rawformat

Lightroom and Aperture Compared: Lightroom has the Edge

Forrest Tanaka, an experienced Lightroom user writes about his week with Aperture in the Martin Bailey forums.

The bottom line:

"Aperture is no longer on my hard drive, and Lightroom is. Aperture's versioning and back-up method will be painful to leave, but Lightroom is more natural to use in the important things, so it stays."

Both apps seem very stable. Neither ever crashed during his tests.

Aperture wins at:

• Versioning. Lightroom has history, but it's not the same.
• Keywording. Selecting and applying are easy. Lightroom's approach is "a bit clumsy."
• Backup. Vaults are very useful.

Lightroom wins at:

• Image adjustments. Curves beat Aperture's histograms.
• Cropping and rotating. One tool in Lightroom manages both. Aperture breaks them into two tools.
• Performance. Lightroom feels "a bit faster overall." Aperture is sluggish during image adjustments.

Here's an interesting point made by Tanaka:

"My main concern with Lightroom, and not being part of the Lightroom team it might be an unfounded concern, but its development seems a bit scattered. It's as if they're trying to figure out a focus based on user feedback, and being a beta, focus should have been determined long ago. Makes me worry a bit about the final product and feature-creep."

Windows Media Photo Format: Pro Photo Summit coverage from Doug Plummer

Doug Plummer was also at the Summit and has several comprehensive posts covering the event. His most recent takes a quick look at the The new Windows Media Photo format that has been introduced. It shows some real promise, and I was surprised that someone like Adobe didn't put an alternative like this out there years ago.

Lightroom for Windows: First Public Demo

Just left the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit where Kevin Connor demoed Lightroom for Windows. I happened to be sitting next to George Jardine, who has been instrumental in its development, and he confirmed this was the first public demo.   

David Riecks: "A Metadata Manifesto" released

David Riecks is chair of the Imaging Technology Standards committee and participated in creating "A Metadata Manifesto" which is being distributed at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit. As with RAW files, a solid cohesive standard for metadata and usage can help remove much of the confusion that surrounds workflow, storage, retrieval, and a host of other issues.

The Manifesto Asserts:
"Without effective systems in place for identifying and managing digital assets, everyone working with digital images is adversely affected. Resources are wasted, opportunities are lost, liability increases and intellectual property rights are eroded."

The three guiding principles the Manifesto puts forth are:

• Metadata is essential to identify and track digital images.
• Ownership metadata must never be removed.
• Metadata must be written in formats that are understood by all.

Three core action items:

• We need industry wide commitment to use metadata.
• We need to embrace metadata standards and best practices that have a consistent world-view approach.
• We need technology that makes it easy to embed metadata, preserve it, and facilitate tracking and rights management.

Get the full Manifesto here.

Microsoft Pro Photo Summit: Directions on RAW session notes

Just a few quick notes from the session today, more detail to come later. The session panelists were Adam Jones, Vincent Laforet, Thomas Knoll and Steve White.

In general the session covered the already much treaded on ground of what photographers want from a RAW format, but some intriguing new thoughts were introduced, as well as some valuable (and geeky) technical insights came from Thomas Knoll.

The usual stuff:

• RAW has become the standard for professional photo capture. "JPEG is doomed" as a capture medium.
• Photographers want a single standard format for RAW.
• Photographers want RAW files that take up less space.
• RAW is too hard to work with now, photographers want an "easy" button for file management and workflow.

Some intriguing thoughts:

• What about a RAW format that allows editing? We'd then have a much richer working space.
• What about a "half cooked" RAW format? Have the camera generate a partially processed file.

Technical insights:
Thomas says that the physics that surround image capture with CCD sensors are presenting us with a situation where we are reaching an upper limit on how much data can be captured. This may give hard drives, memory, and processors a chance to "catch up" with what have been ever-increasing megapixels. Bottom line is that we may find RAW files very manageable in the not-to-distant future.

