rawformat

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.

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.

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.

Working with multiple RAW files

Ben Long at Complete Digital Photogrpahy has figured a way for Mac Photoshop users to manage multiple versions of a RAW file in your workflow:

If you're a Mac-based Photoshop Camera Raw user, then this simple package of droplets and Automator actions will let you easily create and manage multiple versions of your raw images. One of the great advantages of raw files is that they can be processed in different ways to yield completely different images. While Photoshop CS2 doesn't provide any built-in facility for handling multiple versions of a raw file, with this free package of utilities, you can easily create and manage a set of raw versions.

Digital DNA: Images can now reveal the specific camera that created them

Tracy Staedter at Discovery News reports that the June issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Security and Forensics contains a paper detailing how forensic scientists have mapped subtle pixel patterning so that an image can be matched to the digital camera that shot it. The paper was, written by Jessica Fridrich, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the State University of New York in Binghamton, along with her colleagues, Jan Lukas and Miroslav Goljan.

In laboratory experiments, Fridrich and her team were able to match several thousand different images to the correct camera without a single misclassification, even when images were compressed or resized.

"This is one of the first papers out there to have what I think is a realizable, robust and effect technique for doing it," said Hany Farid, associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth University and an expert in digital image forensics.

Aperture 1.1.1 Update

Apple has released a small update for Aperture:

This update addresses several issues related to performance, stability, color correction, and display compatibility and is recommended for all Aperture users

Apparently the update comes on the heels of some rumors that Apple was downsizing their Aperture team quiety. MacWorld claims otherwise.

Fun with HDR

I've been looking around the HDR photos available on FlickR, and a lot of them are really cool and addicting to look at. Since I didn't know much about HDR (or HDRI - High Dynamic Range Imaging) to begin with, I took a look through the Wikipedia entry and around at some of the tools and methods for messing with it. 

It turns out that making an HDR image is basically a process of compiling several different exposures to get a large range on shadows and highlights - in other words getting a High Dynamic Range. I was disappointed to note that compiling the image exposure was a feature not present in CS1 - the version of Photoshop I'm usuing. I'm too honest to download CS2 for free and too cheap to buy myself a new copy, so for now I'll have to do without it.

Regardless, the images I've seen look very cool, and I wish I had more of the tools to play around with it.

Watch That EXIF Data: It Can Reveal Retouching

From the post Fun with EXIF thumbnails by Robert Peloschek.

Peloschek shows how to detect modifications to an edited photo by salvaging the embedded EXIF thumbnail. Particularly a problem for those using "a stupid program like Microsoft Paint for cropping your images."

Universal applications (followup)

Josh Wand, who knows a lot more about coding than I do, answered my previous question as to why Adobe can't just pop their Windows version of Photoshop over to Intel Macs:

Architecturally, trying to translate between MFC and Carbon is like trying to genetically engineer an apple to taste like a coconut.

To say nothing of SSE vs Altivec?

Plus they have to move their whole project management, toolchain, and build systems from CodeWarrior to XCode, which, for a multi-hundred-thousand (million?) line monstrosity that is 9 versions worth of evolution of photoshop, is no piece of cake.

Of course, I don't know what MFC, Carbon, SSE, or Altivec are either--but the bit about moving zillions of lines of code to a different...dialect?...of code makes sense.

Regardless, I hope Adobe gets an Intel-Mac-workable edition of Photoshop out the door without waiting too long. Since Photoshop is kind of a "killer ap" for Macs in many cases, it will probably affect apple sales as well.