Day Two … Live Guides and SCN mode

I’m not sure how many other cameras have a similar features but the Olympus OMD E M10iii has two further features to assist the new camera user.

Ok I have read the manual to get an overview of how these work. They are very straight forward to use, particularly if you are used to using smartphone apps. They make a great next step from using the fully Auto mode and give you a little more control. To access their power you use the little “shortcut” key on the top left hand side of the camera. it does have slightly different functions depending on which mode he camera is in, yet they show a limited set of the main function you might wish to use in that mode, without having to navigate through the main menu (and/or the manual)

If you use the shortcut key in Auto mode, you will see a small set of live guide button on the right hand side of the back LCD screen. Pressing it a second this key with your eye to the viewfinder will show the live guides in the viewfinder (not sure why you would want this, because the best way to use these guides in in the Live View screen). This set of Live view guides lets get sliders to change the obvious things about the image you are about to capture, and you can use the touch screen to adjust the sliders much like you would do on a smartphone.The best part is you see the resulting changes on the Live view screen, its a lot like post processing before you take the shot.

• Colour (Saturation <> muting)
• Colour Temperature (warm <> cool)
• Brightness (Darker <> Lighter>

Just changing these three things, along with good framing (zooming in, or out of perhaps moving closing and filling more of the picture with your subject is probably enough to take a good auto image to a great photo. So many former smartphone photographer will probably be happy to continue using this approach for some time.

There are also a couple of specialized function, but you would probably leave those till later

• Blur (Blur <> Sharpness)
• Motion (Blur <> Stop motion)

Finally right at the bottom of the Live Guides is an item called Shooting Tips, which bring up more guides for common shooting situations and gives advice in example pictorial form. These are actually pretty neat and much more useful to a new photographer than a traditional boring manual or think how to book. Yet they are buried at the bottom of the live guides, I probably would have missed them if I had glanced at the manual and deliberately looked at all items in the Live Guide list. However it you are new to the M10ii definitely press the short cut key and scroll down to the bottom of the live view items.

Under the Auto key (if you move the mode dial clock wise) is the SCN  Scene Mode. Many other camera system have something similar which will change a few to several of the camera setting to best suit the type of scene about to be photograph. This Olympus implementation is pretty amazing if you use the shortcut key to access the set of options you get a set of picture tiles of the six main scene types and then tapping your figure on the most appropriate tile brings up some useful advice and a further set of sub-menus to refine the settings further. Think about it with two taps of your finger you can choose some very specific setting to better capture the photo you are about to take. Compare this with finding all those settings amongst the combination of dial and menu setting. I think this would really help a new camera owners to come to grips with their cameras capability.

These features work with jpeg file output. If you are shooting in RAW the camera will switch to jpeg+RAW and while the the jpeg files will be adjusted to match the Live Guide or SCN mode the RAW file will not be adjusted. So stay tune for working with RAW using tradition settings of the P A S M modes. For now just play in Jpeg, and enjoy getting great photos.

Day One … A is for Auto

I am always advising those with a brand new camera, to start in Automatic (the green box) because that's where you get to know what the camera will do in any given scene. As opposed to starting in M (manual) which is the implied place “real” photographers hang out. Ok that’s just the myth on Youtube, Vlogs and social media. However pretty well all digital cameras (and smart phones) these days will take really good photos just by themselves. So my theory is, it is better getting some good photos and getting to know your camera (and those situations that the camera hasn’t done such a good job). Compared with struggling with manual setting and getting a lot of disappointingly over and underexposed or flat photos, That would be very discouraging to you, and its not your camera’s fault.

So its time to follow my own advice and thus today is A for Auto. Its the first day with my new Olympus and rather than go crazy and snap everything. I figured I’d go green, and look at straight out of the camera photos. All of these images are just the Jpegs direct from the camera with no post processing (including no straightening, which bugs my sensibilities a bit but I needed not to touch the photo after its come out of the camera)

With the exception of those with strong light and shadow (two on the bottom left which had a very high dynamic range) the photos aren’t bad. My advice seems to be justified.

Ok what about jpeg versus RAW, well that’s another post.

The Darkside of AUTO HDR

I have been in the habit of taking bracketed exposure sets for a long time. Not so much that I want to do a formal HDR but really just as a safeguard against getting and exposure wrong. Particularly when I’m not confident the light meter is giving me the right exposure, the exposure I want rather than an average grey. In some case I can use one of the exposures only, or perhaps I can make a composite from two or all three of the images or I can use the various HDR techniques to gain a broader dynamic range.

