I think you're kidding us. Why would anyone switch to Nikon?

Pictures2Exe is straightforward and inexpensive.

Cheers!

The intention is harmless enough - a day set aside for Mum to put her feet up and relax. Today I'm cooking Sunday lunch for both Mums - it's in preparation as we speak.

It's always sad to lose a Mum and I wouldn't want to think that the day makes the loss more acute for some. It may well be so though and we can also perhaps find a thought to consider those who are so affected?

As regards the flower and card industries I'm not sure when it all escalated, but it probably started off innocently enough.

We were amazed at what came out of a card that had been formatted. Not only the last set of images, but several previous sets as well. Very few were corrupted, but some were.

They say they can spot output sharpening and that it's obvious. Apparently sharpening is a Bad Thing To Do. Sharpening is applied prior to the actual book printing, I suppose to maintain consistency throughout the book.

As for 16 bit there are too many things that can't be done and the file sizes are larger. In the end it has to be 8 bit anyway.

Of course much of this is academic unless we are making big images.

This is now a good question but for the time being I'm keeping a full sized uncompressed TIFF of all my completed images, unsharpened, from which I will make whatever JPEGs are required.

Regarding sharpening, fotoLibra don't want any at the output stage, but say that in-camera sharpening is acceptable. Another reversal of what we might expect.

I think this is a reflection of the fact that things move very quickly in the digital world and what we found necessary yesterday has now changed.

Looking at the latest Upload Requirements for fotoLibra it's interesting that some of the basics are changing significantly.

They want 8 bit files as virtually no-one wants the slight quality increase from 16 bit. They want RGB JPEG files only, albeit is at Quality 12. They want 300ppi only, as before. They want no sharpening and preferably no resampling either.

The most interesting thing is that the lossless TIFF is just abandoned in favour of the lossy JPEG. Clearly now JPEG files are more than good enough and they have in fact converted all the existing images on file.

If you have created layers in your image and not flattened it, then this will also restrict the save options.

Also if you have not converted a RAW file to JPEG or TIFF in the RAW converter, maybe that is a problem. When you do this, convert to 8 bit as mentioned.

We haven't had any fail so far. Sometimes one fails to read in a device, but formatting has always solved that and it has always been possible to get the files.

Just to complete that thought (the doorbell rang) I also always use reasonably small cards, so if one does fail then not all is lost in one go. Using the K20D this has had to be increased to using 2GB cards. This is sufficient for the Premium Quality JPEG setting.

If you shoot RAW you need bigger cards no doubt.