Photographs, Photographers and Photography

August 16, 2010

Virtual reality revisited

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

Better tools and some thoughts on Flash.

I have decided to do some new work in Virtual Reality panoramas, having written extensively in these pages about the technique some four years ago. Snow Leopard refuses to let either PTMac – the software used to stitch the constituent images – or CubicConverter – which converts the stitched panorama into Virtual Reality format – work, so my first port of call was to ace panoramic pro UK photographer Rod Edwards. Rod has got this technique down and one of the most stunning examples of VR I have seen is his panorama of the famous Racetrack in California’s Death Valley which can be seen by clicking here.

Following Rod’s advice I settled on PTGui for stitching and Pano2VR for VR generation. Processing VR panoramas is a two step process – first stitch the constituent images into a seamless flat whole, then convert that image into a circular panorama which the viewer can pan at will in all directions, not to mention the ability to zoom in and out.

In the process I learned a couple of things. First, the software is now friendlier than before, though the Panotools engine used by PTGui seems identical to that used by the obsolete PTMac. Second, Pano2VR is an excellent tool making it easy to add sound, navigation controls and copyright data. But, most importantly, I learned how superior Adobe’s Flash is to Apple’s Quicktime. Yes, Pano2VR can generate VR files in either format. The Flash versions are half the size and offer far more control. Panning in Flash panoramas is also much smoother than the jerky alternative in Quicktime. Yes, the very same Flash which greedy piggy Steve Jobs has banned from the iPad. It’s ironical that Quicktime VR is no longer supported by Apple’s own latest version of their media player, QuickTime X, as they appear to be abadoning the VR format. But you don’t expect Apple to tell you that now, do you?

So to play a jerky Quicktime VR pano you have to download the older Quicktime 7 if it’s not on your system. Let’s hope the anti-trust powers stomp on Jobs’s arrogance and force him to open the iPad to Flash. If not, the competition will see to it in any case, and I’ll be first in line for a tablet which plays Flash and has a built in SDXC card reader. What a jerk! Here’s a guy who has a monster ego and a huge vendetta against Adobe for some reason. A little power is a dangerous thing ….

As a quick proof of concept, I snapped six pictures of a loft interior using the Canon 5D and Canon fisheye lens mounted vertically on the King Pano panoramic head. The excellent King Pano remains available and I recommend it. You do not need a fisheye to use it but a fisheye lens is the way to go if you want to do 360 degree Virtual Reality panoramas. Even with regular lenses, the King Pano is immensely useful as it provides the correct nodal point offset for the camera, meaning your efforts to stitch images properly will be speedily rewarded. Determination of the right setting for rotation of your rig about your lens’s nodal point is not that hard, and well explained in many places on the web, including on this site.

As proof of concept, click on the picture below. I have added some Vivaldi to jolly things along and the whole thing takes a minute or so to download. I did not bother using HDR, though that technique is highly recommended in VR work owing to the huge dynamic range frequently encountered – look at the burned out windows as an example. HDR fixes that. Nor did I fill the zenith and nadir holes, concentrating on the core stitching functionality instead. So next week it’s off to Point Lobos to do the real thing. In the image below I used TIFF files for maximum definition and you are looking at the Flash version.

Click to load and play the panorama. Use the mouse to navigate in all directions.
Will NOT play on an iPad.

To view a selection of my earlier panoramas, please click here. These use Quicktime7.

Disclosure: No connection to, or investment in, any of the companies mentioned in this article.

July 28, 2010

Making an eBook

Filed under: Photographs, eBooks — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

The whole process, start to finish.

I thought it might be helpful to illustrate the complete process of creating an eBook from start to finish. The final eBook can be placed on your server of choice and made available to anyone you want. If it contains client-specific pictures, adding password control to the downloadable file is an easy enhancement, explained below. In this case the book created is not password protected.

The tools used are:

  • Lightroom 2 or 3 for assembly of the pictures
  • Lightroom 2 or 3’s Slideshow module to create a PDF file
  • iWork Pages to make title, colophon, etc. additional pages
  • Apple Preview to add these pages to the PDF

As I have saved templates in Pages for the Front and Colophon pages, all I need do is modify these and re-save them as PDFs before adding them to the PDF book exported from Lightroom. You should do likewise to smooth and speed the process.

Having done this a few times I thought it might be fun to time the complete process. It took me just fifteen minutes to select the 20 pictures for the eBook, move them to a new Collection in LR3, arrange them in my preferred order, save the PDF and then add front and colophon pages. I call that pretty efficient. This timing assumes you have the constituent pictures in Lightroom and that they have been processed to your liking before you start.

Here are the screenshots showing the process:

Select the pictures for a new Collection in Lightroom – I hold the Command (Apple) key in Lightroom->Library and mouse click the ones of choice:

In Lightroom, click Library->New Collection and check the box as shown:

Go into the Collection in Lightroom->Library and drag and drop the pictures in your preferred order:

Jump to the Lightroom->Slideshow module and uncheck the boxes for the Intro Screen and Ending Screen – you want to do this to ensure page numbering is correct:

Click on ‘ABC’ at the base of the screen and select the data you want to display on each picture – I have selected ‘Sequence’:

Place and size your data box:

Choose your background and frame color preference using the Slideshow panel on the right. Now, export the slideshow to a PDF by clicking on ‘Export PDF’ on the lower left. Use the Quality=50 setting shown. Extensive tests, documented here, show this to be optimal for a wide variety of display devices.

You are done with Lightroom. Open iWork Pages and create or modify the front page:

In this case I wanted an image on the cover so I popped back into LR3 and exported a JPG of my picture of choice, then drag and dropped that onto Pages. Eventually I also changed the type from red to blue to improve visibility. You have a lot of control in Pages:

Still in Pages, create the Colophon:

Note that I have added Hyperlinks to my sites at the lower right of the colophon page – easily done in Pages using Insert->Hyperlink->Webpage (or email). This is a powerful tool for marketing your services if you are a pro. Any reader of your book can simply click these to contact you.

