Update

Back at home now.

Alice is out of hospital and recovering well, many thanks for your support.

This week is going to be busy, a couple of private workshops, one larger and one smaller retouching jobs and an interesting job cleaning up metadata on 120,000+ images.

Be aware that I service a wide range of clients from advanced amateur photographers whom I can help with training and market advice to large institutions where I can help standardise and raise the quality of image collections.

I will be away on a shoot next week but things free up a little after that so feel free to get in touch if I can help you with any training, retouching or imaging workflow needs.
Stephen

Update on availablility

My daughters operation went well and she is now recovering, however a minor setback means that we will not be able to return home this week as planned.

I have wi-fi access in the hospital and am able to work so please feel free to continue to email queries / work as normal.

Mobile phone use is very intermittent so please email in the first instance and I will call back if thats required.

Many thanks for your support.

Stephen

Photoshop CS4 Windows 7 dragging an image to the Photoshop icon

Windows 7 now treats files dragged to application icons in the new apps bar as files to be “pinned” to menu of the application.

This can be useful for files you open regularly but a bit of a spoiler if your used to dragging image files to the Photoshop icon to open them.

The good news is that this fuctionality is still available – you just need to make sure you press the shift key whilst dragging the file to the icon and they will then open in the usual way.

Stephen

Interesting technology under consideration for Photoshop

Its not usual for Adobe to tell people about new things they are considering for future Photoshop releases so its interesting to see this (and also its pretty amazing):

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/10/video_new_from_adobe_labs_content-aware_fill.html

Its a natural progression for the healing and patch tools and will certainly help reduce retouching costs…

Stephen

Improved video on Canon 5D MKII

Canon have said that they will release an update for the 5D MKII next year so that it can be switched to 24 and 25 frames per second as well as the current 30 fps. This will make it easier to convert to different system standards and is good news, their statement can be seen here:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0910/09102003eos5dfirmware.asp

However, dont wait for the new firmware, if you are in the field and think there may be a salable sequence in front of you then go ahead and capture it.

Stephen

Power saving on imaging workstations

In the past I have advised (for good reason!) not to use sleep and hibernate modes on machines used for retouching.

However, considering the price of electricity these days together with the fact that LCD screens reach a stable state much faster I think there is some room to use these power saving states.

Use with care, if your going to lunch then hibernating the machine is fine, if you know that you will be doing some critical colour work on images in a short while then dont sleep the machine.

Clients who run large batch processes overnight are advised not to use power saving as this will compromise the process.

Stephen

Colorchecker passport part 3


I couldnt quite understand why building profiles with the colorchecker passport was leading to reds (especially) being a little oversaturated.
I got out my (more expensive) Gretagmackbeth SG chart and suddenly all was clear.
The colours on my SG chart are much richer, specifically the colours in the center which should share common values with the passport.
Now my SG chart is a few years old and should if anything have faded, the colour should not be richer!
I can only conclude that the nice matt finish on the passport that makes it easier to light and photograph has the side effect of not being as rich in colour as it should due to light scatter.
However the profile calcualtions must be based on the colour values from the reference chart, becasue the passport colours are weaker the profile is pushing the colours up too far.

I can still work with the passport but I will need to tweak the resulting profile with the Adobe DNG profile editor, less than ideal though maybe a better path if lighting the SG chart is problematic.

Oh well..

(Photograph shows SG chart and passport under the same lighting, the white rectangle shows the colours that are common to the charts and used to build profiles)

X-rite colorchecker passport update


Im still experimenting with this camera profiling kit and have done some work on the strong reds.

My initial analysis was that some saturation was increased using the profile I built and in the case of reds was causing some clipping. All files were coverted to 16 bit and the Adobe 1998 colour space.

When I tried the conversion into the larger pro photo colour space I got a big surprise, it looks like the profile has found a lot of colour detail outside the Adobe 1998 colour space (see the diagram above, the dots represent colour in the file and the solid object is the Adobe 1998 colour space).

In the Pro Photo Colour space there is no clipping, just extended colour…

When I use the standard Adobe camera profile and convert to Pro Photo the colour just about creeps out of the Adobe 1998 colour space so it looks like the custom profile really is getting some extra range out of the camera.

In order to get the advantage of this extended range it looks like I may need to convert and retouch in the Pro Photo colour space, I can always convert to Aobe 1998 with perceptual rendering if clients request.

This could be very useful for me helping clients who do copy work, will need to experiment some more…