Articles and Reviews
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Presentation to Pacific Digital Photography Club I'm the kind of guy who likes to have an entire presentation typed up and available on a word-for-word basis. However, a word-for-word presentation is only an ideal and rarely happens when you interact with the audience and answer questions. One also tends to improvise the presenation at times, using the written notes more as a guide of where one is and what the topic is. Thus, what you read below is the theoretical ideal of what I wanted to present, but is not actually what was presented. It was pretty close though. Thank you Hank and thanks to the club for inviting me to speak before you. How’s everyone doing tonight? Everyone doing okay, because I’m nervous as heck. This is my first time presenting in front of a group of photographers, so go easy on me. So, who am I and why are you sitting here listening to me?
I’m just a regular Joe that loves photography. I got into photography back in 1997 somewhat by chance. In the late spring of 1997, a friend suggested that we take a trip back to his hometown of Montreal and he’d show me how much older and historic Montreal is compared to Vancouver. He also told me about certain establishments along St. Catherine’s Street and the friendly Montreal girls, so it didn’t take too much convincing to get me to tagalong. Since it would be my first trip to eastern Canada with a strong likelihood that I wouldn’t be back for a long time, I decided that I needed to buy a real camera to record some memories. Thus, I bought my first SLR, a Nikon F50, which I had for all of 10 days before I returned it and traded up to a F70. It was the F70 that I had for the Montreal trip. That was the beginning of my diving head first into the world of photography, because here was this SLR that I had no clue how to use beyond Program Auto mode. I bought a lot of technical books, subscribed to magazines and used the fledgling World Wide Web to find news groups and websites that would educate me about photography. Back then, the
most influential website that I came across was Photo.net, which was once MIT
professor, Philip Greenspun’s personal website, which
evolved into one of the largest Internet communities for photographers. If you
visit Photo.net and read some of the old reviews posted, you’ll come across my
contributions to the site in my Nikon F100 and Bronica SQ-Ai reviews. In the beginning I loved landscapes and marveled at the images of Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell, one a master of black and white landscapes and the other a master of color landscapes. These days, I’m inspired by documentary photography, the type that show the human condition and tell us a little something about humanity. Here’s one example of what I’m talking about, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, taken during the Great Depression.
After a couple of years of learning, I decided to write about my experiences and learning process as a photographer and I created my own website called CameraHobby.com.
CameraHobby has been around since 2000, but around 2004 or so, as I found myself busier with work and family life, I found that I was not able to write as many reviews and articles as I would have liked, so I began posting comments to fill the void between major reviews and articles. Today, we call that blogging and most people that come across CameraHobby refer to it as my blog, but it actually didn’t start its life that way as I was actually trying to emulate Philip Greenspun’d Photo.net in my own way. Evolution towards a blog happened by accident and one of my photographer friends said that I was blogging before blogging was cool. For those of you that are Nikon users, you may have come across this website in your Internet travels, NikonLinks.com.
NikonLinks is also my website and is a portal to other people’s reviews and articles about Nikon. I didn’t start NikonLinks, but the original founder approached me to buy the website and relieve him of the continual need to maintain the website. I’ve owned and operated NikonLinks for almost four years now. While much of my activity revolves around my websites, I do try and do the occasional bit of photography and while I’m purposely not doing much this year, I also photograph weddings here and there.
I’ve been photographing weddings since about 1998, when some friends asked me to be their photographer and I suppose I did an okay job, because we’re still good friends. I chuckle a bit when I read forum postings from photographers that ask the larger community if they should agree to photograph a friend or family member’s wedding. Many comments are along the lines of, if you value the friendship, run away screaming from the request, because weddings are stressful and nerve-wracking.
I actually enjoy photographing weddings and while there is stress, it’s the kind that I seem to be able to cope with fairly easily. So, that’s basically who I am photographically, which takes us to why are you listening to me?
In hashing out some ideas for a presentation, Laurence suggested that I talk about digital photography and we settled on me discussing my digital darkroom: what are the pieces of my digital darkroom, why did I choose these pieces of equipment or software, and how do I use it. Given the time we have, this will not be a detailed look, but a high-level overview of what I use when I’m sitting down to edit my digital files. Now, as everyone has figured out, I’m a Nikon user, but the choice of brand doesn’t make much difference when discussing the digital darkroom. And, I’ll let it be known that I’ve been using a Canon 40D and a 70-200 IS lens quite a bit in recent months and I find the combination to be very good. When I was using both systems to photograph my son’s hockey team, I found the 40D to be a better camera than my D200 for white balance, auto focus speed, responsiveness and high ISO image quality. So, here is my digital darkroom.
