Category Archives: Software

26Mar / 2012

ACR lens profiles

Fixing what ails fine optics.

Adobe has long provided a free utility named Adobe Lens Profile Creator which permits any user to generate lens profiles which will correct the three most common causes of image degradation – vignetting, chromatic aberration and distortion. These profiles work with Lightroom 3 or later and with Photoshop CS4 or later.

The instructions are generally good, and the learning curve is steep, whereafter the process is easy and fast. A provided checkered target is snapped nine times – four at each corner of the frame, four at the center of each side and one in the center. The nine files are then input to the application and a profile is created. Multiple profiles for a lens, created at different focal lengths (for zooms) and apertures can be consolidated in one profile file, with PS or LR automatically choosing the profile nearest to the lens settings used. To create a file for RAW originals you need to use DNG files for the application – good luck finding that clear statement in the instructions. The key to all this is that the illumination on the target must be perfectly even. Any shadows will be interpreted by the application as vignetting and erroneous correction will result in the profile thus created.

Once you get the hang of it you can produce an accurate tailored profile, from taking the snaps to dropping the profile file in the right directory, in 10-15 minutes. The first one takes ages, of course.

Many profiles for modern lenses, created by Adobe, are included with Lightroom and Photoshop, mostly for the G and a few late D lenses, but aficionados of the older manual focus Nikkors and many AF D lenses are out of luck. Users of PS CS5 can access user created profiles, but I suggest you read the caution at the end of this piece before jumping in.

I set to making profiles for the two lenses in my collection most in need of them – the 20mm f/3.5 Ai-S (same optics as the Ai version) and the 35-70mm AF D f/2.8 zoom (same optics as the earlier ‘non-D’ variant). Longer lenses seldom need much in the way of correction. Profiles seem to benefit wide angles and wide zooms most. No surprise there as that’s where it’s hardest to fight the laws of physics – distortion and vignetting being much in the picture, if you get my drift.

The profiles below only work with RAW and DNG files. If you use TIFF or JPG they will not appear in LR or PS. They work equally well with full frame and APS-C sensors, as both LR and PS compensate appropriately. They are most effective in full frame Nikons, where the peripheries of the lens’s image circle are most used.

20mm f/3.5 profile:

For the 20mm I created profiles at f/3.5 and f/8. f/8 is very much the sweet spot for this fine optic and use with a tailored profile really makes the results sing.

Click to download the profiles for the 20mm f/3.5.

Even though the 20mm f/3.5 Ai-S lens has no CPU, as long as you remember to dial in the 20mm ‘non-CPU’ lens setting on the camera, the profile will be automatically recognized from the related EXIF data. This should apply to any lens which does not post EXIF focal length data to the file. LR and PS depend on this information to look up the right lens automatically, though you can always override the applications’ choice.

35-70mm f/2.8 profile:

For the 35-70mm zoom I made profiles at f/2.8 and f/5.6 at each of 35mm, 52mm and 70mm. This lens trends, like many zooms, from barrel distortion at the wide end to pincushion distortion at the long end. Vignetting at f/2.8 is largely gone by f/5.6.

Click to download the profiles for the 35-70mm AFD zoom.

Once downloaded, place these files in this directory:

Replace ‘ThomasMBA’ with your user name. In Lion, hold the Alt key in Finder->Go to see your user Library.

When you restart Lightroom 4 (or 3) you will see this in the Develop module once you check the ‘Enable Profile Corrections’ box for a RAW snap taken on the 35-70mm AF D zoom, as an example:


The profiles for the 35-70mm in Lightroom.

Even though I have created six profiles for the 35-70mm AF D zoom, at 35, 52 and 70mm and at f/2.8 and f/5.6, you only see a choice of one file. Lightroom will automatically choose the profile closest to the focal length and aperture you used – no need to select from multiple profiles.

Here’s the 35-70mm profile at work at 70mm and f/2.8.

Before:

No profile applied.

After:

With profile applied. Vignetting is gone as is the slight pincushion distortion.
In this image, the centers of the long and short sides have been bowed out
and the corner vignetting has been removed by the lens profile.

The changes with the 20mm f/3.5 Ai/Ai-S lens are much more noticeable, with fairly strong vignetting at f/3.5 removed and the ‘Cupid’s Bow’ wave like distortion of straight lines parallel to the edges of the image corrected. The latter cannot be properly corrected by normal manual distortion correction controls in LR or PS – only a tailored lens profile like the one above can do that. An already good wide angle lens is made great with this technique. The reason I have included two profiles in the file is that at f/3.5 vignetting is more severe than at f/8, whereas distortion remains unchanged. Lightroom will automatically choose the profile closest to the focal length and aperture you used – no need to select from multiple profiles, though the profile file actually contains two profiles.

