Monthly Archives: February 2006

Fixing distortions

A tweak in Photoshop CS2

I’m finding the definition of the Canon 24-105mm IS L lens to be equal to anything on medium format or from Leica on 35mm. What is not so good, however, is that at 24mm you get noticeable barrel distortion (the sides bow outwards) and darkening in the corners.

Sometimes these aberrations do not matter but if you have strong horizontals or verticals or large smooth tone areas, they can be irritating to put it mildly.

I had thought that the only way to correct these was to take RAW images and make the adjustments in the very nice Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) interface. As I have written earlier, proper exposure technique results in little added benefit with the EOS 5D’s full frame sensor using RAW compared with JPG Fine, at least for this user. Plus I’m getting comfortable with the in-camera processing of JPGs offered through the Picture Styles option. JPGs have the great benefit that file duplication is avoided and, of course, file sizes are smaller meaning import to your computer and loading in image processing software are both much faster.

Stated differently, I’m of the growing opinion that RAW is overrated. I do not see better definition or tonal range in any large prints I care to make. I have no need for an unprocessed original. Once I have processed it I like it as it is and cannot see changing it again. And the thought of having to catalog two images of each picture is complexity in search of confusion.

Well, looking through the myriad menus of Photoshop CS2 the other day, I chanced upon Filter->Distort->Lens Correction which offers the same ability to correct lens aberrations in JPGs as ACR does in RAW.

Here’s how it looks corrected on a screen shot:

Both barrel distrortion and vignetting are quickly corrected.

I’ll experiment some more with RAW but JPG Fine is just, well, fine for me.

Image processing

That’s digital workflow to you.

I did a fair bit of corresponding with people much more experienced with digital photography than I am, which is to say just about every photographer I know, asking how they manage the work flow for an efficient, low risk result.

Not surprisingly, the range of responses was about as broad as the styles of the photographers I spoke with. As with any mechanical process, workers will cast around empirically until something that feels right comes along.

My picture throughput is, I suppose, of two types. There are family pictures sent to me by one and all for eventual publication on the family web site. These arrive in hard copy, as film or slides, on CDs or by email. Generally of low resolution, and not much is needed for web publication, they get dropped into a current quarter album in iPhoto ‘06, are culled and sorted at quarter’s end, then crafted into web pages using the File->Export->Better HTML plug-in for iPhoto, all of it taking less time to do than to explain. After adding titles and dates, upload to the ISP using Transmit takes no time at all. A few seconds more and the menus on the site are updated for the latest quarter. This efficient routine has taken the drudgery out of the process and makes sharing the family site with all and sundry a lot of fun.

The other type of picture I have to process is my own ‘serious’ work. Stated differently, these are the snaps whose primary goal is large, framed, wall hanging prints, anywhere from 8” x 10” up. These fill up the walls at the old manse as well as making nice gifts for friends. The originals are scans from 35mm, medium format or 4” x 5” negatives or, increasingly, RAW or JPG images from the Canon EOS 5D. With all of the medium format gear sold and most of the 35mm equipment now gracing collectors’ cabinets in Japan, that leaves 200 mB large format scans and 4-12 mB JPG or RAW digital files to contend with. As iPhoto is immensely capable, handling even the recent CR2 Canon RAW format with aplomb, these get dumped into thematic directories therein (landscapes, forests, etc.) and, once culled, a double click opens the images in Photoshop CS2 as a native file or, in the case of RAW, in Adobe Camera Raw. Whatever processing is required is performed and the images are then saved to the iMac’s desktop and printed.

These desktop high quality files are then dropped into Extensis Portfolio 7 (now 8, but I have not bothered to upgrade), keywords are added to each, and the whole thing is backed up automatically overnight. Given the amount of time and effort expended through this point, a comprehensive back-up strategy is vital. The cost in light of the risk of loss is negligible. My back-up approach is three pronged. First, duplicates of the good personal pictures appear in iPhoto and Extensis libraries, albeit on the same disk drive. Second, at midnight the iMac’s internal hard disk is incrementally backed-up to an external LaCie Firewire hard drive. This is a bootable back-up with the full OS X Tiger operating system resident on the external drive, allowing me to boot from that drive in the event the internal disc in the iMac fails. The iPhoto and Extensis libraries do not reside on the iMac’s internal drive. Rather, they are stored on a second external LaCie Firewire drive, this a 250 gB monster, which in turn backs up incrementally to a third external 250 gB LaCie.

As backing up is even less exciting than doing your tax return and certainly easier to forget, an application named SuperDuper! takes care of the chore daily and automatically. It’s the first back-up application for the Mac that speaks to you in English rather than Geek and works perfectly. Ever the Doubting Thomas, I check the ‘bootability’ of the external drive monthly and compare the files sizes on the two 250 gB Lacies weekly to see that they remain identical.

Now my iPhoto ‘06/Portfolio 7 strategy may not be suitable for those taking a lot of pictures. but for the 500 or so family snaps and 200 or so personal pictures I reckon on saving annually, it’s fine for me. I confess I was tempted by Apple’s Aperture as a Swiss Army Knife solution for everything, but my research suggests that the application is far from debugged in its first version and needs a top of the line Mac computer to make it run at acceptable speed. As I have no intention of blowing five grand on the latter, Aperture can wait. I still think Photoshop has one of the worst interfaces known to Man (if not Geek), but Adobe Camera Raw for RAW files goes a long way to simplifying things. The folks at Adobe really need to take a look at iPhoto for user interface design.

