RAW Image Processors for Your Digital Photography
Posted by admin in photography on May 28th, 2010
On 5/27/2010, Phase One made the announcement that they had acquired Microsoft Expression Media as one of their product offerings. That got me thinking about the fusion between Digital Asset Managers (DAM) and RAW Image Processing programs. Assuming in some future incarnation, Phase One merges Expression Media with Capture One, that would put their Capture One software on a par with Adobe’s Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture. So, having set the context and named the players, there is are a few other items to get out of the way:
What are RAW Image Processors?
Most Pro and Prosumer digital cameras record image data in a format called Camera RAW. Oversimplified, this means the image data recorded by the sensor is saved intact to the file, and any image interpretation like color temperature or saturation is kept separate. This is as distinctly opposed to cameras that save files in the JPEG format, where the image adjustments are applied in-camera and saved as a whole, tossing out a certain amount of the original image data. What this means to you, the photographer, is that you have opportunities after the image has been captured to revisit critical decisions like color balance, black point, white point, contrast, and so on. To a limited extent, you can even adjust exposure on an improperly exposed image, but that’s really not what RAW was intended for and you should never rely on being able to save a poorly exposed image just because you shot RAW.
Once RAW became popular, software that could interpret this format and turn it into something usable in Photoshop became a new category. Just sprang into existence as a new software category. Just like that! So the primary job of a RAW Image Processor is to do the magic to interpret the sensor data and allow you to perform some rudimentary adjustments on the original data. That’s the minimum and it’s probably about as far as anyone thought it through when the concept of postponing crucial image processing decisions to post-processing was originally formed.
The current crop of software is:
- Adobe Camera RAW (ACR), which ships with Photoshop
- Adobe Lightroom, which uses the same ACR engine mentioned above
- Apple Aperture, a completely different beast by Apple Computer only for Macintosh computers
- Capture One, by Phase One, which has a medium-format Phase One Digital Back heritage
- DxO Optics
Other software exists, but these are the top ones in current use today.
What are Digital Asset Managers?
Digital Asset Managers, which have the unfortunate acronym “DAM”, have only a couple of requirements:
- They need to be able to catalog large numbers of images
- Their image catalog must encompass online (attached hard disk) and offline (removable hard disk, DVD, etc.) media
- The catalog must be sortable and searchable
- You should be able to do some level of metadata manipulation using your DAM, such as titling, keywording, and captioning
In this category of pure DAMs, you have:
Of these, Portfolio seems to have the most general acceptance.
DAMs are YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It — until you do) software. You may have different needs, but most relatively prolific shooters don’t need the capabilities in these software packages, but the do need other capabilities way more. What are those capabilities? Read on…
The Combined DAM/RAW Image Processor
This is my name for the category currently occupied by Lightroom and Aperture, and very possibly soon to be joined by Phase One. That last is just a crystal ball prediction on my part. Speculation. So I previously described the minimum a RAW image processor needs to do. The questions really become “what are the common things they do?” and “what are the evaluation points?”
For what I say below to make sense, I need to make my position clear: I post-process a lot of images and like to keep the time per image to a minimum. Heck, who doesn’t? But I’m really trying for 5 minutes per image in post processing. To a large degree I’m succeeding. So, with that in mind, here is a matrix of who does what in the DAM/RAW market:
| Lightroom | Aperture | Capture One | Capture One + Expression Media | |
| Raw Processing | Good | Good | Excellent | Excellent |
| Adjustments | Good | Good[1] | Good[2] | Good[2] |
| Adjustment Brushes | Good+ | Good+ | None | None |
| Gradient Adjustment | Great | None | None | None |
| Spot/Patch | Good[3] | Good[4] | Acceptable | Acceptable |
| C/A Adjustment[6] | Acceptable | Acceptable | Acceptable | Acceptable |
| Tethered Shooting | Acceptable | Unacceptable | Good | Good |
| Database[5] | Good | Good+ | None | Unknown |
Overall on the Comparison Matrix
The matrix is full of footnotes. Read those below for more detail on each noted entry. Now, for the sake of this remaining discussion, I’ll assume Capture One + Expression Media means Capture One 5 + Expression Media 2. They will probably want to blend the packages together in a future release to be more competitive with Lightroom and Aperture.