Both profiles included in the downloadable file fail to correct very minor chromatic aberration (color fringing) but a click on the ‘Remove Chromatic Aberration’ box in LR4 corrects that perfectly, looking at 30x screen enlargements of ultra high contrast subjects. The one click approach compared to the sliders in LR3 sounds simplistic but in practice works superbly.

Before:

20mm f/3.5 Nikkor at f/3.5. No profile applied.

After:

20mm f/3.5 Nikkor at f/3.5. With profile. Note the dramatic reduction in vignetting.

Well done, Adobe. And thank you Nikon for a real corker of a lens, fully usable at f/3.5 and outstanding at f/8. I look forward to publishing some snaps from this lens soon.

Enjoy!

A caution about Adobe’s lens profile database:

Go to PS CS5, load a RAW file and invoke Filters->Lens Correction. You will see a host of lens profiles, none authored by Adobe – they do not come with LR4 which contains all Adobe’s profiles as well as those submitted by lens makers like Sigma. (For reasons known only to the people at ADBE, you cannot download other lens’ profiles using LR4). Nikon and Canon do not submit profiles as that would cannibalize their RAW processing apps for the three people on earth who actually use them.

The problem is that these profiles, which appear to have been submitted by photographers, seem totally uncurated. As an example there are no fewer than 6 profiles for the Nikon 35-70 f/2.8 lens and each yields markedly different results. The descriptions all say “Nikon 35-70mm f/2.8 (raw)”. There is no indication of which aperture or focal length they apply to, making them completely useless. One Nikon profile is even listed as 0.0mm f/0.0, indicating the author failed to read the instructions. Why this is even in the database mystifies me.

My profiles are carefully made and accurate. It’s your choice.

Another Adobe cock-up:

LR4 comes with Adobe Camera Raw 7.0. On the PS side you can only get that with CS6 Beta. The latest version for CS5 is ACR 6.7 but the download will not install, has no instructions on installation, and the current 6.6.x will not convert LR4′s Process 2012 RAW files. I have read that 6.7 does not either, but obviously I cannot test that as the installer is faulty.

The workaround is to use LR4 as your first point of entry and RAW converter even if you propose sticking with CS5 for processing.This works for all but devotees of CS5′s ACR.

Simply round trip the file from LR4 to CS5/ACR whatever version (you will not be using CS’s ACR), using a lossless TIFF or PSD file format. This way, when Adobe tries to extort money from you when CS6 comes out at $600 or more, you can tell them where to stick it. You can bet they will be forced to keep the RAW converter database in LR4 current, or risk the wrath of a huge installed user base which does not want to spend $600+ on CS6 for occasional use. Hoist by their own petard.

I see no difference in the rendering of Process 2012 RAW files comparing a RAW in LR4 with a TIFF in CS5. The only difference is that the latter is four to five times the size, but $600 buys you a lot of storage ….

More profiles:

To see all the profiles I have created, click here.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Posted in Lightroom, Nikon lenses

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25Mar / 2012

The Lightroom 4 book by Martin Evening

Just buy it.

While there is a case to be made for non-photographers testing new hardware – after all you don’t have to be Annie Liebovitz to stick a camera on a tripod and shoot a test chart – no such argument can be sustained when it comes to writing software instruction books.

The hardware case is exemplified by sites like DPReview. Many do a good job of explaining and comparing features and performance, while attended by the worst photography on the planet. None of this is helped by a commentariat frequently focused on flame wars over brand X versus brand Y. But, as long as you stay away from the noise passing as commentary, sites like DPR add value to the hardware decision.

On the software front you have many poseurs passing as experts with one common attribute. That is, they seem to be software gurus who grew up with Photoshop and think that their familiarity with the arcana of vector based rendering makes them Cartier-Bresson’s peer.

That is why it is so easy to recommend Martin Evening’s latest Lightroom book, which addresses Lightroom 4. He is a working professional photographer, a good one at that, writes clearly and illustrates his recommendations thoroughly. I have previously bought his LR v2 and v3 and PS CS5 books, and recommend the latest unreservedly. The section on the use of the new enhanced localized adjustment tools alone is worth the price. Mine ran me $30 at Amazon US.

