Manxman

There are great concerns in the Maritime world about LED's lately. On board ship they are interfering with Vhf radio transmissions, weakening the signal strength, and similarly with Ais signals.

I'm going to stick with Win 7 for a lot longer yet, Microsoft will probably have Win 12 out before I change. I can't fault it on my machine. As for Win 10 data harvesting there are a lot of articles on the net as to how to stop it quite easily.

Got it sorted, I have a dual monitor setup. Windows was finalising on the smaller monitor which I had turned off. It's easy to be a bit thick at my age.

After foolishly reserving the new Win 10. Win update stopped updating and only gave me the option to download Win 10, no other updates were available. After getting fed up to the back teeth with it I looked on line for a way to get rid of the 10 update. The solution worked for a day or two then went back to wanting to upgrade to 10. This morning I decided to do a new install of Win 7. I've done that about once a year so I'm familiar with the process. Once it installs itself Win 7 restarts itself but hangs. I've left it for up to an hour. I can't remember how many times I've tried it the past nine hours and it's got me beaten. I've tried installing from a CD and a bootable pen drive to no avail. Any recommendations, besides skipping it will be very helpful. The PC was running great with no problems be I tried to reinstall other than the constant wanting to update to win 10. Sent from a 10 year old laptop. Thanks.

Lightroom is a scaled down version of what get with CS5/6. CS5/6 has three parts, Bridge, where you view your photo's on your drives, batch them etc. and open them im Camera raw. Where you have a powerful and very versatile bit of kit. Open a raw and click in the adjustment brush and see what it can do, make sure you tick the box "show mask". Once your finished there hold down the Alt key and click open copy, so you have your raw left to work with again and undo any changes you made. Here's a recent Raw converted straight to a Jpeg and afterwards being through Camera raw and Photoshop. IMG_0084ToJpeg by Manninagh, on Flickr> The whole photo looks muddy, not sharp, highlights are blown out on the silver balloon, poor contrast and the colour need more saturation. Balloons5 by Manninagh, on Flickr After Camera raw and a levels adjustment in Photoshop. Raw is the way to go to get the best out of your photographs

I've never used Lightroom always Photoshop CS5 or 6. Part of which is Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), is this what you get with Lightroom? I only shoot Raw, all of my photographs are first processed in ACR, a very powerful tool which is non destructible and most often overlooked by most people hurrying into Photoshop. I have an excellent Tutorial for ACR if you want a copy Kirisute.

Nice those are Kirisute, I'd have liked to the inside the fence where the balloons were inflating. But the Security Guard, a spotty youth of about 18 wouldn't let me in, even tho' I offered him a tenner lol.

My wife wanted me to drive her down to Somerset to stay with her old friend for a few days, I was rather reluctant until I discovered that the Balloon Fiesta coincided with the trip. The weather at 06:00 am was perfect for the mass ascent which got under way about 06:45. It was advertised that about 160 balloons would take off, but I doubt there was that amount. All in all it was well worth the journey down from Scotland and the early start to get there. Balloons6 by Manninagh, on Flickr Balloons4 by Manninagh, on Flickr Balloons8 by Manninagh, on Flickr Balloons3 by Manninagh, on Flickr Balloons7 by Manninagh, on Flickr

Gimp, another freebie much the same as what Kirisute recommended. http://www.gimp.org/

The Isle of Man was TB free for over fifty years, now there aren't any Badgers, Foxes, Snakes or Toads there. To eradicate TB all cattle that tested positive were simply culled. Any cattle that were to be imported into the I.o.M had to be tested for TB before a certificate of import was granted. The I.o.M. had a good trade exporting TB free stock to the UK. Some ten years ago the Manx Government in their collective wisdom, dropped compulsory TB testing for imported bovines.. Now the I.o.M doesn't have milk quotas, so some UK farmers upped sticks and bought farms there bringing with them their TB infected dairy herds. Now the island is back to square one with cattle infected with TB. I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember milk being delivered daily in bottles, I am. The farmer whom delivered our milk had impressed on the tin foil cap, TB Free. Politicians they don't know their arse from their elbow.

These beggars are proving hard to photograph, but I'm happy with this one from this evening. BarnOwlroost1 by Manninagh, on Flickr

In 2010 a new race at the Isle of Man TT was started for electric powered bikes. These bikes have got faster every year, with John McGuinness breaking the lap record for this class during the race. his average speed for the lap being 117.366 mph, I didn't hear what his top speed was through the speed trap on the fastest part of the course was, but it would probably be 170-180 mph with that average speed. https://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&gws_rd=ssl#complete=0&q=tt+zero As for an F1 car doing a lap, would it have the ground clearance? The roads are pretty bumpy and uneven believe me, with adverse cambers etc. Add to that Ballaugh Bridge and the other places where you get airborne. Although the course looks wide enough it's quite narrow in many places some of which can only be appreciated after you have driven around the course yourself. Mark Higgins lap this year in the Subaru was at an average of 117.51 mph, which is fractionally faster than John McGuinness on the electric bike.

