Color Degradation in Adobe Lightroom

Surprise! Surprise. I was totally in dark about this. Nikon's raw format (NEF Files) is proprietary. I didn't know that. Thus Adobe Lightroom couldn't render the images properly. I was so pissed of, I see beautiful color in my camera lcd but when I open it in lightroom, it kind of blurs out. Then I tried to open the file with Nikon's Capture NX. And voila. It renders the images properly. Now I love the options and workflow of Lightroom and I don't want to buy Capture NX (yes, its not free). So what should I do? The gurus here already faced this and they also found the way around. Apparently Adobe released DNG Profilers in their labs. You just have to select the correct camera profile. There is another way to cope with this. Shoot in NEF+JPEG mode. It will eat up your CF card space but you won't have to worry about post-processing that much. As Most of the time I just do cropping. If you need to post process then you have the NEFs as backup.

Here is the comparison with one image which is just coverted to JPEG from NEF by both softs without any edit. Capture NX one resembles the exact color.

Earth Day 2009 @ Google

April 22 is the Earth Day. This year we celebrated this with the theme "Lesser Energy Use". From office We got 2 LED Bulbs. This bulbs suppose to consume 50% less energy than the CFL ones. I am just happy as I got a geeky T-Shirt as well. Happy Earth Day.
Official Google Post about Earth Day

My T-Shirt



CFL Bulbs

Trekking at Mission Peak

Spring is here in California. The days are long and weather is just right for trekking. So we bunch of out of shape guys decided to trek at Mission Peak of Fremont. We were 6 in total. People goes here for normal backyard walk. Its only 2,517 feet high and 2.7 mile walk to reach the summit. Even so it proved quite hard for us. I haven't done any trekking for long time, I think it was july, 2008.

We started to ascend at 4pm. On our way to the top I thought several times to stop and go back. I don't know what kept me going, maybe it was the lure of taking pictures from the top, or just the kids who are going up. But despite of all the odds we didn't give up and finally reached the summit at 6:05pm. All of us were exhausted by then. But the feelings of reaching the top, the determination and not giving up made the whole effort worthwhile.

I didn't take that much photos while going up. Guess I was too tired to take the snaps. I did take few from the top. Here is few of them.



Fullscreen

We started to descend at 7pm. Everything was fine but then I slipped. It was all because of my shoes. My elbow got scratched. Thank god that I only slipped once, with those shoes i was lucky not to slip again. Lesson learned in hard way.

info:
hiking information
Wiki

Random snaps of flowers

I have got my Nikon D40x almost 3/4 months now. But I haven't done any serious experiments with that so far. However this week I tried to take few snaps around my apartment and my office. Most of them targeted to flowers. Feel free to comment if you like/dislike any of these.

You can see all my flickr pics here.

BTW: Most of the pics taken with the awesome AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4G lens.

Back in social networking.

After a long time break, I am back again in all my social networks. Why? Yes I know its lots of time in waste. But again I miss the fun of not knowing whats going on. So people get ready. I will be poking around you even if you don't want to. :D