Using Pages->File->Export, export both the front, colophon and any other pages to separate PDF files.

Now open the PDF of pictures you exported from Lightroom in Preview and drag and drop the cover page into position in the right hand Sidebar (View->Sidebar->Show Sidebar if you cannot see it):

Repeat the above step for the colophon and any additional pages. Now save the enhanced file from Preview – this is where you can add password protection if required:

You are done! To put the timing in perspective, creating the eBook and this whole article from scratch, including file upload to server and all the screenshots took me just 50 minutes. The hard work was in writing this blog piece (35 minutes) and the easy part was making the book (the other 15 minutes).

All that remains is to move the file to your display storage of choice – file server, iPad, whatever.

And to see the finished product, click the picture below.Need I add ‘Best viewed on an iPad”?

Enjoy!

Click picture to download PDF file.

July 26, 2010

The Age of Machines

Filed under: Photographs, eBooks — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Beautiful engineering.

Click the picture to download the book.

July 25, 2010

Smarter eBooks

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

More discoveries in LR3.

After the first early experiments and successes documented here over the past few days, I have started digging deeper into the excellent Slideshow module in Lightroom 3.

Click on the ‘ABC’ panel at the base of the screen when in the Slideshow module then click on the arrows and this is what you see:

This means that you can click on any of these so called ‘EXIF’ data fields (stored by your digital camera and uploaded to Lightroom when you imported them) for inclusion on the slide itself or add your own custom text.

Further, Click the ‘Edit…’ option and you can create a custom field of your own design:

When you add these fields of information to your image, sizing and placement are easily controlled with the mouse, though the font appears to be fixed at this time.

I illustrate this technique in my Abstractions eBook, where I have included the Camera and Exposure data as well as sequential numbering, as examples. The snag with EXIF data is that film originals scanned into the Lightroom catalog will have none, so I’m looking into batch editors to determine effective ways of doing this.

This has long frustrated me as when someone asks for a particular picture (and I confess my keywording within the Lightroom catalog is less than spectacular) I often find that I associate an image with the gear I was using at the time. “Oh! yes, I recall taking that on the old Rollei 3.5F” sort of thing. So I want to search on Camera but naturally that only works on digital camera images.

Further, as you will see, some of the Camera data in Abstractions is missing the lens in Panny G1 images. Early G1 (and Canon 5D) firmware had a glitch which precluded upload of lens data, so even some of the digital camera images need work on the EXIF data.

So in a forthcoming piece I hope to have researched software which will allow batch additions of EXIF data to old film images, thus making the filter tool fully functional and speeding location of pictures within Lightroom. Something tells me this process will not be easy.

To view the result, click the cover of the eBook below.


You can see just what a mess my EXIF data are by looking at the EXIF summary of my Lightroom catalog – no, I was not around in 1903! And ‘Camera = F-12 Plus’ refers to a commercial Fuji film scanner used by a local photo lab. Go figure. The ‘Unknown Camera’ pictures are all from scanned film originals, as are the Perf2450 (my Epson flatbed scanner) and Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN (my slide scanner, now sold).

To read the whole series on eBook publishing, click on categories->photography->technique->ebooks in the right hand column above.

July 24, 2010

PDF file size and definition

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

What works best?

Read the past few columns here and you will see that I have put into practice my enthusiasm for creating ePhotobooks for viewing on your monitor or, better, on the iPad.

The goal of today’s column is to determine the minimum PDF file size which will work well with the three most common display devices – an iPad, a computer monitor and a large screen TV.

One of the dictates for any data file which has to be downloaded is to make it as small as possible.

No one is going to sit around for ages waiting for downloads and this column is being written in America where time is money. Or is that debt? Residents of Club Med nations likely couldn’t care less, but they probably don’t have broadband in any case. Well, sunshine cures all ills.

When exporting a slideshow as a PDF from Lightroom 3, LR3 suggests a default file size, based on the setting of the Quality slider. For my At The Beach book in yesterday’s column that was a Quality of 63 on the slider:

The default slider setting in Lightroom 3 for At The Beach.

Optimal settings for the iPad:

I decided not to experiment with the output dimensions as 1024 x 768 is the native size of the iPad’s screen, so that seems optimal. Any more is overkill, anything less underutilizes the device’s capabilities.

To test things a little more objectively I exported four more PDFs in addition to the default one (63), using 12, 25, 50 and 75 settings on the Quality slider. Bear in mind that these are screenshots. The original is far sharper, effortlessly yielding pin sharp 24″ x 18″ prints. I know, because I made them on my HP DJ90 printer.

Here are the file sizes:

PDF files sizes at five different Quality settings in LR3.

Exporting all five to the iPad I could not tell any difference between image quality viewing all but the smallest (Quality=12) using GoodReader. Unpinching to magnify the image did show that the Quality=25 version broke up earlier than did the larger versions, but the three largest looked much the same at regular, unmagnified size. The Quality=12 version showed signs of pixelation in normal size and does not make best use of the iPad’s display definition, so it should be avoided.

This suggests that even at a low setting of Quality=25, a PDF intended for viewing on an iPad is more than sufficient in quality and does not compromise definition compared with higher settings and larger file sizes.

Optimal settings for a computer monitor:

There are a lot of variables here. Computer monitors tend to be viewed from very short distances and come in a wide variety of definitions and screen sizes. My two Dell 2209WA IPS displays are 21.5″ diagonally and display 1680 x 1050 using an Nvidia 9800GTX+ card, the latter still unequalled by the latest MacPro, despite nomenclature changes to fool the uninformed.

