It's A Miracle

My 7600 has been sitting for the better part of a year, collecting dust. Tonight I thought I'd see if it was even possible to resurrect it after such a long time, fully anticipating hours of clean, test, clean cycles.

One clean, no tests (couldn't get the test to work), a quick reinstall of Quadtone Rip and a bit of a refresher on how to use it (I've been using the 5000 so hadn't used that either in months) and my first print looks to be perfect - I can't believe it. I'm making a print of the badlands image of the other day - 20X42 inches, 300 dpi (there was slight stretching of the image in the stitching and perspective correction process).

Actually that was a story in itself. With the base of the ball head perfectly leveled, I found that one end of the canyon wall was a bit higher than the other. I figured that if I tilted the base a bit then I could capture the canyon wall on the bias so to speak, and fix it later. What really happened was that the images when stitched came out in an arc. I didn't want to trim to get a rectangle so I brought the image into Photoshop, did a transform using warp and adjusted the warping to straighten the image. This resulted in a rectangular image but I noted later that in this image there are absolutely vertical lines of erosion in the image which could not be either curved or on the diagonal.

A second go with warp later in the editing process was able to fix that nicely without losing any of the image. I find it remarkable that I can warp an image twice and yet maintain the resolution and sharpness but that has been my experience on several occasions. I do try to avoid doing a transform twice but sometimes I miss something or there is a secondary adjustment to be made after the initial one.