Category Archives: Lightroom

Adobe’s masterpiece for processing and cataloging

Tethered photography with Lightroom 2

Lightroom

A bit tricky.

The idea of tethered photography with a digital camera is that what you snap appears shortly thereafter in Lightroom on a screen size of your choice.

Practically, this translates into controlled conditions where the camera and a computer can remain close together, so think studio photography. No matter whether your subject is a flower or a person.

The opportunity of immediately seeing your pictures in Lightroom, with default import processing (camera profile, sharpness, etc.) applied, all viewed on a large, properly profiled screen will take you as close to visualizing the finished thing as you can get. Indeed, if computer display is your goal you will see what you are getting; those who print and have a properly profiled screen/printer will be just as happy.

In a perfect world you should be able to attach your camera to your computer, open Lightroom and bang away. In real life the process is two stage. First, you have to tell Canon’s software (ugh!) to deposit pictures in a named location. Second, you then tell LR2 the name of this folder which it will monitor, transferring any new content to a different folder seen by LR2. Thus the first folder is emptied by LR2 and the second is transferred by you, the user, within LR, with contents either moved to your LR catalog or bad snaps moved to Trash. So you start and finish with these two empty ‘transit’ folders but they must not be removed for everything to work. That’s for the neatniks amongst us!

What follows applies to Canon DSLRs but doubtless similar steps apply with others.

With most modern Canon DSLRs (5D, 40D, whatever) you will need current versions of Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (I am using DPP 3.5.1) and Canon’s EOS Utility (2.40). You tether your camera to a USB connection on your computer (laptops are ideal for this) and the camera end is connected with a miniature USB plug. As the one supplied with the camera is short, you can either buy a USB-A to USB-A extension cable, or simply get a longer USB-A to USB-Mini cable. Radio Shack or whatever. There’s no brand value here.

Plug in your camera, switch it on and fire up DPP, then click on Tools->Start EOS Utility. Go to EOS Utility->Preferences and check the box shown below:

This makes sure that what is transmitted to your laptop is also saved on the card in the camera. A useful safety precaution.

Now using Finder, create a unique folder you want monitored. I call mine ‘Canon EOS 5D Capture’ in my user directory.

Back in EOS Utility, go to the Destination drop-down box and enter that destination:

Before even getting into Lightroom 2, check this setup. Take a test picture and it should appear in a few seconds in DPP. With my 5D on a MacBook it pops up in DPP in 4 seconds – that’s for a RAW original.

Now Lightroom 2 has to be told where to look for the picture you have just taken.

Go to File->Auto Import and check ‘Enable Auto Import’ thus:

The click on ‘Auto Import Settings’ and enter the exact folder name under ‘Watched Folder:’ you just created in EOS Capture as shown:

Any typos here and nothing will work.

Back in Finder, create a new folder for the destination of your pictures as seen by LR. I have used the default name of ‘Auto Imported Photos’ which LR2 suggests, above.

Now take a test snap and the left panel of LR2 will show the following:

The new folder you designated appears in LR2. Click on it, hit F5, F6, F7, F8 and L and you will see this and all future pictures presented in their full glory, filling the screen. It takes 7 seconds from click to view with my 5D and modest MacBook (2.1 gHz C2D CPU, 4 gB RAM) with RAW originals. Doubtless JPG would be faster as less processing is involved, but JPG so compromises quality I do not bother with it.

If you like what you see, remember to drag-and-drop (move) the keepers to your permanent Lightroom catalog. Then, still in LR, delete the losers.

If you power down your camera or the battery fails or you disconnect the cord, you will need to go back into DPP and reload EOS Utility from the Tools menu. Other than that, it’s plain sailing. I’m using OS 10.5.5 Leopard and LR 2.1; earlier versions of Leopard seem to have had issues with the Canon software but now all is well. You can check Canon’s site for free upgrades to the latest DPP and EOS Utility software. (The older Capture application refuses to work with Leopard on my MacBook, so don’t bother with it if you are using like tools).

If you read that tethered photography was only fixed by Canon in the 5D Mark II, save yourself the upgrade money. My 5D Mark I works fine with this technique.

There’s no better way to preview studio snaps even if they involve moving subjects. You can check light and color balance from just a few test snaps. Very handy when you are using studio flash where its virtually impossible to ‘see’ how your lighting has turned out on the camera’s miniscule LCD screen.

Once you have made the settings above, tethered photography involves the following simple steps:

  • Switch on camera
  • Connect to computer
  • Load Canon DPP and EOS Utility
  • Load Lightroom
  • Take a test snap
  • Navigate to the folder in LR and expand the test snap to full screen
  • Bang away

Your camera will use up its battery faster this way as it’s saving both a card image and transmitting a copy to your computer, so come prepared with spares!

