Can A (Snow) Leopard Change It's Spots?

Those few hardy souls following my Twitter stream must be wondering what’s going on with some bizarre posts. I have been working away with giving my website a fresh lick of paint, and testing the changes at www.jonathanbourke.ie. It’s coming along nicely, but it will be a few weeks yet. The new site, while looking similar to the existing site, will have a more consistent structure to it and will greatly ease gallery posting.

In the meantime, here are some interesting links I came across:

• How To Get The Best Colour Out Of Your Photos – Lifehacker again comes up with a great guide for photographers. This one is heavily color focused, and the Photoshop wizardry required.
• How to get (more) space in a newspaper – I follow the @adrianweckler on Twitter, editor of the consumer tech section in the Sunday Business Post newspaper in Ireland. He shares some great tips for PR people (and photographers) in this post bemoaning the quality of photo’s sent to journalists.
• Lightroom Camera Calibration – I spend way too much time on my photography tools, rather than using my photography tools. This post on Camera Calibration in Lightroom definitely falls into the first category, but what the hell, I’ll share this link from Matt Kloskowski anyway.
• What I’d Love to See in Lightroom 4 – Damn, i am only getting started on Lightroom 3 (and the 3.2 release is nearly upon us, bring with it direct posting to Facebook)! Scott Kelby gets the ball rolling with his wish list for Lightroom 4, then has to defend it, before others chime in with their suggestions.

Related posts:

1. Some Quick Links
2. Software for Beginner, Improver, and Advanced Photographers
3. Do You Use Lightroom? Wordpress?

Lightroom & Wordpress user? Then check this out!

Getting my images from Lightroom to my website has always been a little bit of an ordeal:

1. Select images and export from Lightroom to disk
2. Log into wordpress, and manage media
3. Upload new images, and dig around on your hard disk to find them
4. Create a new blog post, or page, or whatever, and then attach the images to them
5. …
6. Profit?

If this sounds like you, then you absolutely need this Adobe Lightroom Export plugin from Luc Renambot called “Dossier De Presse“. Read on for more details and a sample gallery.

There are a number of ways to upload photo’s from Lightroom to Wordpress:

1. Create a web gallery within Lightroom and upload it using FTP to your website. Not exactly the neatest solution, although there are some impressive addin’s now available such as SlideShowPro
2. There is always my clumsy process of exporting jpegs to disk and then uploading to Wordpress. This is rather time consuming
3. Finally, I located a couple of Lightroom Export Plugins, which connect directly to Wordpress from Lightroom:
   1. LR/Blog from Timothy Armes
   2. Dossier De Presse from Luc Renambot

The following photo’s (and the initial creation of this post) were all created by Luc’s Dossier De Presse Plugin. I haven’t had a chance to review all it’s options (I know it also creates NextGen Galleries), but I am impressed at how quick and easy it was to get this far… select images, export, done.

Next step is incorporating these images into a formated and structured gallery, rather than a post. Watch this space…

BTW: the photo’s are from around Sydney during the visit of my own parents, and in-laws.

Related posts:

1. Building A Solid Foundation For Your WordPress Blog
2. The State Of The DAM 2 – Adobe Lightroom
3. Some More Quick Links

Towards The Light - Tourists shoot the Pantheon Oculus

Slowly but surely I am sorting and sifting my way through my back catalog of images. This new gallery features some of my favorite shots from a two week trip to Rome in 2007. During that time, we really got a feel for this wonderful city, and especially it’s food!

This collection features images from the Vatican Museum, the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, St. Peters Basilica, and the Coliseum. If you are visiting Rome, here are some tips I would offer:

• Don’t fill everyday with museums and sightseeing. One of the best ways of getting under the skin of this city is sitting in cafes, or in a Piazza, and watching the world go by.
• Skip the restaurants on the Piazza’s, especially on the Piazza Novona and the Campo Di Fiori. While the food may be good, it will be overpriced. Search down the side streets for the small local trattorias where the locals go.
• Walk or use public transport. Rome is easy to get around by anything other than car!
• The Vatican museum is worth a full day on its own.
• A tripod will not be welcome in the Vatican, nor will you be able to take pictures in the Sistine Chapel (though many do).

While the gallery contains some of my favorite images, I have posted additional images in my Flickr Set:

All images taken with a Canon 20D, and post processed in Adobe Lightroom.

