Posts Tagged Aperture

RAW Deal

Sat, Jan 9th, 2010  |   Equipment, Technique 4 Comments

While I was in PNG recently, I tested a lens set up that I hadn’t used before, a Tokina 10-17mm zoom lens coupled with a 1.5x teleconverter, attached to my Canon 5D Mark II.

The Tokina 10-17mm lens is made for cropped-sensor cameras, so I had used it previously with a Canon 40D body. It’s a beautiful lens, and I recommend it for anyone who’s using a cropped-sensor camera.

With a 1.5x teleconverter attached, the lens works from somewhere around the 11.5 to 17mm range on my 5D Mark II, which has a full-sized sensor. Short of the 11.5mm mark, there’s a bit of vignetting, which can be cropped out in post. I prefer to do as little file-processing work as possible, so I made sure to zoom in past the point of vignetting while testing this set up.

The combination worked perfectly (after trying a couple of different port configurations, I ended up with 40mm of extension + the Pro-One dome on my Zillion 5D Mark II housing), but there was a bit of an unexpected surprise.

The following image is how Canon’s DPP software converted the RAW file from the 10-17mm + 1.5x TC set up…with the photograph taken at about the 13mm mark:

test shot DPP

Just looking at the file, it seems as if there’s significant vignetting…in other words, it looks like this hardware combination doesn’t work.

In fact, the apparent vignetting also appeared on the LCD panel at the back of my 5D Mark II, so when I looked at the LCD preview while I was in the water, I thought something along the lines of: “$@%*(^#!$)!@%$(%^^&*!!!!!”.

But later, when I imported everything into Aperture, the same RAW file looked like this:

test shot Aperture

If you inspect the image corners, you’ll see that the Aperture version has real pixels…i.e., the software isn’t doing something tricky like interpolating data.

Actually, what seems to be happening is that DPP and the in-camera software controlling the 5D Mark II’s LCD monitor are unable to handle this unusual hardware combination. Somehow, the software deletes/ obscures data from the four corners of the file…creating the impression of vignetting.

Out of curiosity, I gave the file to a couple of other people on the trip, and we opened it in Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom as well. No problems.

I don’t understand why DPP creates a vignette, but this is an interesting, if somewhat quirky, illustration of the fact that differences exist among RAW converters. It’s also worth noting that there’s a noticeable difference in colour-rendition between the DPP and Aperture versions, which I wrote about previously.


A Bit About Work Flow

Fri, Jul 10th, 2009  |   Equipment, Technique 8 Comments

Oops. I meant to talk a bit about image-processing work flow in my last post, but forgot. I must’ve been too preoccupied constructing my sophisticated photo-shoot schematic.

Anyway, I hit a bit of an obstacle after getting back from my first day with the Canon 5D Mark II. After downloading my files and making two complete copies, I dragged a random RAW file over to my desktop, with the objective of opening it in Photoshop to see how I did.

Fail. Big time.

You see, every time Adobe releases a major upgrade of Photoshop and related software, the company has the charming habit of ensuring that the previously perfectly good version of their software doesn’t get updated to work with RAW formats from new cameras as they’re released.

Being armed only with Photoshop CS3, I couldn’t open the 5D Mark II RAW file…at least not with Adobe software.

There is a workaround. You can convert RAW format to Adobe’s DNG format, and then open with previous versions of Photoshop, but who the &*#$(@ wants to do that?

Otherwise, you need to invest in new software, which of course makes sense from Adobe’s point of view, but doesn’t really from mine, since I only use a handful of really basic functions in Photoshop, none of which have changed substantially in any iteration of the software I’ve had.

To solve the problem, I brought everything into Aperture (which I normally do anyway, but I was just in a hurry in this case to see how my first photos turned out). I sorted, tagged and picked a few favourites out of the day’s shots. Perfect.

