Working on my photos.

During a night out with friends I mentioned that I had been "working on my pictures" from a recent trip.  I realized later that night that none of them had any clue what that meant. As far as I know they all just use their phones as their cameras and post the jpgs they get from the phone.  So I figured hell lets make the 1st blog post in 4 years and talk about what "working on my photos" means.



I take my pictures with a Nikon D7200 DSLR. When you use a DSLR or a higher end camera you have options on how you store the picture you take. You can choose to save your pictures as a JPG, RAW file or both. A RAW file is the full data recorded by the camera images sensor with no processing or compression. On my camera a JPG will be about 9mb and a RAW will be about 35mb. My camera is set to shoot a JPG and  RAW file. Below you will see the JPG from the camera and a JPG I created from the RAW. As you can see without edits they look very similar.

JPG from Camera

 

JPG from RAW no changes

Edits is where the power of the RAW comes from. Apply some tweaks to exposure, contrast, White Balance,  and a few other adjustments and you get.

IMO, it looks a lot better and well worth the 5-10 minutes to get it there. Of course I take a few hundred pics on a trip so it takes a while to do them all.

Now that I've written the page, I think I need to reduce the exposure a bit on the final version.

Yup, thats better. 

Marvel Heroes 2015

Marvel heroes is a "free" to play MMO in the marvel comics universe.

I have played this game on/off for while I was even part of the beta. Its a Diablo style game made by most of the original Diablo team.

Originally you had a small selection of starting heroes. Hawkeye, Daredevil, Thing, Storm, and Scarlet Witch. You could pick one. Any other heroes had to be purchased ($5 - $9) or received from a random drop. When I tried I got Daredevil(not too bad) and in 12 levels of play only got one drop (the thing).  In 2013 they changed this process but it was not that much better. They introduced "infinity shards" that could unlock a character. But given you would be lucky to get one every 10 minutes of play getting to the 400-600 you'd need to unlock a character was a decent effort. I was never motivated enough to get more then a few shards.


While the prices were not unreasonable to just buy the hero you wanted the game was just never able to get my interest with the hero's I had available.


So why make a post about a game I did not like that much? Cause they fixed it.

For 2015 and the release of avengers 2 they changed the starting hero list. Captain America, Black Panther, Punisher, Black Widow, Luke Cage, Human Torch, Colossus, Storm, Hawkeye, Rocket Racoon, Daredevil

Each hero can be played to level 10 for free.
You start with 400 Shards which will get you several of these heroes and a few others. If you wanted Iron Man you just need to earn 200 more which is easier to do than the 600 originally needed.

They have added a "team-up: system for 400 shards you can get a second hero as your pet. (in theroy this can come as a drop but I have not seen it yet. )

There have been several other small QOL tweaks that have just made it alot of fun to play. Using my 400 shards I got Nova and he's alot more fun to play that thing or daredevil are. I still want Iron Man but I can wait till I get enough shards naturally at this point.

Net Neutrality

I have see some recent posts spouting that the current FCC drive to reclassify the Internet to be regulated as a Title II utility(aka just like phones) is a bad thing and its a way to take it over.

THIS IS NOT THE CASE.

If you use the internet read all of this link and take the time to understand that net neutrality is  something we all need and Title II is the only way to ensure it happens.

https://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/net-neutrality

PLEASE Do not support any petition that would prevent the FCC from reclassifying the Internet as a Title II Utility.

Batman 66 is coming to Blu-Ray

YAY!!!

You can only buy the entire series in one shot and its $270 (190 for amazon per order)

I guess I'll wait a few years for the price to come down.

John Carter the movie

When I was a kid I read the John Carter novels and enjoyed them a lot.  I was excited to see them turned into a movie. As the movie grew closer I just kept hearing bad things about it.  So I skipped it to watch on DVD. 

Last night I watched it ....

If you go into this movie forgetting that its based on the ERB series of books its not a bad sci-fi/fantasy film. the visuals are great, characterization is ok, its got some slow parts but its pretty fun.

But when you try and think of it as John Carter from the books for me it just fails.  Rather than take the story from the book and adapt it they have taken plot points from various books and added their own elements. Their version of the story lacks the fun embodied in the original ERB material.

If you like Sci-fi just watch it and don't think about the story from the book and its not 1/2 bad.

Bah!!!

Having to work the day after Thanksgiving really sucks.

Batman Arkham City PC vs Rage

What we have here are recent releases of two games that are both console ports to PC. One from ID software a company synonymous with FPS shooters on the PC and the other from Rocksteady who had a huge hit in Batman Arkham Asylum.

Thanks to the Nvidia deal on their GTX cards I got a free copy of Batman Arkham City. On Nov 22 the game was finally released and I finally got to play. Yes, PC gamers did have to wait over a month longer than Console players but I'm OK with it. It works when installed. I know this sounds like a silly statement but given my experience with ID Software's Rage.... its a big thing to me.  I have had some issues so far and I'm not far into the game but I've played as Catwoman, fought lots of thugs, and had fun all on the day I got the game.  Once I've gotten further into the game I'll try to make a better post about it.

I was never able to get Rage working  in single player mode on my PC. Multiplayer worked fine from day one but I wanted to play the single player game.  ID has tried to blame the issues on video drivers. If its video drivers why did the multiplayer work?? ATI does have to take part of the blame in the failure with Rage, After 4 driver revisions the single player just did not work on my ATI 4850 based card.  I installed my new card Monday night and low and behold Rage works. Had fun playing it too. So who's to blame for it not working AIT or ID? I blame them both.  ID should have known their was an issue and and worked with ATI to get it fixed before the release.  Releasing a game that was broken for so many on the release day and required so many tweaks and driver revisions should not be acceptable.

Batman vs Rage

The winner Batman Arkham City.  Kudos to Rocksteady you held the game and showed that just because its a port does not mean its half-assed. Its not without issues but it works. It looks good, plays well and I can have fun. Is it annoying to wait a month after the console version comes out? Yes. Is it annoying to have to exit the game to change the config? Yes. But the game works and its fun.

ID this is how a Console to PC port is done. Pay attention and learn from what Rocksteady has done.