Category Archives: Software

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.

One year with the Panasonic G1

Micro Four-Thirds, Photographs, Software

A pure delight.

A couple of years back I wrote of how I use iCal to track warranties, so what would appear on my pop-up list of reminders today but the fact that I have now completed one year with the Panasonic G1.

And what a year it’s been.

The G1 was intended to be a replacement as a street snapper for my Panasonic LX1 to which I had glued an external optical viewfinder to speed framing. The LX1 is a handy and small number but its shutter lag is so-so and the ergonomics are compromised by the small size. Further, with a very small sensor, image quality tends to suffer as you enlarge the finished image. But it remains a handy traveling companion in the car’s glovebox at all times.

Until the G1 came along there really was no adequate replacement for my collection of Leica M2 and M3 street snappers, sold a few years back to procure funds for the Canon 5D and its range of fine lenses. The Canon’s image quality left the Leicas in the dust but no one could accuse the large and loud 5D of being a street snapper unless you are of the persuasion that has it that a gun is a better negotiating instrument than a quill pen.

Here, finally, was a small, unobtrusive, quiet and fast camera with a high quality kit lens which suffices for most situations encountered by the street maven. Sure, the maximum aperture is pedestrian but throw in a very capable anti-shake system and you gain two stops of speed if not of narrow depth of field. Indeed, I have not been particularly excited about adding the 20mm f/1.7 Panasonic lens owing to its lack of the one thing street photography really benefits from and that’s anti-shake technology. The 20mm focal length of that lens is certainly in the sweet spot – most of my street snaps are taken in the 14-20mm range – but it simply does not add enough and takes away the very handy zoom range of the kit lens which, at 28-90mm in full frame terms is about as perfect a traveling lens as one could wish.

And while I have added the Panasonic 45-200 zoom, which is superb in every way, it’s that jewel of a kit lens is what you find on my G1 99% of the time. Fast focusing, as sharp fully open as stopped down, small and with decent flare resistance, it answers most of this photographer’s prayers. I keep a UV filter on for protection and refuse to use the ridiculous, gargantuan lens hood.

The G1 has been discontinued in favor of the G2 with a 14-42mm kit lens and a movie mode has been added. Neither change means anything to me so the G1 and I remain happy campers.

The only alternative out there for my purposes is the underwhelming and ridiculously overpriced Leica X1 which seeks to trade on the Leica name and the fabulous

ergonomic shape of the Leica M’s body. Sure, the 40mm equivalent fixed focal length lens is ideal (though why on earth you have to wait for it to extend when you switch on the camera beats me – Leica should have used a fixed mount lens), and the APS-C sensor sounds nice though from what I have seen it only improves on the G1’s smaller sensor above 800 ISO. In addition, reports suggest the focus is slow, the shutter lag high and, of course, there’s no credible viewfinder for street work. No, I do not regard an LCD screen, invisible in daylight, as an alternative to a proper viewfinder. And that’s all you get for $2,000 …. are you kidding me?

In the past year I have taken just over 6,000 street snaps with the G1 and have had no reliability issues. Once I had set all the myriad variables to my preferred working method – 320 ISO, aperture priority, single shot, etc. – I simply forgot about all the arcane options and programmed just two Custom settings – one for 320 ISO and the other for 800 ISO for poor light. Then all that remains is to hit the streets and bang away.

Complaints? Well, the zoom collar on the kit lens continues to feel as if someone had buried the optic in the sand at Brighton Beach (NY or Sussex – the sand is much the same either side of the pond) unlike that on the 45-200 which is butter smooth. It grates (!) compared with the overall jewel-like precision of the camera. The electronic viewfinder burns out highlights on sunny days all to easily making pre-visualisation a tad tricky at times but it’s not that big a deal. The final image is, of course, unaffected and the trade-off is the brightness of the image in poor light or in interiors, which is outstanding. Once or twice after changing lenses I have received an error message, fixed by simply giving the lens a bit of a tweak on the camera. And that’s about it. I have no complaints about the silly overload of menu choices as I have simply saved my preferred ones to the Custom choice on the top dial. Panny got it pretty much right first time and all that remains is to wait for the GF2 with no prism hump (not needed in an EVF SLR in any case) and an even smaller Leica-looking body. Nirvana.

