rawformat

Lightroom Photoshop Adventure 2006

Photoshop Blog reports that as part of a software test turned publicity stunt, photographer Mikkel Aaland is leading a troup of photography experts around Iceland for a photo-shooting Adobe-testing adventure:

Aaland invited eleven acclaimed photographers to join him in Iceland, where the long midsummer days are suffused in some of the most spectacular light on the planet. From July 28 to August 5, 2006, this intrepid crew — joined by three top Icelandic photographers — is shooting by day and using Adobe Lightroom beta to import, select, develop, and showcase their large volume of digital images each night.

As they go along you can find practical lessons and photo galleries on the Adventure Blog that accompanies the trip.

Check out the post at Photoshop Blog for more details and a list of the accompanying photographers.

New CameraRAW White Papers

Today Adobe released updated versions of two of its White Papers:

Adobe has updated many of the original white papers and primers available as PDF downloads from Adobe.com. Explore these papers and primers — written by some of the biggest names in the industry — to learn more about the world of digital photography.

Adobe Camera Raw 3.x
Bruce Fraser takes you through Adobe Camera Raw 3.x from end-to-end in this essential overview.

You can download the pdf here.

Shooting dark and digital

Looking at The Online Photographer, I'm well impressed with the Fujifilm F30's ability to shoot at high ISOs.

For day to day snapshots I use a Cannon SD400, which is a pretty solid peice of work (if tiny), and since I'm not the world's most steady shot, I tend to keep the ISO higher than lower most of the time. But most of the time it ends up producing images that are a lot more grainy than I'd like.

Looks like the F30 does a good bit better:

I have to admit I bought one of these a few weeks ago. Like most digicams, it's not much fun to use—fiddley menu interfaces driving you crazy. But its high-ISO results are within shouting distance of those of some DSLRs. You can use ISO 400 without penalty, and ISO 800 is fully usable by my standards. In B&W mode, it's the first digital compact that meets and beats Tri-X.

DAM Useful plugin

I'm not sure how long this has been around, but it's the first I've seen of it. I'm usually a fan of using open source software whenever possible (mostly because I'm cheap), but this is probably a fairly solid addition to some people's workflow:

RapidFixer is the new flagship product from DAMuseful software. It's a workflow solution that allows you to make lots of quick proofing corrections to RAW files, while still in Bridge. By pushing the buttons that RapidFixer creates in Bridge, you can have access to many of your favorite Camera Raw settings, such as:

Temperature
Tint
Exposure
Shadows
Brightness
Contrast
Vignette
Sharpen
Color Noise Reduction
and Curve Presets

Find it at their site, for $40.

115 DNG Devices

Barry Pearson has put together a comprehensive list of products (OK, so technically *not* "devices", but it sounds better!) that support Adobe's open DNG RAW format.

The list is broken down into categories, such as "Adobe products" and "Products from Camera Manufacturers," and has 115 items so far - the last update was July 13th.

Pearson's blurb from the site:

DNG is an openly-specified, freely-usable, raw file format. It is the only contender as an emerging de facto standard raw file format. This page identifies products that claim to support DNG in some way. I have personal experience of few of these products. Some of the information here is probably just plain wrong! Please tell me of any errors or omissions, so that I can correct them.

RawShooter is dead, long live Lightroom

Pixmantic says "we will no longer be working on new versions of the RawShooter | premium product." They have announced that some purchasers of Rawshooter Premium can get a free version of Adobe Lightroom 1.0. Their letter to users is below:

Dear RawShooter!

As you may have noticed, Adobe Systems Inc. recently acquired the technology assets of Pixmantec. Pixmantec’s technology and expertise will be incorporated into Adobe’s products. Specifically, some of Pixmantec’s raw processing technology will be incorporated into Adobe’s raw processing engine which is shared by Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. We, the founders of Pixmantec, will join the Adobe team, integrating our expertise into their products, and continuing to be able to serve the photographic community.

As the founders of Pixmantec, we’d like to express how gratifying it has been to see the level of support and praise we have managed to gain through the introduction of the RawShooter product line to the market. We had a vision of making top-notch raw processing capabilities truly accessible to a wide audience of photographers, and the number of devoted users that developed tells us that we made significant progress towards that goal.

