Bret Edge

Must be coming from England, and the North West in particular, and today being wet and cold (where did summer go this year?), but I could look all day at Bret Edge's colour pictures of Utah's canyons and deserts - and my favourite would still be a b&w on a wet and stormy day. Wouldn't envy him living in Utah, either. Well, maybe now and then.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

I kid you not

• Asian elephant cured of heroin addiction
• 'Cremated' father turns up on TV - probably while the family was watching Ashes to Ashes
• Servant kept in cupboard
• Gingerfest and here
• Man City to be a massive club
• Balls found inside 'rattling' dog
• MP tells of gunpoint ordeal over coffee whitener cocaine mix-up (never trust a Tory)

Permalink - General -  0 comments

Rust never sleeps

It's great Google have released this Chrome browser on Windows, if only to wind up Mac and Linux users.

I did download it, like its home page feature, and love their comic way of launching it, but I don't know how anyone can get excited by another bloody browser, especially one designed for the developer's advertizing revenue.

Until there is an equivalent to the Firefox Adblock extension, Chrome's simply not for me (I only upgraded to IE7 a couple of weeks back). But until then, at least there's the Google Content Blocker....

Permalink - General -  8 comments

Oliver's Army

Today's the 350th anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell and over at the historian Edward Vallance's blog is a great guide to the various Cromwell-related events happening around the country and puts the question Just how evil was Oliver Cromwell?:

my wife, who I was boring with all this, pointed out that I was really saying that Cromwell was probably only responsible for 10000s of deaths rather than 100,000s, which didn't really make him a swell all-round guy.

Which got me thinking. Leaving aside the good or bad taste of basing a card game on historical mass-murderers, how do we assess "evil" historically? For many English people, Cromwell remains a "Great Briton." For many Irish people, he's the Devil in human form and synonymous with everything bad about British rule. What, if anything, distinguishes Cromwell from Mussolini? Were the deaths Cromwell was responsible for acceptable because they were mostly armed combatants? (What successful general won’t be responsible for the deaths of many people in some way?) Or is it just a question of which side of the Irish sea you are looking at him from?

It's a lot easier to decide if you were once a history student, and Cromwell played a starring role in many of your essays thanks to winning one decisive battle, Naseby, on your brother's birthday, chopped the King's head off on your best friend's birthday, and not only died today, but won three major battles and opened his Parliaments on the same day. Naturally my school and college essays were packed with such stellar detail. I was a Cromwell fan in any case, but it's sure easy to decide when it's your own birthday too.

Permalink - History -  4 comments

Coming home

Well, on Saturday I was pretty chuffed to get an Italian edition of my Advanced B&W book and joked about how "for English readers, the first one who asks me to do the same for the Russian or Dutch editions will get a virtual whack around the ears."

What I didn't imagine was that two days later DHL would arrive with a bundle of Polish, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Korean! The Polish is best, published under the National Geographic imprint and making it look like I'm one of theirs.... Just kidding.

One great thing about writing is that every so often something like this pops up, you come across a review, or you might get a nice email from a reader who has really got what you were trying to convey. And I've said before that when you first see a new book it’s like holding a newborn child – this lot is almost like all your sperm bank children suddenly turning up on your doorstep!

Permalink - My photography -  5 comments

My not quite famous enough 5 - #4

I'm not that keen on Lightroom 2's new Filter Panel, as I said here. When I do use it, it's usually because I want to temporarily filter the visible items down by key such as rating or sometimes by masters or virtual copies - ie by one of the old Lightroom 1.4 filters.

Display the Filter panel for this purpose and you lose a very prominent chunk of screen space, where your pictures belong. Then you'll eyeball which iTunes-style columns are already visible, perhaps wait while Lightroom starts chugging through populating and counting them up. Clear whatever filter is already present (not an issue for me as I never use the Panel) and then click "Attributes" to set your filter on rating, colour or whatever. Now that's a bit of a palaver, isn't it?

So the fourth little gem is that you can save these Filter Settings. I'm currently running with about a dozen of these, and always access them through the Filmstrip. Some will actually configure the Filter Panel as I might want, but mostly they're for those important things like ratings. If I want anything fancier, it's Smart Collections.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

Pubblicato in italiano

Normalmente, non sento niente quando uno dei i miei libri e tradutto - al massimo, ci sara due o tre email di un lettore ollandese o tedesco. Questo mi piace, ma stamattina ho ricevuto una copia di "Il digitale in bianco e nero", il mio "Advanced Digital Black and White" in italiano. E per qualcuno che parla l'italiano, era un piacere particolare! In questo caso, ho scritto 20% del libro a Tropea in Calabria, e ci sono tanti foto del paese li. Fortunamente, non ho fatto la traduzione!

And for English readers, the first one who asks me to do the same for the Russian or Dutch editions will get a virtual whack around the ears.

Permalink - My photography -  0 comments

Lightroom web galleries from the ground up

One reason why I still use iView rather than switching completely to Lightroom is because I prefer its HTML web gallery templates. iView takes about a third of Lightroom's time to output a big contact sheet style web gallery of say 100-300 pictures because it uses my DNG files' embedded previews, while Lightroom seems to insist on re-rendering the raw files when you're previewing the gallery in Web, again each time you change an output setting, and then again when it actually starts generating them.

A second reason is because I can edit iView's HTML-based templates much more easily. Going back to Lightroom 1.0, the original XML and XSLT templates appealed to the geek in me, but I always felt they were misguided, a developer's solution which demanded a far higher level of skill than even the IT-minded photographer was likely to possess. While you can inch up the HTML learning curve, tweaking templates in small yet rewarding steps, XML and XSLT customization require much more experience. That aspect didn't worry me too much because I used to implement XML and XSLT solutions professionally, but iView works perfectly for my contact sheet galleries and my main site is powered by an online database and some iView scripts. So I never felt customizing the Lightroom XML and XSLT templates was worth the effort. I was rather surprised, impressed, that anyone else bothered.

That thunderous lack of interest cascaded over to the Lua-based templates or "engines" which arrived with Lightroom 1.3. And at the time I was much more enthusiastic about learning Flash and ActionScript. In fact I still am - once I actually launch the Flash site, I'll update it via SlideShowPro's excellent Lightroom-SSP Director export plug-in. That's one click to run the Lightroom export, one click to activate the new web gallery. Beat that, Lua.