If the G1 fails or is stolen or damaged, I console myself with the thought that I can go through a dozen and a half of these and still have change left compared to what that Leica M9 would have run me and, unlike the well heeled owner of that piece of jewelry, my fear quotient when it comes to loss or damage is zero. Plus I don’t have to pause to focus manually through a 70 year old, antiquated rangefinder with a viewfinder which offers at best an approximation of the finished image. Finally, this is a street snapper – you are not going to use it for 40″ x 30″ pin sharp landscape prints. I use the Canon 5D for those.

So, without further ado, just click the picture below to see a couple of dozen snaps from my past year with the G1 which has, quite simply, revitalized my street photography.

Click the picture for more.

To see more from the Panasonic G1 go to my Photoblog, which is named Snap!, believe it or not.

The iPad as a second or third display

Software

A neat app.

Air Display is a $10 app for your iPad which allows it to act as a second or third display using wifi to route the signal.

Air Display with my two Dell 2209WA monitors. Can’t seem to get rid of those yellow stickies ….

As its response is a tad jerky it is not much use for moving objects but ideal for something like email or a preview screen for Lightroom 2 or 3 where the contents are stationary.

System Preferences for Displays under OS X Snow Leopard is properly supported as the following shows, allowing you to set the display’s positioning for mouse cursor movement as you please:


This layout dictates that the mouse is moved left to access the iPad’s display

You have to install a small utility on your desktop (or laptop) Mac to get things working and I had a few issues where the system was unresponsive when trying to toggle on the iPad from the Mac’s menu bar, but after a couple of tries all was well. This might prove handy in the field where you want to share displays with a broader audience by switching on mirroring in Sys Prefs->Displays, or switching it off and using disparate LR views between your laptop and iPad.

Don’t expect miraculous responsiveness if you are using poky wifi speeds; my system is running at 10mb/s download and 1.4 mb/s upload speed and is usable, if not stellar. I simply use the iPad to take the email inbox off the two big screens freeing up screen real estate for other things. You must be running Leopard 10.5.8 or higher for this to work and older PPC Macs are not supported – Intel only.

Lightroom 3 grain

Lightroom

A useful addition.

One of the new features in LR3 is a set of sliders to add and manipulate the traditional effect of grain from film days of yore.

Here’s a straight, unprocessed snap:

Plane, graves and flowers. 5D, 1/350, f/11, 24-105mm at 24mm.

Here’s an enlarged section of the above – note the grain sliders at lower right:

And here it is with the grain sliders adjusted to emulate high speed color film grain – I have to use enlargements to show grain owing to the grain free nature of the 5D’s sensor:

The Roughness setting, here at 38, is a nice compromise. Too small and the effect is too artificial. Too high and it’s overdone. Much the same goes for the Size slider, which I prefer to keep low.

It’s a useful tool, especially if you hit one of those Sarah Moon faux impressionism periods.

To reset to default adjustments simply double click the ‘Amount’ slider.

Lightroom 3

Lightroom

Some outstanding improvements.

Lightroom 3 has exited the Beta test stage and is now available as a $99 upgrade to Lightroom 2 users. I tried the Beta version but when it choked converting my previews to the new version after an hour of grinding away I decided someone else could do the testing and spent my valuable time elsewhere. Clearly something was wrong as my catalog contains a modest 6,000 pictures. Well, the final version appears to have fixed the issue because after download, a meaty 75 gB, I fired it up and it converted the 1:1 preview files in 3 minutes.

Technical background:

The LR3 preview file is given the 2-2 name by default; change it at will.

The catalog of pictures is not changed in any way.

