Category Archives: Lightroom

Adobe’s masterpiece for processing and cataloging

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.

ACR lens profiles

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.

The Lightroom 4 book by Martin Evening

Just buy it.

While there is a case to be made for non-photographers testing new hardware – after all you don’t have to be Annie Liebovitz to stick a camera on a tripod and shoot a test chart – no such argument can be sustained when it comes to writing software instruction books.

The hardware case is exemplified by sites like DPReview. Many do a good job of explaining and comparing features and performance, while attended by the worst photography on the planet. None of this is helped by a commentariat frequently focused on flame wars over brand X versus brand Y. But, as long as you stay away from the noise passing as commentary, sites like DPR add value to the hardware decision.

On the software front you have many poseurs passing as experts with one common attribute. That is, they seem to be software gurus who grew up with Photoshop and think that their familiarity with the arcana of vector based rendering makes them Cartier-Bresson’s peer.

That is why it is so easy to recommend Martin Evening’s latest Lightroom book, which addresses Lightroom 4. He is a working professional photographer, a good one at that, writes clearly and illustrates his recommendations thoroughly. I have previously bought his LR v2 and v3 and PS CS5 books, and recommend the latest unreservedly. The section on the use of the new enhanced localized adjustment tools alone is worth the price. Mine ran me $30 at Amazon US.

Having bought v2 in paperback and v3 in the Kindle version for the iPad, I find I much prefer the paperback for ease of cross reference and quick access to features I need to understand. At least I don’t have to recycle v3 – the Delete button being all that is needed.

The Nikon D700 and geotagging – Part I

Where was I?

The addition of enhanced geotagging in Lightroom 4 prompted me into looking at options for recording GPS coordinates using the Nikon D700. The camera provides EXIF data fields to store latitude, longitude, altitude (!) and time. Many smart phones, like the iPhone, already record such data and the capability is increasingly making its way into point-and-shoot cameras as they desperately try to postpone the day when they will be history, trampled into the technological dust by cell phones. However, full frame Nikons, which may be around a while yet, lack this technology, so a separate device has to be used.

I looked at Nikon’s GPS receiver and immediately crossed it off the list. It’s wrong in every way. It fits in the accessory shoe where it’s waiting to be wrenched off, and the camera will no longer fit in my camera bag with the unit mounted. It uses an ungainly cable to plug in to the ten pin socket on the front and it sucks on the camera’s battery for power. Switch the camera off and the unit is switched off, meaning 30+ seconds to reacquire a GPS lock when next switched on. (First data acquisition is typically 30-40 seconds with GPS devices, with changes recorded at 1 second intervals thereafter, as long as the unit remains powered up). Try and use the built-in pop up flash with the unit in the camera’s accessory shoe and you cannot. Finally, it’s silly priced at $195. Canon users can rejoice in the knowledge that if the Nikon’s unit is silly priced, the Canon’s means you are Rockefeller, as its GP-E2 costs $270. In that case, of course, you can afford it. It works on the 5D/II, 5D/III and some of the ‘pro’ bodies whose nomenclature I forget. Doubtless aftermarket solutions exist at sane prices.

The right way to do this is to use a very small Bluetooth receiver which plugs directly into the D700’s (or D800/D3/D4) body, deriving GPS data from a separate GPS data logger. The data logger has its own battery to do the heavy lifting of acquiring coordinates from satellites, transmitting these to the receiver on the camera, the latter using modest amounts of power from the camera’s battery for the Bluetooth circuitry only. The logger can be left on all day, as it has a ten hour life, so the reacquisition problem goes away even if the D700 is turned off, as the GPS logger remains on at all times.

The only snags I can see is that you have to remember to recharge the battery in the GPS logger and that there is no ten-pin pass through port, so if you want to use any other device which needs the port, like a cable release, you are out of luck. However, the receiver does have a mini-coaxial socket for remotes so if I can find the right cable I should be able to use my wireless remote uninterrupted. Well, there is one other snag, but it’s unlikely to bother me. the software which comes with the logger will run on Windows only, displaying your journey details. It’s not a snag as it will be a cold day in hell before I ever use Windows again and and I really do not need to retrace my travels. All that matters to me is knowing where the pictures were taken.

The GPS Bluetooth receiver.

