Spring ?

 

Transferring a Picasa based photo library spread across a couple of computers

There will come a time with any digital collection of photos that they need to be transferred to a new computer, perhaps a different operating system. If everything is well organised in one directory and subfolders, the whole set can be copied to an external USB harddrive and carried to the new computer and the copied onto it. Pretty simple! However if you check  you might be surprised, what has happened to your previous edits, the tagging, star rating and album organization (collections for lightroom only users), they are much more difficult to ensure make that leap across computers. Now add the fact that not all photo collections are perfectly organized and often the photos are spread across several drives of across the local area network. Transferring photos might just become a nightmare!

I rediscovered that picasa is still a wonderful tool to manage your photos (well jpeg libraries to be specific). While google abandoned picasa a few years ago, but you can still download it free from several popular download sites (just make sure the site is trustworth and doesn't come with unwanted blotware and especially viruses, worms or ransomware). In later version (approx. 2015 onwards) the picasa web component was changed to use google photos (and I strongly recommend not using the autobackup to the web feature).  Google wants everyone to use their google photos system on the web, not do anything on your own computer which does not suit me and I assume will not really suit most people.

“For those who have already downloaded it, it will continue to work as it does today. But we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates.”   ….google post on picasa user web forum

If you already have Picasa,  you will know it has some good photo editing tools (its a pity snapseed never made it into the collection), is very fast to load photos, incredibly easy to understand and probably still has one of the best facial recognition features. It is not so great at enhancing RAW format photos (it can display and manage them). Further the “copy the photo directory” approach works well for picasa because it has a usually hidden file “picasa.ini” in each directory which stores the processes such as cropping etc. and basic organization, as well a simple start rating on each photo you have editing. When the the entire directory is copied onto the new computer and picasa reloaded it can read this file and render the photo as it was on the old computer. I discovered some time ago that this did not copy the facial recognition organization, but there was a complex workaround involving copying the hidden picasa database. I was pleasantly surprised to find the Tools/Back up picture feature in Picasa 3.9 (the last downloadable version) will also copy this extra information. I was using this backup approach for a different reason, I knew it would search out the photos from where ever they are stored and put them into one big set (generally on an external USB drive for easy transfer).

The approach is very simple and easy to follow but I figured I should prepare a simple step by step through the process anyway and post here, because I suspect A lot of people will want to do this as they ungrade computers over the next few years. You will need picasa 3.9 to get all the facial recognition transfered (otherwise see that workaround above).  Get an external USB hard disk and plug it in (make a note of the drive letter it is given). Or alternatively you can find somewhere on your local area network with lots of space (a NAS drive would be perfect albeit slow) Now Run Picasa on your old computer and using the tools menu find the back up picture option.

This will bring up the backup dialogue panels on the bottom of the screen. The default is normally set to somewhere on your hard drive, so you will need to  select the New Set option. Then enter the address of the USB drive (or network location). I’ve put a 1 2 3 marks on things you need to address on the first panel to get your back set defined. Firstly give it a name, Secondly select on the Disk-to-disk backup type and using the choose button locate your destination. I had already created a sub-directory on my USB drive F: called transfer. Finally you need to define which files to backup. Picasa was never used to manage movie on this computer so I excluded them (to save space). If your picasa library is full of screen captures and or downloaded web graphics and you only want your original camera files you can try the last option. Otherwise it may be safest to select All file types to backup. On the second panel you can set up selective folders to backup but when transfering computers just click on the select all button. The final step to start the backup is to press the Burn button on the far right hand side (this term comes from the days when you “burnt” CDs, which you still can do by the way) This process can take a while and there are no progress bars but a pop up screen does tell when it is complete.

Final take the USB drive (after using the safely remove and eject option in your operating system) over to your new computer. If you look in the directory created (transfer in my example) you will see there is a collection of files and sub-directories and one of the files should be PicasaRestore.exe. Click on this to run it.  You can change the location of the restored files but most often the select to restore to original locations is fine for a an inter-computer transfer. Again this can take some time but you can see progress details of the files copied and setup steps and also another pop up when the transfer is complete.

