Jeremey's Weblog

HMNS Meetup!

The Assignment Houston meetup at the Houston Museum of Natural Science was a big success! Thanks to Erin from the Museum and Laurie from Assignment Houston for organizing a very cool event.

A TON of photographers showed up... I was enlisted to take the group photo, I did a merged/stitched panoramic (visit the photo on Flickr to see the full size version, if you dare):

Lightroom 2 Addendum: Details

I wanted to follow up on my Lightroom 2 first look post with some additional details and screenshots.

A word about the screenshots... the full shots are reduced from my full screen size to 1500 pixels wide. Each 500 pixel image in this post is linked to the full version, click it and it'll open in a new window. The sharpening comparison shots are PNGs so that JPEG artifacts won't fool with the results. Apologies if you have a braindead browser (older IE) that doesn't handle PNG properly. The 3-up images are JPEGs, linked to 100% crop PNG versions (not all that much larger, but without any artifacts from resizing or JPEG compression)... again, click on them for a new window. The 4-up PNG of the 640 pixel output is small enough to fit on this page.

First, here's a screenshot of the develop module:

Second, the selective editing user interface, the white circles on the image represent handles to separate selective edits, in roughly the vicinity that they were made... very nicely done:

You can click on a circle to select that edit and hitting Delete will delete it. Nice! When you do mouse over a circle (with a delay) or click on one, you see the mask you made:

For grins, here are before and after images showing some dodging of the head, light burning of the eyes, and clarity added to the eyes. The left image is before, the right image is after.

 

Switching gears a little... one of the more interesting features of Lightroom 2 is output sharpening on any export, as part of the export dialog:

Here are some comparisons of the output sharpening results... first, Judah's eye, exporting to JPEG, 80% quality, sRGB, full size... left to right you see Low, Medium, and High sharpening (click for 100% view):

Second, Judah's sleeve, same as above:

Lastly, here is the sharpening applied to a 640 pixel export (i.e. exported from Lightroom at 640 pixels). Upper left is NO sharpening, upper right is Low, lower left is Medium, and lower right is High:

Cool stuff!

Technorati Tags:
photography, photoshop, lightroom, lightroom 2

Lightroom 2 First Look

Adobe released a beta of Lightroom 2 this week, and it's very cool. The Develop module just keeps getting better and better. A few highlights of the new/fixed stuff:

• Non-destructive dodge and burn
• Other non-destructive brushes like clarity (!)
• Much better Photoshop integration (you can open the RAW file as a smart object to allow for later re-editing of the RAW settings)
• Post-crop vignette tool (finally)
• Smart collections

I imported the images from my "6 months old" shoot w/ Judah as a test. Lightroom doesn't have a managed library concept like Aperture does, so I have to get past the less abstracted file management model... so initially, as is always the case with Lightroom, I'm a little irritated with the import process. I REALLY like the project model in Aperture, and after importing into Lightroom, I don't feel like I know where my images are.

Projects make sense to me, why Lightroom has yet to have a mode where you work with projects and not folders on a disk (even if they are folders on a disk) I don't know. I'm fairly certain that I could make the folder model work like projects, but I think I'd be spending a fair bit of effort to do so.

Lightroom's Develop module is fabulous. It is definitely the strongest piece of the application. The non-destructive selective editing brushes (dodge and burn, clarity, etc.) are excellent, and fact that they're non-destructive is a big win over Aperture 2.1's dodge and burn controls (though Aperture's mechanism is generic and extensible by third parties, I'm not sure that Lightroom's is... but Photoshop is Lightroom's extensible editor anyway).

The quality of the RAW processing is excellent... I probably have a hair-thin preference for Aperture's renderings, they're better in the red channel IMO, but the difference is slight.

