JonathanBourke.Com

Protecting an Image by Watermarking…

jbourke — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:55:24 +0000

Qantas Airbus A380 does a low pass over Sydney

…ruins it.

At least if you have created a watermark of sufficient boldness to defeat the various semi-skilled image thief’s which inhabit the world wide web as it exists today. You only have to do a simple Google search to give an exhaustive list of tools and techniques to remove watermarks on images.

As RC Conception says in this guest blog post on Scott Kelby’s website:

The viewers eyes are now set to do the dance of “let me see what this picture COULD HAVE been provided this big symbol wasn’t in front of it”.

My simple copyright watermark, as in the image above would defeat nobody, but I have now realized that there are better ways to assert your ownership of an image / deter Copyright Thieves:

File name – A tip / directive from Peter Kroghs “The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers” was to include your name or moniker in your file name so that if you ship them to a client, or upload them someplace, there is still a simple and visible reference to you right there in the name.
Metadata – I am already a metadata freak, and every one of my images contains my copyright statement and contact details, so anyone using Adobe Lightroom, Google Picasa, or even Windows 7 metadata will see all this information.
Flickr Stats, Google Image Search, Tineye, and web server logs - Occasionally searching for references to your images using these tools can help you track down images thief’s.
Fight Back Against Content Scraping – Got a great tip from this article on Wordpress Security (Update: Original Source); a simple .htaccess rule can prevent any website other than yours from linking to your posted images:

RewriteEngine On #Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ #Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

Professional Image Tracking – A number of services have sprung up that attempt to digitally track your images such as Digimarc and ImageRights. They achieve this in different ways, Digimarc by embedding tracking information in each image file, and ImageRights by maintaining a database of your images and continuously searching the web for possible copies. Better still, ImageRights is after launching a free service protecting up to 10,000 images, check it out here!

Up to now, I have used my basic Copyright statement as a watermark on pretty much every image I uploaded to either Flickr or this website. this often resulted in some pretty ugly unintended effects such as on my home screen:

With all that said, and despite the low level of copyright theft that I experience, my new strategy for protecting my images will be as follows:

Flickr, Facebook, DPReview, or any other public website will get a Watermark as follows:

On my own website, I will slowly replace all images with watermark free ones in order to present them in the best light possible. I will also register these images with ImageRights.

No Watermark is the New Watermark!

Now if only Adobe Lightroom 3 could output an “Export Package” containing all the required formats

Some Quick Links

jbourke — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:45:29 +0000

Flickrs New Look

After the “War and Peace” like length of my last post on “Editing Canon EOS 7D Video with Premiere Pro“, I have taken a bit of a break. Here are some quick photography related links to distract while I craft my next masterpiece

Lifehacker – How to record great video with your hd dslr camera. Some great tips on shooting video, including knowing which way your focus ring moves. Sounds simple, but you don’t have time to mess around with this when shooting video.
ImpulseAdventure – Comparison of Digital Photo Catalog Software. After my brief reviews of DAM software such as Adobe Lightroom, I found this excellent (and massive) comparison table of pretty much every software product for digital asset management known to man.
Finally, Flickr will shortly be introducing an exciting new look, as seen in the image at the head of this post. It also features a great “Dark” mode, seen below, something which many third party services had provided in the past. I use Flickr to showcase my images, it’s a great community, and I enjoy the feedback that an image or gallery on my website doesn’t necessarily receive.

The new Flickr "Dark" mode

Editing Canon EOS 7D Video with Premiere Pro

jbourke — Fri, 21 May 2010 00:58:39 +0000

The emergence of Canon DSLR video has been a triumph and a struggle for wantabe Steven Speilbergs, me included. The triumph is the undoubted quality of the image, and the creative avenues opened up by the wide variety of lenses available.

The struggle includes the introduction of so much new terminology, so many new ways to be creative and to fail miserably, and the inevitable havoc caused to well established workflows with the introduction of video. This post outlines my efforts to arrive at something resembling a usable workflow for video, using MPEG Streamclip, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Youtube.

