Category Archives: Lightroom

Adobe’s masterpiece for processing and cataloging

Nikon voice memos

Lightroom, Nikon bodies

Smooth Lightroom integration.

One really handy feature in the Nikon D2/D3/D4 bodies is the ability to record a voice memo of up to sixty seconds in length for each image. After enabling the function in Settings, you hold the voice memo button down while speaking into the microphone on the rear of the body. If you are taking posed snaps of strangers and want to send them a copy as a courtesy, this is a great way of recording their email address for later retrieval.

At first I thought this to be a worthless gimmick but in practice am finding it to be a really useful feature on my D2x.


Recording button red circle; speaker and microphone – yellow and green arrows.

You can playback the voice memo using the camera’s small speaker to check it’s intelligible at the time of recording.It sounds far better over your computer’s speakers!

When it comes to processing, Lightroom fully accommodates this function. The WAV file recording has the same frame number as the image but with a ‘.wav’ file extension and is imported along with the image into LR 2, 3 and 4.

You can see the sound file in the Library module of Lightroom and you can play it back by clicking the arrowed icon:


LR’s Develop module and the playback icon.

A like feature is also available on some Canon DSLR bodies.

File sizes? A 10 second recording averages 75MB – not enough to worry about when it comes to consuming precious space on your camera’s CF or SD card. The D2 and D4 use one CF card, the D3 one or two CF cards.

Software of the Year

Lightroom

No contest.

By a country mile, Adobe’s Lightroom is my choice as Software of the Year.

While Lightroom has been around for quite a while, it has continually moved to strength and has never become a resource hog. It runs very fast on a capable machine, be it Mac or PC, yet will perform at quite usable speed on something more modest like my 2012 MacBook Air. Photoshop deserves like praise for speed; I’m still on CS5.

For cross-platform users, the LR catalog will load just fine in Windows and in OS X, and Adobe’s realistic licensing permits use on two machines. While it was hard to imagine any great improvements to LR3, LR4 surprised mightily with it’s greatly enhanced Highlights, Shadows, Clarity and Vibrance technologies, all materially improved from version 3. Used creatively, the first two begin to approximate the power of HDR with none of the complexity or garish results. Add a touch of noise suppression from the built-in controls and you have pretty much all you could wish for in day-to-day processing. With an outstanding database with easy keywording and filtered image retrieval, you are looking at a very powerful tool indeed. Aftermarket apps to load images to Shutterfly or to offer specialized processing needs are easily added. I find I rarely leave the confines of Lightroom for my processing needs, with round trips to Photoshop generally being restricted to perspective correction (PS’s tools are more powerful than LR’s) and, of course, to selectively blur backgrounds with the excellent Magic Lasso tool and Filter->Blur->Lens Blur. It would be great if Adobe was to add these functions in LR, but I suspect cannibalization of their PS cash cow is a key concern.


This merely scratches the surface of the metadata capabilities of Lightroom.

The one other external processing tool I use occasionally is Snapseed, which now accepts TIFF files generated from RAW originals, meaning no loss of quality. I use LR4 with two displays and it is beautifully engineered for this purpose.

Having chipped my many old MF Nikkors, I especially like how LR reads the EXIF data and automatically invokes the appropriate lens correction profile from the many I have created. It just takes one more bit of drudgery out of the processing step.

Best of all, LR is remarkably inexpensive for what you get, which includes Book, Map, Slideshow (really outstanding) and Print modules, all well integrated, for $115 at Amazon. The best book I have found is by Martin Evening who not only writes and illustrates his instructions well, but also takes great photographs. A $33 bargain which really should come with the software.

Update 12/17/2012:

This just hit my inbox. At $129 there are few better bargains in photographic software:

Lightroom 4 rocks

Lightroom

A non-trivial improvement.

When Lightroom 4 first came out I pooh-poohed the improvements. The book module, restricted to Blurb as a printing house, was no big deal and the code bloat was awful, with the app some nine times the size of Lightroom 3.

The GPS mapping feature is OK but needs more work (trip route indication based on file times would be a start) and a global change to the new 2012 process for one’s picture catalog would be insanity. Some of the changes are significant and you risk messing up hundreds of hours of processing work. However, credit where’s it’s due. For the right image LR4’s ability to recover highlight detail where there was none is extraordinary, matched by its enhanced capabilities in the shadows.

Limekiln, 5D, 24-105. LR3 left, LR4 right.