I would describe that combination as upper-middle display quality and a state-of-the-art graphics card.

(When my ship comes in I want to be able to migrate upmarket to a better display without having to blow more coin on a better GPU!)

The best way of illustrating the differences is to do a ‘rollover’ demo, but to see this you must be using a modern Webkit browser, meaning Safari or Google Chrome. The original image used here was taken on a full frame Canon 5D using the 24-105mm ‘L’ zoom lens stopped down to f/8, its optimal aperture – a sharp combination. If the mouseover pictures do not appear in your webkit browser simply refresh the URL and all should be well.

I have placed two pictures in the rollover demo – the top one is from the Quality=25 file, the rollover one from the Quality=75 slide. In each case these are screenshots from Preview with the Zoom ‘+’ button clicked twice for an enlarged image. The full image is 12.7″ x 19″ and shows signs of breaking up regardless of Quality setting. However, the rollover illustrates the degree of breakup between the two:

Quality=25. Rollover for Quality=75

The difference is extremely subtle. You can just see noise disappearing from the white area of the registration plate and from the spokes of the wheel when you roll over the image with your mouse cursor.

Now here is the same exercise but this time the top image is Quality=12, the rollover remains Quality=75.

Quality=12. Rollover for Quality=75

On my monitor there’s a big jump in quality from 12 to 75.

Bottom line? For my purposes the Quality=25 version is more than adequate for my computer monitor as long as the image is not zoomed in and also happens to be optimal for the iPad.

For even higher computer monitor display quality, you should increase the export image size in Lightroom 3 to approximate that of your monitor. If you click on ‘Screen’ in the size drop down (see screenshot above) LR3 will automatically adjust the export size to match your screen dimensions. Doing this for my 1680 x 1050 Dell 2209WA monitor, the Quality=25 file size grew from 2.1mB to 2.8mB. However, the perceived image quality was indistinguishable, suggesting that the modestly larger file size confers no benefit on image quality.

Finally, with export Quality=100 and set for the 1680 x 1050 Dell display, file size balloons to 24.9mB with slightly smoother tone characteristics in large areas of plain color. Definitely not worth it when comparing a 2.1mB Q=25 S=iPad file with the 24.9mB Q=100 S=Dell whopper.

Optimal settings for a large screen TV:

Increasingly we are using the large screen TV as a viewing device in lieu of making large and costly wall prints. So I displayed the 12, 25, 63 and 75 quality PDF on my 42″ 720p Vizio LCD TV (4 years old it’s somewhat removed from the state-of-the-art, but works for me at a very reasonable price).

I used a MacMini, the just discontinued version MC238LL/A which uses an Nvidia 9400M GPU and can resolve up to 1920 x 1200. My TV is 1280 x 720, and thus is

the limiting factor in the equation.

The very best viewing experience was already reached at Quality=50, viewed from my usual 10 feet but the quality drop when viewing the Quality=25 version was so slight as to be almost unnoticeable. The lower quality of Quality=12 was just distinguishable, but far less so than on a computer monitor or iPad.

Bottom line:

The best compromise for one file size for use on an iPad, computer monitor or big screen TV is Quality=25 when exporting a Lightroom 3 slideshow. That results in a file less than half the size of the default Quality=63 setting in Lightroom 3, meaning it will download more than twice as fast from a server.

Another user’s experience:

UK pro Roy Hammans shares my interest in the techniques discussed above and was kind enough to forward some samples created at different quality levels. Roy uses both 24″ iMac (1920 x 1200) and 24″ HP LP2475w (1920×1200) displays, and used the highest quality equipment to make these pictures. The first four were made with the 18-200mm VR lens at 24mm on a Nikon D300 in DX mode, 400 ISO. The second four were taken with the Nikon 10.5mm fish-eye on his NIkon D700, at 200 ISO, (in DX mode), the equivalent focal length becoming 15mm. He used the LR3 built-in lens profile correction for the 10.5mm to remove barrel distortion inherent in the design of the lens.

His PDF images were also generated using the slideshow function of LR3 – click the picture to download his PDF file:

Click the picture to download

So between us we are at Q=50 (Roy – great eyesight) and Q=25 (me – lousy eyesight) for the best compromise setting at an export size of 1024 x 768, whether for iPad or computer monitor display. Those using large 30″ computer monitors (2560 x 1600) should probably adopt the Q=50 setting. In any case Q=50 yields a file size much smaller than Q=100 (4.5 times the size at 1024 x 768), which is overkill in any scenario I can imagine.

July 23, 2010

More on PDF book publishing

Filed under: Photographs, eBooks — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

The dream is becoming a reality.


Before the iPad even hit the shelves I was fantasizing in these pages about the value this tool would add for working photographers. It’s easy to generate PDF files of your work using the simplest tools (Lightroom, Pages and Preview is what I use) or, if you are a real publishing maven like UK photographer Roy Hammans, you can use sophisticated tools like Adobe’s InDesign to craft very professional looking eBooks. Take a look at Roy’s splendid collection of weathered boat hull abstractions which you can download from his site here. Do yourself a favor and move it to your iPad which displays them far better than a regular computer monitor, if my well calibrated Dell 2209WA is anything to go by. Also, I much prefer GoodReader on the iPad as a viewing app for PDFs to iBooks, which is clunky to load and slow to focus and sharpen each image.

I have asked the makers of GoodReader to provide enhanced slide-to-slide transitions (fades, dissolves) – let’s see if they come through. I would have asked the arrogant fruit company to do this for iBooks on the iPad but have you ever received a response from Apple on anything? After all, this is a company whose philosophy is increasingly “That’s how we like it. Take it or leave it, pal.”

