I have lots of raw converters
Capture One is quite logical, and Lightroom has a very nice GUI which is logical... but the image quality SPDS3 beats Lightroom by a looooong way (especially in high ISO images), and Capture One by a significant margin

Personally, I'm happy to put up with the GUI issues of SPDS3 for the sake of image quality

Matt

John,
Your question covered two separate points:

1) Calibrating monitor. This is essential. Get yourself a Pantone Huey, Gretag Macbeth Eye One, or similar. They are cheap enough now The hardware device is normally excellent on all of them, it's just the software that varies in ability (and in most cases I use ArgyllCMS anyway now - which has been more reliable than the ColorVision Spyder 1 & 2 software). You need to calibrate your monitor, assign the profile to the display (the software should do this), and then Elements should pick this up. Mac OSX has built in visual "calibration", but again you should invest in a hardware device

2) Printer settings. How you tackle the colour management depends largely on the settings available in your printer driver. Elements has limited support for colour management. Unfortunately I only have Elements 3 (I use PS-CS2 normally)... let me point out a few things about Elements:


i) Click Edit / Color Settings
ii) Choose "Full Color Management" if you are serious. This will use AdobeRGB as the main editing colour space. This is fine for 99% of photographic work (and a wider colour space compared to the sRGB space).
iii) When you print, click on the "Show More Options" in the dialog box. Here you can then choose the output colour space and rendering intent. Which output space to choose depends on the printer driver:

2.iii.a) Printer driver has "AdobeRGB" colour space option: Set the output colour space in PSE to "AdobeRGB" and choose the "AdobeRGB" option within the driver.

2.iii.b) Printer driver has "sRGB" colour space option: Set the output colour space in PSE to "sRGB" and choose the "sRGB" option within the driver. Note that this may produce clipping of colours (as sRGB is a narrower gamut compared to AdobeRGB)

2.iii.c) Printer driver has "Unmanaged" colour option and you have a custom colour ICC/ICM file for the combination of printer ink & paper: In the output colour space option in PSE choose the exact ICC/ICM file for the paper/ink you are using and set the driver to "Unmanaged".

As mentioned above, the Epson drivers are often a special case as the driver itself contains the ICC/ICM data embedded in a special way



NOTE: If you work in AdobeRGB then you must convert the image to sRGB before saving for the web!

Matt

Peter:
It has a lot of good common sense information.
However, I find that Robin Gillander's The Photographic Portrait to be just wonderful! It deals with a "considered" approach to portraiture and is packed with beautiful and thought provoking images - many B&W. Has information on lighting & flash as well as how to approach it all. Definitely worth a read

Matt

Yes, the Bryan Peterson books are excellent too! I have the one about portraiture which is also good (but difficult to get)!
Matt

I've had to cut back on things lately due to health... but managed to get some serious reading in instead

So, here's a list of recommended books:
"The Photographer's Eye" by Michael Freeman - an excellent book indeed! Lots of analysis over what works and (more importantly) why. Filled with excellent images and lots of diagrams analysing the images.

"Creative Digital Darkroom" by Katrin Eismann and Seán Duggan - Another superb publication from Katrin. Although it deals with Photoshop CS3 quite a bit, much of the information is applicable to any other editing package. Deals extensively with exposure, dodging & burning, colour corrections and other fundamental "darkroom" bits and pieces. More about keeping the integrity of the image (rather than compositing etc). Definitely worth reading and keeping to hand!

I'll add some older books that I've found useful later...
Matt

I've seen the *ist-D & 18-55 for £199 at LCE Group ( www.lcegroup.co.uk )
You may even get it a bit cheaper if you haggle
The *ist-D and *ist-DS are both fine, fine cameras with excellent pentaprism (not mirror) viewfinders. Even at 6Mp they can produce stunning shots (I have one at 36"x24" on canvas in my office )
Matt

Terry,
In P-TTL it's only the camera body that's doing the metering. I suppose there could be a difference between what the camera expects the flash to output and what the flash actually does...

However, you should have two places to dial in flash exposure - in the camera "Fn" menu under flash, and on the flash itself. As you've found out the flash doesn't remember, but compensation dialled in through the camera should be remembered

Additionally, the Pentax metering tends to err on the side of great caution and does underexpose. Personally I go for fully manual when the lighting conditions are constant. In other situations I will use Manual on the camera, underexposing by one or two stops and letting the P-TTL flash "make up" the rest of the exposure.

HTH!

Matt

For "raw" hosting (able to do any gallery/album software) I use Powweb.com
For my photography side I use Photium.com (as it produced a much more professional and easy to manage commercial photography website )

On Powweb I've used Coppermine and Gallery2 (both of which are available at no cost on Powweb). For small albums I've also used the excellent "SimpleViewer" ( http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/ - be sure to check out their other Flash based gallery software), and also Photoshop HTML galleries.

If you can handle PHP/SSI coding then SimpleViewer can be customised! (Something I might have to do one day as the Coppermine/Gallery2 solutions are too slow for me - they make heavy use of MySQL).

HTH!
Matt

Like others I haven't found the K20D to be a problem. When I do long exposures (like 4 minutes), I don't mind waiting for the dark-frame subtraction at all. The results have been much better than the K10D for such long exposures

Matt

Or phone Chris at SRS (as they are a Pro centre).
Direct with Pentax will give you 1yrs warranty. If the camera was bought from a Pro centre you get 2 years
(Pentax UK said a copy of the original receipt would suffice when I questioned them about this last year... in the end I bought what I wanted direct from SRS )
Matt