It’s just a bedroom in my house used as my home office and it is, quite frankly, packed with far too much stuff. There are three computers in it most days, but only two are of any importance for the digital darkroom. There are four printers in it, but only two are of any importance as photo-quality printers. There are also assorted peripherals and pieces of audio gear, as I’m big into audiophile quality sound. Unfortunately, with a somewhat small house and four young kids, I don’t have the space to setup my big hi-fi and I’ve taken to using a computer-based audio system in my office to give me my music fix. Computer number one is an Acer 9920 laptop.
Now, while the Acer is a laptop, it’s one of the biggest damn laptops you’ll find at 15 lbs and offering a 20-inch screen. I’m a greedy bugger and it would sometimes seem like that I live by the adage that bigger is better. I’m a firm believer in running multiple computers, just as many photographers own multiple cameras of varying sizes and capabilities. Each has a particular set of features that offer certain advantages. With the Acer being a notebook, it offers me nearly silent operation and I can hibernate it with a push of a button without having to power it down. In fact, the only time I ever fully shut down my notebook computers is when I’m required to for a software update. Otherwise, it’s just hibernation mode, so that when I’m ready to work again, it’s just a push of a button and a wait of a few seconds to be up and running again. Because of these convenience features, I use the Acer as my day-to-day computer for just about everything, from emailing to website editing to web surfing for research to word processing and light-duty photo editing. The only task that I don’t do on the Acer is heavy-duty photo editing, because the processor in the Acer is not particularly powerful, the amount of RAM is only 4 gigs, and the hard drives are not very large or fast. However, as a day-to-day system, it works quite well and having a 20-inch widescreen monitor is nice. I’ve supplemented the Acer with a 19-inch LCD so that I can see all the most commonly accessed Photoshop palettes, but it’s also handy to be able to have Adobe Dreamweaver open on the larger screen while I have a web browser open on the other for quick links updates when I work on my NikonLinks website.
In this screen shot, you can see the main 20 inch monitor has Dreamweaver on it and the smaller monitor to the left has a web browser open to the DPReview website. I keep the second LCD monitor to the left of the Acer, because on the right side I have a Wacom Bamboo Fun pen tablet, which I use as a mouse. The Wacom Bamboo is my foray back into trying a graphics tablet having tried an entry level Wacom Graphire years ago. I didn’t like the Graphire, but I’m finding the Bamboo to be a better tablet and I’m getting used to using the pen as a mouse, which helps to relieve the wrist and arm stress I feel when I use a mouse for extended sessions. When I’m just relaxing and catching up on some website articles, I sit back in my chair and I have the tablet in front of me. Using the pen to navigate in this manner feels very natural compared to the mouse, but I do find that the mouse is still more intuitive and faster to use, especially when I need to do a lot of clicking around. Computer number two is another notebook, but one that is more conventionally sized.
While I do have a number of graphics applications installed, this is not a computer that I consider important for digital darkroom work. It’s a 15-inch Sony that I bought on sale for pretty cheap so that I could install some video tutorials for a course that I’m currently studying for. The size and weight allows me to haul it out on the road so that I can do some studying. When it’s in the home office, it acts as the music server for my computer based audio system. The reason why I don’t consider it suitable for digital editing is because the quality of the LCD is not very good for viewing angle and color fidelity. I’ve tried four different color management applications and three colorimeters to profile the Sony’s LCD and you just can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. There is also an issue with the integrated Intel graphics processor. While the big Acer has a separate nVidia graphics card, the Sony does not and uses an integrated Intel chipset, which is common in entry-level notebook computers. What I’ve found is that if I plug in a peripheral device such as an external hard drive, or open up some software, a lot of times my custom monitor profile gets thrown away and the LCD reverts to a non-profiled state. The non-profiled state of the LCD is far too blue in color temperature to offer any accuracy for photo editing. Computer number three is the big dog in the house.
While we call this class of computer a desktop, you can see that it really isn’t a desktop computer. This is a server grade and server sized box that runs loud and acts as a space heater. It warms up the room so much that even in the dead of winter I can open the window and be fine. Heat I can deal with to a degree, but what I really can’t stand is the noise from all the fans running inside the box and I find that when I’m using this computer, I need to listen to music using earplug style headphones to block out the noise. The noise and the heat are the big reasons why I’m a big believer in having multiple computers, at least one of which must be a notebook computer. Incidentally, while we’re talking about computers, it’s obvious that I’m a PC user, but I like what Apple has to offer with its Macs and if I wasn’t able to get my main computers for less than retail pricing I would be running at least two Macs.
One would be a 15-inch MacBook Pro, which I consider to be the best overall notebook computer available on the market and the other would be a full sized Mac Pro tower. I may or may not run an iMac as well, because the MacBook Pro is so capable and versatile.
