Category Archives: Software

Lightroom 2

Lightroom

A feature comparison.

With the release of Lightroom 2, Adobe has published a useful feature comparison to Version 1 – click here.

I’m not upgrading right now, respecting my ‘Never Buy Version 1.0 of anything’ rule. Further, as I do not do a lot of image processing, the enhanced controls in v2 don’t do that much for me. 64 bit support? Meaningless to me from a practical perspective.

As for Lightroom 1.4.1, which is what I currently use, I couldn’t be happier. It’s fast, doesn’t lose images and printing is a dream. I’m beginning to wonder whether Aperture will be orphaned soon – a small user base (Mac only), a bog slow application unless you spend $$$ on hardware and very buggy implementation will not see me back with that flawed product.

Cataloging movies and books

Movies, Software

An important source of inspiration.

I believe it’s important for any photographer to manage his sources of inspiration, be they books, magazines or movies. As is clear from yesterday’s journal entry, movies are an important source of ideas for my photographs so it’s important that all those DVDs are properly cataloged for easy retrieval.

In my case each DVD is labelled on the spine with a sequential number and that number is recorded as the location in the database. Movies are filed in numerical order – to arrange by title is futile in a growing library, as you will be constantly rearranging things.

For the past few years I have been using Delicious Library to do the database work but have become increasingly disappointed with its poor export capabilities and general slowness. When the new iPhone software was announced the other day it was immediately obvious that DL’s creators had dropped the ball and failed to deliver a capable iPhone export. Add the fact that you cannot network your DL data unless all networked computers use OS Leopard and I was ready for a change. Networking is important in my setup as the database is maintained on the office MacBook and then shared with the old iMac in the bar, where movies are looked up. The old iMac, no speed demon with a 1 gHz G4 CPU, is perfect for this sort of thing.

Along comes DVDpedia which not only offers a host of export formats, it also permits dynamic syncing with your iPhone once you download the related application to your phone. And, best of all, it’s very fast, far easier to use than DL (it’s as fast as OS X’s Finder) and has an import function to bring in all your Delicious Library movies. The import works well. You really do not want to have to reenter everything manually if you have as many movies as I do – some 500 and counting.


‘Location’ refers to the movie’s number for easy retrieval


Apple’s superb Coverflow view is a built-in option if you use OS Leopard

You can see my library online in one of the many export formats by clicking the Link at the bottom of the page. Download is very fast.

A related product from the same vendor – Bookpedia – does the same thing for your book collection. In aggregate, the cost of these two applications is less than DL which integrates the movie and book cataloging functions. Click on my book Link below and you will see a Bookpedia version of the photography books in my library.

Here is my Bookpedia library Syncd to the iPhone:


Touch any thumbnail for a full screen view of the cover

Enjoying processing

Lightroom

Hard to believe, really.

I confess that the two words in the title of this piece are ones I would never have seen writing together. To me processing is simply a mechanical step that stands between the snap and its realization. A necessary if boring interlude which should be made as fast and automated as possible to let the picture show itself to the world.

If the increasingly rapacious hardware needs of every latest version of Aperture saw me abandon the product rather than spend more money on newer, faster computers seemingly every six months, then I can only report that my first few months with Lightroom have been nothing short of bliss. Relatively speaking, that is. I still hate to process but now I don’t have the endless frustrations of spinning beach balls and lost originals that were becoming Aperture’s specialty.

First, Lightroom runs happily even on our ancient G4 iMac and second, it simply cooks on my current bottom-of-the-line MacBook (1.83gHz C2D, 2gB RAM). Second, while the interface may lack the polish of Aperture’s, who cares? You no longer need Aperture’s pretty screens to distract you while you wait for the beach ball to disappear. In Lightroom you are already three snaps down the road of production and output. In other words, Lightroom is an industrial grade tool for users who need fast, reliable throughput.

Even round trips to Photoshop are not that bad. Once CS2 is loaded (it takes 30 seconds on the MacBook as it’s running in Rosetta PPC emulation mode) a round trip to take advantage of special features not currently available in Lightroom takes a minute or so. Mostly this is to use ImageAlign or the Transform function to correct skewed and leaning verticals. Other than that, pretty much everything I need to fix a picture is in Lightroom, and I would hope that distortion correction will be added to the next full version of Lightroom in a few months.


Hearst pool cloister ceiling. 5D, fish eye, 1/1500, f/8, ISO 400, Image Align

A related benefit is the easy ability to craft import and processing presets – nothing more than one click settings which confer a bunch of preferred adjustments on your image, with full preview and undo abilities. I should add that I use RAW exclusively for my source images, whether from the 5D or LX-1.


Lone diner. One click to monochrome in Lightroom. Lumix LX-1, RAW original, ISO 80

So I’m not about to say processing is fun, but Lightroom simply makes this step as painless as anything since Polaroid gave the world instant snaps.

DxO Optics Pro Elite

Software

Anti-aberration software.

I have been going on for quite a while now about how correction of camera aberrations (rotten lenses, flaky sensors, poor manufacturing quality control) will increasingly migrate to software fixes, away from the far costlier hardware redesign route.

