dispatches

What's new in Photoshop?

This may be the only post today in the blogosphere not about the election.

I've been using Photoshop CS4 for a couple weeks now, and I have opinions. I've processed several thousand images through Bridge and Camera Raw, and prepped a few images for publication through Photoshop itself. I've found bugs and crashed it, and I've also found some new raw adjustment features that I now can't live without.

One of the selling points of the upgrade was a promised faster speed in Bridge. It depends how you parse it as to whether that's true. I took a folder with 700 images and opened it in each version of Bridge. V.3 took 2:43 for the spinning top to settle down. V.4 took one minute for the thumbnails to load, but took an additional 5 minutes for the previews to process and for the spinning icon to go away. Every time you adjust a number of images in Raw, the thumbnails have to be rebuilt, and Bridge is unavailable during that interval. But the preview image does pop up right away, and you don't have that excruciating wait that often occurred in CS3 with a big folder.

Metadata in Bridge is broken. I frequently get “There was an error writing metadata to image xxx” notices. On my laptop (but not the desktop) I cannot write metadata in Bridge at all if I try and apply a metadata template (like my copyright info). I even recreated that template in CS4, but no go. The error message pops up for every single image that fails to write. If you've applied metadata to 700 images, you have 700 error messages. Your only option is to force quit the application.

I haven't delved into the new tools in Photoshop (though I turned off the tabbing option for multiple images, which I found annoying and of no redeeming value). Printing appears to be broken, or I just haven't identified the new secret handshake you always need to learn with a Photoshop upgrade. What happens is that the image as printed comes out a couple stops darker than the monitor display.

Now, what's good about the upgrade? More raw adjustment options. In particular, the adjustment brush. There's an interface that allows you to use a brush to paint in any adjustment available in the basic tab: exposure, brightness, contrast, sat, clarity, sharpness. And Color. What makes this so great? You can brighten up a face in shadow, or use the Color to correct a portion of the image (like when there's daylight on part of a scene that's largely lit by flourescent). It's fast, and intuitive, and now it's an essential part of my workflow. These are alterations I often make in a final file with complicated masks and adjustment layers, but now I just swab it on in my raw processing.

There are so many options in raw processing now that you hardly need Photoshop. Maybe all you need is Lightroom, which I assume has all the same options.

This GAS attack is real

I am generally immune from GAS attacks (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) in my photographic life, which makes me somewhat unusual among photographers. The cameras I have work fine, and until I have a need for a different capability, I never look at camera reviews or new equipment announcements.

But something big has come along, and it's going to accelerate the convergence of still and video shooting. All the major manufacturers are adding video capability to their pro DSLRs, but Canon has leapfrogged over all of them with the 5D MKII. It shoots 1080i HD video, in Quicktime .mov format. On CF cards. No rendering necessary. You can drop the footage right into the Quicktime player or a Final Cut timeline. The top ISO is a mind blowing 25,000, three stops faster than the current 5D, which was the best performing camera in low light.

As an afterthought, the file resolution for stills is 21 megapixels.

Think of it. Shooting HD video in almost no light, with SLR lenses. And yes, there is an audio input. I can  imagine putting a Beach Tek splitter on the camera, mounting a shotgun on the hotshoe, a wireless lav pickup off the camera strap, and making this my main camera for everything.

Read Vincent LaForet's blog for an amazing story of how he got his hands on one for a weekend and how he made himself a movie. The photos on his blog are video frame grabs, BTW.

And I just got my name on the list at Glazers Camera for one. They're saying late October/early November.

Disposing of obsolete technology

"Look honey, it's the table of obsolete technology!" (actual quote)

We had a neighborhood yard sale today—11 households on the street participated. I hauled out old photo gear, things like stacks of filters and darkroom paraphernalia and a sizable chunk of my camera bag collection. Robin accuses me of collecting camera bags the way some women collect shoes. I had four tripods too, two “cast iron” old Gitzo's, an early model Gitzo carbon fiber, and a big old Bogen.

I discovered the proper price point for my camera bags by seeing that I had set them too low—they went almost at once. The tripods disappeared fairly quickly. The darkroom dregs remained mostly untouched. One man bought my film washer to use as a hydrogen collector in the fuel cell engine he was building.Toward the end of the day the kind of manic photo-gearhead type that sellers love to see showed up. He said a friend called him about this great yard sale with carbon fiber tripods and bags in Ravenna. He  swept the table of the ancient (3 year old) digital wallet drives and my camera bag divider collection (he missed all the bags) and a big stash of lens bags and camera straps. Bless him.

Most people picked up the film developing reels and asked, “What are these?” Photographers said, “Well, maybe they'd make good candleholders.” I had to describe to people what filters are used for. One woman, clueless about digital manipulation, insisted on buying my entire stash of 72mm and 77mm, for which I gave her an even steeper discount than the 50 cents per I had them at. One saavy buyer picked out the polarizers right away. No one wanted the 49mm stack.

The rest of the film developing gear remained untouched.

 

Fun With Photomerge

This is from today's hike to Lake Serene. It's a 360 degree composite image from 33 individual shots. Handheld.

I continue to be impressed with the capability of Photoshop's Photomerge function. You're only supposed to be able to do this kind of shot with a panoramic base, where you level the camera and rotate it around the lens nodal point. I used to use PTGUI to stitch the images I made this way.

In this case, I made three scans of the scene, making overlapping exposures: one level, one pointed up, and one pointed down. The only nod I made to traditional stitched pan technique was to set the exposure to manual. Photomerge was smart enough to recognize that it was a three-level pan, and made flawless stitches.