I can generate a PDF of, say, 100 pictures from Lightroom (maybe Aperture has a like feature?) in a few minutes, add cover pages in a few more and have the whole thing on the iPad seconds later; imagine how this would work at any magazine with a lot of art directors, editors and photographic content. The photographer bangs away, the pictures are moved to Lightroom and thence to the iPad and the art director, minutes later each of the many team members is holding an iPad in his or her hands and making the decision what to cull and what to keep. Separately, a version is placed on the photographer’s server for downloading to the Big Cheese’s iPad in the sixtieth floor’s corner office. Eventually, the iPad app will have a Keep/Reject function for the editor to use, will be handed back to the photographer’s assistant, sync’d with Lightroom and, hey presto, off we go to press. Or rather, off we go to ePress.


Anyone looking at the nineteenth century paste-up technology used by Anna Wintour in making the September Issue of Vogue would be blind not to see the possibilities.

Now that I have done this a couple of times, I checked my timing when doing a 24 page eBook of beach pictures. These were all in Lightroom 3 and I simply copied them to a Collection, added the color wash in LR’s Slideshow module, exported to a PDF, opened the PDF in Preview and then dropped in the front and Colophon pages which I made in iWork Pages. Start to finish took me thirty minutes. Had there been 100 pictures the additional time would have been a couple of minutes or so, the most time consuming step being the creation of the front and Colophon pages. I have saved these as template files for future use to make things easier. Click the picture to download the PDF:



July 22, 2010

Street Smarts

Filed under: Photographs, eBooks — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:00 am

Now available FREE.

Back in 2005 I published a book of one hundred black and white street snaps named Street Smarts, using Lulu.com. It sold well which gratified my ego and made my charities happy, as they got the proceeds. The pictures were taken during my last six years of life in London and my first six years of what became a 35 year love affair with my first Leica, an M3. They were taken in London and Paris during the period 1971-77, right until I left permanently for America.

You can still get the book from Lulu in a printed paperback (and I will continue to earn nothing!) but I have also now added a downloadable PDF version which you can get by clicking the picture below and saving the 45

second/14gB download, or by going to ‘links’ at the top right of this site. Gratis, free and for nothing. And it’s been digitally remastered, as the marketing spin for old stuff would have it.

You may contrast my street snapper style from 40 years ago with today’s by also downloading the identically priced Street Snaps 2009-2010 and, in addition to the exclusive use of color where monochrome once ruled, I hope you will also find more joy and humor in the later work, and a more spontaneous approach. Over a forty year period one changes ….



Click picture to download.

July 20, 2010

Street Snaps 2009-2010

Filed under: Photographs, eBooks — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:49 am

My new FREE book.

Online publishing being the thing of the future, I have created a new book in PDF format which you can download free by clicking the picture below.

All but the first were taken on the Panasonic G1 with its kit lens; the exception was made on the Canon 5D. All snaps were taken during the past year in San Francisco.

You can view these in a browser of your choice on your desktop or laptop or, better still, save (File->Save as…) the downloaded PDF file and drop it on iTunes to sync with your iPad or, even better, if you use GoodReader ($0.99) on your iPad get the free GoodReaderUSB utility, plug your iPad in and drag and drop the PDF onto your iPad where you can then view it in GoodReader. (To mitigate image theft I have disabled right-clicking on this site).

This PDF was created using the slideshow PDF export capability of Lightroom 2/3. The PDF file was then opened in Preview and the cover and colophon pages, created in iWork Pages and saved as single page PDFs, were dropped in. The whole thing was then saved again as a PDF and uploaded to my server. Lightroom 3 does allow you to add Intro and Ending pages but I didn’t notice that until it was too late!

The file is 14mB and should download fast – 45 seconds here. It is optimized for viewing on the iPad. You can also download the book by clicking on ‘my books’ in the right hand column, under the ‘links’ tab.

Enjoy!

Update July 21, 2010: Now expanded from 44 to 100 photographs.

January 17, 2010

HDR for street snappers

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

If it moves, forget it.

I gushed on about High Dynamic Range photography ages ago here, meaning that the curative aspects of time have done their thing and forced me to reconsider.

You see, unless you have one of those blitzoid megabuck Nikons which take a bazillion snaps in the blink of an eye, HDR is useless if your subject moves. And this is not just the case with the street snapper’s target. A wavering leaf or a flying bird – if the images differ in subject matter, forget HDR. They cannot be merged without ghastly ghosting effects.

And as I’m a street snapper at heart, traditional HDR techniques do not work. Heck, it’s tough enough getting one good snap, let alone the three or more dictated by HDR. So, somewhat unconsciously, I have found that I am using the localized adjustment tools in Lightroom 2 a lot more. When I have a subject with challenging dynamic range, I will underexpose by a stop or two to tame the highlights and then bring back the shadows with a spot of localized exposure adjustment.

Here’s an example of what I am talking about. The underexposed original saw me bringing back the detail in the vendor’s face while leaving the reflective sculpture alone:

Chrome vendor, Maiden Lane, San Francisco. G1, kit lens.

So yes, this is still HDR, albeit with a street snapper’s twist.

September 12, 2009

HP DJ90 with Snow Leopard

Filed under: Printing — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:18 am

Phew!

Long time readers will know that I use a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 to make large prints using my iMac. I suggested it made little sense to rush into the OS 10.6 upgrade (Snow Leopard) until many of the incompatibility issues were resolved. Indeed, Snow Leopard has already had one upgrade to address security issues since I wrote that piece.

Well, some good news. HP has released new printer drivers for the DJ 30/90/130 series (respectively 13″, 18″ and 24″ wide) as stated in this Apple Support document. This is great news for those of us using what may be one of the best ink dye printers made. While recently discontinued, I confess prints made with it today look every bit as good as they ever did! My only grumbles have been the occasional blocked printer head, easily replaced. Click ‘Printing‘ on the right for more about this outstanding piece of hardware for serious sized printing.