The receiver ran $60 on eBay and as the grammar-free English confirms, it’s shipped from China. The vendor is named “photohobby” and lists the device as “Bluetooth GPS adapter AK-4NII for Nikon D4 D200 D300 D300s D700 D2Xs D3 D3s D3x”.

The GPS device itself looks like this – “photohobby” lists a large range of devices which will work:

i-Blue MobileMate 886 Mini Bluetooth GPS Receiver.

I chose this one because it was the smallest and lightest out there, yet still promises a 10 hour battery life. You keep it in your pocket or in the camera bag, switched on while snapping. It cost $47 shipped from CA to CA, Amazon and many others carry it, and comes with USB and car charger cables. Weight is negligible.

Thus my total geotagging investment is $106, or almost half the price of the Nikon OEM solution with its poorly thought out design.

Now, I would love to tell you I have upgraded to Lightroom 4 and gush on about how wonderful it is but there are two reasons I cannot do so. First, I’m not some whore who adulates Adobe in print because I make a living from teaching the illiterate how to use their products. Second, Adobe’s servers are down and I cannot download the upgrade. What else is new?

However, the geotagging functions in LR4 seem easy to use and I’m of the mind that soon geotagging data will be expected, rather than just a novelty. Here’s a snap of how photo locations appear in LR4:

Geotagging in Lightroom 4.

More in Part II when the mail from the People’s Republic arrives. Hopefully, Adobe’s servers will have been fixed by then.

Alternative approaches:

As I seem to be getting a lot of emails on alternative GPS recording methods, all of which I researched before writing the above. Here’s is why I avoided them:

  • Use software to extract GPS data from your smartphone or GPS device, then sync it with your photographs, hoping that you remembered to sync the camera’s clock with the one in the GPS source as that’s the lookup field used for matching. Uh huh.
  • Hack your iPhone to unlock it using something like Cydia, which permits you to access your iPhone’s GPS data stream and Bluetooth output with like functionality to the i-Blue gadget I bought, above. And you are OK with draining your iPhone’s battery really fast? And you are OK with re-hacking it every time Apple does a software update and disables past hacks? And you don’t care if you can’t make calls when you brick your iPhone and have to restore it?

I guess it all comes down to what your time is worth and whether you prefer futzing about to making pictures.

Lightroom 4 Beta

Meh!

You can download the Beta version of Lightroom 4 here. Windows XP users are SOL.

After a quick look and comparison of pictures on identical monitors side-by-side against LR3, here are my observations:

  • Not a major upgrade unless you do movies.
  • RAW Import and preview generation speed no different from LR3.
  • Despite renamed sliders for Highlights and Shadows I found I could exactly replicate the effect of these in LR3.
  • Enhanced local adjustments nice to have; overall adjustments, while renamed, add little to LR3 viewed on 2 monitors side-by-side.
  • The localized Sharpness adjustment range is still frustratingly narrow, requiring export to Photoshop if you want real control.
  • Export to Blurb is nice – if you like Blurb – but there are canned export plugins for other services for LR3 – I use the one for Shutterfly.
  • No Content Aware Fill added. Still need to roundtrip to CS5 to do that.
  • GPS? Only my iPhone 4S has that so of little use.
  • Soft proofing no biggie – you could do that through Mac Preview in LR3. And you cannot soft proof on your secondary display, only in the main one, which is kind of stupid.
  • ‘Adjust Print Brightness’ is BS as you cannot preview it – at least I cannot find out how – and it’s no excuse for proper printer setup.
  • No crashes or hitches (OS X Lion 10.7.2), though switching to the Develop module rapidly refreshes the screen a couple of times – easy fix for Adobe.
  • No help files – click Help and you get LR3 Help.
  • ‘Email a photo’ implementation sucks as it does not access the Contacts app on my Mac, meaning you have to input the full email address, and setup is awfully clunky. Adobe needs to integrate this better to make it useful. Right now it’s faster to export a JPG and drop it on Mail app.

The localized Develop adjustments panel in Lightroom 4.

Email setup in LR4 – of course you know your SMTP Server and Port, right?

While I will be upgrading after all the usual debugging is concluded, simply to keep current, the best thing that can be said is that Adobe appears not to have broken anything in what is already a robust and stable cataloging/basic processing/printing tool for RAW files.