Camera Settings

Movie Mode: Depending on whether you have your Canon 7D set to PAL or NTSC, you are normally presented with 3 real options:
- 1080P @23.97 Frames/Second or “24P”: This is the Movie Pro’s choice for the supposed cinematic look.
- 1080P @25 Frames/Second for PAL or 30 Frames/Second for NTSC
- 720P @50 Frames/Second for PAL or 60 Frames/Second for NTSC. This is the setting I use. Why? Mainly because it is the best balance between good quality and acceptable file size. Also, converting, editing, playing back HD clips takes a lot of processing power, which not everyone has.
Shutter Speed: For best results Canon recommends a shutter speed between 1/ to 1/125 of a second. Click here for more.
Aperture: One of the great benefits of Canon DSLR video is the ability to use fast lenses, so this is very much a creative decision.
ISO: For lowest noise, this excellent article from Marvels Films suggest using one of 160, 320, 640, 1250, 3200.
Highlight Tone Priority: The interwebs suggest leaving HTP off to reduce banding in the movie files, as mentioned in this forum.
Noise Reduction: With moving images, noise isn’t the same issue it is for photo’s. This can be turned off.
White Balance: As with photography, try and set this before shooting. Saves pain later.
Image Stabilization: Some seem to imply that using image stabilization helps reduce jitter / flicker in your movies… BUT if you are using the inbuilt mic, you can hear the lens motor all the time!
Picture Style: After seeing this Youtube video, I was using the Canon Neutral style to preserve shadow and highlight detail, as in the movie at the top of this post. More seasoned Movie Pro’s employ custom Picture Styles, as excellently outlined in this video:

Shooting

Shooting video with a Canon 7D brings with it a number of ergonomic challenges, which many companies have sought to address with Finders, Follow Focus, Matte Boxes, Contact Rigs. These can all add up, but if you have the money to spend, get a load of this:

Canon EOS 1D Mk IV in a Zacuto Cross Fire Z-DCF3

If you are not in this category, and are improvising with their existing photographic supports and techniques, as I am, then I can share the following:

Shoot more, shorter clips than fewer longer ones. Camera shake, noise, etc. will be less noticeable in your final edited movie as the viewer will have less time to notice erratic movement on screen.
If you plan on changing zoom, or focus, then you better be using a tripod or monopod, as it looks wobbly as hell if you try and do it hand held.
A lot of sites recommend manual focus, mostly for the creative cinematic effect of bring a scene into focus, but if you are shooting handheld, I would go for a larger F-stop with focus at infinity. This is especially important if you are shooting moving objects.
Aperture Priority, Time Priority are completely ignored when shooting video. They become Program Mode, where you adjust exposure using Exposure Compensation. If you are dealing with erratic lighting or have a creative goal in mind, Full Manual is the way to go.
The built in Mic in the Canon 7D is fairly poor, and just “loves” the wind! I nearly always overlay my movie clips with music for this reason.

Transcoding

Ah yes, now to the heart of some of the difficulties. If you think the range of photographic file formats was complicated, wait till you get a load of movie file formats! You’ve got containers, codecs, compression settings, frame rates, dimensions, associated sound formats, sampling rates… it goes on and on. Let’s start with a couple of definitions from Wikipedia:

A video codec is a device or software that enables video compression and/or decompression for digital video.

And

A container or wrapper format is a meta-file format whose specification describes how data and metadata are stored.

My knowledge is very far from indepth at this stage, but the reason why Canon 5D Mk II and 7D movie editing has preoccupied many people on the web is that the file format chosen by Canon (using the H.264 codec in a Quicktime MOV container) is a great balance between quality and size for playback but terrible for editing.

The reason for this is the video compression used, which utilizes Groups of Pictures, where only every 15th frame of the movie is a complete frame, and the intermediary frames are calculated based on differences from this complete frame. As you scrub forward and backwards in your editing software, searching for clips to extract, your CPU needs to work overtime to calculate and re-calculate movie frames as you make edits. Some editing programs do this better than others, with Sony Vegas, AVID Media Composer, and Pinnacle Studio coming in for mention. Try scrubbing through Canon 7D movie footage in Adobe Premiere Pro and you will think that your CPU’s are going to melt!

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 is meant to be a vast improvement in this area, implementing native support for Canon DSLR movie footage. This improvement is enabled by a move to 64Bit, a new rendering engine called Mercury, and support for real time rendering on a number of high end nVidia CUDA enabled graphics cards.

While I have vastly simplified this explanation, you can now get some idea why movie files like this are so hard to edit, so the approach taken by most people is to transcode or convert the out-of-the-camera movie files to a format which is less CPU intensive to work with. The three main approaches that I have read about are:

Convert to ProRes which is a Codec supplied by Apple as part of Final Cut Studio. Which means you need to buy Final Cut Studio. And a Mac. $$$$
Convert to Neoscene which is a Codec supplied by Cineform. This Codec is compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro, but it does cost US$129.
Convert to DNxHD supplied by AVID which many in would consider to be the leader in HD Video Editing. The basic Codec can be downloaded for free here. You need to also get a copy of the free MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5 to accomplish the conversion.

