#post-processing software for photographers

to start off with some technical stuff you have the linux kernel, then you have all the distributions based on said kernel that are customized to suit different needs.

"A kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system that always has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts between different processes. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components."

tbh i think of it like ice cream flavors. each distro is a different flavor but theyre all ice cream. so while anything that i say here is geared towards my distro of choice, cachyos, it would work on other distros, you would just want to find a tutorial to see the differences.

i have tried other linux distros, but cachy has blown me away by how well and fast everything works. i honestly think that if youre gaming or doing any kind of content creation its the way to go. for the sake of this post not getting stupid long im going to assume you have linux installed. if not here is a general tutorial: "How to Install Linux."

here’s the wiki that walks you through installing cachyos specifically, it goes over everything, personally i used grub as my boot manager and kde plasma as my desktop environment, everything else default: LINK

starting out

thinking of content creators you would usually go to streamers, digital artists, photographers, gamers etc. so thats what this post (kind of guide?) is geared towards. so. if youre on your fresh cachyos install you can navigate to cachyos hello.

i have cachyos hello launch at start.

go to apps/tweaks and click install gaming packages. thatll prompt it to download stuff that makes gaming easier on linux. also in cachyos hello go to install apps, which will open the gui (graphical user interface) of the package manager and you can install the heavy hitters, discord, obs and steam, pretty close to how you would on windows by clicking through the prompts. i also downloaded krita, libreoffice (awesome microsoft office alternative), and vlc (my preferred media player). theres also some cool stuff like opentoonz (2d animation), blender and darktable (RAW photo editing) in there.

when you download programs from your package manager (through the terminal or with the gui), youre installing them natively. there is something called a flatpak, which runs a sandboxed version of the program. its in the name of security so its sectioned off from the other stuff on your computer and so that a company can make one version, the flatpak, and it should work on all linux distros without issue. well get more into flatpaks later.

discord: the json files

once you have all of that installed these are some tweaks that i did. sometimes the cachyos update of discord is a little behind the official discord update (usually less than a day tbh but if youre planning to log into a call not being able to before a collab stream would be bad) so you can navigate to the json of discord (basically just the settings txt file) and turn off that discord checks for updates before launching.

you will want to go here: ~/.config/discord/settings.json

and add this line somewhere in the file: "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true

it should look something like this. you can still update whenever its rolled out but youll be able to use discord uninterrupted while youre waiting.

obs: git, the aur and yay

obs almost works the same as on windows. the plugin structure is a little different but its not too bad once you know what to look for. you have the easy ones like this closed captions plugin. where all you have to do is download the linux zip, extract it and put it in this folder in your file directory: ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins.

then there are the harder ones like the move plugin. where you have to clone and build the plugin yourself from github. or the aitum multistream plugin where cloning and building it myself resulted in a cmake error so the best bet is to navigate to the aur and download it that way.

which sounds like A LOT. so let me explain.

something that makes linux so cool is how easy it is to just grab cool shit from github. but to do that well need to start talking about the terminal which seems to scare people.

so background, cachyos is based on another flavor of linux, arch. its super lightweight and customizable! but when you dont know what youre doing it can be scary. since cachyos is based on arch it used the same package manager and the same commands to navigate through the terminal.

you can follow this tutorial here: "How to Install Git on Arch," and just follow to first steps to install and verify that you installed it. ill be honest i havent actually needed to configure it as it works just fine without doing so.

after youve done that you can install all the cool stuff youve seen on github. going back to the obs move plugin you would type the following in the terminal to clone (download all the necessary files from github): git clone <repository link>

which is https://github.com/exeldro/obs-move-transition

still in the terminal, you want to navigate to where it downloaded by typing: cd <folder name in file directory>

which is usually the name of the program obs-move-transition

most github pages have instructions on how to actually build the thing. for the move plugin you would type: cmake -S . -B build -DBUILD_OUT_OF_TREE=On && cmake --build build

(i realized that i already had cmake installed when i wrote this but if you dont youll want to before you try to set up the move plugin. you can install it with the command “sudo pacman -S cmake” then check that it’s installed with “cmake —version”)

youll see a bunch of stuff pop up in the terminal and once its done, you should be able to see the folder for it in your file directory.

