ATCP, LLC

A Sales Engineer is always on the road, and always has her/his laptop. We often need to make calls that aren’t company calls that we don;t want showing up on the company’s bill. We also find ourselves needing to call work discretely in areas where there is Internet (client site) but no cell phone coverage.

And what about those of us that receive calls from all kinds of people throughout the peak hours of our cell carrier, yet don’t want those minutes taken off our allowance?

What is an enterprising Sales Engineer to do?

I was always frustrated at how Skype was too bulky (kills your battery), and was open to government inspection of content. I don’t use it. Like Gizmo, they get paid for “Skype Out” at a hefty fee. There had to be a better way. Other services I have, like GTalk, don’t even allow for calling land lines. Well, there is a way. More »

See the end of this post for the actual RAW file used in this tutorial so you can edit it along with me in the post.

In the previous tutorial, we saw how the controls work in Adobe Camera RAW, or ACR. This time we’ll be dealing with something that only RAW can deal with-bad pictures. Adobe Photoshop is fine when the picture is good, or you want to take artistic license, but is useless when it comes to saving an image.

When would this happen? Well, it happens all the time, really. Every time I hand my camera to someone to take a picture with, the shot is inevitably bad. The problem is, I can’t sit there and teach them how to take pictures, compensate for lighting, etc., so I’m screwed, right? Wrong! I had a waiter at Giogio’s Table in Virgin Gorda, BVI take a picture of my wife & I on our 10th anniversary in April, and he took it with the ocean outside behind us. We came out as black sillouettes.
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I came across this simple trick purely by accident when setting up lighting for a room full of furniture. I ended up supplying indirect/direct lighting for an entire scene with a single light and a plane. The great part of this technique is that it renders really fast.

For a test of how this works, setup a standard scene with a V-Ray Plane that has a checker diffuse. Add a teapot to the center of the scene, with any material. Lastly, add a standard Target Spot above the scene. Crank up the intensity multiplier to 3.0. The scene should look a little like this:

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To setup a test scene, start with the scene from this tutorial.

I’ve cleaned it up by removing the side glass examples, and leaving just the center one. Also, a V-Ray Sphere is a nice touch:

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This time we’ll be taking a first look at how to introduce exceptional lighting into your scenes with HDRI, or High Dynamic Range Imaging. HDRI is the best way to add lighting to your scene that is as realistic as it gets.

All dynamic range refers to is the fact that even if you are rendering your scene with the widest range of colors, with the best video card, on the best monitor, it will still not have the range of colors and brightness that your eye can detect.

To start, we’ll just insert a plane into the scene and give it a V-Ray material that has its diffuse channel set to a simple checker pattern. I use this pattern because it is the easiest way to see precisely how your objeccts are inter-relating to/with each other and their environment.

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