SnapperTalk

Mozilla have announced their expectation that the new version 3 of their popular web browser Firefox will be released this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Why is this a big deal for photographers in particular? Let’s step back a bit…

Colour management of photographs can be a complicated and misunderstood process, but the end goal is always to ensure that the viewer sees the image - with regard to tonality and colour - in the way that the photographer intended.
To achieve this, images are usually saved in a certain colour space such as AdobeRGB or sRGB, which defines the potential range of colours and embeds this information profile in the image in a way that can be understood by any colour-profile-aware application.
So if I view an image saved in sRGB and another in AdobeRGB, my colour-aware application can sense the difference and automatically convert the colours so that what I actually see is pretty much the same. Great huh?

However, if you look at the graph above, you will see that sRGB displays a much lower range of colours - a smaller gamut - than AdobeRGB. Professional photographers generally shoot and save their images in AdobeRGB because its larger gamut is better for capturing the full range of colours and for printing purposes.

The current problem is that most web browsers COMPLETELY IGNORE this colour profile information and assume that the image is saved in sRGB - you can test your browser to see if it is compliant at the ICC Test Page. Therefore when these AdobeRGB images are uploaded to the web and seen on the vast majority of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox 2, Opera, etc) they appear flat and dull - as you can see in the some of the examples here.

Ideally photographers should save an AdobeRGB version for print, and then convert this to a separate sRGB version for web use - but that is of course, a pain. Up until now the only browser that supported colour profiles was Apple’s Safari - which is now available for both Mac and PC. Safari is quite a good browser but has a low market share, and doesn’t offer the wide range of useful plugins and customisations that Firefox does.

Enter Firefox 3. The new version of the browser isn’t colour-profile-aware by default but happily it can be easily fixed by either a hack explained here, or there is already an easy plugin created by Sean Hayes called “Color Management” that does the job - available here on the Mozilla site or here on the author’s homepage. The latter requires no registration.

This is certainly a step in the right direction as far as photography on the web is concerned. It gives me a way to see images on the web as the photographer intended. However the decision to have it off by default means it’s unlikely to help the majority of Firefox users and I find that disappointing, although some of the reasons are discussed here.

Until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer starts recognising colour profiles, and Firefox 3 starts doing so by default, the majority of web users will still be seeing much photography on the web incorrectly represented and not as the photographer intended - but at least I don’t have to any more.

UPDATE 17/06/08: Firefox 3 is now out, I’ve installed the Color Management plugin, and I can say that colour photographs on most websites I frequent look much, much better than before.

© Michael Kamber, used with permission

Photojournalist Michael Kamber - currently attached to the Baghdad bureau of the New York Times - has posted a very thorough review of the Leica M8 on his website.
The review is a real-world, hands-on, in-the-field style review from the perspective of the camera’s use in combat situations. Mike is a long time Leica user but despite the advantages of the camera’s “unobtrusiveness” he found:

“the Leica M8 to be unreliable, poorly designed, and to deliver substandard results in most of the situations in which I have used it. I can’t think of any camera - or for that matter any electronic device I have recently used - that so thoroughly fails to live up to its potential and its heritage.”

Ouch. Read more here.

Update: Mike’s review has sparked a vigorous debate over at Lightstalkers with people comparing his review to more positive ones by the likes of Bruno Stevens and Ashley Gilberston and trying to work out how a camera can be both terrible and fantastic. If you like debates of the “Mac vs PC” or “Nikon vs Canon” variety, take a look at the threads here, here, and endlessly here.

Archiving photos is a tedious, time-consuming experience and the transition from storing negatives to digital files on CD, DVD, or hard drives hasn’t really improved matters all that much. On the other hand, losing images because they weren’t archived properly is even worse and the potential for losing large numbers of images is arguably even greater with digital.
Many friends and colleagues ask me how I archive my photos and what I recommend as a backup solution, so I wrote this post to illustrate the strategy I use:

Image sorting structure

I keep every image shot irrespective of what the subject is, because you can never know what will be important in the future. I also find going through and deleting so-called “unnecessary” photos just takes too much time.
Every card gets copied to my laptop using Photo Mechanic’s Ingest function which is set-up to automatically sort the photos in a hierarchical folder structure according to year, month, date, and card - for example:

HD > Archive > 2008 > 2008-04 April > 20080401 > card-01

I then use the same structure to save all the photos which I actually transmit, e.g.:

HD > Transmit > 2008 > 2008-06 June> 20080612 > card-04

Having a clear structure like this is not just to make it easy and quick to find photos - it is also designed to reduce the chances of accidental deletion/overwriting.

