulled in to the penultimate stop, I was half a dozen pages from the end of tuesdays with Morrie: an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson, a “long paper on what was learned” as the author comes to the terms with the slow deterioration and death of his favorite teacher.

An old lady who sat across from me for most of the train ride, looked directly into my eyes and said, “That is really good book.” She smiled.

“Yes. I have to stop reading now, because I’m liable to cry if I finish it.”

(I’ll confess my eyes were a little bit wet.)

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Plaxo Holiday borders

A couple days ago, Hong sent me an eCard announcing that Plaxo had the new holiday borders live on the Plaxo eCard site.

Plaxo has new holiday borders

Actually, he used my favorite new border, “snowflake”. Tiffany, Michael, and Martin did the design based on a template that Bill had suggested to me for the flowers border that he did.

(Okay, I also like the “sled” border, but that’s mostly because I had to tweak the rendering algorithm so that the watermark on the preview wouldn’t ruin the dog sled. The other new borders are confetti, giftbox, snowglobe, and pine.)

In my eCards talk, I should fix that slide that explains how I wrote the rendering engine that creates these borders. It’s so simple, but very hard to explain.

By the way, if you want to send one of these cards, go to Plaxo’s new Holiday eCards page, it’s a much more fun start point. (Thanks to Bill Scott and the YUI team for making my life easier.)

Posted on by tychay 1

Switching to Mac? Use Plaxo

Joseph sent me this article, in which the writer switches from Windows to a new MacBook Pro (the same one I own).

In doing so, he found the easiest way to import his Outlook contacts into Mac OS X Address Book was just by using Plaxo! While he was being tongue-in-cheek, I noticed Derik DeLong uses Plaxo as the Address Book store in a free dotMac service. (Like him, I still pay for my dotMac account, which is a carryover from the old free iTools days.)

Plaxo indeed a great way of importing your contacts between platforms. I use it every day to keep my Windows data in sync with my Macintosh and I can’t wait until the day my iCal calendar can sync with my work’s Exchange server via Plaxo.

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Not stating the obvious

Digg pointed out this article which states:

A committee of experts looked at all the possible excuses — biological differences in ability, hormonal influences, childrearing demands, and even differences in ambition — and found no good explanation for why women are being locked out [of science].

Umm, what about sexism? Or is that too obvious?

[Short biographies of three famous physicists after the jump]Continue reading →

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Console sales

I had an argument today where a kid at work was spouting the near-complete repertoire of game console myths. Here is an annotated list of facts:

Microsoft lost at least $4 billion on the original Xbox (not $2 billion as many claim).

Microsoft has rather consistently sold just south of 2 million Xbox 360 units a quarter, every quarter since its release. (I believe they might just barely break 2 million units this quarter.)

November sales worldwide:

  1. 664,000 Playstation 2
  2. 511,000 Microsoft Xbox360
  3. 476,000 Nintendo Wii (scarce)
  4. 197,000 Sony Playstation 3 (scarce)

Yes, that’s right, the Playstation 2, though six years old, is still the #1 selling console worldwide. Also the Wii has almost caught the Xbox 360 even though it was not available in Japan or Europe and for only 11 days in the United States and Canada!

Microsoft had expected the Xbox 360 to be profitable by mid 2007, but that is behind schedule and they won’t turn a profit until 2008.

[Reasons why after the jump.]
Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4