youll navigate to /home/*your username*/obs-move-transition/build/ and there should be the actual plugin move-transition.so. thats what youll put in your obs plugin folder from earlier. youll might have to make a few new folders but it should be nested like this: /home/*your username*/.config/obs-studio/plugins/move-transition/bin/64bit/

git is cool but theres another really cool thing that cachy has because of being based on arch. and thats the aur, the arch user repository. it hosts packages made by the community. in order to install these packages i personally use yay. and heres a tutorial for how to install it here, i followed option 1: "How to Install yay on Arch Linux."

but going back up to the obs plugin example, its similar to what we did earlier. first youd have to find the aur version of the aitum multistream plugin then you would type: git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/obs-aitum-multistream-bin

then: cd obs-aitum-multistream-bin

the difference is that someone already built the plugin for us so you just have to type: makepkg -si

it should once again appear in your home directory and you can go digging for the .so. for me it was in /home/*your username*/obs-aitum-multistream-bin/pkg/obs-aitum-multistream-bin/usr/lib/obs-plugins/. and youll nest it the same way we did earlier with the move plugin.

since i linked what we needed for the multistream plugin we didnt need to use yay very much but the tutorial i linked earlier shows the other ways that you can use it!

once youre done collecting all the plugins you want you can start obs, connect your twitch/youtube account and start streaming the same way you would on windows.

steam: proton, wine and flatpaks

moving onto steam... honestly... a lot of steam games should just work. steam comes with proton, which is basically a compatibility layer that lets window games run on linux. its something that we actually downloaded earlier when we installed the gaming packages. if you want to check before hand what games work you can visit ProtonDB. what is pretty much a guarantee NOT to work are games that use kernel level anticheat, like apex legends, sorry. i dont play any games like that anyways because that seems like an invasion of privacy. but you do you.

if theres something that you want to play that isnt on steam you can use wine instead, or the wine manager bottles to do so. wine is another compatibility layer, its actually partially what proton is based off of. if you want to check and see if something specific runs through wine you can check WineHQ.

if you want to use bottles (which is my preference it keeps everything neat), well be rounding back to flatpaks! to get flatpaks set up youll need to install it by typing in the terminal: sudo pacman -S flatpak

sudo means your acting as the "superuser," itll prompt you to type in your password to verify that you actually want to do what youre doing and that your authorized to do it. you wont see your password as your typing. it looks blank for security purposes but if you type your password and hit enter it will work as long as it was typed correctly. pacman is the name of the package manager for arch. heres some more about the commands you can use in pacman: "pacman."

now with flatpak installed you can install anything from the flathub! but were specifically looking for bottles right now. if you go to the bottles page on flathub the install button will give you what to put into the terminal: "Flathub- Bottles"

getting started with veadotube

veadotube is a good place to start if you want to try out streaming. its an easy to learn program for pngtubers specifically. mini is available for free and once the full version is released i can only imagine that it would be installed the same way.

honestly this is the easiest thing to install out of everything weve talked about. all you need to do is go to the veadotube website and download the zip file for mini. you extract it and inside is an exe file like youd be familiar with if you use windows.

i moved the extracted veadotube mini folder to my home folder for easy access. i will admit im not sure if theres a better place but this works for me. once you launch it, veadotube should work pretty much the same as how it does on windows. i havent run into an issues yet but just in case ill leave the docs for veadotube here: LINK

closing thoughts and links

those are honestly the biggest things that i can think of right now. just walking through how to setup/tweak discord, obs, steam and bottles walks you through everything that ive needed to learn in order to get streaming working comparably to how i used to stream and game with windows. everything that i use can be installed with once you know how to use pacman, git or yay.

something that might be helpful is wget... but honestly i wouldnt worry about it unless its needed for something you want. theres no need to have it if you dont use it.

some other useful things:

a general how to doc for streaming on linux, with a bunch of programs i didnt mention: LINK

streamer.bot for managing streams: LINK

what i used to get csp working. my fiance noticed lag while drawing, but its worth a try if you dont want to use krita or other drawing programs with linux versions: LINK

or you can set csp up in a bottle: LINK

opendeck, to use the elgato streamdeck: LINK

this is a plugin for opendeck to use the fifine steam deck, which is what i have: LINK

slime2 is just a neat chatbox for obs, it doesnt say anything about linux but because of how its built it works: LINK

the obspluginbuilding page for if you want to look more into how plugins work: LINK

prism launcher, to play minecraft, i just used pacman but theres other ways to install it listed on the downloads page: LINK

cachyos wiki: LINK

arch linux wiki, if you run into problems that you cant find in the cachyos wiki the solution is probably somewhere in here: LINK

ill sign this off by saying linux, especially distributions like cachyos, are constantly improving. make sure you update often (the easiest way to do so imo is using cachyos hello) and keep your files clean so you know where everything is if you run into problems!

pre-linux i didnt have a super extravagant streaming set up so theres not too too much here but i hope it at least gets you started and gives you resources to figure out the rest!

