I have a laptop that I upgraded to Windows Vista (yeah, I know but I had the flu and needed to do something while locked indoors for three days)

Anyway, I finally got everything working. Even the USB works now after three days of scanning dozens of web pages, throwing things against the wall and sacrificing a small goat. I can now hook up SD cards, thumb drives, USB hard drives, etc... all work well.

Yet, I cannot directly connect my K10D to the thing and access data.
I run Remote Assistant, and although it runs it does not detect the camera.

Any ideas on what else I might have to twist and turn until Vista squeals and lets me get the K10 working?


At this point, I'll probably restore XP if I need to go on site an do tethered shooting, but Id like to get it working on Vista,if not just for the sake of the time I would have otherwise wasted.

Thanks

FYI, reflection of my own face not photoshop'd in.
Done with the wife's makeup mirror with a built in ring light.

What a shame. You generally don't get PHDs working at the big electronics stores... but I'd appreciate it if they simply admitted they didn't know what they were saying. Argh!

Anyway,
Hit menu and the first menu screen has those settings. Easy to get someone to that.
Anyway, I like the sharpness up one notch. I also set the Image Tone from 'natural' to 'bright' (No text for the option, so that is the icon that is in color, as opposed to pale white).

I have read that some also kick the contrast up a notch. Looks more like Canikon, I guess??

Don't know if there is a "best" setting for all cases, but we know that Pentax does do little sharpening of its jpegs and since your friend isn't into post processing yet, you'll want to kick the sharpening up a notch or two. I probably wouldn't go to three unless she only prints directly from the card. (might still be too much?)

I generally shoot in RAW+JPG, and the jpegs looks pretty decent out of the camera for viewing on machines that don't understand PEF files.

Palace of the Doges. Venice, Italy.

Is the flash recharging fully? There is a setting to force the camare to wait for the flash to recharge or to let it fire even when the flash is not ready.
Of course if you're talking about pictures taken quite some time apart (morethan a few seconds), then it could be a flash issue.

Also, do you have your camera set to the green mode (green block above the P Sv Tv Av dial)?
In this mode, the flash will only fire when the camera "thinks" it is necessary - i.e. when there is enough light, the flash will not fire.
Generally use P mode, at worst. Probably better to use one of the other modes, but if you're new to how Tv and Av work, stick with P for now.

OK solved it. Well, at least a majority of my issue.

The images I were using were being showed in Adobe RGB colorspace (via FileInfo from PhotoShop), but some how SilkyPix was saving the images as sRGB, (I know I changed the setting almost immediately after install. I would not pay for a DSLR, PhotoShop, SilkyPix and a color calibration system and use sRGB!)

Anyway, the bad mix of internal settings as AdobeRGB and the actual colorspace of sRGB really screwed things up. I have no idea how the conflicting meta data occurred.

I changed SilkyPix to save as AdobeRGB, re-developed a few images and now all applications look consistent; Photoshop, SilkyPix, Firefox/MSIE, IrfanView. ACDSee Pro 2 is still crap but a bit closer.
The color is still a very slight bit off between apps, so I won't be doing color critical Pantone work, but I am very pleased with results.

I assume if the image was in sRGB and the setting was stored as such, I would not have quite so many problems, but I'll just keep tgesetting as AdobeRGB.


As usual, the problem is between keyboard and chair.
Although I refuse to take all of the blame. If the File Info showed the correct information, I may have found the issue a lot earlier.
I still don't know when or why SilkyPix reverted to sRGB. Argh!

This is not a screen to print issue. Same screen, different software.
I don't have great monitors so I would not trust the work flow through to printing without some experimentation to see how well they fair.
I have some filters set up to make my prints look close... but I'm not going to delve into those issues quite yet. (hardly worth spending time to calibrate the printer to four or five different pieces of software!)


Knowing that Matt has both SilkyPix and CS2 running with consistent color almost certainly means there is something on my end that is not right.

I can try a Spyder2, (Currently using Manaco Optix).
I'm just not sure any other calibration tool would make a difference. The issue does not appear to be a calibration issue but an issue with how the software communicates the image color space into the display color space.

Here's a good one fer ya...
Lets say I shoot an image in RAW+JPG and use a tool like ACDSee, IrfanView and others to view the images, both formats display differently.

Yet when I copy the same software (i.e. IrfanView or SilkyPix) to another machine, those same images do not differ between jpeg and raw formats.
The other machine does not have any calibration. So th images don't look "right", but they are more consistent.

I am sure that behavior is telling me something significant about the problem being on my machine and something with its calibration. But I cannot determine where else to look.
I guess I can turn off the calibration and see what happens.


Anyway, thanks for the info. As long as this stuff is working consistently for someone, I know it is an issue on my end. I'll just have to hunt down the problem.

So, my workflow should be perhaps...
Shoot in RAW (as I usually do),
Use Silky Pix to do my adjustments, but don't trust its display.
Save some halfway decent guess and load into CS3.
In CS3, play with color adjustments to taste to fix what SilkyPix did (the same case could be to use CS3 then use SilkyPix to adjust what CS3 did... just a matter of what is most often to be the final software product used prior to printing I guess..).
Finally, save and send for printing?

Seems like a silly waste of time, if the image is otherwise "good to go" from SilkyPix.

I have tried assigning the specific monitor profiles in ACDSee and in SilkyPix with very little if any display adjustment. So I assume they are properly picking up the default system profile. (or consistently disregarding it).

My alternative is to scrap SilkyPix and stay consistent with all Adobe products, but still what trust do I have that what I see in the end is actually "correct".



I am starting to think this whole color calibration issue is a hoax intended to suck the life and money out of end users.


I guess if everyone has the same issue I'll figure out a way to live with it.
I was just afraid I or my computer was doing something wrong.

Anyone have both SilkyPix and PhotoShop for the MAC??
Does Macintosh not suffer from these issues?

Well, Idid some more playing around with this , er, um, "stuff"...

The following image shows four programs all with different color renditions.




Is there any way to determine which might be the closest to what someone else will see when viewing my images?
Any way to tell if color management of my machine is anywhere near "correct" to begin with??

The apps are ACDSee, IrfanView, SilkyPix and PhotoSHop CS3.
Those that have color management settings have them turned on.

ACDSee (far let) looks the worst. With color management turned OFF, the colors look closer to the others but still not consistent with any single comparison.
SilkyPix v.s. IrafnView are the closest match but the greens are still a tad bit off.

My two main photo processing programs, SilkyPix and CS3, are quite a bit off. Disabling the color management within SilkyPix makes the colors even more divergent.
If I "choose to trust" CS3 as my main post processing software, I certainly cannot process my RAW in SilkyPix and trust they are correct and send for prints without also running them through CS3 to further correct the images.

Am I doing something wrong, or is this just the way things are?
Is this just a MS Windows issue? How does one go about trusting their color management when no piece of software appears to work consistently with any other? For all the money one dumps into the hardware and software to calibrate, profile and otherwise manage the color, I am quite disappointed in the outcome.

ARGH!!

Duh! that makes sense! (too simple perhaps? Argh... :blush
With system wide calibration (on Windows), the image viewed by various applications should be consistent between computers but maybe not accurately displayed.

When the software understands color management, the images should be displayed accurately. Even sRGB may not fit exactly into the monitor's color space so some adjustment will be made and may appear different between managed and unmanaged viewer software.

Now look more into to why I seem to be getting inconsistent display on the same machine between various managed software packages. Is it me? Or do I start sending nasty-grams to the software vendors?

Thanks