Then, I experienced my next obstacle with Aperture’s RAW conversion. The RAW converter does an OK job, but the results from Aperture’s conversion process for underwater images, especially those involving lots of blue, aren’t as good as they could be. For topside photos and macro stuff, Aperture does just fine, but with blue water in the background…not so much to my liking.

Anyway, the work-around was to use Canon’s proprietary RAW conversion engine, built into its Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software, which comes packaged with Canon DSLRs.

The software is slow and clunky, but the RAW converter is by far the best for Canon files…which makes sense if you stop to think about it.

DPP gives you control over quite a few things, the most useful of which I’ve found to be Picture Style (Canon’s proprietary colour-management profiles), exposure and light temperature. There’s also a chromatic aberration correction function, which can help quite a bit if you’ve got a file with noticeable colour shift. I pretty much don’t touch all the other controls.

And of course, transferring from DPP to Photoshop CS3 was no problem, producing beautiful files and obviating my inability to convert 5D Mark II RAW files with CS3.

Yes, this process takes longer and is more cumbersome that a straight Aperture-based conversion, or opening with CS4 RAW Converter, but I believe it results in the highest-quality files, and the fact that I don’t need to buy CS4 is a big bonus too. I only converted the files I really liked, and left all the others alone (i.e., this more troublesome process makes me edit more harshly, which is a good thing).

Finally, I had my first real-life chance to make use of the MarineLife Keywords List I wrote about a while ago.

All I had to do to label my squid shots was look-up “bigfin reef squid” in the MarineLife Keywords index that I had already imported into Aperture, and, like magic, I had everything I needed in order to tag the squid images:

bigfin reef squid: Sepioteuthis lessoniana; bigfin squid: Sepioteuthis lessoniana; Cephalopods: Cephalopoda; Invertebrates; Loliginidae; Mollusks: Mollusca; Squid: Teuthida; Teuthoidea

…in practical terms, meaning I didn’t have to (mis)type all those long multi-syllabic tongue-twisters into each photo’s metadata. All I had to do was drag-and-drop the list onto all my squid files and I was done!

So to summarise, my work flow for the 5D Mark II:

- Import into Aperture; delete junk so no one else sees cruddy images;
- Tag with MarineLife Keywords; add location tags (Note: Save $5 off MarineLife Keywords with discount code I692W094 at checkout);
- Use Aperture’s Smart Albums to pick out favourite images;
- Open selected file with Canon DPP; adjust; send to Photoshop CS3;
- Make final minor adjustments; save as required format.

MarineLife Keywords List

Mon, Jun 15th, 2009  |   Equipment, Technique 9 Comments

Keywording is a necessary, but pain-in-the-rear, task. If you don’t know what keywording is, you need to.

By way of background…one of the biggest challenges that comes with digital photography is keeping track of and organising your files. With digital media and storage being so readily available and inexpensive, most people with digital cameras take lots and lots of photos…a lot more than they would have with film.

For argument’s sake, let’s say you take three big dive trips a year, during which you take 3,000 photos. Add to that several thousand photographs of friends, family and such, and by the end of a typical 12-month period, you literally have thousands of images.

At some point after several years, say you want to find one specific photo…a particularly stunning image of a lionfish that you want to enter into a photo contest.

How do you find it?

Even assuming that you’ve kept all your images in some reasonably organised format (a big assumption!), you’d still need to look through thousands of photos…a time-consuming, painstaking process…and you and/ or your computer might give up before you find the correct image.

Fortunately, there is a solution for this common dilemma…keywording.

So how does this apply to you?

First of all, if you’re not already doing so, you should use either Lightroom or Aperture.

Both of these software packages give you the ability to preview your images quickly (really important given ever-increasing file sizes), edit/ modify them to some degree, and more importantly…keep them organised.

Think of them like the card catalogue at the library. If you’re looking for a specific book or books about a particular topic, you look for “key words” in the card catalogue.

Books about underwater photography, for instance, might be listed under “marine”, “photography”, “underwater photography”, “colossal waste of time and money”, and so forth.

