Photographs, Photographers and Photography

August 15, 2010

Adobe Photoshop Express

Filed under: Software, iPad — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

A useful iPad app.

I’m not sure what they are putting in the water coolers at Adobe Labs HQ in San Francisco, but they should definitely stick with the program.

First we got a really value added, fairly priced upgrade to Lightroom 3, many of whose enhancements I have written about here – film grain, superior RAW conversions, outstanding flexibility to remove lens aberrations and distortions – and now, at no cost, an iPad app named Adobe Photoshop Express.

The price is right!

It’s an inspired piece of programming which really ‘gets’ the touchscreen interface and one of the best efforts yet to make the iPad into a photo processing platform. Sure the controls are limited – basic exposure, sharpness, effects, frames, monochrome conversions and so on – but all the ’sliders’ for the controls dictate that the user merely slides his finger across the screen to change things. Surely this is the future of photo processing? Further, sign up at Adobe and if you can get comfortable with access rights (theirs not yours) to your pictures, then you can sync your snaps to your desktop or laptop via their servers.

Here’s a simple snap of our son with a neat frame added – this is a screen shot as I do not have an Adobe online storage account:

Winston at Point Lobos. My ‘equipment man’.

Very worth while looking into and it seems some of the earlier bugs have been stomped on as I have had no issues with my version. And what have you got to lose?

August 14, 2010

More on Adobe lens corrections in Lightroom 3

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Very clever indeed.

A friend wrote recently how much he was enjoying using the newly added built-in lens corrections in Lightroom 3 with his ultra-wide Nikon zoom on a pair of Nikon pro bodies, a lens whose profile is included with Lightroom 3.

This got me thinking. How can one-click corrections work when distortion varies so widely over the focal length range of many wide zooms? If the lens is pre-programmed into Lightroom’s database by Adobe you do not get a choice of focal length when applying the profile. It’s strictly a one choice affair, which contrasts with my approach when crafting profiles for the 9-18mm MFT Olympus zoom for my Panasonic G1, where I had to create disparate profiles for each of the four marked focal lengths. The barrel distortion of that lens decreases with increasing focal length, so it’s not possible to make one profile to fit all focal lengths.

Now one of the finer lenses for my full frame Canon 5D is the 24-105mm L zoom. Lightroom 3 includes a built-in profile for this lens unlike with the Olympus 9-18mm where I had to make my own. The Canon has fine resolving power and micro contrast at all focal lengths of its useful zoom range but suffers from the most atrocious barrel distortion at the wide end (the center of peripheral straight lines bows out), changing to mild pincushion distortion (the center bows in) at the long end. How could Adobe’s ‘one click’ approach possibly work with this lens whose distortion characteristics vary widely with focal length?

Note that if you use Canon’s DPP software (I do not) to process your pictures I’m fairly certain that it corrects distortion at all focal lengths. However, the 5D, unlike the G1, has no in-body distortion correction for the manufacturer’s lenses, so processing in LR3 brings in the images in their fully distorted glory just as with the G1/Olympus lens combination. And distortion correction is important to me as I frequently take architectural pictures where I want my straight lines straight.

Well, it was but a few moments work to take five snaps, one at each of the marked focal lengths, with a straight edge close to the top of the frame in each. I processed these through Lightroom 3 and, after making virtual copies of each, applied the one-click lens distortion correction to each of the virtual copies, selecting the single profile for Canon’s 24-105mm L lens in each case. The pictures were snapped at 24, 28, 50, 67 and 105mm.

Here are the results – in each case the corrected version is shown first:

At 24mm. Extreme barrel distortion in the uncorrected image at right.

At 28mm. Mild barrel distortion in the uncorrected image.

At 50mm. Very minor barrel distortion in the uncorrected image.

67mm. Very mild pincushion distortion in the uncorrected image.

105mm. Very mild pincushion distortion in the uncorrected image.

So as the above pictures suggest, the Adobe built-in profile for the Canon 24-105mm lens takes into account the focal length at which the image was made and applies distortion correction appropriately. It may be ‘one-click’ for the user, but it seems there’s much more going on below the surface. In all cases the correction is almost perfect, with only the 67mm and 105mm images slightly overcorrected and showing mild barrel distortion. The correction at the wider focal lengths is especially praiseworthy, as the above pictures show. Very clever and much more sophisticated than the case where you have to make your own lens profiles in those instances where Lightroom 3 does not include these.

August 11, 2010

Running Windows on a Mac

Filed under: Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Ugh!

Looking back I suppose there have been two sound decisions I made in my business life – we won’t go into the dozens of poor ones here!

One was leaving socialist England in 1977 for America which, back then, truly was the land of opportunity and, in contrast to my homeland, actually had a work ethic. The other was quitting my day job almost a decade ago and deciding to make my own living.

Working for yourself is truly a breath of fresh air and has probably added a couple of decades to my life expectancy. No more corporate team spirit, working for the greater good and all that gobbledegook which has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder wealth over the past few decades in America’s ‘feel good’ society. Whenever forced to attend one of those ghastly team building sessions – whose goal would have made Stalin proud with its emphasis on stamping out all individuality – I would quickly plead a headache and head for the nearest beach with my camera.

But the greatest reduction in stress in my life came from no longer having to use Microsoft’s Windows. This fraud passing for an operating system with its need for large support teams of unwashed techies and constant problems was in my life no more. I became a full time Mac OS X user. And while I have nothing but contempt for Apple’s fragile hardware, OS X has been a model of stability and reliability this past decade and is as good as it gets in the latest Snow Leopard iteration …. especially if you run it on a home made PC box! Good, plentiful, cheap, easy replaced and reliable PC parts installed in a Hackintosh come to life when presented with a sound OS.

However, because I manage money to make ends meet, there are one or two financial applications I use on occasion which only come in Windows versions meaning – oh! horror – that I still have to load that piece of garbage on occasion.

While OS 10.5 Leopard was around I used Parallels as an emulator to run Windows – my copy of Windows started life as Windows 98 and I upgraded it to XP years ago. Parallels was buggy but sort of worked, with a clunky interface and a very long install time. It would lock up every other day on my MacBook and Intel iMac. Well, still better than Windows.

When Snow Leopard OX 10.6 came to market I upgraded but, surprise, surprise, Parallels would no longer work, the maker wanting more money to make its product compatible. Now given that any spend related to Windows is regarded as obscenity in the home, I shopped around and found two competitors.

The competition is comprised of VMWare’s Fusion, also wanting payment, and Sun’s VirtualBox. The latter is free and, now that Oracle has bought Sun, has some serious development effort being put into it. There’s money in virtualization. My earlier experience with VirtualBox 2.0 was awful and I had forgotten about it.

But when VirtualBox 3.0 was released in June, 2009 I paid attention. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, did not become one of the world’s wealthiest by suffering fools (Gates at MSFT didn’t suffer them either, but made sure he sold his product to them) and a download of VirtualBox 3.0 showed the product to be much improved. Super stable on the HackPro, fast and easy to set up if, that is, you can get past the instructions which were written by engineers for engineers in contrast to the Apple approach of writing instructions for regular humans.