There was an invisible yet overwhelming pressure scrutinising your every move in papaya colours. In Silverstone, during your debut, you had enjoyed the rare benefit of anonymity. No one knew who the new girl sitting timidly on the McLaren pit wall was. But now, after the strategic miracle of pulling an unlikely victory out of a hat and dethroning the favourites, the motorsport world knew exactly who you were. The specialist press speculated about the new "mystery mind" brought into McLaren's headquarters in Woking, and the official broadcast cameras were beginning to hunt for your face.

What hurt the most, however, was the weight of the silent prejudice you felt radiating directly from the garage next door. To your former team, your abrupt move hadn't been interpreted as a natural career progression or a professional challenge; it had been viewed almost as a betrayal—a military desertion in the middle of the season.

As you walked down the central avenue, the sidelong glances from the Mercedes engineers and mechanics—men you used to share jokes and feedback with in the Brackley canteen—cut through the air like cold blades. The implicit hostility made your hands tremble slightly as you held two cups of iced coffee. They didn't understand. None of them knew the real reason you had left.

The secret behind your departure was under lock and key, a wound that still stung whenever you looked at the black and silver cars. About two years ago, you had spent three sleepless nights developing an embryonic variation of your algorithm that would have handed Mercedes a brilliant, indisputable victory in a decisive Grand Prix. The data was clear and the logic flawless. Eager to help, you had taken the detailed reports right to the senior chief engineers' desks. Their response had been a bucket of ice water. They laughed at your audacity. They told you that a young simulation data scientist shouldn't be trying to teach men with twenty years of trackside experience how to do their jobs, and that Brackley’s standard software was absolute. They ignored you completely, stuck to their rigid, traditional route, and their strategy collapsed during the race, causing the team to lose first place in a disgraceful fashion.

That was the final straw. You grew tired of living locked in a dark room, watching predictable mistakes happen simply because the Mercedes ego was too big to listen to your individual brilliance. You knew you could do so much more. And the ones who saw that were McLaren. Going through a dreadful period where nothing worked and the car dragged itself at the back of the grid, the Woking team decided to risk everything. They didn't want the old system; they desperately needed something entirely new. They made an audacious proposal, offering you control and all the necessary support on the pit wall. They trusted your mind when no one else wanted to listen.

"Hey, Birdie!" Lando Norris’s familiar voice cut through the whirlwind of your memories and thoughts.

The British driver emerged from the crowd gathering near the hospitality unit, wearing a perfectly fitted papaya polo shirt, with mirrored sunglasses hiding his eyes. He reached out, naturally taking one of the cups from your hand, but his tone, though attempting to sound light and casual, still carried that subtle distance typical of someone who has only just met you and is still testing the waters.

"Cheers. The heat out here is just unbearable for the media briefings. I feel like I'm going to melt before FP1 even starts," he commented, taking a long sip and sighing at the thermal shock.

You adjusted your posture, drawing in a deep breath to hide the nervousness consuming you from within.

"I thought official race drivers were immune to the Budapest weather, Norris. Don't you spend the whole winter training in saunas to endure this?"

"I wish it were that easy," Lando offered a half-smile, lowering his sunglasses slightly to look at you over the frame, showing a genuine curiosity he rarely displayed around new team members. "You know... people were talking about you in the GPDA meetings earlier this week. A few guys on the grid were pretty curious, trying to dig up information."

You arched an eyebrow, feeling your chest tighten instantly at the mention of the drivers' inner circles.

"And what does grid royalty have to say about a rookie strategist?"

"Well, Pierre and Charles said McLaren have finally hired someone who breaks the dull, grey aesthetic of traditional engineering," Lando shrugged, but his tone quickly lost its playfulness, turning more serious and focused. "But the main talking point was your mind. They were genuinely intrigued by how you out-strategised Mercedes right on your debut. No one could understand where the read on that pit window came from."

