Relatively Ignorant Blog

This is my ‘me too’ blog post with a photo of tonight’s total lunar eclipse.

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I found yesterday at work that images in recent blog entries wouldn’t show up. Everything else was served OK; seemed that they might be corrupted. But the images loaded correctly at home.

Last night I discovered the cause. The images were all exported from Lightroom with EXIF and all the other metadata. Some of the metadata was being blocked by the security filtering at work.

My recent picture of a bicycle pedal screw does not show up at work:

Here is the same photo, exported from Lightroom with the Minimize Embedded Metadata checkbox selected. This one does show up at work:

The ‘lightweight’ image still has minimal EXIF metadata, including the colour profile information.

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The other day I had my first digital in-cinema experience. I saw In Search of Mozart at the Schonell Cinema and, shortly after it started, noticed that it looked different.

There were no scratches or specks that flash by. Next I noticed the fine horizontal lines that were always present in the image. I turned around and saw that the projector was digital. Cool!

Then I started noticing digital artifacts that were occasionally annoying:

• jagged diagonal lines with high contrast (e.g. the keys of a piano)
• somewhat flat and ‘washed out’ colours in some scenes
• ‘halos’ on some high-contrast edges of objects

These are all symptoms of low-quality digital images: no anti-aliasing, poor colour management and crude digital sharpening. Overall these artifacts reminded me of early, inexpensive digital camera images. No doubt we will see improvements in digital cinema images as we have seen them in still photography.

I did enjoy the movie because of the subject matter and because the digital artifacts were not always obvious. My wife did not notice that the movie looked any different to a projected film.

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