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Montag, 19. Februar 2007 |
Adobe today announced the release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0. The software for sorting, viewing, storing and converting digital (RAW) photos comes at a discounted price of 199,- US$, later on the price will be 299,- US$. A demo-version is available, too. Download it here.
Additionally, the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in has been updated to version 3.7 for full compatibility with Lightroom and Photoshop. It now supports new cameras as the Nikon D40. |
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Montag, 12. Februar 2007 |
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 After the first article about “High Dynamic Range” photography, SPIEGEL online asked their readers to produce HDRs and send them in. In the meantime quite a lot of interesting pictures like the one above (from Florian Flerlage) have been gathered in several gallerys. They also posted an interview with Kevin Creley, photographer from Munich. Please also check out my post on HDR.
Photo: Florian Flerlage |
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Montag, 12. Februar 2007 |
 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom seems to be readying for release. After months of public beta-testing on Mac and Win, you can now pre-order the software in version 1.0 on the official product page. Lightroom is a direct antagonist to Apple’s Aperture. Both applications are designed to help the professional photographer view, sort, archive and present their digital photos. They concentrate on RAW-files, but accept other common formats as .jpg and .tif as well. Adjusting photos is absolute non-destructive in both apps. I only skimmed through these opponents, but from what I saw, Aperture seemed to need a little less clicking through modules. A real drawback of Lightroom is the fact that it saves all additional IPTC information in a XMP sidecar-file. So if you use the software as your archive-database and want to store information like caption, location, etc Lightroom uses an external file for this. If you give your photo to an agency you’ll have to remember to attach this file. It’s a proprietary Adobe way, as Aperture saves this info right into the .tif or .jpg like all other applications do.
You can still download the latest Beta of Lightroom from the Adobe Labs page (it’s valid until end of February) or pre-order version 1.0 at a reduced rate. A demo version should be available next week and it’s said that a localized german version will follow soon.
I also found a short essay on the “five golden rules” on dpmac. They also sell a ebook about Lightroom. Finally there are some online (video-)tutorials, if you like to learn more.Video2brain has them in german, and NAPP is your destination if you prefer english. |
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Sonntag, 21. Januar 2007 |
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the race for the championship of automatic image optimization. We’ve learned that each software has it’s own pro’s and contra’s, produced good or bad results depending on the actual image. Though evaluation was based on 5 photos only and these have been judged subjectively, I think we can see a tendency in the chart that could be a good starting point for your own search, if you feel like in need of such a tool. Let me repeat the overall result here as you might have missed the other posts:
- Image Editor: 26
- DxO Optics Pro: 22
- Xe847 ProPlus Plug-in: 21
- FixFoto: 19
- Intellihance Pro: 18
- PhotoPerfect: 13
It’s a shame my hitlist is headed by a Windows-application, but Image Editor seems to have the most constant quality. The resulting files look good in terms of color, contrast and details in the lights/shadows. I’ve said this before: The colors often look a bit artificial. It seems like the algorithm boosts the primary colors so that blue is blue, red is red etc… it’s simple and effective thus not subtle. Also the midtones get levelled too much for my liking. It reminds me of picture-prints I get from amateur-labs. On the other hand: Wasn’t that what I wanted? Nice & good looking pictures with just one click? Well, yes. Let me please remind you that FixFoto, the other Windows-candidate, can also be purchased with the i2e-plug-in which is the same as Image Editor uses. The plug-in I tried with FixFoto, “Perfectly Clear” is inferior and can only reach place 4 in the list. If you can deal with the confusing interface and are bound to the Microsoft-system, FixFoto might be a hot shot as it offers a lot of additional features. DxO makes second place in my test for some good reasons. It not only optimizes the images via luminance, contrast and colors, but has a huge archive of lenses by Canon, Nikon, Sigma and other companies. With this, it also can adjust typical distorsion and vignettation automaticly. Therefore it is one of the slower candidates in this field. In addition I’d also like to warn you: It takes a freakin’ lot of time to download this software and get it up & running, as there are several security-routines to save DxO from getting pirated. Though we have a licence for version 3.5 and bought one for version 4, I was’nt able to get the upgrade downloaded. Again a lot of telephony will be needed to fix this, I’m afraid.