Mercifully, I am an engineer and most certainly not a regular human, so installation was a breeze. I then installed Windows XP Sp2, duly inserted my Win 98 disk to prove I was legit (though why anyone would actually want to steal Windows must be one of the great mysteries of our time) and immediately upgraded to Win XP Sp3 which, amazingly, went without a hitch.

I’m currently on VirtualBox 3.2.6 and Windows runs in it in its own little space, making sure no bad stuff migrates over to my OS X work space. If it gets clogged up I’ll simply reinstall it and the one or two apps I use. I give it 4gB of the 8gB of RAM in the HackPro when it’s on and allow it to use all four cores of the Intel Core2Quad CPU in the HackPro, and it runs fast if only in 32-bit mode, but how anyone can stand the UI of Windows XP beats the hell out of me. It was awful in Win ‘95 and remains so in XP. No, if anything, it’s worse in XP, trying to interpose a user friendly interface which only makes the bad look awful. VirtualBox + XP Sp3 load in some 40 seconds and XP constantly reminds me that my ‘computer may be at risk’. How about fixing that, Microsoft, without forcing the user to pay for band aids? One of the nicest aspects of VirtualBox is that it allows you to create virtual disk drives in Win XP so that you can seamlessly access files in your OS X space. So, for example, I can install Lightroom 3 on the XP ‘machine’ and access my Lightroom catalog on the OS X side easily. A related benefit is that I can see how this site looks in XP using the truly awful Internet Explorer browser which, needless to say, respects few of the standards adopted by every other browser in the universe.

Windows XP Sp3 running this site on the HackPro. OS X in the background.

All the usual peripherals work with no tuning – wireless internet, USB devices, sound, card readers, optical disk drive and so on. The only thing I have not bothered with is getting wireless printing to work as life is too short. I merely take a screen snap and print from OS X on the few occasions I need hard copy.

Anyway, this is a really long winded way of saying that if you really must run Windows on your Mac, get VirtualBox.

It is free, super stable and if you get a hankering to run Ubuntu, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows XP or Vista, Windows Server, Windows 7, Oracle Enterprise, Debian, Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo, SUSE or Mandriva on your Mac, virtualization is a nice safe way of doing that.

And if you are seriously troubled, then consider updating to Windows 7 and making the world’s richest man yet wealthier. After all, there’s a fool born every minute and he has made Microsoft what it is today.

Running Windows in emulation mode under OS X on a PC box hacked to run Snow Leopard may sound like feeding bacon to a pig, but it’s the only safe way of running Windows on anything.

And, if you absolutely must know, this site looks almost acceptable in Internet Explorer 8. Lightroom 3? No problem, if limited to the slower 32-bit mode.

Lightroom 3 running in XP/VirtualBox in 32-bit mode.

August 4, 2010

Topaz DeNoise

Filed under: G1/G2, Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:31 am

Snake oil?

I confess that I have always regarded noise reduction applications for digital images as so much snake oil – a solution which makes the problem worse. Sure, they reduce noise but they also destroy definition in the process. Better noisy and sharp than blurred and smooth, in my book. Further, with most of my digital snaps being on the essentially noise-free sensor in the Canon 5D my incentive for ‘denoising’ images has been non-existent. Until, that is, the Panasonic G1 with a sensor one quarter the area of the one in the Canon became my daily user. Go over 13″ x 19″ when printing (and that is really the only time you will see noise in practical use) and noise makes itself heard, if you get my drift.

So the other day when I was giving my new Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens a good workout on the G1, I indulged in a spot of pixel peeping to see how good the definition was and, in the process, ran into noise when examining the equivalent of a 30″ x 45″ print on the Dell 2209WA monitor. Now one of the claims for Lightroom 3 is that it comes with significantly improved noise reduction capabilities, so I promptly gave these a shot .

Here’s the original RAW image:

At 18mm, f/8. Sunflowers.

And here’s a 30x selection before applying any noise reduction; this is an excellent test image as it has fine detail and shadows:

No noise reduction at 30x. ISO320, RAW.

Here’s that same section after applying the best looking noise reduction in LR3:

After applying LR3 noise reduction.

The LR3 noise reduction setting were as follows – the sharpness settings are my import defaults for the G1 RAW files, and were determined after much experimentation (5D images need less sharpening, by comparison):

LR3 noise reduction settings

Topaz DeNoise costs $80, seems to be popular on the chat boards, and requires Photoshop CS3 or later, where it installs as a plugin. As I’m still on CS2, and unlikely to upgrade, I wanted to run Topaz DeNoise from within LR3. This dictates the download of two applications – the plugin itself (41.2mB download, 113.7mB installed) and a separate app named Fusion Express (free) which is a 509.1 mB monster of a download but installs at 57.9mB if you restrict the installation to Topaz DeNoise; the Fusion Express application supports many Topaz apps, hence the size of the download. Now the installed size of Topaz Denoise must represent some of the sloppiest programming on record. At 113.7mB for a single purpose tool it exceeds the 89.5mB of Lightroom3 by some 27% – and last I checked LR3 does a heck of a lot more than just remove noise. Draw your own conclusions.

For RAW originals Topaz provides no fewer than seven presets for noise reduction and after some experimentation I determined that the lightest of these gave the best result. That said, the result was significantly inferior to what LR3 delivered with its built in tool. No matter how I tried, I could not reduce the artifacts in the circled area to as low a level as LR3 provided and shadow detail in the hairs on the stem of the sunflower was marginally worse at all settings, even after adjusting the ‘Adjust Shadow’ slider.

Topaz DeNoise version at RAW – lightest setting.

The Topaz noise reduction setting were:

Topaz DeNoise settings

What this little experiment goes to prove is that Adobe has done a truly stellar job in coding the noise reduction features built into LR3 and kept it nice and simply with just five sliders (you mostly use the first three shown above) compared to the overkill of seven offered by Topaz. No matter how much I messed with these I could not approach the LR3 result with regard to the elimination of contour artifacts in out-of-focus areas, and these artifacts are both more noticeable and annoying in the Topaz processed image.

Speed? LR3 is instantaneous. Topaz? First you need to invoke the plugin from within Lightroom which causes the RAW image to be converted to a TIFF copy then exported to Topaz DeNoise, some 7 seconds. Topaz Denoise take a further 7 seconds to process the preview image, and seven seconds every time you move a slider which makes experimentation a royal pain, then a whopping 58 seconds to process and save the file in TIFF format (I’m doing this on my four core Mac with 8gB RAM running a 2.83gHz CPU speed with an Nvidia 512 mB 9800GTX+ video card – it doesn’t get better than that!). So that’s a minimum of 72 seconds per image on a very fast computer. Good luck if you have many images to process …. that’s no more than 50 images an hour.

