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03.1.2010 Mark Wood No Comments

Post Processing a Glove

The other night, my wife and I got to milk cows for our neighbors.  We always enjoy this as it gives us a chance to pretend to be farmers for a day.  Also, there’s something very rewarding about a little bit of hard work.

After we finished chores, I tried to get a few photos.  At my wife’s suggestion, I took a few of an old, well worn, pair of gloves.  While they may not be the prettiest things to look at, they really speak to the hard work that goes into any physical trade.

While I liked the original photo (shown below), I really felt that it didn’t do justice to the subject matter.  It looked a bit washed out directly out of camera (which isn’t unusual) and so I thought I’d give it a go and try my hand at some post processing in Lightroom.

NIKON D200 @ 50mm — ¹/60 sec, ƒ/2.8, ISO 160 | zoom in
Original Photo

I really wanted to accent the aged / weathered look of the glove, so I dragged the Lightroom Clarity slider to +100.  This accentuated all the cracks and other textures of the glove.

NIKON D200 @ 50mm — ¹/60 sec, ƒ/2.8, ISO 160 | zoom in
Clarity +100

This looked better, but I really wanted to make it look aged.  Usually, age yellows things.  So I changed the temperature to make the whole photo warmer and messed with the fill light and vibrance settings until I was happy.

NIKON D200 @ 50mm — ¹/60 sec, ƒ/2.8, ISO 160 | zoom in
Warmed up the colors

I intentionally made things a bit too warm and yellow.  This was done because the next step was to desaturate the photo by dragging the saturation slider to around -25.  This isn’t so much as to create a greyscale photo, but enough to make it look antique.  I also did a little cropping to straighten the photo.

NIKON D200 @ 50mm — ¹/60 sec, ƒ/2.8, ISO 160 | zoom in
Final Version

I’m happy with the outcome and used this version in my Daily Photo #60.  I never had to leave Lightroom and it took under 5 minutes!

Just as a note, the easiest way to view all the steps is to click on the first photo in this post.  Once it’s loaded in a larger format, hovering your mouse over the right and left sides will bring up next / previous buttons.

Let me know what you think!

11.24.2009 Mark Wood 4 Comments

Canon G10 – No mass storage mode??

I love the little Canon G10. It’s a great camera that is much more portable than either of my two Nikon dSLRs. However, this little issue is enough to make me incredibly aggravated!

See, I guess I’m spoiled. My old Canon Powershot S30 (really old, but still works great to this day) had a mass storage mode. So do both my Nikon bodies. So what’s up Canon? What could possibly motivate you to remove such a helpful feature from your camera? And looking around online, I’m not the only one! In fact, it appears that many of the Canon dSLR bodies don’t have a mass storage mode either!

So let’s back up a step. With most cameras I’ve used, I shoot photos, they get saved to a flash memory device (either Compact Flash or Secure Digital) and I put the aforementioned card into a card reader. This works good for me. I don’t have to get out a cable and open the side of my cameras to attach the USB cable, and most card readers boast faster transfer speeds than the camera itself. So why, you ask don’t I just do this for the Canon G10? Good question!

When I bought my Nikon D50 which uses SD cards, I purchased a few 2GB SD cards for shooting. These worked well and were all I really needed. I got plenty of photos on each card (6 megapixel images) and I don’t like to store all my “eggs in one basked” so to speak. With the purchase of the Canon Powershot G10, I found that the 15 megapixel RAW files were so large that a 2GB card simply wasn’t enough. I found a good deal on a 4GB SDHC card and went for it. Little did I know that my SD card reader didn’t support the “HC” (high capacity) format of the cards. Bummer for me.

After a weekend of shooting in RAW I decided to copy the images off the card, run my custom renaming script on them and import them into Lightroom. Finding that my card reader wasn’t going to cut it, I simply pulled out a USB cable and plugged the camera directly into my MacBook. But wait! No icon appeared on my desktop. I tried my wife’s computer. No dice. Strange. I opened up Lightroom and behold, it recognized the camera. But wait! I can only import the photos into the Lightroom catalog. I don’t want to do this yet! I want to rename them first!

See, Canon, in all their infinite wisdom, decided that their cameras were too good for a Mass Storage mode which allows them to look like an external hard drive. Why? Well, that you’ll have to take up with the fine folks at Canon.

In the end, i worked around the problem by importing the files into Lightroom, deleting them from Lightroom (but leaving them on the hard drive), running my renaming script and then re-importing them into Lightroom. Phew! And then I went to bed. Needless to say, I’ll be posting some of the images I took soon, as well as investing in a newer SDHC card reader.

08.10.2009 Mark Wood No Comments

SmugMug Downtime

After some recent troubles with SmugMug over the past week, it appears the SmugMug team has decided to just schedule two downtime windows to get things sorted out.

They published this article detailing the recent problems and their proposed solution.

What does this mean to me?

They claim that there will be two windows. One tomorrow (August 11, 2009) and one Thursday (August 13, 2009). They don’t list exact times of these outages so I really don’t know what to expect.