DxO has been making aftermarket software – meaning you run it on your computer not in your camera – to address many of the more common problems for ages. However, if you sniff around their web site (it’s invariably bog slow, so be patient. It’s so bad I almost didn’t bother, in fact) you will find that DxO also offers its creations for in-camera use. If they can get it to work fast in that iteration, let’s hope that Canon, Sony et al will take them upon it, swallow their ‘not invented here’ pride and start offering automated fixes for all that ails modern digital cameras within the camera’s firmware.

The product is named DxO Optics Pro Elite (a dumb name – something like Magic Lens Repair would have captured my attention much sooner), the costlier $299 Elite variant being DxO’s way of extracting some more coin from those of us who use full frame Canon DSLRs, as these are not supported in the base $169 version.

First you have to download the thing which takes for ever:

The 151mB download (version 4.5) is for my 5D with the lens modules for the 14mm, 15mm, 20mm, 24-105mm, 50mm f/1.4, 85mm f/1.8 and 400mm f/5.6 lenses chosen. Another mistake, DxO. Why not simply include all cameras and lenses to make one download for all users? I also have a 200mm f/2.8 L but DxO lists no module for that – probably because the lens is already close to perfect. By the way, I do not own the very costly 14mm L optic, but do have some snaps taken with a loaner. And that lens, special as it is, needs a lot of error correction. My download includes the Lightroom plug-in, meaning I can use the application as a standalone or from within Lightroom. Nice. I had to install the application three times before it worked properly – with the first two tries the lens modules were not recognized. Not so nice.

Anyone even thinking of using this application should first check if his body and lenses are supported – otherwise it’s largely useless.

What DxO is trying to do is provide a software suite to fix all that ails digital camera lenses and sensors, including vignetting, chromatic aberration, distortion, dynamic range limitations, noise removal (not really needed for the 5D), sharpness masking, de-fishing, etc.

$299 is an awful lot of money for someone who already has Photoshop, which offers many of the functions in DxO so the question here is whether it’s worth spending the money? I downloaded a 14 day (How silly is that? How about one month, DxO? Something this complex needs time to evaluate) free trial version for my MacBook which is using OS X Tiger 10.4.11. It also comes in a PC flavor for masochists.

What makes this interesting is the claimed lens-specific modules and the de-fishing function, especially now that ImageAlign appears defunct. If you use PS CS3 (at $700 it’s way overpriced for me) then you have the de-fishing ability built in. PS CS2 and earlier need the ImageAlign plugin or you use something like DxO.

In trying out this software my primary interests are in fixing the various lens distortions in the 14mm, 15mm, 20mm and 24-105mm lenses (the latter at its wide end, where it needs most help) in an effort to make a subjective evaluation of whether it’s money well spent compared with the existing tools in Lightroom and CS2.

Installation: DxO needs to learn from successful software makers that offering a product for under $100 will quintuple their sales and negate the need for all the anti-piracy software they insist on installing when you first fire up their product. Let’s face it, they aren’t going to sell too many of these at $299, any more than Apple sold Aperture at $499 (now at $199 and counting). $49-99 sounds about right to me.

The install screen says 21 days, their site says 14 days for the trial. Go figure.

I went with ‘Expert Settings’:

Here’s the first file – a fish eye snap – being processed. That took 2 minutes – slow. Chromatic aberration correction was the prime aspect of this first pass.

Next into the ‘Enhance’ section where you see something like this after clicking on ‘Geometry’:

One click and the image preview is de-fished.

Click ‘Process:’ and it’s another long wait – 3-4 minutes – before your file is output.

Sure, the result is fine, but it only takes a few seconds to do the same thing in ImageAlign.

Integration with Lightroom: DxO supplies a plugin which you can point Lightroom to as a second external editor. My first is, of course, PS CS2.

This works well – just remember not to have DxO already open or the plugin will not run. The image saved from the plugin will appear next to the original in the Lightroom catalog.

Another welcome feature is the abiity the application has to automatically correct vignetting (provided yours is one of the lenses supported) and also to optionally correct for Volume Anamorphosis – the tendency of objects near the edges of a picture taken with a very wide lens to be distorted. This is physics, not optical aberration, and the application does a good job of ‘naturalizing’ the result.

Here are before and after snaps of a file exported using the Lighroom plugin and taken on the 20mm Canon which has lots of vignetting and, obviously, renders objects with Voulme Anamorphosis uncorrected (like any 20mm on a 35mm format full frame camera). I have also allowed DxO to do its own thing with contrast and lighting. I think you will agree the result is good:

Did I try DxO’s noise reduction? Well, it’s not needed on the 5D’s images and where it’s really needed – for the Panasonic LX-1’s noisy snaps – it’s no use as that camera is not supported.

Cautions: A reading of the DxO forum suggests that upcoming version 5 for the Mac may be buggy if its recently released Windows predecessor is anything to go by. Worse, DxO apparently drops support for obsolete cameras in the later version, which disables a lot of DSLR users given the pace of change in hardware. So I suppose that when DxO upgades the application the user may have to upgrade his camera. Beyond dumb.

