Friday, 2nd September, 2022

I used this neural net website to try cleaning up some of my grandad’s slides from the 60s. Some were damaged by fungus and other issues, but this site does a nice job of making them look reasonable. They’re not perfect but much nicer for using it. Might pick out a few others and process them through it to tidy up.

All this blot chat is tempting me to try it, however, I quite like what I have here and I’m over 4 months of use of it. I have daily notes going back longer (nearly a year) but this exact setup is more recent. Images are still a hassle in this, although maybe the app I use to write in could help me with it, although image compression etc. is still something that needs to be done.

Looking at the slides gallery in Piwigo makes me want to make a static version of it. I’m not going to be adding new photos to it as I’ve scanned all there is. It’s also inundated with spam comments, all screened but unnecessary. It’s also hosted on my home computer and I’d prefer it to be external (and ideally on some free hosting!) I just never found nice AND easy static gallery creation tools. I was thinking of using Adobe portfolio, but now that I cancelled my LrCC subscription that’s not really an option. If I spend some time, I might be able to reuse the blot templates and a bit of manual work.

I’ve sold my X-T2, and 35mm f/2, but I’ve not bought anything in their place. It feels wrong to do so, as in my head that money then disappears into the general account and then if I buy something later it feels like an expense not a trade. However, I don’t just want to buy stuff for the sake of it. I’ve thought about the 35mm f/1.4 but I’m enjoying just using the pancakes with the X-E4 (18 and 27), makes for a nice setup and gets me using focal lengths I don’t often use. The 18 is proving nice for indoors, and 27 for outdoors - I then don’t notice the f/2.8 whatsoever. I’m quite liking a “vintage” style colour profile I have on it. I feel like it might be borderline tacky, and no better than a random instagram filter. I switch back to my “regular” colour profile but then find it so boring. I shoot raw+jpeg, so I can always reprocess it if necessary, but like most digital photos (that I take), they’re fine and more about a record of the event.