When you start Picasa on the new computer it may take a some time in background to scan through the library and connect up all the faces and some organizational aspects. However you should find that your complete picasa library is fully and safely transferred and available on your new computer.

Looking at XnView MP as a Picasa Alternative

I have had XnView on my USB Darkroom Key (its always in my camera bag and has portable Apps so that if and when I only have access to a cyber cafe or library computer I can still work on my photos). It is a really simple to use but feature rich photo viewer/manager, I have also had XnViewer MP (a multi platform enhanced version) running on a repurposed Linux machine and my desktop computer and they do get frequently used, However picasa is still my go to application for loading organizing and culling new photos. The newest version of XnViewer MP (0.81) may change my mind.
There are three reasons

1. Its RAW rendering is fast and decent. I would not suggest that it is a fantastic replacement for other RAW editor but it is is an ok conversion. The downside is it converts the RAW image into an 8 bit jpeg, and thus you will loose a some of the potential dynamic range,
2. It now includes (from version 0.80) the ability to read and write metadata in .xmp sidecar files. Which means you can transfer rating and metadata into other photo mangers (that can read the adobe sidecar format). You have to go into settings under the browser/metadata tab and click on the options highlighted on the right. Again there is a small caveat in that XnView does not include a pick and reject flag (so useful in lighroom and other software) when first reviewing and culling newly loaded photos. Also the XMP compatibility does not extend to post processing options (just the metadata and ratings).I can not write to xmp in picasa so this is a big plus.
3. It has a simple tools/import and sort feature that can load photo from a variety of sources (the can be camera, card readers, external drive, they just need to be connected to the computer and have a drive letter and/or folder directory. Whilst XnView MP does build a catalogue entry and thumbnail at this time it is way faster than lightroom for example. You can also add metadata and do some filtering by time (assuming the photo has EXIF data). It can also write data to a subdirectory yyyy_mm_dd according to the day it was photographed and this is how I like to organize my files

There are heaps of other well loved features that have come from the original XnView program.  The real power of XnView is the organizing your images, doing a few basic edit and sharing your photos via email or getting them to go to a social media site (nothing ”one click” automatically upload to those sites but there are the right tools to make the files the appropriate size and format). There is also the great range of batch editing tools which can simplify task like changing timestamps to synchronize camera times and external GPS tracks, for geocoding (an all to tedious a task in lightroom).

There is also the ability to read and write an extensive array (the web site claims 500 format) of graphic file formats. Ok there are only a few formats I regularly need but it is handy to be able to at least look at the strange files that turn up from time to time in graphic art. Thus this would make a great for managing the reference photos for a graphic artist who normally works in illustrator or Corel Draw/Painter.

I’m still only luke warm on it being able to replace picasa in my toolkit, but I have made a commitment to put this version on all my computers along side picasa and give it a fair work out.

One disappointment already is on the HP Spectre  (2 in 1 windows 10 laptop) where it its decidedly awkward to use in tablet mode and where it can be very touch screen frustrating.

More pieces falling off Picasa at the google photo end

I have (been trying) to use a google photo album for my travel shots on the go. I am mainly using a conventional DSLR camera and loading them onto a computer first using the now deprecated picasa, but I am struggling because google photos wants to vacuum up everything (via autobackup, and I strongly advise you not to install that) then do most of the editing and organizing for you via Auto awesome and stories, (but they are not very satisfactory and you have to edit a photo at a time, very tedious, and doing your own organization can be equally as tedious).

 

What I was able to do until last week was keep using Picasa to load and organize my photos, then uploading to my google photos albums. I often edited the photos in other tools (Picasa is still great in these  import and organization tasks and works well with other software that my edit the photos). Picasa’s RAW file rendering is not as good as lightroom, AfterShot Pro or OnOne but there is no penalty for using those other editors. It is a decent little workflow. However things are falling apart at the google photo end.