Still, I'm really glad to see Sean McCormack is doing a bite-sized series on writing Lightroom web engines, starting with Anatomy of a Lightroom HTML Gallery:

Lightroom HTML galleries used to be written in a mix of XSLT and XML. The simpler coding in Lua makes it a pleasure to create HTML galleries with. You can write Flash galleries in Lua, but because IE doesn't allow plugin loading on PC Lightroom, you can't see them in the preview window. Hence 3rd party Flash galleries use the old method for cross platform compatibility.

Lua galleries were introduced in Version 1.3 and have matured somewhat with V2.0. The new syntax is much tidier and more compact. In fact Matthew Campagna shaved 500 lines off one of his galleries for version 2, and my new website in a gallery LRB Portfolio managed close to that also.

So what comprises a Lua Gallery? Well the absolute minimum a gallery can contain is 3 files: galleryInfo.lrweb, manifest.lrweb and a HTML file. Let's look at them in a little more detail....

And part 2 is over here. You never know, now I've cracked Flash and ActionScript, this might even encourage me to learn Lua at long last.

Other Lightroom Web resources:

• Lightroom 2 SDK now includes the web engine, as well as export and the beginnings of custom metadata
• SlideShowPro Director is an online management system for web photo galleries and powers my new site
• SSP-Director plug-in for Lightroom makes updating it a dream
• SSP for Lightroom is their standalone web gallery engine
• GalleryMerger is a tool for hassle-free maintenance of standalone SSP multi-album galleries
• The Turning Gate
• Lightroom galleries (with added exclamation marks)

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  8 comments

Plug-ins (Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy)

It's easy to see real positives in Aperture's announcement of plug-in architecture. Taking advantage of existing third party tools can quickly flesh out its features, while positioning it at the centre of a viable "ecosystem". Meanwhile third party developers can be working on fully-integrated solutions.

On the other hand, it's a long way short of the original concept of the one ring to rule them all, and might even be seen as defining limits on what's going to appear in the core product.

In any case, even if that fear's untrue, it seems pretty obvious that people don't really want to pay for a range of plug-ins for essential tasks like noise reduction or lens distortion - they will do so, but reluctantly, as a distress purchase. Then there's the hassle each time the host or the plug-in upgrades, or the palaver of tracking down licence numbers when you get a new computer (I'd love to know how many Mac users actually use the automated transfer processes). And when your chosen plug-in developer vanishes? Hopefully the plug-in works in the host's next version, and in cases like noise reduction, there'll always be a replacement, at a price. But will any of your settings transfer? Should you welcome plug-ins so uncritically, forgetting that you have grudgingly accepted you'll always be shelling out for them? Or should you demand the functionality in the box?

It's for reasons like this that I've never been particularly enamoured of plug-ins for Photoshop - only NoiseWare and PTLens have ever made it past an upgrade or change of computer - and I have the same doubts about them in Aperture and Lightroom. Still, it is the accepted wisdom that plug-ins played a seminal role in Photoshop's early history and so they have acquired a semi-mythical status. Questioning their virtue seems as heretical as doubting the Founding Fathers or Good Queen Bess, or Ivan the Terrible if you're Russian.

Just as these personalities can symbolize their nations, and embody certain values, so in the field of digital imaging the term plug-in has a history and a special meaning. It's certainly great PR to announce Aperture has plug-ins, but we're talking about a program whose raison d'etre is non-destructive editing and non-modality. So how can the current crop of external TIF editors in modal windows really be dignified with the term "plug-ins"? Fundamentally that's the question Lightroom product manger Tom Hogarty asks in Plug-in or External Editor? when he explains why we haven't seen image processing plug-ins for Lightroom is because of the:

incredibly powerful link between the raw and rendered workflow, and half measures (my emphasis) with marketing spin labeled as "plug-ins" are not the highest priority for the Lightroom team.

Not surprisingly, that touched a raw nerve, so over at AUPN Micah Walter has a crack at gerrymandering the term plug-in by including batch processing (by which criterion a command line program might qualify as a Lightroom plug-in, let alone Noise Ninja's new standalone) and tries to shift attention to what the plug-in specification allows. Derrick Story makes the same point:

Some of the advantages of the plug-in architecture include: access to metadata, batch processing, Raw processing, and control over Aperture objects.

Surely that's a bit like saying you're already a Latter Day Saint because one day your unborn grandchildren are going to become Mormons? If the host program's essence is as a non-destructive editor, a true plug-in operates within that concept. Until then, all you've got is an external editor strapped on in a modal window.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  1 comments

My not quite famous enough 5 - #3

The third feature in this little list is something which I won't swear is new, but which if it was there in version 1 is something I never noticed and can't get working now - autocomplete drop down lists.

Previously Lightroom remembered whatever you'd entered in the Metadata panel, and would then autocomplete your entry the next time you started off typing something similar in the same box. That could be both helpful and an irritant, especially when a few of the most recent entries began similarly. Still, I liked the feature.

What LR2 does is take the 12 most-recent entries and displays them in a list when you click the field's name. So here I clicked Title and LR shows me the most recent entries in that field, and it's the same for most other items in the panel. It's a real time saver, and makes me wonder if there's anything I can hack which will make LR remember many more of recent entries....

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

My not quite famous enough 5 - #2

Another change I particularly like in Lightroom 2 is being able to add multiple external editors (via Preferences). OK, not everyone likes to have multiple versions of Photoshop installed, but it's incredibly handy to have other external editors just a click away - here for example you see that Noiseware's standalone application, my preferred noise reduction program, and PT Lens are just a right click away.

I never really used Noiseware standalone very often before Lightroom 2 - the Photoshop plug-in was a better fit for me. But I can now do most dodging and burning work in Lightroom, so it's no coincidence that I've found I am now using the Noiseware standalone more frequently and the plug-in correspondingly less. That may change back as I play with Imagenomic's new droplets for Lightroom (they also include ones for their Portraiture plug-in which I don't have). You place this set of Photoshop droplets in Lightroom's Export Actions folder and apply the chosen Noiseware treatment to batches of files exported from Lightroom. Here I've taken it a bit further by setting up some of these droplets as additional external editors, which lets me apply them directly to existing images via Edit With. Of course, this technique is not restricted to Noiseware - you can set up any droplet as both an Export Action for export batches and as an additional external editor for existing images. Neat, eh?

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  5 comments

SlideShowPro Director and Lightroom - update

OK, I tried it out. After my little joke about Ahmedinejad and his centrifuges, I should say that this little toy didn't work 100% properly first time.... The Lightroom side of it worked perfectly, and the plug-in also created a new album (a grouping of pictures) on my server, but it didn't send the payload - no pictures were uploaded. OK, so I hadn't bothered updating Director 1.20 beforehand, but it should still have worked.

