BB would have no interest in the much-vaunted Mozilla Firefox...if it weren't for the Live Bookmarks feature, and particularly the Sage extension that makes use of this to provide a full RSS feed browser. Otherwise, we'd rather avoid dumbed-down, reduced featureset applications in favour of old-fashioned (but powerful) Mozilla (or Seamonkey as the project is now). As it is, we're currently running two slightly different browsers for different purposes and trying to keep them in sync manually. Fortunately, RSS extensions for the latter are starting to come online, although none yet match the capabilities of Sage.

Habari Xenu

This oddly-named extension bases itself on Aggre8, which was a monolithic XUL-based feed reader that required Java. Fortunately, HX has no such requirement. It is, as this point, mostly usable although the interface isn't quite as nice as Sage; for example, it lacks the headline review pane that also allows you to mark all items as read (only links you've actually clicked are differentiated in the feed pane). In fact, it seems generally to exhibit a few oddities in tracking read and unread feeds. It also seems to have trouble displaying images in Atom feeds, which makes it inconvenient for Photoblog feeds. Note that at time of writing, HX hasn't been updated in some time.

InfoRSS

I haven't tried this one, although it's apparently more popular (in download terms) than HX. It looks slick, but I can't see a way to view the complete article summaries/contents for a feed instead of just the headlines (i.e. for reviewing feeds rather than being alerted to new items).

Multizilla

The mighty Multizilla everything-and-the-kitchen-sink extension now includes an RSS reader for Seamonkey. It's been added as a sidebar plugin, which feels logically like the right place for such a feature (other extensions take note). However, currently it lacks crucial OPML import/export functions although we're sure they're coming, as almost everything always is with Multizilla; the impression remains of author HJ slogging his guts out against insurmountable odds to deliver an infinitely long wishlist. [Note: HJ adds that the feed reader has been part of Multizilla since September 2005.]

NewsFox

Added, 2007-03-29: NewsFox has been successfully modified to work with Seamonkey (ignore the home page that suggests it's Firefox-only). NewsFox has a pleasant interface and an OPML import/export feature. Unfortunately, once again there's no option to view all the article summaries for a feed on one page, and it appears to become sluggish if it hangs while refreshing the feed list. But it's a strong contender and well worth a look.

Following the Welsh theme of the last post, here are a couple of good blogs spotted at the Welsh Blogs aggregator recently:

• Chris Cope is an American columnist who learnt Welsh solely online using the BBC's website and has now brought his "child bride" to Cardiff to take a degree course in the language. This is an excellent and amusing take on British and Welsh society from an outsider's perspective, although like BB you'll probably cringe in horror when he seriously contemplates "Tesco bitter, four cans for only 92p!"
• Alan Cole "dropped out of the rat race", moved his family to Ynys Las and started a small web design business. And the very best of luck to him, the jammy ... (I mean, just read this entry!)
• Not exactly a blog, but Cerys Conner's Wales photoset on Flickr is a thing of great beauty, and none of it the usual clichéd landscapes. There's something distinctly Holga-ish about her shots, but we suspect she's not actually using a Holga for many (any?) of them.
• Lest you think it's the promised land: the downside (props to Chris for the link). (Update: There's now a Flickr group for this.)

(Note to Americans who aren't Chris: if you come across a blog with entries that read like "Dwi wedi bod wrthi y wythnos 'ma yn adeiladu canoedd...", it's Welsh, not page corruption. Note to Welsh people: we have no idea what the quoted text means so apologies if it's offensive or simply mundane.)

I have a number of long-term photographic projects on the go, and I've just formally launched the latest by creating a dedicated album for it in my PhotographyBlog gallery. This is a round-up of what they are and what their purpose is.

Poppy, a domestic cat

This isn't another bunch of cute cat pics on the web (honest). In an ideal world, it would be something more akin to Tony Mendoza's Ernie project, although I actually discovered that book after I started the project. It aims to document the relationship between a cat and a typical household. Unfortunately, I've somewhat run aground with this since the arrival of the Junior Research Assistant; I know I'm going to regret my tardiness one day, since Poppy isn't getting any younger and now has a list of ailments longer than her tail, although her chosen therapy (constant napping, with the occasional break to soil the dining room carpet) seems to be working well.

