layout managers

Downloaded netbeans 6.0 a few days ago. Spent a while fighting the layout manager. Changed the layout from absolute to gridbag (my favourite) still fought the layout manager. Gave up in disgust. Some time later, thought, I wonder if it is a bug. So went back, downloaded all the latest patches. Lo and behold! the layout manager is now doing what I want it to do. It had some kind of weird resizing problem.

Photo Software

When I purchased my new computer I purchased Adobe Photoshop to replace the program - Paint Shop Pro I was using on my old computer. I am not really happy with this choice. I had used photoshop at the training course I did at the Powerhouse Museum. But it is not really designed for mass processing of photos. It is great and still the best tool for editing images I have. Though I think Paint Shop Pro is better as a photo editor.

While in China, Ewen recommended a program called Capture One Pro. It is certainly very good and I down loaded the trail version. I also down loaded the trial version of the Apple program Aperture. After much consideration, I decided to purchase Aperture. Here are the reasons why.

Both programs are good work flow programs. Both have similar features. Aperture has more features for editing individual images and Capture One is better at batch processing of the changes thus made into output files. At the moment I am keeping my raw files untouched and then processing the output into JPEG files for upload to flickr at max (1440 x 960) as this is the resolution of my monitor. In the end of the day, the features that I use exist in both programs - the histogram/curves editor, saturation and feestyle rotation. For these features Aperture is significantly cheaper (at $450 AUD, I paid a bit less than that) than Capture One Pro (at $500 USD).

So now I can mass edit my photos in Aperture and when I need some extra feautres like removing barrel distortion or fixing the perpspective I can use Photoshop.