Once I'd updated Director to the latest 1.22, the process was as slick as can be. You select your images, begin an Export using the SSP export plug-in, and press Export. A few minutes later and it uploads your files to the server and takes you to Director's control panel in your default browser. You're ready to go. Very neat.

The one thing I don't like is not having control over the sizes of file that are uploaded. I would prefer to upload at the size at which I anticipate and set the sharpening option accordingly. Instead it uploads full size files, making the upload slower, taking up more disc space, and invalidating your sharpening choices.

UPDATE - It's easy to edit the plug-in and gain access to the file sizes and quality settings.
UPDATE 2 - Now you don't have to do so because a bug fix for the plug-in also restores your control over file sizes and quality settings.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

SlideShowPro Director and Lightroom

While the existing SlideShowPro for Lightroom generates individual web galleries, when your site consists of multiple galleries you have to do some manual editing of xml files which (a) not everyone can do (b) is still manual work for those who can do it. It's much more efficient to power a site with an online database.

That's where SlideShowPro Director comes in - it's a database which supplies the data to SlideShowPro. Previously Director let you import Lightroom's SlideShowPro web galleries, which worked but was still a bit of an effort, but now SlideShowPro has released a Lightroom export plug-in for SlideShowPro Director. This is an export plugin that allows you to upload pictures directly from your Lightroom library to an existing or new album inside SlideShowPro Director. It works with both the self-install version of Director 1.2, as well as their hosted subscription accounts (more here).

Just like President Ahmedinejad unwrapping a shiny new delivery of centrifuges, I can't wait to try it on my still-hidden Flash-based site.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  4 comments

My Hot 5 - #1

I've never used the word "cool" in the American sense. I remember hearing it as a teenager, but then 1976 and punk reached Bolton and swept away all such hippy Americanisms along with all the rock dinosaurs (for some reason it's always Rush who spring to mind) we'd previously admired as the height of musical dexterity. I don't recall hearing the word again until my first business trip to Dayton Ohio in the mid 1990s and at the time I put it down to being in the backwoods with pickup trucks everywhere, the odd Confederate flag, and no doubt with Rush on the stereo. Much as "cool" is now commonplace again in British usage, it's still a word I don't think my age group could use, Still, it is on the borderline of acceptability, while firmly on the wrong side lie "hot" or "awesome" or "killer"....

Whether or not I find that sort of language foreign or juvenile, or both, it's not me, is it? Much as I might enthuse about Lightroom 2's most obvious new features, such as non-destructive dodging and burning and gradient tools, I could never call them "awesome", superb though they are. So more like the Housemartins, whose hype was to call themselves the 4th best band in Hull, here is the first of my "not quite famous enough 5" - Keywords are metadata again!

I never liked how Lightroom 1 treated keywords as if they weren't metadata like any other descriptive metadata. After all, if you photograph the same subject more than once, there's a fair chance those pictures will share the same title, caption, locations, and many if not all of the same keywords. Bridge metadata templates let you apply all that information in one fell swoop, but in Lightroom 1 keywords were excluded from its Metadata Presets. And if you wanted to copy metadata from one image to another, Sync Metadata also failed to copy the keywords. You were back to cut and paste.

But next time you cut and paste keywords from one picture to another, take a quick look at Metadata Presets and Sync Metadata. They now include keywords too. Isn't that awesome? Hm - not quite me. Bravo!

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  2 comments

5 new ways to while away the summer

A not altogether random selection of blogs:

• John Paul Caponigro now has a blog and mentions he has written 3 new artist's statements this summer alone (each a classic of its type). Interestingly, he has also used Blurb for a new book of photos and had a good experience. Interesting as I've been also looking at it instead of Lulu. Shame I can't do it from Lightroom....
• Lightroom engineer Eric Scouten has also written this week about using smart collections to manage workflow.
• Photo Attorney is a US lawyer who works for photographers and covers issues both sides of the pond. After all, we're in the same mess....
• War on Photography is about how (some) police and (most) security guards fight the good war against Osama bin Laden
• Edward Vallance is an academic historian who writes on 17th century history or as he puts it "Radicalism, history and occasional pop culture references"

Permalink - General -  1 comments

Smart collections for controlling your workflow

When you have a library of many thousands of pictures, querying or searching is clearly a very important feature. And you've got to be able to save those search criteria - after all, each time you narrow down your catalogue to find certain pictures, it's a fair bet that you may want to find the same pictures again before too long. The more efficiently you find those pictures, the more time you'll have for perfecting them. So two of the biggest and most welcome changes in Lightroom 2's Library are the iTunes-style Filter panel (below), which replaces the old disc-thrashing Metadata Browser, and the introduction of Smart Collections.

Both the Filter panel and Smart Collections let you filter down the catalogue to find a selection of pictures, and each lets you save and recall the criteria you used to find them. What's less clear is which you should use and when. The answer, well my answer, might be a bit controversial.... Use Filters when you don't know what you're doing, use Smart Collections when you do.

Having been lucky enough to have been using both for a few months, I've happily settled down to using Smart Collections almost all the time, and visit the Filter panel only for quick filtering by star rating, flag, coloured label, or master/virtual (though more often than not, I'll apply these quick filters through the Filmstrip). I do use the Filter panel's Text section, but just once in a blue moon, and use its iTunes Metadata section so rarely I really wouldn't miss it.

• While the Filter panel menu does let you save a preset including your criteria, after you've added a few presets you soon have a long and unhelpful list. On the other hand, you can work easily with a large number of Smart Collections, group them in multi-level families, and mix them with Dumb Collections too. A filter doesn't remember any output settings, while a Collection stores the last Print, Slideshow or Web settings applied to it. Smart Collections let you organize and add structure to your catalogue.
• The Filter panel's iTunes-style columns hang around when they're no longer wanted. I'm always going back to folders and wondering why some pictures seem to be missing - and then realize it's because the folder has remembered some filter applied last time I visited it (which might be months ago). Clearing filters each time you change folder is about as practical as locking interior house doors every time you change room. It's a lot easier not to use them.
• I find Filter panel's iTunes-style columns of more interest when you're exploring a catalogue, hacking your way into unknown territory and discovering the way it's laid out. You don't have a clear aim in mind, and your search criteria are changing as you discover how you previously tagged your pictures (like slicing and dicing with Excel pivot tables or Cognos). But the thing is, I don't normally need to explore my catalogue - I know, pretty well, what I want to find.

So while the Filter panel is fine for temporary filtering, chopping and change what rating or flag values are visible, Smart Collections are much better for ongoing needs to manage a catalogue and it makes sense to invest time learning their nuances and then applying them as ingeniously as possible.

