New Life
As some of you know, I’m going to be an uncle soon 🙂
My bro and sis-in-law were down for a small family gathering a week or so ago and while they were down they asked be to take a couple shots of the ‘bump’for prosperity.
So, up went a coulple of lights and down went the colorama …. 30 minutes later we were driving to a restaurant to feed the 5 1/2 of us 🙂
Only snapshots but I thought you may like to share in the celebration of a much loved little bump:
My role in all this is officially “Wreckless Uncle”
So in that vein I edited the following entitled “Gimme a Huuuug” 😀
Light Blue Software – review
This is a bit of an unusual post for me as I don’t tend to do reviews.
In every business there are tools and workflows designed to make your life easier which in turn makes you more efficient. This can result in a faster turnaround, less time on the mundane and more time either working on your business (rather than in it), or just more free time to spend with your family and friends.
In the world of photography there are the usual names banded around – Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture and so-on. Each one is a phenomenal tool in it’s own way and can easily be used to speed up your workflow so you can be out finding and making more work to edit 🙂
Lightroom and Aperture are amazing at batch editing images for proofing, exporting galleries and slideshows.
Photoshop has actions to speed up your fine-tune editing and droplets for batch processing.They’re great for managing the workflow once you’ve made the images, but what about pre-production?
You could use spreadsheets, an email calendar and a wallchart to do your bookings, but it’s time consuming to keep it all up to date, keep everyone’s details easily to hand, track conversations, move dates and so on.
And that’s only when you’re in front of your computer. What happens if you’re mid-shoot and someone calls to bump their session forward a few days and you forget by the time you get back to your desk? Doesn’t look good when they turn up and you’re unprepared or they call asking where you are.
And then there’s tracking queries, estimates, invoices, expenses and income.
It’s a spreadsheet nightmare and a job in itself.The only option you have, if you don’t have an assistant or manager to do all that for you, is to purchase some software to manage it all for you as efficiently as possible so that you spend the minimum time required to manage your schedule, bookings and accounts.
I’ve tried a few applications in the past such as QuickBooks and Blinkbid, before I was recommended LightBlueSoftware by my friend Helen Jones.
QuickBooks is an awesome and complete accounting system, but it doesn’t do anything other than that.
Blinkbid was a good studio quotation and licensing tool, but again it didn’t do much other than that.Then there’s LightBlueSoftware (now just called LightBlue)
It does it all – and then some. And it does it really really wellIt manages your contacts and calendar (+synced to your phone), all the details of the shoot from query to final bill, estimates, expenses, VAT, mass mailing, online galleries for image purchasing from your own website … It does pretty much everything except take the photos for you (I think it would given half the chance ;))
LBS also have a service (new in V3) where they will securely host your data file for you… online … 24/7
If you’re out on that shoot and the client calls to bump your session forward, you use their iPhone app to make the change there and then. Your computer accesses the same online data file so your schedules are automatically in sync.Job done 🙂
For social photographers, one of the great things about the app is that it’s a complete management system. As it holds all your contacts details in the software, you can filter and search for clients with upcoming birthdays or anniversaries and use LBS to mass mail exclusive promo offers.
If you are a busy studio with more than one photographer or/and a staff, then there’s is a multi-seat version so you can all be accessing, entering, updating the data at the same time and everyone’s work schedule can be assigned and managed separately within the software.
There’s no 2 ways about it – the software is immense.
Not in size, but it’s fast becoming to studio management what Photoshop is to Post Production. One of the best things is that you raise a support question or a feature request, and the guys that run the company email you back, usually within a day or so.Their focus is on listening to and giving their clients what the clients want.
I can’t imagine Shantanu Narayen (CEO of Adobe inc.) pinging you an email back on a feature request for Lightroom to say “Yea, we’ll look at that for the next release” or “That wont work because …” 😀Quite a few of my suggestions were put into new updates and as a result I was asked to be one of the Beta testers for V3. I got the chance to try to break it before the final V3.0 was released back in Jan/Feb.
And that’s about it really.
I recomment LBS to everyone and I’ve been meaning to scribe a review of LBS for a while, but never really got round to it. They pinged me an email this morning saying they were offering a short term 10% discount for existing users to pass on (now expired), so I figured it was karma.You can try it free for 30 days before you’re required to purchase a license, so you can have a good dig around to see if it’s as good as I said. It only took me about an hour to decide 🙂
HDR Vs Single Image Editing
HDR Single Exposure This is a follow-on to my previous post HDR Explained
To recap – HDR is a method of blending images to get as much detail as possible from multiple exposures.
In this post I’ll (hopefully) explain why it’s best to avoid it if possible and show you an example of why you don’t really need HDR.So ….. you’ve taken a picture of a landscape and created an HDR composite.
You like it.
Your family and friends like it.
You share it on Flickr and a bunch of sheep say that HDR is rubbish and false and rubbish (x2 so it must be true). Probably because they heard a friend or an ‘internet Pro’ dissing it.The fact is that people can’t say someone is wrong when it comes to a personal opinion or personal taste.
