Category Archives: Software

Adobe Photoshop Express

iPad, Software

A useful iPad app.

I’m not sure what they are putting in the water coolers at Adobe Labs HQ in San Francisco, but they should definitely stick with the program.

First we got a really value added, fairly priced upgrade to Lightroom 3, many of whose enhancements I have written about here – film grain, superior RAW conversions, outstanding flexibility to remove lens aberrations and distortions – and now, at no cost, an iPad app named Adobe Photoshop Express.

The price is right!

It’s an inspired piece of programming which really ‘gets’ the touchscreen interface and one of the best efforts yet to make the iPad into a photo processing platform. Sure the controls are limited – basic exposure, sharpness, effects, frames, monochrome conversions and so on – but all the ‘sliders’ for the controls dictate that the user merely slides his finger across the screen to change things. Surely this is the future of photo processing? Further, sign up at Adobe and if you can get comfortable with access rights (theirs not yours) to your pictures, then you can sync your snaps to your desktop or laptop via their servers.

Here’s a simple snap of our son with a neat frame added – this is a screen shot as I do not have an Adobe online storage account:

Winston at Point Lobos. My ‘equipment man’.

Very worth while looking into and it seems some of the earlier bugs have been stomped on as I have had no issues with my version. And what have you got to lose?

More on Adobe lens corrections in Lightroom 3

Lightroom

Very clever indeed.

A friend wrote recently how much he was enjoying using the newly added built-in lens corrections in Lightroom 3 with his ultra-wide Nikon zoom on a pair of Nikon pro bodies, a lens whose profile is included with Lightroom 3.

This got me thinking. How can one-click corrections work when distortion varies so widely over the focal length range of many wide zooms? If the lens is pre-programmed into Lightroom’s database by Adobe you do not get a choice of focal length when applying the profile. It’s strictly a one choice affair, which contrasts with my approach when crafting profiles for the 9-18mm MFT Olympus zoom for my Panasonic G1, where I had to create disparate profiles for each of the four marked focal lengths. The barrel distortion of that lens decreases with increasing focal length, so it’s not possible to make one profile to fit all focal lengths.

Now one of the finer lenses for my full frame Canon 5D is the 24-105mm L zoom. Lightroom 3 includes a built-in profile for this lens unlike with the Olympus 9-18mm where I had to make my own. The Canon has fine resolving power and micro contrast at all focal lengths of its useful zoom range but suffers from the most atrocious barrel distortion at the wide end (the center of peripheral straight lines bows out), changing to mild pincushion distortion (the center bows in) at the long end. How could Adobe’s ‘one click’ approach possibly work with this lens whose distortion characteristics vary widely with focal length?

Note that if you use Canon’s DPP software (I do not) to process your pictures I’m fairly certain that it corrects distortion at all focal lengths. However, the 5D, unlike the G1, has no in-body distortion correction for the manufacturer’s lenses, so processing in LR3 brings in the images in their fully distorted glory just as with the G1/Olympus lens combination. And distortion correction is important to me as I frequently take architectural pictures where I want my straight lines straight.

Well, it was but a few moments work to take five snaps, one at each of the marked focal lengths, with a straight edge close to the top of the frame in each. I processed these through Lightroom 3 and, after making virtual copies of each, applied the one-click lens distortion correction to each of the virtual copies, selecting the single profile for Canon’s 24-105mm L lens in each case. The pictures were snapped at 24, 28, 50, 67 and 105mm.

Here are the results – in each case the corrected version is shown first:

At 24mm. Noticeable barrel distortion in the uncorrected image at right.

At 28mm. Mild barrel distortion in the uncorrected image.

At 50mm. Very minor barrel distortion in the uncorrected image.

67mm. Very mild pincushion distortion in the uncorrected image.

105mm. Very mild pincushion distortion in the uncorrected image.