For the geeks amongst you, here is the Geekbench 64-bit score for my hardware:

So while Topaz DeNoise does a half decent job for the $80 asked, and if you shop around you can find discount coupons bringing the price down to $50, if you are a Lightroom2 user you can upgrade to Lightroom3 for $100. For the additional $20/$50 you get superior noise reduction, the processing is instantaneous compared with bog slow for Topaz, LR3’s improved Adobe Camera RAW processing software compared to that in LR2 is included, and LR3 offers an integrated solution which does not require that you exit the Lightroom application to enter a separate de-noising one. I did not do any tests with JPGs as I only use RAW, and you should too.

You can draw your own conclusions where the value lies. Here’s a side-by-side comparison to make things easier:

LR3 on the left. Topaz on the right.

August 3, 2010

Keywords in Lightroom

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:06 am

A useful discipline.

No matter how well you catalog your images in Lightroom, adding keywords always helps. That snap at the beach may belong under ‘Beach and Sea’ in your catalog or, equally well, under ‘Abstracts’. But if you add the name of the beach as a keyword, or the words ‘beach’ if it’s cataloged in abstracts, the chances of finding it at some later date when you have many thousands of images added will increase through the use of keyword search.

To find which of your images are missing keywords, set up a Smart Collection (Library->New Smart Collection) as follows:

Then when you click on the Smart Collection named ‘Without Keywords’ you can see all the images that need keywords added. I frequently forget to add keywords before cataloging my images after import and processing, so this is a useful discipline. And if you are way behind on your keywording, simly do a few images each time before quitting Lightroom. The payback down the road in image retrieval and time saved is immense – it takes less time to enter a keyword than to search for an image without one.

And while you are setting up this Smart Collection, take a look at some of the other filters that Smart Collections support. It’s a powerful tool.

August 2, 2010

Lens profile correction in practice

Filed under: Lightroom, Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:20 am

A dream to use.

Having explained how to create your own lens profiles for use with Lightroom3 yesterday, here’s that experience being put to use.

In this snap I wanted to emphasize the foreground sign to heighten the impact of the lone child on the beach. As you can see the original is rather blah as I was trying to moderate exposure between the poorly lit sign (the sun was shining into the lens – note how flare free the image is, especially as I do not use a lens hood) and the brightly lit beach. A separate attempt using fill-in flash looked too artificial for my taste, like one of those over-lit 1950s outdoor Hollywood musicals.

Original on the top. G1, Olympus 9-19mm MFT lens at 9mm.

A quick tap on the lens correction profile for the lens in LR3, two minutes work with the adjustment brush on the signs using AutoMask and zero feather to faithfully define the edges, a local exposure adjustment of plus one stop on the masked signs, a minus one stop exposure adjustment to the whole image, a touch on the vibrance slider, a little post-crop vignetting (the Olympus lens is totally free from optical vignetting even at 9mm, as you can see from the original, above), some selective darkening of the foreground and a blah original becomes a picture, and exactly what I visualized when pressing the button. The sheer idiocy of the sign testifies to the fact that the least able in any society work for government.

Stop! Turn right! G1, 9-18mm Olympus at 9mm, 1/800, f/8, ISO 320

With images where you expect to use lens distortion correction or perspective correction at the processing stage, it makes sense to compose with a little space around objects close to the edge of the frame, as that space will be lost when corrections are added – as in this example. Things are made a lot easier by the fact that the Panasonic G1 has one of the very few viewfinders which shows 100% of the image – most crop 3-5% making it impossible to exactly preview the saved file.

Lightroom3 is a powerful, efficient photography tool. The enhancements in Lightroom3 have now almost totally obsoleted my use of Photoshop for which feature, alone, I am immensely grateful.

Thank you, Adobe. Now maybe you can convince that jerk Steve Jobs to allow Flash to work on the iPad before I resort to jailbreaking mine.

August 1, 2010

Lightroom 3 Lens Profile Creator

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:04 pm

DIY lens profiles.

Adobe has not left Panasonic MFT camera users out in the cold when it comes to automation of corrections to remove distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting in Lightroom 3. They provide a fine tool to create your own lens profiles, for example when using non-Panasonic lenses on a G-digital body, like my newly acquired Olympus 9-18mm MFT. In my third column reviewing that outstanding optic, I stated:

Well, it turns out that Adobe provides a free application named Lens Profile Creator which allows you to create your own lens profiles for just about any lens on any camera, film or digital, from iPhone to Leica S2 or scanning 4×5 back on a field camera. The download includes not only the charts (you must print one so that you can photograph it) but also instructions for use of both the application and details of how to set up your camera and lighting.

With the G1 it’s only necessary to do this for non-Panasonic MFT lenses like the Olympus 9-18mm ultra-wide zoom. Panasonic lens’ distortions are corrected by the software in the G1/G2/G10/GH1/GF1 range of bodies. Here is what Adobe says of their application:

The PDF instruction guide for Lens Profile Creator can be found here and the instructions for printing the calibration charts are here.

Creation of a lens profile is easy. You take nine pictures of the chart – I used RAW as that is all I use – convert them to DNG format by importing to LR3 then exporting in DNG format, and then you load the nine DNG images into Lens Profile Creator to create the lens profile for a specific focal length. As chromatic and barrel distortion in the Olympus 9-18mm lens vary with focal length, I did this at the four marked focal lengths – 9, 11, 14 and 18mm – a total of 36 pictures. It doesn’t take but a few minutes to take the pictures (alignment, per Adobe, is not critical) and, on my nuclear powered Mac, Adobe Lens Profile Creator took some 2 minutes to generate each of the four profiles from the nine constituent pictures I took for each. For the criminally insane, you could generate multiple profiles for each focal length at varying apertures, (chromatic aberration varies with aperture) but I would rather be taking pictures. Please yourself. I focused (!) on creating profiles at disparate focal lengths as it’s barrel distortion that is the most sensitive variable for my use and it varies significantly with focal length.

Once done you place the profiles in the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/LensProfiles/1.0 directory on your Mac where they will be available to all users of that Mac. (There are also instructions for those poor, unfortunate Windows users who place little value on their time and have yet to get a life). Finally, the Adobe application allows you to submit the profile to Adobe’s user forum though for some bizarre reason the submitted profiles are only currently available for download to Photoshop CS5 users, not Lightroom 3 users. Hey! Adobe! Can you say ‘Duh!’?.

Here’s how your Lightroom 3 options will look if you named your profiles correctly:

The drop down focal length selection panel in LR3.

And here’s a ‘before’ (no profile) and ‘after’ (9mm profile) comparison of a profile being applied:

Henry Moore’s bollard. Before and after with the 9mm profile.

Why four profiles? Because the degree of distortion and chromatic aberration differs at different focal lengths. Pixel peeping the above I can confirm that chromatic aberration is also accurately corrected. That’s a pretty nice bit of application programming at Adobe. In practice you note the nearest focal length used to take your photograph when in the Develop module of LR3 and click on the appropriate profile. You are done.