While Windows Vista doesn’t get much good press, all three of my computers run Vista. The two notebooks run 32-bit versions of Vista while the desktop runs 64-bit Vista Ultimate. Other than a memory leak that required a hot fix patch to correct, I’ve not run into any significant issues with this OS. My thinking is, like it or hate it, Vista is here to stay and is where Microsoft is going to throw all its resources at, whereas the XP era is slowly dying. However, if you’re contemplating the purchase of a new computer and running Vista, I would take stock of all the peripheral devices you have and which ones you want to buy down the road and see if there is Vista support and drivers from the vendor. While 32-bit Vista is quite broadly supported now, 64-bit Vista might be problematic, depending on what you have and want to use, for example scanners and printers. Getting back to my own tower, I specified the parts in the summer of 2007, but it wasn’t built and delivered until December 2007, which really annoyed me. I stuck with it because my builder is family and was getting me wholesale prices on the parts. If it were anyone else, I’d have walked away from it and just bought a Mac instead. The tower has dual 2.66 GHz quad core Xeon processors for a total of eight cores installed in an Intel server motherboard. It has 8 gigs of RAM and a 512 MB ATI graphics card that can drive two 30 inch LCDs at the same time. Currently, I use a 30 inch Dell LCD and a 24 inch Acer LCD with my desktop computer – who ever told you that size doesn’t matter, lied to you. Inside the box, there are four hard drives, two 150 GB Western Digital Raptors and two 1 TB Seagate hard drives. Outside of SCSI or SAS drives, the Raptors are the fastest consumer hard drives you can buy and run at 10,000 RPM, whereas other desktop model hard drives run at 7200 RPM. Western Digital just announced a brand new Raptor, which now offers 300 gigs of storage capacity and is supposed to be 35% faster than the older Raptors I use. I use one Raptor as the operating system and applications drive. I use the second Raptor as the paging file for the operating system, as well as the scratch disk for Photoshop and as a cache disk for other applications. At the moment, the two Seagate drives are enough storage to accommodate all my files, but if and when I decide to get myself back into shooting weddings on a regular basis, the two drives won’t be enough. At that point I will have to segregate how I use the internal storage drives and how I use my external storage drives. My long-term intention is to use the internal drives as short term data storage drives. Short term is defined as anything that I think I will need within a year. If not then the files can go to long-term storage, which are external hard drive systems.
At the moment, I have four external drive systems: 1) The oldest is a 1 TB TeraStation Pro network
attached storage box that I’m using to store all my photographic files. The
TeraStation is configured as a RAID 5 box, which means that the original 1 TB
capacity gets reduced to about 700 gigs of actual storage capacity, because the
RAID 5 uses 300 gigs for parity data to rebuild the RAID in the event of a hard
drive failure. 2) My newest external drive is a Drobo
Robot, which I currently have setup as a 2 TB storage unit using four 500 gig
hard drives. The Drobo is like having a RAID 5 box without having to setup a
RAID 5. Storage capacity is also lost just like with a RAID 5, because the
Drobo uses it to rebuild the data in the event that a hard drive goes bad, or
in the event that you want to upgrade the storage capacity. 3) My two other external drives seen here are only 500 and 600 GB in capacity and are used to store my music files. The Western Digital MyBook is the main music server drive, because it doesn’t have a fan, so there’s no noise contamination while the Vantec case beside it is a duplicate for redundancy. What you might have picked up on is the amount of duplication and redundancy that I have for my files. I have a complete set of files inside the computer spread out over the two 1 TB drives. I have another complete set of files externally in the Drobo and then a third set spread out over the TeraStation and the two music server drives. I used to burn CDs and DVDs, but as I generated more and more files, the idea of burning hundreds of DVDs seemed like a waste of time and would take up too much space to store, so now I use hard drives with some form of failsafe mechanism, i.e. a RAID or the Drobo system. Nothing is ever perfectly safe and hard drives will eventually fail, but having a RAID type system provides some protection so that the loss won’t be catastrophic if a drive goes kaput. Performance wise, my desktop system is pretty sweet, which helps to make up for the noise and heat I have to put up with. There are certainly faster systems available now, but I think this box will keep me going for the next three to four years. In Windows Vista, there are gadgets that you can have displayed along the side of the monitor. One of the gadgets is a CPU meter that also has a memory gauge to track how your CPU and RAM resources are being used. When I use either one of my notebook computers, I can see the CPU gauge spike up into the red zone quite regularly, whereas my desktop’s gauge barely moves above one or two doing the same task. Many of you have probably heard that Photoshop is very RAM intensive and when configuring a new computer, you should install as much RAM as you can afford and maybe go with a lesser CPU. However, if you’re shooting and editing RAW files with a digital SLR, you will want to consider processing power and RAM equally. It is true that Photoshop is a RAM-hungry application, but if you happen to use Adobe’s flagship RAW converter, Lightroom, you will find that it doesn’t need as much RAM as Photoshop, but it will utilize all the CPUs or cores available. I expect that other good RAW converters are the same in being more processor hungry than needing RAM. RAW conversion is like editing video, which is another processor intensive activity and Lightroom can utilize all eight of my CPU cores in my desktop system, whereas Photoshop CS3, as RAM hungry as it is, cannot utilize all 8 gigs of RAM. This is because Photoshop CS3 is a 32-bit application, which has an addressable limit of 3 gigs of RAM. However, CS4 for the PC is expected to be 64-bit, which will finally unleash Photoshop and I can imagine that some hardcore users are going to be throwing crazy amounts of RAM at it, like 64 or 128 gigs. For Mac users, rumor has it that due to some coding changes for OS X, Adobe won’t be able to produce a 64-bit version of Photoshop for Macs until CS5 comes out. Lightroom 2, which is currently in public beta will be available as a 64-bit converter for both platforms. Not everyone needs an eight core computer and truth be told, for right now, a quad core computer with 4 gigs of RAM offers the best performance to cost ratio. The reason why I built an eight core box with 8 gigs of RAM is that I expect to own the computer for several years and well into the era where all the major applications will be 64-bit capable. Before the break I talked about hardware, so let’s start talking about some of the software I use.
