A fast web display application.

I chanced upon the free application Autoviewer the other day which, once downloaded, can be used as a web display generator using iPhoto or Lightroom and comes in Windows and OS X versions.

I tried it with Lightroom 2 using the ‘Web’ module (first time I have ever gone there, believe it or not) into which Autoviewer integrates elegantly and within 30 minutes had uploaded a 42 slide presentation of recent street snaps which you can see by clicking the picture below.

San Francisco street snaps July, 2009 – January, 2010

Autoviewer uses Adobe Flash technology so it may be a bit poky on older machines. However, I used my netbook with its slow Atom CPU and it does fine. There are also SimpleViewer (tabular presentation) and PostcardViewer (what is says) options available through Lightroom 2, though the full screen approach seems to work best for formal presentation of photographs.

I know I have to edit this selection down, but thought a quick first look would be of interest, as I’m beginning to think that a slide show presentation is superior to the clickable thumbnails I have traditionally used on my web site.

Auto blur.

With smaller and smaller digital sensors lenses get shorter and depth of field grows. It’s tough to beat the laws of optics but, in my opinion, all those calling for ever faster small lenses to limit depth of field and thus differentiate the subject from its surroundings just don’t get it. That’s yesterday’s technology.

The faster the lens, the larger the lens, which defeats the whole purpose of compactness – the very attribute in a camera that makes you take it with you.

What I think is needed is what I call Auto Blurâ„¢. We already have face recognition technology. So why not add technology to blur everything that is not the main subject. Rollover the image to see what I’m talking about (renders fine in Chrome and Safari on my Mac). Refresh your browser if the image is not visible. Will not work on mobile devices.

This is a typical G1 image with the kit lens at 18mm fully open at f/3.9. Everything is sharp.

Now, in this case, the background in the mouseover version was tortuously conferred using PS CS2 and the lasso tool – not my idea of fun – but why shouldn’t this be a simple user choice in the camera’s settings?

Software is cheap and weightless. Fast lenses are not.

Follow-up: A reader has alerted me to a Photoshop plugin from Alien Skin named Bokeh which provides many options for the blurring of backgrounds. However, the plugin is seriously overpriced at $199, as the key step – selection of what is to be blurred – remains the exact same time consuming process in Photoshop which I had to use above. So it’s not a solution. Combining face/shape recognition technology with auto-blurring is the approach for those who favor picture taking over picture processing.

Further follow-up: Anothe reader has pointed me to Nik Software’s Viveza 2 – see the Comments to this piece. I see two advantages and one drawback. The advantages are that you do not need Photoshop, as the plug-in will work with Lightroom or Aperture. Further, the selection tool in Viveza 2 is truly amazing – exactly what is missing from Alien Skin’s Bokeh which uses Photoshop’s clunky selection tools which are labor intensive at the best of times. But the key drawback of Viveza 2 is that it does not provide adjustments of sharpness which is what the above piece is all about. Instead (click the link provided at the end of Arun’s Comment) you have to resort to machinations in Photoshop once again. So if only Nik Software could add a sharpness slider to all the other sliders in their tool, that would seem to do the trick until Panasonic or Sony do this with in camera software. Or, even better, if Adobe decides to add this sort of thing to Lightroom – now wouldn’t that be nice?

For anyone suffering from data overload.

There’s that old saw which has it that two workers turn up at your house to build a new wooden staircase. One is from the old world, makes a big pitch about how he only uses hand tools and the crafts he learned from his grandfather and probably has a missing digit to prove it. The other asks where he can plug in his saw bench. Which do you hire?

The investment world’s version of this tale is the old line manager who consults the paper copy of the Wall Street Journal, gets the Financial Times delivered for world news and reminds you that’s how they used to do it on Wall Street when he was learning the trade from his dad. The new kid refuses to meet with you, stating his time is too precious, and sets up a videoconference instead, during which he constantly consults one of a half dozen monitors to see how things are going in the markets.

