Category Archives: Software

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.

Lens profile correction in practice

Lightroom, Photographs

A dream to use.

Having explained how to create your own lens profiles for use with Lightroom3 yesterday, here’s that experience being put to use.

In this snap I wanted to emphasize the foreground sign to heighten the impact of the lone child on the beach. As you can see the original is rather blah as I was trying to moderate exposure between the poorly lit sign (the sun was shining into the lens – note how flare free the image is, especially as I do not use a lens hood) and the brightly lit beach. A separate attempt using fill-in flash looked too artificial for my taste, like one of those over-lit 1950s outdoor Hollywood musicals.

Original on the top. G1, Olympus 9-19mm MFT lens at 9mm.

A quick tap on the lens correction profile for the lens in LR3, two minutes work with the adjustment brush on the signs using AutoMask and zero feather to faithfully define the edges, a local exposure adjustment of plus one stop on the masked signs, a minus one stop exposure adjustment to the whole image, a touch on the vibrance slider, a little post-crop vignetting (the Olympus lens is totally free from optical vignetting even at 9mm, as you can see from the original, above), some selective darkening of the foreground and a blah original becomes a picture, and exactly what I visualized when pressing the button. The sheer idiocy of the sign testifies to the fact that the least able in any society work for government.

Stop! Turn right! G1, 9-18mm Olympus at 9mm, 1/800, f/8, ISO 320

With images where you expect to use lens distortion correction or perspective correction at the processing stage, it makes sense to compose with a little space around objects close to the edge of the frame, as that space will be lost when corrections are added – as in this example. Things are made a lot easier by the fact that the Panasonic G1 has one of the very few viewfinders which shows 100% of the image – most crop 3-5% making it impossible to exactly preview the saved file.

Lightroom3 is a powerful, efficient photography tool. The enhancements in Lightroom3 have now almost totally obsoleted my use of Photoshop for which feature, alone, I am immensely grateful.

Thank you, Adobe. Now maybe you can convince that jerk Steve Jobs to allow Flash to work on the iPad before I resort to jailbreaking mine.

Lightroom 3 Lens Profile Creator

Lightroom

DIY lens profiles.

Adobe has not left Panasonic MFT camera users out in the cold when it comes to automation of corrections to remove distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting in Lightroom 3. They provide a fine tool to create your own lens profiles, for example when using non-Panasonic lenses on a G-digital body, like my newly acquired Olympus 9-18mm MFT. In my third column reviewing that outstanding optic, I stated:

Well, it turns out that Adobe provides a free application named Lens Profile Creator which allows you to create your own lens profiles for just about any lens on any camera, film or digital, from iPhone to Leica S2 or scanning 4×5 back on a field camera. The download includes not only the charts (you must print one so that you can photograph it) but also instructions for use of both the application and details of how to set up your camera and lighting.

With the G1 it’s only necessary to do this for non-Panasonic MFT lenses like the Olympus 9-18mm ultra-wide zoom. Panasonic lens’ distortions are corrected by the software in the G1/G2/G10/GH1/GF1 range of bodies. Here is what Adobe says of their application:

The PDF instruction guide for Lens Profile Creator can be found here and the instructions for printing the calibration charts are here.

Creation of a lens profile is easy. You take nine pictures of the chart – I used RAW as that is all I use – convert them to DNG format by importing to LR3 then exporting in DNG format, and then you load the nine DNG images into Lens Profile Creator to create the lens profile for a specific focal length. As chromatic and barrel distortion in the Olympus 9-18mm lens vary with focal length, I did this at the four marked focal lengths – 9, 11, 14 and 18mm – a total of 36 pictures. It doesn’t take but a few minutes to take the pictures (alignment, per Adobe, is not critical) and, on my nuclear powered Mac, Adobe Lens Profile Creator took some 2 minutes to generate each of the four profiles from the nine constituent pictures I took for each. For the criminally insane, you could generate multiple profiles for each focal length at varying apertures, (chromatic aberration varies with aperture) but I would rather be taking pictures. Please yourself. I focused (!) on creating profiles at disparate focal lengths as it’s barrel distortion that is the most sensitive variable for my use and it varies significantly with focal length.

Once done you place the profiles in the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/LensProfiles/1.0 directory on your Mac where they will be available to all users of that Mac. (There are also instructions for those poor, unfortunate Windows users who place little value on their time and have yet to get a life). Finally, the Adobe application allows you to submit the profile to Adobe’s user forum though for some bizarre reason the submitted profiles are only currently available for download to Photoshop CS5 users, not Lightroom 3 users. Hey! Adobe! Can you say ‘Duh!’?.

Here’s how your Lightroom 3 options will look if you named your profiles correctly:

The drop down focal length selection panel in LR3.

And here’s a ‘before’ (no profile) and ‘after’ (9mm profile) comparison of a profile being applied:

Henry Moore’s bollard. Before and after with the 9mm profile.

The profile file contains no fewer than 8 profiles, created at 9mm (f/4, f/5.6), 11mm (f/4.3, f/5.6), 14mm (f/4.9, f/7.1) and 18mm (f/5.6, f/11) at the apertures shown. Lightroom will automatically chose the profile nearest in focal length and aperture to your photograph’s EXIF data.

If you would like to download the profiles I created, for your own use, you can do so by clicking below. Please note that these are for use with RAW or DNG originals only. They will not appear if your file is in JPG or TIFF. Feel free to share them with anyone. Unzip the downloaded file then place the four individual profile files (not the enclosing folder) in the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/LensProfiles/1.0 directory. Next time you start LR3 they will be available. Please note that these are solely for the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens used on a Panasonic G-series digital body taking RAW images.