This screen shot shows Adobe Lightroom, incidentally the thumbmail photos are from a meeting of the Nikon Historical Society, which had its biennial conference in Vancouver last weekend. You would think that the Nikon Historical Society would be all about cameras and lenses, but it’s actually more about binoculars and specialized optics such as aerial lenses. Anyway, in my digital darkroom, the flagship piece of software is Adobe Lightroom. Whether I shoot with Nikons or Canons, everything is captured in RAW mode. If I shoot JPEG, there’s probably a specific purpose for it, but other than some test shots, I cannot recall the last time I used JPEG capture with my SLRs. On occasion I will use Adobe Camera RAW instead of Lightroom, but this is usually for processing some sample photos for the website where I don’t intend to keep the original RAW files. Any RAW file that I keep permanently, I will import into Lightroom, which conveniently acts as a cataloguing application too. When I find the time to revamp my third website, which offers my wedding photography services, I will use Lightroom to create new galleries, whereas before I used the gallery feature in Photoshop. While it is best known as being a RAW converter, Lightroom is actually a few different applications in one. As mentioned, it is a database that can catalogue your digital files and they don’t have to be RAW files either, as you can import JPEGs and TIFFs into the Lightroom Library. Digital asset management, or DAM, is a buzzword in this digital age and Lightroom has the ability to be your DAM application. When you import files into Lightroom, you can browse through them using the Library module. You can view the files as thumbnails in a table view, or view them one at a time with a larger view, or magnify it to 100% or larger. There is also a convenient scrolling thumbnail navigator at the bottom of the Lightroom screen, which is handy for when you use the main window to view only one image.
In this screen shot, on the left side under Folders, we have folder names with the white names showing folders that are online, while the red names indicate folders that are off line, which means the original RAW files aren’t directly available for rendering, but you can still see the previews and track what’s in your folders.
You can compare files two or four at a time, which is handy when reviewing a number of files that are only different in subtle ways.
In the Develop module, which is the RAW image editor, on the left side of the application, you have all of the expected editing parameters available, such as white balance, exposure, highlight recovery, shadow detail, sharpness and even noise reduction. There are also additional editing parameters that are unique to Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW. These include the Vibrance and Clarity settings, as well as the split toning settings. One really handy feature of Lightroom is the ability to have a before and after view of an image, so you can see how far you’re going from the original capture. In this screen shot, we see the original RAW file before it’s been edited and the after edit right beside it to the right. This shows some of the flexibility of shooting RAW mode, to be able to pull back and recover highlight details in a photo that looked hopeless at first view. If this had been a JPEG, chances are I’d have tossed this image into the trash bin.