Come to think of it, a battery powered netbook computer and a tethered camera would be more than useable in the field. An ideal combination, perhaps, for those who like to take their studio with portable strobes with them. Of course, you would have to convert the netbook to running OS X to use your time effectively ….

HP Designjet paper profiles in Lightroom 2

Lightroom, Printing

Trust HP to design this for engineers, not humans

In yesterday’s column I mentioned the existence of aftermarket profiles for some interesting papers made by the likes of Hahnemühle and Arches. These are swellable papers designed to absorb the ink dyes used in the HP DJ 30/90/130 printers. That’s all well and good, but how on earth do you get these to show up as choices in Lightroom when you are in the Print module? Especially as the instructions from HP for the right place to install these simply do not work.

Well, HP is first and foremost an engineering company which means that things obvious to engineering graduates are gobbledeegook to regular humans. Mercifully, your instructor, Dr. Pindelski, happens to have an engineering degree, so if you use an HP Designjet 30, 90 or 130 printer, follow the instructions below and all will be well …. so long as you have the good sense to get a life and use a Mac. PC users can probably figure things out from what follows, but please do not ask as I neither use nor propose to ever use a PC again.

Here’s the Print module in LR2:

Click on ‘Managed by Printer’ then click ‘Other’ and you get a listing of the standard HP paper profiles:

Now go to Finder and click on the Library (this is the Mac’s library on the root of your internal hard drive, not the one under your name in Users) and navigate to the directory show – navigation is from bottom to top (this is for OS Tiger – see below for the changed location in Snow Leopard):

Your Finder screen now looks like this:

Now Control-Click on the file named ‘hp_designjet_pm.plugin’ then click on ‘Show Package Contents’:

Now drag and drop the downloaded package of profiles (see yesterday’s entry for the download link) onto the directory named ‘ICCProfiles’:

The ‘designjet’ directory is the one with the new profiles, which you just dragged and dropped.

Click on the ‘designjet’ directory in ‘ICCProfiles’ and you will see all the additional profiles, thus:

Snow Leopard update:

Additional paper profiles are stored in your user directory thus:

Location of additional paper profiles in Snow Leopard.

The remaining task is to edit the ICC profiles of your choice so that they will show up in the LR2 drop-down box. The snag is that you have to use one of the tailored HP name strings to force the choice to show. This means two things:

1 – You must use a file name identical to one of the existing ones used by HP for their papers
2 – You will have to embed your profile description of choice in the replacement new paper profile for it to display meaningfully in the LR2 drop-down box.

First, then, we have to determine which of HP’s standard paper choices we can dispense with. That’s easy, because you didn’t buy this fabulous printer to use Brochure or Proofing paper or for that matter generic Coated paper, so that means at least nine of HP’s file names can be reused. Further, if you stick with the ‘Max Detail’ drivers, you get even more redundant file names to use – and why would you want anything but maximum detail in your display prints?

First, determine the new papers for which you would like to install profiles – here’s the list from the file downloaded from HP:

I’m intrigued by the Arches, Hahnemuhle and Ilford papers. so in the following screen snap I have erased those imported profiles which are not wanted and also erased all the clutter from the inclusion of the HP Z2100/Z3100 profiles which are for HP’s latest – and very expensive – wide carriage pigment printer, thus:

As I am adding nine new profiles I will need to reuse nine of HP’s file names to make these show up – here’s the ‘conversion’ table:

To embed these paper names in the new profile ICC files we have to edit the profiles, rename them using HP’s cryptic file naming convention, rename the original files rather than erase them, in case they are needed in future, then move the new files down one level in the directory so that LR2 can read them.

Double-click on the first new file, the one for Arches Infinity Smooth 230 paper. You will see this as Colorsync opens:

Click on ‘Localized description strings’ and enter the name you want for the paper of choice – the default looks like this:

Those names are awful (this is the text which will show up in LR2) so I make them more user friendly, like so:

Now save the file in Colorsync (Command-S) and move on to the next one, repeating as necessary with descriptive names for each paper.

Next we have to rename the original files which are no longer needed; I do this by simply appending the text “.old” to the name of the original file; use the conversion table you created above to determine which files need to have ‘.old’ appended to their names:

Next, rename the new paper profile files using the old HP file names – the same ones where you just added the “.old” extension, like so, repeating for each new profile and making sure to use unique HP file names from the original files, with no duplications:

Here all all the name changes on the new files:

Finally, drag these renamed .icc files down one level to where the “.old” files reside, thus:

Load LR2 and click on Profile->Other in the Print module and this is what you will see:

To further clarify matters, I then add the text “HP” to the HP paper profiles, using Colorsync as before, with the following result – compare with the previous screen snap:

Now check all the boxes thus to make these properly named profiles show up in future when you click in LR2 and hit ‘OK’:

Next time you click profiles in the LR2 Print module you will see this:

Select the profile of your choice, load the appropriate paper in the printer and off you go! But do first make sure your display is profiled properly and, of course, I highly recommend Dr. P’s free screen profiling approach which will not only save you money on the colorimeter you do not need, but will get you more accurate colors to boot.