Click to download Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens profile for the Panasonic G-series body. For RAW and TIFF originals only.

So if you really must have automated corrections for that 65mm Super Angulon on your 1964 Linhof 4×5, Adobe Lens Profile Creator is the tool you need.

Indeed, I see no reason why this software tool should not be used to create profiles for your film and flat bed scanners – instead of photographing Adobe’s target, simply scan it and run the scans through the program, so now you can profile your scanner (or, heavens forbid, a darkroom enlarger) in much the same way you can profile your 21st century lens on the latest in digital bodies.

Alternative #1- DxO Optics Pro Elite:

DxO makes the fancifully named DxO Optics Pro Elite for correction of lens aberrations at the equally fancy price of $300. It’s bog slow even on my hyper-speed Mac, must be loaded separately from your regular processing application and at the price asked compares poorly with the free Adobe Lens Profile Creator. I reviewed it here. And there is no version for Snow Leopard. These people need a loud wake-up call.

Alternative #2 – PTLens:

I wrote in glowing terms of PTLens here. It’s a $15 app which can be used as either a stand-alone or as a PS or LR plugin, and has a large and constantly updated lens database. The latest version includes the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens for both RAW and JPG on a Panny G body but I cannot recommend it. Simply stated, the RAW profile is awful, way overdoing the correction and turning barrel distortion into severe pincushion distortion instead. Further, as you have to round trip the file from LR that means that a TIFF file (lossless) is first generated, meaning that your 12mB RAW file will be 80gB by the time you save it back into LR. Not a big deal but with its current RAW profile I cannot recommend the product. My profiles, above, are way superior.

By way of illustration, here are the PTLens (left) and my custom profile (right) versions of an original which shows pronounced barrel distortion of the horizon. In the PTLens version a lot of the image is lost and the figure is way too elongated. If you could see the horizon which PTLens chops out you would see severe pincushion distortion, not to mention chopping out much of the ultra-wide effect you just paid good money for:

PTLens vs. my custom profile at 9mm

Here’s another example showing what a poor job PTLens does with this camera/lens combination – PTLens on the left cuts out lots of image information; my profile on the right does it correctly:

Moore’s bollard again – see above for the ‘as shot’ original. PTLens version on the left.

Alternative 3 – use LR3:

If you don’t mind having to manually correct distortions for every picture then manually adjusting for chromatic aberration, LR3’s controls are just fine when used with the Olympus 9-18mm. However, if your ultra-wide lens displays the ‘bow wave’ type of distortion where the barreling changes to pincushioning at different spots on the horizon then the built in LR3 control, which can correct plain spherical distortion only, is of no use and a tailored lens profile is the only option.

Conclusion:

“If you want a job done well, do it yourself” is one of the most asinine homespun philosophies in the Western world. If you want a job done well, delegate it to a professional and maximize your time value by applying your skill set to what you do best. This may just be an honorable exception to that dumb ‘rule’. If you want a good lens profile, do it yourself or if you use the Olympus 9-18 MFT on a G-body, use mine.

A great Lightroom 3 book

Lightroom

Martin Evening scores again.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about Martin Evening’s outstanding Lightroom 2 reference book and the Lightroom 3 version is now available.

Best of all, you can get it in a Kindle eBook version which will play on up to five devices – I have mine on the iPad and on my desktop Mac.

What distinguishes Evening’s writing is not only clarity and practical experience, he is also a very good photographer. Too often these so called software experts turn out to be truly awful photographers which makes you wonder what you could possibly learn from them. It’s still impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, last I checked. The beauty of an eBook is that you can look up the index then just touch the page to jump to it; it’s also weightless, not something that can be said of the 600 page paperback predecessor, which I refer to constantly. Further, you can bookmark as many locations as you like as well as change the font sizes to suit your eyesight. The Table of Contents is instantly available if you touch the bookmark logo at the base of the screen.

Bookmarking in the Kindle edition on the iPad.

Finally, the Kindle version meets with my goal of getting rid of every last physical book in my home, freeing the wall space covered with bookshelves for better use – like displaying photographs.

I use mine on the iPad where it works really well, as both my big Dell monitors are full when using Lightroom, making the desktop Mac unavailable unless I want to switch apps. You can also read the book on a Kindle but without color it’s not the same. It is very handy to peruse on the iPad in idle moments – rare is the occasion when I do not learn something new. And thanks to Kindle’s sync technology, the page you left at on the iPad will be the page the book opens at on the Mac, and so on.

There’s a good reason to buy the latest version – the new features of LR3 offer substantial processing enhancements and it really helps to have a working photographer show how to get the last ounce out of these.

I continue to learn daily about Lightroom – yesterday, for example, I did my first split toning effort. I never did understand what those sliders were for until I checked Martin Evening’s book.

Hut. Split toning – my first attempt! G1, 9-18mm Olympus @ 9mm, ISO 320

Update as of July 30, 2010: Amazon just released an updated version of the Kindle app which allows free text search! Want to look for ‘noise’? Just touch the magnifying glass, type the word and there you are. Wonderful!

Some of Evening’s insights are tremendous. Take this one on film of days past:

Any old timer worth his salt knows well that if you agitated your film less when it was in developer that you would increase sharpness, owing to the exact effect he describes. It was a pre-digital age ‘sharpening’ process, albeit with near-zero control! The book is full of this sort of thing though rarely as quirky as this.