1. If you click on the google photo logo of use the view on-line button for some inexplicable reason you are connected to the old version of internet explorer (where as I use google chrome) and internet explorer tries to configure itself and set itself up as the default browser. Ok keep well clear of those buttons!
2. The bigger worry is what might happen when you press the big green button upload to google photos. It started playing funny about two weeks ago, Uploading a whole days photos. Then it started forgetting some photos in a multiple upload selection. Then often not uploading anything. Now  it also log me out of my google account after any upload. Logging back in for each upload is very tedious especially when the log in dialogue is frequently blank and it often forgets files when there are multiples of your selection tray. All super frustrating when you are relying of available WiFi and generally low bandwidth.

 

I haven’t downloaded a new version of Picasa so these must be issues at the on-line google photo end, I find it hard to believe they are trying to annoy the Picasa faithful, but they are. A big #FAIL google.

PS: Whilst I don’t understand Instagram, it is clearly an easier way to share photo from your cameraphone, when you are on the go.

Bad Google Photos (again)

Oh google what are you doing? I had pretty much stopped using google photos (the on-line end) and deleted it of my phone (it kept updating and gobbling up lots of precious memory) but I am more fond of picasa and use it daily as my preferred method to off load photos from the memory cards.

The biggest advantage for me is I’m used to it, but it also organises into daily directories, named YYYY-MM-DD so that each day has a separate sub-directory and they automatically sort into dates in descending order. I then quickly cull the duds, the out of focus, unnecessary duplicates anything not worth keeping. I immediately delete both the jpeg & raw files

 

What I was trying to do yesterday was use googles Auto-Awesome feature to produce a small animation of a cruise ship passing late last nigh. This involved uploading 25 jpeg images, so I selecting those images and hit the big green button and let the computer sort out the bandwidth and time taken etc, the animation was created over night. (ie I didn’t watch the uploads). The animation was created as expected.

However What The?

Over night most of my photos from yesterday had also been uploaded and weird auto awesomes created everywhere (it seems to always make my HDR sets animations and almost never makes proper panorama to mention a couple of common misdemeanours). All the photos have been uploaded to the daily directories that auto backup used to use (not the albums I had been using). Except for bandwidth losses, these extra photo on google photos don’t bother me as they are private and are the size that is free to store. I just can’t figure out why they are uploaded, I have avoided loading google’s autobackup on this computer. Further I can not see anothing in picasa that might trigger such an upload.

 

The more devastating occurrence was that at the same time (or more particularly overnight) the album I am building from photos of my current trip had been filled with duplicates of some of the images and many others are now missing from the album. It is possible that I have somehow been involved in this because  I did up load some new photos into that library last night. I do have the original images on my computer and also safely backedup up on separate hard drive. The causality here is my faith in google photos, well there isn’t any left now

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.

Picasa has gone, but am I using Google photos?

Whilst the free download for Picasa has been removed (as promised) it still works fine. In fact on my recent trip was the one reliable piece of software an a laptop struggling under a windows 10 upgrade. The alternative, google photos boldly promoted by google on the picasa download page, just proved inaccessible while I was away. Mainly because I was having difficulty accessing the local form of WiFi hotspots. Basically I see googles photos as an on-line and mobile only service and thus of little interest to me. Whilst I once recommended sharing via google picasa web albums, as a way to control the sharing (rather than it being always public, as in most other social net services). This is no longer the case and to share on google photos is effectively public. You can still store your photos privately and that is the default. However if you are concerned about privacy, a better option is  just don’t upload photos to the net services. My trust in google as a place to store your photos has been significantly eroded this year already and my recommendation is to make sure google photos is not the only place you keep your photos (ie download then and back them up, do it now!)

There is one exception, after Microsoft abandoned Live Writer, I started using Open Live Writer (Microsoft had made the sensible move and made their well loved blogging tool open source). which just happens to seamlessly store any photos for the blog post in google photos. This works fine so for at least the short term (ie until that stops working) it is public sharing and I’m aware of that and I contune using google photos in my blog posts (a task largely taken over by flickr at the moment by the way)  but probably for nothing else.

