Comparing RAW rendering of a camellia

 I decided while a had a couple of other big name photo editors under extended trial I should attempt a few comparisons. Then I came up against the very limited formatting capabilities on the new blogger. ...gramble, moan yet again!

So it looks like I can only present the images one on a line, at a time. Oh well so be it.

So what I am attempting to show here is how each package take the RAW image (in this case an .ORF from my little Olympus and renders the RAW image ready to edit. At the superficial level they are all very similar.

Yet they are all just subtle difference. Perhaps not different enough that once edited they are edited anyone could end up with the same result.

In a line up I would probably pick the Jpeg straight from the camera. Still my little Olympus is like that and it doesn't surprise me. So how do I justify having expensive software and spending lots of time to try and do better. Or even spending more money on more software. You'll need to watch this space as I work through that question.

AI enhanced .vs. classic HDR

I’ve already commented that I am finding the jpeg straight out of my new Olympus camera fine for those quick uploads (eg instagram or email) where time is important. I also have Auroa HDR 2018 & now Photolemur 3.1 on my handy little HP spectre and both of these came give really great images from processing RAW files (.orf files) straight up with little intervention. So here I will to compare the three approaches.

Original Photo ISO 200 f11 1/320sec 42mm	3 Bracket Photo HDR	PhotoLemur AI Adjusted

There are differences, however they are subtle. I do see the two images derived from the RAW files to show better detail and crisper colour rendering. It probably then gets down to personal preferences which you like best. The classic HDR required three bracketed images (here at 1 EV steps) and then some time to merge, align the photos, tone map the HDR version, and a couple of personal manual tweaks (in this case polarization to get a bluer sky and lifting the exposure a little at the bottom of the image) perhaps 2 minutes of editing, compared with the 10-15 seconds that PhotoLemur takes to do its magic (automatically). Both are fast enough to appear pretty instant but I probably still prefer to spend the extra time on the classic HDR approach (which includes taking the three bracketed photos)

Out of camera .jpeg versus RAW …continues

Continuing a comparison of the jpeg photos straight out of my camera with RAW images, from my new Olympus E M10 iii. I’ve chosen a photo of a passing pelican that came up to say hi! (ok he was probably looking for food) but he seemed happy enough and continued down the canal oblivious to my camera. I must admit I like getting candid bird photos this way.

The two images below are default rendering by ON1 Photo 10 and just default tone mapping from Aurora HDR of the single .orf file. Once again I was using the 2x digital tele-converter, so the jpeg is enlarged whereas the .orf RAW file isn’t. I must admit I prefer the Aurora rendering, interestingly it is also much closer to the out of camera jpeg.

 

However I then did my own cropping, tonal & colour tweaks in ON1 photo develop.

Confirming that the jpegs out my little Olympus EM 10 iii are really decent but if you have the time and motivation you will be able to bring out a little more from the RAW file. RAW+jpeg is still my preferred setting

Comparing .jpeg & RAW ..with a surprise

I’ve deliberately left this just a simple comparison, so you can decide yourself.

Which photo do you like best?

Move you mouse over each image to find out more about it

Archive Obsession Two :: What makes a good Photo Archive

I know I bang on a lot about the difference between an Archive and a Backup. The key difference is a backup can consist of anything, even a great messy mass of files, whereas an archive is a clean long term place to store and easily retrieve information.

rchives, to be useful must include straightforward ways to find and view photos relatively quickly and easily. It needs a logical structure and whilst an archive should seldom be required, it should not be difficult to use or complex to learn. In other worlds KISS (Keep It Simple). It is desirable that it does not contain duplicates and damaged or corrupted photos. The essence is the collection, whilst it can contain a wide variety of photos and style needs to be clean and consistent. Archive should be managed and will grow with time. Backups should be kept of Archives

ackups, their purpose is to quickly restore the mass of data effected in the event that the media on which it is stored is damaged or lost. The emphasis is usually on a full restore, but a few systems do allow for a selective restore. Backup software seldom concerns the structure and viability of the data/files included. A corrupted file will be backedup the same as a good file. They are also focussed on the short term recovery of data. Old backups can become a liability if their contents is not known &/or well organized. Worse still they might be on a media format no longer supported.