"And what else did they say?" you pressed, your heart beating a little faster against your ribs.

"Russell was in the room," Lando dropped the information carefully, his eyes fixed on your reaction. "He was the only one who feigned total indifference. Didn't even look up from his tablet while the others were discussing it. Acted as if Silverstone was pure luck on our part—a statistical anomaly that won't happen again. But you could feel the atmosphere, Birdie. You could cut the tension with a knife. He clearly thinks you used what you learned at Brackley to get one over on them. Left a bit of a... sour taste. Anyway, he’s far too focused for his own good. Don't think too much about it. See you in the garage later for the briefing."

Lando walked off with brisk steps toward the interview square, leaving you alone with the weight of that information. Feigned indifference. You swallowed hard, feeling the iced coffee go down bitter. The greatest irony of all was that George Russell had absolutely no idea what had actually happened behind the scenes at Brackley before you left. In his obsessed mind, you were just an opportunist who had defected with stolen data, when in reality, it was the blind pride of his own team that had pushed you right into McLaren's arms.

Seeking refuge from the sun and the staring eyes, you entered the air-conditioned McLaren hospitality unit. The atmosphere inside was a stark contrast of technical serenity. Near one of the high-definition screens, you bumped into Oscar Piastri. The young Australian was sitting in a relaxed posture next to his race engineer, a tablet resting on his knees, analysing thermal charts from previous years. Noticing your presence, Oscar looked up with his clear eyes, his usual calm, almost unshakeable expression shifting into a respectful nod.

"Morning, Birdie," Oscar said, his voice quiet but firm, with that characteristic measured Australian drawl. "I was reviewing the Silverstone logs last night at the hotel. The predictive model you ran on lap 18... honestly, it was brilliant. I thought the simulation was going to collapse because of the front tyre degradation in traffic, but you nailed the reaction time perfectly. It's great to have a mind like yours on our side of the wall now."

"Thank you, Oscar. That means a lot coming from you," you replied, feeling a genuine, warm glimmer of relief spread through your chest.

Earning Piastri’s unfiltered, technical respect was a Herculean task in Formula 1. He was not a man for empty compliments or paddock politics; if he said something was brilliant, it was because the numbers had proven it. Receiving that direct feedback quietened a significant fraction of the anxiety that had been gnawing at your chest since early morning. You belonged here, regardless of what the neighbours next door thought.

Meanwhile, a few garages down, the atmosphere inside the Mercedes motorhome was the absolute opposite of calm. The environment exuded a contained obsession and a bitter resentment that seemed to cling to the mirrored glass walls. Inside the drivers' private room, young Kimi Antonelli—a newcomer to the sport and Russell’s new teammate—observed the older Briton with a mix of genuine curiosity and trepidation.

George sat rigid before the main monitor. He hadn't changed position for the last forty minutes. His light eyes were fixed, barely blinking, on the exact point of the telemetry graph where Lando Norris’s McLaren had pitted on lap 20 at Silverstone. Behind that mask of aristocratic coldness and impeccable posture, George's mind was ablaze.

He was absolutely, completely convinced that you had stolen the mathematical logic from the Mercedes servers before signing your contract with McLaren. To George's ultra-rational, methodical mind, that was the only plausible explanation in the universe. He simply could not accept, as a matter of pure ego and institutional pride, that a single individual's mind could outclass his team's entire engineering infrastructure without an unfair advantage. He vaguely remembered seeing you walking the corridors of Brackley, always quiet with your laptop, and now he felt betrayed, believing you had handed Mercedes' secrets to their biggest rivals on a silver platter.

"George?" Kimi called out softly, hesitating on the threshold of the door with a sheaf of digital documents. "Toto is asking for the simulator braking maps for FP1. Have you uploaded the file to the system yet?"

George didn't even move his head. His knuckles were white from the sheer force with which he was pressing the stylus against the digital desk.

"It's on the network, Kimi. You can take it whenever you like," George replied, his voice perfectly controlled, polished and cold, though the tension in his jaw betrayed the effort it took to keep it that way.

Kimi approached slowly, crossing his arms and looking over his teammate's shoulder at the screen filled with overlapping lines.

