The Elusive One-Click Instant Fix

From the very earliest days of digital photo editing software, developers have been trying to create the ultimate instant fix button. Whether it's labelled “quick fix”. “auto-correct” or “auto-balance”, google had “I’m feeling lucky” and later “auto-awesome”, the goal has always been the same: to make photo editing as simple and effortless as possible. However, despite numerous attempts, none of these one-click fixes have truly lived up to their promise.

The trouble is, while digital cameras have improved significantly over the years, they still can't cover every situation. And even when they do capture a great shot, there are often still some focus and exposure issues that need to be addressed. This is where photo editing software comes in, but finding the perfect balance between automated fixes and manual editing can be a challenge and all too often very tedious.

Over time, I started to warm up to auto-fix tools and even created my own preset for Lightroom called SDR+. However, I didn't use it much, as I found it was often quicker and more trustworthy to just fiddle with the exposure sliders manually.

It wasn't until I started experimenting with Macphun's Aurora HDR that I really began to see the potential of what AI (Artificial Intelligence, in the form of Neural Networks) could do. This software used the networks to segment the image into different areas, such as the sky, foreground, background, buildings, and foliage, and potentially correct those areas separately. However, this information wasn't shown to the user. It would have been nicer to have access to it through prebuilt masks. Just be patient that feature would eventually come.

However, the developers' approach was somewhat arrogantly more focused on "we’ll do it better than you" and releasing regular updates for users and expecting them to sit back and enthusiastically pay for what they were being fed.

Skylum’s Photo Lemur showed great promise when I was invited to beta test it. Having previously tested Nic's Collection and Snapseed when they were still Macphun, and also looking at a pre-release Windows version of Luminar, I could see that the big difference with Photo Lemur was its simplicity and ability to batch process many files in a reasonable amount of time. It did a good job, although not outstanding, especially for social media where post-processing excellence would go unnoticed. It's biggest appeal that you don’t have to do anything was also its biggest weakness, you really can not control anything. Still I bought it straight away and still occasionally use it.

Macphun became Skylum and their software creations Aurora HDR and Photo Lemur were great examples of how AI can enhance the editing experience and made it easier and more efficient for photographers to create beautiful images.

Looking back AI within photo editing was still in its early stages, slowly making small incremental steps usually with room for improvement. The really rapid expansion of the tasks AI could perform and the rate of improvement were about to explode

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 :: 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.

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

Auto Awesome Blooper or Optical Illusion?

I took these photos of my footprints in the sand late yesterday afternoon. The Auto awesome HDR* photo on the left is taken looking away from the sun and the HDR* on the right is taken towards the sun. The effect is not as noticeable in the single images, but is very apparent in the google+ autoawesome HDR*(which by the way was not intended to be created and sorry about the annoying solarizing-style effect on the wet sand in the upper right of the left hand image, my interest in in the footprints which appear inverted)
 

Do the footprints on the right hand side look inverted?

Google+ Photo Playing with itself

I tuned on google+ photos autoback a couple of weeks ago (and forgot to turn it off) so google+ has been not only auto-enhancing my images It has now also been adding auto-effects (in this case a grotty border), Then awarding them as autoawesomes. I have no idea why this phone photo of an incomplete clay sculpture I was working on (taken just for my own reference) would get such auto-attention!

Stop it Google+ your just embarrassing yourself.

My Autoawesome Blooper Album is getting very full (but remains still largely unviewed)

Tale of Two Pano Stitchers

On my recent trip I had been giving google+ photos an opportunity to redeem itself (in my eyes). So most of my photo where running through auto-backup and thus into “autoawesome” algorithms. I took two separate sets of the back beach at Sorrento (the first above) just a set of overlapping photos. The second a set of overlapping bracketed photos (-1.5E,0,+1.5EV) with the sets overlapping in the same way as the first set (see result below).  The image above was joined  by the autoawesome *Pano feature, and shows a distinct wide angle lens perspective. The image below was first combined to increase dynamic range, using Autoawesomes *HDR features, I then downloaded these and used Autostitch to combine them, The differences are astounding! I expected the colouration and tonal difference but the perspective differences came as a bit of a shock.

 I just happened to be in Jells Park as the cold front approached, Making an interesting sky, which Google+ Autoawesome HDR* has captured

AutoAwesome HDR in the City

Even on a chilly cold day, you can still find glimpses of green among the strong verticals in the Melbourne CBD. Both Autoawesomes from Google+, I might have otherwise overlooked.

Straight to the Blooper Reel

I got my first Autoawesome video yesterday, but it is really terrible. albeit with a catchy soundtrack, so I’m not going to post a link to it. This is kind of the last straw for me, there is way better material already up there in the cloud and google’s algorithmic attempts to make me awesome just depress me. Surely google could let me use these tools to be more creative BUT NO! that’s not enabled.  I’m contemplating turning off AutoAwesome in Google+,  if not shutting down google+ photo auto backup all together.

ThePatch :: Automobile AutoAwesome (that wasn’t quite)

Looking for a more creative direction for this weeks theme Marketing/Automobile on ThePatch I had to look no further than my grandson. He loves lego, the lego movie and everything is awesome, within seconds of suggesting we make a short movie he was designing and assembling a suitable awesome car from scratch and worked out a little sequence before I had my camera ready. We had fun shooting the circling Awesome-Mobile, although you can glimpse his enthusiastic hands in a couple of frames. To keep within the everything awesome theme I had planned to let google+ autoawesome create the *Motion gif for me.  Alas it only used a couple of the 25 photos we had created (see the google+ efforts below) so I went back to an on-line service called imgflip to create the GIF file (above left).
 
Since all of this was fun but probably not serious enough to enter on the patch so I have returned to a still photo of the wonderful little Awesome-Mobile itself but decided what the heck to go with the Gif (or is that Jif?)!
 