There is also a nice web gallery module that allows for quick creation of HTML or Flash based web galleries with slideshow features. There is also a Print module that I’ve not used yet, but it’s one that has some great potential to be like a RIP for placement of multiple images of varying sizes on a sheet of paper. The last module is a slideshow creator, but this is the weakest of the five major modules available in Lightroom. I’d have preferred that Adobe not even have bothered, because compared to the dedicated slideshow application I use, what’s available in Lightroom is not in keeping with the kind of quality we’d expect from Adobe. That shortcoming aside, Lightroom as a total package is powerful, flexible and quite straightforward to use. It’s not cheap at USD $300, but I think it’s worth the money. What about other RAW converters and as a Nikon user, have I considered using Nikon’s RAW converter? I’ve tried and used other converters before Lightroom and the reason why I use Lightroom now comes down to another buzzword of this digital age, workflow! Nikon Capture NX is obviously considered to be the best in rendering RAW files from Nikon SLRs, but is not known for having an easy to use interface. I’ve not used Capture NX in any serious fashion, so I cannot offer any personal experiences with it, but the comments I’ve read about Capture NX indicate that those that are pleased with it are typically low volume shooters and/or those without pressing deadlines. I used to use the predecessor, Nikon Capture 4 and while it had a better workflow than Capture NX, it’s very slow in applying and rendering edits to RAW files. I’ve also used Bibble Pro before deciding on Lightroom as my RAW converter of choice. Bibble Pro is quite a feature-rich converter and it’s half the cost of Lightroom. If you don’t like the cost of Lightroom, Bibble Pro is definitely worthy of consideration, but I found that in some instances, when using the highlight recovery feature of Bibble, I would end up with some funky pink or blue highlights. Turning off the highlight recovery setting would get rid of the funky colors, but then I’d lose out on one of the key features of shooting RAW, which is the exposure latitude of being able to recover what would appear to be blown out highlights. So far, I’ve not seen any funky colors from any file edited through Lightroom. For workflow, consider this scenario: you’re hired to photograph a wedding. They want you to cover the event for the full day, which could be 10 to 12 hours. You hire a second photographer to help with the coverage. Together, the two of you shoot off over 2000 RAW files. How would you approach reviewing and editing that many files? Before Lightroom, my reviewing and editing used to be two separate tasks that would 2-3 days to complete. I would copy all the files to my hard drive and then try to sort and arrange in sequence order so that my files would coordinate with the second photographer’s files. God help you if you weren’t smart enough to time synchronize your cameras before you started photographing. There have been times when my cameras were not time synched and I can assure you that it is a laborious chore to manually sort the image files. After the sorting has been done, then I would review all the files in a browser, such as NikonView or Adobe Bridge and then start culling the bad shots and keeping the good shots. After the cull, then I would finally edit the RAW files through Bibble Pro or Nikon Capture 4. I would output a set of TIFF files of all the keepers for printing purposes and any additional editing as needed in Photoshop. Then I’d create a Photoshop action to batch convert the TIFFs into a set of JPEGs, which would be burned to DVDs for the client. Today, I would import all the files into Lightroom and immediately begin reviewing and culling the files as needed, while at the same time, doing basic edits as needed to the keepers. Because of the way Lightroom catalogues the files, any edit you do to an image is not done on the actual RAW file, the edits are actually stored as instructions in sidecar files. You can see the edits in the previews displayed in Lightroom, but your RAW files remain untouched, which is very handy for archival purposes. Bibble Pro also works this way in keeping edits as instructions in sidecar files instead of to the actual RAW image. The old Nikon Capture 4 did not work this way, which is one of the reasons why it was considered a dog for speed – every edit you did had to be rendered in order to see the effect and if you did not save the edit into the RAW file, you would lose the edit. The beauty of using sidecar files to store edits means that you can apply a bunch of edits in Lightroom, shut it down, start it up again and your edits will still be intact. Unlike other RAW converters, including Lightroom’s older brother, Adobe Camera RAW, the sidecar files aren’t directly stored where the RAW files are saved. With Bibble or Adobe Camera RAW, the sidecar files are created and stored in the same folder as the original RAW files. If you revamp your filing structure and move your RAW files around, you have to remember to move the sidecar files too. If you delete the sidecar files, all your edits are gone. With Lightroom, it catalogues the sidecar files in its own folder structure and you’re free to move your original RAW files around wherever you want on your hard drive, or even to an external drive. All you have to do is when you move the RAW files is just point Lightroom to where the files are now stored and it will re-associate all the previous edits with the RAW files and you’ll see them again. Back to editing in Lightroom – if I come across a bunch of files that were taken in the same setting or conditions, I can highlight those images and then do an edit on one file and then apply the same setting to the rest of the images in the same batch. Lightroom has helped to speed up my editing process and at the end I can export the files to TIFFs for printing purposes and also export to JPEGs for client purposes. Within Lightroom, I can also create a web gallery that I can post on my website. Lightroom has also reduced the amount of time I spend in Photoshop. Now, I should make clear what kind of editor I am. I’m not a tweaker or a touch-up artist. There are photographers like Vincent Versace and Scott Kelby who have forgotten more about Photoshop than I will ever be able to learn. For me, with the kind of numbers I find myself facing, my main criterion is to process my RAW files into nice looking JPEGs for the clients that they can take somewhere and get their 4x6 prints. If the client orders enlargements from me, that’s when I spend extra time in Photoshop to clear up blemishes and maybe glamorize it to the extent that I’m capable of within my limited Photoshop skill set. And, if I’m honest about it, my glamorizing is actually done using actions that I bought from a local pro, Craig Minielly. Google Craig’s Actions and you’ll find his website that he sells his production actions.