Well, the answer is the same in both cases. The old guy loses the job. Time is money and he will end up costing you too much of both. And the young guy’s work will not only be faster and much more accurate, he can correct three mistakes while the old boy is still sharpening his hand tools.

This preamble is perfectly in context of this year’s Software of the Year award which is for NetNewsWire.

NetNewsWire

No matter what your interest, NetNewsWire will leverage your time just as effectively as the electric saw leverages the carpenter’s.

A case in point is the increasing frequency with which camera and lens software is updated by manufacturers. New features are added and existing problems fixed. If you have NetNewsWire tuned in to any of the many web sites addressing these things, using an RSS feed you can be assured of not missing these important updates. For example, Panasonic and Canon – whose products I use – have released several camera and lens software updates this year alone. I may not need them all but it’s nice to know they are installed if I do. On a related topic, keen photographers read many web sites and can avoid wasting time checking for new articles through the simple process of using NetNewsWire and a site’s RSS feed. If the site lacks an RSS feed, why bother with it? Clearly, the author cares little whether you read it or not as he cannot be bothered to draw your attention to new content.

This year NetNewsWIre started using Google Reader as its feed engine and has, as a result, become much more reliable. In particular its syncing of feeds between multiple devices is greatly improved. Thus, when I read an article on, say, my netbook, I am assured that its ‘read’ status is updated on my desktop and iPhone. That’s worth a lot to me.

After a while you quickly filter your feeds, separating gold from dross. And if, like me, you manage money for a living, you are in seventh heaven, because that’s a business where dross is dominant.

NetNewsWire is a free download and is this photographer’s Software of the Year. It only runs on Macs but there are doubtless like products for users of other operating systems. Whether you are a photographer or a data fiend who values his time, this application deserves to be on your computer(s).

Once you have loaded NetNewsWire on your Mac, just click the RSS logo in the toolbar of your browser and the feed will be automatically added.

The easy way to fix distortions.

PTLens was recommended to me by a fellow photographer and proves to be one of the easiest ways of fixing four common problems:

• ‘De-fishing’ fisheye images
• Correcting common lens distortions
• Perspective correction (leaning verticals, etc.)
• Correcting chromatic aberration (color fringing) and vignetting – not tested here

It comes in Mac and Windows versions; on the Mac it runs in native 64-bit mode if invoked from Lightroom and is a Universal application, meaning no need for the buggy Rosetta application (which causes spontaneous reboots in Snow Leopard) and supports full 16-bit color TIFF and PSD file formats. It’s a free download permitting 10 uses, whereafter the price is $25 – a very sensible policy.

Up to now I have been using ImageAlign for de-fishing snaps on the 5D taken with the Canon fisheye and Photoshop CS2 (a Rosetta application) and for correcting leaning verticals and barrel and pincushion distortion from Canon’s poor wide-angle lenses. ImageAlign does not work in PS CS3 or CS4. Perspective correction has been done in Photoshop CS2. As for chromatic aberration and vignetting, Lightroom version 2.0 and later does all I need, so I do not touch on that aspect of PTLens here.

I downloaded the PTLens application and installed the the programs (PTLens and PTLensEdit), making the latter the choice in Lightroom under Preferences->External Editing.

Many common lenses are programmed in though not, for some reason, fisheyes. No matter – correcting distortion in the latter is child’s play using the slider.

Here’s an original fisheye image of one of the bedrooms in Hearst Castle where I very much wanted to retain the ceiling in the final image:

Here is the same image ‘defished’ in both ImageAlign (left) and PTLens:

There is no practical difference, defishing rendering the field of view of a 12mm hyper-wide rectilinear lens. PTLens saves the processed file back into the image stack in Lightroom and is very fast, the preview reacting in real time as the sliders are worked. As ImageAlign has folded and the application/PS plugin are no longer available, PTLens is a viable and inexpensive modern alternative.