Related posts:

1. New Gallery – Queen Victoria in Sydney
2. Repost – Duke Special @ Dolans
3. New Gallery – A Weekend in Carcassonne…

Adobe Lightroom 2

In my previous post on Digital Asset Management, I briefly outlined some of the entry level contenders for DAM software such as Google Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Elements. In the rest of this series, I will look at some of the heavy weights, the professional asset management systems. I will start with the one I use most –  Adobe Lightroom. Not sure if this is a good idea as I it is the product that I am most intimate with, knowing its strengths and weaknesses. Let’s get started…

Adobe Lightroom is now the elephant in the room of DAM software. As John Nack (of Adobe) revealed a short while back, Adobe Lightroom pretty much owns the professional market, beating it’s next nearest competitor, Apple Aperture, by a considerable margin. I have been using it since the very early beta’s (and Pixmantic RawShooter before that, which Adobe bought to kick start Adobe Lightroom), and hopefully, am somewhat qualified to give you a non-professionals opinion.

Library / Catalog Tools:

This is the module of Lightroom where I spend 85%+ of my time. I am slowly working through my back catalog of images, and suffering from OCD as I do, I insist on all images being correctly located, named, tagged, etc. Lightroom is very strong here, having the ability to apply extensive keyword tag hierarchies to images. A strong file renaming engine, along with virtual collections (and collections of collections), and numerous methods of catagorizing images (by colour label, by star rating, and by Pick/Reject) are available. Apples’ Aperture was the first major DAM product to be announced in my memory, but immediately there was a lot of critism regarding it’s approach to asset management; namely migrating all managed images INTO it’s database, removing all external access. While this had it’s merits, Adobe chose to go another way, winning lots of friends in the process, allowing the Lightroom user to:

• Reference the image file from it’s existing location
• Manage the image file by copying it to a managed location, still on the file system and accessible from other tools (I will touch on this again at a later date).
• Manage the image file by moving it to a managed location.
• Manage the image file by converting it to Adobe’s open DNG RAW standard, and moving it to a managed location.

Image Editing:

The second major module with Adobe Lightroom is the develop module, which is where the real fun starts. Here is where you apply image adjustments such as exposure, white balance, contrast, saturation, and a host of other modifications. Version 1.0 of Lightroom restricted these adjustments to the whole of the image, requiring the use of Photoshop for more targeted adjustments such as removing blemishes, or other distractions. Thankfully with version 2, Adobe introduced the adjustment brush and other specific pixel level adjustment tools. Now you can remove spots and blemishes, smooth skin, whiten eyes and teeth, apply graduated filters as well as adjust other settings relating to the entire image. You still need Adobe Photoshop in order to perform more advanced adjustments such as panoramas, collages, HDR, or other major image surgery. I would recommend Martin Evenings’ book if you want to get best value out of the Develop module though…

Altering white balance in Adobe Lightroom

Exports / Sharing:

In some respects this is where Adobe Lightroom has lost ground on the competition, especially Apple Aperture. Out of the box, Lightroom can export images to disk, and to CDROM (not on 64 bit windows), as well as having modules to govern printing, creation of a web gallery, and a slideshow. Doesn’t sound to bad… but Facebook, Flickr, and other online resources are now becoming major marketing tools for photographers, and exporting directly to these locations is a capability now offered by some competitors. Another major gap was the ability to export to a Photo Book creation service. This capability may feel a little consumer orientated, but again, it is offered by Apple Aperture.  Yes, export plugins are available, and I use them myself; they are very capable, but the lack of a native ability to export to the major hosting sites feels like an omission.

The X Factor:

What do I mean by the X Factor? Basically, why would I buy this over a competing product when, on paper,  the competing product is more capable. And for Adobe Lightroom, the X Factor is this… community. Lightroom has a massive community around it, producing tutorials, presets, blogs, reviews, reports, etc. When you are getting started with a product as advanced as Lightroom, that really helps and can’t be overlooked.

Details:

• Link: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/
• Cost: US$ 229
• Platforms: Windows, Mac OSX
• Buy: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

Related posts:

1. Great Overview of 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop
2. The State Of The DAM, Part 1
3. Software for Beginner, Improver, and Advanced Photographers

20 Years of Adobe Photoshop - But is it Still Relevant for Photographers?

Webdesigner Depot website has a great overview of 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop. While I have Adobe Photoshop CS4; I find myself using it less and less, and I wonder whether it will remain as relevant to Photographers in particular in the future. The touch up tools now available in  Adobe Lightroom / Apple Aperture and the like could very well render Photoshop to the realm of super specialized tool for Graphic Artists and Web Designers.