For many users the enhanced capabilities of LR4 obsolete HDR with its clunky processing cycle and default ‘awful orange’ look. HDR is increasingly the province of the Kinkade Set which never saw a piece of kitsch it did not like. For those new to Kinkade he is the drunken letch – now mercifully deceased – who gave the world crap for the wall in abundance. You can search his name because I’m damned if I’m printing his garbage here. The man makes HDR look good.

But Adobe didn’t leave 4.0 alone. The Bokeh Cabal was going on about how some lenses were rendering out of focus detail with purple color fringing, even though LR fixed the in focus bits well. Adobe calls this ‘lateral chromatic aberration’. So they added an enhancement in LR 4.1 to fix this. I paged back through my catalog to some images snapped on the Panny LX-1 which, though it has a decent Leica lens, opts for purple fringing at every opportunity. Sure enough, Adobe was telling the truth. Their enhanced chromatic aberration correction really works.

For photography LR4 is the single biggest improvement I have seen in ages, increasingly obsoleting add-ons and Photoshop itself, the latter restricted to the occasional round trip to fix leaning verticals or to add blur or to erase Cousin Vanya, and so on. And while Adobe’s corner office seems to have frequent difficulty telling its ass from its elbow, there is no denying that their crackerjack software engineers are the bees’ knees. Too bad Apple has abandoned its original constituency of creative users, as ADBE would be chump change for AAPL and a great fit.

As for processor efficiency, LR4 barely moves the needle on CPU temperature when processing; Aperture, in its defense, does permit you to brew your tea on the keyboard under like conditions, at half the price of LR. Neat feature, that.

The Nikon D700 and geotagging – Part II

Lightroom, Nikon bodies

Simplicity itself.

Update 2/22/23: A superior geotagging technique using Lightroom, a plug-in from Jeffrey Friedl and your cell phone is addressed here.

I detailed the components for adding geotagging to a late Nikon or Fuji DSLR in Part I. The idea was to avoid wires, and not to use any GPS power hungry device which would derive power from the camera’s battery. And the whole megillah had to be small, unobtrusive and attention free. The solution was a remote GPS data logger which has its own battery and communicates with a small wireless bluetooth receiver attached to the camera’s ten pin socket.

I had done a lot of research in determining the right hardware and had dismissed both the poorly designed and costly Nikon GPS receiver and Rube Goldberg solutions using remote GPS loggers in combination with software. These demand additional labor to match the GPS data with the picture files from the camera, using the camera’s inaccurate time clock as the lookup field. From my perspective, it either works with minimal post-processing labor or I’m not interested, as I much prefer to spend time taking pictures than playing at code monkey. Add the fact that many Nikon DSLR bodies have GPS connectivity built-in makes my solution a no brainer.

Accordingly, the solution proposed here is elegant, requires a minimum of user intervention and is inexpensive.

The total investment of $106 proves to have been money well spent; you can find the hardware sources in Part I. With the camera receiver finally arriving after a 17 day wait for the mail from Hong Kong, I plugged it into the ten pin socket on the Nikon D700, enabled GPS in the camera’s Setup menu, switched on the data logger and a few seconds later the ‘GPS’ icon illuminated on the LCD screen and the camera was ready to receive and save GPS data. 30 seconds is the manufacturer’s claim for initial acquisition of GPS coordinates; I have generally found that to be correct, although sometimes it takes a mere 10 seconds from powering up the logger for the camera to recognize GPS coordinates. Go figure. I told the camera to use the GPS time clock, not the poor one in the camera itself, renowned for drift. The D700 can adjust for Daylight Savings time, true, but if your camera cannot, you have been warned. The chances are high that you will forget and any solution which depends on memory in our data-fevered world is not robust.

If you cannot wait the 2-3 weeks the camera receiver takes to ship from the Far East, you can get hosed down at B&H for some $190 more for the aptly named Foolography Unleashed unit and have it in a few days. Or you can pay Amazon $120, which is $60 more than I paid. A fool and his money are easily parted ….

The AK-4N bluetooth receiver, circled in red, plugged into the D700.
The green arrow denotes the 2.5mm pass through port for a wireless remote.
The wireless i-Blue MobileMate 886 Mini GPS data logger is on the right.

Mercifully, unlike Nikon’s wired unit, the receiver on the camera is completely devoid of any controls or flashing lights.

How well does it work?

To quote from ‘My Cousin Vinny‘, where the tool in question was an automotive torque wrench:

Lisa: “Dead-on balls accurate.”
Vinny: “Dead-on balls accurate?”
Lisa: “It’s an industry term.”