August 26, 2009

An excellent Lightroom book

Filed under: Technique — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:58 am

Evening writes good English.

It’s now coming on for two years since I made the painful switch from Aperture to Lightroom and scarcely a day passes when I do not rejoice in that decision.

From the resource intensive Aperture (sells more ‘newer, faster’ Macs, I suppose), illogical and buggy application to one that is logical, has yet to lock-up on me and is blisteringly fast on my middle-of-the road iMac, Lightroom (I’m on version 2.4) is a joy to use. I visit some of the Lightroom blogs now and then and find I am always picking up new tips, no thanks to the lack of a proper instruction book from Adobe, as none is bundled with the software.

Indeed, to my own surprise, I actually find that after 50 years of processing pictures, I’m beginning to enjoy what is ordinarily a drudge. Anyway, a while back I decided to get a good book on the product as it was increasingly irritating to find out more or or less by accident about features that really helped the processing step along.

In selecting my book of choice, the first dictate was that it had to be written by a photographer who can actually take good pictures. Why on earth would you want to learn any skill from an academic, clueless in real life application of his expertise? That dictate promptly excluded most of the many books out there – some of these people really have no right to be preaching about Lightroom when they cannot take a well composed, decent photograph.

The second driver was that the author has outstanding communication skills.

Having watched some of his instructional videos on the web the book to choose was easy – Martin Evening’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers. (Disclosure: The link is to Amazon – I get no ‘click through’ payment if you click on it. I have no position in AMZN at the time of writing.)

My main reason for buying a good reference manual, dictated by the poor quality of the materials included with the software and the generally poor Help files within LR – was that I wanted to be absolutely sure how best to integrate two catalogs of pictures. I wanted to add the one from my laptop to the master on my desktop computer. While I have daily back-ups of everything, I would rather get this right first thing than scramble to recover from mistakes by resorting to the back-up.

Evening’s book not only walked me through this in accurate detail, I found that it added value in many other areas where the apparently simple user interface of LR hides many special functions, often invoked through the use of the Alt key on the keyboard. Areas where I find real value was added include:

  • Importing and creation of import profiles specific to a camera or lens
  • Using filters to find images
  • White balance corrections
  • Sharpening – a whole chapter, much of it addressing magic simply invisible to the normal user
  • Custom profile printing

The book, at 600 pages, seems long, until you realize that much of that is the result of copious illustrations which make it much easier to follow along. I still think of it more as a dictionary – something you look up to learn from – than a tutorial, but I find I keep it at hand when processing and frequently dip in to learn a new trick or two.

It’s published by Adobe Press (I only learned this after buying it – it was most certainly not a reason for purchase) which simply begs the question why it isn’t included with the software in the first place.

Quibbles? On p. 582 Evening states “The graphics card does not play such a vital role in Lightroom’s overall performance.” This contrasts with my experience which shows that screen rendering of previously generated previews when flicking between images is considerably faster with the new nVidia 7600 GPU (256 mB RAM) in my iMac 24″, compared with that using the nVidia 7300 GPU (128 mB) it replaced. But I have no objective measurements to bear this out and it may just be the placebo effect at work as I try to justify all the time I have had to waste in repairing my faulty Apple computer.

Overall, it’s a fine manual by a real, working photographer who has had the benefit of a proper education in the use of the English language. Highly recommended.

August 6, 2009

Meet my new view camera

Filed under: Photographs, Technique — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:16 am

A Panasonic G1? Are you crazy?

I have absolutely no reservations about cropping and manipulating an original picture if it results in a better result.

Never does this apply more than in architectural photography.

The other day, making my way through the horrors of the UCSF-Mission campus in south east San Francisco, I was struck yet again by how ugly much modern architecture is. Given the incredible cost of land, bribes to officials and unions, the cost of design and materials, how much more would it take to make something beautiful rather than just another precast, soulless box? And this is on a campus of higher learning, for goodness sake, where you are meant to encourage open communication, sharing and ample leisurely exchange to help brains grow. How do you do that surrounded by architecture seemingly inspired by concrete makers and designed by structural engineers?

Gazing at the horrors around me I was reminded how Prince Charles has been pilloried over the years for his stance on keeping British architecture beautiful. Whereas he was written off as a privileged nutter with nothing better to do but gripe about buildings and talk to his daffodils, we now increasingly see him as a voice of wisdom in an ugly urban world and a pioneer of the green movement. UCSF-Mission needs him.

Back to the topic at hand, architectural photography. When I know I cannot but have leaning verticals, I make a point of leaving plenty of space around the subject as it will be needed when correcting these at the processing stage, if correction is needed.


Before and after. G1, 41mm, 1/250, f/8, ISO 100

Here the G1’s kit lens was almost fully extended to bridge a building lot in front. I knew that what I wanted was a borderless image of the multi-colored glass (a movement originated by Cesar Pelli in New York, if I am not mistaken). The lamp standard lower right was simply icing on the cake. Here’s an example of the use of modern materials in a lovely, refreshing manner, providing visual interest and harmony in an otherwise uninspiring box shape. And some of the windows actually open! Nice work.

Once the RAW original was in Lightroom 2, I exported it to PS CS2, set up a background layer and used the Edit->Transform->Perspective function with the Grid turned on (Command-Apostrophe) to aid in aligning the verticals. This corrects leaning verticals but shortens the image, squashing it vertically, so to return the correct aspect ratio to the windows I switched to Edit->Transform->Distort and simply stretched the picture vertically until the windows looked right. Finally, before saving (PS integrates with LR so the ‘Save’ creates a second stacked image in LR – nice) I go to Layer->Flatten to keep the file size small – no need for the bloat of layers in the LR catalog of images. I use a lossless TIFF format to save the PS-processed image.

So there you have the G1 as a compact view camera! Here’s the final image. It will make for a nice 30″ square print.