The availability of a trial download of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, which brings with it greater native support for DSLR video and much improved performance during playback and editing, allowed me to compare editing performance as can be seen in the following sequence of screenshots:

Processing RAW Canon EOS 7D video in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. In the clip properties, you can see the different coloured frame types (i.e. the full frames and the differences). Simply playing the clip results in excessive CPU utilization.

Processing 10Bit AVID DNxHD video in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Even converting to this codec does not bring much of a saving in CPU utilization, although you can see that all frames are now full frames.

Processing 8Bit 50% Quality AVID DNxHD in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Dropping the quality level even further still doesn't show great improvements, but it does help.

Processing RAW Canon EOS 7D video in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Now we see an improvement, which is especially good considering that it is using only the software version of the Mercury Engine, and the trial doesn't include the native DSLR codecs due to licensing reasons.

I am unable to show Cineform Neoscene as my trial had expired and I don’t plan on purchasing it after seeing what Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 can do. Pending an upgrade, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is still my day-2-day video editor, and I chose the last, free option of AVID DNxHD and MPEG Streamclip. After installing these to components, here is how to go about performing the transcode:

File, Open 7D file.
File, Export to Quicktime.
Choose AVID DNxHD.
Click Options button beside the AVID DNxHD choice, which brings up a confusing looking dialog window. There is a bug in the layout.
Set Color levels RGB.
Click the tiny sliver of a box at the bottom of the window, and a drop down box will appear, allowing you to select the bit rate for DNxHD. As I demonstrated with the screenshots above, you may need to experiment to see what works best for your editing workflow, but ensure you pick the same resolution and framerate as the source clip.
Hover over the Uncompressed selection and the OK button will appear. This is another bug. Click OK.
Set quality to 100% (again this is something to be experimented with).
Uncheck Interlaced Scaling.
Ensure that “1920×1080 unscaled” is selected (or the relevant unscaled resolution for your source clip).
Click “Make Movie”

Setting AVID DNxHD options in MPEG Streamclip. Note that the drop down list for resolution and frame rate settings hang awkwardly from the messed up dialog window.

Other MPEG Streamclip "Export to Quicktime" settings, in particular frame size is unscaled and interlace scaling and video are unchecked.

Editing

I tested the waters with a number of video editors, including:

Microsoft Windows Live Video (I can’t believe that I am even admitting this, but it worked fine!)
Pinnacle Studio HD (based on the advice from this Photoframd Blog post)
Premiere Elements 7

As I stated at the beginning, and alluded too at a number of other points, I eventually settled on Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, which I am lucky enough to have as part of the Adobe Master Collection. No point having all that professional software if I don’t use it! For me, the easiest way to learn this product is to watch a number of the excellent tutorial series on Youtube, such as this one from OrlyHoodTV:

I won’t go into great detail here about the editing process, as that in itself would make up a very very long post, but will make the observations:

When creating a new project in Premiere Pro you will need to create a new preset based on the nature of the video files you will be using, i.e. you shot 24p
I am still tiptoeing creatively when it comes to editing, using simple standard Cross Dissolves / Dips to Black
I am not using any external sound recording, and the Mic on the Canon 7D just loves background noise and wind, so I mostly overlay music on the clips
If you have imported a lot of media, some of which you have trimmed, others you haven’t used at all, creating a new “Trimmed” project at the end and deleting the original is a great way of conserving disk space.

Exporting

I am not really churning out sufficiently long (or sufficiently high quality for that matter) videos to want to create DVD’s or BluRays… currently. When it comes to exporting, I typically have the following two targets in mind:

Web Video: mainly Youtube, but for a more professional feel I am also looking at Vimeo.
iPhone / iPod Touch: My iPhone is my Photoalbum, my Slide Collection, my primary method of physically sharing with those around me.

Once you are done in Premiere with your edits, you need to render or export your project for the appropriate destination. I am not familiar with your version of Premiere Pro but these are the general settings I use, much of which is based on the guidance from this Youtube and this Vimeo support page :

Originals: the fewer re-encodings or transcodings between original file and Youtube the better
Aspect Ratio: don’t change the aspect ratio if possible
Resolution & Framerate: again, don’t change the resolution or framerate
TV Standard: I am not sure whether this has a major bearing, but if you shot in PAL you should export in PAL (same for NTSC)
Containers & Formats: While Youtube and Vimeo both support a wide variety of import formats, sticking with H264 in a MP4 container seems to be the best option

Finally

So that’s it, my longest, most involved blog post to date. Writing this has helped me collect together the various snippets of knowledge required to produce something approximating a quality video.

Hopefully it will be useful to all of you as well.