As minimal as my Photoshop skills are and as minimal the amount of time I spend using it these days, I still wouldn’t be without it. In this screen shot, what you see is my Acer based system where the larger monitor is used to show the image nice and large, while the second monitor has all the palettes that I like having access to. Photoshop is the 800 lb gorilla of the image editing world, but these days, when upgrades come out, I no longer feel an imperative need to immediately upgrade. CS3 was out for about a year before I finally got around to upgrading from CS2. When Lightroom 2 moves from beta to production, the need for Photoshop will be even more diminished because Lightroom 2 will offer localized pixel editing, which was only possible with Photoshop when using Lightroom 1.x. What I mean by this is when editing in Lightroom 1.x, the edits are global, which is to say adjusting a color, say red, would affect all the reds in the image. Whereas in Photoshop, if you only wanted to edit the red in a particular part of the image and nowhere else, you could mask the specific area and make a local edit instead of a global edit. This will change in Lightroom 2 and I expect that eventually, Lightroom will offer more and more of what used to be only available in Photoshop, which I have no problem with. When I’m finished with the editing and I’m ready to move on, for wedding clients, there are a couple of other applications I use to create proof CDs and DVD slideshows. To create a proof CD of image files for viewing only, I use FlipAlbum Pro.
FlipAlbum creates a virtual photo album to view images. The screen looks like a book and when you mouse click, the pages turn. There’s even a page flipping sound, but I turn it off, because I use a music track that starts when the album is viewed. The version of FlipAlbum I bought is expensive at USD $160, but there are cheaper versions available if you’re interested in it. At $160, I think it’s exorbitant for what it offers, but when I was looking for the software, not only was it exactly what I wanted, but I think it might still be the only software that mimics viewing a photo album on a computer. To create Flash-based slideshows for viewing at my website, I use ShowIt web, which was designed by US wedding pros, David Jay and Gary Fong.
Gary Fong, calls his version Album Showcase and it’s cheaper than David Jay’s ShowIt Web, but a friend who has both told me that David Jay’s version is more flexible in allowing you to use larger windows for the slideshow. While both come with set templates and royalty free music, you can use your own music files. For copyright reasons, when I display slideshows on my website for wedding clients, I use the set templates and the royalty free music. In this screen shot, what you is a slide show layout and the red crosses you see in the images is where the panning and movement is centered on. When you enable motion, the slideshow has a more vibrant and alive feel to it than a regular slideshow without the panning motion. ShowIt Web is another expensive application at USD $200 and I also consider it to be exorbitant, as it is only good for displaying a slideshow on a website. It has no capability to create the same show on a DVD. For shows to be played back on a home DVD player, I use ProShow Gold.
The following text in italics was not spoken during the presentation, as I discovered that the club members are already very familiar with ProShow Gold and use it for their own slideshow presentations.
So, for wedding jobs, those are my key applications: 1) Lightroom for digital asset management, browsing, editing and RAW conversion 2) Photoshop for more detailed edits as needed, creating album designs and printing 3) FlipAlbum Pro to create proof CDs 4) ShowIt Web to create Flash slideshows for the website 5) ProShow Gold to create DVD slideshows I do have some other applications that I tinker with, but my volume editing for weddings involve the five mentioned here. Ever since I’ve gone digital, I’ve never printed any of my files at an outside lab. I print everything myself at home using two Epson printers, the R2400 and the 4800.
The R2400, seen in the top left of the image, is a 13x19 inch capable desktop printer that uses the Epson K3 inks. K3 stands for three black inks – the K stands for black just like in CMYK, the K stands for the black ink. In the R2400 and 4800, you use one of the regular blacks, a light black and a light, light black. The other colors are cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta and yellow. The 4800 is a 17x22 inch capable printer that while it can sit on a desktop, at around 90 lbs and with the amount of force generated by the printer, it had better be a solid desktop. The 4800 is beastly and rather loud when printing, because it uses fans to create suction for the paper as it is fed through the print path. There are no rollers used in the 4800 that can mar the paper surface. One of the features of the Epson K3 ink sets is the availability of two different blacks for use with matte or glossy papers. Photo black is for glossy papers and Matte black is obviously for matte papers. The lighter black inks are the same no matter which black you use. Unfortunately, Epson didn’t do its users any favors with the R2400 or the big x800 series of printers. These printers do not allow for the simultaneous installation of both Matte and Photo black inks, only one can be installed. This means having to swap out the black ink cartridge if you like to print on the two different types of paper. With the R2400, because the ink lines are short, the cost in lost ink is not too bad, but on larger printers like my 4800 or the other x800 printers, the lines are very long and consequently when flushing out the old black ink so that you can use the new black ink, you’re essentially flushing about $75 worth of ink down the toilet. And, if you need to switch back, that’s another $75 gone. For that reason, my 4800 is dedicated to printing only on glossy papers and usually, I have the R2400 dedicated for matte papers. Another frustration with the K3 printers is the air bubbles that can form and clog up the print heads, which require costly cleaning