Conclusion: DxO Optics Pro Elite does what it says, and does it well as regards output quality. However, I have major issues which prevent me from recommending it:

  • It’s way overpriced. Sell it for $49.95 and customers will beat a line to your door. But $299 is ridiculous.
  • It’s simply too slow to be useable. My experience was on a speedy 2gB 1.83gHz MacBook with an Intel C2D CPU. It took DxO 4 minutes, typically, to process one 70mB TIFF file in 16 bit mode. The application comes with a batch processing function so if you can live with having like corrections applied to all your batch members, run it overnight.
  • The way the software, when updated, apparently obsoletes support of discontinued cameras or lenses. That one about does it for me, as my 5D will doubtless be ‘obsolete’ by the end of the year.
  • The application is buggy. After one day’s use (and three installs on a plain vanilla MacBook) the lens profiles were lost the next day and another install was required. That says Beta not Release version to me, and you still want $299? I don’t think so.
  • The list of supported cameras and lenses is very short.

The one feature this application has – the ability to correct Volume Anamorphosis – which I have not seen elsewhere – is nice to have, especially for architectural and object pictures made with very wide lenses and including significant depth. Otherwise, everything here can be done with Lightroom (vignetting, chromatic aberration, highlight and shadow recovery) and ImageAlign/PS CS2 (de-fishing and distortion correction). If, like me, you already own these, save your money or buy them used for less than DxO wants for Optics Pro Elite.

Lightroom 2.0

Lightroom

Beta testing is the way to go.

Adobe has just released Lightroom 2.0 Beta allowing all and sundry to bang away at it in a sort of group grope-wiki software development approach which I can only applaud.

Localized corrections in the Develop module and multiple monitor use seem to be the most useful enhancements – this is enough to call it 2.0 or are earnings hurting? Still, Adobe is adopting the right development approach.

There’s no soft proofing support yet, but read this for a workaround.

Interestingly, the ‘10,000 pixels a side’ import file size limit (meaning files cannot be over 10k pixels on either dimension or more than 100mB in total) has been increased to 30,000. I actually ran into the 10,000 pixel limit when migrating from Aperture to Lightroom on some big scans of 4″x5″ originals, so this is not as odd as it at first sounds.

Anyone can use the 2.0 Beta but to extend the trial past 30 days you either have to be a registered 1.x user or ask Adobe nicely. There’s a neat tutorial here. In a related tutorial an easy way of exporting, say, multiple images to Photoshop, such as in HDR photography is explained. The enhancements allowing multiple image printing on one page are nothing short of superb – some 5 minutes into this tutorial.

Is Adobe trying too hard? With 2.0 Beta newly out and 1.4.1 still in need of repair, is Adobe unnecessarily rushing things?

While I have no access to current data, assuming that PC users outnumber Mac zealots by 4:1, it’s not like Aperture is a competitor. Add the fact that Aperture 2.0 seems to require the costliest Mac to run half decently (if then), whereas Lightroom potters along nicely on an ancient G4 Mac, I somehow doubt there are going to be too many users switching from Lightroom to Aperture. In fact, I would guess they are about as common as people looking for permanent resident status in North Korea. Trust me, Abobe, I only want to go through this hell once, so there’s no way you are about to lose me as a user unless something better comes along and it uses LR’s catalogs without need for conversion.

However, given how few people use Macs, I wonder whether Adobe would be better off canning half the Lightroom development team and spending the savings on properly marketing 1.4. Lightroom 2.0 is nice but, let’s face it, it can wait and you are not going to dump Aperture just because of this Lightroom Beta upgrade which isn’t even ready for prime time.

And, please, no comments about how photographers are disproportionately users of Macs. The sole reason you visit this blog is to read about photography and 80% of you, according to my statistics, use Internet Explorer. Last I checked, that piece of garbage doesn’t even run on a Mac …. and anyone using IE with Parallels on a Mac truly needs a lobotomy. And I’ll bet that of the 20% using Safari, some are running it on Windows and many don’t use Aperture in any case. So the 4:1 LR:Aperture user ratio is probably understated.

Sure, all the toadies, sycophants, commercial flacks and those otherwise in the pay of Adobe will extol the virtues of 2.0 and praise Adobe for its community spirit. Utter nonsense. Adobe is a stockholder-owned public company. It’s primary duty, as with any public company, it to maximize the wealth of its shareholders, not tell us about its great good heart and wonderful social policies.

So, Abode, fire a dozen developers (starting with the fellow who approved 1.4.1 for release) – $1-2mm saved – and roll something like this out.

“Aperture users! Make Lightroom run twice as fast. On your ten year old Mac. Invest the hardware savings in a new Nikon D3 instead”.

And let’s face it, Adobe, your stock is nothing to write home about.

Or, better still Adobe, write a proper converter for Aperture to Lightroom catalogs and sell Lightroom at 50% of retail to anyone downloading it and sending in the box top from their Aperture software. Now that’s something that might make me show some interest in your stock and it would pay for itself with the first few conversions. It might even preclude an imminent hostile takeover though I’m conflicted here as I would far rather own the stock is someone wants to acquire you for a premium to the quoted price.