Having bought v2 in paperback and v3 in the Kindle version for the iPad, I find I much prefer the paperback for ease of cross reference and quick access to features I need to understand. At least I don’t have to recycle v3 – the Delete button being all that is needed.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Posted in Lightroom

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20Jan / 2012

iBooks Author

Roll your own.

iBooks Author is free OS X (Lion only) software from Apple which makes it relatively easy to create ebooks with interactive content. The user interface will be familiar to anyone who has used iWork’s Pages or Keynote with content easily added using drag and drop.

I wrote about how easy it is to create ‘flat’ PDF photobooks using Pages here and if you want to see the difference between a flat book and an interactive one, take a look at Al Gore’s excellent offering on global warming. That one took a large team of programmers and is full of very high quality content. iBooks Author (“iBA”) makes it simple for anyone to create something almost as polished, in a fraction of the time.

For traditional novelists, this is a waste of time. There are multiple self-publishing services like Lulu and Blurb which do just fine with text and a modicum of pictorial content, though the latter quickly becomes price prohibitive. And for most photographers iBA adds nothing that cannot be done as well, or better, on a web site. But if interactive content is your thing – touch a map, see a picture, hear sounds, look at graphical data and so on – then iBA is an appealing offering.

I downloaded the app and found it easy to use. There are only six templates provided but you can bet that number will grow quickly. Adding movies and touch-interactive content is simple. Best of all, you can simply attach your iPad to your Mac (iBA is for iPad output only, no iPhones) and preview your work in the iBooks iPad app. This works well.

iBooks Author outputting a draft to the iPad.

Economics and Marketing:

In exchange for making the app available at no cost, Apple dictates that any sales be made through its AppStore, meaning they keep 30%. If your product is free, you can distribute it either through the AppStore or directly. While this has caused much protest from the brigade of wooly thinkers who dominate the blogosphere, there is nothing wrong with this. If you don’t like the exclusive distribution model just wait a few months for competing products for Android to come along, as they surely will. Or simply create a web app where updates require no new app downloads. So such criticism misses the point. The AppStore is not a marketing medium, any more than Blurb or Amazon is a marketing medium. It is a distribution mechanism. Without marketing your one book is lost , buried in one million apps in the AppStore or five million books at Amazon. It will sell to friends and relatives only and to you as a ‘vanity’ sale. When was the last time you found an app by looking in the mess that is the AppStore? Chances are that, like me, you heard about it by reading a blog or newspaper of interest.

Without that sort of exposure it doesn’t matter what percentage Apple monopolistically commands, as your income will be precisely zero. So iBA does not take away the need to market your product. It’s a creative tool, not a selling one. Absent marketing, your presence in the AppStore is worthless and Apple’s claim to exclusive distribution is meaningless.

For photographers, iBA is a mixed picture. For traditional still makers it adds little and takes away much from what can be done with a traditional web site. Your display is limited to the small confines of an iPad’s screen and moving around content can be made far easier in a web site. But for photographers who need the interactive capabilities, this could be a powerful creative tool. One reader suggested this would be an ideal mechanism for making his forthcoming book of flower pictures, a variation on the traditional travel book. Touch the snap of the location and you get a map. Touch a flower in the snap and you get details and close-ups. Generally, tour books, be they of cities, art collections, geographies and so on are ideally suited to this presentation. But for the traditional high quality print maker, a web site remains superior.

Apple’s intended market:

Apple is targeting iBA at books for US high school students. Good luck with that. First, America is a nation which denigrates education. Look at any political campaign and the educated candidate will be accused of elitism. God help him if he also happens to speak French. It’s an attitude which has taken US public schools from first to worst in the Western world in a generation, aided by corrupt unions who prevent dismissal of illiterate teachers and school book publishers who rape the system with $75 text books whose production and distribution cost is $5 at most. It’s a $20bn annual revenue business. Their sole marketing costs are the occasional bribe/political donation to make sure their book is accepted by the system. So getting these entrenched interests to budge is a Sisyphean task, the publishers’ promises to make iBooks text books available for $15 notwithstanding. Finding the money in the public school system for all those iPads is likely impossible, compounded by high theft and damage rates. This will simply widen the gulf between private and public schooling. Private schools will require parents to provide iPads to their children, or will do so from endowment funds, while public school students will continue with 15th Century technology while political debate rages. And simply moving to a better area to avail your child of better public schooling will not cut it. The system will never permit one school to have the technology denied another. By definition, a system which refuses admission to no one will always cater to the lowest common denominator. Further, pandering by politicians to minorities with the resulting corrosive effects of biculturalism (my son needs to learn Spanish why, exactly?) will only see a broadening of that gulf. Sorry, but I don’t recall Spanish being spoken in America’s boardrooms, which I have frequented a good deal, other than by the cleaning staff.

