: Karl, I repeat, I'm not going to any more hassles to submit to the gallery. I : spent a fortune on the premier imaging program, Photoshop, and frankly my : computer is full of programs right now that I don't really use. I started by using many of the professional programs. Having been the senior technician (and a lecturer) in the departments of graphic design, multimedia, photography and film & television, I had the dubious pleasure of watching many folks struggle with often unwieldy cumbersome complex professional programs. As time went by, I found students and lecturers alike who stumbled across 'other' programs, many of them cheaper or free, who found smaller program sizes, greater functionality, quicker processing and better results - this surprised me and I started looking long and hard at some of these programs. I discovered students were preferring to work at home on their own lowly sub $500 machines rather than using the 10 million dollar edit suites with firewire networking, terabytes of RAIDed hard drives and multi thousand dollar Matrox RT cards. Why? because they could do it quicker, faster and producer leaner, cleaner results with 'non professional' software. We'd spent literally millions on the 'good' software and no one wanted to use it! An example, I used many pro dvd shrinking programs - many costing hundreds of dollars, before I found dvdshrink (free) which was a TINY program. it's interface was sleek and simple, it's options many and not unduly complicated and best of all, it's output was both much faster (some of the 'better' programs literally took days to render) and devoid of all the artefacts and jitters of the others. In time I found myself modifying my workflow to use batch processing of images where possible, and then one day I timed the processes and compared the results - astonished to find a little thing like irfanview (under 1Mb and free) capable of processing images around 400 times faster than photoshop, I moved largely to that for such work. I admit I'd been reluctant to start exploring other programs earlier as I'd thought the complexities of the expensive programs I already had were enough and I really didn't want any more complications in my life.. but comparing complexities, I found the pro progs were often unduly intricate and the little freebies were a dream in comparison! I visited a graphic designer friend the other day who was grumbling that he'd gotten sick of PS and had moved to another pro graphics program - I asked him why and he replied PS was too slow, cumbersome etc and demonstrated the newer addition to me. He showed me and we timed the difference - it was some 26 seconds for PS to open and resize this one image in question. he then showed me the newer prog opened and processed the same image in around 18 seconds. I fired up irfanview and batch processed all the images (16 of them) in under 10 seconds.. he now uses irfaview and curses the time wasted in learning and running the 'pro' programs and the $$ he's shelled out over the years (he calculated spending close to $18,000 in software) only to discover a free program did it quicker and faster, with a simple learning curve - his reluctance to try it in the past was based similarly to mine, he didn't want to learn new stuff anticipating it to be hard! : I can instruct Capture One to not save metadata, but frankly I don't see that : saving 30K, it's just a few bits of text. your image was 85.7 kb , stripped it was 56 kb - one third of your image wasn't image. not simply a 'few bits of text' you could have made your image 30% larger.. : Do you think everyone on the list should go out and get a special 'stripping' : program in order to submit? I think not. I say up the limit to 100K and everyone : should be happier. use 'save for web' in PS if needed. it'll take you longer and has a few more steps for you to confront if you like.. I was offering a free program which opens in a second, you drag a folder in, click 'go' and the job is done in a matter of seconds. no images to open, nothing more to do. You'd have found your image processing time would drop significantly and you'd be free to output higher image quality (not the images themselves, the jpeg quality) than your present processing allows. : Computer life is already too complicated, adding to the complexity is not my : favourite thing. again, I'm offering a reduction in complexity. : I appreciate your effort, and frankly I'm amazed. OK I may be a pedant, but I really, honestly like to give people the choice to simplify their lives. I *loathe* complexity.. I really don't like spending time on learning new computing skills at all hence the suggestions :) : Did you like the image? yes :) On a technical note, I am a little disturbed by the softening on the far hill to the right, a function of the compression I think rather than a loss of quality by aerial atmospherics or lens resolution. On an aesthetic note and being a crop-aholic, I found chewing away 55 pixels on the right side made the image more 'tense', more dramatic and seem a little more ominous, a look that felt appropriate for the landscape. k
