Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
date and time when the image was taken. Ideally, you need to generate a sufficient number
of dark frames to match these parameters; the more the better. If you do a lot of
night photography, HotPixelRemover can save time spent on “spotting out” hot pixels
individually.
Version: HotPixelRemover 1.0 (2007)
OS: Windows 2000, XP, and Vista
RAM: 256MB
Supported file formats: JPEG, BMP, TIFF, and PNG
Price level: Approx. $10
Address: sales@lightningcube.com
www.lightningcube.com
Sandra Professional
Vendor: SiSoftware
Purpose: Analysis and diagnostics for computer systems, including disk drives and storage cards
Description
Sandra, which stands for “System ANalyser, Diagnostic, and Reporting Assistant,” is a
computer analysis, diagnostics, and benchmarking utility that can test most aspects of
computer performance including that of disk drives and storage cards. It comes in six
versions—Lite (for workgroups only), Pro Home, Pro Business, Engineer, Enterprise,
and a Legacy version for home enthusiasts with older computers.
Sandra is widely used by the world’s computer press for testing new hardware and has
over 5,000 online reviews to prove it. It is included here because it is a great utility for
making sure your computer system or network is functioning properly. What is more,
it can test individual peripherals such as disk drives and storage cards. For example, if
you need to test whether a storage card is genuine, you can run a performance test with
Sandra, and if the performance is lower than that claimed by the manufacturer it is likely
to be a fake.
Comments
Computers are central to the digital photographer’s workflow. If you want to make sure
all your systems are functioning properly, you need a diagnostics program like Sandra.
It is an outstanding product that has won dozens of awards. Using it is not necessarily
as hard as you might suppose, as you can quickly grasp how to measure basic performance
and compare it to other, benchmarked components. In this respect it is not unlike
a scientific calculator—square roots are easy, but you need at least some training as a
computer scientist to get full benefit from it. Remember to back up your system before
attempting to run any stress tests on it.