So as the above pictures suggest, the Adobe built-in profile for the Canon 24-105mm lens takes into account the focal length at which the image was made and applies distortion correction appropriately. It may be ‘one-click’ for the user, but it seems there’s much more going on below the surface. In all cases the correction is almost perfect, with only the 67mm and 105mm images slightly overcorrected and showing mild barrel distortion. The correction at the wider focal lengths is especially praiseworthy, as the above pictures show. Very clever and much more sophisticated than the case where you have to make your own lens profiles in those instances where Lightroom 3 does not include these.

Running Windows on a Mac

Software

Ugh!

[column width=50% padding=3%]

Looking back I suppose there have been two sound decisions I made in my business life – we won’t go into the dozens of poor ones here!

One was leaving socialist England in 1977 for America which, back then, truly was the land of opportunity and, in contrast to my homeland, actually had a work ethic. The other was quitting my day job almost a decade ago and deciding to make my own living.

Working for yourself is truly a breath of fresh air and has probably added a couple of decades to my life expectancy. No more corporate team spirit, working for the greater good and all that gobbledegook which has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder wealth over the past few decades in America’s ‘feel good’ society. Whenever forced to attend one of those ghastly team building sessions – whose goal would have made Stalin proud with its emphasis on stamping out all individuality – I would quickly plead a headache and head for the nearest beach with my camera.

But the greatest reduction in stress in my life came from no longer having to use Microsoft’s Windows. This fraud passing for an operating system with its need for large support teams of unwashed techies and constant problems was in my life no more. I became a full time Mac OS X user. And while I have nothing but contempt for Apple’s fragile hardware, OS X has been a model of stability and reliability this past decade and is as good as it gets in the latest Snow Leopard iteration …. especially if you run it on a home made PC box! Good, plentiful, cheap, easy replaced and reliable PC parts installed in a Hackintosh come to life when presented with a sound OS.

However, because I manage money to make ends meet, there are one or two financial applications I use on occasion which only come in Windows versions meaning – oh! horror – that I still have to load that piece of garbage on occasion.

While OS 10.5 Leopard was around I used Parallels as an emulator to run Windows – my copy of Windows started life as Windows 98 and I upgraded it to XP years ago. Parallels was buggy but sort of worked, with a clunky interface and a very long install time. It would lock up every other day on my MacBook and Intel iMac. Well, still better than Windows.

When Snow Leopard OX 10.6 came to market I upgraded but, surprise, surprise, Parallels would no longer work, the maker wanting more money to make its product compatible. Now given that any spend related to Windows is regarded as obscenity in the home, I shopped around and found two competitors.

[/column]

[column width=45% padding=2%]

The competition is comprised of VMWare’s Fusion, also wanting payment, and Sun’s VirtualBox. The latter is free and, now that Oracle has bought Sun, has some serious development effort being put into it. There’s money in virtualization. My earlier experience with VirtualBox 2.0 was awful and I had forgotten about it.

But when VirtualBox 3.0 was released in June, 2009 I paid attention. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, did not become one of the world’s wealthiest by suffering fools (Gates at MSFT didn’t suffer them either, but made sure he sold his product to them) and a download of VirtualBox 3.0 showed the product to be much improved. Super stable on the HackPro, fast and easy to set up if, that is, you can get past the instructions which were written by engineers for engineers in contrast to the Apple approach of writing instructions for regular humans.

Mercifully, I am an engineer and most certainly not a regular human, so installation was a breeze. I then installed Windows XP Sp2, duly inserted my Win 98 disk to prove I was legit (though why anyone would actually want to steal Windows must be one of the great mysteries of our time) and immediately upgraded to Win XP Sp3 which, amazingly, went without a hitch.

