Category Archives: Lightroom

Adobe’s masterpiece for processing and cataloging

DxO ViewPoint

A handy plug-in.

DxO is a Photoshop or Lightroom plugin whose purpose is twofold. Correcting keystoning from leaning verticals or slanting horizontals and removing volume anamorphosis, the elongation of objects near frame’s edge when very wide angle lenses are used. I have traditionally used PS CS5 to correct keystoning and believe that PS CS6 adds volume anamorphosis correction, but as DxO is running a $39 special offer – half off – through December 31, 2012, I purchased the Mac version on the recommendation of a friend.

DxO’s poky servers went down half way through my first download attempt but the second was successful. It’s a whopper at some 187MB, larger than Lightroom itself. You have the option of installing it as a PS and/or LR plugin in addition to the mandatory stand-alone version which is installed in the Applications folder.

The LR version integrates seamlessly, requiring the user to hit Photo->Edit in->DxO Viewpoint when in the Library or Develop module whereupon LR generates a lossless TIFF file which pops up in DxO ViewPoint. You have a choice of 32-bit or 64-bit versions. I went into Finder and erased the 32-bit one as it’s a distraction. If you can use 64-bit, why not?

The controls are intuitive. In the image below from the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, there is keystoning in two planes – vertical, obviously, and horizontal as I was not plane to the subject.

There are three keystoning icons in addition to traditional sliders. Icons are the way to go. First you dial in your preferred aspect ratio – 3:2 like the original in this case – then click on the double keystoning icon and align the guidelines with the two verticals and two horizootals that have to be straightened:


Guidelines aligned along two verticals and two horizontals.

Click Accept then File-Save and the corrected version is saved, stacked, along your original in LR:


Corrected version.

Here’s the result after using the Transform->Distort command in PS CS5 for comparison:


Corrected in Photoshop CS5.

Note the excessive elongation of the plinth compared with the DxO ViewPoint corrected version. I have left in a hint of keystoning in both versions to preserve the suggestion of great mass and height.

Either version is better than the rudimentary correction in Lightroom, which tends to remove far too much of the original.

I don’t know that I would pay $79 for this plugin but $39 seems fair. As I do a fair amount of architectural photogrtaphy, it fills a niche in the toolbox. Whenever taking pictures where keystoning is unavoidable, I make sure to include lots of space around the main subject, knowing that much of it will be lost in processing.

Original on the D700, 35-70mm f/2.8 AFD Nikkor.

Nikon voice memos

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

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

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

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.