I took the additional precaution of making the new, renamed .icc files ‘read only’ to make sure that any new profile or application updates do not overwrite the files created above. You can do this by control-clicking the .icc file, clicking on ‘Get Info’ and making it ‘read only’ in the dialog box that pops up.

Why use printer-managed profiles rather than application managed colors? For the simple – and vital – reason that when you hit Print->Preview in LR2, Apple’s Preview application will display a Preview; at the lower left you will see a box for previewing the print on the screen using the color profile you have chosen – so much for all the ‘experts’ who maintain that you cannot soft proof with applied paper profiles in Lightroom:

You are now viewing a Print Preview of your picture with the paper profile of choice applied to the image. And you can use a selection of non-HP branded printing papers. What’s not to like?

And I can think of no better time to buy one of the truly great wide carriage printer bargains – HP still lists the Designjet 90 (18″) for $995 and the Designjet 130 for $1,295 (24″). I would not hesitate to buy another today and do, on rare occasions, rue the fact that I did not buy the 24″ model as the form factor is much the same with six inches added to the width. Either takes up little room for such a large format printer. OK, so they go ‘clankity-clank’ when they print, but you can afford ear plugs from the $2,000 saved on not buying their latest Z series machines. And ink use is so frugal, even a Scot would approve.

Camera profiles in Lightroom

Lightroom

Now you can match the manufacturer’s intent.

I have generally avoided using Canon’s DPP Professional software which comes with the 5D. Clunky, slow, limited in application and not integrated with my man processing ‘engine’ – Lightroom – plus all those comedic spelling errors, well, it’s all just too much. Or too little.

Now Adobe has made it possible to view your RAW imports in Lightroom (and this only works for RAW images) emulating the manufacturer’s software. So instead of viewing your images in the latest Adobe Camera Raw profile, you can get to look at them in what DPP Professional would do. The differences are easily seen on the screen.

Point your browser to this address and download the profile package:

Now when you next start Lightroom 2 you will see the following in the Develop panel:

Click the drop down box and the camera specific profiles appear:

So if you are still using DPP, forget about it, download the profiles into LR2 and you have all you need in one place.

Here’s a snap processed using the Camera Landscape Beta 2 profile – note the warmth in the rose:


5D, 400mm ‘L’, 1/500, f/5.6, ISO 250

Lightroom 2 Upgrade

Lightroom

Painless, amazingly.

My extensive tests with the free trial version of Lightroom 2 confirmed that the product is stable and debugged and I now find I cannot live without the localized adjustment features LR2 added. Not to mention enhanced keywording and search functions. Hopefully Adobe will add keystone/perspective correction in the next version and I will be able to bid a not-so-fond farewell to Photoshop CS2 (and its many predecessors), that user interface nightmare of a product.

Having had nothing but trouble upgrading Adobe products in the past I approached the idea of an online upgrade of Lightroom 1.4.1 to Lightroom 2 ($99) with trepidation.

Mercifully all went well.

Pay your $99 – assuming you have a version of LR1 on your computer – and off you go:


Download in progress – you have to elect either the Mac or Winblows version.


The new serial number is provided for input.


Old and new numbers input and she’s ready to go! I have blurred out the last four digits for security – you have twenty thousand guesses!

Even though I had the trial version already loaded, Adobe insisted on uploading the whole thing again – no big deal as it only took a minute or two.

My only complaint so far is that the auto-masking feature, when applied to large areas, is very sluggish. Now I must try the application on our old iMac G4 (PPC, 1.25gHz) and see how well it works on a relatively ancient machine.

If you do not have LR1 then LR2 will run you $299 – $100 more than Apple’s Aperture. Adobe has no earthly reason to drop the price to compete with Apple’s offering. If you elect the latter, be prepared to blow another $2-3,000 on a machine which might actually run it at something approaching reasonable speed. If you don’t believe me, stop by an Apple Store with your favorite RAW file and load it in Aperture on a MacBook. Then try the crop tool. Convinced?

Lightroom 2: Keywording

Lightroom

I have been putting this off for too long.

I have been putting off adding keywords to the pictures in my Lightroom database in much the same way as stock market investors prefer denial to fact. Open that statement in the mailbox and, yes, you too will be apprised of this year’s 40% drop in value. That’s the result of the foolish “stay fully invested” mantra of the past two bull decades which has been brainwashed into your psyche by amoral advisers seeking only to maximize their fees. This is by no stretch of the imagination a financial blog – though I do like to point out photography equipment bargains when I see them – but suffice it to say that after the 1929 crash the Dow index did not return to pre-1929 levels until …. 1954. So the ‘fully invested’ bunch, or what was left of it, had to wait out a war and 25 years later they had devalued dollars equal in amount to their 1929 investment.