Abandoned Tracks

Disused transport links, particularly railway lines, have a strong tug of melancholy; something that was once in essential, or at least viable, use now condemned to overgrown neglect due to the shifting patterns of society. This project tries to capture that feeling. However, most of the shots to date were taken as the opportunity occurred, and I don't feel I've yet grabbed this one by the horns and produced a definitive statement to illustrate what it's about. Tramway to Jerusalem perhaps comes closest.

Neglected Wales

A project documenting abandoned and derelict facets of the Welsh landscape.

Most places have odd pockets of leftover detritus from earlier economic good times; for example, Manchester's mills and canals. However, while in England these buildings and objects are often eventually either demolished and replaced, or cleaned up and utilised afresh, in Wales they seem to simply linger, decaying slowly over the decades. Perhaps the money doesn't exist to clean them up, or nothing has come along to replace them, or the land isn't needed; the relics of a slower economy. Perhaps hope is still held out for a revival, such as has happened for the Welsh Highland Railway, sixty years after its demise. Or perhaps the Welsh are just more attached to their past and reluctant to wipe it away. I'm not just talking of slag heaps and abandoned railway trackbeds, although they're numerous and obvious examples, but the remnants in almost every town and village of enterprises that failed, died out or were left behind when history abruptly swerved away on a new course; the filling station with empty pumps, the graffiti-ed lime kilns next to the canal, the fading paintwork carrying the name of a vacant shop, or even just the grassy slope off the main road that now seems to lead nowhere. The subjects of this project have been neglected both by the locals and by other photographers, who only seem to churn out endless vistas of mountains, lakes and waterfalls. Well you know, sometimes it rains in Wales too.

I know that the Welsh economy is now on an upswing to match the first signs of political independence in centuries, with confidence returning along with some of those who left what they once thought was a dead-end, isolated place. However, even disregarding some of the large scale regeneration projects, such as the landscaping of the pit valleys in South Wales, artefacts and signs of the past still abound, raising and asking questions.

The Anglesey Barracks and Llangar series are effectively subprojects of this one (I hope to revisit the latter while on holiday next month), and Abandoned Tracks also contains some related work.

"...and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
Substance and life to what I feel, enshrining,
Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past
For future restoration."
- The Prelude, William Wordsworth

What's up with Bibble?

Bibble is a raw converter and image enhancement application for Windows, Mac and Linux. It's particularly geared to large scale batch processing of many images. In terms of enhancement features, it supplies almost everything except selections and direct editing functions: for example, lens correction, sharpening, exposure fixing, etc.

The only fly in the ointment is that it's a pain in the mouse to use.

Let's be clear up-front: I support the idea of Bibble, particularly its high end feature set, low price and cross-platform availability. There aren't so many professional graphics applications on Linux that we can afford to be overly picky about them. But Bibble is extremely likely to promote blasphemy, because it often leaves you pounding the keyboard while screaming, "What in the name of holy hell are you DOING??!"

While all the individual settings in Bibble and fairly straightforward and do their job well, applying them in combination to a set of images is erm...non-intuitive to say the least. Using the program, you get the feeling it was developed by someone who thinks differently to you or indeed, anyone else you can imagine. It appears to have a fondness for "randomly" resetting the controls between image selections, probably because changed settings for individual images are transparently saved (to a matching .bib file) and recalled. In particular, it takes a lot of work to make it retain and obey the output scaling parameters. There are several potential sources of setting information:

• default settings;
• a saved group of settings, or settings for individual tools;
• custom settings for an individual image.

My only conclusion to date is that the program carefully works out which group of settings is the one you least want at any moment, and then applies them. To get it to do anything else, you have to force every option you can find to use your desired settings. (To be less facetious, I think the problem is that Bibble tries to be intuitive by transparently doing the right thing at any stage, but its idea of what's right is a little odd. This causes frustration because the user can't divine what it is doing.)

For example, for a batch queue that resizes the source images for web display (600 pixels on the longest edge), my solution was:

1. Adjust the settings for one image, including the scaling (by percentage rather than dimensions, since width/height need to be kepyt proportional and rather depend on image orientation) and then save them as a group.
2. Tell the queue to use the saved settings from the file.
3. Oh, and tell it to use the settings to determine the final image size, rather than the default ("Full") or any of the other preset options.
4. Oh, and delete any individual settings for the set of images to be processed, since these appear to override the queue settings (Select All and Delete Image Settings).

You'd be surprised how much effort Bibble will apparently make to frustrate these choices and do the wrong thing. Maybe I need to read the manual more closely ... or maybe I shouldn't have to.