Primary Photo Archive

Every week or two I manually copy the new images in these folders to my primary photo archive hard drive. It’s easy to know what has already been copied due to the strict folder structure. You may be wondering why don’t I use some kind of backup script to automate the process? Well, I’ve found automating this process to be just complex enough to run the risk of accidentally deleting or overwriting existing images, and so I feel safer doing it manually.

For my primary photo archive I use the Stardom SR3610 (model# SR3610-2S-SB2) external RAID-1 hard drive enclosure shown above (read a review here) which has both eSATA and USB 2.0 connections (or there’s a Firewire/USB unit if you prefer that - model# SR3610-2S-WBC).
I chose this model because it’s relatively affordable, has a hardware RAID-1 controller, hot swappable drive trays, eSATA for speed and USB 2.0 for compatibility, and most importantly has excellent cooling due to the temperature-regulated internal fans monitored by the controller. I am currently using 2 x 500GB 7200rpm Samsung SATA drives in a RAID-1 configuration inside giving me 500GB of useable space - which I chose because Samsungs tend to be cool-running and in my opinion very reliable. Saying that, these are almost full and I am looking to upgrade them to 1TB Samsung F1 drives.
In my opinion, particularly for those living in hot climates, overheating is a significant cause of hard drive failure so having a well-cooled enclosure is critical.
In addition, such countries often have irregular mains power therefore all my hardware is connected to this 1500VA APC UPS unit to prevent against data loss caused by power outages/blackouts, brownouts, overvoltage, surges, and line noise.
All my drives are formatted with the “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” filesystem (now the system default) because this gives journalling protection should the system shutdown in the middle of copying files.

RAID is not the same as a Backup

There’s a widespread misconception that RAID is all you need to protect your data - it is not. RAID-1 will protect you against DISK FAILURE of a single drive - if one drive dies your data is safe because the other is always a perfect mirror. That’s all fine and necessary, but disk failure is not the only cause of data loss. User error e.g. accidentally deleting files or folders, applications corrupting the files themselves, backup up an “old” folder over a “new” folder, etc can also result in the loss of your images, and with any RAID system these errors will be replicated on all drives.
Therefore you also need a separate backup archive.

Secondary/Backup photo archive

One of the reasons I chose the SR3610 is that the drive trays are hot-swappable and interchangeable with other Stardom enclosures.

So for my backup photo archive I chose the Stardom iTank i302 shown above (read a review here) - a non-RAID single-SATA-drive enclosure with eSATA and USB 2.0 connections, which uses the exact same drive trays as the SR3610, so I can quickly swap drives around if I want to. Inside the enclosure I use the same model Samsung 500GB drive.

Maintaining the Backup

So we have a RAID-1-protected primary archive, and a secondary backup archive on a single disk - what is the best way to ensure that the first gets properly backed up to the second?
If software cost isn’t an issue I’d recommend using Retrospect. This is one of the best backup applications and is available for Macintosh and Windows. Initially it may seem hard to configure, but with a little time you’ll realise just how powerful it is.

What I would recommend is setting up a “Duplicate” script that clones the RAID volume to the secondary drive. This will compare all the files on the primary archive with the secondary one and then copy over just those images that have been added since the last backup (Note: and also delete any files on the secondary drive that are no longer present on the primary drive).
Why not just use any old backup program to do this? Retrospect has an important option called “byte-by-byte-verification” which once it has finished copying, goes back and compares every 1 and 0 between the original and copied files to ensure it has made a perfect copy with no file corruption. Many other backup programs verify the copy made but most do this simply by looking at the date-stamp and size of the file - which confirms the file has been copied but does not confirm that no corruption has occurred.
The only disadvantage of this method is it takes almost twice as long - but is probably worth it for peace of mind.