However, they do claim that there will be a new feature coming soon — as early as this week. This is good timing for me as I am planning on trying out Zenfolio again. But more on that later!

08.6.2009 Mark Wood No Comments

Further ICC Profile Updates for Firefox 3.5

As discussed in the recent post Firefox 3.5 – ICC Profile Support, the latest Firefox supports ICC Color Profiles. However, there appeared to be problems in the implementation of this support — especially for the Windows platform.

Problems with Firefox 3.5

While the implementation of ICC Profile support released in Firefox 3.5 went a long way toward standardizing the way users see online images which utilize ICC Profiles, there were two major problems.

First, as mentioned by an astute commenter on my last post on this topic, the Firefox team decided to only implement Version 2 of the ICC Profile standard. While this is a huge step forward, version 4 of the ICC Standard has been around since 2005 (from what I could find). Therefore, there are many instances where support for Version 2 is simply insufficient.

To see an example of this, see the International Color Consortium (ICC) official page to test browsers for Version 4 compatibility here.

The second problem with Firefox 3.5 was that on many Windows machines, images containing a Version 2 profile were displayed incorrectly. In fact, they appeared much too dark.

One Problem Solved

Just released today was the latest update to Firefox 3.5, version 3.5.2. This update fixes the second problem discussed above. (See release notes – Bug 497363.) In theory, with this release, the images which displayed very dark under the old version now display correctly.

While I really didn’t know how much of a difference it would make, after installing the update on my Windows machine, the images on my last Firefox post appear much better.

Now, if only they could fix the support for Version 4 of the ICC Color Profiles…

07.20.2009 Mark Wood 3 Comments

Firefox 3.5 – ICC Profile Support

After many discussions, much frustration and a good bit of community involvement, Firefox 3.5 now supports embedded ICC Color Profiles by default.  This is a huge step forward for photographers (or really, anyone who wants to view online images how the author wanted them to be viewed).  While I won’t say that this latest update will solve all the color profile woes of online browsing, it is definitely something photographers and other photo publishers should be aware of.

So What is an ICC Profile?

Books have been written about color management.  In fact, numerous websites have been created, articles written and arguments waged about how color profiles and color management should affect the everyday user.  Suffice it to say that it’s no small or simple matter.  I fully expect many to disagree with what I’m about to say.  But please stay with me to the end, and feel free to comment if you have an opinion.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I feel it’s somewhat appropriate to step back and give a bit of an overview to color management so it is clear just where ICC profiles fit into this whole topic.

An ICC Color Profile is a description of the color space used to encode the color data of an image.  Sounds cryptic?  To understand this concept, we have to step back and understand a bit more about digital images.

What is a Digital Image?

I know what you’re going to say.  This is a trick question — a digital image is an image that resides on a computer, or some form of digital device.  And in that statement, you’re 100% correct.  But it’s important to understand just how that image is stored.  In it’s purest form, an image is made up of a series of numeric values each representing a portion of the image.  This numeric data is translated into real-world colors by the image viewing application.  Simple?  Sort of.  The issue is, there are different color spaces, or translations between the numeric data and the real-world color.  What this means is that if the application creating the image is using one translation, and the application viewing the image is using a different translation, the image will likely look very wrong!  Here’s an example:

Train_Seat_sRGB_Profile Train_Seat_Adobe_RGB_No_Profile

The above image on the left looks relatively correct.  The one on the right?  Not so much.  What went wrong?  Your image viewing software (a web browser in this case) didn’t know what translation was used when the image was saved, and therefore, translated the color data of the image incorrectly.

So, how does someone ensure that this doesn’t happen to them?  How can an application know how to decode the data?  Simple.  By embedding a ICC Color Profile in the image which describes the color space used to create the image.

But wait!  It’s not so simple…

Sadly, it’s actually much more complicated.  In an ideal world, image creation software and image viewing software (in all forms) would understand and respect the embedded ICC Color Profile.  Unfortunately, this isn’t even close to being true.  In fact, most software that isn’t written for graphic designers or professional photographers simply ignores these profiles.  Shocked?  I was too when I started becoming more involved with digital photography and started realizing just how hard this color management thing was!

The annoying thing about color management is that each computing platform and each software application plays a role.  What this means is that Internet Explorer running on Windows may have completely different color profile handling capabilities than Firefox running under Windows.  Bring in Mac or Linux systems and the issue gets even more confusing and uncertain.

To start with, is your browser color profile aware?

Train_Seat_sRGB_Profile Train_Seat_Adobe_RGB_Profile Train_Seat_Adobe_RGB_No_Profile

If the center image is the same as the image on the left, great!  Your browser respects and understands ICC color profiles.  If the center image looks more like the image on the right, you are using a browser which does not support ICC color profiles.  If you’re running the newest Firefox version 3.5, the center image should look like the good image.  Now try that with another browser?  What are the results?

I’ve only scratched the surface of ICC Color profiles, but stay tuned.  I’m planning on writing more on this topic over the next week or so!

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