Without adjustment brushes, the overall usefulness of the tool is significantly decreased, as you can’t target specific areas for enhancement or exposure adjustments. Lightroom has the gradient adjustment, which allows you to create a sort of adjustable split neutral density filter. Aperture allows you to create multiple adjustments where you can apply them to the whole image, brush in specific areas, or apply them to the image and just brush out specific areas. Capture One is missing adjustment brushes.
The metadata entry in Aperture seems more natural than Lightroom. Lightroom tries to be too helpful and it seems very difficult to get the exact metadata I want in a Lightroom image. But it’s doable. In Capture One, you can enter metadata, but it only persists if you export the file as TIFF or JPEG. If you export as DNG, then the adjustments and metadata evaporate.
Tethered shooting can be a big deal for studio shooting, as it exposes lots of unseen problems in corners or with exposure before you pull the whole shoot and lighting arrangement down. Capture One would have gotten an Excellent, except that — at least for Canon — they can’t control the camera settings other than the shutter release. I haven’t tried Lightroom’s tethered shooting but it is rumored to be about the same. Aperture has tethered shooting, but they haven’t really put it together. The “approved” solution is a hackery of setting a “Hot Folder” by using an AppleScript that some guy wrote and then using the Canon EOS Utility software to fire off the shots. It’s slow, error-prone, and just not up to pro standards.
The summary is that there is no single perfect tool. There is a ton of overlap and from version to version, one tool will pull slightly ahead of another in ease of use or in terms of “killer feature you can’t do without”. It’s still a multi-tool environment.
[1] Aperture adjustments contain “Definition” which is “Clarity” in Lightroom or ACR. However, Lightroom allows for negative as well as positive values of Clarity, allowing for some skin softening or gauzy effects. As a make-up provision, Aperture has a skin-softening adjustment brush.
[2] Capture One has Vibrance, but not Clarity. Clarity is really just a midtone contrast enhancement, but it’s way easier to add with a simple slider than with curves.
[3] Spotting and patching in Lightroom are intuitive because you can create a target area, then drag the source area around until you have the look you want. Adobe owns the live preview feature in this respect.
[4] Aperture allows you to brush in spotting and patching, more as you would in Photoshop, but in a non-destructive manner. This is nice, especially for areas that aren’t circular — in other words, not spots. But… it’s slow and you have to wait for it to re-render to figure out whether the results are acceptable.
[5] The database feature is the one that sets Lightroom and Aperture apart from Capture One. You can catalog your images — up to a point, using Lightroom or Aperture, then do pretty good searching on the metadata, including when the image was made, what keywords were included, the camera, etc.
[6] Chromatic aberration is one of those “your mileage may vary” features. Capture One was made with the Phase One digital backs in mind. It has a catalog of back/lens combinations that ostensibly allow it to do some useful lens defect correction. They have no similar catalog for DSLRs. With that background, Lightroom and Aperture both take the same approach: They look for high contrast vertical lines and allow you to reduce the yellow/blue or red/cyan fringing. Sometimes, and to some extent. Capture One has an “analyze” feature where it looks at the image and tries to make a best guess from that. Additionally, it allows for some automated elimination of purple fringing.
Zooming In Photoshop CS4 and CS5
Posted by photodiva in photography, photoshop tips on May 11th, 2010
I’ll assume you’ve used a few versions of Photoshop and noticed the changes Adobe made in CS4, and now in CS5. To be clear, in CS4, Adobe added a “feature” that displays a pixel grid once you have zoomed to a certain level. In CS5, Adobe changed the default behavior of the zoom tool such that when you click and drag the zoom tool, the zooming happens as in an animation.
I hate both of these features. I don’t like the visual “noise” interjected by the pixel grid, so let’s first figure out how to get rid of that. Shopping through the preferences panel (Cmd+K on a Mac) reveals … um, nothing. So, a bit more Googling and messing around and presto! Go to View > Show > Pixel Grid and make sure it is unchecked. The first step in figuring this out was to identify the actual Adobe-approved name for the feature (Pixel Grid), then figure out how to turn it off.
Now, the second, and more frustrating, of these features is the zooming one. Figuring out what this feature is called took a bit more persistence. Pro-Tip: It’s called “Scrubby Zooming.” To turn it off and make it so you can again draw a marquee with the zoom tool to do your zooming, first select the zoom tool in the tool well. Then, with the zoom tool selected, look in the tool bar at the top, and uncheck “scrubby zooming.”