If you would like to download the profiles I created, for your own use, you can do so by clicking below. Feel free to share them with anyone. Unzip the downloaded file then place the four individual profile files (not the enclosing folder) in the directory referred to above. Next time you start LR3 they will be available. Please note that these are solely for the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens used on a Panasonic G-series digital body.

Click to download Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens profile
for the Panasonic G-series body.

So if you really must have automated corrections for that 65mm Super Angulon on your 1964 Linhof 4×5, Adobe Lens Profile Creator is the tool you need.

Indeed, I see no reason why this software tool should not be used to create profiles for your film and flat bed scanners – instead of photographing Adobe’s target, simply scan it and run the scans through the program, so now you can profile your scanner (or, heavens forbid, a darkroom enlarger) in much the same way you can profile your 21st century lens on the latest in digital bodies.

Alternative #1- DxO Optics Pro Elite:

DxO makes the fancifully named DxO Optics Pro Elite for correction of lens aberrations at the equally fancy price of $300. It’s bog slow even on my hyper-speed Mac, must be loaded separately from your regular processing application and at the price asked compares poorly with the free Adobe Lens Profile Creator. I reviewed it here. And there is no version for Snow Leopard. These people need a loud wake-up call.

Alternative #2 – PTLens:

I wrote in glowing terms of PTLens here. It’s a $15 app which can be used as either a stand-alone or as a PS or LR plugin, and has a large and constantly updated lens database. The latest version includes the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens for both RAW and JPG on a Panny G body but I cannot recommend it. Simply stated, the RAW profile is awful, way overdoing the correction and turning barrel distortion into severe pincushion distortion instead. Further, as you have to round trip the file from LR that means that a TIFF file (lossless) is first generated, meaning that your 12mB RAW file will be 80gB by the time you save it back into LR. Not a big deal but with its current RAW profile I cannot recommend the product. My profiles, above, are way superior.

By way of illustration, here are the PTLens (left) and my custom profile (right) versions of an original which shows pronounced barrel distortion of the horizon. In the PTLens version a lot of the image is lost and the figure is way too elongated. If you could see the horizon which PTLens chops out you would see severe pincushion distortion, not to mention chopping out much of the ultra-wide effect you just paid good money for:

PTLens vs. my custom profile at 9mm

Here’s another example showing what a poor job PTLens does with this camera/lens combination – PTLens on the left cuts out lots of image information; my profile on the right does it correctly:

Moore’s bollard again – see above for the ‘as shot’ original. PTLens version on the left.

Alternative 3 – use LR3:

If you don’t mind having to manually correct distortions for every picture then manually adjusting for chromatic aberration, LR3’s controls are just fine when used with the Olympus 9-18mm. However, if your ultra-wide lens displays the ‘bow wave’ type of distortion where the barreling changes to pincushioning at different spots on the horizon then the built in LR3 control, which can correct plain spherical distortion only, is of no use and a tailored lens profile is the only option.

Conclusion:

“If you want a job done well, do it yourself” is one of the most asinine homespun philosophies in the Western world. If you want a job done well, delegate it to a professional and maximize your time value by applying your skill set to what you do best. This may just be an honorable exception to that dumb ‘rule’. If you want a good lens profile, do it yourself or if you use the Olympus 9-18 MFT on a G-body, use mine.

July 31, 2010

A great Lightroom 3 book

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Martin Evening scores again.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about Martin Evening’s outstanding Lightroom 2 reference book and the Lightroom 3 version is now available.

Best of all, you can get it in a Kindle eBook version which will play on up to five devices – I have mine on the iPad and on my desktop Mac.

What distinguishes Evening’s writing is not only clarity and practical experience, he is also a very good photographer. Too often these so called software experts turn out to be truly awful photographers which makes you wonder what you could possibly learn from them. It’s still impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, last I checked. The beauty of an eBook is that you can look up the index then just touch the page to jump to it; it’s also weightless, not something that can be said of the 600 page paperback predecessor, which I refer to constantly. Further, you can bookmark as many locations as you like as well as change the font sizes to suit your eyesight. The Table of Contents is instantly available if you touch the bookmark logo at the base of the screen.

Bookmarking in the Kindle edition on the iPad.

Finally, the Kindle version meets with my goal of getting rid of every last physical book in my home, freeing the wall space covered with bookshelves for better use – like displaying photographs.

I use mine on the iPad where it works really well, as both my big Dell monitors are full when using Lightroom, making the desktop Mac unavailable unless I want to switch apps. You can also read the book on a Kindle but without color it’s not the same. It is very handy to peruse on the iPad in idle moments – rare is the occasion when I do not learn something new. And thanks to Kindle’s sync technology, the page you left at on the iPad will be the page the book opens at on the Mac, and so on.

There’s a good reason to buy the latest version – the new features of LR3 offer substantial processing enhancements and it really helps to have a working photographer show how to get the last ounce out of these.

I continue to learn daily about Lightroom – yesterday, for example, I did my first split toning effort. I never did understand what those sliders were for until I checked Martin Evening’s book.

Hut. Split toning – my first attempt! G1, 9-18mm Olympus @ 9mm, ISO 320

Update as of July 30, 2010: Amazon just released an updated version of the Kindle app which allows free text search! Want to look for ‘noise’? Just touch the magnifying glass, type the word and there you are. Wonderful!

Some of Evening’s insights are tremendous. Take this one on film of days past:

Any old timer worth his salt knows well that if you agitated your film less when it was in developer that you would increase sharpness, owing to the exact effect he describes. It was a pre-digital age ’sharpening’ process, albeit with near-zero control! The book is full of this sort of thing though rarely as quirky as this.

June 22, 2010

The iPad as a second or third display

Filed under: Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:52 am

A neat app.

Air Display is a $10 app for your iPad which allows it to act as a second or third display using wifi to route the signal.

Air Display with my two Dell 2209WA monitors. Can’t seem to get rid of those yellow stickies ….

As its response is a tad jerky it is not much use for moving objects but ideal for something like email or a preview screen for Lightroom 2 or 3 where the contents are stationary.

System Preferences for Displays under OS X Snow Leopard is properly supported as the following shows, allowing you to set the display’s positioning for mouse cursor movement as you please:


This layout dictates that the mouse is moved left to access the iPad’s display

You have to install a small utility on your desktop (or laptop) Mac to get things working and I had a few issues where the system was unresponsive when trying to toggle on the iPad from the Mac’s menu bar, but after a couple of tries all was well. This might prove handy in the field where you want to share displays with a broader audience by switching on mirroring in Sys Prefs->Displays, or switching it off and using disparate LR views between your laptop and iPad.

Don’t expect miraculous responsiveness if you are using poky wifi speeds; my system is running at 10mb/s download and 1.4 mb/s upload speed and is usable, if not stellar. I simply use the iPad to take the email inbox off the two big screens freeing up screen real estate for other things. You must be running Leopard 10.5.8 or higher for this to work and older PPC Macs are not supported – Intel only.