Most photo oriented online discussions at present revolve around keeping backups of photo collections not archives. Certainly backing up your working data is important and the 3-2-1 approach is a good starting point. However if your collection of photos is getting large and you want them to be preserved in such a way that you can easily find a specific photo now is the time to start think about building an archive

Features I consider important in an Archive

1. Photos need to be indexed and catalogued (via metadata)
2. Photos should be easily viewed
3. Collection should be free of duplicates
4. Collection should contain only decent images (out of focus, corrupted or low quality images removed)
5. Photos should be in a limited number of standard (non propriety) formats

This is a pretty straightforward set of objectives but alas I have struggled to find a single commercial system that has these features. Lightroom sounded like it might be suitable but I found it both wanting and frustrating to use when several computers and people are involved.

• I have given myself the added burden of quarantining the Archive away from the internet and even my own local area network and housing it within a Linux workspace.

At the moment I use a Hybrid collection of software tools, I now used mainly PhotoMehanic to ingest (upload) from camera cards (I used to mainly use Picasa) and straightway cull the poor quality images and add appropriate metadata. I usually have a short break (could be up to a day or so) and then come back to PhotoMechanic and rate and colour code the images. I use a simple 1, 2 or 3 star rating, photos with 2 or 3 stars are the ones I would like to further process. They will normally be the ones I take into Lightroom (Aurora HDR or On1 RAW these days). Each step in Photo Mechanic is set up to record in both the Jpeg EXIF data and the .xmp side car files for RAW formats. The one star and above photos are the ones that get archived, any unrated photos will be left behind. At present I store the native RAW formats (.cr2,.pef,.orf & .dng) exactly as uploaded from the camera but I’m not convinced this a great long term option. Whilst there is some form of propriety CRC checks in the .xmp files I also create a file in each folder being archived with the .MD5 hashtag for each file. These CRC style checksum are useful to find duplicates and also to check with the files has been in any way altered (ie corrupted)

At the Linux end I read the same files and folders on external hard drives but now I have Linux version of XnViewMP and Aftershot Pro (both of which can view RAW files and read the metadata and ranking in EXIF data and/or the sidecar files. Both these programs can build catalogues or just browse folders. I have not yet tried to catalogue the whole collection but I’m slowly working towards that objective.

Day One ... cont. jpeg .vs. .orf RAW

This was not a surprise. My lightroom (still ver 4.4) could not read the Olympus RAW format .orf. The same thing happens to most owners of new cameras, they have to wait for an update from adobe and they complain a lot on the internet. Please don’t think I’m just complaining, I understand the issue but I not interested in the adobe subscription so this probably marks the beginning of the end for lightroom in my photographic tool set.

On the left is the jpeg image straight out of the camera, shot in Auto. On the right is the same image but the .orf version read by Aurora HDR 2018, which can read the Olympus .orf RAW format. To keep with the spirit of using Auto I have only used it’s basic Tone Mapping (just stretching the tonal range) as a fairly basic thing you might do with any RAW file. I like both but the one of the right feels more like being there, so I made it my PhotoFriday post this week.

JPEG vs RAW an update

ooking through my most popular post on this blog I was surprise to see how much an very old post on JPEG vs RAW was still rating. This was a personal opinion of the difference I had experienced on my Pentax K20D and Canon 1100D and why had choose to shot both jpeg+RAW and still do.

Some of the reasons have changed a little …

 BUT If you don’t have a way to post process a RAW file, you are likely to find it flat and boring (software companies and specifically adobe) tended to render a Raw file to the same overall recipe which in theory suits all situations, but in practice leaves images looking flat and grey/bland. No worries if you have the knowledge and software (eg lightroom) to take the image further you could create a miracle. However a lot of people get stuck there, and they see other competitive software doing a much better rendering up front (eg Luminar, OnOne, Capture and even Corel Aftershot Pro)

On the other hand modern camera come with a lot of settings ( like higher contrast, vivid colour and/or filters) that can enhanced your photo for various picture types and lighting scenarios and the Jpeg image it prepares (ie what you see on the back of the camera will be in part post processed and could look great). This same jpeg thumbnail is written into the RAW file.  You may notice as you first load a raw files it looks good but then pales to beige as the software tries to re-render the photo to a suit all situations.