Illegitimi non carborundum

What to do if you want to keep using Picasa on your PC

 

The simple answer is NOTHING

 

 

There are a few extra things you might consider in the very immediate short term. If you don’t have the very latest version3.9.141 (you can find this on the about item under the help tab) it is probably a good idea to at least download the latest version, which according to the google blog will only be available till the 15th. March. I have downloaded this version and it looks a lot like version 3.9.140 (which I’ve had on my machines for a while). This version shows upload to google photos on the big green button at the bottom of the main picasa screen, and seems to work, but bizarrely when I try view on-line it loads internet explore (whereas chrome as my default browser), but it lands on a page that introduced the google photo apps for android and IOS, but looking around there is a red goto google photos button that first ask me to log in with my google account, then recycles the screen and this time ask me to also put in my passwords and then finally I can see my photo. Not exactly simple, probably best avoided in future (see below).

 

I already know an elegant way to share photos privately with just specific people via an email link, that is just the basic dropbox. Something I’m sure you already have. If you want to automate this a little, get the drop box app for your PC and this sets up a drop box directory under your user account. One of the default directories set up is called photos. Now using the export button all you need to do is the change the directory to that dropbox location. Any new export folder then becomes a separate album and the whole album or selected photos are easily shared, using drop boxes share with tools. This includes setting up collaborator two way sharing. With a two-way share you can also the add folder to picasa and set up the scan always so the picasa view is always up to date.

 

One final thing you might consider is making sure google doesn’t keep watching you and/or interfere (albeit unlikely). To do this, find the Options Tab under the tools item on the main menu, and untick the send anonymous usage stats to google item under the general options tab.

 

There are a few things to do to ensure you can migrant your collection’s organization to other packages but that can wait for another post.

Time is running out for Picasa

That 15th March deadline is approaching fast for the cutting off picasa in favour of google photos. I’m choosing to keep picasa running on my computers, as long as I can. It is easy to use and fits in well with the other applications I use (ok there is some tension between my various photo software mistresses) but picasa is very reliable. She definitely handles the reading of my SD cards (via a card reader) faster and more efficiently than any other program I’ve tried and gives me flexibility of which files (I can select thumbnails) and importantly weather I want to delete upload files or not. Also the organization of subfolders to load into (I prefer a date base format YYYY-MMM-DD so that the sub-directories for each day are in chronological order)


It is with family photos (which I almost never post on-line now) that she really still outshines other software. Her face recognition is a cut above the other offerings, there are the occasional misclassification (interestingly often with other family members or their parents as a child). Importantly it is easy to correct misclassifications. This is incredibly useful to find people, and therein lies one of the biggest issues, how to save this organization, if picasa becomes truly obsolete. (I do have a workable solution which I will outline in a future post). The family friendly aspects extend in her easy of use and the creation of albums in addition to the data based upload organization. For all majour family events I also select the better photos and put them straight in an album (the album appears to contains those photos but is just a link back to the original photo (where ever it is stored). It is then very easy to set up a slide show of that event (and perhaps chrome cast it to a TV) or in the past upload and share that album via Picasa web album. (Even if google do provide other a way to access existing web albums, I would be wary of sharing anything on google photos now and definitely can not recommend it).

I have put together a few workshop on digital photography for artist and have always recommended picasa as the best way for them to get organized on a PC (sorry but I have given up trying to help those in the apple-verse). It was the easy visually select and tagging and/or creating albums that meant that artist could take charge of large reference collects (without having to tediously give metatag every image).  The fact that it is a non-destructive manager & editor is often overlooked, but this help keep collection managable. Those used to illustrator of bit-map graphics ediotors some get overwhelmed with versions. Most photo software now offers similar ease of organization. Whilst not extensive picasa does provide most of what an artist might want in terms of manipulating images to support and provide reference for their art. Typically this might be cropping, adjusting tone and colour and maybe collage. I also show them the way to better composition via colour desaturation (and notan), layers and how powerful the retouch brush (to clone away things) can be (albeit the one process that adjust the original but keeps a copy). If their art is mainly photographical based and they shoot RAW they do probably need extra photo finishing features (like lightroom, photoshop and/or add-ins, browsers like OnOne10) however these can share the photos with picasa. Importantly because picasa was a free download it fits most artist merge budgets (if they even have one or money to spare)