I tried Adobe’s free beta release of Lightroom (I challenge you to find it on Adobe’s web site) which has a nice look and feel stolen from Aperture. However, it is so slow in loading larger files on my iMac G5 as to be unusable. I would dearly love to drop the duplication resulting from using Portfolio 7, but as Apple has had some complaints about stability in iPhoto (though I have had no issues) I remain committed to the belt and (two sets of) suspenders approach until I can be convinced otherwise.

There seems to be a growing number of external RAW processors and sharpeners out there which plug-in to Photoshop, as if that application needed any more menu items. While I let others do my testing for me, everything I have read (after discounting the fact that 90% of what’s out there is nothing more than a paid endorsement) suggests that the native code in Photoshop CS2 is as good or better than the after-market variants. For me that means RAW conversion, curves, levels and unsharp masking, which is about all I ever use in CS2. Dust removal? A thing of the past with digital images.

Excuse me while I examine my Portlait setting through the Glid

Either someone at Canon has a great sense of humor or they need better English-speaking programmers

I checked out the Canon software that came with the 5D; it’s not bad but doesn’t seem to add much to my preferred working method which is to drop all the files into an iPhoto ’06 album (RAW included), preview them in iPhoto, then fix the best ones in Photoshop for saving in Extensis Portfolio 7 in PSD format – the industrial strength, bulletproof cataloging application I use.

Here’s what I saw in a couple of menus in Digital Photo Professional, a Canon application far less competent than iPhoto for quick image manipulation, and very slow in converting from RAW:

Now do these guys at Canon have a sense of humor or what?

By the way, a RAW file saves as 8.4 mB in JPG, 36.4 mB in 8-bit TIFF and a whopping 72.8 mB in 16-bit TIFF.

Joe’s NYC

A Photoblog to satisfy your need for a daily fix

When I left Manhattan’s West Side in 1987 for Los Angeles, the two closest friends I had in the world were the limo driver who would take me home from the southern tip of the island at ridiculous hours and my doorman. The driver was a whole lot more fun than the methadone case who held the door open, palm expertly proferred, once a year at Christmas. You see, Dimitri was a Russian emigre and we used to argue about Tchaikovsky and Chopin and Mussorgsky during the 30 minute trip home. Music and dance, whether in the streets or in more formal settings, were the artistic highlights of my many years in New York, but it was time to go.

Fulfilling the American business belief that motion beats action any day, I found myself revisiting the city on many needless cross country trips over the next few years and gradually fell out of love with it. Too dirty, too crooked, too everything.

However, every now and then I need a quick fix. Whether to confirm the wisdom of my decision or to see how wrong I was, I’m not exactly sure. And the best way to do this is to visit Joe Holmes’s photoblog Joe’s NYC where, without fail, you will find a new picture every day taken, as often as not, in Brooklyn or Manhattan. The work is fresh and vital, clearly done by one who loves his environment and captures the best and worst of the city I recall so well. Some of Holmes’s best work was done in early 2005 when he and some friends set about documenting Fulton Fish Market on the lower East Side before some developer converted it to high rises.

Click the picture to see Joe’s fabulous documentary photography. Ten months after he took these, the market was relocated to the Bronx, a victim of rising real estate values in lower Manhattan.

Click the picture for the slideshow.

Take a peek. It beats flying to New York and getting ripped off on the cab fare into town any day.

Digital Dust

Or I’ll be blowed!

Mooching around some of the Canon digital fora out there one recurring complaint seeems to be how much dust the EOS 5D attracts to its viewfinder.

Now while most of my pictures over the years have been snapped on rangefinder 35mm film cameras, with few dust bearing surfaces between subject and film, every SLR I have used has been plagued with the occasional speck of dust or a hair in the viewfinder. The 5D is no different. I suspect the increased use of plastics in modern cameras makes matters worse as they seem to retain static charges more, but when I did get some dust in the 5D’s viewfinder the last thing I was going to do was blow it away.

When the maid vacuums the carpet she does just that – she vacuums. She does not blow. Blowing on dust in your camera seems the exactly wrong thing to do. You are a) Hoping to dislodge it, and b) Praying it magically exits the camera rather than getting embedded or relocated elsewhere inside. Ideally what is called for is something like those suction gadgets dentists use to remove waste water from the patient’s mouth. Until something smart like that comes along – and imagine the liability issues in a country whose residents have long ago ceased taking responsibility for their actions – you can blow (!) your money on one of the Digital Camera Cleaning Kits. For your eighty dollars you get a small bottle of Miracle Solution, probably 2 cents worth of isopropyl alcohol, a 5 cent rubber tipped blower and a Digital Brush. The latter, you should understand, grows on Digital Camels only, hence it’s price.

Me? I’ll continue using the $5 anti-static film cleaning brush I have used for years when scanning film, holding the camera just so to let gravity do its thing with the dust, and I’ll continue to avoid changing lenses in the middle of the Sahara in a sandstorm. I hate to admit it but the dust in my 5D didn’t know any better and exited stage left after I gave it a gentle shove. Oh! yes, and I’ll keep the change.

For some new thoughts on the causes of sensor dust, please click here.