cycles to clear up. Every time you do a cleaning cycle you have to use ink and again, it’s money flushed down the proverbial toilet. The R2400 has actually been very good for minimal ink head clogs, but the 4800 has given me some frustrations whenever I leave it alone for extended periods between print jobs. Epson’s competitors, Canon and HP, caught onto the Epson user frustration and produced printers that did not require ink swapping and apparently do not clog up as frequently as the Epson K3 units. However, it’s not quite as rosy as that might seem, because both Canon and HP consider the print head to be a consumable item, whereas Epson considers the print head to be a permanent part of the printer. With Canon for example, the print head has thousands of tiny nozzles for the ink to be sprayed out. Over time, those nozzles will get plugged up, but because there are so many of these nozzles, the printer just maps to the usable nozzles and you never know the difference. Eventually, all the nozzles will become blocked and you need to replace the print head. Canon print heads are not cheap, so while it may be years before you need to replace a print head, when the time does come, you may end up being better off with a whole new printer instead. Epson is learning though and in its new flagship 11880 printer, it has addressed the two biggest complaints of black ink swapping and clogging, but surprisingly, in the newer and smaller x880 units, the ability to install and swap between the black inks were not implemented. Thus, we are likely to have to wait another year or two before we see the change implemented in printers smaller than the $15,000, 64-inch capable 11880. For those interested in either of the R2400, 4800, or 4880, I would actually recommend the Epson 3800, which is like the 4800 and 4880 in being able to print on 17x22 inch paper, but unlike the 4800 or 4880, is able to hold both Photo and Matte black at the same time and switch over fairly seamlessly. You still lose some money in lost ink when switching, but it’s nowhere near what it would cost with the 4800. The 3800 is more expensive than the R2400, but cheaper than the 4800 series, but when you consider that you get a full set of ink cartridges with the 3800, it actually costs less than the R2400 with the equivalent amount of ink, thus I see no point in getting an R2400. About the only limitation with the 3800 is that it can only print on cut sheets and not on roll paper. The 3800 uses rollers instead of air suction to move the paper along the print path, so it’s much more compact than the 4800 and can truly be considered a desktop printer. Incidentally, if anyone wants to know if there is any difference to a printer using rollers and a printer that uses suctioned air to move the paper, the rollers can, when using the right paper and printing the right kind of image, show faint lines in the print, which are known as pizza roller tracks. The paper type is generally semi gloss surfaces and where the marks would show up would be in the light tones or highlight regions of the image. I know this from experience, but I don’t want to make more of it than it is, as it only shows up under specific conditions. The last significant piece of the puzzle for the digital darkroom, but not the least, is color management. The physics of color is incredibly complex and without some management, it can be the Wild West in figuring out if the color that you see is the same as what someone else will see.
Thankfully, standards have developed that allow us to calibrate and profile devices such as scanners, monitors and printers to those standards and bring about some uniformity. Before color management became as important as it is, many of us probably used Adobe Gamma to try and calibrate our monitors by eye, which is notoriously inaccurate based on how we felt, how tired we were, what we ate, what the color of our walls are, what kind of lighting we used in the room, etc., etc. Earlier on, I talked about trying to profile the Sony notebook’s LCD with various applications and devices. In this shot, we see the three devices that I own and tried on the Sony, but in this photo, they’re on my 19-inch LCD They are left to right, the Monaco Optix XR, which is an X-Rite brand. A ColorVision Spyder2PRO is in the middle, followed by the X-Rite Eye One Photo spectrophotometer. You can buy standalone monitor calibration packages from X-Rite and ColorVision. There are others, but these are probably the two brands that you’ll come across most often. ColorVision offers three different monitor profiling kits, but the only one that serious users should probably consider is the successor to the Spyder2Pro, the Spyder3Elite, which is about $300. X-Rite took over the biggest name in color management last year, when they bought out GretagMacbeth. After the deal concluded, X-Rite started dumping its own products in favor of marketing the GretagMacbeth products it inherited from the takeover. For monitor profiling, my old Monaco Optix XR and EZColor software were discontinued by X-Rite, because the former GretagMacbeth Eye One Display was more popular amongst pros and serious amateurs. I wasn’t too pleased to see them shunted aside, because the Optix XR is still considered a very good colorimeter for calibrating monitors. While X-Rite does provide support for 32-bit Vista, there appears to be no desire to support 64-bit Vista, which goes back to my earlier recommendation that you want to take stock of what is supported and not supported if you are thinking about moving to a 64-bit OS. The X-Rite Eye One Display 2 is about $250. The packages from both brands include a colorimeter, which is the hardware measuring device that you place on the monitor for reading brightness, contrast and colors. To drive the hardware, there is also software, which will provide a step-by-step process to measure the brightness, contrast, and if applicable, the RGB output of the monitor for calibration and profiling. Going hand-in-hand with monitor calibration and profiling is printer profiling. Printer profiling is taking your own specific printer, your ink set and your choice of paper to print off color calibration patches.