However, when it actually does the right thing, it's a handy way to quickly prepare large numbers of digital camera files for web display or further editing. The interactive queue feature here is a joy, letting you rip through a large number of images, merrily despatching each to an appropriate work queue for processing: this one for web preview, this one same but in mono, this one to a full-res mono TIFF with no sharpening for subsequent proper editing, etc.

I particularly like using Bibble for monochrome conversion, now that it includes a "Black and White" plugin. You can supposedly do a "better" job using the Channel Mixer in an editor, but I find that the mixer gives too many options; I move the sliders around vaguely until I end up with something that sorta, kinda looks right, but always with a nagging feeling that a different set of tweaks would be much better. With Bibble, I can just enable the plugin (which I think simply extracts the Value/Luminosity channel by default), boost the contrast with an S-curve, optionally apply a vignette and then spit out ready-made B/W photos that somewhat mimic the look of XP2 chromogenic film. If the B&W plugin had a toning option, rather than the gimmicky "spot color" feature that will plague us all with selectively-coloured images for years to come, it would be perfect.

The other minor problem with Bibble, in common with other similar programs, is that you can't apply sharpening after resizing (or can you - again, not an intuitive feature). When will application vendors appreciate that this is necessary to regain clarity, particularly for web-sized images?

Hence if you're looking a bulk raw processing program on Linux (with a GUI), Bibble gets a qualified recommendation - it does the job after some wrassling, and it's not like there's an alternative.

A review of LightZone

I'll get right to the point: LightZone is so good, it was worth installing Java for.

In over eight years of PC ownership, I've never yet found a need to install Java - the megabytes of libraries, the bloat, the slowness, just for a few footling GUI applications. LightZone changes that (and the bonus is, after holding back for so long, it seems like Java performance has finally caught up with real world expectations).

LightZone is a photo-editing and raw converter application for digital images. It's sold for Windows and Mac, but there's also a Linux version which is free (although unsupported, but that's par for the course). This isn't a complete review - see the Light Crafts site for full details of the product. What makes it different to other image editors, and so much fun to use, is the ZoneFinder and ZoneMapper features. These graphically indicate the various zones of brightness in the image and allow you to adjust them simply by stretching or compressing sections of the tonal range. If you're used to Curves and Levels in a traditional editor, this rapidly changes from a complete mystery to a bloody revelation - suddenly, you feel like you have half a clue about what you're doing.

That apart, LightZone has a number of other benefits in the Linux arena:

• 16 bit processing and colour management throughout. Maybe one day the GIMP will get there, but it will probably be the last graphics application to do so.
• Non-destructive editing. The LightZone "stack" of edits provides the equivalent of Photoshop's adjustment layers. This gives you much more freedom to manipulate the image, since you're not doing anything that can't be undone (or simply disabled) at any later date, and you know you're not impacting the quality of the original data. (Although perversely, my initial edits in LightZone have turned out less dramatic than equivalent work in the GIMP, perhaps because the ZoneMapper encourages subtler, more gradual tweaks than simply hitting "auto levels".)
• Editing stacks are saved separately to images (in a descriptive XML format). Hence you can, say, reapply the same edits to a 16 bit rescan of a negative that was originally only done in 8 bits. (If you want a finished image, you "export" it to a new file.)
• Handles raw image formats and standard ones. In comparison, other raw converters like Bibble and UFRaw will only recognise, somewhat ironically, proprietary raw files (although Bibble now does JPEGs too); this is mainly because the underlying dcraw program they're based on doesn't read standard image formats either. I can apply LightZone to my scanned TIFF images.
• All selections (regions) are automatically feathered, and you can see and directly alter the amount of feathering. The region creation options appear limited, but in practice the feature has been so well implemented that they quickly become intuitive.
• Unlike the rest of the crop of newer image editors (e.g. Krita, Pixel), performance is acceptable. I'm running it in 1GB of RAM on an Athlon 2000XP, and it's perfectly usable - not as fast as I'd prefer, but it doesn't annoy me.

There are downsides, which are certainly apparent but not sufficient to deter a user. You might occasionally need to import a LightZoned image into another application to finish it off, which is another step in the workflow.