"Are you still studying their strategy from two weeks ago? The whole paddock is talking about the new McLaren girl. On TV, they said she rewrote their code using what she learned here with us."

"The paddock is far too easily impressed, Kimi," George countered coldly, turning off the monitor with a sharp tap on the screen before rising with surgical precision, pulling down the sleeves of his race suit. "Silverstone was a statistical anomaly caused by weather variables beyond our control. She used our own simulation database against us, which made their victory... ethically questionable, to say the least. But she doesn't work here anymore."

George walked over to the room's mirror, adjusting his perfectly styled hair before turning back to the young Italian with a sharp gaze.

"Budapest is a purely technical circuit, Kimi. There are no long straights to compensate for errors here, and the heat destroys any poorly executed plan. Stolen tricks don't work here if you don't have the mechanical infrastructure to back them up. We have the best car in qualifying trim on this type of track, and we will focus exclusively on our own job."

Kimi merely nodded in silence, feeling the almost tangible rigidity radiating from his teammate. George was consumed by a resentment that went far beyond championship points. He didn't just want to win Sunday's race; he felt an obsessive need to crush the strategy of the woman he considered a traitor, if only to prove to himself—and to the world—that Mercedes was infinitely superior to any data you might have carried away in your suitcase.

Later that same media Thursday, the heat seemed to have reached a historic peak. You were walking down the paddock's central avenue, trying to ignore the bustle around you, completely immersed in the historical data and Hungaroring heat maps on your phone screen. Saturday's qualifying would mean absolutely everything, and your 37%—your golden rule of optimal stopping theory, a calculation purely your own that you had been developing alone in absolute secrecy for years—would need to be meticulously calibrated for the lap times here.

You were so focused on cross-referencing tyre degradation data with the track temperature that you didn't notice the tall silhouette advancing from the opposite direction, stepping straight out of the Mercedes hospitality unit. The collision was subtle—your shoulder brushing against his arm—but enough to send the remainder of your coffee sloshing violently in its plastic cup, splashing a few dark drops onto your fingers.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't paying atten—" The words died instantly in your throat, the air freezing in your lungs.

In front of you, George Russell looked down at you. He was immaculate in his black team kit, standing tall with the polished demeanour of someone who knows exactly the impact he makes. However, as his blue eyes travelled down to the papaya pass hanging around your neck, his expression shifted drastically. The professional coldness of a driver in front of the cameras vanished, replaced by a raw spark of disdain and silent accusation.

"No problem," he replied, his voice sharp, perfectly modulated in that flawless British accent that seemed designed to unnerve anyone. He took a half-step forward, subtly invading your personal space while rigidly crossing his arms. "But I must admit, it's an interesting surprise to finally find you out of the shadows of Brackley... and wearing colours that definitely don't suit you, Birdie."

The way he spat out your new nickname—with a heavy irony, laden with an almost personal resentment, as if he were looking at a spy who had sold state secrets to the enemy—made your spine straighten instantly. The vulnerability you had felt this morning evaporated, replaced by a purely proud defensive instinct.

"Russell," you returned the greeting with a meticulously calculated nod, flatly refusing to look guilty or intimidated by something you hadn't done. "I didn't know Mercedes drivers walked around the paddock so distracted. I thought your peripheral vision was better trained in the factory simulation rooms."

A glimmer of restrained anger flashed across George's light eyes, his jaw tightening for a fraction of a second before he hit back.

"My peripheral vision works perfectly fine, thank you. In fact, it's been focused on trying to solve a mathematical riddle for the last two weeks," he countered, taking another step forward, leaning his body slightly toward you, his eyes narrowing in direct accusation. "I was trying to understand how you used our own internal Brackley mapping to create a tactical window that our supercomputers flagged as impossible. It was a bold move in Silverstone, I admit. But we both know very well where that data came from, don't we? Bringing ideas from one team to another is a dangerous game, and pure mathematics has an annoying tendency to correct itself under pressure. The Hungaroring isn't usually forgiving to those who try to replicate our engineering without our infrastructure to back them up."

You took a step forward, closing the distance even further to hold his gaze as an equal, despite the clear height difference. Feeling the direct impact of that unjust accusation made your blood boil. He truly thought you were a thief. He had no earthly idea that the intelligence he now called "stolen" was the fruit of your own original intellect—the very same that had been tossed into the bin by Mercedes' blind pride a year ago.