Other respected backup applications on Mac OS X that are worth considering:

Carbon Copy Cloner: This is an excellent and free (donations are welcomed) utility for MacOSX that lets you create a bit-for-bit copy of one volume or folder, to another volume or folder.

SuperDuper: Is another very well-respected general backup application.

For further Mac OS X backup applications look here.

What about Apple’s Time Machine? This is attractive because it keeps multiple versions of files if they do change, but in my mind isn’t quite ready for critical backups because of the lack of user-control over how it operates.

Improvements

If your level of data-loss paranoia is somewhat higher, you could use another SR3610 as the secondary drive instead of the iTank, providing increased protection against drive failure.

Another step that I would definitely recommend is to make an extra copy of all data on either a hard drive or DVDs and leave it in another physical location. This is really easy to accomplish with the above hardware because you can easily add more drives to the setup simply by purchasing extra drive trays as shown above.

Other storage ideas

Networked Attached Storage (NAS) of different RAID varieties, though particularly RAID-5, is an increasingly popular option for data storage. Personally I’m not yet convinced of the reliability of large-volume data-transfer over ethernet, and I don’t need 24/7 network availability of my photos, so I continue to prefer direct-attached storage.

If you do like the idea of accessing your entire library 24/7 - including remotely - then a NAS such as those made by Netgear, QNAP, and Synology might be for you. For great comprehensive info on different NAS models go to the SmallNetBuilder site.

In the future I think the ZFS file-system will become the preferred option for photo archiving as it has some really impressive next-generation features, and Apple says ZFS read/write support will be included in the next version 10.6 of OS X Server codenamed “Snow Leopard” - but at the moment it is way too experimental on OS X for real-world use.

Conclusion

This setup works nicely for me, your needs may vary - particularly if you have many terabytes of data to protect. In that case you are going to want to have multiple sets of drives that you rotate-out as they get filled up - which you could do with the above hardware by purchasing more drive trays. Or, you’re going to have to start looking at a multi-drive RAID-5 setup.
So far I’ve avoided RAID-5 because I prefer the simplicity of RAID-1. If a drive dies in a RAID-5 setup the RAID controller should be able to rebuild the volume, but if for instance the RAID controller itself dies, rebuilding is not so easy a task. With RAID-1 you can just remove the good drive and connect it directly to the computer - this I see as a very great advantage for the average user.

Well, if you’ve made it this far (!) I guess you are somewhat interested in this subject, so you might want to take a look at this “RAID for photographers” article I wrote back in 2006 which has some more in-depth information.

If you use a backup system that has advantages over this in terms of either workflow or hardware, or have any other photo archiving tips, please share your experiences by leaving a comment below.

Following on from the previous post, German server software company Helios is reporting they’ve discovered a serious bug in the Mac OS X 10.5.3 update whereby “Images saved from Photoshop CS3 can get corrupted visually (stripes or
similar in the image) or even structurally so that they cannot be opened again in Photoshop or another application”.
They say this occurs with Apple based AFP servers (i.e. Apple filesharing over ethernet) as well as with their own sharing software.
The changelog for the OS X update mentions it “Improves Spotlight searches on a AFP file server volumes” and I wonder if the two are related.

UPDATE: Macworld has more info on this particular problem which seems to affect images that are saved directly to network volumes. This seems to be part of a more long-running problem between Adobe and Apple and not related to the Spotlight update I mentioned above.

UPDATE 2: Senior Product Manager of Adobe Photoshop John Nack writes in his blog that he’s been receiving a lot of inquiries about “problems saving files from Photoshop directly to network drives when using the recently released Mac OS 10.5.3″. He goes on to say Adobe is “working closely with Apple to troubleshoot the issue and have identified the cause. Apple is working on a fix, and we expect they’ll release it in the next System Update.” Advice then is until this is fixed, do not save directly to network drives - save it locally then transfer the file.

UPDATE 01/07/08: Apple now claims to have fixed this problem in the 10.5.4 update release today

Naked Light claims to be a new image-editing application for Mac OS X promising non-destructive editing, node-based compositing, “infinite resolution”, live tools, and pro tools that work in photographer-friendly units like “stops”.
Rather than deal with all this jargon, just download the public beta when it becomes available tomorrow and give it a try… the interface certainly looks appealing. Note they say it requires Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), and probably a decent graphics card, to run.

