Camera Raw 6 and Lightroom 3 Lens Correction Feature Preview

It appears that Adobe will ship with a standard set of camera / lens profiles.  They also state in the video that they will make the profile generator available to the public!

For those who haven’t been following the release closely, the latest generation of 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pro models have been upgraded to use Intel’s latest Core i5 and i7 processors.  (For those curious, the 13″ line of MacBook Pros has stayed with the Intel Core 2 Duo line of processors, but did see a speed bump as well as more RAM standard.)

In addition to the upgraded processors, the other hot news is the change in graphics cards.  All 15″ models now come with a discrete graphics card – an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M.  Models are available with either 256MB of graphics memory or, for the higher end model, 512MB.

For a full review of all the latest options, I suggest reading the Engaget’s description of the updates, or their Review of the MacBook Pro Core i7.

So what does all of this mean to photographers?

Processing Power

Pure processing power has always been on the list of necessary features for a photographer’s laptop choice.  Converting RAW images, running programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture and storing / cataloging the hundreds of images taken every day is simply a processor intensive task.  And while the previous MacBook Pro machines were indeed powerful, over the course of the last 10 months, a lot of upgrades have come about in mobile processors.

In an effort to stay competitive, Apple made a smart decision to include the latest Core i5 and i7 processors in this generation of MacBook Pros.  Early benchmarks of these Intel processors has shown very favorable results and these should prove to provide an even better user experience to anyone doing complex computing.  While there have been many complaining about the lack of a quad core option, Apple has always been conservative with their laptop specs.  I guess, in this case, I’d rather have a rock solid laptop with slightly slower processor than the latest and greatest processor at the sacrifice of stability and build quality.  However, I’m sure many would not agree.

Screen Resolution

While the upgraded processor is a huge draw for running Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom, the other huge news is the ability to add a higher resolution screen to the 15″ product line.  For me, this alone makes these a huge step above the previous generation MacBook Pro for any sort of photographic tasks.  And while the 17″ does have an even higher resolution, many mobile professionals can’t justify the additional bulk.  In fact, most professional photographers I’ve conversed with feel that the 15″ is the best option with regards to bulk and horsepower.

While some may argue that there is really very little gain from the new higher resolution screen, let’s do some quick math.  The 13″ screen has a standard (non-upgradable) resolution of 1280×800 or 1,024,000 pixels.  The standard 15″ resolution of 1440×900 pixels equals a total pixel count of 1,296,000 (for those doing the math, that’s only a 26.5% increase over the 13″).  And while this does indeed make a difference, if you’re anything like me, the more pixels the better — especially for a program like Adobe Lightroom.  Enter the new upgrade option from Apple.  For only $100 more (for glossy, $150 for a matte option), the latest 15″ can be ordered with a 1680×1050 pixel resolution for a total pixel count of 1,764,000.  This is a 36% increase over the standard 15″ configuration and a whopping 72% increase over the 13″ model!  That’s huge!  I’m sure we’ll see many people upgrading for that feature alone.

Graphics Processing

The NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M has received its fair share of criticism in the last week.  However, since this chip was manufactured exclusively for Apple, and has only been released for a week, I really feel it’s too early to pass a harsh judgment.  In fact, early reports show it being more than adequate for most users.  Also, according to many (including the above Engadget review), the latest version of Photoshop (CS5) will take full advantage of the upgraded GPU.  I can only hope that Lightroom 3 (when released) will also follow suit as rendering a couple GB of images can currently take a noticeable amount of time.  Only time will tell how well this graphics option will perform.

Conclusion

Personally, one of the biggest reasons I’ve stuck with my 3+ year old MacBook was the fact that the MacBook Pro line simply didn’t offer enough incentive to upgrade for my uses.  And when Apple announced the new 13″ Pro models, I thought I’d finally found my next laptop.  However, with the discrete graphics option now standard on the entry level 15″ models, and the option to add a higher resolution screen, I really feel that the 15″ MacBook Pro is the perfect portable photographic companion!

Update:

The new MacBook Pro arrived and my Initial Impressions are posted (as well as unboxing photos).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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…

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:

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?

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!

It is important to note that for those who are installing the Lightroom update, the latest version of Camera Raw is included so there is no need to install both.  For those running Photoshop, I believe the Camera Raw update may need to be installed separately.

What do these updates mean to users?  Personally, the Lightroom update means little for most users.  The bug fixes seemed focused around language support and updates to the crop module (which I have never experienced problems with).  However, for those users using newer camera such as the Canon EOS 500D (Digital Rebel T1i) or the Nikon D5000, the Camera Raw updates to support these cameras are welcome!  (As well a those users using Hasselblad digital backs which I expect is a very small number of my readers).  To view the official release notes, please go here.

Lightroom Links

• Adobe Lightroom 2.4 for Mac
• Adobe Lightroom 2.4 for Windows

Camera Raw Links

• Adobe Camera Raw 5.4 for Mac
• Adobe Camera Raw 5.4 for Windows

No new features are introduced, but there is a list of bug fixes and new camera support including the Nikon D700 and Nikon D90.  Great news for all those early D700 users as this would cause a major snag in a Lightroom work flow.

To get this update, go to the Adobe Labs page for Lightroom 2.1 and download it.  It won’t occur automatically due to its Release Candidate status.  Once it’s finalized, I’d assume that it will pop up as an update from within Lightroom.

As soon as I have a chance, I’ll be checking this out.

Of course, the power lines had to go.  It also had to be straightened.  The shot was taken just before a storm.  The wind was starting to pick up and there were some very threatening clouds approaching.  So I decided to try to re-create the mood that existed at that moment.  Granted, I didn’t really capture it in the original, but thanks to the digital era, I was able to take some creative license.  The next few steps really just sort of happened and with a little selective burning and dodging, I ended up with a moody shot which I believe captures the feeling that day.  Click on the image to see a larger version as I don’t think the small version does it justice.

Let me know what you think.  I submitted it to a couple stock agencies so we’ll see if they think it’s sellable.  All comments are welcome!