The Workflow Smart Collection

As an example, here's how I now manage new work. My objective is to see at a glance what's been done and what I've got to do next. For instance, I want to be confident every picture has my copyright and know that I've added descriptive metadata like keywords. Likewise I want to be sure I've adjusted all the pictures without eyeballing the badges on a few hundred thumbnails, and I want the catalogue to help point out pictures which need special attention. In other words, I want to introduce some quality control.

• The key is a single Dumb Collection, called "0.00 Current work" into which I drag the pictures I want to process (the 0.00 is there to assist sorting).


• I then have a series of Smart Collections which mostly check for images containing "Current work" in the Collection name, and then target specific criteria. So 1.30 No Captions checks that those pictures in "Current work" have something in the caption field - here it's zero so I'm happy. On the other hand, 1.40 No Copyright shows me that for some reason I've overlooked two pictures in "Current work". I can see straight away if there's any missing metadata in my shoot.


• You can, to a certain extent, apply the same technique to Develop adjustments too. The caveat's because, unlike Aperture 2, unfortunately Lightroom 2 doesn't let you target individual adjustments so a Smart Collection can't identify for you any ISO1000+ images where the Luminance and Color Noise settings are less than certain values. But what you can do is what I've done - identify high ISO images and remind yourself that you might want to treat those pictures as a group. Anyway I'm sure we'll catch up, probably before most Aperture users realize they have the feature.

That's how it works. In practice, it's very simple - after a weekend away, I clear out any existing items from this Collection and drag in the newest pictures. The Smart Collections recalculate automatically and I always can see what's done and what needs attention.

If "Current work" has existing items which still need work, I can move them to another Dumb Collection "Last week's work" so that my Smart Collections don't pick them up.

If you want to try this out, you can build up such a Smart Collection structure yourself. Alternatively, save yourself a load of time by going to my Lightroom downloads section where you'll find a small "Workflow" catalogue which you can import directly into your own. Use File > Import as Catalog, point to my Workflow.lrcat file, and Import the single JPEG file (delete it afterwards). This should import the Smart Collections in their groupings. They obviously took me a bit of time to get right, so you can always say "thanks" or "grazie" or "yeah buddy that's f***ing cool" via my Amazon wish list.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  35 comments

Leon Taylor

Leon Taylor has a small but excellent set of black and white pictures including this gloomy North of England landscape - you know how much I like those. A few more of his pictures are at Filmwasters.

Via Arena.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Choice cuts

A few other Lightroom links... Product manager Tom Hogarty writes about what's really a plug-in and how so-called plug-ins (Aperture's and others) are really external editors. Tom and marketing manager Frederick Johnson are interviewed about LR2 in this new O'Reilly podcast, and Adobe Camera Raw engineer Eric Chan writes about the Adobe profiles. The whole lot's worth reading:

We have a new set of camera profiles called the Adobe Standard profiles. Our goal in designing these profiles is to give photographers a better default color: that is, a better starting point for making image adjustments. With the new profiles, the main improvement is in the warm colors: reds, oranges, and yellows. Deep saturated reds should indeed appear red, without messing up skin tones. Saturation is better maintained in warm highlights, and warm colors are easier to distinguish. There are also improvements in other colors, but the changes in warm colors are the most noticeable.

I've never felt strongly about Adobe Camera Raw colour, though generally prefer it to the look from Nikon Capture or other converters. But as shown here in Lightroom 2's calibration panel, these new roll-your-own profiles should keep the pixel peepers and colour charters happy.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

Stripping while exporting from Lightroom

Jeffrey Friedl has released a set of Lightroom 2 export plug-ins including one feature which really caught my eye - his "Metadata Wrangler" which:

allows you to strip selected metadata components from images as they are exported. You can use it, for example, to remove the embedded thumbnail and any Lightroom "develop" metadata, while retaining other metadata, such as the exposure settings, lens information, copyright, etc.

While this filter can be used with Jeffrey's plug-ins, you can download and install it on its own and use it as part of Lightroom's standard export dialog. And apart from what it does, it's also interesting for how it does it - using the Exiftool tool to post process the exports. Nice work.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

Five for Three

Somewhere in one of the Lightroom 2 Is Out articles I saw someone mention the 5 features he'd most like to see in Lightroom 3. So, based on a view that Develop now needs incremental changes, deeper picture management capabilities, and more output possibilities, here are mine:

1. Books - for now, just match Aperture for "good enough" functionality
2. Manage in Library any file type including CMYK, sound, Word etc - allow assignment of keywords and other metadata, exporting copies and file movements, but no processing
3. Let Smart Collections target all the metadata in the catalogue including individual Develop values
4. Backup data validation - disks show signs of going bad, DNGs have hashes, backups need reconnecting with catalogues based on GUIDs and not on mere filenames, let along someone writing SQL
5. Make soft proofing something people don't need to worry about. Maybe I'm a dreamer but I'm not actually proposing Soft Proofing. I'm pretty convinced that fewer photographers use it in Photoshop than you might think, and that most LR users don't actually want Soft Proofing as such - they just their prints to come out right. Hiding complexity is supposed to be the Lightroom design, and Soft Proofing if it ever comes has got to be no more scary, and as routinely used, as Print Preview.
   

I would include one other wish - correcting all the text that reads "grayscale" so it is the more photographic "black and white". But until I can persuade Adobe, or finally give up, you can fool Lightroom's multilingual translation engine by placing my LR2 TranslatedStrings.txt file in Lightroom 2's program folder, in the subfolder \Resources\en\ . Now, what about changing Clarity to Punch....

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  2 comments

AutoSync, Gradient Presets, and wet haddock

Yes, I do throw up my hands in despair every time I read some Lightroom user saying he has hundreds of Develop Presets. It's the same personality type who will trumpet the hundreds of Velvia-effect Photoshop actions he's collected, who'll leap for his wallet every time another newly-released plug-in promises black and white conversion just like Ansel Adams, and who worst of all has an unshakeable belief in the accuracy of his digital HP5+ effect despite never having touched the real stuff or seen the warm orange light of a darkroom. These religiously-gullible folk need a firm slap around the jaws with the proverbial wet haddock.

That's not to say I don't use any Lightroom Develop Presets (currently 20), Photoshop plug-ins (just NoiseWare), or that I have never touted my own Photoshop actions to mimic albumen or palladium prints (after spending days in the V&A print room, I should add). But you've got to use these things sparingly. That's partly a creative thing, but it's also because the actual range of HP5+ prints or palladium print tones varies much more widely than the gullible victim of Presetitis will ever see - for all his unconvincing talk of using Presets or actions as a starting point.

