Category Archives: Photography

Image processing

Software

That’s digital workflow to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excuse me while I examine my Portlait setting through the Glid

Canon 5D

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Dust

Canon 5D

Or I’ll be blowed!

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

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

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

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

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

Monochrome flashback

Photography, Technique

Still taking the occasional black and white picture

While I may have largely given up on black and white pictures, sometimes things just look better without color.

This was taken almost directly into the sun and the color original is already pretty desaturated. One click using the TLR Black and White Conversion action for Photoshop and a satisfying monochrome rendition results. I find the TLR plug-in gives a better monochrome tonal range than Photoshop’s native ‘Desaturate’ command. There are lots of other interesting actions on that site, too.

Note the slight vignetting in the sky from the Canon 24-105mm L lens at 24mm. I left it in as it heightens the mood.

Hearst’s Castle

Canon 5D

The only good thing to come out of yellow journalism

If the state of American journalism was headed solidly downwards in the 1930s, publisher William Randolph Hearst made sure that the pace to the bottom of the cess pit was accelerated. His populist, sensationalist brand of reporting bequeathed to the modern consumer prime time television news that focuses exclusively on the latest murder/rape/divorce, or the tribulations of some famous sports figure who has taken one steroid too many. Bread and circuses.

However, you can glean more useful information from one page of any American newspaper than from one hour of the so called prime time ‘news’ on television. Unless, that is, you read the New York Times or Washington Post, whose reporting sources tend to be Hollywood stars, supremely qualified to report on geopolitics and the fiscal state of the nation.

Thank you, Mr. Hearst.

However, Hearst’s millions did leave us with one fine attraction, namely Hearst Castle on Highway One in central California, some 20 miles from my home. Taken as a whole it’s something of an abomination, the ultimate in ‘check book collecting’, but digested in smaller pieces each of the many rooms packed with antiquities is a fine thing to behold. The Castle was Hearst’s lifetime hobby, and his architect Julia Morgan was adding to it throughout his life. Hearst would buy a medieval ceiling on one of his European jaunts (he probably wanted to read the British press to see what was really going on), bring it home and tell Morgan to build a room around it. Now that’s thinking big!

Driving by the other day on the way to see the elephant seal pups a few miles north on the beach, I took a picture from Highway One with the castle rising magnificently in the distance on top of the hill some mile and a half away. I had despaired of ever getting this right on film, as the long lens required only emphasized the atmospheric haze, but as I had my 400mm Leitz Telyt with me I gave it a shot anyway. I finally get to try RAW, I thought.

So I set the EOS 5D on RAW, the film speed at ISO 400 and the f/8 setting on the lens yielded a 1/500th second shutter speed. The result, after dropping the snap into Adobe’s Photoshop CS2, which automatically opens Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), was disappointing. The haze had washed out the picture, and the Telyt lens, I know, does not lack for contrast.

However, a few tweaks of the sliders in ACR made things look better so I saved the file in PSD format and added the usual unsharp masking and a small tweak to the levels control and look what emerged:

Now I must confess that, so far, I have not found the Canon EOS 5D’s Fine JPG images lacking in any way. The quality is outstanding, large prints a breeze and whatever JPG processing the camera does appears unobtrusive. Digital artifacts are invisible. Best of all, the file size is relatively small – some 4 mB or so. By contrast the 5D’s RAW file is 14 mB and the processed PSD version balloons to a ridiculous 73 mB. Now that is large. So RAW appears to have a place for challenging subjects that need a lot of manipulation, but the extra processing time is not justified, for this user, on the average photograph. JPG Fine quality equals or exceeds anything from medium format and processing is fast and easy.

Still, it’s nice to know RAW is available in the overall tool kit. Now I want to retake this picture early in the morning with the castle rising from the mist as California’s sun gradually makes it visible.