Nevertheless, we also saw that we were not the only company recognizing the need for specialized photography workflow software. Specifically, Adobe a company we have always admired had for some time been working on their own workflow solution, which was announced as the Lightroom public beta program in January of this year. When we met with the folks from Adobe, we found that the admiration was mutual, and that our visions for the customer were very well aligned. Ultimately, we saw the opportunity to make a bigger impact by joining Adobe, and lending our own best ideas and expertise to the ongoing Camera Raw and Lightroom efforts.

As we work to integrate Pixmantec technology and expertise into Adobe’s raw processing pipeline, we will no longer be working on new versions of the RawShooter | premium product, and have stopped selling this product. Of course, your RawShooter | premium product will continue to work and serve you well, but we also know that many of you will eventually want a software solution that you know will continue to evolve, remaining up-to-date as raw workflows and processing continues to improve. Adobe Lightroom is a product targeted at solving these evolving workflows and up to the minute raw processing. Currently in public beta format for the Macintosh platform Adobe Lightroom will be released as public beta for Windows this summer.

Lightroom is being built from the ground up to address the unique challenges of a photography-centric workflow. Not only will it offer what we believe will be second-to-none raw processing, but it is designed to provide a start-to-finish workflow solution for photographers. We encourage you to learn about Adobe Lightroom: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom

For those concerned about the transition to Lightroom or the acquisition in general please visit this FAQ that addresses many of the topics discussed in the Pixmantec forums recently. Please continue to let us know how we can ease this product transition for you.

Now that we’ve joined the Adobe family, we must emphasize that RawShooter users also are now Adobe customers, regardless of whether you ever purchase another Adobe product. Your satisfaction matters to us. Specifically, Adobe will do the following:


Offer a free download version of Lightroom 1.0 for customers who bought RawShooter | premium prior to July 12th 2006, 12 noon European Standard Time. Given that Lightroom 1.0 will serve a much broader range of functionality and will be priced at a higher price point than RawShooter | premium, we believe this represents a great value for our customers.


Adobe will investigate to what extent your image corrections made within RawShooter can be transferred to Lightroom.


We will deliver support for Canon EOS 30D In RawShooter | essentials this summer.

We are deeply thankful for the support you have offered Pixmantec and we thank you in advance for your understanding and continued support.

The best is yet to come!

Sincerely yours,

Kenneth Laerke and Michael Jonsson

Mikkel Aaland on Reducing Noise in RAW files

An article/excerpt from Aaland's Photoshop CS2 RAW book has been posted at webreference.com, and discusses at length how to reduce noise, correct chromatic aberrations and control vignetting in RAW files.

"With varying degrees, all digital cameras produce images with electronic noise, chromatic aberrations, and vignetting. Electronic noise shows up as extraneous pixels sprinkled throughout an image. Chromatic aberrations appear in transitional tonal areas as colored halos, color banding, or purple fringing (especially around backlit edges). Vignetting--darkening around image edges--occurs with a filter/lens/sensor mismatch. In this chapter, I'll cover how you can reduce the effects of these imperfections in your RAW files."

RAW conversion comparisons

I spotted an article at Digital Outback Photo today that talks about the experience of moving from a 4x5 film camera to a medium-format digital camera (the Phase One P45 39-megapixel camera).

The most interesting bit was about RAW conversion however. They stacked up the RAW conversion between Capture One and Raw Developer, with images that show notable differences.

The article with images is definitely worth a look-see.

Stripping the excess from image files

Although it's not directly about RAW, Fazal Majid wrote a post in April about how to work around the extra baggage (XMP data) that Photoshop drapes around its image files.

For Majid's workflow, there's a bug that renders the data innacurate in his photos, and he also traced it to a bug that renders images invisible in Internet Explorer. He uses a few open source programs and even wrote one himself to deal with the bugs:

I wrote jpegstrip.c, a short C program to strip out Photoshop's unnecessary tags, and other optional JPEG "markers" from JPEG files, like the optional "restart" markers that allow a JPEG decoder to recover if the data was corrupted — it's not really a file format's job to mitigate corruption, more TCP's or the filesystem's.

If you're having problems or frustrations with XMP data (or just want to strip it) the post is worth a look-see.

Capture NX Trail Version available

According to Rob Galbraith, Nikon's Capture NX 1.0 is now available as a trial version in the US, Canada, and Europe.

You can find download links on their site. The software is expected to be available for purchase later this month.