wiredfool

I have a thing for some of the older photo images, especially some of the ones that were shot for the FSA and other government agencies during the depression era. Lewis Hine, Dorthea Lange, that sort.

Shorpy.com is digging these up and runnning them as a weblog, and at the same time, offering prints. I’ve spent a bit of time in the last few weeks poking around — of course there’s Hine’s Powerhouse Mechanic, but there are a few from Dorthea Lange that I find quite powerful.

A New Beginning

North of Elma

and
Migrant Daughter

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This came in the mail a couple of days ago — a non-descript Dell catalog with more of the latest and greatest in cheap consumer computers. (And displays, but, I order online when the prices are favorable).

This looks like a nice little ad for Windows Security software. Attentive users, clean design. But wait, what’s that laptop? What we have here is a first generation tibook, complete with the paint rubbing off where the user’s wrists rest on the white surround. Oh, and the logo is photoshopped out of it.

I don’t know if this is Dell’s doing, or if it’s something from Trend Micro, but the message here is: It’s not safe to use our products on the net, and if you do, you need something else. And that something else is an old Mac.

I’m guessing here that someone took this as stock photography, and to avoid trademark issues, they surgically removed the big Apple logo on the screen lid. Someone picked it up and used it in the ad, not realizing that it’s a competitor’s laptop. If Dell commissioned it, I just don’t see them saying to just use a mac.

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I went to a Flickr Meetup a couple of weeks ago, 50 photographers, a couple of pros, a bunch of models, and one big aircrafe hangar for a studio. I took the new old film camera, shot a couple of rolls, and was happy with the outcome. It’s a different feeling shooting on film, both for me and the models. And the results are different too. Maybe less contrast, a different depth of field, and different grain.

This is Awan, one of the models there with a lighting setup that I jumped on from one of the other photographers.

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Last weekend was big and busy between the Island County Fair and my Strobist Photo Seminar. Basically on the run all weekend, now I’m looking forward to a work week where I can relax a bit.

Flying #2 won Best in Show, Best Amateur, and the People’s Choice Awards. That’s pretty much a sweep. Ben and the Cedar Tree got a blue ribbon.

My Honey Wheat bread got best of the yeast breads, and the white got a red ribbon. (But I was almost not going to enter the white, since it didn’t make the nice loaf shape that I was looking for.)

All in all, not bad for entering 4 items. I’m not sure what I can do to top the photo entry next year. Maybe go for the pros in their own category.

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Since We’ve got a camera that’s more than a few minutes/days/months old, I’m thinking about what I don’t like about it and what I’d want in the next one, assuming that I’m not just going to rush out and buy the really expensive one, features be dammed. We’ve got the original Digital Rebel, 300d, a 6MP camera that’s perfectly adequate for almost anything. It doesn’t generally get in the way, and it produces really nice images when run properly. It’s 2 generations old by now, so there’s possibly some significant advances to be had. What I’d like in a new one, or rather, what annoys me and I want to change from this one are:

•  Buffer Depth/ Time to clear a full buffer. With a 4 image buffer and quite a few seconds to clear once it gets full, I find myself waiting on it a lot. It’s quite a bit slower than the recycle time of the flashes when they’re below full power.  It doesn’t help that I shoot raw, but then again, that’s where the image quality is. 
• Tungsten white balance. It’s awful, either on the auto or the tungsten setting. It’s fine if I shoot a custom frame, so I know that the camera can do it. It’s rare that I do that when I’m shooting around or under varying light conditions. I can fix it in LightRoom, but I’d still rather get it right in the camera.  
• Autofocus speed. It can be really slow, or hunt badly. I know that AF has gotten better.  
• Lower, less objectionable noise at high ISO, and an ISO 3200/ISO50 range expansion. The noise at the high end is starting to wear on me, especially since there are sensors that do so much better out there now. The pictures I’ve seen online show that the top of the line 1DM3’s 6400 performance is probably better than the Rebel’s ISO 800. 
• Onboard flash that can be configured for non-TTL and manually turned down. Sometimes it would be nice to run optical slaves from the onboard flash. 

What I don’t necessarily need is more megapixels, a smaller camera, better battery life, or a different lens mount. (though the Pentax pancake lenses look nice)I was hoping for the Canon 5d to come down in price, or have essentially it with a 1.6 crop sensor in place of the 30d. The 30d hasn’t advanced the art as much as many reviewers would like, being more of a warmed over 20d than a scaled down 5d.I got a chance to shoot with a 30d at a wedding, when the Mother of the Bride’s camera found it’s way into my hands, after being handed to someone who looked very uncomfortable with it. (Sample question: Where’s the zoom? )  Despite not being able to find some of the controls — aperture in full manual mode, exposure compensation in Av — and starting out shooting people in white in full sun in jpg on iso 1600 — I was able to get it to a reasonable point.By that point, it felt relatively natural. Autofocus was blazingly fast, buffer depth was enough, and sun on white clothes was tamed.  It felt far better than I would have expected, given the reviews of the camera. It’s probably not everything that I want, but it’s certainly enough for what I’d want. But I’m not really in the market yet. Just thinking about. 

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In which I get a reference calibration.

To figure out what was really going on, I calibrated the display with a $$$ GretagMacbeth EyeOne that’s used in the local print shop and compared the results.
First, a problem image, screen captured from my camera. Note that this image has blue and yellow/green fringes in the mid gray regions. This is an all gray image, so there should be no color there. (The absolute colors are off here due to the capture).
That same image, using the monitor calibration from the EyeOne, shows a smooth grayscale and no color banding.

The OS profile for this monitor shows a little color banding, but nowhere near as much as the Huey profile, and not enough to show on one of these screenshots.

After seeing the EyeOne calibration, it’s not the monitor, it’s the calibration. Comparing the calibrations, it’s pretty clear that they significantly differ, at least in the curves.

