Having a headache

This morning I did the testing with ImageMagick and colour profiles that I was intending to do yesterday. I found that the sRGB_IEC61966-2-1_black_scaled.icc profile was the one to use when converting from aRGB to sRGB and keep the images looking the same in colour managed applications.

I think the other day I also said that photoshop seemed to embed a much smaller ICC profile in the image than the ones I'd downloaded from the ICC website. Well actually, I extracted the ICC profile from an image converted to sRGB with photoshop, and the ICC profile file created was actually slightly larger than the ones from the ICC website (33.3Kb vs. 33Kb I think).



Looking at the PHP Manual page for the Imagick extension, I found there was an adaptive sharpen function. So I tried this out in order to try and get my web sized image nice and sharp. While it did sharpen the image a bit, I couldn't work out how to make it stronger.

Googling I came across this page about using unsharp mask in ImageMagick, which has lots of useful info on the different parameters, of which radius and sigma are also used as parameters for the adaptiveSharpenImage function.

After lunch I went on Animal Crossing. Then I had a headache and went on a walk. I didn't take many photos. I saw a few small butterflies, but whenever I got near them they would fly away. And I couldn't really be bothered to try and photograph the other insects I saw as I was too headachey.

When I got home I finished reading the article about unsharp mask in ImageMagick, then tried adjusting the radius and sigma parameters of the adaptiveSharpenImage function to see if I could get my image sharper. Unfortunately, this didn't seem to actually make any difference. So I played around with unsharpMaskImage instead, and eventually ended up with a reasonably sharpened image, though not as good as the same image smart sharpened in photoshop.

I need to get some way of sharpening an image according to its size, so I did some googling and started reading Sharpening 101 by Thom Hogan.

After dinner I watched an episode of The Equalizer. Then me, Clare, Lil' L and Moccle went to the polling station. Me and Moccle voted for the conservatives because they had a bloke called 'Pain', so we voted for Pain. Clare voted for Labour because she felt sorry for them. Lil' L didnae vote for anyone because he's a being too young maniac.

We thought that Moccle should change his name to 'Charles Widmore' and then become an MEP candidate and then he could probably get voted into the European Parliament and always go there and wear a Widmore mask. Moccle said that then he could say to Gordon Brown "I didn't mess up the economy, you did!"


We missed the first 15 minutes of Springwatch because we were out voting. After watching Springwatch I did some website work. First I tried for ages to get a PHP constant to work when enclosed in backticks. I tried lots of different things, but couldn't get it to work.

Then I remembered that I had added a symbolic link to the exiftool executable in my local bin directory, and had added my local bin directory at the start of my shell $PATH. However, I couldn't get that working. After some testing, I think it is because PHP or at least the shell command that PHP executes isn't executed as me (probably executed as www-data or whatever the name of the apache user is), and so that doesn't have my local bin directory in its $PATH.

I'm quite sleepy, so I'll look at that tomorrow.

Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Ham with iceberg lettuce sandwich; banana; caramel Rocky; cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: fake jammy dodger; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Spaghetti bolognese; tomato ketchup; ground black pepper. Pudding was a Muller crunch corner. Coffee. Easter egg.
Supper: Hot chocolate; fake Jammy Dodger; fly biscuit.