RAW

Phase One, makers of the RAW image converter Capture One, have been moving away from the consumer market. They still offer their professional level Capture One Pro, but the cheaper products have been relegated to the "software archive" area.

For those of you who aren't into serious photography, RAW is a set of image formats containing unprocessed data from a camera's imaging sensor. When you shoot in RAW mode the images stored in your camera have not been compressed into JPEG format. RAW preserves more image information and allows you to do much more sophisticated post-processing on your computer before finally converting to JPEG or TIFF for display or printing. You can do much better exposure adjustments with the extra information provided in RAW, pulling out details that otherwise would have been blown out or lost in the shadows.

Several of my Canon-loving friends and I have beeing usingPhase One for years. For a time it was offered for $99 and was the fastest and best RAW converter out there. Since then, the RAW converter for Adobe Photoshop has been dominating the market.

And since I'm trying to eliminate the need to boot into Windows (or even fire up the VM, for that matter) I went looking at alternative RAW converters. I actually tried to move my Capture One license to a new Windows XP installation under VirtualBox but was denied a license since I've hit my installation limit. Bah.

My current favorite alternative is RawStudio. It's a free, open source converter for Linux. It's not as fully-featured as Capture One, but it does the job and is reasonably fast with conversions, though the previews are a bit poky.
Jim on 11.26.09 @ 10:02 AM ET [link]

eee

In an attempt to reduce my monthly electric bill I replaced both my basement web & mail server and my primary desktop machine with a low-power Eee Box machine. This is a nice, small Intel Atom N270 based system that draws no more than 20 watts, which is low enough to keep on 24/7.

The only addition I made to the stock Eee Box was to add an extra gig of memory for a total of 2GB. And I wiped the disk and installed the latest Ubuntu 9.10 Linux release.

The server machine it was replacing was an ancient PIII 800MHz system that I had picked up from the MIT flea a couple of years ago. The 1.6 GHz Atom, though a wimpy processor by today's standards, blows the PIII out of the water. The desktop machine it replaced was a 1.6 GHz P4, which seems to be roughly equal in performance, so no loss there either.

And I'm not going to even dual-boot the Eee Box -- Windows XP runs fairly well in Sun's VirtualBox. It remains to be seen how well photo tools like PhaseOne and Paint Shop Pro will run in the VM, though.

Overall, the Eee Box is a great machine. It's small, quiet, reasonably powerful, and cost only $280, shipped. The only thing you need to add is a monitor. It does come with a cheap keyboard and mouse, which immediately went onto my junk pile.

Jim on 11.04.09 @ 09:51 AM ET [link]