Microsoft Pro Photo Summit Opener: Vista, Windows Photo Gallery, and Pro OS features

Here are my notes live as the presentation progresses. At the Pro Photo Summit in Redmond today, and Tim Gray (Director of Pro Photo Community) gave his welcome remarks. There are 350 or so attendees present, most are not from the Seattle area. Most have raised their hands in response to the question "how many are pro photographers?" and most also responded to the affirmative that they are Macintosh users as well. Most attendees were not from Seattle. MS research asserts that 52% of professional photographers use Windows.

One interesting note is that Microsoft produced a fun video featuring well-known Seattle TV and radio personality Pat Cashman. He asked people on the street pro-related questions such as favored rendering intents, and if they shoot RAW, etc. Most responded with befuddled looks.

Presenters admitted that XP has several weaknesses related to working with photos.

* No image editing
* No archiving
* Slow acquisition
* Poor searching
* No central library
* Slow rendering
* No Metadata Control
* Limited Workflow
* No RAW
* No integrated sharing

All are apparently addressed with Vista. MS wants to bridge the gap between consumer and pro users.

Vista Demo:
Insert a card and copy files, via the OS, tagging can be applied as while photos are imported. RAW support is built into the operating system, and all SLR manufacturers are building filters.

Comprehensive color management is also built into the OS.

Windows Photo Gallery:
Clearly targeted at the iPhoto space. It's slick looking, very fast when moving, tagging and performing edits.
* Some basic touchup tools, cropping, auto color, etc.
* Supports extensible contact sheet templates.
* Can send files to service partners for printing
* Photos can be shared on consumer DVD players using Windows DVD Maker.

Nikon software gets Intel-mac test run

According to Rob Galbraith DPI, Nikon has been testing its software for compatibility with Intel-based macs. The results of the tests for NikonUSA can be found here, but Galbraith had a few thoughts of their own:

Our own experience with Capture 4.4.1 is that if the application's parts are copied over from an installation on a PowerPC Mac, Capture Editor runs just fine on an Intel Mac (though slowly), while Capture Control will not see either USB- or FireWire-connected cameras. In other words, the main stumbling block is getting the application onto an Intel-powered Mac, since the installation process won't complete. And even when manually installed, tethered operation isn't possible. While we haven't tried this here, we've heard from several photographers now that Capture Control in v4.2 and possibly 4.1 as well will link properly to the D70 and D70s but not necessarily other Nikon USB models.

Microsoft Acquires iView(!)

Looks like Microsoft continues to take the pro photo market very seriously, and is continuing to make big moves in this space. iView has just announced that they have been acquired by the Redmond giant. This from their site:

Open letter from Yan Calotychos, founder of iView Multimedia

Tuesday June 27, 2006

Today marks an exciting new chapter for iView and its relationship with our customers. We’re announcing that iView has been acquired and is now part of the Microsoft Corporation. With Microsoft’s purchase of iView, we are in a position to enhance our industry-leading product, whilst strengthening our customer service and support.

As digital asset management has become an essential requirement for all creative professionals, many of you have told us that iView MediaPro is a critical component of your business. We take that responsibility very seriously.

In my view, this Microsoft acquisition affords us an unprecedented opportunity to be even more responsive to a thriving market and ensure that iView MediaPro continues to perform to its full potential. Our engineering and marketing team here at iView are energized and excited to be joining the Microsoft team, and I personally will continue to be involved in the evolution of the product for years to come.

What this acquisition will mean for you, our customers, is that together we face a bigger and brighter future in managing your creative workflow. The product that was born on the Mac will remain on the Mac as well as on the Windows operating system. All iView products will continue to be sold on the iView website and through our partners and channel. Bottom line: You all can continue to use and buy iView products knowing that they will be fully supported as Microsoft evolves the products in the future on both the Windows and Mac platforms.

Your feedback and suggestions have been integral to the development and tuning of our software, and as always we welcome your comments and questions. We have provided an FAQ regarding this announcement and we will keep you informed through regular newsletters and blog postings as appropriate.

Thank you again for your support, and we look forward to sharing with you the evolution of iView MediaPro — the industry’s true standard for digital asset management.

