Rev cannot open my jpeg ! - and some serious thinking

Francis Nugent Dixon effendi at wanadoo.fr
Sat Jun 27 12:45:01 EDT 2009


Hi from Paris,

I bought a  Sony-DSC-F717 a couple of years back - went into my list  
of "Best-Spent Money" items - gives beautiful photos of 5 Megapixels  
(I never change the setting).
The photos each represent about 2 MB, and with that, I can print out a  
high quality photo on A4, reasonable quality on A3. My close-up photos  
of flowers would make many photographers green with envy. What I mean  
is that a 5 megapixel/2 MB photo is enough for me, and I am a stickler  
for quality. I have many Rev stacks that display hundreds of jpg  
photos, and so I had to scale down my photos for rapid display and  
reduced disk space.

I use GraphicConvertor (Mac) - also on my "Best-Spent Money" list. You  
can batch scale-down a complete folder, to the size of photos you want.

Just in case I ever want higher quality (and I have more than 30 years  
of 35mm negatives to examine), I also have a Nikon DiMage 35mm  
scanner, and I CAN scan the negatives up to 100Mb files (what for, I  
will never know !)

I scan my BEST colour negatives to about 20 MB, and I CAN print them  
up to 1.5 metres x 1 metre posters - much more than the average Yogi  
Bear requirements.

The latest cameras are providing more than 15 Megapxels, and  
technology will take us much higher within a very short time ! I'm not  
sure what that represents in MB, but it certainly is a lot. I'm also  
unsure of the need for cameras of this quality for the average user.

Unless you are a professional, you don't need photos of this quality,  
so why take them ?

My next camera (I'm in no hurry) will probably clock in at 25  
Megapixels, and I will need to upgrade seriously from my iMac with 1TB  
in order to be able to store and treat my photos. Maybe 1 photo in a  
thousand will require that precision (if I want to push it to a  
poster), but I will have to take ALL of my photos at that precision to  
do so ! I'll need many TBs to store all of them, and one hell of a  
processor ! Don't you think that this is just a little bit "overkill",  
remembering, of course that the lifetime of an average photo is about  
the same as that of a household fly ! I have three photo categories -  
1) photos for the masses 2) photos for those who appreciate photos,  
and 3) photos I am proud of. I examine all my photos and decide which  
category it goes into, AND SCALE THEM DOWN if they are for categories  
1 and 2, THROWING AWAY the originals afterwards. Why waste disk  
space ? Did you really want all those megapixels ?

Which brings me to the forum question "I've got photos of 13  
megapixels that Rev can't handle". Who wants to push the (Revolution)  
envelope that far ?

Let's assume that you are a professional. Don't use Revolution to  
solve this problem, it wasn't designed for that - use a professional  
photo program like GraphicConvertor. Of course you can alway put in a  
bug report, but seriously, don't you think that there are more  
important issues to be solved with Revolution ?

If I want to knock a nail in, I use a hammer, not my shoe (which was  
designed for protecting my foot). Revolution is fantastic. It does so  
many things. Why ask it to wake you in the morning with a hot coffee ?

FWIW

-Francis




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