The lovely thing about such a file is that each image is on a layer, with a layer mask. If there are errors, you can play with the masks to fix things.

Click on the image to open up a larger view. The psd image these are derived from is 14000 pixels wide. 900 megabytes. And I used a source file size at half the native resolution.

G9 RAW processing

Anniversary Party 8.16.08

Anyone else notice this?

I've been shooting with the Canon G9 exclusively for the last week. It's a great walking around camera, but I'm frustrated by the noise level at anything above 200, and at a slight shutter lag. I've also sensed that processing the files is more sluggish than my 5D images.

I use Adobe Raw Converter for everything, and 99% of my work never gets any further than ACR processing. I process my files daily, renaming the day's photos, adding metadata, and applying default and individual image corrections.

With the Powershot G9 images, it seemed this goes a lot slower. The sliders hesitate and I have to wait a second or two for any change to register. Today I did a side by side test.

I put a hundred images each in a G9 and a 5D folder. I purged the image cache in Bridge, and I manually deleted all the .xml sidecar files. Then I did some test processing.

I could process the 5D files with an instantaneous response to my adjustments, even with a hundred files open in ACR. The G9 files were slow and hesitant. A great test on processing speed is to hold down the Option key when clicking either the Black or Exposure slider. This gives a black or white point preview. Response was instant on any 5D file. The image took a second or two to display with the G9 shots.

It seems that Adobe's code for reading the Canon RAW files is more robust for the pro camera than for this P&S. Anyone have experience with other raw processors?

It's more fun when you don't understand it

The last few months most of my spam has been in non-western alphabets. With too much time on my hands one night, I used Babelfish to translate a recent selection on them:

The curriculum content actual combat, technical, lodges the theory in the actual combat method, the classroom is vivid.

Sets up the professional spirit which the staff and the enterprise crosses a river in a boat together.

I greet you, Sergey. Postponement of the payment of tax to the profit for the prolonged period and its minimization;  Everything about the legal decrease of the taxes.

I greet, Complete collector of all Soviet cartoons and children's films on [DVD].

Outstanding solution for all amateurs to sing under the original (!) musical tracking. ═ This is cheap " [karaoke]" , badly imitating the original.

How do you do, They are glad to present to your attention the first catalog of official plants and factories in C.P.R. (Chinese Peoples' Republic). To find any, interesting goods became easy.

Presently, with 47 metropolis and districts the middle to elderly-aged man and woman has been disordered hotly. By all means, in at this opportunity don't you try being disordered in the meeting of physical interchange?

I think the last one is about sex. Hey babe, wanna get disordered?

New toy

Late adopter that I am, I just acquired a Canon Powershot G9, a point-and-shoot with RAW file capability. I'd been intrigued with Paul Butzi's series of entries about the G9, basically as the walking-around camera when the 5D was too much to carry (and I love that he first got the 5D as a walking around camera in lieu of the Linhof 4x5). I've been facing the same issue, and since my neck injury I've been more reluctant to heft the big rig everywhere I go. There was a shooter on the Newspaper Video listserv getting rid of his G9, and I pounced.

I flirted a couple of years ago with a p&s, and decided that I just didn't like seeing the world through an LCD. Ultimately, it was being stuck in jpg land that made me toss the camera back where it came from (Glazers bought it back—a great reason to buy local). But in video, I can only see the world through an LCD, so I figured I'd just better get used to it.

First impressions, from someone unfamiliar with this genre of cameras: it's a cool little beast with a lot of usability. It's sharp. I like that I can poke it into my subjects (like my flowers). I like that I can actually manually focus it. I really like the RAW file thing. At 1600 it's noisy, no getting around it. But, you know, it's a kinda pretty noise. It reminds me of old 1000 speed Agfachrome.

When get my Sandisk SD reader to work on a Mac (it sees the reader, but not the card—any ideas, anyone?), I'll be even happier.

Big is better

I've become a fan of The Big Picture, which once or twice a week posts Big Pictures of, usually, some current news event or human interest subject. Scale matters, and now that most of us are on broadband connections it's an inconsequential matter to view larger images online.

I'm testing my Daily Photo at a larger scale over on my Test site, and plan to make the conversion to larger images there soon. As soon as we can solve the issue of the live feed to my main website.

"Hmm, this is quite uncommon."

Don't you hate it when a tech support person says that? We appear to be starting on another adventure into a "crashes for no apparent reason"  saga, this time with Expressions Media 2. I cannot transfer image files from one catalog to another without causing the application to crash. Reliably. Every single time (which is a plus, not one of those, "only doesn't work when no one is looking" problems.)

I have their attention. Stay tuned for the next episode.

Krappy kamera fun

I made a point to not take a camera to my wife's uncle's retirement party, as I didn't want to get roped into being the official photo geek. But the light washing across the Chinese food debris was compelling. I had my iPhone. It has a camera in it.

The quality of the iPhone camera is so bad that it falls into the "art" camera category (Holga, Lensbaby, et. al.).  Compelling images can be made with little effort, because of the instant "weird" gauze. I don't know if I'm proud of these photos, as it brings up the issue of what made the aesthetic decision here. Not me. The camera's quirks dominate the visual field. But then again, it's like any other tool used to mediate reality--you become conversant in the way your tool converts reality into something else, and learn to manipulate that to some other end. Conventional, straight photography is no less artificial a window through which to perceive reality. We just have a more widespread convention that "this" is what a photograph looks like. And now, we have this other "this" available in millions of hands: our cell phones.