Now, that said, you might now expect my fire's going to turn towards Sean McCormack's graduated filter Presets for Lightroom 2 - after all, I might ask if we're talking B+W neutral grads, Lee, or some other filter maker. But while I might question the need for as many as 70 variations, Sean and I seem to have been working on similar lines. After all, a tobacco filter for example can contain a range of slightly-fiddly settings, and Presets let you store and visualize a range of subtly-different results.

But the other big reason for changing my tune - at least in this case - is because of AutoSync, which as you know is the most efficient way to work in Lightroom. Although the Gradient filter is very elegantly implemented, sadly Adobe haven't let the time-poor snapper use AutoSync to apply the Gradient to multiple images at once. So instead of Shift dragging the same Gradient onto a series of frames needing the same grad effect , such as the elements of a panorama, instead you're forced to do the Copy and Paste Two Step (the same inefficient process you have to follow in Aperture).

All is not lost however - you can apply a Gradient Preset to multiple images at once (and as an aside, the Gradient's Reset button works in AutoSync mode too).

My little group of Gradient Presets are similar in concept to Sean's, though I hadn’t thought of charging for them. That's an interesting toe in the water and I’m sure he’ll tell me quietly if it makes him rich. I’m not sure if he did the same with his Presets, but I've biased mine to a rule of thirds approach to composition.

So, work in AutoSync mode, use it with Gradient Presets, and remember to use them only as a starting point – my haddock’s within easy reach!

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  6 comments

On target

Lightroom 2's out, and there are comprehensive lists of its new features at Lightroom Team Journal, by Victoria Bampton, and Ian Lyons. Here, like I did after Lightroom 1, I'm going to stay away from the detail of how features work and focus on the whys and what fors, and on best practice.

I'm going to start by drawing attention to a small feature which could easily be overlooked but which I find unbelievably useful - the Target collection. When you're racing through lots of pictures, it's pretty common to want to mark up certain images so it's easy to return to them later - for example, I've recently been shortlisting pictures for a number of new web galleries. Previously you'd hit B which added pictures to the Quick Collection, and then you might save the Quick Collection as a regular, Dumb Collection.

The change in LR2 is that you can right click any Dumb Collection and set it as the Target Collection, which means that hitting B will now send the current picture(s) directly to it, not to the Quick Collection. This keyboard shortcut is most useful when you're reviewing images full screen, but when you're running through a big grid of thumbnails it's faster to use the Painter - Target Collection has been added to the list of metadata it can paint. So it's B when you're reviewing images full screen, and the Painter in grid view.

As an aside, this use of the Painter is one way in which Adobe can make a somewhat-maligned tool really punch its weight. Another would be to let you copy and paste adjustments from one image to another, just like the Format Painter in Microsoft Office. While to some extent you can do this already - it's Settings in this screenshot - this is limited to Develop presets. If you've got the brains to use the Painter, you've got the brains to have pushed your adjustments beyond Develop presets....

Also, for those who want to catalogue CMYK images in Lightroom, see Ian Lyons' Trojan Horse workaround. It's the first Lightroom article I've seen with allusions to Hellenic mythology, but his choice of pictures makes me think it can't be long before we see allusions to the Icelandic sagas too....

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  4 comments

New stuff

Just refreshed the site with a few new pictures - the new gallery is again all new stuff, as it should be, while the wedding gallery includes newer work as well as some old favourites.

Both galleries are Flash-based and use the excellent SlideShowPro. I'm using the SSP for Lightroom web engine purely to generate the content, the jpegs and the xml file with all the filenames and captions. But they're displayed via my own Flash movie which is based on an SSP for Flash component. This approach means I can quickly create new galleries to add to existing pages, while the power of ActionScript lets me show extra information like the gallery's name and description. As my long-threatened Flash-based site uses the same SSP galleries, the transition - if it ever happens - should be painless....

Permalink - My photography -  0 comments

A true story

I was going to reply to Sean's comments on filenaming conventions in this Lightroom forum thread:

Nothing wrong with using yymmdd-camera sequence, lots of people do.

I generally just use Custom Name_YYMMDD_3 dig Seq (or 4 for larger shoots)

It's not a pedantic point either - I'll assume his "generally" using a filenaming convention was a slip of the tongue - but I'm more interested in the two conventions he contrasts.

Either method satisfies the basic principle of no two pictures sharing the same file name, and I happen to follow something similar to the first - YYMMDD_A081234.nef where the "1234" came from the camera-generated "DCS_1234.nef". The additional letter is "A" or "B" and allows for the chance of two camera bodies shooting a DCS_1234.nef on the same day. Yet I often wish I'd gone Sean's way from the start as it results in a shorter unique file ID and gives you the possibility to check you've not accidentally deleted any items - in accountancy (eek) we used to call this a "sequential continuity" control. However, Lightroom users who renumber the files in this way have a problem if their hard drive crashes. Here's a true story....

A couple of weeks back, a friend/client had a hard drive crash. He shoots 6-900 pictures a day, 4-5 days a week, and had just lost 2-3 weeks' worth of client pictures. But his Lightroom catalogue was safely backed up, and he restored the originals Lightroom had backed up as part of its import process. Sounds wonderful? Well, not quite.

The problem was that after editing down each shoot to around 300 pictures, he renames them YYMMDD-0001.cr2 through YYMMDD-0300.cr2. His newly-restored Lightroom catalogue was looking for those file names, but his restored originals still had the original camera-generated names like KLKJ1244.cr2.

Now in my case, my filenaming convention is repeatable and I could have renamed the restored originals - DCS_1234.nef would again become YYMMDD_A081234.nef. LR would then have had no trouble remarrying its thumbnails to the renamed backup files, and the whole job would have taken a few minutes (I'd have done it in Bridge or in a new, temporary Lightroom catalogue).

But in his case, he had deleted hundreds of rejects before he had renamed the keepers. To reconnect Lightroom's thumbnails to the originals, he would have needed to examine each thumbnail in turn, allow for tiny variations between frames (he uses two Canon 1D Mk III tripod mounted-bodies), and then rename the original file so it matched the new 001-300 name in Lightroom. For one or two images that might be acceptable - but for thousands?

This is clearly a downfall of Lightroom's backup upon import feature - as a minimum it needs a corresponding feature that switches its thumbnails back to the original file names. As it stands, with this unrepeatable filenaming convention you need to back up the images again immediately after renaming them. In my friend's case, he happened to know someone who knew the original filename was stored in Lightroom's catalogue and who could also write the SQL to restore it and overwrite the current filenames....

