SnapperTalk

In the latest Digital Journalist Tech Tips, Canon USA’s Technical Advisor Chuck Westfall explains something that I’ve been wondering about for a while – just what do the Auto Lighting Optimizer and Highlight Tone Priority modes in the newer Canon cameras (such as the 5D Mark II)… actually do?

Update: There are some interesting tests concerning noise when using Highlight Tone Priority in this Cinema5D forum thread

The Canon EOS 5D MkII can shoot video in either 640×480 (VGA) or 1920×1080 (1080P, Full HD) resolution, both encoded with H.264 video compression. Playing video files in the former is easy, but the sheer amount of data that needs to be processed with 1920×1080 resolution can tax even quite modern computers.
VLC has been my video player of choice for many years as it is free, open-source, and will play virtually everything you can throw at it – but disappointingly I couldn’t get it to play 5D MkII videos without major stuttering or no playback at all.

Thanks to this post on the Photography Within blog, I’ve now found a trick that enables VLC to play these files very smoothly – you just have to change one setting:

Go to Tools > Preferences
In the lower left of the box click the checkbox “Show settings – All”
Then go to Input & Codecs > Other Codecs > FFmpeg and look for the option called “Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding”
Change it from “none” to “all”
Restart VLC

I’ve tried it on Windows and all the 5DmkII videos that were problematic before now play perfectly. It also works on Mac, though you may not need to do it on that platform.
Bear in mind this method DOES reduce the playback quality (by not doing any de-blocking noise reduction), so if you aren’t having problems with playback then don’t do it, but if you are then it’s pretty useful.

Canon have posted firmware update 1.07 for the EOS 5D Mark II, which it claims fixes the widely discussed “black dot” problem.
Rob Galbraith has more on the subject here and in an earlier post here

It seems interactive panoramas are all the rage, or I’m just noticing them more. The New York Times yesterday posted this 360 degree panorama shot from the top of the 10-meter diving platform at the Olympics, with commentary from American diver Thomas Finchum. Technically speaking it’s quite impressive, but the empty stadium leaves it without the fascinating details of this one by Kari Kuukka that I wrote about yesterday.

If you haven’t seen it already, this is a pretty amazing 360 degree panorama shot by sports photographer Kari Kuukka from the photographer’s stand at the Beijing Olympics. You have to let the flash keep loading until the image becomes colour, then use your mouse to move around and Shift/Control to zoom In/Out (Win) or Shift/Command (Mac). Rob Galbraith has all the technical details.

If you were holding off trying out Tineye the image search engine I wrote about previously, because you were put off by the beta/invite status of it, then you’ll be interested to know that as of Aug. 15th they’ve introduced instant-signup and invitations are no longer required.

Following on from this article about strategies for archiving photos that I wrote in June, the Death to Film website has a couple of good articles on the subject that might be interesting for anyone looking at creating a good photo archive – see here and a followup article here.

There’s been a number of incidences of photos being manipulated and the photographer found out… and now it would appear to be television’s turn.
The Daily Telegraph reports that aerial footage of opening ceremony fireworks purportedly shot from a helicopter, was “in fact computer graphics, meticulously created over a period of months and inserted into the coverage electronically at exactly the right moment.” PDNPulse also has an article on this affair.

When photographers need to search for their photos on the internet there’s a few ways available, such as Google Images and other search engines. What they all share in common is these methods search by the text information associated with the image – whether it be the photo caption itself or the content of the page the image is on.

Fellow photographer Jason Bye tipped me off to a new image search engine called TinEye, currently in private beta, that adopts a radically new method that does not consider the text information at all. Instead it analyses the actual photo itself – “TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.”

You can use the search engine in two ways – either by uploading an image stored locally on your computer, or by cutting/pasting a link to an image posted on the internet, and then asking it to search for all other instances of that image.

How could that work? Surely after small differences such as cropping, toning, and other image adjustments, it wouldn’t be recognised as the same image? I was quite skeptical about this point but it does work, and rather well. The search software is capable of identifying images even after they have been heavily cropped, toned, converted to black & white, even if they have text overlaid on the photo e.g. on a magazine cover.

The search engine is currently in private beta which means you have to sign-up to request a beta invite, however I received mine within a day or so. The image-recognition software behind the search engine is also used in the company’s commercial product PixID, which is currently being used by a number of large photo-agencies and other media organisations to track unlicensed use of images on the web. They even have a nice plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer to enable you to rapidly initiate a search of images.

Those concerned about the copyright of their own images uploaded when using Tineye should note that the terms of service explicitly state that “Copyright for all images submitted to TinEye remains with the original owner/author, and images submitted to TinEye for searching are not added to our index.”

The main limitation I would say is the limited number of images currently indexed – currently about 701,666,310 – sounds like a lot but still misses much. Presumably as the service continues that will improve.

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.