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Sonntag, 21. Januar 2007 |
 After some surprising, some confusing and some dissapointing results with the tools for automatic image optimization, I thought I’d try going to extremes. While I chose all other photos for their lighting situation, none of the originals was really bad concerning quality. I mean underexposed or even with a strong tint. So how about those pictures we’d rather delete than spending hours of work on them? I was curious about, so I desperately searched for an example to test with my applications (No, I’m not sooooo vain, it simply was difficult to find one, because I usually throw away those kinds of images 
The one above was shot in September 2005, when I was in Sardinia for a shooting. Probably it is kind of typical for a “touristic-terrific” picture at the beach: directly into the sun, underexposed, weird colors. So I had to do a lot of work to get to the result you can see above. In this case, I want to show you the original file as well, so you can get an impression of how much the software-candidates had to adjust. |
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Freitag, 19. Januar 2007 |
 Off we go for the next round! This time I chose a studio shot of a small translucent plastic nub. Basic work, I thought. But only one contestant matched my manually adjusted artwork, the others fell poor. Intellihance Pro didn’t really attract my attention so far, I was almost a bit disappointed as I saw the Windows-applications outrun my beloved Mac-software. With this motive, Intellihance produced the best output by far. The colors are quite close to my own result, though the yellow lacks a bit shininess. Luminance and contrast are perfect. |
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Donnerstag, 18. Januar 2007 |
 We proceed to the next challenge: Indoor photography with few, artificial light and fill-in flash, typical for reportage jobs. The picture was taken during the AO Davos Courses in December 2006. It took a while to get the result shown above, but I think it was worth doing all the photoshopping and fine-tuning as none of the automation-candidates could preserve the mood.
The aspects to consider are: The Powerpoint-presentation should not fade to white, the speaker should not look to yellowish, the audience needs a little light-up and the gentleman´s shirt in the front shall keep blue. That quite a lot of details to handle for my auto-optimization-tools. Surprisingly, Xe847 did the job fairly well. I can remember the other results from this plug-in being a bit dark, but with the mixed-light-situation we are presented with shadows that look quite natural. It´s nice seeing the speaker being brightened enough to squeeze a little of that yellow out of the lights. I judge DxO as second because it does lighten the shadows, but in a very friendly way: It keeps contrast in it. Overall lightness is nice and colors are acceptable. Image Editor is similar, but somehow lights up the crowd significantly more while losing details in the darker shadows (check the far back corner of the lecture hall). The projections also begins to fade. Though the output from Intellihance is way too light, I prefer it over the following as details are preserved. FixFoto has good lights and contrast, but is even darker than Image Editor´s picture. Forget about PhotoPerfect in this case: Full contrast, poor colors, no details at all. Seems like it´s almost darker than the original… |
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Donnerstag, 18. Januar 2007 |
 This picture I took just a couple of weeks ago. It shows the Congress Center in Davos where the World Economic Forum will take place next week. Hopefully this is suitable for testing on available-light-shots. With this lighting, we have to be aware of complementary colors (deep blue sky and yellow lights) as well as of deep shadows. I was surprised to see only one software interpreting the blue sky correctly.
It is Image Editor´s result that almost look identical to what I had manually modified the picture to. Overall nice and correct colors, good details in the shadows: Perfect! All other apps tend to put more reds in my photo. Judging from contrast and shadows, DxO is second to best. Despite the color of the sky it´s very close to my own result. Same goes for FixFoto except for being darker and thus losing details in the shadows. Intellihance´s file is the other way round: It´s too light for my opinion. Though Xe847 tints everything yellow, I prefer it over PhotoPerfect´s result, which has acceptable colors but is too high in contrast and too dark in the shadows. Here are the results, ordered from best to worst: |
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Mittwoch, 17. Januar 2007 |
 This photo from Ljubljana, Slovenia was chosen to represent the average outdoor scenery with sunlight during the daytime. I shot this late spring 2006 and manually optimized colors, contrast, shadows and highlights. The result is shown above.
This file originally was saved in “Adobe-RGB” colors, but when I mistakenly used the Windows Explorer to rotate the picture, the color profile got ripped out without warning or notice. Then the file was optimized with all those applications I introduced you to in my last post. They had no chance to recognize the file was in Adobe-RGB. That might have influenzed the results, though I didn’t know at that point. |
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Mittwoch, 17. Januar 2007 |
When I return from a photo-shooting I usually find myself with a giant pile of digital pictures to populate the harddisk. So the first step will obviously be to view the pictures and throw away the odds. If you want nothing but the best you’ll use Photoshop to fine-tune the data next. But I can hear them customers ask “Can we have them all to make our selection… we need them by tomorrow morning…” Don’t want to spend the whole night on that? Well, me neither, so there must be solutions out there in the software-universe for automatic picture optimization, even if it’s just “quick & dirty”. I found a few and gave them a try. But again, for those who always reads the last page first: It is indeed almost impossible to beat the manual optimization process as long as quality is concerned. But yes, those automatic tools work faster, though not lightning fast. The difference amongst them is very hard to spot.
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