A master carpenter once told me: "no matter how many times and ways you cut a board, you can't make it larger".

The application to digital images should be obvious.

I somehow avoided German Measles when I was in grade school. at 16, I came down with it Dec. 28 in 1964. Sickest I've ever been in my life. Someone must have brought their sick child to church that Christmas. If you want to do the same to others, skip the vaccination.

A Pixel 8 Pro. Or, if you want to spend a little more, an iPhone 15 Pro.

Another possibility is that your drive has a proprietary file system, and that you have accidentally deleted the proprietary driver needed to access files on it. Have you recently did any file system cleanups? I suspect an anti-virus tool might think said driver was a bad-boy and remove it. I should hope that the install disk would contain a manual with a file manifest, and you could see if something is missing from your computer's file system.

My guess is that inside is good-old reliable flash memory. Their marketing people do a commendable job of not explaining how one can backup their photos in the field without also buying what they call their 'cloud' option. It is not clear if this cloud runs on their hardware or your hardware. If your hardware -- then you must leave your computer running whenever you are offsite but want to download photos to it.

I can buy a 1TB Samsung flash drive at Costco for $89. Cloud storage for my photos worth worrying about is cheap from either Google or Amazon.

You would no longer recognize the place. That little Italian restaurant has been replaced by a larger, more upscale place, and the millpond has been encased in concrete. Does look good in December after sunset.

I now realize that all my photos of Tahquamenon Falls are so far beneath your capture that the best scores a 5 to your 100. I never thought that such a shot of the falls was possible.

I am also partly color blind (some semi-humorous details under my dashed line. I've become fairly good using some basic post tools (levels and curves on the luminescence channel, crop, sharpen, mask, etc.

then I decided to try raw processing.

Was real proud of a couple results. Showed them to my BTW. Her response was: "where did you get those colors?"

So, I think something which would be helpful to me (as well as to some other folks here) would be for someone who is not color-compromised to tell us which post tools are very unlikely to produce any color shift. So, I I didn't use those, at least I would not be introducing anything weird. I won't be able to do any color correction, but I know better than to try.

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Was told at a very early age I was color blind. Caused a problem in kindergarten. Was pulled out of school and my parents met with my teacher, who thought I was learning disabled: I had colored the sky purple, the grass orange, the leaves brown. When they asked me why I did that, I replied that all the crayons in the dish had had their wrapper removed, so I couldn't read what the colors were.

Later discovered my nephews were also color blind, we all are unable to see the the pattern in any of the color-blind test charts (except for the black-and-white demo). Sister asked us how we respond to the traffic lights. It's easy, The dark light on the top means stop, the white light on the bottom means go, and the light in the middle means go real fast if you are already at the intersection.

Alternative theory of why all these animals in the zoo take the same time: there species have learned the optimum time to spend reviling themselves without getting attacked by a predator.

My 2 cents: If you are going to take the laptop on the road for accounting work, get one you will be comfortable with on the road. For your digital photography, attach a good monitor (you may already have one). Don't know if Apple requires Apple branded external monitors; this may influence your choice of brands. The enterprise market buys a lot of Dell and Lenovo laptops; they have to keep reliability up to keep the business.

Me, I'm one of those nuts who doesn't trust any computer I haven't built myself.

I gave up on Amazon Prime 10 months ago, and I keep feeling better about my decision all the time. Wonder when Google will pick up on this idea and include ads ( but Better Quality Ads) in their YouTube premium?

Great point. On the rare occasions that I buy new hardware, I always check for it's Linux support.

There's an old saying among hardware nuts that MIPS stands for Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed. I've adapted that to Mpixels standing for Meaningless Indicator of Picture Excellence.

I've run nothing but openSUSE Linux for the last 15 years. Had no idea WinDoze had gotten so bad.

I'm a scientist by trade. If I have to give advice, I MUST try it out first. Right after I downloaded this photo and tried different ways to improve it with GIMP, I realized that I may have broken a Cardinal Rule here. If I did, I want to confess to not having read all the rules, and promise I will never do it again.