I’m currently on VirtualBox 3.2.6 and Windows runs in it in its own little space, making sure no bad stuff migrates over to my OS X work space. If it gets clogged up I’ll simply reinstall it and the one or two apps I use. I give it 4gB of the 8gB of RAM in the HackPro when it’s on and allow it to use all four cores of the Intel Core2Quad CPU in the HackPro, and it runs fast if only in 32-bit mode, but how anyone can stand the UI of Windows XP beats the hell out of me. It was awful in Win ’95 and remains so in XP. No, if anything, it’s worse in XP, trying to interpose a user friendly interface which only makes the bad look awful. VirtualBox + XP Sp3 load in some 40 seconds and XP constantly reminds me that my ‘computer may be at risk’. How about fixing that, Microsoft, without forcing the user to pay for band aids? One of the nicest aspects of VirtualBox is that it allows you to create virtual disk drives in Win XP so that you can seamlessly access files in your OS X space. So, for example, I can install Lightroom 3 on the XP ‘machine’ and access my Lightroom catalog on the OS X side easily. A related benefit is that I can see how this site looks in XP using the truly awful Internet Explorer browser which, needless to say, respects few of the standards adopted by every other browser in the universe.

[/column]

[end_columns]

Windows XP Sp3 running this site on the HackPro. OS X in the background.

[column width=50% padding=3%]

All the usual peripherals work with no tuning – wireless internet, USB devices, sound, card readers, optical disk drive and so on. The only thing I have not bothered with is getting wireless printing to work as life is too short. I merely take a screen snap and print from OS X on the few occasions I need hard copy.

Anyway, this is a really long winded way of saying that if you really must run Windows on your Mac, get VirtualBox.

It is free, super stable and if you get a hankering to run Ubuntu, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows XP or Vista, Windows Server, Windows 7, Oracle Enterprise, Debian, Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo, SUSE or Mandriva on your Mac, virtualization is a nice safe way of doing that.

[/column]

[column width=45% padding=2%]

And if you are seriously troubled, then consider updating to Windows 7 and making the world’s richest man yet wealthier. After all, there’s a fool born every minute and he has made Microsoft what it is today.

Running Windows in emulation mode under OS X on a PC box hacked to run Snow Leopard may sound like feeding bacon to a pig, but it’s the only safe way of running Windows on anything.

And, if you absolutely must know, this site looks almost acceptable in Internet Explorer 8. Lightroom 3? No problem, if limited to the slower 32-bit mode.

[/column]

[end_columns]

Lightroom 3 running in XP/VirtualBox in 32-bit mode.

Topaz DeNoise

Lightroom, Micro Four-Thirds

Snake oil?

I confess that I have always regarded noise reduction applications for digital images as so much snake oil – a solution which makes the problem worse. Sure, they reduce noise but they also destroy definition in the process. Better noisy and sharp than blurred and smooth, in my book. Further, with most of my digital snaps being on the essentially noise-free sensor in the Canon 5D my incentive for ‘denoising’ images has been non-existent. Until, that is, the Panasonic G1 with a sensor one quarter the area of the one in the Canon became my daily user. Go over 13″ x 19″ when printing (and that is really the only time you will see noise in practical use) and noise makes itself heard, if you get my drift.

So the other day when I was giving my new Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens a good workout on the G1, I indulged in a spot of pixel peeping to see how good the definition was and, in the process, ran into noise when examining the equivalent of a 30″ x 45″ print on the Dell 2209WA monitor. Now one of the claims for Lightroom 3 is that it comes with significantly improved noise reduction capabilities, so I promptly gave these a shot .

Here’s the original RAW image:

At 18mm, f/8. Sunflowers.

And here’s a 30x selection before applying any noise reduction; this is an excellent test image as it has fine detail and shadows:

No noise reduction at 30x. ISO320, RAW.

Here’s that same section after applying the best looking noise reduction in LR3:

After applying LR3 noise reduction.