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I was just browsing along, when this low budget ad caught my attention. It’s selling patches, or watermarks, or something.

An image at this resolution from istockphoto is $1, shutterstock takes a $199 subscription for the ability to download 25/day for a month. (And it’s on the first page of search results from shutterstock).

Perhaps the diet patch business isn’t as good as my email box would have you believe.

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I picked up a Pantone huey colorimeter this week so that i run a little more of a chance of getting a reasonable match between the colors that I see and what comes out of a printer. I can’t say that I’m 100% convinced that I’m getting good results yet, at least on the MacBook’s screen. The MacBook vs. Huey is not exactly an unknown issue on the net, though this seems to be a more subtle version than the heavy green casts that people were getting.

First off, the colors are different. Cooler and less contrast are the first things that I notice. if I take a break and come back to to the screen, the colors do look reasonable, so that’s not evidence of miscalibration. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the native MacBook colors are far punchier with high contrast and saturation and muddy shadows. That’s great for videos and selling machines in the store.

What does worry me is that the B&W images that I’m displaying (in Lightroom, a color aware application) aren’t coming out in pure neutral. There’s distinct coloration, a sort of off color yellowy green in the mid-tones. That shouldn’t be there in a properly calibrated screen. I’m going to venture a guess that the response curves for the individual RGB channels aren’t the same. The calibration software does the bulk of the profiling with neutral tones instead of a pure singe color. I’m not sure why, unless it’s a speed or product differentiation issue. That compromise would wind up making the overall luminosity curves correct at the expense of the color balance. Thankfully, it’s something that might be fixable in software.

The calibration seems better on my Dell 20″ desktop LCD, so perhaps it’s a quirk of the MacBook screen. I’ll have to try comparing to good prints to see if it can nail skintones on the external monitor. If it can, then it’s worth having.

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I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom since the beta3 time frame, and I’ve got to say that it’s improved the results of my photography. There’s a noticeable quality improvement from the pre-Lightroom times. 1.0 has been solid, if not totally speedy on my Macbook. I have a couple of quibbles though:

• Sharpening — there’s very little control of sharpening. I’m used to (older) Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask, and the ability to control radius and threshold is quite useful.
• Noise Reduction — i can barely make out that it’s doing anything. At least it’s split into color and luminance noise sliders, so that the little it’s doing are on appropriate axes.
• ‘Channel’ Mixing — This is so important that they rounded up twice the usual number of channels. I wish that there was a good way to see the individual channel contribution quickly, like the cmd-123 in photoshop.
• The Slideshow produces a PDF. Great, but probably relies on some acrobat specific behavior to make a slideshow. This is the most useless of the 5 modes for me right now.
• Web Galleries are a nice way to dump out the images for a quick gallery. The HTML seems a little limited. I would have liked to see something similar to the flash gallery done in HTML. (Thumbnails across the bottom, in a frame/scrolling div, and the main image on top.
• Also in the Web Galleries, the flash versions look absolutely horrible if the image isn’t displayed at full size, since they don’t use a good scaling algorithm to adjust the image size. I’d rather that they simply let a smaller image float rather than scale an image with jaggies

All in all, that’s a pretty small list for a 1.0 product.

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and towards a more color managed workflow.

A while ago I posted about an article that had a lot of detail on colorspaces, profiles, and what works both on the web and in print. One of the takeaways from that was that my workflow was not color managed, except for (possibly) on the mac and probably on my laptop.

Which is a bummer, since the laptop has proved itself to have a really wonky color response profile, at least as compared to what gets printed and any other display I have access to. For example, custom white balance in the camera is better than doing anything by eye on this machine. Print matching was a nightmare. It turns out that there’s a monitor profile from 10.4.7 that is a lot closer to what the prints were producing, so I’m using that for now. But still.

The takeaways were that anything destined for the web or print probably should be in sRGB, that the camera should probably be in AdobeRGB (a wider color space), and everything at every stage should be tagged with the appropriate profile. Finally, I should get a colorimeter and at least get the best profile I can on this monitor.

I’m still using a raw converter that’s using the coregraphics filters to do my first cut at the images. It’s good enough for most of the web destined images, unless I need to do B&W conversion or edits. It turns out that it’s not that hard to hack in support for specific color spaces, instead of the generic ones.

Since I don’t see this well represented in google: Obj-C following:

CGColorSpaceRef cs, default_cs;
CGDataProviderRef profile;
NSDictionary *options;
float ranges[] = {0.0,255.0,0.0,255.0,0.0,255.0};

defaultcs = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB(); profile = CGDataProviderCreateWithURL((CFURLRef) \ [NSURL fileURLWithPath:@"/System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/sRGB Profile.icc"]); cs = CGColorSpaceCreateICCBased(3, ranges, profile, defaultcs);

options = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:(id)cs forKey:kCIContextOutputColorSpace];

context = [CIContext contextWithCGContext: [[NSGraphicsContext currentContext] graphicsPort] options: options];

Where previously, I was passing in no options (or more precisely, nil), this time I’m passing in a dictionary specifying an output color space, initialized to a system profile. This will convert anything that is painted into the context into sRGB, and include the profile in the output image. It’s apparently also possible to use a Lab color profile, but I’m unsure how useful that would be since the only other Lab aware app I know of is Photoshop.

Looking at the camera data, the RAW files are tagged with AdobeRGB, 16 bit which is a bit of strangeness, since AdobeRGB is an 8 bit space. But, since it’s RAW, it really doesn’t matter, since the RAW files are open to so much interpretation anyway. If I do switch to JPEG, it should still be in AdobeRGB, so I’ll capture as much of the gamut as possible.

I’m curious how much of a difference this will make. It certainly feels like the right thing to do.

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