Tomorrow I’ll be at Canon’s authorized repair-shop to have them look at my 20D. It’s got what I think is hot pixels even at indoors shooting at 1 second shots. Not good. But, being nervous that my camera will be gone without replacement for a while, I am reading up on the subject. There are quite a number of programs and articles on reducing noise in digital images.

Oh, and thank you Alan Briot for your EOS 300D diary. It’s a great read, and introduced me to Lens baby (review). I’ll be experimenting more with my new 100mm f2.8 macro, though. But these babies look like very fun toys.

At the moment I use Canon’s EOSViewer Utillity and The GIMP for RAW handelling. While I need to figure out how to use The GIMP without getting heaps of artefacts/noise, I get quite often strange artefacts that are white curves that follow the light within a picture. To give an example, look at this selfportrait (not the best portrait as my eyes are crossing). The first picture is using The GIMP:

The second one is using Canon’s software and then cropping it slightly in Photoshop:

Any suggestions to how NOT to get these white curve-artefacts with Canon’s software? What kind of RAW handelling software do you prefer, and what do the pictures look like after you’ve exported them to jpeg?

According to DPReview: the P-2000 is a very well-designed, very sophisticated and very desirable addition to any serious digital photographer’s gadget bag. My conclusion from reading their review: drool Good luck to Epson with the RAW support. My 20D is already supported, but it seems they have just a little further to go.

Oh, and merry christmas to everyone coming by my blog

I’ve been using UFRaw, a GIMP plugin to work with the RAW shot of the moon. The images was quite under-exposed to start with, but still it gives me very many colours in the sky:

It uses dcraw that I talked about earlier. Do you have any experience with dcraw or utillities based on it you’d like to share? I’ll spend some time learning this tool so that I can get better results than this redish sky.

At 13.42 today, the sun turned (Norwegian link)