Great photo Kirisute, run it through Silver Efex Pro, some good effects available in there.

Now I know you lot like a bit of culture, so have a look at this. The singing Priest, absolute fabulous voice and performance at a wedding. Just imagine if every church was like this on Sunday morning, they'd be full. A great guy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYKwqj5QViQ

Ok, followed your instructions to the letter, Roguefix found a couple of things, MBytes was clean, ran CC, there are no Programs listed in programs and Features that I don't recognise. Rest IE. In Manage Add-ons > Search Providers the only entry was for MySearchDial which was greyed out and I couldn't remove it. When I next opened IE I chose to add Google as my homepage, that then gave me the option to remove MySearchDial from the list of search providers. I have now set my homepage in Internet options to http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0 this stops Google using Auto complete, another little thing that gets on my wick. Thanks for the help Kirisute, it's great to have someone with your knowledge handing out good advice.

Cheers Kirisute I'll run them tomorrow, hopefully Dropboxus will find it as Malwarebytes couldn't even in Safe mode.

Cheers Ayjay, I've been through everything that I found on Google, still no joy. I do now have it disabled in Manage Addons but when I right click the option to remove it that is greyed out and unavailable. Right now it's not causing a problem (I think) but I want it gone as it's like an itch I can't scratch. I've down loaded and run Malwarebytes Anti Rootkit and Adware cleaner, there must be a way. I don't really want to do a complete clean Windows reinstall as I only did so a couple of months since.

I think Mysearchdial came with a codec pack I downloaded. I've tried everything I can to get rid of it. In Manage Addons, right click, no option to delete it. Control Panel, Programs and Features, it does not show here. Revo uninstaller, it does not show here. Internet Properties, Advanced tab, Reset Internet Explorer to default, Mysearchdial became my home page. I can't find any reference to the program in C:\ Program files or Program files x86. Any idea's where else to look or how to find it and remove it?

I'm glad the days of being locked in the spare bedroom with just a red bulb glowing are over, I'm sure the neighbours thought our house was a knocking shop when they saw the red light glowing through a chink in the curtains.

Ac couple of nice ones there Kiri, Barn owls aren't that common around here. I have found two nesting sites one of which I'm trying to work out as how to photograph the young when they appear out of the nest box. I don't want to disturb them by going into the small building. I know the owner and as it's never going to be inhabited again I'll ask if I can pull a few slates off the roof so I can view them from outside next year. Do you have a good population of Barn Owls down your way in Norfolk? We have a massive Buzzard population, but no matter how slowly you approach them, on foot or in a car as soon as you point a camera at them they're off in a hurry. Not surprising really as they were persecuted for many years.

Not in the I.o.M now Chesters, retired to 28 miles further north across the Irish sea, the land of Whisky. I do miss the T.T. though couldn't get over in the boat this year as I knocked a rather large hole in the wall for patio doors and had to get that sorted.

If you want everything in focus (depth of field) you need to use a higher F stop. Now I don't believe it's that easy in macro photography. What lens did you use on the dragon fly Ayjay?

Never seen a spider like that, it didn't have a web to catch the fly? Just relied on it's cammo then.

The same photo. How I achieved it in Raw . 1. 3 Copies with altered the exposure for the sky foreground and middle ground. 2. Bring them into PS and layer them on top of each other 3 Use an eraser brush to away parts of each layer until the whole photo has a balance exposure, probably took an hour. 4 Increased individually the saturation on each colour, especially red and orange. 5 Levels, set the black and white points and altered the midtones to get rid of the muddy look and to give it a bit of oomph. 6 Sharpened it 7 There's probably a few more tweaks that I've forgotten. It all sounds complicated but there are many excellent Photoshop tutorials on line and if you start with just the basics you'll improve most pictures. I doubt that any Professional photographer publishes photo's that haven't been through Photoshop. Who said the camera doesn't lie ? But in this photograph nothing has been added it's only what the camera captured in Raw. By the way it is a far better photo than it looks here via Photobucket.

I never took it as a criticism at all Chesters, the time is spent adding layers to achieve certain things, exposure, levels to get rid of the muddy look, sharpness, the option are endless in Photoshop. I'll have a look at your photo soon, My Canon is 15mp and a typical Raw file is 16/17mb a straight conversion to Jpeg squeezes it down to 6/6.5mb. This photo is a straight Raw to Jpeg in Photoshop, nothing added or taken away. It was taken a couple of miles from home at a very popular holiday hamlet. Now I've sold umpteen copies of this to visitors as they all like to sit outside the Pub watching the sunset. Now who'd want this hanging on there wall? I'll put the Photshop version in another reply below this one.