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Disneyland Information Guide Archive

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The return of
DisneylandBlues
Fixed Items & Digital Photo Notes

Disneyland is not just another amusement park. It's unique, and I want it kept that way.
- Walt Disney

UPDATES: [If any to the site] Will be placed here.

DIGITAL PHOTO NOTES: I got a note when this site first went up asking about how I process the photos used here from the digital camera I use and thought this was something I should fill you in about.

As you may know, digital photography is still pretty much in its infancy - and although much progress has been made up to now, these cameras still have a long way to go to come close to the detail and resolution a regular film camera can give you. As a result of this most photographers feel that once you get the image onto your computer, it should be used as the basis of what will be a final result once you work with it.  This is done so as to represent more accurately what you saw when you took the shot.

Sometimes with sophisticated processing programs such as Adobe PhotoShop or ULead's PhotoImpact, a photographer can alter images to such an extent that they can represent something else other than the reality that was originally photographed. But more commonly the camera itself, due to compression used on images to fit them onto the recording media, will soften the picture overall.  In a few circumstances, you can see through glare on a surface for example with your own eyes, and a camera cannot see though it as well due to limitations in the angle you shoot at.

Before images go up on this site, there are a few steps I take to prepare them, and I'll fill you in on what they are so you have a better idea of what goes into the photos seen here.

First they are transferred from the floppy to the hard drive [boy do I love the Mavica's ability to do this] - and then they are either rotated [if the shot is taken as a tall one, rather than a wide one] or cropped to focus on the subject a bit better, and allow the proper sized images for faster downloads. Then they are then run though ULead's PhotoImpact 4.2 "Auto Process" - which allows me to choose which of the following adjustments should be made, and gives me the ability to do / undo each step so I can judge how it looks to what I remember seeing in the park:

(NOTE: The items marked with a "*" tend to significantly alter / affect the image at extreme settings, and must be very carefully used.)

1] Straighten (which is rarely needed, unless it is a panorama shot)

2] Crop (usually already accomplished by this stage)

3] Remove MoirŽ (never used on this site - best for when a print item is scanned and then you want to remove the patterns used in printing that show up)

4] Focus* (which is mild at default settings- and helps sharpen just a tad the Mavica's generally soft images - most photos do not get this, but if they do, it is at very low settings)

5] Brightness (which helps if the shot is taken on an overcast day or indoors)

6] Contrast* (which many times makes paint damage look more extreme than it is - and I tend to avoid it whenever possible)

7] Balance* (which looks for a better match between colors by finding a source for "white" within the shot, and then balancing all the other colors to it.  This one gets used only on half the shots, it can highlight too much of a difference on a painted surface many times)

The program also offer all sorts of other digital effects and / or filters plug-ins too - but none are utilized beyond what is listed above.

The goal of preparing the shots for the web is pretty simple - they need to reflect what I've seen out there - and also what others see too. More than a few times people who visit the park with me are asked to look at the shots on the LCD playback screen the camera offers and I depend upon them for their additional opinions to make sure the shots do represent what is out in the park accurately.

During the preparation process I sometimes play around with combinations of the above variables in the Auto Processing mode. For many shots only one or two selections bring the most faithful result, very few times all of the steps come up with a result that shows more clearly what was actually seen on that day.

You can rest assured that no individual elements / items within a shot are ever manipulated to highlight them for this section - nor is anything cropped without trying to give you some sense of size / perspective of where they are at and how large they are.   It is important to me that you see what I see - and you see it in as much the proper scale as possible as I do.

After the photo is finished, it is then saved again, sometimes with additional JPEG compression, during which I make one final check to make sure nothing got altered during this process yet again. The additional compression helps makes the photos download faster, but some pages on the site will still take up to 90 seconds to download at a 28.8 modem speed.

Now that you know what happened on my end, let's briefly touch on color depth, photo resolution and monitor display settings at your end of the modem.

As you know many computers and all their different video cards can show the photo files used on web sites quite differently.  Many people only run at 16 or 256 colors at 640 resolution, and others run 1024 plus with "millions" of "true colors" in either 16, 24 or 32 bit. Not to mention all the differences in operating systems [Mac, Linux etc.], video drivers and video cards, (and let's not even get into the monitors themselves, how well converged they are, or if they are Sony Trinitrons, bargain basement Fry's models or LCDs). And of course we should remember you most probably have your own personal preferences when it comes to setting brightness, contrast and other variables. Needless to say there is no one viewing standard set that one can match up to. Even systems that now standardize settings usually only do so for matching print results.

Summing up here, it should be understood that no photos will look the same on all computers - and it is quite possible that, yes, some shots reproduced here will look much more severe or worse on your own equipment at home / work that what I may have seen in the park.  The inverse is also true though - some of those same shots may look a lot better than they actually are are too.  My goal is to make sure on my monitor at least, the shots do reflect what is seen out there.  That's what I work towards.

My home system, so you have some kind of reference here, is a Compaq Presario 5610 [350 PII] with an ATI Rage LT Pro AGP 2x card, set at 24 bit True Color / 1024 x 768 resolution. The monitor utilized is a Mitsubishi Diamond Scan 15FS which uses its specific Windows 98 driver. The digital camera used is a Sony Mavica FD-91 with a 14x zoom.  Most shots are taken at 640 Fine mode, Standard mode is sometimes used also. I use ULead's PhotoImpact 4.2 to prepare the images, and Microsoft's FrontPage 2000 to assemble the final HTML files.

As I said before, I feel it is important you understand how this medium works, and how it is used. This will help you in how to judge this site and the information it offers.

Al Lutz - 3/9/99 - updated 5/30/00

ParrotHead kindly hosts the WALT DISNEY WORLD BLUES web site, stop by to see problems on the other coast