I believe this is the issue that is really behind adobe’s moving the camera profiles (and picture type filters) from deep down in camera calibrations up to prime position in the develop panel. Its all just about a better starting rendering of a Raw file.

Moral of the story: If you don’t have the fancy post processing software or don’t have the time to finesse each photo perhaps you are better just sticking with jpeg your have nicer looking photos. If you want the best of both worlds shot jpeg+RAW like me.

Extending Dynamic Range

Contrary to want a lot of people believe Digital Cameras, even the best ones, are not capable of capture the full extent of light from the darkest blacks to the purest white. They struggle to get close to the capabilities of traditional film and they are certainly no where near as capable as the human eye. This range of illumination is usually referred to as Dynamic Range. This limited range coupled with an automatic light meter that is trying to get an average exposure (ie matching a mid tone grey overall) is the reason a lot of images turn out boring, washed out and flat looking even though you remember much stronger light (and often colour).

Here are a couple of techniques that can help you get a wider apparent Dynamic Range in your final photo.The first is the use a camera app on your phone that will take an “AutoHDR” (this usually means it will take 3 exposure and combine then using software with the app, a few will do pseudo HDR a bit like the next approach.) This is the simplest approach and results can be surprisingly good.

A second approach is to take a RAW image (this is in .PEF format) and use software (I’m using lightroom Develop basic panel only.) I’m following what I once called SDR+ (standard dynamic range plus) and I even wrote a couple of presets to do it. The basic idea is I bring up detail in the shadows (usually moving the shadow slider to the right, sometimes I also change the blacks using the approach often called “finding the black point”, while on the black slide hold down the <alt> and the scree turn black, the adjust the slider till a few whit areas (these are the areas that will be rendered pure black) show up. You can do a similar operation with the white slider. The objective is to get the illumination histogram to be as evenly spread across the range as possible. This doesn’t take all that long  and I prefer to do it manually to even my own preset, but it requires specialist software, some skills in the oftware and a camera that can take RAW files. Many RAW purist will explain this is why you should always take RAW images.

The third approach is classic HDR (High Dynamic Range) and here I am using three bracketed +/-1 EV exposures. Then the Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 software and the balanced preset to create a new 16-bit colour .Tiff file. There are many variation of the HDR technique and software, but it normally involves two steps. First collecting and preserving the full range of illumination values from the three or more exposures. Then a second step of “tone mapping” these into the available dynamic range of your image (and this is also related to how you might reproduce the image, eg print or screen). The downside is these steps and any image prep take extra time and a lot of folk get carried away with the slider options in the “tone mapping” step, thereby producing the sickly vivid and disturbingly surreal images that have given HDR  a bad name. I personally think this method has give me a final photo much closer to the late afternoon light I was photographing in. I have to admit I do take a lot of HDR images, particularly in contrasty light or where I know I need to preserve the Highest Dynamic Range possible.

So if you are disappointed with flat washed out images you might like to investigate at least one of these approaches.

A lesson I keep relearning

It definitely pays to check your DSLR camera setting BEFORE you go out with your camera to take some photos. I had been taken some night photo and had set the ISO to 3200. Then next day (in a hurry to get packed I grabbed the same camera. Also I don’t often chimp my photos, so it this case I had taken about a dozen photos before I realised. They all looked like this.

Because I was taking RAW+ Jpeg the RAW images do Have a bit pf coolured in the default RAW rendering. Yet such failures are a good time to experiment. Just how much off the badly over exposed image could I expect to recover with some careful postposing of the Canon CR2 RAW file?