And now you’re back!
Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO = Exposure
Posted by photodiva in photography on May 1st, 2010
To make a properly exposed image, the photographer (you!) have to control how much light falls on the light sensitive surface (sensor or film). The longer this light falls on the sensor, the more light there is.
So, let’s use a handy metaphor: The garden hose. Turn it on high, and you have a wide aperture — lots of water. Close it down a good deal and you have a narrow one — just a trickle. Continuing the metaphor, if you water for 1 minute with the hose wide open, your plant might get enough water. But with the hose closed most of the way down, it could take 10 minutes. So you see that to get the “right” amount of water, you can either water really hard for a short while or drip the water in for a longer time.
Bringing this back to cameras and lenses, you can use a small aperture (larger numbers like f/16) for a longer time (say, 1/30 sec.) or a large aperture (say, f/4) for a shorter duration (say 1/500 sec.). And these would deliver the same amount of light to the sensor.
ISO
We’ll get around to why you might care about all this in a minute. First, what does ISO have to do with it all? The ISO is sort of like how thirsty the plant is. So, an ISO of 100 would be a pretty thirsty plant and ISO 800 would be, shall we say, drought-resistant. The point is, the larger the ISO, the less light needs to fall on the sensor to make a properly exposed image.
But wait, you say, my meter figures all this junk out for me. True enough, grasshopper, but do you really understand the decisions your meter is making and control its recommendations? Let’s tie the whole thing together.
Big ISO numbers work well for lower light situations or when you need to stop motion. However, sensors operating at higher ISOs tend to produce what’s called digital noise. The lower the ISO you can use, the higher your image quality will be. Your camera manufacturer will not engineer you out of this responsibility.
Shutter Speeds
Fast shutter speeds (higher denominators like 1/1000 second) will stop motion, but they allow less light in than longer shutter speeds. Longer shutter speeds, especially on a tripod, will allow you to achieve artistic effects like motion blurs.
Aperture
Aperture is the real kicker. The wider the aperture, the “shallower” the depth of field. What, you ask, is depth of field? It’s the part of the image that is tack-sharp in focus. The smaller the aperture, the more of your image will be in focus. Sometimes you need tack sharpness from edge to edge, so you will tend toward f/16 or f/22. Other times, you are deliberately selecting a particular image component to be sharp and stand out from the more diffuse background. For these images, use a wider aperture like f/5.6. And, of course, as you vary your aperture, you will have to vary your shutter speed in the inverse to keep that magical “correct” exposure. Depth of field varies from lens to lens, and by the distance between the camera and the subject. Learn how you lenses behave.
The images below are of the same set of batteries in the same light, shot at (from left to right) f/4, f/8, and f/22, respectively. Focus was on the second battery, and you can see that at f/4, the second battery is pretty much all that is in focus, as the aperture gets smaller, the surrounding batteries come more into focus.
So… how to apply this to the modern DSLR? Use either the shutter priority mode (often denoted as TV) to pin your shutter speed at a given point. I know I can hand-hold a moderate lens like 80mm or shorter at a 60th of a second, so if I’m working fast, I’ll put the camera on TV at 1/60 second and just watch to make sure that the aperture doesn’t get so wide that my subject will be out of focus (too shallow depth of field). However, if I’m shooting a landscape on a tripod, I might set the camera on AV at f/22 and let the camera’s meter figure out all the rest of the good stuff. By the way, I use ISO 100 unless I simply cannot get sufficient depth of field without increasing.
iStock UBB Helper Updated!
Posted by admin in iStockphoto, photography on January 14th, 2010
Several of you have noticed that changes at iStockphoto have caused the UBB Helper not to work. To you, I say: It’s fixed!
There were a couple of issues that came about, presumably as a side-effect of iStockphoto’s most recent redesign.
- Q: No sizes other than thumbnail or ginormous are showing. How come?
A: Cuz iStock removed the intermediate sizes. Now, they are not presented as options in the UBB Helper. - Q: What does “scrape” in the lightbox toolbar do and why can’t I make it work?
A: Cuz when iStock changed their markup (for the better, I might add), the scraping code could not find the page elements anymore. That’s now fixed. What it does is, when supplied with a lightbox ID, grab the thumbnails for a bunch of images and display them in groups, three across. You can edit from there.