Actions are one of the most powerful and time-saving features of Adobe Photoshop yet many people do not use them to the full.
Everyone has their own favourites, but if you are looking to find some additional ones, here’s a couple places hosting downloadable actions:

ActionCentral
Adobe Photoshop Exchange
PhotoshopSupport.com
About.com
ActionFX
The Light’s Right Studio
Fred Miranda

If you know of any other good sites or actions you find useful, please leave a comment…

Now that Adobe Lightroom is finally shipping, if you’d like a detailed rundown on it, how it compares to Apple Aperture, and whether it is for you… Ars Technica has published its typically comprehensive take on it:

Ars Technica review

I’ve been meaning to write about this Photoshop tip since I read about it a few months ago in an issue of the PhotographyTech newsletter. It was one of those moments when you realise that despite using Photoshop almost every day for many years, there are still things to learn…

If you have an image with a horizon that isn’t quite horizontal, the usual method is to use the crop tool and rotate the crop.

Try this instead:

1. Select the Measure Tool (usually hidden under the eyedropper tool) in the tools palette.
2. Draw a line along the edge of the part of the image that you want to make horizontal.
3. Go to Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary, ignore whatever value has been entered into the “Angle” box, and just hit “OK”.
4. The image will now have been rotated so that the line you drew is a perfect horizontal, and all that’s left is to crop the black canvas out of the frame.

I still use the normal method most of the time - but do find this useful for pictures where you need an accurate horizontal or where you need to visualize the rotated image before cropping.

Martin Shakeshaft notes on his blog that the widely used audio-and-stills multimedia slideshow software Soundslides is now undergoing beta-testing of a version for Windows XP. Previously only available for the Mac, developer Joe Weiss has posted the first public beta for windows and is seeking feedback from users in order to iron out remaining problems and turn it into a final release. The beta version seems fully useable, but watermarks the final output as per the trial versions.

Soundslides public beta for Windows XP information
Soundslides public beta for Windows XP download

UPDATE 12/07/06: Martin has posted an interesting slideshow of his black & white pictures from the 1984/85 miner’s strike in Britain, created using the Windows version of Soundslides.

Wipe that “I’m slinging the latest Canon EOS1D MkIIN round my neck” look off your face as you smugly pass those cameraphone-toting punters in the street - they may just be shooting bigger files than you. As if the cameraphone market wasn’t ridiculous enough, Samsung comes out and unveils a 10-Megapixel cameraphone.

I know it’s not the same, but still…

Rob Galbraith has posted his impressions of the MacBook Pro - specifically as a machine for photographer’s use. It’s a good article highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the new machine’s hardware and processor architecture from a photographer’s perspective. He notes that “Dennis Walker from Camera Bits says that most of the work has been done to make the application [Photo Mechanic] a Universal Binary, though the company has not committed to a release date.” So hopefully there will soon be an Intel version of Photo Mechanic… which leaves the biggest question of all - When will Adobe release an Intel-native version of Photoshop?

As mentioned pretty much everywhere by now, Adobe has released a new product intended as a contender for Apple’s Aperture. Initially available as a public beta for Mac OSX only - they say Windows versions will follow later - it’s good to see the big companies tackling the arena of professional digital photography workflow and asking the important question of HOW you do things, not just WHAT you can do.

Lightroom product page.
Download Lightroom Installer [DMG, 8MB]
Download Lightroom Installer + sample content [DMG, 140MB]

Adobe Lightroom video tutorial [streaming flash]
Luminous Landscape - Lightroom review
PhotoshopNews - announcement & screenshots
PhotoshopNews - Lightroom FAQ

Veteran Photoshop plug-in creator Fred Miranda has a very clever plug-in called DRI Pro. The idea behind bears its origins in the old split-grade black & white printing where you would expose an image on multi-grade paper partially at high contrast and partially at low-contrast, thus increasing the dynamic range of the resulting image. This plug-in claims to bring that functionality to digital images and will appeal to imaging perfectionists and those needing to handle high-contrast and/or badly exposed scenes.