Picasa is on all my computers and is the goto application if I want to find a photo. Whilst I am far from an obsessive metadata or keyword tagger, there is enough organization logic build in via face recognition, my albums, the chorological upload order and occasional key wording. I actually have a separate picasa library that is my catalogue to my photo archive. (and have a copied of the picasa install package stored with that archive)

At the moment I expect picasa on my PCs to function as normal (it does work fine under windows 10, despite the website only suggesting windows 7+ compatibility), except for the on-line web album connection. However it is probable that it might not be loadable onto future version of operating systems or hardware (eg it doesn’t work on apple mac or ipad, or on android phones). Thus another set of issues I’m working on and will post about soon is protecting the organization and context of the photo collection. So I will be sticking with picasa, on all my computers even after March 15^th. After my hassles with windows 10 I have grown to dread upgrades anyway.

Picasa peut-être morts

Mais à long Picasa en direct

A dozen regrets, and reasons I’m not excited about google photo

That 15^th March deadline is approaching fast for the cutting off picasa in favour of google photos. Although I know I must keep using google photo for my blog, but it is clearly wanting in many aspects compared with Picasa web albums, connected to Picasa of the desktop

1. Sharing privately is now very difficult if your family member do not have google accounts. It is possible to send links to selected photos and albums, and whilst you can share publicly to a number of social networks with one click, you need to get a link and then cut and paste to be able to email the link. The URL is not a direct link to the photo anyway but some google address that google needs to translate. All this is tedious and not obvious.
2. Albums in google photos should be called events or photo sessions as they are rigidly saved as the chronology (of the first uploaded photo). Something you are trying to constantly append to (eg a 365 daily photo or year long photos from one location) disappears into the past If you don’t provide an album organization the photos are grouped by date anyway. One small screen and even standard opens because of the album tile size, anything older than a couple of weeks disappears “below the fold” (ie you have to go scrolling to find it).
3. You can no longer choose create common licensing. In fact it would appear you can not copyright images either (at least there is nothing to that effect displayed). The terms of service
4. The People organization is not as comprehensive as the people (face recognition) in picasa
5. Classification of Places and Things are even less successful. What’s more disappointing here is there is no way to redress the misclassifications. (eg. my wife does not appreciate being on the tile labelled things)
6. Why oh Why! was SnapSeed editing removed from google photos? The current edit capabilities are so very limited. Its just sad really.
7. Why is something as fundamental as resize (eg smaller to email) missing?
8. Where is the exposure histogram?
9. What about all the other EXIF & metadata?
10. What has happened to geotagging (location)? Is it merely being used occasionally in the location organization. Why not have an option to display it in photo details?
11. I haven’t been successful in getting google photo autobackup to be selective, either from my phone camera or computer, it just behaves like a vacuum cleaner (and miss-behaves a lot as well, so I have removed it). The android google photos app kept updating itself and then crashing requiring yet another download and re-setup I just gave up and deleted it (and enjoyed having a lot of space back on my phone). If my older android version was not compatible wouldn’t it have been better not to have kept trying to update. No matter its gone also.
12. I’m frequently off the grid (ie no internet access a lot of the time) and I normally load and preview on my laptop computer first (I know I will continue using picasa to do this) THUS the [DEPRECATED] picasa connection makes the cloud based google photos irrelevant to me.

The list could go on but my firm opinion now is that google photos is way below my expectations. Ok Google photos can keep storing images for my blog but is not the place I intend to use to share and store my photos on-line anymore. I definitely intend to keep using picasa on my computers locally but the search is on for an on-line service that makes sharing and organizing easy, that will at a pinch do a reasonable job of simple editing, not strip out metadata and clearly display licensing, eg creative commons &/or copyright. Face recognition and auto organization might be nice but that’s not the deal breakers, lack of control is.

The last straw :: GOOGLE IS SHUTTING DOWN PICASA

Today’s top story on Engagdet today is that goggle is shutting down picasa. Yes Picasa, that photo software that has millions of loyal users including me. Well they used to have loyal users.