June 12, 2010

Lightroom 3 grain

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:36 am

A useful addition.

One of the new features in LR3 is a set of sliders to add and manipulate the traditional effect of grain from film days of yore.

Here’s a straight, unprocessed snap:

Plane, graves and flowers. 5D, 1/350, f/11, 24-105mm at 24mm.

Here’s an enlarged section of the above – note the grain sliders at lower right:

And here it is with the grain sliders adjusted to emulate high speed color film grain – I have to use enlargements to show grain owing to the grain free nature of the 5D’s sensor:

The Roughness setting, here at 38, is a nice compromise. Too small and the effect is too artificial. Too high and it’s overdone. Much the same goes for the Size slider, which I prefer to keep low.

It’s a useful tool, especially if you hit one of those Sarah Moon faux impressionism periods.

To reset to default adjustments simply double click the ‘Amount’ slider.

June 8, 2010

Lightroom 3

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:24 am

Some outstanding improvements.

Lightroom 3 has exited the Beta test stage and is now available as a $99 upgrade to Lightroom 2 users. I tried the Beta version but when it choked converting my previews to the new version after an hour of grinding away I decided someone else could do the testing and spent my valuable time elsewhere. Clearly something was wrong as my catalog contains a modest 6,000 pictures. Well, the final version appears to have fixed the issue because after download, a meaty 75 gB, I fired it up and it converted the 1:1 preview files in 3 minutes.

Technical background:

The LR3 preview file is given the 2-2 name by default; change it at will.

The catalog of pictures is not changed in any way.

The hardware I am running this on is my HackPro with OS Snow Leopard 10.6.3, 2.83gHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, 8gB of 800 mHz DDR2 RAM and an Nvidia 9800GTX+ video card driving two Dell 2209 21.5″ monitors, so it’s a very fast setup, designed for photo processing. CPU and memory use is modest and I would guess that 4gB would be just fine – Lightroom has always been good in this regard, unlike Aperture.

CPU use for all four cores. I show the effect of paging through several full screen previews here.

Memory use with LR3, NetNewsWire, Mail, iStumbler and SpamSieve running

LR3 runs natively in 64-bit mode.

LR3 allows you to change to what Adobe calls the ‘2010 Process’ for your pictures; I avoided this in light of the warning, below, but LR3 will adopt this process for all future imports, which is fine with me. I don’t want to have to reprocess a lot of older snaps which I am happy with:

LR3 ‘2010 Process’ warning.

Click the ‘!’ logo on any picture in the Develop module and you get this message, meaning you can selectively update to the new process:

Perspective correction:

One of the biggest surprises for me is that LR3 has added perspective correction; I don’t recall seeing that in LR3 Beta. The application can automatically sense the lens used for a limited range of camera manufacturers:

Only a few cameras are supported

Loading up a Canon Fisheye snap from the 5D I see this:

Hearst Castle pool drained for maintenance. 5D. 15mm Fisheye.

Click the ‘Enable Perspective Correction’ box and you immediately get a perfectly corrected picture:

Hearst Castle pool straightened out.

You can make horizontal and vertical corrections but the ‘distort’ feature available in Photoshop is missing. Still, this adds a key tool to the LR application which removes one of the last few uses I have for Photoshop. In LR3 it is fast and perfectly implemented, right down to the remasking of the image to fill the frame after correction.

What if your camera is not listed? Simply click on ‘Manual’ and have at it – an approach which allows both lens distortion correction and correction of leaning verticals.

Here’s an uncorrected image from my Panasonic LX1 with leaning verticals (and leaning everything else owing to earthquake damage!):

Here it is after messing with the slider:

Next you use the Resize slider to fill the frame:

Then hit Enter and you are done:

Until now I have been using the excellent PTLens and round tripping images from LR2. Unless your lens cannot be corrected in LR3, PTLens seems obsolete, though it does boast a huge lens database so is worth keeping, just in case.

If you want to add an unlisted lens to Lightroom 3 rather than using the manual method, simply download Adobe Lens Profile Creator and follow the instructions.

LR3 does not include the useful ‘Distort’ function for dramatic corrections, so it still means round-tripping to Photoshop if that is needed, which is rarely in my case.

Tethered shooting:

I have addressed tethered shooting here on occasion and, frankly, it has been a pain to get it working correctly, what with the need to set up capture folders, tune LR2 just so, etc. That is all in the past. Tethered shooting is now beautifully integrated into LR3 and the following cameras are supported:

I plugged in my Canon 5D to a USB port on one of my Dell monitors and set up LR3 for tethered shooting thus, after which I named the capture folder:

LR3 displays the tethered shooting menu thus:

The big button on the right (it really should be colored red) is the shutter release, or you can use the one on the camera.

Snap, and the picture appears in LR3:

Click on ‘Develop Settings’ and you get the usual choice, together with any you may have saved:

This is a plug-and-play implementation, perfectly executed. Bravo Adobe! The sort of thing you expect from Apple ….

P.S. Adobe – you need to make your LR3 demo videos run on the iPad – face reality and get with the program.

There are lots of other improvements in LR3, including movie processing (not for me), allegedly better noise reduction (not needed with the Canon 5D or Panasonic G1 which are my daily snappers), but the two detailed above alone make the $99 upgrade worthwhile for this photographer. Speed has not been compromised, the interface remains as nice as can be and the improvements need no instruction book to learn.

Recommended. I just paid Adobe for mine!

May 26, 2010

Running Lightroom on the iPad

Filed under: Lightroom, iPad — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:58 am

Prepare to have your mind blown.

Yes.

You read that right.

I am using my iPad as a remote viewing and control device for Lightroom, which is running on my desktop HackPro under OS X Snow Leopard.

The iPad app I am using is named LogMeIn Ignition and costs $29.99 for the iPad. You think that’s a lot? To allow you to run any of the apps on your desktop from your iPad wherever there is wifi? Gimme a break.

After installing LogMeIn Ignition on the iPad, download the free LogMeIn application for every computer you wish to control remotely and start it up on that computer. So far I have just set up the HackPro in the office and here is how my account at LogMeIn looks, viewed in Safari on the HackPro:

Moments after invoking LogMeIn on the HackPro desktop, I started up LogMeIn Ignition on the iPad, made contact with the HackPro, touched the mouse symbol on the iPad and …. loaded Lightroom 2 remotely from the iPad. This is what the iPad’s screen displayed:

Lightroom 2 on the iPad

You can just make out the LogMeIn app on the HackPro’s screen – it’s the small circle to the left of the CPU sign in the status bar at the top.

Clicking/touching on the iPad’s screen moved me from grid view to full screen view thus:

Timings?

  • Two seconds to start the app on the iPad
  • Eight seconds to select the HackPro and login
  • Ten seconds to load Lightroom icon on the iPad’s screen and see what Lightroom is showing on the HackPro. I can alternate between the two views – full screen and grid in Lightroom by simply shaking the iPad. This is the equivalent of the two disparate monitor views on the desktop. Add four seconds.