To start you would need two identical images - one exposed for shadow detail and another for highlight detail. If the camera was on a tripod one could theoretically shoot two separate frames and start from there. Or you could take an original jpeg and save it as two TIFFs each with different tonal adjustments made to capture the shadow and highlight detail. But where this plug-in would really find its raison d’être is with RAW images. RAW images capture a much higher dynamic range than a jpeg and so you would process the same RAW file twice - firstly adjusted to capture the upper levels/highlights, and another time to capture the lower levels/shadows. Once you save these two resulting images and feed them through the plug-in, it would blend the two to create a single image that captures both the shadow and highlight details.

I haven’t actually tried the plug-in, which can be ordered from the site for $19.90, so if anyone has please let me know how well it works. There are manual ways to achieve similar blending results described in this tutorial at Luminous Landscape and this one at Samy’s Camera.

As reported in PDNonline, a worldwide coalition of organisations have joined a non-profit initiative to clearly define and standardise aspects of image licensing and management. The Picture Licensing Universal System (PLUS) is intended to become a system of codes that will define all the possible different type of image licensing options and assign numbers to them. The type of information that would normally be written in a contract, or added as usage restrictions in a caption, can then be described precisely in a numeric code they call the “Media Matrix”. Currently they have a glossary of over 1300 licensing terms and in time they hope to enable photographers to embed this Media Matrix directly into the image metadata so that it travels with the image and can be recognised at every stage of the distribution process. With the likes of Adobe, Getty Images, the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), and Editorial Photographers (EP) amongst others as backers it seems like the project has quite some potential.

According to this Wired News article a Stanford University graduate student has invented a prototype camera that allows users to take photos and choose how to focus the image later. Ren Ng calls his creation the “light field camera” and it uses about 90,000 micro lenses between the main lens and sensor, which measure all the incoming light AND its direction of origin. The software later adds up the rays, according to how one chooses the focus. Apparently it is based on work in the 1990s on something called a plenoptic camera. Some more info and videos showing the “refocusing” here and here. So no excuses anymore.

Rob Galbraith reports that Camera Bits are prepping their latest version 4.4 of the excellent Photo Mechanic image-browser, and that a beta will likely be available on November 1st. There seem to be some pretty substantial features added, notably in the area of captioning, all of which are well covered in the article.

UPDATE 01/12/05: Final version 4.4 now available for download

It seems everybody is releasing new photo software the last few days. LightCrafts has released a new photo-editing application called LightZone. It claims to have a somewhat innovative approach in treating images as a set of automatically-recognised tonal zones which you can then adjust, and also has RAW image support. Currently only for OSX, but a Windows version is expected in November. More information can be found on the product FAQ.

Apple has created Aperture - a new application for pro digital photography. Although not yet released, it appears to be the Final Cut Pro of stills photography and is a very exciting development in an arena pretty much exclusively dominated by Photoshop and a few other applications.

It looks from the technical specifications that it is not intended to be a Photoshop replacement, but rather an all-in-one workflow application that they claim integrates seamlessly with Photoshop. And for minimal-manipulation photojournalism photography, it may even be the only application needed for a large proportion of such work. It has extensive RAW image support and EXIF/IPTC support, although I’d like to know if the captioning is fully compatible with the multitude of imaging systems out there. Let’s hope so.

At the moment it is only available for pre-order but the Aperture page on the Apple website has a lot of information on it.

UPDATE 31/10/05: Rob Galbraith now has an extensive page of additional information about Aperture.

Somebody please build one of these - an image created by artist ‘Chris’ and titled “Oldtimer Mark II” in a ‘vintage products’ contest over at Photoshop-skills contest site Worth1000.
Easy to forget what amazing images can be crafted in Photoshop when you live outside of the zero-manipulation arena in which photojournalists work.

From RobGalbraith comes the news of a new Photoshop plug-in for Mac or Windows that takes a very different and innovative approach to the problem of colour correction in images. Rather than a complicated process of colour adjustment based on hues, colour-channels etc, the aptly named SkinTune from the company PhotoTune attempts to achieve natural-looking colour correction based on skin tones. They collected thousands of sample images of all different races from around the world, took precise spectrophotometer measurements, and then compiled a database which is the basis of the plug-in. Basically you choose the likely race of the subject and then have options for fine-tuning. Technical notes on the process can be found here and demo versions can be downloaded here.