|
Conquer Your Colour Scheme
I get a lot of emails and letters asking why the colours in
printed photos sometimes don’t match what’s on the screen? Sometimes it’s the
printer, but more often than not it’s simply that the monitor hasn’t been
properly set up. Monitor calibration is essential if you work with graphics or
photo editing software but how many of us ever take the time to adjust our
monitors, apart from twiddling the brightness and contrast controls? Not many, I
bet, but there’s no excuse any more. A freeware program called Calibrize takes you gently by the hand,
and in three simple steps helps you to adjust your display; from start to
finish it only takes around 2 minutes and the new settings or colour ‘profile’
is then saved and applied every time you start Windows. It’s also handy for
those who, like me, use two monitors, making it easy to accurately match the
two displays.
23/10/08
Is My LCD OK? Well, Is it?
Here’s one way to find out, a small freeware
program called, you guessed it, IsMylcdOK.
It’s a simple LCD monitor checker program that displays a series of solid
colours, gradients and horizontal and vertical lines that will show up most of
the common faults on flat screen monitors. These include dead or ‘hot’ (always
on) pixels, faulty backlights and incorrect video phase setting. The program
download is tiny, around 15kb, and it doesn’t even need to be installed, it runs
from the zip/exe file, or from a pen drive. It is really easy to use; though
watch out for the intro screen, it’s in German, so click the English button to
continue (unless you are, or speak German, of course). To select a particular test
just hit the appropriate number key no your keyboard, or cycle the tests by
pressing any key, and to quit just press the Escape key. Here’s hoping you get
a clean bill of heath!
0506
Free Video Capture Makes its Debut
If it moves and it appears on your PC screen then you can
capture it with this freeware application, called Debut. Now don’t get
too excited, it can record streamed video (and audio), like You Tube and
iPlayer, but the unless you have a blisteringly fast PC the frame rate will
probably be quite slow if you don’t want to sacrifice too much picture quality,
but it’s definitely worth experimenting and its certainly good enough for a
quick and dirty archive. It’s just the job for making tutorial videos, showing
someone how to do something on a PC, by recording everything that happens on
the screen. It also has a built in timer and it can be set to email or upload
your movie by FTP. You can even get it to burn directly to DVD with an optional
add-on and there’s a facility to record from external sources like web-cams and
USB capture devices.
28/04/08
|