This has probably been on the horizon since the google plus days but it will leave a big void. The on-line thing called google photos is nothing near as useful as picasa, it is the emperors new clothes for cameraphone types and its flashy autoawesomes over which the user has little control are smoke and mirrors. When they could be wonderful creative tools for photographers. The free storage is nice, but the issue trust is very real now.

I guess a bit of user input could have helped google to understand this but have you ever tried to contact google?

The time line doesn’t seem that clear but it will probably start occuring after may 1st. The date when exitsing Picasa web album will be migrated somewhere else. The google/picasa blog does state that you can download picasa up till 15th. march. After that it will not be supported and the upload function probably won’t work but picasa itself should still work on your PC. Thats my hope! My trust in google not to do something evil had dissapeared (through not consulting its users base and scant details of changes) Their history of [DEPREECATED] applications does given me any confidence,

Can you still trust Google with your photos?

I foresee a lot of heartache. So if you have a lot of photos on google photos already. It is time to think about storing them somewhere safer!

Finding creativity by using different tools

I’ve never been a big fan of set work flows and always using presets, I think that approach stifles creativity. However I constantly use a range of different software. So how do I manage to get a consistent style. Well in actual fact I don’t bother, I choose what seems to suit the image, each tools has it strengths and limitations. It was grey and close to dusk so he was flapping his wings to dry them, the movement combined with a telephoto shot low f-stop and low light, my set of photos thus have soft-ish focus and digital noise due to higher ISO. C'est la vie.
First cab off the rank was Picasa, which I normal just use to upload my photos and allows me to quickly review and cull the photoset and perhaps rank the top photos. I tend not to use it to enhance my images, unless i really want something to post on the web or email straight away. It’s jpeg rendering is fine but google’s, “I feel luck approach” often makes the RAW files look dull and perhaps overexposed. I like more tonal range. Here I am editing the JPEG version and using the tuning tab but just clicking on the magic wand to let Picasa set the tonal sliders. I’ve also used the straighten and cropping tools.
I have been using Aftershot Pro as my preferred first look at RAW files on my laptop and have a fairly standard approach of clicking on the perfectly clear filter, then tweaking the details slider and for this photo a little extra raw noise correction. In this case I have toned down the vegetation a little via the Colour Equalizer Plug-in to help highlight the darter. I’ve also used a desaturate vignette along with cropping & straightening.
The RAW photo I am processing with OnOne Photo 10 Suite doesn’t have the detail in the darter, which limits its success somewhat. However I used by very favourite Dynamic Contrast filter to manipulate the tones, opting to enhance the small scale contrast rather that larger scale (which help subdue the trees & reeds in the background) while backing off vibrance and lift the darter. I also used my very favourite vignette the Big Softy.

I ended up breaking my own rule here, using a SDR+ preset I made myself some time ago to stretch the dynamic range in a single RAW photo. To which I tweaked clarity (local tonal contrast) to the right and dropped down the vibrancy a little, Similar crop and straighten to the other photo and finished with a subtle post crop vignette.

The photos are different, not unlike using different media (oils vs acrylic) and have subtly different appeal. Despite the approach to post processing being largely similar. I think the exercise of doing this help become familiar with the tools and what can be achieve. It is a more creative approach than following a rigorous workflow within a single software package. Vive la difference.

PhotoProject :: Knowing a bit about Notan

Composition is a subject that most artists feel intrinsically, whereas photography themselves often struggle. They may not be to blame as popular photography literature generally only superficially covers a few over simplified aspects of composition, like the rule of thirds and perhaps leading lines. Yet there is a lot more to how and what our eye see and find interest, particularly in terms of light and shade. Artist learn about positive & negative shapes, points and movement of interest. The harmony necessary between light and dark and how this can be designed. There is a “secret” artist principal called notan that deals with using this light and dark, mostly through very quick black and white sketches. The word and concept of Nōtan come from japan, if it were a real word it would have a meaning like the the play and placement of light and dark in harmony next to each other. It is taught in some art circles as as a way to develop a strong design at the preliminary sketching stage, however the notan of an image can easily be “reverse engineered” and is thus very relevant to photographers as a very useful post processing compositional tool.