That said, it really has been a phenomenon; so much so that it is often used as a verb:

That image looks photoshopped!

A result of that is that in popular culture it now stands for all that is wrong with magazine images of skinny models. It is accused of being complicated, difficult to learn and use, and extremely expensive. So much so that it must be one of the most pirated pieces of software on the internet.

Still amazing software though…

Related posts:

1. The State Of The DAM 2 – Adobe Lightroom
2. Software for Beginner, Improver, and Advanced Photographers
3. My Top Three Adobe Creative Suite 5 Features

Be Careful With The Delete Button

Would you believe that I had deleted this photo?

Nope…  Well, I had; didn’t like it in colour, so it was trashed.  Only I made a mistake. I only removed it from my Adobe Lightroom catalog rather than from disk, so I was more than surprised when it popped back when I sync’d folders.

A little tidy up with spot removal, some localised sharpening, and the Glow 10 preset from onOne Software (free download, by the way), and I am left with this.

Feel like I won the lotto… of course this little boy makes me feel like that every day. See more in this gallery.

Related posts:

1. Jack L @ Dolans Warehouse in Limerick
2. New Gallery – Rome

Is this my best photo?

Is this my best photo?

It is if you are to believe the hive mind of Flickr, but I am not sure. Rating your own photo’s, filtering out the good from the bad, is possibly the most difficult photographic skill in my opinion. Nowadays, with Digital Camera’s we can easily take more and more photo’s, we can store them, organise them, and manipulate them easier than ever. In order not to be overwhelmed (or to overwhelm others ) with this volume, we need to choose the best and discard the rest. Whittling them down to the best of the best is fraught with emotional baggage, what if’s, “I can fix that…”, and “safe it for later” moments. I really struggle with this, and I am guessing I am not alone…

There are many guides on how to use rating systems in Adobe Lightroom, Aperture, or whatever… but very few guide the aspiring photographer on how to apply ratings? What makes a one star, a two star, etc? Should it all just depend on technical merit, sharpness, exposure, etc. When do artistic considerations come into it? Rule of thirds, negative space… What about simple emotion? Does simple mathematics have any place? The definitive guide on managing and sorting “Digital Assets” is The DAM Book by Peter Krogh. This is an exceptional book which I would recommend to anyone wanting some pointers on everything from file naming schemes to backup strategies. In it, Peter takes a more commercial point of view to sorting the levels of ratings applied to his shots. What I find most helpful though is the mathematical approach which is built into his system. He suggests applying ratings in a semi fixed steps:

1. One star is what’s left when all technically deficient photo’s are deleted, i.e everything after the first pass
2. Approx 10% of 1star make it to this level, which are the better shots from a shoot
3. Again approx 10% of 2 stars make it to this level

And so on. Blogger, Fraser Spiers, has a less mathematical approach, focusing on whether he would share an image on flickr or not. In his blog post on this topic, there were some very interesting comments from other readers.

I think a combination of all these approaches works for me, using the descriptive definitions to decide which rating a photo gets, but with mathematical quotas to force decisions, with the emphasis on not awarding a higher ratings for the sake of it. As mentioned above, Peter Krogh with his huge commercial library goes with 1/10th of 1/10th of… etc. This would mean that I would have a single 5 star image in my library of over 10000 images. A bit extreme, so I will shoot for a 5 fold reduction at each level. With this approach, I am forced to get over myself and down select by a factor of 5 with each pass. My library of 10400 images would break down as follows:

Now for an example:

So how do I work with this in practice? Assuming a typical import of 100 photo’s, these are the editing passes I would make:

1. Import all related photo’s from cards. The Lightroom import dialog is imensely powerful, and after this step, you should be able to tick the following of the list:
   1. Copy to single directory in Lightroom Managed Photo’s
   2. Rename
   3. Convert to DNG
   4. Backup
   5. Apply basic Copyright and Metadata
   6. Apply initial keywords
   7. Generate 1:1 previews
2. Quickly scan through, removing rubbish, duplicates, blurry, etc. Mark as rejected using “X”, and then deleting. Assign all remaining 1 star, let’s assume it is 95, resulting in the following ratings: (*:95, **:0, ***:0, ****:0, *****:0).
3. Scan through again, stacking similar, or edits (shouldn’t be any at this stage), put best on top. Assign selects or those that might be ok with some processing, cropping a 2nd star, ratings are now: (*:76, **:19, ***:0, ****:0, *****:0).
4. Third pass, these are the photo’s good enough for Flickr / Sharing. Give them a 3rd star (*:76, **:15, ***:4, ****:0, *****:0).
5. Picks of the shoot, not picked immediately, but perhaps a reflection of views on Flickr – 4 star (*:76, **:15, ***:3, ****:1, *****:0).
6. After time, best of collection – 5 star

Related posts:

1. Spectra Photo / Digital Beginners Travel Competition
2. Spectra Photo / Digital Beginners Competition – Lessons Learned
3. New Gallery – Rome

Which Photo Software? What photo software you need, when, and why...