The possibilities here are so huge I’ll stop for now while I begin to digest what can be done remotely, but here’s how the view changes from one to the other monitor attached to the desktop, by simply shaking the iPad:

Shaken and stirred – the full screen view in Lightroom, viewed on the iPad

Screen refresh on the iPad takes about a second, compared to instantaneous on the HackPro – you are sending a lot of data over wifi, after all. I see no reason why this would not work over 3G with the 3G iPad, though I expect screen refresh would be a good deal slower.

What’s that you say? You want to run ancient Rosetta apps from your desktop on the iPad, like Photoshop CS2? No problemo!

Photoshop CS2 on the iPad

What was all that about the iPad being suited solely to reading and games?

April 30, 2010

Photoshop CS5

Filed under: Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:02 am

Things are not looking so good at ADBE.

If I were the CEO of Adobe I would be getting pretty worried.

Look at the issues:

  • Flash is going to die. Apple refuses to use it on its mobile devices and the alternative, HTML5, runs on everything, is bug free, fast and doesn’t spool up the fans in your computer when launched, drawing large amounts of power
  • Acrobat is mature and has no growth potential
  • No meaningful offerings for mobile computing
  • An entrenched culture of low energy and late to market
  • No focus, with time wasted on slagging Apple rather than making new products
  • The worst customer service on the planet, bar none
  • A core product which is, let’s face it, dead

Yes, that core product is Photoshop. Just as the LP reached perfection within its limitations when the CD was launched, so has PS reached a like peak and really has no place left to go.

The only significant additions to CS5 over CS4 are built in lens aberration correction (which you can get in a $25 PS plugin named PTLens which I recommend unreservedly) and Content-Aware Fill.

The latter option will be beloved of advertisers and dictators. Now when the Russians next rewrite their history books (”Let me check the history. Have we written it yet?”) and decide that Lenin is now persona non grata their army of retouchers will be replaced by a dude with CS5 which will likely as not be a pirate copy. Two key strokes and, hey presto, Comrade Lenin is gone.

Lenin? Nah! He was never in our band

What has not changed in CS5 is the awful user interface, one of the worst there is, or the egregious cost, hardly justified by ADBE finally making the thing run in 64-bit mode. Sure, a few pros will be unable to live without it, but a few pros do not constitute meaningful earmings per share, and if I was running Adobe, I would definitely be fixated on those:

A tale of two companies.

Adobe needs to craft some really innovative products, like Lightroom, for the mobile user. An iPad-using photographer is rarin’ to process his pictures on the road and a touch enabled, rethought Lightroom would be a hot seller. But, when you realize that the only reason Lightroom exists is because Apple came out with Aperture, forcing Adobe to react, then it’s not like you conclude that the people running Adobe, who seem to prefer spending their time slagging Apple over Flash use (or non use), are about to suddenly get it.

Think about this. Storage in the iPad is currently limited, so not much space for your RAW files. But a new mobile processing app will allow you to make all your changes on the road and then simply upload the RAW sidecar file with your processing data, which is very small, to your cloud storage. Thereafter you delete that day’s RAW originals from the iPad, once more freeing up space, your snaps remain on an SDHC card and your processing changes reside in the cloud. Once home you re-download the RAW originals from your SDHC card (at $20 for 8gB it’s not like you need to save on these) then your desktop app goes out to the cloud, downloads the minuscule sidecar files and hey presto! you are ready to export or print. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for something like this from Adobe.

At $660 for basic CS5 or $200 for the upgrade from CS4 I would say save your money and wait for someone else to come up with the next generation of photo processing tools unless, that is, you are in the Politburo.

As for ADBE stock – a great short after the near term earnings bump from CS5. Sad really, as without Adobe and Postscript and Photoshop, the Mac would likely not exist today.

Me? I continue to use CS2 (in Rosetta mode!) and still dread every time I have to roundtrip to it from LR2. My use is now restricted solely to correction of converging verticals.

March 13, 2010

iPhone Explorer

Filed under: Software, iPad — Thomas Pindelski @ 11:28 am

An interesting app.

Yesterday I speculated about using the iPad as a storage device for pictures taken on the road. Let’s assume for a moment that the iPad version of iPhoto supports Panasonic G1 RAW or whatever your choice of RAW format happens to be.

It should then be a simple matter to connect the iPad to your home computer and, using iTunes, sync the devices in the same way as you do with the iPhone.

Meanwhile, until the iPad becomes available and some experimentation is done, I came across a free application named iPhone Explorer which permits files to be moved between the iPhone and your desktop.

Here’s a screen shot:

What you are seeing is a Finder-like directory of the iPhone – mine is the 2.5G original, by the way. The file named _1050431.RW2 is a RAW file I dragged and dropped from my SDHC card, inserted in my desktop, onto the iPhone. I then tried drag and dropping that same file onto the hard drive in my desktop and it worked perfectly. So if this application works with iPad (and there’s a chance it will or that an update will be crafted) you can use the iPad as a storage device in lieu of external drives when travelling with your camera. Where am I going with this? Simple. The less you have to carry on a trip the more likely you are to focus on taking pictures.

The advantage of an application like iPhone Explorer is that I do not want my photos which I have stored on the iPad downloaded into iPhoto on my desktop. I want the RAW originals imported into Lightroom. (Lightroom can already import JPFGs but that is of little interest to me). So by using the iPad as a storage and preview device, I can cull the losers on the iPad and, once home, import the remainder by drag-and-drop into Lightroom.

The only change I made to iPhone Explorer was to set the minimum file size it will accept on the iPhone at 14mB – slightly larger than the largest RAW file size produced by the Panasonic G1.

As you can see my iPhone only has 2gB of space, or enough for some 180 RAW files but this does prove that if you can get the RAW file into the iPhone (or iPad) then it’s easy to transfer it to your desktop. The issue then becomes how to get the file into the iPad, and I’ll have more on that when I have one in my hot little hands – if I can wrest it from our 8 year old son, that is!

January 18, 2010

Autoviewer

Filed under: Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 1:14 pm

A fast web display application.

I chanced upon the free application Autoviewer the other day which, once downloaded, can be used as a web display generator using iPhoto or Lightroom and comes in Windows and OS X versions.

I tried it with Lightroom 2 using the ‘Web’ module (first time I have ever gone there, believe it or not) into which Autoviewer integrates elegantly and within 30 minutes had uploaded a 42 slide presentation of recent street snaps which you can see by clicking the picture below.

San Francisco street snaps July, 2009 – January, 2010

Autoviewer uses Adobe Flash technology so it may be a bit poky on older machines. However, I used my netbook with its slow Atom CPU and it does fine. There are also SimpleViewer (tabular presentation) and PostcardViewer (what is says) options available through Lightroom 2, though the full screen approach seems to work best for formal presentation of photographs.

I know I have to edit this selection down, but thought a quick first look would be of interest, as I’m beginning to think that a slide show presentation is superior to the clickable thumbnails I have traditionally used on my web site.