Troubles can surface if all the decisions are passed onto an automatic process. This can be appealing because you can save time. It also removes your input into the creativity or aesthetic decisions. However more and more systems are offering HDR and it is now so often a one click solution.

Bald Hill windfarm makes itself noticed

This example might make the look like Tony Abbot’s comment about blots on the landscape could have a glimmer of truth. The reality is this image is the google+ autoawesome HDR has over adjusted the sky and produced the telltale halos of inappropriate tone mapping of high contrast areas and dirty skies. There are techniques to fix these halos but the best solution is to avoid them in the first place and don’t rely of automatic processes to get it right.

Postscript: A small upside is it has highlighted that I have a couple of dust particles on my sensor, and time for a clean

PhotoProject :: Straightening Out

“There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.” - David Hockney

I believe what David is highlighting here is that the camera’s view of the world is from a single lens with a specific perspective. We have two eyes and “see” a much richer three dimensional worlds and our vision can be influences by our expectations. For example when we are dwarfed by tall trees we know we are surrounded by a strong vertical world. Our camera however see a more curved representation (depending on the zoom) and we will probably notice wide angle views tend to show curves where we expect strong vertical lines. For this reason many architectural photographers go to some extreme length with special cameras and lenses to overcome this perspective distortion. The Tilt/Shift lens being very popular because they do allow control of this distortion. A number of tilt/shift filters are also now becoming popular because they can be used to create the effect of looking at a miniature world.
In this vertarama, made from three *HDR photos (created by google+ autoawesome) you can see the trees enclosing over me as the camera moves higher. Ok this is pleasing in some respects but I want to show the strong vertically of these pines, so I have Tried out a plug-in for after-shoot pro called zPerspector. There are a number of similar perspective adjustment plug in fro Photoshop, gimp & even paint.net. The all perform varaiable scaling  and/or warping to adjust the image. zPerspector has a very easy to pick up approach where you can stretch and pull at each of the corner edges of your photo to thus arrive at the expected view. In my example below I am not trying to get all the trees straight and vertical (because they weren’t really) what I was looking for for trying to reproduce the strength of the trees towering over me as I remember it.

Gaining the Upper Hand

I’ve had a fairly lukewarm relationship with google+ photos, firstly it took over simple and easy to use picasa’s web albums, google then added a numbers of changes that are supposed to wow me but they are at best hit and miss. The most frustrating of which is the so called auto backup. Ok I was never using it as a true back up system (because I can see no reason to do so). So I have now turned off the two default backup sources in the Google+ backup setting (shown on left) and added a new location that is a place I can just load those items I want to upload, perhaps to see if an auto-awesome is possible or what short of auto-enhancement might be possible. I suspect I will not be using it much, in which case I can confidently delete google+ autobackup in a few weeks.

 

Even though auto backup does load photos, it doesn’t organize them, (except by the upload data) so you still have to manually move them to albums, one at a time. It is much easier to upload them directly from picasa, into either an existing album or create a new one. you can also set up the sharing as you upload from picasa, (but with the no sharing as a default) rather than having to share after the upload as in google+ autobackup.

Off-site but not really backup

I have been using Google+ AutoBackup for a while now on two separate laptops, and it does work. It voraciously whips away any new images loaded onto those computers into the cloud somewhere. This is perfect when you have good net access but can be a real pain when travelling and only having intermittent access to the net (or worse still using roaming data on a mobile device, could be very expensive if you want to try it, I haven’t). So here are my luke-warm impressions of it’s Pros & Cons.

 

Private unless Shared

The uploaded photos are definitely private unless you chose to share them. This is a really important feature. Thus a lot of hysteria, conspiracy theories and suspicion about Google’s motives in providing this service (and there must already be a lot of server space crammed with photos, so it is a serious commitment) are not well founded. In theory Google do make it “easy” for you to share within a controlled manner, but that really only applies to the Google+ environment and sharing with those who have Google accounts. I’m not yet convinced by the discussions that this a secret plan to get Picasa users off their PC and onto the net. But it is definitely a way to move photographic traffic into Google (and away from Instagram & flickr).