If you like it then you like it, if you don’t then you don’t – there is no right or wrong. But nobody should tell you not to do it just because they don’t like it.So, do I use HDR?
…. er… noI know I just did the big "in defence" thing, but the reality is that, unless you’re a landscape photographer (which I’m not) then in most cases HDR isn’t really practical. It’s a possibility when you have a static subject, but when you want a dynamic image and you’re photographing something like racing or sports or doing portraits then it’s really a no-go.
So to still make your images "pop" then you need to start digging into the areas of lighting and/or more advanced post-processing.
This means you actually have to do some work instead of pressing 2 buttons and letting your computer do the heavy lifting for you 😉At this point you probably want me to show an example so …..
Here’s an example image which I took waaaay back in March this year.
You will see that the image has almost bleached the sky and yet under the car is still soooper dark.
I take the Raw file from the camera and enter it into Lightroom. From here I’ll start making some non-destructive adjustments to the file to the point that it looks something like the file below.
As you’ll see, I’ve recovered a lot of the details back into the image and it now has a better balance. At this point I’d normally export it for a client to see as part of their online gallery/contact sheet so they can make their selections.
Normally this would be 95% there, but cars can usually take quite a hard edit, so from Lightroom I’ll export the image as a 16bit TIFF (for maximum detail) into Photoshop.
In PS I’ll start running through some actions that I’ve built with an aim to get to the image I have in my head. In the example below – this took me a little while to do which is why I’ll only do it on client selected images, not all of them.
This to my eye is the way it should look with perhaps some final polish to finish it off.
Part of my editing involves "painting" in the detail and dynamic elements to the image, whereas with HDR it’s like pouring a bucket over the picture and what you get is what you get.Generally speaking HDR looks quite flat because the contrast has been eliminated during the blend, but it also tends to look "soft" too. You’ll see the processed single image is 100% pin sharp and has depth and form created by the contrast.
So, by taking the time to build some PS experience I can create something I’m happy with.
So there you have it. HDR Vs Single image editing. No composites or pulling elements from other pictures. It’s enough to catch someone’s eye and if you look deeper you can see it’s edited, but not enough to make it too detailed and flat the way HDR does.
For more examples of single exposure editing – see my earlier post on Colonsay Panoramas. Some of those were stitched together from up to 19 images to create 1 huge panorama which was then edited once in photoshop. I shudder to think of doing those in HDR (PC meltdown).
Click the split images to see a direct before and after:
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For those that don’t know what HDR is …. its an acronym for High Dynamic Range and it’s a method of blending multiple images together to create a single image composed of the detailed elements of all the images.
Why do it?
The main reason is to do with limitations of a camera sensor/film Vs the human eye.
If you were to look into shaded woodland with the sun overhead then the human eye can almost cope with the extreme bright and extreme dark that’s visible …. almost.Ansel Adams created a zone system which segments the extreme Low and High tones.
The human eye (amazing thing that it is) can see a huge range of zones, most film can see about 4/5 of the range at a time and 35mm digital cameras about 3/4 (although they’re getting better every year). But the bigger the sensor chip, the bigger the range of tones captured.11 stop zone chart from Imroy at wikipedia 
0001020304050607080910Because the camera sensor is limited, when you take a picture of a subject which is an extreme zone you can "bracket" your exposure over multiple shots and pull all the data from each one to create the single image with the composite detail from the darks to the lights.
You can do the composite in-camera, but more often than not people use software which’ll do an HDR composite for you in a minute or two.
Most commonly Photoshop and Photomatix.Good right? Not quite 😉
- The good is that if you don’t have time or experience in editing then you can pull together an interesting image quickly and with little effort.
- It also can create surreal images which are more like paintings than pictures, although some photographers tend to look down their nose at those
But there are downsides.
- You have no control over the final result. Ok, you can adjust the intensity of the tonemapping, but it’s applied to the whole image
- If you have any noise…. any at all in the image, then the HDR process will multiply it and it can look pretty bad (esp. in extreme tone mapping)
- You have to take up to 9 exposures to get 1 final image which eats into storage space.
- If you move the camera, even a fraction, between shots then chances are it won’t work.
- It’s ok for 1 static subject, but a nightmare if you want to do a panorama, stop motion sequence etc…
- If anything moves in your shots (trees, water, politicians, skateboarders…. :)) then they’ll repeat as ghosts – ruining the final image
So …. do I use it?
Yes and No. I rarely do HDR as I’ve developed a workflow that means I don’t need it, but that’s not to say I won’t do it if I’m in a pinch …..The closest I get in reality when in extreme conditions is to take a 5 stop bracket (-2 to +2) and when I’m editing I’ll choose the best one of the 5 to edit rather than doing an HDR composite.
I’ll explain how to create a dynamic image with a single exposure in my next post. More to come…. 🙂
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