Channel Mixer is a very powerful tool for black and white conversions, so it's worthwhile keeping at it until you can get the effect you want.

You plug the card reader into a USB connection on your PC. The card reader has slots that will take most or all types of memory card. You take the card out of your camera and insert it in the reader and then copy the images onto your computer. It's faster, more reliable and doesn't run the risk of your camera batteries failing during a transfer, which would probably corrupt your image files.

Card readers can be less than £10.

Much better to avoid the problem and use a card reader.

Sue and I were photographing a wedding for a friend yesterday, which gave the first real chance to use the K10D for real.

The performance was excellent all round, and especially difficult as the weather was atrocious and the shots all had to be taken indoors.

Sue used the SMC Pentax-DA 18-55mm and I used the SMC Pentax-DA 16-45mm, plus the SMC Pentax-DA 12-24mm for a few shots.

Later on, at disco time, I changed to the SMC Pentax-A 50mm f1.7 to try some disco lit shots of the bride, groom and friends dancing. These were at f1.7, ISO 1600 and I let the matrix metering decide the shutter speed. This was all about shape, colour and movement and I was very pleased with the end result. These shots will end up as a Picture to Exe slide show.

We photographed from 1pm tp 9:30pm and one battery charge lasted all the way through.

All in all, the cameras and lenses were well up to the challenge and any defects in the pictures will be entirely ours.

The first sample will be on ePHOTOzine shortly after midnight, where my user ID is johnriley1uk.

Too much effect I think. Subtelty is the thing needed....

I like that picture a lot. The composition is very striking and the effect suits the subject matter.

Well done!

I think you like it for the glistening texture on the stones.

Perhaps some item of interest (a leaf, some other item) at an appropriate point might add something to the shot?

An achromat is a lens corrected for two wavelengths of light, blue and green.

An apochromat is corrected for three wavelengths and would be the preferred option.

But bear in mind also that to a large extent you get what you pay for and a Sigma APO and a Leica APO may have very different degrees of apochromatic qualities...

It's not much of a problem with film as lenses are well corrected and as film has a flat surface it is happy to accept oblique light rays.

You can see the effect in abundance if you use a colour film in an old box camera with a lens only corrected for Ordinary Film (blue sensitive only).

As an aside, if you want sharp pictures with a box camera and panchromatic film, use a blue filter.

To remind those younger than 100 years old:
Ordinary Film was sensitive to blue only
Orthochromatic film is sensitive to blue and green
Panchromatic film is sensitive to blue, green and red

The CCD is shiny, so the the new coatings are intended to eliminate the chance of any flare or ghost images. This is a different issue to Chromatic Abberation.

The term does cover your purple fringing by its very nature - chromatic refers to colour and abberation to defects that have not been corrected.

This has not been such an issue with film cameras, where the film is a flat surface and can accept light from any angle quite happily. Each pixel is in a pit on the chip, and angled light will spill over, causing colour fringing to be exaggerated.