 

Photo Organization

This was mentioned a lot last year but I cannot actually see any reference to improved photo management in the meagre on-line documentation of Google+ Photo now. The uploaded photos are organized by date, and that’s about it. Worse you have to scroll down to see the older ones. I haven’t been able to find a filter or search mechanism that uses embedded metadata for example. You can move the individual photos into albums, which are easier to search & manage and there is a limited list of other ways (see panel on right) to view your growing clump of photos, which is accessed
This is brings me to the idea of Highlights. I was actually looking forward to this feeling it might have become a lot like Everpix’s idea of Highlights, selecting only a few of the better images, but to me Google+ highlights tends to show almost every photo and not be very selective. Checking the very terse document I found

Find your best photos & videos using the highlights tab of your Google+ photos. Your Highlights will leave out duplicates, blurry images, or photos with poor exposures, making it easier to find the photos that are most meaningful to you.

Ok does that mean the google+ algorithm thinks I’m a near perfect photographer? Nothing blurry or poorly exposed (I take plenty of those, often deliberately) many of them are highlighted! I guess what I was hoping for was something a fraction more atheistic but I should have known better.

 

The Auto Everything Effect

One aspect of Google+ photos that has puzzles me is the obsession with auto-everything and corresponding lack of controls to do those things smack of the “trust us we know what we are doing” you don’t! Yes there are some basic editing features and they are good and the so-called creative filters (as in the one-click variety) with some limited controls. However these leave me feeling unsatisfied, without encouraging me to fiddle on-line I prefer to return to Lightroom, After Shot Pro. or Picasa. Yes I have AutoAwesome’s turned on and occasionally look at them but other than the few better HDR efforts I’m kind of mostly underwhelmed, but not enough to turn AutoAwesome off.

 

Timing

What gets uploaded is everything (photos and videos) from the directories you nominate Including and media devices. They get uploaded immediately if the Google+ Autobackup is running as a background process. This means you will not get a chance to add keywords into the metadata before they are uploaded. Not that Google+ Photos displays or even make use of this extra user metadata at the moments. It probably won’t even give you time to cull the duds. You can pause the backup process and restart it at will but when you start up the computer if seems to always start up hungry to upload. I would have preferred a sticky toggle here.

 

Size matters

Whilst you can upload full size jpegs and RAW files to Google photos easily and Google+ Autobackup does handle them I suspect this would quickly become expensive in terms of both storage and bandwidth to access that storage.
Any image who’s longest dimension is less than 2048 pixels is stored free (ie it doesn’t come off your 5GB space allowance) and this is a big deal for anyone who takes a lot of DSLR photos. In the Autobackup setting you can select standard size to do this. I haven’t been able to work out if the autobackup process only uploads a resized image but I assume it does. So there are possibly second reason to just select standard size it will save you bandwidth, If your photos are just intended for display on the web this 2048 file size is plenty big enough, but it isn’t a true backup anymore.

My conclusion is that this service is really designed like mobile apps on phones and tablets (they have the Google+ app and instant upload) as a way to bring activities from your PC onto Google web services and specifically into the Google+ photo world. Whilst I see some benefits in using it, I’m not excited by its implementation. I would rather better documentation, more “real” sharing options and more control of what is and isn’t uploaded. Picasa on the PC already offers much better photo management, decent basic editing functionality and can share into the Google+ photo world anyway. So Google+ Autobackup is not going to get me to stop using Picasa locally. Does it replace my backup, definitely not! Will I keep Google+ Autobackup running in background? At least in the short term yes, hey it’s free, but not when I’m travelling.

PC melt down, was Google+ AutoBackup the Culprit?

Whilst travelling in New Zealand I was able to connect to free but relatively low bandwidth access to the net, eg most libraries offer free WiFi and many cafes have 30minutes free WiFi  etc. With this sort of free access it seem unnecessary to pay the exorbitant data roaming charges of telstra. The downside was the bandwidth is very limited but still. First I noticed it was almost impossible to shut my computer down. Then one night I was on line and loading a number of photos from several cards and the card seemed to hang. Everything on the computer just got slower and slower even when not connected to the net and I had to kill the system and restart it in safe mode. My first step was to get everything backedup to a backpack USB drive I always carry but being so busy I hadn’t done in a few days. Given all the publicity about the heartbleed vulnerability, virus and malware check was by first though but things checked out fine. I even did the full check disk thing, still ok. Then when I reconnected to the net I saw google+ autobackup was waiting to rebackup every photo on my laptop and suggesting it would take 73days! I did check the photo size it was trying to upload and it was still set to standard. If you select the standard size google+ autobackup only stores images at 2,048pixels in maximum dimension, which is fine for web display and small prints, and this size and smaller the storage is free (ie unlimited). I paused Autobackup immediately. However I ended up uninstalling it, rather than restarting it. Mainly because there is no obvious help files that I could find. Magically the slowness of my system and glitches loading photos disappeared. Sadly the specific card reader I was using at the time of the melt down has completely die.

