Yes, as it says above, this is CallMeAlan.uk, the personal website of a guy called, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, Alan.
alansworld {at} [gmail.com] will find me, should you care to discuss anything I've written about. I welcome any feedback.
This website has been tested NEGATIVE for coronavirus. However, the end of the world is at hand!
DJI, a wonderful Chinese company, are the manufacturers of the world's best drones and stabilised cameras of various descriptions and types.
But recently, maybe within the last 6 months, not sure, they released their Robomaster product, a supposedly programmable wheeled robot
vehicle. Beautifully made (by you - it arrives as a kit) but, in my humble opinion, it is unmerchantable, meaning it should never have been
released for sale. Please don't be tempted to splash out on one; you will probably regret it.
This is why
Following on from my previous item, in which I hoped I might have saved you 500 (dollars/pounds) by avoiding that robot,
I'm now going to advise you to save yourself 30 pounds per month, by avoiding an organisation called HelloFresh.
This is why
Sometimes I come across something so weird, strange, outrageous, funny, interesting, annoying or just different that I want to record it. So I thought I'd dedicate a page to such oddities. Here you'll find various stuff and randomness, some of which may be funny, some may be
thought-provoking. It won't hurt you to check it out.
My snippets
I talk about how I've reduced the vast number of RAW processing software packages down to just two that work well and work
quickly enough that you don't need to go get a coffee every time you click Process. It also happens that these only two
worthwhile applications are the only two which can work completely and efficiently with control surfaces.
Read about *proper* RAW software and control surfaces
Some December 2019 news. Anybody visiting my site, and who may understand, use, or read about RAW processing, will be aware of the product called
Capture One. It happens to be one of the only two *proper* and worthwhile packages out there, and I talk about it in this section
via the above link.
Keen RAW photographers who are familiar with C One may be aware that Phase One has now (4 Dec 2019) released the much-teased version 20
of Capture One. I had previously mentioned here that I had seen a beta pre-release of 20, but was unable to talk about what it
featured. Well, as of now, it is in general release. I'm not going into what's new as there's plenty of Youtube material out there.
However, as a very early initial personal comment, I must say that, wow, it's become sloooow! In version 10 I could twist a knob or push a
button on my control surface and see instant results. No longer. Increase the exposure and watch as the program slowly brightens
the picture in little hops and skips. Yawn. Trouble is, you think, oh, it needs a bit more, twist the knob further and bam! You've
grossly overshot the mark into an utter washout because your previous twist was still grinding away.
Hence - and I've been patient, tried everything, rebooted the computer, all of that - due it having become as slow as various other
RAW products I've trialled and rejected I must change my views on Capture One : There is now only one contender in the RAW processing
arena: Adobe Lightroom. I can no longer call Capture One one of my two worthwhile RAW products. Lightroom reigns supreme.
But in the latest news, December 2020: I was musing about the gradual demise of Capture One into the slow thing that is version 20. Its
awful slothfulness made it effectively unuseable. Then I recalled how good version 10 - long deleted from my Apps folder - was. I searched
forlornly and without much hope for the installer and Bingo! There it is, deep in the dark depths of one of my external drives. After ensuring
that there was no remaining trace of version 20 on my Mac I installed version 10. This is unbelievable! All the old well-remembered
speed is back. The overshoot is a thing of the past.
So I am promoting Capture One back to being one of my day-to-day RAW working products
I want to talk about the Sigma Quattro and Foveon sensors - what they are, how they differ from the more usual and normal Bayer sensors,
and about the difficulties and differences about processing their RAW files, which have the X3F extension. Let's learn about why you
won't be processing an X3F in Lightroom, ON1, Affinity or DxO, to name but a few. No, you're going to have take a different approach.
Read my article about Quattro / Foveon / X3F.