June 8, 2009

The Race Track improved

Filed under: Panoramas, Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:35 pm

Dykinga was good. Edwards is better

There’s a magical place in Death Valley, Arizona and it’s called the Race Track.

Jack Dykinga illustrated it in his magnificent book which I reviewed a couple of years ago. Simply stated, stones of substantial mass move, magically, yet no one has ever seen this occur. I choose not to dwell on the reasons. Some things are simply magic. The Race Track is one of those.

Why not leave it there?

Well, because a fine photographer whose work I have been privileged to mention here on occasion, has done it better.

Rod Edwards, a UK professional, is that photographer and he has taken Dykinga’s work to a higher level in his rendition of that phenomenal place in Death Valley.

I have been unsuccessful in monetizing my QTVRs, much as I have tried. I would take my iBook around various wineries in central California and show them to proprietors, only to be met with blank stares. Indeed, when I had my one man show I considered including a couple of big screen TVs to better show them off, sound effects and all, but gave up on the idea based on those self same stares.

However, to Edwards’s credit, he has persevered and has been justly rewarded with a commission from Britain’s National Trust – an institution which you can best learn about from the wonderful writings of James Lees-Milne, a magnificent conservator and writer about the early years of the NT. Simply stated, the National Trust is charged with the preservation of the UK’s architectural and cultural heritage – a rare good use of taxpayer monies.

No need to dwell further on the subject – just click on the picture below.


Rod Edwards’s Race Track

April 6, 2009

Going glossy

Filed under: Printing — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:49 am

Just doing what it takes

I have been unsparing in my criticism of Apple’s cynical move to producing only glossy screens on its displays. The thinking is identical to that of the jeweler who installs strong quartz iodine spotlights in his store. That 1 carat bauble that so impressed in the store, thanks to the Hollywood lighting, leads to a sense of dismay when viewed at home. It’s no different for Apple’s glossy screens.

So what on earth was I doing ordering glossy printing paper for my HP DJ90 the other day?


An engineering company. Note the micrometer and the Swiss manufacturer!

Well, I may dislike glossy when it comes to making and printing my photographs, but I am not beyond learning from the ace salesmen at Apple, Inc.

Simply stated, I have not submitted a photo for publication since 1977 when I left England and started getting paid for my labors in America. So great was the increase in income and reduction in tax (the top income tax rate when I left the UK in 1977 was 83% ….) that the modest amounts that publication brought no longer made sense. I could earn more the easy way and use the money to take the pictures I wanted to take, not the ones some editor preferred to see.

But the bug bit again recently and while I have no intent to make any money from getting my stuff in print (and the odds of doing so are, let’s face it, pretty remote in an internet world), my ego can now afford it. And as first impressions are 100% of the battle with photographs, when that editor opens my envelope of snaps I want them to say ‘wow’. Glossy paper does that.

So the medium, not the content, may be the message, but if it ghastly glossy paper helps get me into print, so be it. Just don’t expect these prints to be gracing the walls at home any time soon.

This is my first experience of using HP Premium Glossy (it’s made by Hahnemuhle) and when prints first come off the printer they look simply awful. The inked areas are matte whereas highlights where no ink was deposited retain the original high gloss of the paper. However, after drying for a couple of hours the inked areas take on a good gloss, although not as high gloss as virgin paper. So it’s a bit of a mess and may explain why some later printers now use a glossing agent to restore high gloss to a print – the DJ90 does not have this technology. You get something approaching glossy but a critical viewer will immediately notice the higher gloss of ink-free regions. In other words, I will be sticking with Premium Photo Satin for the big stuff for wall hanging.

April 4, 2009

Picture Packages

Filed under: Printing — Thomas Pindelski @ 11:12 am

A useful Lightroom technique

When I make large prints on the HP DJ90 dye printer, it’s usually strictly a ‘one at a time’ sort of thing. The prints are 18″ x 24″ (’Super A4′ is the uninformative European description), which is as large as my HP will go and, after an obligatory 24 hour ‘drying’ period to let the ink dyes set, they are dry mounted and framed.

However, with my new found determination to get some work published again, smaller prints were called for – 9″ x 12″- and these just happen to divide an 18″ x 24″ sheet into four equal parts.

Rather than cut up the paper first and then do four print runs, it proved just as easy to make one combined print job and do the cutting last.

First I went into the Library module of LR2 then clicked on Library->New Collection. I dragged the candidates into this new collection and oriented them all vertically (Photo->Rotate Left/Right). These candidates had been processed and cropped just so, so that no further adjustments would be required.

Into the Print module of LR2, where I clicked on Tempate Browser->Lightroom Templates->2×2 Cells. Lightroom comes with this template installed. Moving the mouse cursor to the base of the screen to disclose the filmstrip – which I have set to hiding mode so it is ordinarily invisible – I simply highlighted four contiguous images, which then appear on the print ‘canvas’.

The screen now looked like this:

Then it’s off to the races, printing in the usual way. It takes a lot less time to do than to explain and you have the benefit of applying the same print settings to all pictures on the ‘canvas’. Of course if you process the originals poorly, then you may end up with four clunkers, but I seem to have lucked out.

Note the personalized nameplate at the top left of the Lightroom pane in the last picture above. You can do this by going to Lightroom->Identity Plate Setup.

March 9, 2009

At the grocer’s

Filed under: Photographs, Technique — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:29 pm

Amazing what you can find when you try seeing

I really do not like pineapple. Too tart and acidic for my constitution, yet I was struck by the incredible complexity and beauty of the fruit at the local grocery store.


5D, 100mm Macro, ring flash at f/8, 4 images, Helicon Focus Pro

So I picked one up (carefully!) and took four differentially focused snaps, stitching them in Helicon Focus.