But, like that reluctant letter opener, I have preferred to fool myself that my Lightroom cataloging system, which heretofore has avoided the use of keywords, would serve me well, added by a solid dose of good memory to help find things in a trice.

Wrong.

I am now finding that it’s getting increasingly difficult to locate a treasured snap in short order. Was that picture of my sweet little boy, Winston, under ‘Playground’ or ‘Winston’ or ‘Birthdays’?

Here’s how I have ordered my folders:


In LR2, the green light refers to the active drive. The numbers indicate that I have 207gB left on a 465gB drive

Click on, say, the ‘Beach and Sea’ containing folder and you get:

Well, you get the idea. As long as you remember that the snap you want is in ‘Beach and Sea’ the rest is plain sailing. Snag is, sometimes it’s simply not where you would logically place it today and memory tends to fade.

Now that Lightroom 2 has made key wording easier and faster, if no less tedious, I have resolved to add keywords to as many of my pictures as makes sense and I am disciplining myself to do a hundred or so a day. Rather than doing this one by one, I assemble those that need generic keywords – ‘monochrome’ or ‘grain effect’ for example – and do a batch add of the relevant words. In a final pass I will add image specific keywords where warranted, the goal being that a keyword search renders a handful of results.

A related motivating factor is that my catalog of images (the keepers, that is) is growing faster than in days past, owing to the higher success rate of digital technology and greater availability of time for my hobby compared with those days when I was putting in 60+ hour weeks on Wall Street.

Here are some of the keywords I have added – note that I have replicated the folder names in case I ever decide to scrap or revise the folder structure. I have then started adding new keywords like ‘Red’ which identify pictures with strong red content:

LR2 allows you to drag and drop keywords onto image(s) so the process is fairly fast. The tricky bit is coming up with image specific words that make sense. “How would I think of this image were I looking for it?” is the recurring question.

Now when I wish to locate all files matching a specific keyword, I go to the right hand panel of LR2, highlight the word and click the arrow to the right – here’s the result of clicking on ‘Cemeteries’:

Keywords can be stacked for compound searches, though the technology in LR2 still trails Aperture’s where you can select a filter with boolean keyword input, using ‘if’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ logic. I have no doubt that this will eventually come to Lightroom.

So far I have encountered one snag. If you stack images of like kind (I stack composite HDR images for example as all go towards one result once merged) and leave the stack closed when keywording, only the top picture in the stack will be keyworded. If you subsequently change the top picture in the stack you will not be able to find the new one if you forgot to keyword it. To work around this I simply open all the stacks in the Library before keywording, so that all pictures in a stack have the keyword applied.

I have been banging away at LR2, moving files and folders, stacking, copying, processing, exporting and adding keywords for a while now and have had no lock-ups. The only time the application really bogged down was when I tried using the adjustment brush with auto-masking switched on to paint in a large, irregular sky area. I got the spinning beach ball while the overtaxed, modest GPU (Intel GMA 3100) in my MacBook did the data crunching. Mercifully, this is not something I expect to do often. At 4 megabytes of RAM it’s not like I’m hurting for CPU memory so I’m blaming the graphics processor for this one!

If I decide to upgrade to LR2 (I’m using the 30 day free trial which comes fully featured) I’ll give it a run on our old iMac G4 ‘screen on a stick’ which continues to soldier away as a great Internet browser. That will answer the question of how well LR2 runs on older PPC CPU Macs. I can confirm that LR 1.4.1 runs well on this computer if nowhere as fast as on the MacBook. It remains more than useable for those looking for a low entry price to the world of Lightroom processing. The latest version of Aperture does not run at acceptable speeds on older machines like this one, whose G4 CPU runs at 1.25gHz and has just one core compared to the Intel’s two. One of the most distinguishing features of LR 1.4.1 is its speed on these old but still useful machines. Let’s hope that has been retained in LR2.

By the way, for those readers into this sort of thing, here are some interesting statistics on LR vs Aperture users from the Adobe blog. Probably self-serving given that this is Adobe’s data, but interesting all the same. Sample sizes are not stated in this survey:

I have questioned Apple’s commitment to Aperture before (no critical mass, no significant profit) and have little reason to change that opinion. And as I can testify, the conversion process from Aperture to Lightroom is not pretty. So the sooner you switch, the better. Adobe does this for a living; to Apple it’s a rounding error.

Enough talk. Here’s a snap from the beach, a composite of four images combined using Helicon Focus:


Kelp. 5D, 100mm macro and ring flash, 1/100, f/22, ISO400. Composite of four images using Helicon Focus.