Value for photographers:

So iBA has a place for photographers seeking an interactive presentation for their work. For all others, be they public schools or traditional print workers, there’s nothing here to look at. The print worker already has superior tools available, and the public school is beyond saving.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Posted in Software

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10Jan / 2012

Lightroom 4 Beta

Meh!

You can download the Beta version of Lightroom 4 here. Windows XP users are SOL.

After a quick look and comparison of pictures on identical monitors side-by-side against LR3, here are my observations:

  • Not a major upgrade unless you do movies.
  • RAW Import and preview generation speed no different from LR3.
  • Despite renamed sliders for Highlights and Shadows I found I could exactly replicate the effect of these in LR3.
  • Enhanced local adjustments nice to have; overall adjustments, while renamed, add little to LR3 viewed on 2 monitors side-by-side.
  • The localized Sharpness adjustment range is still frustratingly narrow, requiring export to Photoshop if you want real control.
  • Export to Blurb is nice – if you like Blurb – but there are canned export plugins for other services for LR3 – I use the one for Shutterfly.
  • No Content Aware Fill added. Still need to roundtrip to CS5 to do that.
  • GPS? Only my iPhone 4S has that so of little use.
  • Soft proofing no biggie – you could do that through Mac Preview in LR3. And you cannot soft proof on your secondary display, only in the main one, which is kind of stupid.
  • ‘Adjust Print Brightness’ is BS as you cannot preview it – at least I cannot find out how – and it’s no excuse for proper printer setup.
  • No crashes or hitches (OS X Lion 10.7.2), though switching to the Develop module rapidly refreshes the screen a couple of times – easy fix for Adobe.
  • No help files – click Help and you get LR3 Help.
  • ‘Email a photo’ implementation sucks as it does not access the Contacts app on my Mac, meaning you have to input the full email address, and setup is awfully clunky. Adobe needs to integrate this better to make it useful. Right now it’s faster to export a JPG and drop it on Mail app.

The localized Develop adjustments panel in Lightroom 4.

Email setup in LR4 – of course you know your SMTP Server and Port, right?

While I will be upgrading after all the usual debugging is concluded, simply to keep current, the best thing that can be said is that Adobe appears not to have broken anything in what is already a robust and stable cataloging/basic processing/printing tool for RAW files.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Posted in Lightroom

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06Jan / 2012

Zite

A news consolidator for the iPad.

For the past year my default RSS feed reader on both the iPhone and iPad has been Reeder, a product well attuned to the touch interface and continually improved. I use it for RSS feeds I elect, thus making an efficient process of reading just those sites which interest me and making it unnecessary to visit to see whether updates exist. Reeder looks at your RSS feeds in Google Reader (yes, the company which :”Does no evil” and derives content based on those.

A new class of feed reader is coming along as an adjunct to Reeder, and one example is named Zite. If you wonder about the name it’s derived from German under the mistaken impression that Americans actually speak more than one language. (Had this been a News Corp app it would have been named ‘Scheiss’).

Zite also goes out to your Google Reader account (and Twitter and others) to look at what you are reading then returns stories based on the most popular sites within your interest areas:

So, for the most part, there’s relatively little overlap between what you choose in Reeder and what Zite chooses for you based on your Reeder feeds. The layout is magazine style and on my iPad1 everything loads quickly. Setup is a breeze, with the user choosing major categories of interest, which you can see down the right hand column:

Touch ‘Photography’ and you get:

Touch the story for the full text. Swipe left for the next page under the same Section heading.

There are links on the right of the iPad’s display (not shown above) which permit emailing or saving to Instapaper, etc. Nicely done.

The app uses the touch interface really well and I’m enjoying it greatly, not least for some of the unexpected source materials it presents. The one shortcoming I have asked the developers to address is that once read a story should be ‘greyed out’ to make the whole thing more efficient. With so many stories, I find that I was choosing ones I had already read before they were relegated to the dustbin of history.

Zite is free and I have not been troubled by any intrusive advertising.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Posted in iPad, Software

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