The LR3 noise reduction setting were as follows – the sharpness settings are my import defaults for the G1 RAW files, and were determined after much experimentation (5D images need less sharpening, by comparison):

LR3 noise reduction settings

Topaz DeNoise costs $80, seems to be popular on the chat boards, and requires Photoshop CS3 or later, where it installs as a plugin. As I’m still on CS2, and unlikely to upgrade, I wanted to run Topaz DeNoise from within LR3. This dictates the download of two applications – the plugin itself (41.2mB download, 113.7mB installed) and a separate app named Fusion Express (free) which is a 509.1 mB monster of a download but installs at 57.9mB if you restrict the installation to Topaz DeNoise; the Fusion Express application supports many Topaz apps, hence the size of the download. Now the installed size of Topaz Denoise must represent some of the sloppiest programming on record. At 113.7mB for a single purpose tool it exceeds the 89.5mB of Lightroom3 by some 27% – and last I checked LR3 does a heck of a lot more than just remove noise. Draw your own conclusions.

For RAW originals Topaz provides no fewer than seven presets for noise reduction and after some experimentation I determined that the lightest of these gave the best result. That said, the result was significantly inferior to what LR3 delivered with its built in tool. No matter how I tried, I could not reduce the artifacts in the circled area to as low a level as LR3 provided and shadow detail in the hairs on the stem of the sunflower was marginally worse at all settings, even after adjusting the ‘Adjust Shadow’ slider.

Topaz DeNoise version at RAW – lightest setting.

The Topaz noise reduction setting were:

Topaz DeNoise settings

What this little experiment goes to prove is that Adobe has done a truly stellar job in coding the noise reduction features built into LR3 and kept it nice and simply with just five sliders (you mostly use the first three shown above) compared to the overkill of seven offered by Topaz. No matter how much I messed with these I could not approach the LR3 result with regard to the elimination of contour artifacts in out-of-focus areas, and these artifacts are both more noticeable and annoying in the Topaz processed image.

Speed? LR3 is instantaneous. Topaz? First you need to invoke the plugin from within Lightroom which causes the RAW image to be converted to a TIFF copy then exported to Topaz DeNoise, some 7 seconds. Topaz Denoise take a further 7 seconds to process the preview image, and seven seconds every time you move a slider which makes experimentation a royal pain, then a whopping 58 seconds to process and save the file in TIFF format (I’m doing this on my four core Mac with 8gB RAM running a 2.83gHz CPU speed with an Nvidia 512 mB 9800GTX+ video card – it doesn’t get better than that!). So that’s a minimum of 72 seconds per image on a very fast computer. Good luck if you have many images to process …. that’s no more than 50 images an hour.

For the geeks amongst you, here is the Geekbench 64-bit score for my hardware:

So while Topaz DeNoise does a half decent job for the $80 asked, and if you shop around you can find discount coupons bringing the price down to $50, if you are a Lightroom2 user you can upgrade to Lightroom3 for $100. For the additional $20/$50 you get superior noise reduction, the processing is instantaneous compared with bog slow for Topaz, LR3’s improved Adobe Camera RAW processing software compared to that in LR2 is included, and LR3 offers an integrated solution which does not require that you exit the Lightroom application to enter a separate de-noising one. I did not do any tests with JPGs as I only use RAW, and you should too.

You can draw your own conclusions where the value lies. Here’s a side-by-side comparison to make things easier:

LR3 on the left. Topaz on the right.

Keywords in Lightroom

Lightroom

A useful discipline.

No matter how well you catalog your images in Lightroom, adding keywords always helps. That snap at the beach may belong under ‘Beach and Sea’ in your catalog or, equally well, under ‘Abstracts’. But if you add the name of the beach as a keyword, or the words ‘beach’ if it’s cataloged in abstracts, the chances of finding it at some later date when you have many thousands of images added will increase through the use of keyword search.

To find which of your images are missing keywords, set up a Smart Collection (Library->New Smart Collection) as follows:

Then when you click on the Smart Collection named ‘Without Keywords’ you can see all the images that need keywords added. I frequently forget to add keywords before cataloging my images after import and processing, so this is a useful discipline. And if you are way behind on your keywording, simly do a few images each time before quitting Lightroom. The payback down the road in image retrieval and time saved is immense – it takes less time to enter a keyword than to search for an image without one.

And while you are setting up this Smart Collection, take a look at some of the other filters that Smart Collections support. It’s a powerful tool.