"You are entirely mistaken, George," you said, your voice dropping low, measured, firm and ice-cold. You held his gaze, refusing to back down a single millimetre. "I did not replicate a single thing from Mercedes. And if the computers in Brackley failed to see the window in Silverstone, perhaps the problem is that you’ve been looking at the wrong numbers for a very long time. The credit for that strategy belongs to me, and me alone. See you on Saturday."

Without waiting for a reply, you swept past him with firm, decisive steps, maintaining impeccable posture as you walked away. You could feel your back burning under the intensity of his glare. George stood frozen in the exact same spot for a few long seconds, his fists clenched, digesting what he considered to be the unacceptable audacity of someone who had betrayed his trust.

On Saturday morning, the McLaren garage had turned into a veritable pressure cooker on the verge of exploding. In Q3, the final and decisive phase of qualifying, only four minutes remained on the countdown clock. All surviving cars were parked in their boxes, fitted with gleaming new soft tyres, waiting for the surgical moment to bite into the Hungarian asphalt for their final flying lap attempt.

Sitting on the high pit wall perch, your headset pressing tightly against your temples and isolating the deafening roar of the engines outside, your fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard. On a secondary monitor hidden by a privacy toggle, the algorithm of your mathematical secret ran in infinite loops.

The Budapest 37%.

You needed to find the exact point on the timeline where the statistical rejection of traffic stabilised, ensuring the cleanest possible track. Your eyes focused obsessively on the green loading bar. 35%... 36%...

"Do we send Lando now? Traffic at the pit lane exit is building up drastically!" the chief engineer shouted over the team's internal radio, sheer panic rasping through his voice under the time pressure. "If we wait another thirty seconds, he’ll hit traffic at the chicane and lose the ideal tyre warm-up!"

"Negative. Hold," your voice cut through the internal line sharply, devoid of any hesitation, injecting absolute authority into the garage. "Monitor the Mercedes garage."

"They’re firing up George's engines! Birdie, we’re going to miss the window and get left behind!" the engineer pressed again, his hand trembling over the release button.

"I said hold," you countered, your eyes locked onto the global car positioning monitor.

On the track map screen, you caught the exact movement you were waiting for. George Russell’s Mercedes had been released and was sitting at the pit exit, but it wasn't moving onto the open track. They were holding there, static. George was intentionally delaying his own departure, trying to mirror McLaren’s exact release time. He wanted to use what his obsessed mind believed to be your "stolen pattern" against you, trying to hunt you down on track and steal your slipstream.

He thinks I need the Mercedes system to create a pattern, you thought, a tense, sharp, and purely defiant smile playing on your lips beneath the headset microphone. He thought you were predictable because he believed you relied on his old metrics. He had no idea he was about to collide with your own original mind.

At that exact fraction of a second, your secret loading bar flashed a brilliant green: 37.0%. The optimal stopping choice had been reached.

"Release Lando. Now," you ordered.

Lando Norris pinned the accelerator, his tyres screeching against the concrete floor of the garage as he launched. In the exact same tenth of a second, Mercedes released George Russell, who dived onto the track right behind the McLaren, precisely as he had planned on his own strategy monitor. George thought he had caught the "traitor" in his own mirroring trap, ready to reap the benefits of the slipstream and dethrone his rival in her own backyard.

However, what Russell didn't know—and never would as long as he insisted on looking only at Mercedes' rigid data—was that your 37% calculated the exact thermal dissipation rate of the dirty air generated by Charles Leclerc's Ferrari, which had flown past seconds earlier, based on a complex mathematical equation you had created entirely on your own in your free time.

By sending Lando at that exact millisecond, you placed him in the perfect pocket of remaining clean air that the Ferrari had displaced. But George, trailing right behind in his eagerness to hunt you down, caught the exact turbulent vortex and the superheated mass of air that the Ferrari had left behind at the apex of Turn 4.

Over the internal Mercedes radio, George’s voice snapped through his entire team's headsets, completely jagged with pure frustration and the impact of a technical error his flawless logic couldn't comprehend:

"I’m losing front downforce! The car is just snapping at the rear in Turn 4! The air is completely dirty and hot here! What on earth! How did they calculate that?!"

