If you don’t have one you are getting left behind.
Just over 6 months ago I was amongst the first in line with our son to buy an iPad, a fairly unusual ‘early adopter’ stance for one who prefers to let others do the testing for him and then buys Mark II of a gadget. You know, the one that works properly.
Well, since that great day three things have happened. Our son is one inch taller, I have bought five more iPads as gifts for friends and a piece of junk named ‘Kindle’ has come and gone. No, none of the gift recipients have returned their iPads.
And, not coincidentally, AAPL stock has risen over 20%.
Mobile devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod) now account for nearly 60% of Apple’s revenues and, depending whom you believe, somewhere between 8 and 14 million iPads will be sold in the last nine months of 2010.
But the grumblers continue to wait for something better, denying the time value of information. It doesn’t run Flash, it doesn’t have an SDHC card slot, it’s clunky for file sharing with your desktop, it doesn’t multitask, it doesn’t print, there’s no matte screen version and on and on. Meanwhile I have found the iPad has become my dominant reading tool, be it blogs, news, books, art, photography, PDF files or music. And our son loves it for gaming!
While what I really want is a 21″ iPad for art and picture books, it seems that the next variation will be a 7″ model with greater portability which I expect to start at $299 compared to $499 for the original.
The next iPad.
That one will be fine for books and snaps but of less interest to photographers who generally prefer a larger screen.
The early adoption decision was easy. After three years with the iPhone there was no learning curve, and the touch screen technology is identical. The same features that make the iPhone so successful – instant on, bog reliable OS, high manufacturing quality, reasonable price – were all expected in the iPad and I was not disappointed. Plus, unlike a MacBook or any other laptop or netbook, it runs very cool, a pleasant and unexpected bonus. Finally, the eleven hour battery life is a game changer.
I have placed more stock trades and read more research reports using the iPad than I can recall. Now instead of catching the market open bleary eyed in the office, I simply prop a pillow under my head and have at it in bed, if you get my drift. Waking at 3 am to check the far east markets is now a process with a very low resistance factor, as I do not have to go anywhere to do it.
So, time is money and information is power. If you are still waiting for something better, you have just lost 6 months – of time, money and power – for what is a trivial outlay. What’s your problem? Heck, your local Target now has them and even the maker of that execrable piece of junk, the Kindle, will sell you one sales tax free.
And next year when I get the second version I’ll hack the original to run Flash and spray the screen with matte enamel, making for a complete experience.
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:
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?
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.
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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:
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The default slider setting in Lightroom 3 for At The Beach.
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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.
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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:
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PDF files sizes at five different Quality settings in LR3.
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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.
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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:
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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
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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
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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:
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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.
It’s never a bad idea to look at more photographs. I get ideas and enjoyment and education in equal measure and the iPad is just one more handy viewing tool, and a very capable one.
Publishers of magazines are proving their usual slow selves in getting with it and some still don’t understand that only a fool will pay $5 an eIssue when an annual paper subscription can be had for 20% of the cost but patience is called for. After all, the magazine publishing business has never been inundated with grey matter, and things take time. I may love trees, but I’m not that dumb.
The Zinio app for the iPad is a work in progress but I have found the maker responsive to problem reports and the app keeps moving to strength. Their magazine inventory grows daily and includes lots of European and Asian content. It’s never bad to broaden one’s views.
Here are my current subscriptions, all geared to good photography with the exception of Macworld, which is focused on great software and lousy hardware which they love without exception (can you say ‘conflict of interest’?):
I count no fewer than four book readers on my iPad:
Apple’s iBooks – best UI, lousy title selection
Amazon’s Kindle – improving UI, huge title selection
Border’s – a work in progress, but promising a large selection
Stanza – the nerd’s choice, with easy access to 30,000 books on Project Gutenberg among many others
I was noodling through Stanza on my iPad (also runs on a Mac) and came across this intriguing 1849 book on the Daguerrotype process:
And some details:
Seems to me that advice is as pertinent today as it was in 1849. Maybe more so. And you are unlikely to find such elegant writing in any modern tome on electronic this and digital that, whose authors’ written skills generally stop at “click the mouse”.
So if you want to discover your inner Daguerrean, download the free app and book and give it a shot!
By the way, I’m using the gorgeous Georgia font in the above illustrations – Stanza has a large selection of fonts and colors, more than any other reader.