Permalink - Lightroom -  9 comments

Cold places

Bruce Percy's colour landscape work is rather lovely, and I'm sure I've seen his Iceland pictures somewhere before. He's got a blog with an excellent podcast on a Patagonia trip, and I do also like his attitude:

I doubt that most people could tell what equipment was used to create any of the images on my own site. Sure some would have a good idea if the image was:

1. digital (lack of grain)
2. film (grain)
3. medium format (tonality)
4. large format (smoother tonality)

But that’s just the technical aspect of photography. Photography is about the ‘art’ or ’soul’. The technical side is valid, but only as a means to an end. Having a super duper mega expensive camera is not going to make you a better photographer. I know that in my work, my style has not changed when I’ve changed to different camera’s.[sic]

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Silver Efex Pro

Doing a lot of black and white, I thought I'd give Nik's Silver Efex Pro Aperture plug-in a quick trial. I'll be mischievous and say that like other so-called Aperture plug-ins, it's better described as a strap-on - it's an external editor that's launched from Aperture and which sends it a rendered tiff file. But the "integration" is smooth enough - you select some images in Aperture, choose the menu command Images>Edit With, and they're opened in the Silver Efex Pro's modal window.

Presets are down the left, a set of adjustment panels are down the right, and you can set up a Before/After comparison - all rather Lightroom-style. Adjustments mimic the effect of coloured lens filters, the colour sensitivity of well-known b&w film stocks, and control the level of grain. You also have dodging and burning via Nik's U-point, and various toning or split-toning effects. Overall, Silver Efex worked well enough, and I particularly liked how you can vary not just the grain size but also its softness (I always liked high acutance developers like Rodinal for the gritty look).

I do have doubts about how some credulous users are bound to imitate the supposed typical T-Max or HP5 tonality rather than focussing on making the image look its best - what I call presetitis in Lightroomspeak. As far as I can see, while there's a split Before/After view, there's no equivalent of how Lightroom lets you send the image's current state over into the Before area at any point - something I find really handy for gauging progress. I'm also not too keen on the idea that your adjustments don't apply to all the selected images and that you'd either have to repeat your adjustments on each picture, or save them as a preset and then go through applying the preset to each image in turn.

It's also $200.... I'm not sure if that's for a cross-platform licence or one that includes the Photoshop plug-in too. I suspect not. $200?

Also see comments at AUPN and Inside Aperture.

Update:
Trial over, my view's not changed. I do a lot of black and white and felt it was very nicely designed, has a good and pretty convincing set of features, but is significantly overpriced.

If you know how to do b&w in Photoshop CS3, I don't think Silver Efex Pro adds much at all unless you routinely add exactly the same filters AND clarity / wide area sharpening AND grain AND can't figure out actions, layers etc. I don't think the end results are better in an absolute sense - it's just nice having a bunch of b&w-oriented controls bundled together.

If you don't know how to do these things in Photoshop, then it's a nice shrink wrapped solution that will have you going round proclaiming "you can't do that in Photoshop, you need a dedicated solution". Hm.

I felt the grain was particularly attractive, though with these b&w apps I always wonder about how accurate the film recipes actually are - is that HP5 in ID11 or Perceptol or how about Rodinal? Maybe these recipes are spot on, and maybe there is some creative sense to mimicking film....

Overall, I just didn't think it was good value for money.

Permalink - Aperture -  0 comments

Reverse geocoding with iView or xMedia (updatad)

I'd overlooked Felix Andrew's article Geotagging with Microsoft Expression Media 2 but spotted it yesterday while checking out what's happening at Microsoft's Pro Photo Summit - wish I'd gone over again but have too much happening this month.

There wasn't anything new for me in the article, though I was amused one of Felix's examples uses leafy Dulwich, not by coincidence either. But what caught my eye was a link lurking down at the bottom of the article to learn how to install a custom GPS script. Wondering what that GPS script might be, I came across a handy little Windows script that automatically updates geotagged images with country and city information from geonames.org. The script missed out the states and location fields, but with a quick bit of hacking here's my version - Country State City Location from GPS.

The script's Windows-only, but creating a Mac variant shouldn't be too tough. Makes you wonder why Microsoft didn't include more such goodies in the Expression Media 2 release.

Update 24 July
I've updated the script to handle geonames.org's slightly inconsistent country / state / city / location hierarchy a bit more elegantly

Permalink - GPS -  3 comments

Ted Leeming

Ted Leeming has a lovely set of in-camera blurred landscapes:

The landscape. What appears solid and unchanging is in reality a story of movement and evolution. Nothing remains constant. This planet and all upon it is in a state of continuous transition, both seasonally and over the eons of time. By looking at the present we are also subconsciously reading the story of a past almost as long as the history of the earth. This body of work studies the elements at play that have formed the Inner Sense of the landscape as we know it.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

First ladies

Political leaders' partners do have a pretty raw deal. If they're talented or outgoing personalities in their own right, like Hillary or Cherie, or Bill too, they get pilloried whenever they do express their own opinions - which are of no relevance anyway as no-one elected them. Alternatively, like Laura Bush, Norma Major, and whoever Gordon Brown's married to, they're forced to act as if we're still in the era long before women ever had careers or independent lives. And today's ultimate decorative first lady, Carla Bruni, seems to be forced to follow the latter route - though she's had a couple of careers long before she met Sarko.

But Mrs Ahmedinejad has clearly got it all worked out. Here's one presidential spouse who's doing her best not to overshadow her husband or be exploited for her looks - no hand in hand photo-ops in Petra or at the Pyramids. If it is her in there, that is.

Permalink - General -  0 comments

HoudahGeo

After my recent post on the Windows-limited Geosetter, I thought I'd take a look at the Mac-limited HoudahGeo which Richard mentioned in his comment on that post. I'd first heard about it in Lightroom designer Eric Scouten's post Geocoding Your Photos with Lightroom and HoudahGeo. It's certainly not as well-featured as Geosetter, and nor for all the hoo-haa on Houdah's site about Mac design principles is it any more elegant - except for one interesting aspect:

What this screenshot shows is one of the ways you can select images for applying GPS coordinates. It's a sort of File Open dialog box, but it's the inclusion of Lightroom catalogues that really caught my eye.