I did try a few classic tricks with lightroom Like moving the highlight & whites sliders pretty much all thw way to the left but the image was starting to look a bit fake and badly posterized. So I decided to try prefect exposure plug in first. It did a much more natural job and the Dehaze preset seemed to recover from the highlights best. I could return to lightroom and use the whites, highlights and shadows sliders to a less extreme effect. Finally I darkened the blue of the sky by lowering the luminance of just the blue channel. Not perfect but a useable photo now (this is the bottom right photo on the over exposed strip above)

PhotoProject :: A chance to compare

This is an alright photo for an overcast drizzly day. Actually I was waiting in hope of catching a rainbow, but the sun never shone for me so I didn’t get a rainbow, just the last of the oak leaves falling. Being adventurous and warm back inside I figured this was perfect for a comparison of how I might post process the RAW version of this image in my software on my HP spectre 2 in 1 laptop.

Picasa (no adjustments)	After Shot Pro 3 (Perfectly Clear)
Lightroom (Tonal & Colour Adj)	OnOne 10 (Enhance & Effects)

I have included the unaltered render of the .pef RAW file, just to show that an unedited RAW file usually looks flat and often a bit dark. My goto tool for the first pass look at photos at the moment is After Shot Pro and the perfectly Clear filter (in this case it has the colour a bit loud and the sky blown out, not that wasn’t pretty much blown out in the unedited version). At this stage I think the image has potential and flag it was a keeper and even give it a couple of stars.

I then fired up Lightroom and set to doing a fairly standard tonal tweak, recovering some shadows by mainly looking to pull highlight down and deepen the blue of the sky (moving the blue channel viberance to the left) I also cropped the image to avoid the leading lines of the edge of the road drawing the veiwer to the bottom left corner. I felt this was better than the Perfectly Clear. Next I used OnOne, I’m having trouble with the browser not display my RAW filesin version 10.5 so I took the unprocessed lightroom rendering into OnOne 10 Enhance and tweaked the total range similarly to lightroom and I also used the magic eraser to remove a couple of post a swing and BBQ and performed a similar crop. Next I went into OnOne 10 effects and started with a soft dynamic contrast, added a little sunshine and finished with the big softy vignette. Happy with this and it becomes my photo of the day, albeit a dull day.

My thoughts on collecting Photo Reference for Painting

Whilst there is a school of artists that still insist the only landscapes are those painted plein-air. The vast majority will finish their big painting in the comfort of their studio, a few from just sketches but the majority will use photo reference. I love to sketch and paint outdoors but time and the light seldom let you finish a big work outside. However I know that when you try to slavishly copy all the detail in a photo it can make a painting look very flat. Whereas a sketch hurriedly dashed off is more likely to be dynamic and truly capture the sense of the place. So my take on this is to spend time to do a sketch or small composition painting to capture your impressions of the view, and record the important aspect you see. Do this on site. I like to use a watercolour wash, then add the the detail with a soft pencil afterwards (I’m not filling in a detailed sketch with colour, I’m putting down the area of colour and main composition elements then adding a bit of detail.) Or alternatively I just sketch monochrome in pencil of graphite stick.

So My First Rule of taking reference photos is

Start with a sketch

• Put your camera down
• Do some compositional sketch to capture you what you first see and feel. Just the main elements

Whilst I wait for the watercolour wash to dry enough to sketch without damaging the paper. I find this is a good time to pick up the camera and take those reference picture because you now know what is important in the image. The first photo being the obvious, the same view you are painting. This is where a camera with a zoom lens comes in handy because it is likely that your composition will not match a snapshot from your camera. You will probably have to zoom in or out. In my example I have taken two images side by side and then stitched them together, using Austostitch, because my sketch is a little wider than by camera can handle (alternatively I could walk back behind me before I took the scene, assuming their is room and the full scene if not obscured)

However don’t stop there, take at least an additional 4 views, zoomed in (or walking close) to key aspects of detail that will help you finish or zoom out to get the broad feel of the place (you might like to add some slightly out of view detail or subject into your composition). If there are large areas of colour or texture photograph them, they could be the key to visual appeal in your photo.