• LightZone is still a 1.x product, and the UI lacks polish - those little extras that the GIMP has picked up over many years of development. For example, it doesn't predict the size of an exported JPEG for a given quality, which can be useful if there are limits on uploaded file sizes.
• In addition, LightZone misses all the bells-and-whistles tools of a mature editor. You can't add text or borders to an image. There's only one blur algorithm. There are no straightforward toning options for monochrome images, although you can fiddle with the White Balance or Color Balance tools and blend mode to approximate this.
• Sharpening is done with one or more USM passes in the stack. You can't resharpen after resizing the image to its final output size to recover clarity, since this occurs at export time. (It would be possible to address this if "resize" were simply another tool in the stack, rather than an export option.) To be fair, this is an issue that many similar tools fail to recognise (Bibble is the same).
  Furthermore, I normally apply edge-sharpening on scanned film negatives to avoid over-emphasising the grain. This isn't possible with LightZone at present, since you can't select edges easily - possibly some more flexibility is required in the region selections.
• Although the regions concept is so well implemented that it quickly becomes intuitive, at the pixel level it's still not as precise or convenient as simply painting on to a layer with a brush; e.g. for burn & dodge operations.
• The resizing algorithm appears much coarser than the GIMP's bicubic scaling; for example, it preserves the graininess of a scanned neg, whereas resizing in the GIMP always smooths it away. At present, resizing and output sharpening are best done in some other app.
• Very little documentation. There are some online tutorials and tool descriptions, and the Windows/Mac versions include a help feature if you're prepared to download the eval versions, but a proper manual is still outstanding.
• The file selectors are quite poor; each one retains its own state between runs, so not only will you not necessarily find yourself browsing the current directory on startup, but the Open, Save and Export dialogues are quite likely to refer to different directories unless you re-navigate in each one. You can easily save the edits to a different directory than the original file by accident, which means that LightZone won't show them in the browser.
• It's Java on UNIX so the fonts are atrocious and there's no preferences option to change them (e.g. to a sans typeface).
• ("Hey Ade, what about Digital Asset Management capabilities?" - "La-la-la, not listening, what's that?!") Proper management of all my digital images is something I'll look at when I take my head out of this nice cool sand.

However, I feel there are only two extra features that would really improve the product. Firstly, a "before/after" comparison mode that would redisplay the (buffered) image without the last change made simply by mousing over it (similar to the examples in the tutorials on LightCraft's site). You can disable or re-enable any step in the editing stack with one click, but it takes a moment to update the display so it's difficult to judge the precise difference. (This would be a novel feature for any editing app.) Secondly, Light Crafts really ought to create an official user forum. This is such good software that it deserves to have a community built around it to share tips and explore the possibilities.

LightZone is addictive; it actually makes you want to process your images so you can play with those fantastic zone manipulations, whereas most other editors make the job seem like a painful chore in which you don't entirely feel in control. If, like I initially did, you mistake it for a novel interface in an "experimental" program that may one day be useful, try it now. My one worry is that the Linux version may be following the crack cocaine business model; give out free samples to get the customer hooked, then jack the price up. Because I'm afraid I'd have to buy it if that ever happened.

Other bubbles

• Digital Outback Photo have an informative review-cum-tutorial.
• Auspicious Dragon has a number of postings about LightZone (although note that a representative of Light Crafts feels these are overly weighted with negative comments ;-).

"...For the purposes of this book, I will be dealing with rock music and pop music, the subtle distinction being that 'rock music' is a loud aggressive form of entertainment enjoyed by many people, whereas 'pop music' is crap."

Many years ago, BB bought a small yellow hardback called "What with being Stone Deaf and Everything" from a remaindered books shop in Manchester. It was a satirical guide to being a musician and caused much hilarity when taken into the studio that the Scarlet Martyrs were using at the time; for example, it quickly became verboten to argue with Meic the producer because, as the book said, he "watches Channel 4 and 'knows what the kids want'".

Several years on, while wasting time as usual on t'Internet, BB discovered that the pile of "Stone Deaf" copies had been the last act in a short story of a publishing failure (which was a bit of a blow, as we'd misplaced our copy while failing to become a musician - maybe this explains it). On his web site, author David Hallamshire relates the tragic tale of how publishing conglomerates, takeovers and stock dumping led to only a thousand copies of the book ever making it to the shops before the rest were snapped up for pennies by discerning (and tight) people like us.

Having tried and failed to interest publishers in a revamped version (presumably because Hallamshire isn't a C-grade celeb with a minor talent, a recovery problem and/or huge false bazongas), he's said "Stuff the lot of 'em" and published it himself via Lulu so go there and buy a copy now. It's got all the old jokes (e.g. the "drummers are thick" gag), lots of new ones and some cartoons for the drummers who can't read, and all the money raised goes to charity David.