The ring flash head was half covered with black tape to add some modeling.

January 9, 2009

Sound recording

Filed under: Sound — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:17 am

It’s a lot easier now.

When the hero of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 movie, Diva, sets to making his bootleg recording of the operatic soprano who never records, he is hiding the best portable analog tape recorder ever made, under his coat. Simply stated, the Nagra was the Leica of its time.


Actor Frédéric Andréi starts the Nagra

Seconds later, soprano Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez lights into Ebben ne andro lontana from Alfredo Catalani’s opera La Wally – you know the tune even if you have never heard of Catalani.


Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez – mediocre voice, non-mediocre looks

The movie is a splendid example of the very best in French film, which means it’s awfully good. Quirky, avant garde, beautifully filmed and a great plot.

I was reminded of the movie when asked for a recommendation for a really good digital voice recorder the other day. Naturally, I mentioned the Edirol R-09 which I am delighted to see Edirol has improved, enhancing the finish and redesigning the fragile battery door. We have been using ours for more than two years – with external microphones to mostly record my wife and son’s piano playing – and remain delighted with the fine sound quality this device offers. Unlike our protagonist’s beautiful Nagra, it can fit in any pocket.

For anyone interested in just how good French movie making can be, Diva is highly recommended. For anyone liking great photography, it’s a must have movie.

Here’s a track of my wife playing Misty Blues, recorded on the Edirol, using nothing but its internal microphones. Editing was done using Audacity with the LAME MP3 plug-in to permit MP3 output generation. This is a wonderful, and free, sound editor which I recommend for easy editing of sound tracks.


Misty Blues – recorded on the Edirol R-09

December 16, 2008

Lightroom 2 keyboard shortcuts

Filed under: Technique — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:29 am

LR2 displays few of these

When you want an on-screen reminder of the many keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom 2, you press the ‘Command – /’ key pair for a heads-up display on your screen, thus:

Click on the pop-up display to dismiss it.

The snag is that this display only shows a small fraction of what is available. You can download a PDF of all LR2 or LR1 shortcuts here. Surprisingly,I can find no such LR2 guide on Adobe’s web site.

Dense as it is, it repays study.

For example, I have found use of the adjustment brush frustrating in that one has to view the red mask to see the area which has been brushed. You do this by hovering the mouse cursor over the mask pin (the little blob which appears on your screen). If you want the red mask to show continuously when using the adjustment brush you can toggle full time display while the adjustment brush is in effect by hitting ‘O’ on your keyboard. This makes masking very easy and allows you to adjust exposure/brightness etc. after you have delineated the area of choice for adjustment.

In the above example, after switching on the adjustment brush in the Develop module I hit ‘O’ and, thereafter, could see the red mask as I applied it by brushing areas of the image. Once satisfied that the right parts had been brushed, I switched the red mask off (hit ‘O’ again – it’s a toggle) and then applied adjustments as required.

If the default red color interferes with the image and your assessment of the masking you have applied, you can cycle through mask color options using the Shift – O key combination while the adjustment brush is live. In the following example I have changed the mask color to green using the ‘Shift – O’ key combination.

Very handy. There are many more gems in this long list and a few are even worth learning! Now if only Adobe could add all their keyboard shortcuts to their ‘Command – /’ key on screen display.

Follow-up: A reader has kindly pointed out that Adobe’s version of the short cuts is to be found here and the presentation, which is by module rather than in aggregate, is far more useable.

November 24, 2008

HP Designjet paper profiles in Lightroom 2

Filed under: Lightroom, Printing — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:44 am

Trust HP to design this for engineers, not humans

In yesterday’s column I mentioned the existence of aftermarket profiles for some interesting papers made by the likes of Hahnemühle and Arches. These are swellable papers designed to absorb the ink dyes used in the HP DJ 30/90/130 printers. That’s all well and good, but how on earth do you get these to show up as choices in Lightroom when you are in the Print module? Especially as the instructions from HP for the right place to install these simply do not work.

Well, HP is first and foremost an engineering company which means that things obvious to engineering graduates are gobbledeegook to regular humans. Mercifully, your instructor, Dr. Pindelski, happens to have an engineering degree, so if you use an HP Designjet 30, 90 or 130 printer, follow the instructions below and all will be well …. so long as you have the good sense to get a life and use a Mac. PC users can probably figure things out from what follows, but please do not ask as I neither use nor propose to ever use a PC again.

Here’s the Print module in LR2:

Click on ‘Managed by Printer’ then click ‘Other’ and you get a listing of the standard HP paper profiles:

Now go to Finder and click on the Library (this is the Mac’s library on the root of your internal hard drive, not the one under your name in Users) and navigate to the directory show – navigation is from bottom to top:

Your Finder screen now looks like this:

Now Control-Click on the file named ‘hp_designjet_pm.plugin’ then click on ‘Show Package Contents’:

Now drag and drop the downloaded package of profiles (see yesterday’s entry for the download link) onto the directory named ‘ICCProfiles’:

The ‘designjet’ directory is the one with the new profiles, which you just dragged and dropped.

Click on the ‘designjet’ directory in ‘ICCProfiles’ and you will see all the additional profiles, thus:

The remaining task is to edit the ICC profiles of your choice so that they will show up in the LR2 drop-down box. The snag is that you have to use one of the tailored HP name strings to force the choice to show. This means two things:

1 – You must use a file name identical to one of the existing ones used by HP for their papers
2 – You will have to embed your profile description of choice in the replacement new paper profile for it to display meaningfully in the LR2 drop-down box.

First, then, we have to determine which of HP’s standard paper choices we can dispense with. That’s easy, because you didn’t buy this fabulous printer to use Brochure or Proofing paper or for that matter generic Coated paper, so that means at least nine of HP’s file names can be reused. Further, if you stick with the ‘Max Detail’ drivers, you get even more redundant file names to use – and why would you want anything but maximum detail in your display prints?

