The good news is that ithe second order colour casts are gone. But so is almost all
of the colour, including the “cake”! What do I do next?
And removing noise? PhotoGlory seems unable to help there. In fact I still haven't found
any software that can significantly reduce noise in an image. Did a bit of searching,
bringing some surprises: some panoramas that I can't identify, dated 24 December 2000 and taken with a camera that
identifies itself in the Exif data
as Nikon E900:
I've never had that camera. I had suspected Daniel O'Connor, who was there on that day, and
who in the past has dabbled in panoramas. But no, not he. It took me a while to discover
an author in the Exif: James Proctor, a name that I can't find in my diary.
Finally I found an image that cries out for denoising:
That was taken with my Nikon
Coolpix 880. It wasn't normally that bad, but I had lightened the background. The
original was much better (again run the cursor over an image to
compare it with its neighbour):
I think that the processing improves the image, but at the expense of extreme noise. How do
I get rid of it? Asking Google Gemini brought some interesting results. In order of decreasing desirabilty, they were:
DxO PhotoLab. Oh. I have that,
of course, and I use it a lot, but I hadn't considered it for denoising. It only
occurred to me later: Gemini is confused. Denoising raw images is excellent. But this
is a JPEG, and I haven't had
any useful results there at all.
Topaz Photo AI. Oh. They
have gone the other way and dropped all one-off purchases, though Gemini hasn't
discovered it yet. Sorry, Topaz, not interested.
So really only Luminar Neo and ON1 remain in the running. I haven't had spectacular results
with Luminar Neo. I've used ON1 in the past without being convinced, but that's 8 years ago, so OK, try ON1 with a free trial. But the file didn't download. Try
again on distress, where it was to be installed. Log in, fill out all the details
and was presented with a CAPTCHA. Sorry, ON1, you're out of the running. Looking back, this closely resembles my
experience last time. And this time I didn't even get as far as finding out whether it
would run.
But ON1 was the bottom of the list, Affinity is there too, and I have it installed. Found a
way to reduce noise, along with a convenient video. The video showed one of the great
weaknesses of Affinity: it was for version 2.0, and it jumped all over the place, to an area
that no longer exists in version 3.0! No worry, there are alternatives, involving creating
extra layers, choosing values for a number of sliders:
That's not exactly what you want to do with dozens of files. But no need: it doesn't work!
As far as I can tell, manipulating the sliders made no difference!
So where do we go from here? For this one photo I could go back to the original and try
from there, but I do want to have the background. Luminar's still there, but I don't have
much hope. What I really need is a program that will automatically remove noise. And so
far that doesn't seem to exist.
When did the seller post the camera that I bought on Monday? eBay kept telling me that
it hadn't been posted yet, but Australia Post gave me more plausible information, that it was posted on Tuesday. But
eBay stayed that way until I found this morning:
From ebay@ebay.com Wed Nov 5 23:42:10 2025
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2025 05:41:59 -0700
From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com>
Subject: 🚚 Order update: Nikon D1 Camera Body And 70- 210mm Lens Please Read Description
Estimated delivery: Wed, 05 Nov - Mon, 10 Nov
Well, that's optimistic, isn't it? Sent just before midnight and expects delivery the same
day? And why should I read the Description? That's a link that they could have included in
the message. Never mind, 40 minutes later, still in the middle of the night, they had the
wonderful news:
From ebay@ebay.com Thu Nov 6 00:21:32 2025
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2025 06:21:20 -0700
From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com>
Subject: Your package is now with its carrier!
Estimated delivery: Wed, 05 Nov - Mon, 10 Nov
That's particularly optimistic. Posted in the middle of the night, delivery yesterday!
Checking showed that the item had been somewhere between Melbourne and Ballarat at the time. Never mind, a third
message:
From ebay@ebay.com Thu Nov 6 10:32:13 2025
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2025 16:32:01 -0700
From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com>
Subject: Delivery attempted: Nikon D1 Camera Body And 70- 210mm Lens Please
Read Description
Australia Post just missed you.
Delivery attempted: Thu, 06 Nov 08:27 Local time
Well, no, eBay, Australia Post never tries to deliver parcels to me. At the specified time
the item was in Delacombe and
marked for transport to the post office, where it arrived at 10:27.
But they do this every time. Why? They've been round for over a quarter of a century.
Surely they could have got their act together by now. Still, they ask a question: “How
useful is the email?”. Useless, of course, and that's what I said for the first email. But
I couldn't give a similar feedback for the second message: they only allow one feedback per
day! Why? Do they even care?
Yes, the three on the right are Four Thirds system form factor,
but the one on the left is a 24×36 mm sensor, and the Nikon is roughly APS format, between the two.
The lens is one that I got five years ago. The camera won't stand up straight with the 70-210:
Normal details: Nikon D1,
serial number 5022707. Nikkor 70-210 mm f/4.0-5.6, serial number... Oh. I can't find it.
Where could it be hidden? Sent off a message to the FacebookNikon Collectors group, also
asking about the batteries: I have three, all discharged, but no charger. What can I use
instead?
But no replies came. A bit of searching around produced this message:
What's that? After following the “Learn more” link I still don't know. But by chance I
found a more obvious answer: it's waiting for moderator approval. Why didn't Facebook tell
me up front? And what does it have to do with Community chats, whatever they may be?
Apart from that, of course, looked at the camera. Like the Olympus E-1 next to it in the photo
above, it's an early camera with amazingly complicated interlocks. Two covers and a button
just to reveal that it does, indeed, have an CF card (512 MB) in it, and that I need to
fold over another lever to finally remove it.
Why do I want to remove it? It fits my Nikon Coolpix 880, with which I
wanted to take a photo some time back before discovering that it didn't understand cards
over 1 GB. It also had a photo on it:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~/Photos/20251106 546 -> mdir -s e: Volume in drive E has no label
Volume Serial Number is F0F3-7854
Directory for E:/
But then it was taken at 1/4 s on a camera without any stabilization, so it's not
surprising. It also appears to have been taken with the lens I got. Sadly, though it has
Exif data, it doesn't appear to
include serial numbers. It does include a time zone offset, though: UTC+11:00. And
presumably it tells me how long the camera hasn't been used, though at that time there was
nowhere worth mentioning with that time zone offset: DST had finished at the beginning of the month.
Presumably the user had forgotten to reset the date.
The CF card also gave me a chance to take a photo with the Coolpix 880, which hadn't been
used even longer To my surprise I found a battery, and was able to take a photo that at
least confirmed that the camera still works:
I'm getting more and more frustrated with computers. It's been long enough: they should
Just Work. By chance I found this entry in my diary for 6 November 2005, 20 years ago:
I think the time for playing around with software is over, and now I want reliability.
Certainly the hardware is more reliable. But the software still has its issues.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