The other feature I've tried (so far) is the web gallery. I like Lightroom's HTML web galleries (the Flash galleries are unusable, IMO, because Flash itself ignores ICC color profiles). However, I want some kind of permanence to a gallery. I want to create it, name it, and keep it around, to add to later (or whatever). Aperture handles this very nicely and Lightroom doesn't handle it at all. I can cobble together the same effect from creating a collection for the gallery, and then also creating a web gallery preset so that I can reproduce the settings later... but this is hardly "creating a gallery" which I can later modify.

I guess it boils down to web galleries being one-offs in Lightroom, and an integrated feature in Aperture. I prefer the Aperture way by far.

Overall, Lightroom 2 is very compelling as a digital darkroom, but a bit disappointing as a workflow tool IMO. I admit that I may not be "getting it" and I can do everything I want, but it isn't clear to me and because it isn't clear, it doesn't work for me. But I know Lightroom works for a lot of people, so it's more a matter of workflow taste.

Having said that, the new develop features are so compelling that I might consider buying Lightroom anyway, especially if they price it at $199 (where Aperture is).

This is really a 'first look' review... I'll follow up when I've had a lot more time to spend in the app.

Technorati Tags:
lightroom, workflow, lightroom 2, adobe, photography

Color Profiles, Digital Photography, Photoshop, and YOU

...or "Everything I Know About Color Profiles"...

Note: this is something of a rough draft... I would appreciate feedback and will try to incorporate it as much as possible.

It is really, really important to understand and be comfortable with ICC color profiles if you're serious about digital photography. So this is everything I know about the subject, in one place, mostly so that I can send people this link if they are having questions or issues.

Questions this might answer:

Why do my images look great on my screen at home, but too [whatever] on someone else's?

Why do my images look great on a PC, but washed out on a Mac?

Why do my images look great in Safari, but washed out in Firefox?

Why do my prints look terrible when the images look great on screen?

Do I want to enable color management in Photoshop?

If you know a bit about color management and just want the short answer, here it is: shoot in Adobe RGB, use a color-managed workflow (such as Aperture or Lightroom, or Photoshop with color management enabled), calibrate your monitor, export for the web in sRGB with an embedded profile.

Some people will disagree with some of the above, some people will have different software, etc. OK.

Digital Color and Color Spaces

Pixels in images shot on digital cameras have three numeric values, a red value, a green value, and a blue value, aka RGB. An 8-bit image (JPEG is an 8-bit format, for example) can have everything from (0,0,0) to (255,255,255) ("pure" black to "pure" white, respectively). My baby's eyes have many different shades of blue in them, but one of them is (103,115,136).

Every digital image ever recorded was recorded in a particular color space, whether intentionally or by default. A color space defines a gamut, which could be described as the field on which a pixel in that space can play. A "larger" gamut is a larger field, there are more possible colors than in a "smaller" gamut. A pixel, i.e. one set of (R,G,B) color values, only has meaning in a color space. The color space defines what that pixel really means in the universe of all colors.

Where matters get complicated is in dealing with rendering an image onto a device, such as a monitor or piece of paper. Physical devices have varying capabilities and gamuts, and thus it is necessary to convert, or translate, a pixel's value from whatever space it is in to the space it is being rendered on.

Color Profiles

An ICC color profile is a description of a particular color space suitable for computers to convert between it and another color space (profile). As I said earlier, every image exists in a color space, that is, it has a color profile. The question then is whether we know what that profile is.

Here's where this becomes practical, and really not very complicated (yet). Most image formats support embedding the ICC profile in the image file itself, and thus any application wishing to render the image has the opportunity to properly interpret its pixel values. So the first thing to take away from this is: embed the ICC profile in every image you save! (providing that the format supports the concept... JPEG, PSD, TIFF, etc. all support this)

Which Color Space?