Unlike iDVD or other Apple applications which apparently, almost magically, use the Mac operating system to display the contents of iPhoto or Aperture libraries, it looks like HoudahGeo gets the images' locations directly from Lightroom's SQL databases and then displays their embedded thumbnails. While it would be nice to see the Lightroom-adjusted previews (which Marc Rochkind's LRViewer can do), that's not a must-have requirement. It also makes you think too, that either iLife integration via the OS is a little more mechanical than they make it sound, or thoughtful designers can readily replicate it, regardless of operating system.

Permalink - GPS -  3 comments

Big city walking

True story. Yesterday was indeed a lovely day, warm and sunny but with a fresh breeze, one of those Sundays when it is actually a pleasure to walk around central London. Next-to-no traffic coming into town, I'd shown off the new Beardymobile and picked up my friend Adrian from his office - I'm sure he does so little during the week he ends up working Sundays - and then we'd enjoyed a dim sum at Joy King Lau and caught up on our recent travels. Afterwards I felt like a walk, so instead of heading directly back to the car I'd marched up to Oxford Street, turned into Regent Street, and then hurtled down to Bond Street.

As I write this, the location has suddenly brought to mind the opening pages of Virginia Woolf's wonderful Mrs Dalloway - "I love walking in London", said Mrs Dalloway, "Really, it's better than walking in the country." I imagine her progress was much more stately and ladylike than mine - my normal walking style is a tourist-scattering power yomp - but yesterday afternoon I had exactly that sort of dreamy good-to-be-alive bounce in my metropolitan step.

Still, I was moving at quite a speed, and soon in Old Bond Street I spotted a smallish Indian guy meandering slowly in my path. Smartly-dressed, wearing a blazer, he could easily have been a chauffeur killing time. He didn't get in my way, though. Rather like on the autobahn when you see the fast-approaching headlights of BMWs and Mercs coming up behind you, he'd soon pulled over to one side and I had continued without breaking pace. As I'd passed I had heard him saying what sounded like "you're a lucky man", but nowadays you are so used to people apparently talking to themselves in the street that you probably wouldn't give a second thought if they had a Babelfish rather than a Bluetooth device in their ear. Maybe he was just talking to himself - I didn't turn to look.

The next one was crossing the road at the time and though I wasn't sure he it was directed at me, he certainly did say "you're a lucky man". It was a bit like a film from a scene - either I was about to be called upon to give Maria Sharapove the kiss of life or a grand piano was about to drop ironically on my head. He was also Indian. Some Hindu holy day perhaps, where you have to give out good wishes? The thought of checking Wikipedia when I got home had barely been chased out by the thought it was probably a scam - they were probably selling cheap suits or carpets - when it happened a third time. This one was stood right in front of me, cheerful too, and looking right at me as he blocked the pavement. My car was 30 yards away. Fuck 'em.

Permalink - General -  4 comments

Result

Had a surprising couple of days. Imagine you go along to a trade show, and just wander up to see if you knew anyone on the Adobe stand - a gentle bit of networking, nothing more. You ask why they're showing Lightroom 1 rather than 2's public beta, but apparently they weren't even showing version 1 - the speaker hadn't shown up and no-one on the stand knew the software. Then the Adobe guy starts to say if you do want to learn Lightroom.... Well, you respond, actually I.... Ooh - and 5 minutes later you're miked up and doing an impromptu presentation and Q&A.

Well, that's what happened on Thursday at the Digital Photo and Imaging Show at the Design Centre, Islington. I was there as a regular visitor and was then meeting a friend for a pint. I'd enjoyed a Hasselblad presentation and was fascinated by the H3D MultiShot which moves the sensor after each exposure. My initial thought was of those 19th century cameras which moved the lens or film back so that 4 pictures could be exposed onto a single sheet negative, but obviously that wasn't the concept. Moving the sensor 1 pixel at a time, right, down, left, then back up, an image is built up of 4 exposures - with each pixel recording red, green and blue values, rather than the standard RGGB mosaic. Its main application is in archival work, such as in the Vatican library, but I also wondered how far it is away from the mainstream where many current digital SLRs have mechanisms to shake the sensor for dust cleaning. Anyway, that was just a thought. I then stayed in my front row seat for Colin Prior's talk, and I can't remember what was next but that was when I thought I'd do my innocent bit of networking.

Unknown to me, the seminar area had been full for the earlier LR slot and there had been a "mini riot" or "mass exodus" when Adobe announced a PS Elements demo instead. I'll confess my presentation skills are rusty and date from my financial IT days, but I do "know my stuff", and no sooner had I disentangled myself from the cabling than the conference organizers were asking what I was doing on Friday. So yesterday, after three Lightroom presentations and Q&A's, each an hour long and unscripted apart from 20 bullet points scribbled on a notepad, I deserved a pint or two - and it was fun too.

Permalink - Lightroom -  5 comments

The generic photographer

Another surprise yesterday - I bumped into the photographer Richard Baker at the DPI Show. Bumping into a photographer at a photography show - what's odd about that? Well, it seemed off as he lives round the corner and we're more used to encountering eachother in Sainsbury's or in the street.

Richard's best-known for his great series on the Red Arrows, Britain's Royal Air Force Aerobatic team. Thankfully, we're not talking "aviation porn", but there's a more ironic approach and this picture seems typical of his best shots where the crowd is his subject and the aircraft are incidental. But until I looked up his site again this morning I didn't know he has been writing such a great blog England's Pleasant Pastures. From his visit to Olympic Land:

It doesn’t bode well. A clearly disturbed young man is carrying old orange Sainburys bags and deliberately barges into an elderly gent as he crosses the road outside Stratford station. The first edition of The Standard yaps: “Flasher judge shows court his briefs!” and the pensioner wobbles but stays upright. I help him to gather his balance and thoughts.

I am in Olympic pastures, the land of hope and sport, of pomp and circumstance. In five year’s time, thousands of destructive carbon footprints will tramp across the landscaped dreams of Lord Sebastian Coe and the Rt. Hon Tessa Jowell MP - the High Priest and Priestess of the XXX London Olympiad. Today, the IOC have arrived in town for three days of hard hats and canapés.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Creep

Brilliant piece of Flash animation here:

Creep is a music video of Radiohead's 'Creep' song. It took 3 months to create and contains over one million key frames. I know this because I counted them. I counted them because I made the animation and delivered every one of those mewling baby key frames.

Creep was created as an extension to a series of shorts called 'Low Morale' which I began to develop during a well-paid, comfortable yet soul-destroying job as a senior designer in a multimedia agency. The countless days spent in the run down converted office, churning out banal multimedia and animation for faceless, lifeless, clueless blue chips had taken their toll on my soul. Creep became my creative escape tunnel.

