It's Christmas time.

And the pressure is on to own more stuff.

:p

But the upside is that we get to go 'Christmas shopping' together in Oxford today, which will be really nice - just being out together is great.


On a different side of things, I'm not at all convinced that Win XP and I are going to be happy together, having enjoyed the freedoms and speed of Linux for so long. And it may be because I've installed it on an old drive, but it makes a real din, with the drive seemingly continuously seeking and reading instead of just loading into memory what's needed and then waiting quietly.

And a little more on software - the 'incompleteness' of image processing software is becoming frustrating, where every application does some things well and some badly, but no single package seems complete. If one manages photos well then it tends to lack powerful editing tools or fail at finishing the image. Another will finish the image well with great colour balance tools and sharpening (DigiKam for example) but lacks good RAW processing and deep editing. Another will edit deeply, but will be slow and clunky.

It seems that I'm far from the only one who sees image processing like this, and many (professional) photographers use multiple packages to work on an image; even (especially) those with full photoshop. It's irritating because it slows work down and tempts one to just knock out unfinished pictures.

Hey, I should be grateful really, that I have all this processing power available at all. It wasn't so long ago that I'd have to work up to 2 or 3 in the morning in our bathroom, printing stuff and using ticks from the immersion heater timer to count seconds for exposure. And as for removing unwanted objects.....


On a related front, I'm wondering about trying to create a wallpaper repository. Wonder if there would be any interest? Here's an example from my latest Pear Linux build.