Give Your Mac a Tune-Up

So i've had an imac at home for about 2 years now and for the past couple months it just starting opening applications slower and running sluggishly so I decided to get to the bottom of it. After surfing the web and talking to apple care I found a few tips on how to speed up the performance of your mac.

1. First you are going to wanna run Disc Utility which is located within your applications>utilities folder to repair any damages that may be occurring on your harddrive. Highlight your hard drive from the list and have the program repair the permissions. This is a common way to correct some computer errors which could be slowing down your hard drive.

2. It always helps to upgrade your ram. see if your mac is able to be outfitted with more ram.

3. Shut down your mac, unplug the ac cord from your computer and then hold down the computer's power button for 6 seconds. Then plug your mac back in and restart to desktop.

4. Restart your mac again and immediately hold down (Command, Option, P, R) keys

until you will hear the "bootup mac ding" twice. Then let go of the keys and let your computer restart to the desktop.

5. Download an application called AppCleaner. AppCleaner is a free small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps.

Additional Tip - If you have an apple care protection plan then you have access to download TechTool Deluxe which is a powerful diagnostic utility that allows you to test your computer's critical system components, such as the processor, RAM (random-access memory), VRAM (video random-access memory), the hard disk, and more.

Please feel free to post if you have any other tips as well.

Pittsburgh In High Dynamic Range

Here are a few high dynamic range images I created recently using photomatix with apple aperture.

High Dynamic Range

I recently purchased Photomatix which is software that is used to create high dynamic range imagery. High Dynamic Range or HDR is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques or photographic prints. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight. Hdr Soft makes Photomatix as a stand alone version as well as a plugin for photoshop, adobe lightroom, and apple aperture.

To learn more about the software, visit HDR Soft's Website
http://www.hdrsoft.com/