Via Gordophoto

Permalink - General -  0 comments

John Gravett

I've been waiting a while to make this post, but finally John Gravett has finally uploaded photos to his personal site. John's the photographic half of Lakeland Photographic Holidays and I spent a happy half hour playing spot-the-location. I didn’t do too badly - though I knew some from the 2 or 3 excellent weeks I've spent at LPH - but I wish he'd included details of where he’d shot some of the others!

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should

Firefox 3 is out and it has colour management. Disabled by default, it's pretty easy to switch on, as this this Lightroom news post explains. But it's a bit like encouraging someone to drive without saying they should pay attention to other road users. While you can do it, the real question is should you?

Where I take issue is with the comment "Your Lightroom [I'd add - or other programs'] galleries and exports will now look better online." Sure, your galleries will indeed look better on your own screen, but that really isn't the point of the web, is it? It's how the pictures look on the visitors' screen that matters. Until you can be sure that a significant-enough proportion of your visitors is using colour managed browsers *, you're misleading yourself if you evaluate your site's appearance in your colour managed Firefox.



* As far as I can see in my own site logs, there's no way of seeing if a Firefox 3 browser is colour managed

Permalink - Lightroom -  6 comments

Nice and big

Recently I've felt my Pipex/Tiscali ADSL problems are making this blog like a Bridget Jones weightwatching diary or like King Charles I marking his children's height by notches on his silver walking stick. Diary entry June 22nd 2008 - 768kb on an 8Mb line. Must reboot router. Pull out cable.

At least this speed is just about usable for online radio, the BBC iPlayer, VNC connections, or Skype - well, one at a time - and for another site I reckon I'll start visiting every day. While I use their RSS feeds to keep an eye on big photojournalism sites such as Magnum or Reuters, their pictures are decently-sized for the old web. The Big Picture shows them nice and big, and like many good things it started as a personal project of its designer.

This shot is from a series on the fascinating mud volcano in Indonesia which was set off by gas company drilling. And though the screw-up's on a much smaller scale, I'm sure there must be a parallel here - if only Tiscali had kept their hands off my Pipex connection.....

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Lost tribes

There's an article here on Edward Sheriff Curtis's photography of American Indians:

During those 30 years (twice the time he had originally planned for the project), Curtis visited more than 80 tribes, from the Apache to the Zuñi, and earned the personal support of the president, Theodore Roosevelt. He worked 15-hour days for months at a time, spent more than $1.5 million of his benefactor JP Morgan's money, was shot at four times, disowned by his brother, divorced by his wife, and went bankrupt. On returning from one prolonged trip into Eskimo territory he was thrown into jail for failure to make alimony payments.

Sounds quite an obsession. For many more of his photographs, go to The Curtis Collection.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Black and white

See the slideshow at When Images Galvanized the Nation:

If ever social change was propelled by photographs, it was during the civil rights movement. Burning buses and raised batons, snarling police dogs and blasting hoses, the young black girl in bobby socks and gingham trailed by a group of sneering white girls as she tried to enter high school — the images spurred a national reckoning in a way that words could not.

Behind the pictures are stories of smashed equipment and journalists beaten, of activists drawn south by images, of amateurs who picked up cameras for the first time.

And sometimes we think we have it tough with security guards or busybodies.

Permalink - Tripodophobia -  1 comments

Geosetter

For a while I've been playing around with GPS and geotagging. Without a real need, I've been happy just nibbling at it from various directions but for some reason in Italy I seemed to find time to try a bit of everything.

I've a little Garmin GPS unit that connects directly to the camera. After the wedding in Positano, I had time to look around the Amalfi coast and found a lovely location called Fiordo di Furore. Unfortunately the "fiordo" in its name means it's a deep cove that's well-sheltered from passing satellites. My other main location was Paestum with its Greek temples. Being in the midst of a mosquito-infested swamp (you should see my legs) it was much easier to gain a GPS signal and all should have been perfect for recording the coordinates directly into the image. But - and probably because it's a very basic unit - the signal kept dropping. I really couldn't be bothered checking the little GPS indicator on the camera each time I wanted to take a shot, and after a while I just disconnected it. So as usual I was left with a mixture of a few geotagged and many more untagged images.

Sure, I know I could always leave the GPS unit on as I wander around (and carry extra batteries), or I could capture various waypoints or whatever they're called. With something to connect the GPS to the computer, I could download the tracklog, and use something like ImageIngester to merge the log data into the NEFs or DNGs. I'm sure this process would work, but it seems more trouble than it's worth. So last week I hacked a tracklog in TextEdit, using the data recorded on a few Paestum frames, and applied it with ImageIngester. That worked, but satisfied my curiosity rather too easily.

What else have I tried? Well, over the weekend I also wrote a script for Bridge but found Adobe protects the EXIF fields - sensibly enough. I could have modified it to post coordinates to existing IPTC fields, but I don't really agree in principle with hijacking and abusing fields. Another alternative was to modify the script to write GPS data to my own private tags until such time as there's an agreed place for manual GPS entries, when I could probably copy the data over. But for now only Bridge, Photoshop, and Extensis Portfolio would have been able to read those tags - not Lightroom, Aperture, iView etc. And any of these methods would mean entering the GPS data manually. That was also the downfall of making yet another doomed effort at understanding the very thorough documentation behind Exiftool.

This seems so typical of my efforts with geotagging. I don't find it worthwhile enough to record GPS automatically, or at least consistently, but adding the information afterwards, which should work better for me, has also seemed too half baked (Expression Media 2's dragging and dropping onto a Virtual Earth map, which seemed so promising, is more a developer's ugly proof of concept than a polished feature fit for release) or too Heath Robinson like Exiftool. But it was after I got home yesterday when I was trying to make sense of Exiftool that I noticed a link to a program that a few people have recommended - Geosetter.

Whoo. It's rather good:

• A Google Earth window helps you identify where pictures were taken, and a button then applies the GPS coordinates to the image screenshot here.
• A particularly well-done feature is that you can choose by individual file type how Geosetter writes the information, so for raw files you can choose to write into the image itself or into a sidecar file, as I prefer, while for DNG I chose to write the data directly into the file.
• The other feature I really liked was Geosetter's ability to get the location information from Google and fill in the IPTC fields, and it's possible to copy those fields into the keywords too.

That done, you can drag images into Lightroom to initiate its import process or use Library's Metadata > Read Metadata from File to update existing images.

But I feel I've only scratched the surface of what looks like a really good program - and all the more reason to install Windows on my Mac laptop.

Read more...

Permalink - GPS -  9 comments