So, now you might ask: Are any new developments planned? The short answer is that I can either program or photograph. I think photography wins out for now. But stay tuned…
Help Make the Holidays Brighter for Kids
Posted by photodiva in photography on December 10th, 2009
This year I’ve decided to give a portion of my November/December earnings to buy presents for children and support the Holiday Gift Drive. You too can help by downloading some of my work on iStockphoto.com. Thank you for your continued support.
Fun With iPhone Photography
Posted by photodiva in photography on December 3rd, 2009
I’ve had an iPhone for a while and the camera, while not incredibly great, is incredibly fun. The great thing about taking photographs with a cell phone is it’s not serious. I mean, reaaalllly, does anyone expect cell phone pictures to be any good?
Lightroom for Stock Photography
Posted by photodiva in photography on November 29th, 2009
Lightroom is a bit of a hybrid between digital asset manager and photo processor. It’s not Photoshop and it’s not Extensis Portfolio. In version 2.0 and later of Lightroom, the retouching tools are sufficient to give you good results for many images without getting into Photoshop. The filing and filtering tools are good enough to keep pretty organized.
A Suggested Workflow
After noodling around with this for a bit, I’ve settled on the following philosophy: “Do what makes sense in Lightroom’s Develop Module. If there is any remaining work, edit in Photoshop.” So, here’s what I do as I go over a photo shoot:
- Edit. Use whatever flagging you like — color coding, stars, whatever. When you have decided on an image…
- Crop/straighten if necessary.
- Color correct if necessary.
- Exposure correct and watch the edges so highlights and shadows are not clipped.
- Look at edges for chromatic aberration — this applies primarily to high-resolution digital cameras like the Canon 5D Mark II or 1Ds Mark III. Correct if necessary.
- Use the keen spot-removal tool at 100% to make sure there is no sensor dust in the image.
- Move on to the next image. It’s that simple and quick!
There are a number of other adjustments you can make in Lightroom, and your image might benefit from them. Here’s the catch. If there is a stray object that borders on an important object, the spot-removal tool may not produce good results. This is the primary reason I ever take an image into Photoshop anymore. Precise cloning and healing. To do this, simply use Lightroom’s Edit In Photoshop command.
Once you’re done partying on the image in Photoshop, just save and close. Switch back to Lightroom and there, right beside the original, is your new copy.
Finally, export the JPEG to a location you can remember so you can upload the image.
Summary
Switching tools is time consuming. Do it as infrequently as possible. Stay in Lightroom when possible, but bail into Photoshop where it is obvious.
The Elusive White Background
Posted by photodiva in photography on May 13th, 2009
Photos shot on a white background are easy for buyers to use. White provides a consistent color (or non-color, if you will). So, as a result many of us spend time perfecting setups that will allow for people or objects to be isolated on these pure white backgrounds — “floating in space.” Built in camera meters are, unfortunately, not designed to help you achieve that look. Nobody, however well intentioned, can give you a “secret formula” for creating this white background look, but here are some guidelines:
- Your camera will try to make a scene’s exposure average out to 18% gray. That means a scene that is mostly white will wind up looking gray because the in-camera meter is working at cross purposes to your intent.
- To be white (and that means 255, 255, 255 in RGB), the background must be 1.5 to 2 stops brighter than the main subject.
- Lights tend to produce “hot” spots that could be 2 stops brighter at the center, but falling off at the edges.
These effects look, to read many of the blog posts on the net, easy to achieve by taping a couple of little strobes in strategic positions. This turns out not to be the case for reliable results. Besides the +2 exposure for the background, there are a couple of other questions:
- How do you get a background that bright?
- And how do you make sure that light doesn’t pollute your subject?
How to Get a Really Bright Background
There is only one way to do this, with a few variants: Shine a really bright light at it. The variants are that you can shine a light off a white background, shine several lights off that background to reduce falloff at the edges of the frame, or shine bright lights through a translucent background. So that’s at least one light in addition to your keylight.
How Not to Get Light Pollution on the Subject
The short answer to this is distance. The further from the background the more distinct the separation between the subject an the background and the less background light will spill around the edges of the subject. The longer answer is that whatever light you have pointing at the background needs to be modified so all of its output is toward the background and none up off the ceiling, or back at the subject. Barn doors, black cards, cereal boxes, anything that doesn’t let light shine through is fine.
The Other Option: Photoshop
The words I hate to hear in conjunction with a planned photograph is “and we can Photoshop this later.” If you know about the problem beforehand, it’s always easier to solve the problem with cropping and lighting. Ok, say that doesn’t work. No way do you get your 255, 255, 255 background that you so dearly desire. The temptation is to grab the eraser tool and start hacking. And everything is fine until you get near the object you wanted isolated, at which point, everything begins to look quite artificial.
Canon 5D Mark II: Lots of Pixels!
Posted by photodiva in photography on April 19th, 2009
- The 5D is amazingly quiet. So quiet, if fact, that it doesn’t seem you’ve made your exposure. Spooky… but cool in a way.
- Canon implemented a feature called “Live View” on the 40D and later 1-Series DSLRs. This sounds kind of dumb initially. After all, who uses an LCD plate on a DSLR? It turns out to be incredibly useful for no-shake, deliberately composed studio shots. The 5D also has this feature, but it is tangled up in the video features of the camera, so it is easier to make mistakes and clunkier to use than the same feature on the 1Ds. Clunky because if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Canon user, you will come to expect the SET button (you know, the one in the middle of that big wheel you turn with your thumb) to control important functions. The SET button turns Live View on and off on the 40D and 1Ds Mark III, but there is a separate button on the 5D that is overloaded to both control Live View and control the HD video capability. I’m sure that, over time, I would get used to this, but my first encounter with this particular control was not a positive one.
- As one might expect, the resolution from the 5D is amazing. The RAW images come out to about 22MB, so buy more hard disks. A subjective opinion: The images from the 5D are way better than the 40D just because of the density. The images from the 1Ds Mark III seem “creamier,” if that’s a good way to characterize image quality.
- Flash. Prosumer cameras from Canon – and I categorize the 5D at the top of that basket – have always had built in flashes. They weren’t great, but in an absolute emergency, the could provide some fill. The 1-series never has had built-in flashes, on the assumption that carrying heavy gear makes you a good photographer (I made that part up). Anyhow, if you decide on a 5D, set aside a few dollars for one of the 580EX speedlights.
- Feel. I’ve been shooting with the 1D and 1Ds bodies for the last several years and every time I pick up a camera without a vertical-release grip, I feel like someone cut a hand off. It’s just plain weird. If you have gotten used to a vertical release grip, then you might want to consider the add-on accessory for the 5D.
- Weather hardening. This is a major point Canon makes in their sales. The 1-series bodies have more weather-resistant seals at all their coupling points – lens mount, electronics attachment points, etc. But if you use your camera with some care and don’t drop it in water, then saving a few thousand dollars can go a long way toward making you feel better.
- Sensor cleaning and mapping. The new Canon cameras have these features. They are better than nothing, but you will still need to clean your sensor. Period. I don’t care what the sales pitch is, sensors attract junk and not all that junk can be shaken off. Caveat photographer when you use your sensor cleaning gizmo-du-jour. Sensor filters can be scratched and damaged easily. Now, to mapping, this seems like a non-feature to me. You have to use the Canon software to take advantage of it. Basically, the idea is that the software identifies and remembers repeated “bad spots” caused by hot pixels or persistent dust. It then edits these spots out using some kind of nearest-neighbor algorithm. This works pretty well on the large sensors because there is just so much data, but I have to come back to the fact that you have to use the Canon software. Using Adobe Camera RAW is so infinitely superior that it renders any advantage from this sensor mapping irrelevant when compared to all the ACR utility you would have to give up if you used the Canon software.
- Lens performance. Here is the bad news: The old lenses that were performing quite nicely, thank you very much, won’t anymore. Two reasons: 1) The sensor has far greater resolution; and 2) Full-frame sensors bring out chromatic aberration near the edges of images, especially an minimum or maximum apertures. This is not a new problem, nor is it a problem unique to the 5D. It just is. The CA adjustment in Adobe Camera RAW will clean up all but the worst offenders. I am able to get acceptable performance out of my 15mm fisheye and 17-35mm wide zoom. The chromatic aberration is there at f/2.8 and sometimes at f/22, but f/5.6 through f/11 are just fine.
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