January 8, 2010

Auto Blur™

Filed under: Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 3:00 am

Auto blur.

With smaller and smaller digital sensors lenses get shorter and depth of field grows. It’s tough to beat the laws of optics but, in my opinion, all those calling for ever faster small lenses to limit depth of field and thus differentiate the subject from its surroundings just don’t get it. That’s yesterday’s technology.

The faster the lens, the larger the lens, which defeats the whole purpose of compactness – the very attribute in a camera that makes you take it with you.

What I think is needed is what I call Auto Blur™. We already have face recognition technology. So why not add technology to blur everything that is not the main subject. Rollover the image to see what I’m talking about (renders fine in Chrome and Safari on my Mac)

Thumbsucker before and (mouseover) after AutoBlur™.

This is a typical G1 image with the kit lens at 18mm fully open at f/3.9. Everything is sharp.

Now, in this case, the background in the mouseover version was tortuously conferred using PS CS2 and the lasso tool – not my idea of fun – but why shouldn’t this be a simple user choice in the camera’s settings?

Software is cheap and weightless. Fast lenses are not.

Note to thieving designers: Auto Blur™ and the Auto Blur concept is a trademark of the author and I will sue your crooked behinds if you use it without paying me gobs of money.

Follow-up: Reader Peter Solmssen has alerted me to a Photoshop plugin from Alien Skin named Bokeh which provides many options for the blurring of backgrounds. However, the plugin is seriously overpriced at $199, as the key step – selection of what is to be blurred – remains the exact same time consuming process in Photoshop which I had to use above. So it’s not a solution. Combining face/shape recognition technology with auto-blurring is the approach for those who favor picture taking over picture processing.

Further follow-up: Reader Arun has pointed me to Nik Software’s Viveza 2 – see the Comments to this piece. I see two advantages and one drawback. The advantages are that you do not need Photoshop, as the plug-in will work with Lightroom or Aperture. Further, the selection tool in Viveza 2 is truly amazing – exactly what is missing from Alien Skin’s Bokeh which uses Photoshop’s clunky selection tools which are labor intensive at the best of times. But the key drawback of Viveza 2 is that it does not provide adjustments of sharpness which is what the above piece is all about. Instead (click the link provided at the end of Arun’s Comment) you have to resort to machinations in Photoshop once again. So if only Nik Software could add a sharpness slider to all the other sliders in their tool, that would seem to do the trick until Panasonic or Sony do this with in camera software. Or, even better, if Adobe decides to add this sort of thing to Lightroom – now wouldn’t that be nice?

December 11, 2009

Software of the Year

Filed under: Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 3:11 am

For anyone suffering from data overload.

There’s that old saw which has it that two workers turn up at your house to build a new wooden staircase. One is from the old world, makes a big pitch about how he only uses hand tools and the crafts he learned from his grandfather and probably has a missing digit to prove it. The other asks where he can plug in his saw bench. Which do you hire?

The investment world’s version of this tale is the old line manager who consults the paper copy of the Wall Street Journal, gets the Financial Times delivered for world news and reminds you that’s how they used to do it on Wall Street when he was learning the trade from his dad. The new kid refuses to meet with you, stating his time is too precious, and sets up a videoconference instead, during which he constantly consults one of a half dozen monitors to see how things are going in the markets.

Well, the answer is the same in both cases. The old guy loses the job. Time is money and he will end up costing you too much of both. And the young guy’s work will not only be faster and much more accurate, he can correct three mistakes while the old boy is still sharpening his hand tools.

This preamble is perfectly in context of this year’s Software of the Year award which is for NetNewsWire.

NetNewsWire

No matter what your interest, NetNewsWire will leverage your time just as effectively as the electric saw leverages the carpenter’s.

A case in point is the increasing frequency with which camera and lens software is updated by manufacturers. New features are added and existing problems fixed. If you have NetNewsWire tuned in to any of the many web sites addressing these things, using an RSS feed you can be assured of not missing these important updates. For example, Panasonic and Canon – whose products I use – have released several camera and lens software updates this year alone. I may not need them all but it’s nice to know they are installed if I do. On a related topic, keen photographers read many web sites and can avoid wasting time checking for new articles through the simple process of using NetNewsWire and a site’s RSS feed. If the site lacks an RSS feed, why bother with it? Clearly, the author cares little whether you read it or not as he cannot be bothered to draw your attention to new content.

This year NetNewsWIre started using Google Reader as its feed engine and has, as a result, become much more reliable. In particular its syncing of feeds between multiple devices is greatly improved. Thus, when I read an article on, say, my netbook, I am assured that its ‘read’ status is updated on my desktop and iPhone. That’s worth a lot to me.

After a while you quickly filter your feeds, separating gold from dross. And if, like me, you manage money for a living, you are in seventh heaven, because that’s a business where dross is dominant.

NetNewsWire is a free download and is this photographer’s Software of the Year. It only runs on Macs but there are doubtless like products for users of other operating systems. Whether you are a photographer or a data fiend who values his time, this application deserves to be on your computer(s).

Once you have loaded NetNewsWire on your Mac, just click the RSS logo in the toolbar of your browser and the feed will be automatically added.

November 7, 2009

PTLens

Filed under: Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 2:47 pm

The easy way to fix distortions.

PTLens was recommended to me by a fellow photographer and proves to be one of the easiest ways of fixing four common problems:

  • ‘De-fishing’ fisheye images
  • Correcting common lens distortions
  • Perspective correction (leaning verticals, etc.)
  • Correcting chromatic aberration (color fringing) and vignetting – not tested here

It comes in Mac and Windows versions; on the Mac it runs in native 64-bit mode if invoked from Lightroom and is a Universal application, meaning no need for the buggy Rosetta application (which causes spontaneous reboots in Snow Leopard) and supports full 16-bit color TIFF and PSD file formats. It’s a free download permitting 10 uses, whereafter the price is $25 – a very sensible policy.

Up to now I have been using ImageAlign for de-fishing snaps on the 5D taken with the Canon fisheye and Photoshop CS2 (a Rosetta application) and for correcting leaning verticals and barrel and pincushion distortion from Canon’s poor wide-angle lenses. ImageAlign does not work in PS CS3 or CS4. Perspective correction has been done in Photoshop CS2. As for chromatic aberration and vignetting, Lightroom version 2.0 and later does all I need, so I do not touch on that aspect of PTLens here.

I downloaded the PTLens application and installed the the programs (PTLens and PTLensEdit), making the latter the choice in Lightroom under Preferences->External Editing.

Many common lenses are programmed in though not, for some reason, fisheyes. No matter – correcting distortion in the latter is child’s play using the slider.

Here’s an original fisheye image of one of the bedrooms in Hearst Castle where I very much wanted to retain the ceiling in the final image:

Here is the same image ‘defished’ in both ImageAlign (left) and PTLens:

There is no practical difference, defishing rendering the field of view of a 12mm hyper-wide rectilinear lens. PTLens saves the processed file back into the image stack in Lightroom and is very fast, the preview reacting in real time as the sliders are worked. As ImageAlign has folded and the application/PS plugin are no longer available, PTLens is a viable and inexpensive modern alternative.