When it comes to correcting more regular lens distortions, PTLens is in its element, as it has a large database of lenses with all the settings stored for you, whereas Photoshop has none – you have to do everything manually. Here’s an example from the over-rated 24-105mm Canon L zoom which noticeable barrel distortion at 24mm as is clear in this picture:

Barrel time – 24-105mm Canon lens at 24mm.

Here are the before and after images, the latter processed in PTLens using the programmed settings from PTLens with no other adjustments:

Take a good look at the handicapped parking sign before and after correction.

Finally, perspective correction – here’s the picture I published the other day showing the correction of perspective using GIMP; in PTLens it’s even easier.

Before PTLens

After PTLens

A slam dunk purchase at $25 and you can even make it use all four cores of your CPU if it has that many. Highly recommended. PTLens has finally consigned Photoshop to the trash, where I have long wanted to place it. Lightroom and PTLens does all this working photographer needs and neither needs Apple’s compromised Rosetta PPC CPU emulator whose repair is doubtless a low priority in Cupertino, though they do admit its existence:

Great price beats Photoshop.

Stupidly named, GIMP, or “The GNU Image Manipulation Program”, this Mac application does itself no justice with that dumb name. It’s a fine alternative to Photoshop for users who, like me, detest the user interface of that Adobe application and like the ridiculous price asked even less.

One of the reasons I still make do with Photoshop CS2 (an older version of the current CS4 which runs under the Rosetta PPC emulator in Snow Leopard) is that the upgrade price makes no sense for this photographer who gets most of the tools he needs in Lightroom and basically roundtrips to Photoshop from Lightroom to fix converging verticals and pincushion and barrel lens distortion. (Try Canon’s 24-105mm at 24mm to see real barrel distortion).

The problem is that Snow Leopard suffers from a huge problem in the Rosetta emulator, as widely reported on Apple’s Discussion Forum. Rosetta applications are prone to spontaneously reboot your Mac! This has happened to me on all three I run – Quicken 2005, Excel v.X and Photoshop CS2. It has never happened with any Universal/Intel applications. Maybe Apple will admit error and fix this. Who knows? More likely they will just tell users to upgrade to Universal versions of the affected applications (impossible with Quicken where none exists, by the way).

GIMP fixes all of that. It’s a Universal application so there are no Rosetta issues. Exporting to GIMP from Lightroom is merely a question of setting Lightroom’s Preferences->External Editing to use GIMP as the external image editor. Then hitting Photo->Edit In->Edit in GIMP in LR moves a TIFF copy of your image to GIMP for distortion or perspective correction. Correction is applied in Filters->Distorts->Lens Distortions (for lens distortions) or in Tools->Transform Tools->Perspective to fix leaning verticals. Unlike in CS2, there is no need to create a Background Layer when doing the latter – it’s much easier in GIMP. When you tell GIMP to save the processed picture it will save it right back into Lightroom alongside the original, in a stack. Just like CS2.

GIMP can only handle 8-bit files. I have experimented with it and compared output to the 16-bit ones from Photoshop and cannot tell the difference in 30″ x 40″ prints. You can read lots of technical articles explaining why 16-bit is better but not a one of those will be illustrated with the only thing that matters – real pictures. The Label Drinkers are at work again.

Here’s a ‘before’ and ‘after’ showing the use of perspective correction to get rid of extraneous detail on the right of the picture – I simply could not get into a better position from which to take this:

Original snap before applying perspective correction.

Here’s the ‘after’ image:

Morro Bay at sunset. 5D, 24-105mm @ 105mm. Perspective corrected in GIMP.

The price of GIMP? How about free?

You can download it here and it runs fine on Snow Leopard 10.6.1. If you need the Help file, that’s a separate download (strange) but it integrates nicely. Just use a keyword search to find what you need after invoking Help from within GIMP.

Friend of the blog Greg Littell has pointed me to a couple of useful links. To make GIMP feel more like Photoshop and to use your old Photoshop plug-ins, click here. For a complete directory of hundreds of GIMP plug-ins, click here.