For further reading, please visit:

Canon Digital Learning Center: Harnessing the Power of the EOS 7D’s Video System
Philip Bloom: Articles about DSLR Video
Cinema5D: Originally created for 5D, but relevant to 7D as well
Planet5D: 5D and 7D News
DVINFO: Canon 7D Video Forum
Vimeo: Canon 7D Group

End Of An Era – Selling My 20D

jbourke — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:03:32 +0000

We Had Some Great Adventures!

Ah, my first DSLR, a Canon 20D, it is time to part company. I will miss it, but the truth is I have not used it since I got my 7D. So it is up on eBay now, to be recycled into something new and shiny! Check it out here.

UPDATE: Sold and dispatched.

New Gallery – Queen Victoria in Sydney

jbourke — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 03:10:14 +0000

MS Queen Victoria alongside in Sydney

I have just posted a new gallery of some shots of the Cunard Line cruise ship MS Queen Victoria on her recent visit to Sydney, Australia. For more information on this beautiful ship, check out this Wikipedia entry, or the Cunard Line website.

While not strictly a “Landscape” photo, for the moment, I am including “Cityscape” and ‘Seascape” in this category.

Go take a look!

New Gallery – Rome

jbourke — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 01:43:59 +0000

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.

My Top Three Adobe Creative Suite 5 Features

jbourke — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:45:46 +0000

What’s In The Box?

So Adobe has announced Creative Suite 5. There have already been some amazing preview video’s, but, as always with Adobe products, there will be the debate whether to upgrade or not. I am lucky enough to have Adobe Master Collection CS4, but here are the top three features which will probably push me down the upgrade path…

Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5

Ok, I’ll admit it, I am terrible at retouching photo’s, and I would imagine that I am not alone. Good behind the camera, but don’t have the time to master this exacting skill. For us, Adobe has introduced Content Aware Fill. I could explain it, but it’s simpler to see it in action:

Native Support For Canon 5D MkII / 7D Movies In Premiere Pro

Let me tell you, editing video from a Canon DSLR in Premiere CS4 is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. The main issue being Canon’s file format choice for DSLR video, good for size and playback, bad for editing on a Non Linear Editor (i.e. Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas, Avid, etc.). Because of the type of compression used, Premiere Pro has to work hard to extrapolate image data when you try and “scrub” through your clips. The normal resolution is to trans-code the files to another format, usually at additional cost for additional codecs (Neoscene, I am pointing at you!). Combined with a new, GPU accelerated, playback engine called Mercury, native support for Canon formats should make the whole editing process a lot less labor intensive:

Ability To Create / Edit Wordpress Sites in Dreamweaver

As I am the jack of all trades (and more than likely master of none) when it comes to the design and maintenance of this website, I am especially looking forward to the ability to create, edit, and maintain WordPress sites within Dreamweaver CS5. Up to now, I have been reluctant to dive in and learn proficiently the HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript necessary to perform this task, but this feature should allow me a greater understanding of how a typical WordPress template hangs together.

Bonus Features

Some of the other Creative Suite 5 features which caught my eye:

Lens correction in Photoshop CS5 (as against PTlens)
HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5 (as against Photomatix Pro)
64Bit across all applications

DSLR Video – Welcome to the Future

jbourke — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 01:53:12 +0000

“The Last 3 Minutes” From Shane Hurlbut, ASC from Shane Hurlbut, ASC on Vimeo.

After watching this video, all I can say is:

Wow!

My Canon 7D can also shoot High Definition 24P video, though coming from a photography background, I am struggling to catch up. New formats, new tools, new challenges (i.e. have you tried to edit Canon 7D footage in Premiere Pro? That is a major challenge for another post…) and new creative decisions.

Then you see a video like this, and realize that even with all the right tools, you still have a mountain to climb The video capabilities on the current Canon 5D MkII and 7D are so strong that even the season finale of House MD was filmed completely on one.

I Hate Flash…

jbourke — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:18:17 +0000

I Hate Flash...

Why? It scares me, it defies me to control it, demands manual control for best results. And mostly, it beats me… so much so that I bought this book, this flash, this camera, and finally, this lens to wrestle back control at the darker points of the my photographic adventure.

If I am honest with myself, I don’t know how to use it correctly, and have the photographic evidence to prove it! This post from Photocritic.Org might just put me on the path to flash redemption, and cure me of my past sins..

It can cast harsh shadows, especially when you forget to remove the lens hood!

It can wash EVERYTHING out. And off course, there is Red Eye!

It can reflect in glasses, windows… even been known to sparkle of the odd shiny nose or forehead.

And if you are using it, so is everybody else. Flash attack from all angles!

Occasionally…

Just occasionally…

It can work out all right

No related posts.

The State Of The DAM 2 – Adobe Lightroom

jbourke — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:08:45 +0000

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