Sincerely,

Yan and the iView Team

Huffman's Digital Camera Raw Converter Comparison Chart Updated: Bibble Pro 4.8 Included

Steve Huffman has put a lot of effort into this comprehensive chart and article which he says is intended to provide an "overview of each program's features and capabilities and to provide reasonably accurate image comparisons."

He provides overviews of:

Adobe ACR
Bibble Pro
BreezeBrowser Pro
Canon Digital Photo Pro
Capture One Pro
RawShooter premium

DPP 2.1 and Bigger JPEGs: Canon Digital Photo Pro Conversion Algorithms Changed

A reader of Chuck Westfall's Digital Journalist site comments that since upgrading to DPP 2.1, JPEG file sizes are now "around 4-5 times bigger" after conversion.

Chuck confirms that the JPEG compression algorithms were changed in DPP 2.1 compared to 2.0 and earlier, and says:

"At this point, I am not permitted to release the chart that Canon Inc. provided, but I can tell you that Level 7 in DPP 2.1 is roughly equivalent to Level 9 in DPP 2.0 and earlier, in terms of JPEG compression ratios."

More info here.

RawShooter Technology Headed for Lightroom

Peter Cohen at MacWorld reports that Adobe's acquisition of Pixmantec will result in RawShooter technology making its way into Lightroom. Commenters speculate that Pixmantec had already been working on a Mac version of the popular Raw workflow app, and that Adobe was interested in incorporating the batch processing capabilities of RawShooter.

Three good tweaks for Adobe Camera Raw

Benedict Slotte, over on the dpreview forums, has compiled a quick hit-list of three tweaks that can really improve your RAW conversions in ACR:

1. Colours (these tweaks are specific to 5D):

This is what most people complain about in ACR. Basically, as can be seen in all threads describing this, one has to quite considerably alter the Red hue and Red saturation slider on the Calibration page in ACR. Red Hue has to be decreased to -10...-15, Red saturation has to be boosted to +20...+25. Some minor adjustments should also be made to the other sliders, but in my own calibration trials the ideal values for these have still stayed within about -5 to +5. I have used a Gretag Macbeth chart and the ACR calibrator script (the improved one that optimizes all patches instead of just red, green and blue) to get these values.

More specifically:
Red hue = -12
Red saturation = +24
Green hue = -7
Green saturation = +1
Blue hue = 0
Blue saturation = -5

Check out the forum post for the full list.

DXO, ACR, Silkypix, Lightbox Raw Processing Compared

Daisuke Tomiyasu has processed and presented an image captured with a Canon EOS 1Ds Mk2 and converted using four popular Raw processors. Although his translation to english is imperfect, " Sometime too perfect then result is not as image what you want..." the images speak for themselves.

Iridient RAW Developer 1.5.1 vs. CaptureOne Pro 3.7.4

David Mantripp, a long time CaptureOne user has documented his own experience comparing RAW Developer and CaptureOne Pro in his post Switching to RAW Developer. One of the reasons he prefers RAW Developer is that it isn't designed to be a workflow tool and therefore he can use it "efficiently in tandem with iView MediaPro." Another is their support for Olympus cameras.

He concludes:

"I've been considering switching to RAW Developer for some time. Now that I've finally found a few hours to evaluate it, I've decided to do so. It's a great piece of software at a very fair price. I'm not saying that CaptureOne is no good. I've been using it happily for 2 years. But I doubt that PhaseOne sees much point in improving Olympus RAW performance for the tiny user base which all indications show they have."

You'll want to read the whole post, and see the image comparisons here.

OpenRAW Survey Report in PDF

If, like me, you missed the release of the OpenRAW survey report entirely, then this is new news - if you didn't, well - now it's more conveniently packaged.

In January, the folks at OpenRAW put out a survey for basically anyone in the professional photo community about their opinions on RAW and RAW standardization. The survey report is now available from the OpenRAW site in pdf format. It's a nice looking document with chapter hearders, bookmarks, and the works.

If you haven't had a look at the results yet, it may be worth a gander.