Was Google+ AutoBackup the culprit?

Did I miss it, the highlights and autoawesomes. Not at all I was still able to share, with my family (not the world) via a new album I set up in Picasa.

An Interesting Action Enhancement

An ongoing photo/art project of mine is Des Vagues, the waves, and I had taken a series of stop-motion like photos. On checking on what google+ had done in its auto awesomeness I found this kind of cute rendition of a breaking wave. I realise the photo junctions are a bit patchy but it does have life and a definite Japanese wood print feel.

Google+ action enhancements typically use a strobe like capture the movement of a person, placing them in progressive positions that map out the movement between photos. Here the wash and ripples of the breaking wave can be seen developing as the wave approaches the shore.

Its Perfectly Clear why she is becoming a new every day mistress

Having given up on choosing just one photo manager/post processing system I have been happier just using the software that seems most appropriate at the time (I often call this my many mistress project) One of the steps that I do want make sure is not tedious is what happens when I first load my photos and review them. This is one area that Lightroom has left me feeling there is a better way, other than running away to get a coffee and getting distracted. Infact my short trial of Photo Mechanic, opened me to the possibility that there was a better way. I also had become comfortable with doing a lot of this preview and culling in Picasa, which is much faster to load photos and very easy to use. The problem was that ranking and other organizational issues where just wasted on Lightroom

Enter AfterShot Pro, which is a much appreciated Christmas gift. At first it appeared to be duplicating a lot of Lightroom functionality. The really attractive part of this new mistress was the fact that you could just look at photos without having to import them all into its library. It does take a very short moment or two to build a thumbnail (on the fly) but its as easy as moving to the directory where the photos have been loaded (I still use picasa for this) using the navigation (browse) panel on the left of the screen. Choosing the appropriate view, must admit I swap around a bit but I prefer the Multi-Image View (as shown above).  The basic edit features are always there on the right (no changing modules as in Lightroom). I’ve already mentioned the little magnifier tools I still think its a gem. The fact that I can save my ranking and metadata to xmp files that Lightroom can pick up later is one reason I have started to do most of my previewing in AfterShot.  Like Lightroom (and Picasa) AfterShot Pro is a “non destructive” editor, the original photo remains unaltered and you can store its adjustments in an xmp file, the problem is this post processing isn’t compatible with Lightroom’s processing. I’ll probably write more on this later.

An unedited RAW image on a calibrated screen, can be a very boring thing. It often takes a fair few steps (ie not just Auto White Balance or Auto Tone in Lightroom) to see the potential of an image might have for further tweaking and post processing. Which brings me to another real gem I have discovered in AfterShot Pro. It now has the Perfectly Clear plug-in, built into the basic edit panel. This a an “image enhancer” (their term to differentiate themself from other “creative filter” plug-ins) by anthentech, which you can be still purchase separately as a desktop application or downloaded as a smart phone app. The details of their “science” make good reading, but they had me hooked when I saw the quote “Your “Enhancement” Software Takes the Camera Distortions and Makes Them Worse”. The proof though is in the pudding and I have always tried to me honest and fair in my evaluation of AUTO anything style claims. They usually fall short of the mark for me. However I love perfectly clear as I scroll though my photos because with one click I can see the potential of a raw image. It gives me a target to strive for in Lightroom later without having to invest a lot of time tweaking an image and not be able to transfer this to Lightroom. I will probably still try to do better with some manual tweaking later but I haven’t invested a lot of time, and if I’m in a hurry to email a proof or just upload an image to illustrate a blog post that one click is pretty much all I need to do. Perfectly Clear does work with jpeg as well, but it may not have as much potential to work with as the equivalent RAW file.

A Month on and Google+ AutoBackup is a Vacuum

Its a month since I set up AutoBackup (as a trial) on one of my computers (a laptop onto which I load most of my photos, they will get stored permanently somewhere else). Well it is a real vacuum, as in cleaner, not void space. It sucks up everything as soon as it’s loaded, and often before I even seen the photos. Well before I get a chance to cull the duds and keyword or rank the better images. What it is building is an uncurated pile (aka a mess) rather than an organized backup!

So here are my observations after the first month of use.