So by now you're probably asking this question... which color space should I use? The answer is it depends. But here are some guidelines:

sRGB was designed to approximate the gamut (and gamma) of a standard PC monitor

sRGB has quite a small gamut as a result

Many digital cameras shoot in sRGB only

Digital SLRs and maybe some others may allow you to shoot in AdobeRGB, which is a much larger gamut than sRGB

Because it was designed to look approximately correct without converting color spaces, sRGB is the profile of choice for web use

Shooting in AdobeRGB will preserve more information than shooting in sRGB

As such, it would be "better" to shoot in AdobeRGB if you can, as long as that doesn't put a big road block in your workflow (because you will now need to convert your web output to sRGB)

Color managed workflow software, such as Aperture and Lightroom, make all of this much easier

The Problem

So what's the big deal, why do color space issues and questions come up over and over and over?

The problem is applications. Virtually all applications on the Windows platform are totally unaware of color profiles. This means that even on a calibrated PC display, images may or may not render correctly. sRGB images should look pretty close on most. This is the big reason to save your web output in the sRGB space, it's really the only hope of getting an image to look close to correct for Windows users.

Most Mac applications do obey color profiles because that handling is embedded into the OS, but there are some notable exceptions.

Web Browsers (The Problem Continued)

Only one web browser obeys color profiles: Safari (by Apple). Every other browser will ignore them completely. This is extremely unfortunate, and it is the cause of much frustration, oddly enough to Mac users.

UPDATE: It appears that Firefox 3 (currently in beta) supports color profiles, but you have to enable it. It would be nice if it was on by default, sigh... but support is a far cry from no support, so thank-yous to Mozilla (and to the commenter who pointed it out). [updated 04.04.08]

The problem is this: the default gamma on the Mac is 1.8, whereas it is 2.2 on the PC (I like 1.8, FWIW). This means that an uncorrected image that looks correct on a PC display will look washed out on a Mac display (if gammas are left at their defaults). But Safari obeys profiles, so if you embed the ICC profile, it will render every one of your images correctly, even though the gamma is different (because it is converting between the embedded profile and the profile of your display).

However, Firefox does not obey color profiles, and thus Mac Firefox users will see just about everything on the web a little washed out.

Conclusions

What can we learn from all this?

Use color management. Turn it on in Photoshop, use color-managed workflow tools, etc.

Calibrate your display so that at least you are seeing accurate color.

Embed color profiles. This gives you the best chance of someone else seeing the image as you intended.

Don't use Firefox on the Mac for looking at photos (e.g. on Flickr).

FAQ

Back to those questions...

Why do my images look great on my screen at home, but too [whatever] on someone else's?

Probably because one or both of you have uncalibrated displays, or possibly because you didn't embed a color profile. Or both.

Why do my images look great on a PC, but washed out on a Mac?

Probably because you didn't embed a color profile, or because you're using Firefox on the Mac.

Why do my images look great in Safari, but washed out in Firefox?

Because Firefox does not support embedded color profiles, and renders everything without correction for the typical Mac display.

Why do my prints look terrible when the images look great on screen?

There could be a lot of things going on, but the first place to look is at color profiles. Is your display calibrated? Do you have an ICC profile for your printer? Is it being used? Is something else also doing color translation when it shouldn't?

Typically I get a profile for my printer, paper, etc. and turn off the native OS's attempts at color translation, allowing the app (Photoshop, Aperture, etc.) to do the color converting.

Do I want to enable color management in Photoshop?

YES.

Technorati Tags:
color, color profiles, photography, photoshop

The Artifact Treatment

Everyone remembers the drawing of Rose from Titanic (the James Cameron film), right? Here's a recent headshot given a similar "treatment" of time and damage.

Mask Pro Sweetness

I love Mask Pro. I'm not going to do a detailed review, that hardly seems necessary, but I'll just say I love it and here's an example. This took less than 60 seconds total. Click for full size.

The sun was setting so the sky is a wide range of blues, reds, and yellows, with dark greens and medium to dark browns making up the trees. I just painted over the trees after setting a few keep colors and a few drop colors.

Technorati Tags:
photoshop, onone, maskpro