 

So My Second Rule of taking reference photos is

Take Five

• The composition you intention to paint.
• Plus 4 details zoomed in or out, or concentrating of a key texture or colour

The biggest limitation of trying to copy a photo religiously happens with tonal issues. Whilst modern digital cameras are great they still have limitations with Dynamic Range and photos typically look flat compared with what you saw as you where sketching. There are two approached here that can help here by they may require a upgraded camera.

The first approach if to take a bracket set of images (many but not all point and shoot cameras can take a set of three EV settings, older camera usually don’t have this built in but there are several camera apps that add this capability. The bracketed set gives you an underexposed version (to focus on the highlight) a normal exposure and an over exposed version (which will give you a lot more details in the shadows). These three images should give you the ability to play with the tonality to suit your composition. If you want to take the tonal representation further you could investigate processing this bracketed set as a HDR image and refine the tonal mapping to bring out the tones as you remember. HDR is an advance post processing technique that requires specialist software but it will give you a lot of freedom adjusting the tonal range.

The second approach is to take RAW format images (probably as well as jpeg). This require software that can handle RAW images (like Lightroom, Aftershop Pro, OnOne or RAW therapy). The advantage here is the raw format records everything recorded by the camera sensor and it is possible to “pull” extra detail out of the shadows and often bring back the highlights. This requires learning how to use this software and extra time to refine the RAW images. However the ability to refine tonality and colour can be wonderfully inspiring. I started to like having the overhanging tree as part of the composition.

So My Third Rule of photo reference, if you have the technology to do it, is

Why not Take Ten?

• Use Bracketing
• Take and Process RAW images

A bit of slide film nostalgia

It was a great sunset tonight, but as good as Raw is, it does leave a lot of photos “flat”, when the light seemed richer when you where there. I often yearn for the rich colours of slide film, But I don’t miss the disappointment of not getting the right exposure to get those rich tones and delicious colours (slide film being even more prone to blow out the highlights than any autoexposured jpeg which has been pointed at the light. It was character building but could become expensive in slide film.

So here are a series of photos processed in OnOne 10’s Film presets, and given a 35mm border for added nostalgia

 

MDR rather than true HDR

I’m using the abbreviation MDR to mean Maximum Dynamic Range, to differentiate these approaches from “true” HDR.

Something I haven’t tried out in a while is Amalence’s HDRAW standalone utility. This utilizes Tone Mapping technique, allowing it to preserve the details while fitting the highest dynamic range image, taken from a single RAW photo, into the limited dynamic range of a single JPEG or any other 8-bit format.

It displays the options in popular filter examples that you just need to click on the most pleasing option (ie not shinny painting please)

Another way  I have seen described to get a HDR set from a single image is to take a well exposed image and create an overexposed version and save that and then an underexposed version. Normally by moving the exposure slider by the equivalent of one f-stop. This might let you use tone mapping tools but it does not get you extra tonal range, you can find in bracketed exposures. If you want to follow this approach the new AfterShot HDR has this as its second option to create a HDR file (I don't recommend this approach)

The final approach, which I feel is the most obvious, is to use software like lightroom to stretch the tonal rendering to its maximum (well maximum acceptable amount). In this example I am using lightroom’s development module I just use the basic tonal controls controls at the top of the development tool panel. I fist try the whote balance, although in this case I feeel the as shot does reflect the warmth of the first dawn light colours well. Next I have a adjusted the exposure up a little (moving the whole histogram a littel to the right because it is so heavily biased to the left, the dark side). Next I adjust the shadows and blacks to keep the forground dark (and hide the shadow detail, for pictorial reasons). Finally I lift the highlights and the whites (there aren’t many as shown by the histogram). I lift the clarity (local contrast) and vibrance (the intensity of the deeper co0lours just a little.  I do have a preset I developed ages ago called SDR+ which follows these steps but I actually prefer to do the steps manually because I can finesse the sliders in each step.

A number of software programs offers histogram stretching tools and they can produce HDR like results but they are less easily controlled than the tonal tools in packages like lightoom and AfterShot.