• It isn’t the bandwidth pirate I expected. It does seem to takes its time and not interfere too much with others on my network when it has a lot of images to load
• It highlights some strange photos, and more importantly skips over some gems
• I’m well over being auto awesomed
• Many HDR sets and multi-image overlapping panorama sets are turned into Motion Gifs. This puzzles me?
• I can not see tools to help me find specific images in the vast collection I am amassing on-line (scrolling through just one month’s uploads is already tedious)
• I’m still uncertain if there are dangers involved with having most of your photos on-line somewhere in the clouds. So far I’m happy that the defaults are private and you have to specifically share an image to let others see it
• Already there are many unintended duplicates
• Sharing outside the Google+ world is difficult (even into blogger, see steps I had to use in image caption below)
• Whilst you can easily download individual images there are no “recovery” tools that I can find
• I’ll probably leave it installed for new uploads, at least for a month or so
• BUT I have no plans to backup my full digital photo collection onto google+

An AutoBackedup photo, edited  including frame and then copied to another album in google+ photo before I could share it here

An opportunity to compare

I was refilling my little watercolour sketching palette with fresh paint and the beautiful light suggested a perfect opportunity to compare a the software I normally use to post process my photos. This is an example of an image with strong highlights (the white palette) and strong shadows without a lot of intervening tonal gradation. It is the sort of images a lot of cameras will have trouble capturing. Luckily my original photo is reasonably exposed.

	I can’t as yet find a histogram presentation in Google+ Photo

So there isn’t a massive difference between the results. The main difference is in the “blow out” (or clipping in adobe parlance) at the white and black ends of the spectrum. All the images are reasonable but it is in the midtones and particularly in the yellow hues that there is most difference. My preference is the Lightroom image, but maybe that’s because I was specifically trying to avoid the clipping and improve the clarity.

… … Looking Forward

Looking into a crystal ball used to be a common past time at the new year. Rapid Technological change was always a key aspect of these predictions, yet this year the changes in photography might not be gleaming new toys you can pick up.

1. We’ll do better without you, the move to on-line storage and display has been a wealth of Auto-fix facilities. Even your humble photo processing service in the local shopping mall probably uses an “enhance” filter. A lot of this is gimmickry and little more that increased contrast and colour saturation. Some are based on science, particularly from the field of medical imaging and some have come down from fancy photoshop plug-ins. Corels inclusion of Perfectly Clear and Niks Software’s Snap Seed (now Google’s Auto Awesome) are good examples of what can be achieved. However if you are a creative you might need to fight this trend, at least recognise it.
2. Better user interface on cameras (particularly smartphones). In todays world cameras might have a few mechanical and optical functioning bit bits (particularly the bigger DSLR) but at their centre is now a lot of electronics. They are essentially specific purpose computers and as such are programmable. Some existing cannon camera can already have their firmware updated (see magic lantern). However it is in the smartphone camera arena that the changes are most evident. There are hundreds of camera apps, unfortunately many are trival (and specifically the zanny filers I could do without). Yet there is light. There probably is no need to link new cameras back to the three traditional exposure controls, which relate back to the sensitivity of the film, or a diaphragm style aperture control. Even the time taken for the exposure. A simpler set of sliders on a touch screen that corrected over exposure, maybe focus (by just touching the screen where you want it in focus), a slider for depth of field and maybe a drop down set of buttons for specific modes like fast action close up all on the phones touch screen (or on the back of the camera) and the changes can been seen on the screen straight away, This doesn’t sound like much but I bet that would become a popular camera app or even an actual camera.
3. I suspect this will be the year of the photobook, Ok the term has changed a lot some time ago, not so long ago actually serious photographers had exhibitions and very occasionally a publisher might hang the expense and produce a wonderful book of photos, usually with accompanying text but a recognised write, Now the photobook can easily be self published. There are some quiet amazing limited edition photobooks being created today by semi-professionals and gifted amateurs These books have reached a price, mainly due to the technology of the production aspects and old fashion competition where it is can be cheaper to prepare a photobook full of say a hundred or so 5 by 8cm sized snaps of a recent overseas trip compared with getting those snaps printed out individually. The difference is it will probably take some time and energy to create the book and possibly your family will slink away when they see you get the book out, In between there is a place where you can be creative and publish what is important to you. The movement to photobooks is also present in the ebook area where photobooks are starting to gain traction mainly due to the larger screen on IPads and Android tablets. 2014 is a good year to consider creating your first photobook, just start small (in $20-$25 range)