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Digital Blue: QX3 Microscope

Zoom in on stuff - up to 200X The USB connected Computer Microscope allows you to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary for hours of fun and learning. View specimens collected around the house, backyard, your desk, or the fridge. Look at the micro-printing on a dollar bill or examine the traces on your motherboard. This microscope provides you a quick and effective way to zoom in on a wide variety of objects to satisfy your basic curiosity of the world around you. Ever wondered what lint looks like or a little bit of the mold on your week-old bagels? Now you can find out. Simple plug and play operation with included software that allows you to magnify objects and view them on your PC, up to 200X and take snapshots and time-lapse movies. You can also manipulate images with drawing and painting tools. The microscope is also detachable from the stand to allow you to get closer to large objects. The Computer Microscope has these great features:

...so just out of curiosity I actually got easyHDR running in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with Wine and tried it out on some of my high-contrast shots.

I'm still thinking that it's better to run Windows as the base OS and then use Ubuntu on top of that (for freeware). Simply because I've yet to get my USB devices to work in a virtual Windows OS...aside from the fact that it only uses one CPU the way that it's set up now. Though the sound and networking work fine. For maximum driver-compatibility Windows should be the base OS. There are also some other performance issues with Ubuntu but that's a secondary concern for me at the moment. Of course...I don't have to run Win7 or XP as my base OS and then dick around with *them*. Ubuntu upgrades fairly transparently....I just upgraded from 9 & so far all I've had to do is reinstall Vbox (they had a new version anyway) (note: "reinstalling" covers a large range of ground from an IT perspective), and I've yet to get accelerated 2D drivers for my ATI card on this yet. I haven't seriously tried though. But it wasn't just a simple matter of going into the software repository and selecting the ATI drivers, and I've lost the ability to run movies at high FPS at 2MP fs. More work to do there.

So ANYWAY back to the question at hand. How do I get "wet" shots out of my cameras...so I have wanted to give easyHDR a try for a while now, I finally got it up and running in Wine and opened up one G9 raw file. It uses dcraw for the transformation with a limited set of options, but the output looks ok. So this is what you get...it's fairly-intuitive, I picked it up in about 30 minutes. The key features here are the "tone-mapping" (for one image)...I first thought I'd see about just working with the whole 12-bit space in one raw file (the G9 has 10stops of DR range at ISO80). The "local contrast" box there does what it says: it increases "local contrast" in the sense of in I suppose a 50-pixel radius it boosts the contrast as opposed to a global contrast boost. I turned that on in the next shot. The DR sliders at the top allow the shadows and highlights to be clipped, there are various tone-mappings built into the program and you can "roll your own", but they all basically change the saturation/brightness of the pixels. This isn't what I want to do. I want to increase the contrast without blowing-out the shadows & highlights.

Aside from this it quickly convinced me that pushing the shadows of a G9 shot at ISO80 is not a good idea.

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