I've been developing my “workflow” in Photoshop Elements, and thought I'd share in case anyone is interested.  Before I jump in, let me just say that I highly recommend Scott Kelby's The Photoshop Elements Book for Digital Photographers.  It's a fanstatic step-by-step book that cuts through all of the theory and goes right to the heart of showing you how to do what you want to do.  If you want to learn the in's and out's of Elements, this not the book for you.  But if you want to immediately be productive in Elements and learn by doing, you can't go wrong.

Now for my workflow ..

1. Layer | New Adjustment Layer | Levels ...
1. Adjust the left and right sliders to the left and right edges of the histogram, respectively
2. Layer | New Adjustment Layer | Brightness/Contrast ...
1. Brightness -3, Contrast +7
3. Filter | Sharpen | Unsharp Mask
1. Amount 65%, Radius 4, Threshold 3

Some may say that my Unsharp Mask is a little aggressive, but this is what I developed when shooting up-close portraits of my kids and I tend to not get the focus exactly on the eyes.

I've been spending a lot of time chatting with a very kind and knowledgeable indivudal, Doug Kerr, on the subject of how my Digital Rebel calculates exposure when using a flash.  One of the most interesting aspects is that when taking a picture with flash, you are actually getting an exposure that consists of both ambient light and the flash.  This is illustrated this timeline (ignore the absolute times and treat them as relative:)

 

Consider a subject that is backlit.  If you take the picture without flash, you will end up with a silhouette of your main subject.  If, on the other hand, the camera allowed you to only use flash - and not ambient light from the background - your main subject would be properly exposed, but your background would be underexposed.  By combining the two - flash and ambient light - in a single exposure, you end up with both your main subject and the background properly exposed.

From my discussion with Doug, it goes deeper than this, but this was definitely enough to help me understand how flash interacts with the camera's main metering system.

Seems the problem may be a “feature” of ASP.NET.  I'm checking on this to find out for sure.  See http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=503316 for the discussion.

I've configured .Text to live in the root of http://www.casadehambone.com.  Unfortuantely, the httpHandler used by .Text tries to intercept all requests for ASP.NET content and interferes with any other ASP.NET application that might live beneath the root (as in, all of them.)  I've tried mucking around with the httpHandler and httpModule configuration to no avail.  Time to reach out to the discussion board.

Angelique and I went and saw First 50 Dates tonight.  It's not going to win any awards by a long shot, but it was entertaining and it moved me enough that I can say that I enjoyed it - especially the ending.  Definitely some Saturday Night Live throwback content that if removed would have increased the quality of the movie.  Still, it was great to get out with Angelique for a bit and enjoy dinner afterwards.

This was one tough printer to find!  Every place with the exception of a remote Office Depot is sold out.  Apparently the Epson Styuls Photo R300 is a little easier to come by, but not by much.  The Epson Stylus Photo R300M has the LCD preview display and front-panel media slots for CF, SD, etc.  Near as I can tell, they are exactly the same printer with the exception that the R300M comes with the LCD screen that you snap into the body of the printer.  The R300 appears to have all the connections, just lacking the display.

The reviews that I read of the printer states that it does an excellent job up to 8x10, surpassing that of store prints.  I firmly believe that it will be a printer that both my wife and I can use to great effect.  She'll throw CF cards from the Kodak DC4800 directly into the printer and print.  I'll touch up my high-end prints from my Canon EOS Digital Rebel in Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 and print.

It was a tough decision between this printer and the Canon i960 Photo Printer, but the deciding factor was the media slots, LCD preview.  Furthermore, I've got a couple of friends, Ryan and Jim, who are professional photographers and they swear by the Epson printers.  I'll set it up tonight in hopes of putting my Epson Stylus Color 777 to rest - or at least some place we can use it for one-off document printing.

For the longest time, I've had name resolution issues here at Casa dé Hambone.  Last night as a part of putting Casa dé Hambone on the Web, I made sure that DNS was properly configured internally.  Casa dé Hambone is running on Windows Server 2003 with dynamic DNS, offering up one set of resolutions internally while Network Solutions offers up the public resolutions to the rest of the Internet.  Thus far, I've eliminated my name resolutions problems and am connecting by FQDN to my internal machines once again.

I spent some time tonight after everyone was fast asleep setting up .TEXT for www.casadehambone.com.  Many thanks to Scott not only for .TEXT but for helping me through my little gotdotnet.com download fiasco.  Current plan of record is to use www.casadehambone.com for my personal blogging and blogs.msdn.com/kevinha for my professional blogging.

With the obligitory “test” post out of the way and noticing that it's almost 1:30AM, I'm off to bed.

Okay, one more post and then off to bed ... http://www.casadehambone.com/gallery was the start of my amateur photo gallery.  Technically, it's still there but it would seem that .Text has somehow interjected itself into the request processing cycle and now you get an error trying to reach it.  I'll ping Scott tomorrow in hopes that we can get this cleared up.  Could be as simple as the galleries feature of .Text is expecting to use the gallery subdirectory with already exists due to the installation of nGallery.