I recently discussed the must haves / don’t needs of buying a digital camera, depending on the stage of your photography obsession . I would imagine that most of the time photo’s come straight out of the camera and onto paper, if at all. If you want to take your photo’s that little bit further, here are some software tools which can smooth the way…

I don’t know how many times I have had to rebuild my PC due to a glut of software. I must have tried nearly every photography related software or utility on the market. Don’t waste time like I did… here are the winners:

First Steps

So you use a compact digital camera, and you shoot exclusively JPEG files (though it may not mean much to you). Nothing beats Google Picasa for ease of use, power, and price… Free!

Google Picasa - Did I mention it was free?

Pluses:

Picasa can produce some amazing effects, which would take many steps in either Photoshop Elements or CS3. It’s photo organising capabilities are not bad either. And, did I mention it was free!

Minuses:

It currently does not support RAW files, and it’s edits are limited to the entire picture, so any advanced digital editing is out.

Brisk Walk

You are using an advanced compact digital camera, and you are beginning to tinker with the RAW format. Additionally you see all these tutorials about digital editing, mostly referring to Adobe Photoshop, but the cost is out of your league. Give Photoshop Elements a whirl. It has most of the tools that it’s big brother has for Digital Photographers, and has continuously updated RAW file support due to Adobe Camera Raw.

Adobe Photoshop Elements - Better than you would imagine!

I have used Adobe Photoshop Elements for years, and in many ways it is more powerful than many professionals give it credit for.

Pluses:

For example, it’s integrated organisation capabilities have only recently been matched by Adobe Lightroom, supporting keyword tagging, collections, versioning, tight integration with the editor.

Minuses:

Doesn’t support layers, non destructive editing, advanced renaming, automation.

In fact, in my opinion, you really need a good reason to buy Photoshop CS3 over Photoshop Elements, especially since you can expand it’s capabilities with Photoshop Compatible plugins.

Jogging

You are using an entry level SLR, and shoot nearly exclusively in RAW. You have amassed a large image library, and are beginning to poke around in the murky world of digital noise.  Here are some additional tools which I have found useful:

• NeatImage - Very easy to use, intelligent noise reduction in your images.
• PTLens – Great at “straightening” out the photo’s produced by imperfect lenses.
• Hamrick Vuescan - Got a scanner? Get this!
• Adobe DNG converter – When you start adding tags, and other metadata to images, you will begin to see additional “XMP” files appear. These files store the additional data when Adobe does not know how to write back to a particular image file, such as a proprietary RAW file. Converting all your RAW files to DNG has many advantages, one of which is the ability to store extensive metadata.
• Flickr Uploadr – The best photo sharing community.

I will leave the pluses and minuses of these as an exercise to the reader .

Sprinting

Ok the big kahuna! Despite it’s outrageous price, you have decided that you absolutely need Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop Lightroom. That said, if you are a professional photographer, and utilise any third party studio management, colour management, or any software, it is certain to work with these. Tutorials in industry press – you guessed it, Adobe Photoshop CS3. Many open source fans mention “The Gimp” as an alternative… but as good as it may be, it will never be taken seriously in the Photographic industry as long as it is called “The Gimp”.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - the professional choice for Digital Asset Management

Adobe Photoshop CS3 - The Big Kahuna!

I know I recently upgraded… so what do these give me:

• Complex file renaming in Lightroom
• Advanced metadata capabilities, such as templates, in Lightroom
• Advanced colour management
• Automating Photoshop with Actions

Pluses:

Extremely powerful, and pretty much the industry standard.

Minuses:

Bloody expensive, and in Europe, it’s a rip off with prices which bear no relation to sales tax, importation duties, currency exchange etc. Buy a boxed product in the US and bring it home.

Related posts:

1. The State Of The DAM 2 – Adobe Lightroom
2. Great Overview of 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop
3. The State Of The DAM, Part 1