First, determine the new papers for which you would like to install profiles – here’s the list from the file downloaded from HP:

I’m intrigued by the Arches, Hahnemuhle and Ilford papers. so in the following screen snap I have erased those imported profiles which are not wanted and also erased all the clutter from the inclusion of the HP Z2100/Z3100 profiles which are for HP’s latest – and very expensive – wide carriage pigment printer, thus:

As I am adding nine new profiles I will need to reuse nine of HP’s file names to make these show up – here’s the ‘conversion’ table:

To embed these paper names in the new profile ICC files we have to edit the profiles, rename them using HP’s cryptic file naming convention, rename the original files rather than erase them, in case they are needed in future, then move the new files down one level in the directory so that LR2 can read them.

Double-click on the first new file, the one for Arches Infinity Smooth 230 paper. You will see this as Colorsync opens:

Click on ‘Localized description strings’ and enter the name you want for the paper of choice – the default looks like this:

Those names are awful (this is the text which will show up in LR2) so I make them more user friendly, like so:

Now save the file in Colorsync (Command-S) and move on to the next one, repeating as necessary with descriptive names for each paper.

Next we have to rename the original files which are no longer needed; I do this by simply appending the text “.old” to the name of the original file; use the conversion table you created above to determine which files need to have ‘.old’ appended to their names:

Next, rename the new paper profile files using the old HP file names – the same ones where you just added the “.old” extension, like so, repeating for each new profile and making sure to use unique HP file names from the original files, with no duplications:

Here all all the name changes on the new files:

Finally, drag these renamed .icc files down one level to where the “.old” files reside, thus:

Load LR2 and click on Profile->Other in the Print module and this is what you will see:

To further clarify matters, I then add the text “HP” to the HP paper profiles, using Colorsync as before, with the following result – compare with the previous screen snap:

Now check all the boxes thus to make these properly named profiles show up in future when you click in LR2 and hit ‘OK’:

Next time you click profiles in the LR2 Print module you will see this:

Select the profile of your choice, load the appropriate paper in the printer and off you go! But do first make sure your display is profiled properly and, of course, I highly recommend Dr. P’s free screen profiling approach which will not only save you money on the colorimeter you do not need, but will get you more accurate colors to boot.

I took the additional precaution of making the new, renamed .icc files ‘read only’ to make sure that any new profile or application updates do not overwrite the files created above. You can do this by control-clicking the .icc file, clicking on ‘Get Info’ and making it ‘read only’ in the dialog box that pops up.

Why use printer-managed profiles rather than application managed colors? For the simple – and vital – reason that when you hit Print->Preview in LR2, Apple’s Preview application will display a Preview; at the lower left you will see a box for previewing the print on the screen using the color profile you have chosen – so much for all the ‘experts’ who maintain that you cannot soft proof with applied paper profiles in Lightroom:

You are now viewing a Print Preview of your picture with the paper profile of choice applied to the image. And you can use a selection of non-HP branded printing papers. What’s not to like?

And I can think of no better time to buy one of the truly great wide carriage printer bargains – HP still lists the Designjet 90 (18″) for $995 and the Designjet 130 for $1,295 (24″). I would not hesitate to buy another today and do, on rare occasions, rue the fact that I did not buy the 24″ model as the form factor is much the same with six inches added to the width. Either takes up little room for such a large format printer. OK, so they go ‘clankity-clank’ when they print, but you can afford ear plugs from the $2,000 saved on not buying their latest Z series machines. And ink use is so frugal, even a Scot would approve.

November 23, 2008

Latest ICC color profiles for HP Designjet dye printers

Filed under: Printing — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:27 am

HP updated these recently

While I have been a happy user of HP’s branded papers exclusively for my Designjet 90 18″ wide dye printer, HP does not entirely neglect the aftermarket for paper makers.

Indeed, HP has recently updated a bunch of color profiles for some well known papers which feature the swellable/absorbent surface of HP’s paper, allowing the printer’s dye inks to be properly absorbed. These are for use with the Designjet 30/90/130 series of printers.

Here are the papers supported, with details of how to feed the paper into your printer – tray, rear slot or roll (by the way, I always use the tray to (multi-)sheet feed my 13″ x 19″ and 18″ x 24″ HP Premium Plus Photo Satin paper and have had no issues):

As you can see, HP recommends that many of the heaviest papers are loaded one sheet at a time. For reference, HP’s Premium Plus Photo Satin weighs in at 286 grams/sq. meter, whereas the heaviest William Turner is 310. I suspect, but cannot confirm, that HP’s papers are made by Hahnemühle which has been around since 1584, so they just missed making the stock for Gutenberg’s bible, printed in the 1450s. Hahnemühle references the HP relationship here.

Here’s their data sheet on the heavier William Turner paper:

Many stockists carry it, not least of all Atlex which I have found to be reliable. The William Turner comes in sizes up to 17″ x 22″ or in larger rolls – these you would have to cut down first. Sounds like an interesting option for HP users and, as I mentioned recently, I would be a buyer of the HP DJ 90 or 130 (24″ wide) today – it’s not like parts and supplies are about to disappear for a printer which shares consumables with the DJ 30 (13″ wide) which sold in vast numbers to photographers everywhere. And, at its price, the wide carriage HP has no competition.

Finally, why dye based inks in preference to pigments which now dominate the market? Can you say lousy blacks? Bronzing? We dye printer users know nothing of those issues.

In tomorrow’s column I will provide a step-by-step guide to making new profiles of your choice, for non-HP branded papers, display correctly within Lightroom 2 because, goodness knows, HP’s installation instructions are about as wrong as you can get. Suffice it to say that if you follow mine, your profiles will display correctly in LR2 thus:

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress