Even in Digital Photography, Glass Filters Still Matter
Posted by admin in photography on January 24, 2012
I recently returned from a trip to the Caribbean and packed very few glass filters. Many of the effects and color correction filters simply don’t matter anymore because they can be done in post-processing. But there are still a few that matter very much.
Filters I Still Carry
Skylight or UV
I use these to protect the lens and for no other reason. I’d rather scratch a filter than the lens glass. I cannot honestly say that either skylight or UV makes any apparent difference to my images. But every one of my lenses that isn’t a macro has one or the other on it.
Circular Polarizer
I always try to carry one of these filters. It’s not always necessary — in fact, it’s often unnecessary — but I’d rather have it and not use it than the other way around.
This image (no correction, right out of camera) was shot with a circular polarizing filter. As you can see, the coral sea bottom is clearly visible. One of the effects of a circular polarizer when shooting water scenes is to reduce polarized glare, allowing for a clearer view of details below the surface. Nik Software has a wonderful polarizing tool in their Color Efex software. It’s important to note that this is an emulation of what might happen if you had used the glass filter to begin with. In the case of the image I’ve shown, the image information below the surface would have been lost in the glare, so the software emulation would not have reproduced the effect — it would have deepened the blues and slightly enhanced the contrast in the clouds, but that’s it.
Scratch and Star Filters
At night, these filters can lend some sparkle to an image. Again, the effect can be reconstructed in Photoshop, but many of us have better things to do with our time. And… there’s something special about a purely analog effect.
Gradient Neutral Density Filters
For those shooting RAW you might be thinking you’re off the hook with this one. What a gradient ND filter does is apply a neutral density (darkening) across one half of the frame. The filter can be rotated to match your horizon line. You use these when, for example, the sky is very bright as compared to the foreground. And why would the RAW shooters think they’re off the hook? Because you can fix it in Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW. But again, the better your image is made, the more you will be able to do with it later. Getting it “right” in camera is the best first step you can take.
Neutral Density Filters
Regular ND filters darken everything. These tend not to be particularly useful in a travel or landscape setting, as you can normally drop the ISO to 100 or so and crank up the shutter speed. So unless you are looking for motion blur and shallow depth of field, they aren’t a carry-around filter. But… for small-studio work, you might find your lights are too bright to shoot portraits at flattering apertures (say, f/5.6 or so). An ND filter can really help out here by giving you back a stop.
Filters I No Longer Carry
- Color Correction: I just can’t justify carrying any color-correction filters because I shoot everything in RAW and the chances are I will get a more accurate color rendering in post-processing than if I had guessed and used a filter in the field.
- Color Effects: Similarly, for effect filters like the coffee or blue/yellow filters that were so cool on film, there is more flexibility shooting it neutrally in RAW and deciding on this kind of effect in post.
- Soft-focus: Sadly, the soft-focus filter has found its way out of my gear bag. There are so many Photoshop techniques and add-on filters to get dreamy effects or flattering skin treatment that soft-focus in the world of still digital photography is (in my opinion) better left to post.
- Warming, Landscape, etc.: Same as color correction. This can be handled with the tweak of a slider, be it color temperature, clarity…
And the Wrapup Is…
I still use glass filters, but sparingly. I typically get thin filters, as I have no need to stack them; it’s either the skylight or the polarizing filter — never both. Each time I get a new lens that has yet a different barrel size, I curse the lens manufacturer over the change and re-evaluate what kind of glass filter is absolutely necessary.
But with that said, now that digital is not a shiny new toy, I find myself thinking, “I’ll fix it in Photoshop later” a lot less. When you’re faced with thousands of images to process, the ones that get bypassed are the ones you have to “fix.” If there’s a way to get it right in camera, the original idea of the image might make it to the select pile of images (if there’s such a thing as a digital “pile”).
I’ve used a boatload of Photoshop tools and add-ons. By far the most useful are:
- Adobe Camera RAW color balancing. This cannot be overstated. This is where your color correction filtering comes into your digital workflow. I’ll say it again: Get your color balanced how you want it using your RAW converter; anything after that is destroying perfectly good pixels.
- Nik Color Efex Pro. These are about the coolest tools available for changing the color and applying effects way beyond what you can do in Camera RAW. You can download a demo copy and see how they work for you but be forewarned: They are addictive!
At the end of it all, I find that less is more in terms of applying filtration. If the image was captured correctly, then it should be a snap to post process it.
Digital Infrared Photography
Posted by admin in photography on July 13, 2011
Some things go in cycles, and infrared photography is one of those things. It’s kind of a quirky way of recording an image — you record only the infrared part of the spectrum reflected from your subject.
A bit of history: Once upon a time we all shot film. Infrared film came in a number of different varieties. The primary distinction was color or black & white and if you see IR images now, you are probably looking mostly at black & white. The black & white infrared film had the eerie characteristic of haloing or blooming around the highlights, making the image look not only somewhat negative but also gauzy or even ghostly.
Fast forward to digital. The way people started out doing digital infrared was to use something like an R72 or an 87 filter — a deep red that cut all the light except the infrared. It has an immense filter factor, so exposures have to be extremely long.
Infrared Sensor Filters
At this point, enter a company called LifePixel. They are based in Washington State (USA) and will convert your digital camera to shoot only infrared. I mean only infrared. They do this by replacing the highpass filter that normally goes over the sensor with one that only allows the infrared part of the spectrum to pass. Sound familiar? But the beauty of this solution is that exposures are of normal duration — i.e., if you were shooting f/8 at 125th of a second with your normal DSLR, then it would be pretty much the same with the converted one. This reduces the need for extraordinarily long exposures.
Color Infrared
Here is an example of an image shot in raw on a converted Canon 20D with no post-processing:
You may notice somewhat brown skies along with the signature white trees and ghostly look associated with infrared. The image is pretty much monochromatic. However, the cut filter does allow the sensor to detect a bit of color and since it is recording in RGB, it doesn’t look quite like a black & white infrared. There are two directions to go with this. The first is to do some smart juggling in Photoshop:
For this image, I did a bit of levels adjustment to bring up the whites and darken the blacks, added an S-curve to enhance contrast, then the important part: Used the Channel Mixer to mix red to 100% blue and blue to 100% red. Green is left alone. This makes the sky blue and gives the appearance of a color infrared. You can read a bit more here.
Black & White Infrared
I’m not crazy about the weird color infrared look, preferring, instead, the stark black & white look. Here’s the same image done as a black & white.
For this image, I simply took the image from the first version, popped it into Nik Silver Efex Pro, made a few adjustments, and voila!
Conditions for Infrared
Infrared light does not reflect off everything, so don’t think you’re going to make all kinds of keen night shots and so on… You have to test and try and feel out what looks best in infrared. One thing you will see right away is that foliage is wicked cool in infrared. It’s so easy, you’ll find yourself developing a magnetic attraction to all things green even if you are allergic to plants. Other subjects that are absolutely amazing in infrared are structured cloudy skies. That is, thunderstorm style clouds where there are darker and lighter areas of cloud. Just plain overcast won’t be as much fun.
Finally, cityscapes can be eerie in the best possible way in infrared, but as with many infrared subjects, your mileage may vary. These are particularly sensitive to the direction of the light so some experimentation is necessary to get some usable shots.
Summary
Infrared is a really fun technique and one that really cannot be duplicated in post-processing. It’s the result of a particular part of the spectrum falling on the sensor — this part of the spectrum is absent once a digital image is captured on a normal camera.
However, converting a camera to infrared means you are sacrificing a camera. One use only, which is why I mentioned that these images were made on a 20D — obviously, this was an older camera and one that could be sacrificed at the altar of infrared.
One additional change that should be made is that of focus. This is important to understand. Different bandwidths of light are focused by the lens at different locations. Because infrared has a wavelength longer than that of visible light, lenses are not optimized to focus it at exactly the sensor plane. As a result, you either need to modify your lens to focus appropriately, or you need to take this into account yourself by refocusing manually. Because you cannot perceive infrared light with your eyes, you absolutely cannot focus for infrared by eye. LifePixel performs this modification to lenses, which makes it an obvious choice as opposed to using an IR filter.
Everybody’s a Photographer
Posted by admin in photography on July 12, 2011
Well, I said I was moving my blog to a different server and it happened. Now that that’s over, it’s back to some photography posts.
The camera industry has done an all-around good job of making photography accessible to nearly everyone. Two cheers to them. Three cheers to the mobile phone industry. They are the ones who have really made everybody a photographer. Not every cell-phone image is art, but many are images that would never have been made if the photographer had relied on having his or her camera on hand.
If you are a serious photographer, you may be wondering why cell-phone images matter. I can’t answer that for everyone, but for me they matter because they are taken of pretty much anything and everything in the human experience. By devices that fit in a pocket or purse. By your phone! The rules are a bit changed but the game is the same. With a big expensive camera or with a cell phone the things that matter most are where you point it and when you push the button.
So, if you are tempted to dismiss cell-phone photography as “just fooling around,” give it another thought.
Security — What It Means to You: READ THIS!
Posted by admin in photography on November 12, 2010
This title may seem a bit odd for a photographer’s blog, but there are a couple of reasons why you should be concerned. What triggers this post is the emergence of a Wi-Fi hacking tool called Firesheep. I’m not going to provide a link and have never used it but I know what it does. And its sobering.
What’s The Threat?
If you use open Wi-Fi networks, what you do online can be watched and in many cases a “watcher” can immediately impersonate you on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and so on. Banking and other financial sites, not so much.
What’s an Open Wi-Fi Network?
For the sake of this article, it’s a network you just “jump on” in a public place like an Internet Cafe, coffee shop, airport. Basically, it’s free Wi-Fi where you don’t know all the other people with access to the network. And for travelers (and we photographers travel), these open Wi-Fi networks are valuable and many of us use them regularly.
What Happens With This “Firesheep”?
The author of Firesheep created it as an example of how insecure many Web sites that require login can be. He is unapologetic about the potential damage he has done, and claims it is a force to make developers of Web sites clean up their acts. In the meantime, your accounts and your data are at risk.
An oversimplification of Firesheep is that someone running it wanders into a free Wi-Fi area and sets up shop. It’s stupid simple. They then wait until Firesheep shows a list of other people on the network and some of the sites they are logged into. The Firesheep user can, with the click of a mouse, hijack the “session” of an unsuspecting user. That makes said Firesheep user appear to be said unsuspecting user. So, take the example of Joe Photographer, who is logged into Facebook, the bad guy Firesheep user can easily impersonate Joe and take steps like these: Change Joe’s password, deface Joe’s wall, upload embarrassing images to Joe’s photo galleries, and all without Joe knowing a thing. As with any identity theft, it’s hard to know the extent of the damage.
And it’s not entirely fair to single out Facebook. Almost every site that requires logging in also uses these “sessions” and many are open to this exact kind of session hijacking. It’s also not accurate to single out Firesheep, as it builds on well-understood hacking techniques but does so in such a user-friendly way that it makes it really easy for your friends to play a malicious prank on you and for bad guys to do worse. It lowers the technology bar on who can do this stuff. Again, I’m not a hacker, but I do watch out for potential risks in an effort to stay safe online.
So, It’s Not Just Facebook? How Can I Tell What’s Safe?
Your browser displays a “lock” icon to show you when you are browsing to what’s called a “secure site.” When the lock icon is showing, all the information your exchange with the site is encrypted and even if Firesheep could see it, the data would be of no use to it. That’s safe. But as soon as the lock disappears, you are back in the clear and at risk again. These sites might include your blog(!), your photo agency… you get the picture.
So, boiling this down, if you go to a secure (lock icon) login page and get yourself logged into xyz.com, then immediately go to an unsecured page, this “session” thingie exists and can then be hijacked. Good that your login and password exchange didn’t happen in the clear, but you are not safe. Only if the lock icon remains showing are you safe. That is the exception rather than the rule because secure sites are expensive to operate.
On the other hand, there are lots of sites where you simply don’t care if the Firesheep user has a peek behind your kimono. Who cares if they watch you read the news or check out the sports scores? That would be the digital equivalent of peeking over your shoulder. Who cares if they watch you read your favorite photography blog. No login, no problem.
What Can I Do About It?
Basically, for the time being, give up on free Wi-Fi. It’s that simple. There are some so-so alternatives. If you have a mobile device like an iPhone, iPad, Android, etc., just shut off the Wi-Fi and use the cellular connection. Slower, yes. Safer for right now.
If you are using a laptop or device without cellular connect, consider one of the closed cellular hotspot devices. Word has it that the Sprint device is relatively affordable, works in many locations, and offers some protection against this particular security risk.
What About Dedicated iPhone, Android, and iPad Apps?
Still not safe. You can’t know how they exchange login information but know that they do exchange that information. Best not to use them on open Wi-Fi.
Where Can I Read More?
TechCrunch says this. Although you can figure out where to get Firesheep from this article, I would beg you not to take it out for a test drive. Please?
WikiPedia says this. They recommend a VPN (kinda geeky stuff) and another Firefox extension. The VPN is not trivial to set up but it is effective if you can live with its limitations. The extension doesn’t solve the problems of mobile devices or computers running browsers other than Firefox.
PCWorld says this. This is a pretty balanced report.
Two Simple But Effective Lightroom Tricks
Posted by admin in photography on October 31, 2010
One thing Apple got really right in Aperture was to make a zoom center wherever you clicked. So, if you click on a model’s eye, you see a zoomed version of that eye. Lightroom, by defaut, zooms to center, so if you click on that eye, you might get the bellybutton.
Tip #1: Zoom Clicked Point to Center
Choose the Preferences item from the Lightroom menu (this is different in Windows, I know… you’ll find it).
In the dialog box that comes up, in the “tweaks” section, tick the “Zoom clicked point to center” checkbox.
Dismiss the dialog and just like that, zooming happens to the point you choose!
Tip #2: Use Stacking Wisely
Aperture and Lightroom have a concept called stacking. If you are unfamiliar with it, imagine your images are a deck of cards, and they are arranged by suit. The top card is what shows and there are four stacks — one for each suit.
That’s kind of what happens when you stack your pictures. They take up a ton less space on the screen, and allow you to group them visually. So here’s an example: When shooting this model, we chose a them, took a number of shots, waited a minute or two to discuss the next theme, then moved into those shots.
Autostacking
There is a very cool feature called autostacking that takes advantage of the fact that photographers often shoot “in bursts”, as I described. Just go to Photo > Stacking > Auto-Stack by Capture Time. You can adjust the sensitivity slider to account for how long or short your pauses were, but the best guess of a minute is normally good.
Now that you have only a fraction of the images on the screen you had before, the question how to open up (expand) one of the stacks. The trick is to recognize a stack. Here is what one looks like:
See the little number 17 in the upper left corner of the image? That means there are 17 images in the stack including the one chosen to represent the stack. To open it up, the first thing many people do is unstack the photos. Not a good choice. What you want to do is “expand” the stack. To do this, click on the image representing the stack and press the S key.
As you can see, the highlighted image on the left is the top of the stack, and the dimmer frames are all the images contained in the stack. You can now edit or do whatever you like with these images. And you can press S on any one of them to collapse the entire stack neatly into place when you’re done.
There are many more stacking options including arranging the images within the stack and choosing the stack image. Just shop around the menus or check out the Adobe help for more tips on how to do this.
Using NIK Filters to Enhance Digital Photography
Posted by admin in photography on October 28, 2010
If you are doing much digital image processing, you are probably aware of the great tools from NIK Software. Calling these tools Photoshop filters is doing them an injustice. They are, for many photography professionals and avid amateurs, core tools. They are also free from the confines of Photoshop-only, integrating with Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture — great image processing tools in their own right.
The NIK product line includes:
- Sharpener Pro (the tool that started it all!)
- Color Efex Pro
- DFine
- Silver Efex Pro
- Viveza
- HDR Efex Pro
They also created one of the key technologies that makes Nikon Capture NX such a great piece of manufacturer-provided RAW image conversion software.
It’s not like me to focus on a single vendor and spotlight a product, but these tools have proven their effectiveness and quality to me daily over the years I’ve been using them. However, in attending an event presented by NIK recently about their new HDR Efex Pro, it became clear to me that some people don’t exactly “get” why these tools are so useful.
U Point Technology
Rather than go into a laundry list of everything each tool does, I’m going to point out the concept I feel is most important to grasp in order to unlock the potential of these tools. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll only talk about Viveza — a tool whose name discloses little about what it does. All the other tools have similar interfaces, so picking only one is not necessarily doing a disservice to the others.
Viveza — What Does It Do?
In my mind, Viveza is a tool that allows you to selectively adjust various attributes of a selected tonal range. Don’t let the fancy words put you off, using it is much simpler than describing it. Here’s an example: Say you have an image of a vineyard and you think, “nice pattern, but the dirt didn’t come up as red as I remembered it, the leaves of the vines were way greener, and the clouds had lots more relief.” If you’re like me and process a lot of images, that kind of images is one that might get punted as a rescue project. But with Viveza — and more particularly, U Point — it’s pretty darn easy to make the kind of adjustment I described.
Let’s Get to A Picture
A picture is worth 1,000 words, so here we go. I used Photo > Edit In > Viveza 2 from Lightroom to open the Lightroom Viveza plugin. Here is the image, and you can see it needs some help.
Global Adjustments
The first thing I would do is to work on overall exposure and color, which is what Viveza does when in “Global” mode (i.e., no control point selected). The sliders on the right control these global adjustments. These should be familiar to you, as they are pretty much the same ones as you see in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW. Although you can’t see it in the screen grab, you can affect:
- Brightness
- Contrast
- Saturation
- Structure
- Shadow Adjustments
- Warmth
- Red
- Green
- Blue
- Hue
Of these, structure is the only one that is really foreign to most non-Viveza (or non-NIK software) users. I think of structure as being similar to clarity in Lightroom or definition in Aperture. Nobody really says what it does, but my interpretation of the image changes is that there is a subtle increase in midtone contrast. That also increases the appearance of sharpness without the haloing and pixel damage caused by one of the more traditional sharpening algorithms.
The image I chose was properly exposed and the tones pretty evenly distributed so for this example, I left the global adjustments alone.
Adding a Control Point
If you don’t get anything else out of this blog post, get this: Control points are the most important thing you can learn about any of the NIK tools. And… it’s not like using the pen tool in Photoshop. This one is easy. To do it, I just click the control point icon:
and place it on the area I want to affect. In this case, I want to make the earth redder.
Here’s where the real power comes into play. What that little ladder-like thingie I placed there does is allow me to change the tonal values of just the colors under the point. Now, I tell U Point how much of the image (roughly) I want to affect. I do this by grabbing the slider marked by the circular blob and dragging it left or right. You’ll see a circle expand or contract to describe the areas considered by Viveza for the correction:
As you can see, the circle encompasses the dirt, but also the green vines and some of the sky. If you’re familiar with Photoshop selection, you might be thinking, “this is a nightmare … it’ll never work,” but check out what Viveza thought about it:
I select the show/hide mask for all control points icon and presto!
As you can see, the white areas are the only areas Viveza will target for the adjustments. The subtlety and detail of this mask is amazing and the amount of work I did to get it was almost zero. So now I press that show/hide mask icon again and drag a few sliders around to achieve the effect. Note that because the control point is selected, I can use the sliders in the main part of the interface as equivalent to those on the control point “ladder.”
I increased the warmth, red, yellow (that is, decreased the blue), increased saturation and reduced brightness. If you compare this to the image at the top of this post, you’ll see two things. First, the vines and sky were completely unaffected by this change because of the precision of the mask. Second, the earth is now redder as it was in the original scene.
Finishing the Adjustments
To complete the adjustments, I added a control point centered on one of the leaves of the grape vines. The circle was extended to cover the entire field. I added green and increased the saturation. Additionally, I added a control point in the clouds and extended the circle to cover the entire sky. For this adjustment, I added structure and contrast, while reducing the brightness.
And the Wrap-Up
The real power, to me, of the NIK tools is their ability to cut masks with precision and subtlety so I can control the color and intensity of various parts of the image. As important is the ability to do this fast. I have a lot of post-processing to do, so anything that impedes this is a non-starter. Viveza is a great example of a tool that enhances rather that blocking productivity.
Give it a try. NIK has demo downloads available on their Web site, so you can test drive. They also have lots of tutorial material online so you can get more detailed information about all their products.
RAW Image Processors for Your Digital Photography
Posted by admin in photography on May 28, 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 11, 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 1, 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 14, 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…
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