Haven’t used my old 300D in ages. So when it got to getting the photos off the camera it refused to work on windows 7 (64bit RC in case that makes a difference). No Canon drivers available, everyone just saying “buy card reader”. No, you don’t need a card reader, they are nice and fast, but it is possible without one.
If your camera has a PTP mode this will probably work for you too.
How to get your photos off an old Canon camera with Windows 7:
On your camera set Communication to PTP in the menu.
Plug your camera’s data cable in and switch it on. Windows should try and install drivers, which failed in my case. If it works for you, be happy and on your way 
if not continue on with the next step.
Start > type in “cmd”
Right click on cmd application top of the list and select run as administrator.
Type in these two commands:
bcdedit.exe -set loadoptions DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
bcdedit.exe -set TESTSIGNING ON
No thats not a typo on the DDISABLE. Reboot your pc.
This disables driver blocking and allows the installation of unsigned drivers. Plug in your camera and switch it on. Windows should install the Picture Transfer Protocol drivers now, and you should be able to access the memory card just like a usb drive. Sadly the Canon control software wont work though.
Categories: Howto.
Tags: camera, canon, drivers, Howto, windows 7
Thought I’d start off with something general, yet technical. Gamma correction and linear workflow. This is going to be hard to hear ( if you don’t know what I’m talking about ) but you’ve been doing it wrong.
In the majority of 3d (and compositing) applications you render 1.0 gamma images by default. Some of the new ones like Modo corrects your renders to 2.2. Without correcting the raw 1.0 gamma image to 2.2 you end up with a darker than expected image.
So what do we do? We push up the intensities of our lights, resulting in blown out speculars and unrealistic falloff on our lights. That’s why many of us used to work around this by separating specular and diffuse lights, pushing up the ambient colour on our materials and rendering many separate passes to try and get a realistic result.
sponza model | left gamma 1.0 defaults | right gamma corrected to 2.2 | directional light for the sun, constant plane for the sky, final gather for bounced light rendered in mentalray xsi
In the second image you’ll notice there is more light in the shadow areas, giving the impression that the bounced light is traveling further and helping to illuminate the scene more. Obviously better than the left image.
Continued…
Categories: Howto.
Tags: colour, gamma, workflow