After printing the patches and letting the paper dry, you then use a spectrophotometer to measure the color patches. At the end of the measuring, the software will create a custom profile that you save and will call upon in Photoshop or other color management capable software to make your prints. Every current photo printer from the three major brands of Epson, Canon and HP will offer canned profiles that are installed with the printer’s driver and while they are pretty good and certainly usable, if you’re fussy and critical about getting the best quality prints, you will want to create your own custom profiles. For those of you using printers that are 4-5 years old, and you haven’t used custom printer profiles, you will probably be very pleasantly surprised at what kind of quality might be available. Let me relate a little anecdote about that. A former coworker of mine got tired of the 9-5 rat race and decided he needed to express himself creatively, so he quit his job and became a professional photographer. Currently, the Georgia Strait has picked him up as one of its regular editorial photographers. He’s been at it for almost two years, but he still has to watch his budget and he only recently picked up a used Epson printer that was current about 4 or 5 years ago. The print quality was not accurate enough for his needs (it was actually pretty bad), so he asked me if he could borrow a printer profiling package I had, the ColorVision PrintFIX Pro, seen here. After he created the profiles and tested them, he remarked how pleased he is now with the printer’s output on the two papers that he profiled. What I use in my digital darkroom is a color management suite, which is an all-in-one package that can calibrate and profile my monitors and printers. The specific package is the X-Rite Eye One Photo.
There are various packages available under the Eye One Photo name catering to photographers at the serious amateur level right up to the professional that needs to create custom profiles for offset CMYK printing, in other words, magazine and/or book publishing. For most of us, we live in the RGB world, so we don’t need to worry about CMYK devices. Technically speaking, our inkjet printers are CMYK devices, but the printer driver converts the RGB data on the fly to CMYK, so it’s seamless and invisible to us. My specific Eye One Photo is the base LT package. It doesn’t come with all the accessories or features of the more expensive Eye One Photo packages, but that’s okay with me, because I don’t need most of the extended features or accessories. As you can see in the picture of my Eye One Photo kit, half of it is actually empty, as it’s missing components from other kits that can be two or three times as much as my kit. The one upgrade that I did buy though is a module that allows me to do large target RGB printer profiling. With the lower cost packages, X-Rite only makes available small test targets of about 250 patches, whereas the large target offers nearly 1000 patches for more accurate printer profiles. Another example of where size matters. In total, I spent about $1300 to buy the Eye One Photo LT with the upgraded RGB printer profiling module. If I had bought one of the pre-packaged Eye One Photos that already offers the upgraded printer profiling module, I would have to spend another $500 and also get features and accessories that I would never use. The spectrophotometer that comes with the Eye One Photo packages is the gold standard that many people consider as a reference for quality.
It is a more accurate device than the spectro units offered by ColorVision and while there are better spectrophotometers available, they will cost significantly more money than this one. The X-Rite unit can also be used to profile monitors and I’ve since retired my old Monaco and ColorVision suites now that I have the Eye One Photo available. If you’d like to get into both good monitor and printer profiling but don’t want to spend $1000 to get started, you can look at two other kits priced at around $600. There is the ColorVision Spyder3Studio, which offers two different hardware devices for profiling the monitor and printer. This is the successor to the PrintFIX Pro suite that I loaned to my former coworker. There is also X-Rite’s new Munki, which apparently uses the same quality spectrophotometer as the more expensive Eye One Photo, but in a smaller and easier to use package.
Like the older, larger and more expensive device in the Eye One Photo, the Munki can profile both monitors and printers and while it does not offer large patch printer profiling, the two-step 100 patch measuring process apparently offers very nice printer profiles. X-Rite has fine tuned the measuring process, so that you don’t need to measure 1000 patches, as required with the Eye One Photo, which is older technology than the Munki. So, that’s basically it for my digital darkroom. We’ve covered a fair bit of ground and none of it was in tremendous detail due to time limitations, but let me offer you some additional resources for those of you that do want more detail. From Toronto photographer Michael Reichmann of the Luminous Landscape website, there are two sets of video tutorials that cover Adobe Lightroom and how to set yourself up for getting high quality prints in his Camera to Print tutorial.
While the video tutorials are good, for learning something as powerful as Lightroom, you really need a book to figure out what’s important and not important to your workflow. I have Scott Kelby’s book on Lightroom, which I highly recommend.
Kelby has been the #1 bestselling author on computers and technology for four years in a row and I like his down-to-earth approach to writing about technical matters. A lot of other photographers, who also happen to write technical books, write like emotionless robots. Kelby writes like he’s having a conversation with you, which some don’t like, but I like it, because it’s a style that I try to write in too. If any of you would like to contact me and discuss anything that I’ve talked about tonight, you can send me an email to camerahobby@shaw.ca. I usually respond same day and almost always within 24-hours. So that’s it, are there any questions? Thank you again for inviting me to speak before you. In closing, I would just remind everyone that what I use is just one way to do things and that there are other choices available. It’s up to you to decide how to setup your own digital darkroom and what kind of workflow is best for you. What I hope I’ve done tonight is just show you some of the tools available. Thanks again. |
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