While George wrestled with his own car, Lando Norris’s sectors turned a brilliant purple on screens worldwide. One after another. The papaya driver was flying across the Budapest asphalt, balanced perfectly on the cushion of clean air that your individual mind had carved out for him against all odds.

As the chequered flag waved and the clock hit zero, the official timing screen consolidated the result:

Pole Position: Lando Norris (McLaren). Fourth Place: George Russell (Mercedes).

The McLaren garage immediately erupted into a deafening roar. Mechanics and engineers cheered in unison, throwing their arms up and slamming the metal workbenches in pure, cathartic euphoria. On the pit wall, the celebration was massive. That pole in Hungary was the golden ticket the team desperately needed to cement their turnaround in the season.

You let out a heavy breath, feeling an overwhelming wave of triumph and pure adrenaline race through your veins. You pulled off your headset slowly, feeling every muscle in your body fill with an unshakeable certainty. You had conquered your past and proven, in front of the entire paddock, that the genius behind that strategy was you, not the corporate framework of Mercedes.

As you stepped down from the pit wall to enter the garage, Andrea Stella came straight toward you, wearing a wide smile he rarely displayed on race weekends. He gripped your shoulders firmly with deep respect, his eyes shining behind his glasses.

"Magnificent work, Birdie. Absolutely magnificent," Andrea said, his voice steady and clear over the noise of the ongoing garage party. "They tried to mirror our window because they thought they knew what you were doing, but you destroyed them on track with pure intelligence. Never let people who didn't believe in your potential in the first place dictate your worth or your integrity. You are bigger than any paddock rumour, Birdie. You belong to McLaren now."

The team principal’s words echoed deeply in your mind. Looking around the garage filled with papaya faces who now blindly trusted your numbers, any lingering trace of morning anxiety or insecurity vanished completely. You felt right there. You felt, at last, at home.

And more than anything, an edge of cold, calculated anger began to take the place of your former nervousness. Anger at George Russell. Anger that he had been so arrogantly blind as to reduce your entire mathematical capability to an alleged data theft, jumping to conclusions simply because his pride couldn't accept the fact that you were, individually, smarter than his system. He didn't know about the prejudice you had faced inside his own garage, or how the pride of those senior engineers had pushed you straight into the arms of McLaren.

Without realising it, you had entered his mind games earlier in the week. But now you were fully aware of it. And you were going to strike with everything you had in the race.

Walking back to the restricted area with impeccable posture and your chin held high, you crossed the corridor of the media pen, where the drivers were giving their mandatory interviews. Through the gaps in the metal barriers, George Russell stood with his back to you, hands on his hips and his head lowered, listening to the initial report from his race engineer. The qualifying defeat was tearing him apart inside, but the frustration in those rigid shoulders tasted different now. He could no longer blame a data leak from Brackley. The algorithm that beat him on track didn't exist on Mercedes' computers. George knew, deep down in that obsessed, brilliant mind of his, that he had purely underestimated and been outperformed by the raw talent he chose to ignore in the corridors of his old factory.

As if sensing the magnetic weight of your presence, George turned his head slowly. Over his shoulder, his light eyes locked directly onto yours through the crowd of journalists, microphones, and TV cameras.

This time, there were no fake corporate smiles, masks of indifference, or Thursday’s arrogant disdain. There was only a profound seriousness, a focused intensity, and, for the very first time, a distinct edge of shock and doubt in his eyes.

Scanning: Modern scanners, by and large, are shit for this. The audience for scanning has narrowed to business and work from home applications that favor text OCR, speed, and efficiency over archiving and scanning of photos and other such visual media. It makes sense--there was a time when scanning your family photographs and such was a popular expected use of a scanner, but these days, the presumption is anything like that is already digital--what would you need the scanner to do that for? The scanner I used for this project is the same one I have been using for *checks notes* a decade now. I use an Epson Perfection V500. Because it is explicitly intended to be a photo scanner, it does threebthings that at this point, you will pay a niche user premium for in a scanner: extremely high DPI (dots per inch), extremely wide color range, and true lossless raws (BMP/TIFF.) I scan low quality print media at 600dpi, high quality print media at 1200 dpi, and this artbook I scanned at 2400 dpi. This is obscene and results in files that are entire GB in size, but for my purposes and my approach, the largest, clearest, rawest copy of whatever I'm scanning is my goal. I don't rely on the scanner to do any post-processing. (At these sizes, the post-processing capacity of the scanner is rendered moot, anyway.) I will replace this scanner when it breaks by buying another identical one if I can find it. I have dropped, disassembled to clean, and abused this thing for a decade and I can't believe it still tolerates my shit. The trade off? Only a couple of my computers will run the ancient capture software right. LMAO. I spent a good week investigating scanners because of the insane Newtype project on my backburner, and the quality available to me now in a scanner is so depleted without spending over a thousand on one, that I'd probably just spin up a computer with Windows 7 on it just to use this one. That's how much of a difference the decade has made in what scanners do and why. (Enshittification attacks! Yes, there are multiple consumer computer products that have actually declined in quality over the last decade.)