The card catalogue acts as an index of such key words, allowing you to sort through thousands, sometimes millions, of titles to narrow down your choices to those most relevant to your objective.

Or…a more contemporary idiom might be using a search engine. If you look for underwater photography books using Google, the same concept applies. You’d enter key words like the ones above, and Google would hopefully return useful results…from the billions of web pages Google has indexed.

Bottom line…key words help you make sense of an overabundance of information.

Similarly, in Lightroom and Aperture, if you apply key words to your images, then later, it’ll be a lot easier to find specific photos.

The actual process of keywording in these software packages isn’t difficult. Just click on the metadata section and type in your key words. Later, you can use the search fields to find your photo.

For instance, with the example above, if I’ve keyworded properly, all I’d need to do is type “lionfish” into my search field in Aperture, and all the images I’ve labeled with the key word “lionfish” will pop up…meaning I don’t need to sort through pictures of cardinalfish, anemonefish, my dive buddy’s rear end, etc.

Keywording isn’t hard by any means, but it can be a royal pain, especially if you dive in Asian waters teeming with marine life. After a single dive, you might need to apply key words for 10, 20, 30 or more species…looking each one up in guide books, and trying to spell each name correctly. Repeat for three dives a day…and you’ve got no time to enjoy your trip!

There’s help available now, at least for marine photographers, in the form of a pre-packaged list of key words for marine life that covers the genus and species of over 4,000 fish, 4,000 invertebrates, and all known marine turtles, rays, skates, sharks, marine reptiles and marine mammals…basically, just about everything you’re likely to encounter.

aperture

What this means is that once you’ve identified your subject (No…unfortunately the keyword list cannot ID marine life for you!), you can literally drag-and-drop all the relevant keywords onto your file(s), saving you the time and hassle of typing, and also ensuring consistency.

I use Aperture, and I have my own keywording system that I’ve developed (“cobbled together” is probably more accurate), so when I was testing a review copy of the keywords, my primary concern was ensuring that the MarineLife Keywords list didn’t wipe out my own system.

It didn’t.

After importing the MarineLife Keywords into Aperture, I had all of my original key words available to me, as well as the new ones…which means my old filing system is intact, and I can gradually start to integrate the new one.

There’s one other feature I really like about the MarineLife Keyword list. One of things that really irritates me is when people capitalise common names of marine life…typing something like: “I saw lots of Lionfish and Giant Frogfish after photographing Spotted Eagle Rays.”

Common names should not be capitalised. Period.

The MarineLife Keywords list does not capitalise common names (unless there is a proper name involved) and the genus and species names are properly formatted, with the genus name capitalised and the species name not. Simple formatting issue, but it shows attention to detail and knowledge of proper convention.

If you’re wondering what the key words actually look like, let me give you one example. Say I wanted to apply key words to this photo of a flamboyant cuttlefish I took in Ambon.

flamboyant cuttlefish

All I do is type “flamboyant” into the search field in Aperture’s key word heads-up display, and the MarineLife Keywords database gives me:

Marine Life, Invertebrates, Mollusks: Mollusca, Cephalopods: Cephalopoda, Cuttlefish: Sepiida, Sepiidae, flamboyant cuttlefish: Metasepia pfefferi

…in other words, everything I’d need to find this photo (and others like it) again later.

Of course, the MarineLife Keywords database isn’t meant to anticipate every key word you’ll ever need…just the taxonomic ones.

For this photo, for instance, I’d add my own additional key words of: Air Manis, Ambon, Indonesia…to keep track of where I took the photo.

So to wrap up, if you take a lot of photos and need a good filing system…use Aperture or Lightroom, and get the MarineLife Keywords list to make keywording quicker and easier.

You can see more details on the MarineLife Keywords website. The MarineLife Keywords database costs $99, but you can get a $5 discount by using the discount code I692W094 upon checkout.

If you’re not already familiar with keywording, be sure to watch the demo video on the site that Eric Cheng put together.