February 27, 2004
I love my Kodak
I love my Kodak DC290. Originally, it was sold as a "semi-professional" digital camera. Probably because it represented, at the time, the pinnacle of digital design (this was several years ago). It's long since been surpassed but with the addition of some new lenses (so I can do macro photography of the watches I collect) and a new memory card (faster, bigger, stronger..) it has a new lease on life.
I still think it does a better job than most digitals at portraying colors really accurately. This particular old tractor had the most fascinating patina of rust. Combined with the surrounding greenery and the early morning light, I find it a sublime image. It makes me wish I had my SLR with me.
I am playing with the new Adobe Photoshop CS (yet another reason to give Adobe money) and I was distressed when this lovely photograph I took of an old tractor (see my earlier post on eagling up in Concrete) lost a lot of color detail when I "saved for Web". I was unable to save the color profile of the camera (which I presume Kodak has lovingly crafted) with the photo so it became desaturated in jpeg format. The alternative was an uncompressed format such as PNG but that is about 1.1Mb and I figure that is not an image most people want to download.
As an experiment, I tried "Save As" and found that the camera's color profile was automagically selected. At least on my laptop, the image still looks great.
Judge for yourself. If you're on high bandwidth, the PNG image is here (1.1Mb).
Posted by artandscience at February 27, 2004 08:15 AM