Post-processing: Photoshop. Sorry. I have been using Photoshop for literally decades now, it's the demon I know. While CSP is absolutely probably the better piece of software for most uses (art,) Photoshop is...well it's in the name. In all likelihood though, CSP can do all these things, and is a better product to give money to. I just don't know how. NOTENOTENOTE: Anywhere I discuss descreening and print moire I am specifically talking about how to clean up *printed media.* If you are scanning your own painting, this will not be a problem, but everything else about this advice will stand! The first thing you do with a 2400 dpi scan of Utena and Anthy hugging? Well, you open it in Photoshop, which you may or may not have paid for. Then you use a third party developer's plug-in to Descreen the image. I use Sattva. Now this may or may not be what you want in archiving!!! If fidelity to the original scan is the point, you may pass on this part--you are trying to preserve the print screen, moire, half-tones, and other ways print media tricks the eye. If you're me, this tool helps translate the raw scan of the printed dots on the page into the smooth color image you see in person. From there, the vast majority of your efforts will boil down to the following Photoshop tools: Levels/Curves, Color Balance, and Selective Color. Dust and Scratches, Median, Blur, and Remove Noise will also be close friends of the printed page to digital format archiver. Once you're happy with the broad strokes, you can start cropping and sizing it down to something reasonable. If you are dealing with lots of images with the same needs, like when I've scanned doujinshi pages, you can often streamline a lot of this using Photoshop Actions.

My blacks and whites are coming out so vivid this time because I do all color post-processing in Photoshop after the fact, after a descreen tool has been used to translate the dot matrix colors to solids they're intended to portray--in my experience trying to color correct for dark and light colors is a hot mess until that process is done, because Photoshop sees the full range of the dots on the image and the colors they comprise, instead of actually blending them into their intended shades. I don't correct the levels until I've descreened to some extent.

As you can see, the print pattern contains the information of the original painting, but if you try to correct the blacks and whites, you'll get a janky mess. *Then* you change the Levels:

If you've ever edited audio, then dealing with photo Levels and Curves will be familiar to you! A well cut and cleaned piece of audio will not cut off the highs and lows, but also will make sure it uses the full range available to it. Modern scanners are trying to do this all for you, so they blow out the colors and increase the brightness and contrast significantly, because solid blacks and solid whites are often the entire thing you're aiming for--document scanning, basically. This is like when audio is made so loud details at the high and low get cut off. Boo.

What I get instead is as much detail as possible, but also at a volume that needs correcting:

Cutting off the unused color ranges (in this case it's all dark), you get the best chance of capturing the original black and white range:

In some cases, I edit beyond this--for doujinshi scans, I aim for solid blacks and whites, because I need the file sizes to be normal and can't spend gigs of space on dust. For accuracy though, this is where I'd generally stop.

For scanning artwork, the major factor here that may be fucking up your game? Yep. The scanner. Modern scanners are like cheap microphones that blow out the audio, when what you want is the ancient microphone that captures your cat farting in the next room over. While you can compensate A LOT in Photoshop and bring out blacks and whites that scanners fuck up, at the end of the day, what's probably stopping you up is that you want to use your scanner for something scanners are no longer designed to do well. If you aren't crazy like me and likely to get a vintage scanner for this purpose, keep in mind that what you are looking for is specifically *a photo scanner.* These are the ones designed to capture the most range, and at the highest DPI. It will be a flatbed. Don't waste your time with anything else.

Hot tip: if you aren't scanning often, look into your local library or photo processing store. They will have access to modern scanners that specialize in the same priorities I've listed here, and many will scan to your specifications (high dpi, lossless.)