The addition of enhanced mapping in Lightroom 4 makes the retrieval and presentation of GPS locations trivial. Here’s my first effort

GPS at home – loft, bedroom, office.

As you can see, even movements of the GPS unit of a few feet are distinguishable on the LR4 display. I have blurred out part of the GPS coordinates as doubtless there’s at least one psycho with an Uzi reading this intent on wreaking revenge for all those Anselites in denial of my bad experiences with the man, and I would rather not make his job any easier. As for the white car in the driveway, it’s a loaner. My Ferrari Enzo was in the shop when this was taken. Nothing serious – regular oil change, $5,000.

Power draw? The logger runs 10 hours on a charge and comes with both USB and car adapter charging cables. The camera receiver’s data sheet states that its power consumption is 10mA – a local Bluetooth connection only. The D700’s standard battery stores 1500mAH, so if you kept the receiver on for 10 hours straight you would use almost 8% of the battery’s capacity. In practice, the receiver only comes on when the camera’s LCD is lit by a first pressure on the shutter button, meaning that GPS is available to the camera within 1 to 1.5 seconds of touching the release button. The D700 also has an option to keep the receiver powered all the time, but I have not found it necessary to use this. When the camera is turned off, the receiver does not draw any current from the camera’s battery, contrary to what the data sheet states. The logger, which takes 30 seconds to first acquire a signal, is on all the time, thus avoiding any delay in use. It refreshes data from the GPS sateliite(s) every few seconds.

So the camera receiver is a set-and-forget device. Small and unobtrusive, you will forget it is there and, unlike with the Nikon unit which mounts on the accessory shoe, you do not lose the use of the built-in flash and need no connecting cables. With a 30 foot range, the data logger can be kept in a pocket or in the camera bag.

The small 2.5mm pass through coaxial socket on the side of the receiver accepts a short coaxial cable to connect with the wireless remote whose stock cable can no longer access the ten pin socket. The silly Nikon socket plugs can be removed as they only get in the way and are frightfully badly designed. I pulled mine off – a process which took far longer, what with all the futzing with the strap and D-rings, than getting GPS to work. The receiver does not interfere with the camera’s handling in any way and is a very tight fit, so the absence of a locking ring is not an issue. It’s not about to be knocked off. It does block the coaxial flash socket, so use a hot shoe adapter if you use wired flash or, better still, a radio trigger for studio strobes.

Short 2.5mm male-to-male coaxial cables are hard to find for those needing the wireless remote to work. I bought mine from Summit Source for some $4.95 shipped, and it’s 18″ long. Neither Radio Schlock or Amazon stock what is needed.

The receiver’s data sheet states that it works with the following camera bodies: Nikon D200, D300, D300s, D700, D2X, D2Xs, D3, D3X and Fuji S5Pro. The new D4 and forthcoming D800 and D800E appear to use the same ten pin socket and none has built-in GPS, so I would guess this device would work equally well on those bodies, but I have not tried that.

Here is the data sheet for the receiver:

AK-4N data sheet.

There is still one dependency on memory – you have to remember to turn the data logger on at the start of the shooting session! The camera’s GPS flag on the LCD is small, so I have added a white paint reminder to the accessory shoe protector:

Aide memoire and camera’s GPS flag.

I hope I remember what that means ….

I’ll publish real world results tomorrow.

GPS receiver – October 2012: A reader has advised that the receiver I refer to above has been discontinued and recommends this one.

Update October 2012: Having just added a Nikon D2X to my hardware collection I purchased another Aoka camera receiver to permanently install on that body – the 10 pin fitting is identical to that used on the D700 and the existing Aoka works perfectly with the D2X.

Try as I might, I can only get one camera to record GPS data using the one GPS data logger. If I turn on both the D2X and the D700 simultaneously, the D2X grabs the signal first, displays the ‘GPS’ flag and prevents the D700 from getting it. If I turn the D700 on first, then the D2X, the D2X cannot see the data logger. By the way, the much older D2X ‘sees’ the data logger far faster once turned on than the D700 – a second or two – I can only think the larger D2X body has room for a superior antenna. So much for progress.

So it seems the logger ‘locks on’ to one camera receiver and is incapable of driving two at the same time.

Oh well.

I suppose if you are using both cameras together, you can always look up the GPS data on a picture taken from the other at about the same time. Not ideal. Or get a second GPS data logger.

ACR lens profiles

Lightroom, Nikon lenses

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.