Picasa, which you can still download for free, has a wonderful little posterizing filter that is ideal for investigating the Notan of an image. This filter is in the second last filter tab on the main tools panel displayed when a single photo is selected. It is design to reduce the number of colours actually being used (the top slider) and this is original of the name posterization because the image begins to look like older style posters which where printed with only a few colours. In the case of investigating notan we are looking for just a black and white image, and all you need to do is move all the sliders to the left (BTW In picasa you never get a pure white using this tool but it is very close), Our eyes are always drawn first to edge of sharper contrast, so it is easy to see that the movement all flows along there strong boundaries of dark and light shapes to the wheel of more particularly the hub cap ( and this puts the main point of interest right on the edge of the frame. Poor design and bad composition. This is so called two value notan, and some artist recommend including a third tone (the mid grey) three value notan. In picasa you can tweak the top slider a fraction to the right an get the three value version (see centre image below). There is also a very useful detail slider which will progressively display more detail (smaller bumps and shapes).
To see how this might be applied to photgraphy I will use  couple of photographs I took for this week’s PhotoFriday’s topic clean. My original idea was to have the foam and green bucket being the focus to covey the story clean(ing). Ok the photo is really bland, so lets look at the notan.
   
Once I saw the black and white shapes I realised that the cleaned section of the car and the soap suds where lost in the composition. Worse still is the light and shapes just break the space in two and the movement and point of focus are on the wheel at the edge of the photo. Even when I consider the mid tone I am not gaining any interest around the cleaning story. Luckily I took more photos including some of me actually cleaning.
   
The balance of light and dark is no longer so symmetric, and thus more interesting also, the dark shape of my arms help draw the flow of interest into the area being cleaned. With this insight I could them focus on this balance when doing my final post processing.

This video nicely covers the concept of using notan in building the underlying strength and composition of a painting, but it does also use notan examples created from photos

PhotoProject :: Making My Own Layers

I photograph this scene (which is at the end on my street) many times throughout the year. Whilst it wasn’t a spectacular sunset, and I’m looking south in any case, the sky is nicely dramatic and I felt it woild suit to the HDR treatment. I’ve even tried the HDR three ways, Google’s auto awesome HDR*, Aftershot Pro’s new HDR & Picturenaut. They are all ok,  somewhat blurry, some with noticeable halos and/or don’t quite capture the time & place.

  

Which is all well and good but I would rather be experimenting with what is inspiring me at the moment. I am currently fascinated with what make Fred Williams’s work so appealing. Part of this related to scale, and it is pretty impossible to convey that here on a small screen. The next two parts are more easily tackled here. I find Fred’s work really captures the colour and texture or real places in the real world. The essence of the place’s Australian-ness. Many of Fred’s works don’t have a clear horizon, they are more likely to appear abstract up close, Just squiggly ornamentation on a strongly coloured ground.

My initial idea to find the colour ground, was pretty simply just create a background layer which is simply the image blurred. There are Gaussian blurs in most photo editors but in this case I am experimenting with picasa’s soft focus filter which is like a vignette only instead of darkening the edges it puts thing progressively out of focus.

The surface calligraphy or “ornamentation” was more about how Fred made his marks. I like to think of it as he was painting or writing in a special font, one that matches the texture of the scene and more than that tells the story of the place. Even more important was that there is often and economy in what Fred has written, a good precise without having to tell the whole story. So I was looking for a way to filter the photo to find those few lines, some key things that identify the place, without having to record all the detail. I first experimented with the pencil sketch filter in picasa but it was pretty lame (see image above) so I took this through the infra red film filter and then back via inverse colour filter (image on the right). Now I’m getting both simpler and still keeping the feel of the road and trees, without a detail overkill. The final step for now, also carried out in picasa, was to create a multi-exposure collage, which simply overlays the two images. The result was a greyed out mess so I undid the inverse colour and overlayed again. This time the detail is light and the coloured ground is still toned down but still brings a strong sense of the time of day

This image looks nothing like a Fred Williams painting and not a lot like a photo of the scene. Yet it pleases me. I am staring to understand what is important. I feel I’m on my way for an interesting journey.