Archive for category Mac
Epson 2200 in Snow Leopard
Posted by therider in Mac, Photography, Software on January 27, 2010
The upgrade to Snow Leopard a few months back was smooth, except for one fatal thing. The colors from my Epson 2200 went from awesome in Leopard to downright awful, thanks to the third party Gutenprint driver. I only realized this mess today since I had been printing black and whites using the Quad Tone Rip (QTR) driver which kept producing neutral prints.
So I hit google and there it was, a pretty long forum thread on the very same issue. To my surprise I found that Epson indeed released Snow Leopard driver for the 2200 printer sometime in Nov 2009. I installed it, then removed and re-added the printer and voila, the colors are almost back to normal. The interface is actually much better than what I expected, and the advanced color setting panel actually worked (it was mangled up in the Gutenprint driver).
Now that I still had a little magenta cast (as opposed to horrible), I tweaked with the advanced color settings panel. Took down magenta to -9 and suddenly the grays started to look like gray. There is just one thing to be done in photoshop prior to printing. The brightness of the image has to be increased a little bit. A foolproof way to do this is to have a curves layer, with no adjustment, then setting the blending mode to screen with 50% opacity. That makes my color prints about same as what I see on my monitor. For black and white prints using QTR, the last step is not necessary, or maybe about 20% opacity will do.
Looking forward to some print sessions in the coming days.
Update: Magenta -12 works even better.
Update: Brightness +16 nearly eliminates the need to brighten the image using a 50% screen blended curves layer with no adjustments.
MAMP stop servers button doesn’t work
When you have to force shutdown your mac due to the sleep-wake hanging issue, the MAMP stop servers button stops working as well. The fix is simply clicking the preferences button, and then clicking ok. I picked up this tip from here: http://www.imventurer.com/2008/04/02/mamp-stop-servers-button-doesnt-work/
cdto – a nifty mac osx tool
In my digital photography workflow, I often need to use a shell in a directory fairly deep from the home dir. For example, I am at ~/Pictures/photography/portfolios/priti/2009-05-30-sf in the finder and want to cd to this folder at once. Found out two delightful options from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/420456/open-terminal-here-in-mac-os-finder
1. Copy an item from the finder using command-c, jump into the Terminal, type ‘cd ‘ and simply paste with command-v
2. cdto
The second option is working out perfectly for me.
The friggin’ mac is here !
Got my first ever mac – a shiny new mac book pro. And no, my wallet didn’t get lighter. Had a really long wait to get my POS windows laptop swapped to get this to actually use it for work. Did I say “work” ? Compared to the experience of using a mac, windows just seems a crappy environment to get any useful work done reliably. I had so many instances of the XP disappointing me at the times of need (slowing down, wireless acting up, freezing, blah blah) that I had to demote its use to only the Firefox browser 90% of the time. Even then I had to close it before putting to standby, else with 95.25% chance it would freeze up next day, wasting a good 30 min of my time.
At work, nothing could be better. I am now all up and energized to learn developing flash, and what is a better environment than OSX where everything works seamlessly. It is made for developers and artists and am loving every bit of it.
Now the mac is here, my dark days are gone. I am playing with it like a kid with a new toy, and not getting bored at all. The mac keeps stunning me with its interface and the fact that everything just plain works seems incredible. On the first day itself I took a bunch of pics using photo booth and made a fun movie using iMovie. What a hoot ! I am now thinking of taking actual movie clips along a storyline and try my hand at documentary making.
Here is the movie I made. Enjoy.
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Hi, I'm Joy. I am a developer at Yahoo! Finance. Besides having fun with software design, hacking and programming, I enjoy photography, woodworking and touring on a motorcycle. Read on, and welcome to my blog.
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