Month: June 2017

Calculators for planning: image storage, transmission, print and repro

I often need to make advanced plans around quantities, sizes and transmission of images for my clients and to aid this I use some simple maths to quantify things. To aid this further I have created a set of web calculators covering all the common tasks.

Here are some common calculations I need to make when planning in advance:

  • How long will it take me to upload 2GB of images via ftp to a client? – or download 1TB?
  • How many raw or tiff files can I store on a 3TB drive or a 9TB NAS?
  • How many minutes (or hours) will it take to transfer 1620GB of raw files to a NAS from a client’s USB2 external drive?
  • To make a high quality 20″x16″ print at the Epson ideal print density of 360dpi how many pixels do I need?
  • What is the lowest megapixels a camera or file can be to still cover (for example) an A2 print at 350dpi? how about 7″x6″  at 150dpi?

All of these can be answered using the calculators below, here is a list of what they do:

 

Time and transmission:
Internet calculator – Calculate upload and download times for large files and collections of images.
Network calculator – Calculate transfer times for large collections of files across a local wired or wireless network

Capacity and file size:
How many images? – Calculate how many images/ files can fit on a hard disk, NAS or optical device
Camera file size and space calculator – Calculate files sizes and storage requirements of a particular camera
Card Full? – Calculate image capacities for your camera writing to different sized SD or CF cards

Dimensions for print and repro:
Print size calculator 1 – Calculate file size requirements when someone asks for a physical size for print or repro, this calculator allows you to specify units of meters, feet, inches, cm, mm.
Print size calculator 2 – Calculate native print and repro sizes from your images pixel dimensions.

Misc:
Getting View: Print Size to work properly in Photoshop – Calculate the right dpi for your monitor using this easy and practical method

I hope you will book mark these individual calculators to help plan your workflow. If you have any ideas for other calculators let me know and I will see what I can do.

How many images?

Getting View: Print Size to work properly in Photoshop

 

I love using “Print Size” in the Photoshop “View” menu as it allows me to see how big the image will print in the physical (real) world.

The chances are that if you try this with an image in your Photoshop the result will be incorrect (for instance a 10″ image may be nearer 7″ on screen). The reason for this is that by default Photoshop assumes you are using an early Apple monitor that has a resolution of 72dpi. In actual fact most modern monitors display many more dots per inch (pixels per inch) hence making the print preview too small. To make an accurate sized print preview you need to enter the actual dpi for your particular monitor.

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Welcome generosity

B0003753 Crystals of a DNA repair protein bound to DNA
Credit: Bernard O’Hara & Renos Savva. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
Growing crystals of a DNA repair protein bound to
DNA. This particular repair protein is the E. coli
mismatch U:G DNA glycosylase. The crystals are
produced for x-ray crystallographic studies to
determine the structure of the protein-DNA
complex.
Published: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Welcome images – the photolibrary arm of the Welcome Trust has decided to make its image collection freely available to all under the Creative Commons image license.

High res images are available for download under either a free use for any purpose or  free use for non-commercial purposes only. You can read more about this on their website here: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/page/News.html

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Client Story: Natural History Museum new book

Very pleased to have worked on the new book from the Natural History Museum titled “Unforgettable Behaviour”

The book shows some of the most interesting animal behaviour from past “Wildlife Photographer of the Year” overall and category winners and adds descriptive text that adds context and depth to the story of each image.

Im a big fan of having a better understanding of the world and happy that this book is not just visually strong but also contains a depth of knowledge in the subject matter.

t was my job to translate the RGB images supplied from multiple sources into a cohesive and consistent set of CMYK separations that could be printed safe in the knowledge that shadow, midtone and highlight details are preserved and best represent the image on paper.

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Update: Preparing the workshop


Very much looking forward to presenting my half day Imaging Workflow Workshops at Chester Zoo in September this year. I’m going through material for the presentation and I’m determined to fill the session with as much information and insight as possible.

As well as my session there is a half day session each with Sue Flood (photography) and Cindy Miller Hopkins who will guide you well on metadata amongst other things. The final half day sees us all together to review and help answer any outstanding questions. It will be a very worthwhile 2 days, we will pour out our knowledge with no compromise or commercial break.

Lightroom is too slow? don’t get me wrong, I do love Lightroom, I use it to ingest shoots, search for images, manage collections, bulk print and make the occasional web gallery, it really excels in lots of important areas. Where it falls down on is speed for editing and retouching, I will be showing work arounds and methods for faster and more accurate workflow using Bridge and Photoshop but in the meantime, here is a message I posted for Adobe:

Adobe:

 Lightroom is getting a little long in the tooth, the mobile apps are a fun and sometimes a useful addition but we really need the main desktop program to be better.

Editing and retouching – even with pre built smart previews is achingly slow.

I have monitored processor, memory and disk usage during these tasks and found nothing on my fast i7 PC is stressed, the headroom in speed and bandwidth is simply unused – there must be something  fundamentally askew with the code to be causing this latency.

Please use a tiny fraction of your newly expanded profits to employ someone who can write tight and fast code to get the job done, it would be appreciated.

Many thanks

Stephen Johnson
Copyrightimage Ltd

Update: July 11th
Adobe have released a statement acknowledging problems and have promised a fix. Nice to see Adobe responding to its wider community, I hope a better product will be the result.

Network calculator