The hardware I am running this on is my HackPro with OS Snow Leopard 10.6.3, 2.83gHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, 8gB of 800 mHz DDR2 RAM and an Nvidia 9800GTX+ video card driving two Dell 2209 21.5″ monitors, so it’s a very fast setup, designed for photo processing. CPU and memory use is modest and I would guess that 4gB would be just fine – Lightroom has always been good in this regard, unlike Aperture.

CPU use for all four cores. I show the effect of paging through several full screen previews here.

Memory use with LR3, NetNewsWire, Mail, iStumbler and SpamSieve running

LR3 runs natively in 64-bit mode.

LR3 allows you to change to what Adobe calls the ‘2010 Process’ for your pictures; I avoided this in light of the warning, below, but LR3 will adopt this process for all future imports, which is fine with me. I don’t want to have to reprocess a lot of older snaps which I am happy with:

LR3 ‘2010 Process’ warning.

Click the ‘!’ logo on any picture in the Develop module and you get this message, meaning you can selectively update to the new process:

Perspective correction:

One of the biggest surprises for me is that LR3 has added perspective correction; I don’t recall seeing that in LR3 Beta. The application can automatically sense the lens used for a limited range of camera manufacturers:

Only a few cameras are supported

Loading up a Canon Fisheye snap from the 5D I see this:

Hearst Castle pool drained for maintenance. 5D. 15mm Fisheye.

Click the ‘Enable Perspective Correction’ box and you immediately get a perfectly corrected picture:

Hearst Castle pool straightened out.

You can make horizontal and vertical corrections but the ‘distort’ feature available in Photoshop is missing. Still, this adds a key tool to the LR application which removes one of the last few uses I have for Photoshop. In LR3 it is fast and perfectly implemented, right down to the remasking of the image to fill the frame after correction.

What if your camera is not listed? Simply click on ‘Manual’ and have at it – an approach which allows both lens distortion correction and correction of leaning verticals.

Here’s an uncorrected image from my Panasonic LX1 with leaning verticals (and leaning everything else owing to earthquake damage!):

Here it is after messing with the slider:

Next you use the Resize slider to fill the frame:

Then hit Enter and you are done:

Until now I have been using the excellent PTLens and round tripping images from LR2. Unless your lens cannot be corrected in LR3, PTLens seems obsolete, though it does boast a huge lens database so is worth keeping, just in case.

If you want to add an unlisted lens to Lightroom 3 rather than using the manual method, simply download Adobe Lens Profile Creator and follow the instructions.

LR3 does not include the useful ‘Distort’ function for dramatic corrections, so it still means round-tripping to Photoshop if that is needed, which is rarely in my case.

Tethered shooting:

I have addressed tethered shooting here on occasion and, frankly, it has been a pain to get it working correctly, what with the need to set up capture folders, tune LR2 just so, etc. That is all in the past. Tethered shooting is now beautifully integrated into LR3 and the following cameras are supported:

I plugged in my Canon 5D to a USB port on one of my Dell monitors and set up LR3 for tethered shooting thus, after which I named the capture folder:

LR3 displays the tethered shooting menu thus:

The big button on the right (it really should be colored red) is the shutter release, or you can use the one on the camera.

Snap, and the picture appears in LR3:

Click on ‘Develop Settings’ and you get the usual choice, together with any you may have saved:

This is a plug-and-play implementation, perfectly executed. Bravo Adobe! The sort of thing you expect from Apple ….

P.S. Adobe – you need to make your LR3 demo videos run on the iPad – face reality and get with the program.

There are lots of other improvements in LR3, including movie processing (not for me), allegedly better noise reduction (not needed with the Canon 5D or Panasonic G1 which are my daily snappers), but the two detailed above alone make the $99 upgrade worthwhile for this photographer. Speed has not been compromised, the interface remains as nice as can be and the improvements need no instruction book to learn.

Recommended. I just paid Adobe for mine!