When it comes to correcting more regular lens distortions, PTLens is in its element, as it has a large database of lenses with all the settings stored for you, whereas Photoshop has none – you have to do everything manually. Here’s an example from the over-rated 24-105mm Canon L zoom which has the most awful barrel distortion at 24mm as is clear in this picture:


Barrel time – 24-105mm Canon lens at 24mm.

Here are the before and after images, the latter processed in PTLens using the programmed settings from PTLens with no other adjustments:


Take a good look at the handicapped parking sign before and after correction.

Finally, perspective correction – here’s the picture I published the other day showing the correction of perspective using GIMP; in PTLens it’s even easier.

Before PTLens

After PTLens

A slam dunk purchase at $25 and you can even make it use all four cores of your CPU if it has that many. Highly recommended. PTLens has finally consigned Photoshop to the trash, where I have long wanted to place it. Lightroom and PTLens does all this working photographer needs and neither needs Apple’s compromised Rosetta PPC CPU emulator whose repair is doubtless a low priority in Cupertino, though they do admit its existence:

Note: Canon deserves a thorough spanking for its mediocre wide angle lens designs and the high incidence of color fringing in others – see my piece on their 50mm f/1.4 as an example. They need to wake up and learn from the Johnny-come-lately on the scene, Panasonic, which in its G1/GH1/GF1 cameras does a great job of correcting the distortions of the 14-45mm kit lens using software. By the time the RAW original gets into Lightroom there’s little left to correct.

November 6, 2009

GIMP

Filed under: Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:59 pm

Great price beats Photoshop.

Stupidly named, GIMP, or “The GNU Image Manipulation Program”, this Mac application does itself no justice with that dumb name. It’s a fine alternative to Photoshop for users who, like me, detest the user interface of that Adobe application and like the ridiculous price asked even less.

One of the reasons I still make do with Photoshop CS2 (an older version of the current CS4 which runs under the Rosetta PPC emulator in Snow Leopard) is that the upgrade price makes no sense for this photographer who gets most of the tools he needs in Lightroom and basically roundtrips to Photoshop from Lightroom to fix converging verticals and pincushion and barrel lens distortion. (Try Canon’s 24-105mm at 24mm to see real barrel distortion).

The problem is that Snow Leopard suffers from a huge problem in the Rosetta emulator, as widely reported on Apple’s Discussion Forum. Rosetta applications are prone to spontaneously reboot your Mac! This has happened to me on all three I run – Quicken 2005, Excel v.X and Photoshop CS2. It has never happened with any Universal/Intel applications. Maybe Apple will admit error and fix this. Who knows? More likely they will just tell users to upgrade to Universal versions of the affected applications (impossible with Quicken where none exists, by the way).

GIMP fixes all of that. It’s a Universal application so there are no Rosetta issues. Exporting to GIMP from Lightroom is merely a question of setting Lightroom’s Preferences->External Editing to use GIMP as the external image editor. Then hitting Photo->Edit In->Edit in GIMP in LR moves a TIFF copy of your image to GIMP for distortion or perspective correction. Ccorrection is applied in Filters->Distorts->Lens Distortions (for lens distortions) or in Tools->Transform Tools->Perspective to fix leaning verticals. Unlike in CS2, there is no need to create a Background Layer when doing the latter – it’s much easier in GIMP. When you tell GIMP to save the processed picture it will save it right back into Lightroom alongside the original, in a stack. Just like CS2.

GIMP can only handle 8-bit files. I have experimented with it and compared output to the 16-bit ones from Photoshop and cannot tell the difference in 30″ x 40″ prints. You can read lots of technical articles explaining why 16-bit is better but not a one of those will be illustrated with the only thing that matters – real pictures. The Label Drinkers are at work again.

Here’s a ‘before’ and ‘after’ showing the use of perspective correction to get rid of extraneous detail on the right of the picture – I simply could not get into a better position from which to take this:

Original snap before applying perspective correction.

Here’s the ‘after’ image:

Morro Bay at sunset. 5D, 24-105mm @ 105mm. Perspective corrected in GIMP.

The price of GIMP? How about free?

You can download it here and it runs fine on Snow Leopard 10.6.1. If you need the Help file, that’s a separate download (strange) but it integrates nicely. Just use a keyword search to find what you need after invoking Help from within GIMP.

Friend of the blog Greg Littell has pointed me to a couple of useful links. To make GIMP feel more like Photoshop and to use your old Photoshop plug-ins, click here. For a complete directory of hundreds of GIMP plug-ins, click here.

October 12, 2009

Snow Leopard coming around

Filed under: Snow Leo — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:12 am

Compatibility issues are quickly disappearing.

Six weeks ago I cautioned against an early upgrade to Snow Leopard largely on grounds of its lack of compatibility with many common applications.

Having tried SL 6.1 on my iMac I can report that most of the most commonly used applications I use now run fine. It’s especially satisfying to see that legacy PPC applications (ones written for the old Macs using the IBM G3/4/5 CPUs) run really well under Rosetta, though why on earth Apple makes Rosetta an optional install which you have to search for (under ‘Customize’) beats me. Most specifically, Photoshop CS2 runs perfectly and I have no need or desire to pay Adobe for a later version given my limited PS use. And yes, I still run ancient versions of Microsoft Word and Excel as they do all I need and I simply hate paying Microsoft for anything.

Lightroom in 64-bit mode runs fine and, once again, it’s a wonder to me Adobe doesn’t simply detect 64-bit systems automatically rather than insisting on installing in 32-bit mode by default. The switch is beyond obscure – right click on LR in Finder and uncheck the ‘32-bit’ box. Jeez! To confirm you are running in 64-bit mode, switch on the splash screen to make it show when LR starts (it’s under ‘Preferences’) and you should see the ‘64-bit’ narrative there.

Why switch to Snow Leopard at all? Because sooner or later it will be mandatory as older OS version are supported less and less. Do it now and it’s easier. Do it later and lots of things have to be fixed all at once. And Apple does a decent job in major OS revisions (Panther->Tiger->Leopard->Snow Leopard) that once they are past the first or second version things tend to run pretty well. They have for me.

Now if we could only get the likes of Adobe to rewrite their applications to properly use multi-core CPUs and all that 64-bit goodness, wouldn’t life be sweet? Unfortunately, one of the sadder aspects of the gradual demise of Aperture is that Adobe has less competition. Would that Apple bought Adobe (chump change to Apple) and brought some modernization and proper user interface design to Photoshop, though why anyone would want the aggravation of all those angry help calls from Windows users beats me.

But look, I’m not grumbling. Lightroom 2.5 runs just fine with Snow Leopard. For that I am sincerely grateful.

There’s actually some pretty interesting technical information on 64-bit technology and related developments to be found on Apple’s site which those so inclined can find by clicking the picture below.

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