Tears Before Bedtime
Remind me to sort out other pictures by Kathleen that I’ve used this week. Most are mine, though.
Trust me, this picture is sharp at full size. Kathleen took it with her EOS Digital Rebel.
You’d have thought that I’d be able to download this image onto Canon’s ZoomBrowser EX application, which has already been loaded onto the laptop in order to accommodate my much more modest PowerShot A95. On the other, older laptop, as well as on the desktop at home, the same program services both cameras.
But the computer at hand has other ideas. It wants a disc. It craves installation.
<Heated discussion about the elements of planning for vacation.>
So much for ZoomBrowser EX. End of story? No. As we were struggling out the door toward lunch, Kathleen pulled a small bundle out of her bag. It included a piano-shaped device with a USB plug at the narrow end and a cavity for a memory card at the keyboard end. The small CD that came with it first demanded that I download Chinese characters and then told me that its drivers work only with Windows 98!!! (Exclamation marks signify Asian happy faces.) So I plugged the piano into the laptop anyway, sans benefit of driver – and it worked. All 267 images, most of them taken here last year and none of them ever deleted (evidently). It took a few minutes to download this crate of bytes, but we ran an end run around finicky Canon software!!! (More Asian happy faces.)
Problem was….
The images in the default viewer, Adobe Photoshop Album Starter, were awful. Blurry and indistinct – in a word, flou. This would never dou. And it didn’t have to. The problem turned out to be confined, not unreasonably, to the Album Starter, which is not, after all, a program that requires fantastic resolution. Viewed in Photoshop Elements, Kathleen’s kayaks were gloriously crisp and saturated with colors otherwise found only in a bowl of Kix.
<Phews all round.>Â Â
As the I Ching has it: “No Blame.”