Winter Solstice

A fitting sunset over the lake at Jells Park to mark the start of our longest night down here in the southern hemisphere.   

No AutoAwesomes, but an Observation

Today I didn’t take many photos (I was busy and it was raining heavily) so I only got one autoawesome showed up and it was definitely not worth sharing. Looking back over the week’s blog stats I can see my view counts have dropped, so my little experiment hasn’t appeal to you, my audience either. All this “fun stuff” from google+ photos comes for free but it isn’t really that useful. You can not get many of the features to work from scratch, so I they are not tools, they are tinsel. Even more obvious/disconcerting is the lack of documentation on these effects, and even how to use the editing features that are available. This nextweb article, does a decent job of covering the basics (unofficially on google’s behalf).

Whilst I’m not going to stop using picasa, autobackup and utilize google+ photos, I’m not inclined to leave it to google+ to look after my photos, select what is worthy and sharable.

AutoAwesome Bloppers

I should have prepared more consistently for this, in that for some time I was deleting the not quiet right autoawesomes. Perhaps I get more than most, but I doubt it. Other than the *HDRs and an occasion *Motion and even rarer *Pano, I have found the autoawesomes to be bemusing because they so often miss the mark. Here is a collection of some I have received )and not deleted for some reason, they are not my best work for sure.

There are a couple of *HDR images where I moved the camera (I had pushed the shutter by accident and auto-backup had scoped up everything before I deleted these duds). My biggest disappointment is with stitched panoramas, which have very seldom worked for overlapping sequences I have shoot, Often they are jumpy *motion gifs, sometime they are weird *erase images. Also *erase seems to have a pretty consistent habit of liking to remove the subject or cut them into fragments. And don't get me started on *snow, I even have it covering my sketches now.


Anyway (other than in this post) I don't have to share these mishaps. Part of my Week of AutoAwesomesness

Google+ Stories, yet another “leave it to us” offering.

I noticed yet another autoawesome style offering from from google called Stories, which seemed perfect to add into my week of autoawesomeness. It is basically a on-line slide show that has been automatically prepared by yet another google algorithm to automatically select your best shots and is being prompted as a tool to  “brings out the richness of the memories behind the photos” and present them as “beautiful, interactive stories so you can relive your adventures”. Ok thats the hype, what actually happens? Well it does choose your adventures for you. At the moment you can not create your own from scratch! For me this is a very puzzling omission. You can however “tweak” the slideshow by adding or removing photos or videos and can change the cover photo. Thats about it!

 

The stories are supposedly about your “memorable” travelogues and it would appear these stories are triggered by either locations (geotags) information embedded in your photos or by landmark detection tools shifting through your images (and possibly including having your home address already known, eg. typed into google maps). Perhaps I am not the only one just a little concerned about who or what knows I’m not at home and when. 

This is an interesting in the context of a recent program titled “Digital photography: message and memory” on the ABC Radio National’s Series Future Trends. Which presents a different view, the rush to photograph every moment may be leading to us remember less and less. 

So should we leave our memories to google+ to manage?

Not sure I want that, and I worry many will not even realise their real memories have gone and been replaced by something else.

I guess the one redeeming feature is google+ stories (and movies) are private until you share them.

Experiments in Stop Motion with Strong Light & a Jug of Water

I had been looking for a different theme to trial another format of AutoAwesomes. My leaning was towards the *Motion format, which is actually a Stop Motion style .Gif files. The sun can out for a short time and left interesting retractions of light trough a jud of water on the bench, so I swirled the jug and grab my camera and took a "Burst Mode" Series in quick succession (above). I also experimented with pouring the water into a glass (below) between photos. Google+ AutoAwesome obligingly did the rest.

Part of my Week of AutoAwesomes

Another HDR Panorama

The actual stitching of this panorama was carried out by autostitch, but the three underlying images where HDR autowaesome images generated by google+ (ie 9 photos have contributed). There are halos and there is a decided seam in the sky, still it is a power panorama giving the right feel for the distant hills and expanse of grass under the power lines. It is an almost technical success rather than a good photograph.

Part of my Week of AutoAwesomes

Dark Skies over the Lake

I was pleasantly surprise when this AutoAwesome Pano showed up in my Google+ photos. It is actually created from 16 individual photos in approximately 3 overlapping bands (taken hand held so the overlap is not precise) and cover approximately 180° view from the horizon to directly over head. It is a very big wide panorama.

I have found so far it is relatively rarely that google+ assembles my multipanel panoramas, instead it often makes then into stop motion movies. I see not being able to create a multi-image stitched panorama when you have collected a set of suitable photos is a bit of a limitation, waiting for autoawesome to do it for you is an inevitable let down.

Echos of Summer Sunset

Winter is setting in and darkness is coming early, but despite this, here are a couple of Autoawesome HDR images created by Google+ that bring the feel of a balmy summer’s evening (albeit several hours earlier). Yes the colours are just a little to stronger than I remembered but otherwise these HDRs created with all the defaults settings (ie HDR scape nature, aka Preset 1, strength slider slightly to the right,  brightness and saturation unchanged in the middle).

I’m still not convinced I should wait for google algorithms to tell me my best photos and how to post process them, but I am intrigued.  I think these are a perfect way to start off a week of posting only AutoAwesome Photos on this blog.

The Ellusive Mutli-Stitched HDR Panorama

I have actually been toying with doing combined HDR and Multi-image stitched panorama for a while. I have done a few in the past with limited success but can not find any I’ve posted. It was just such a long winded process. (ie you have to do several HDRs first then your must work on correctly joining them) Autos stitch seems to be a little frightened of HDR images and often would connect well overlapping images. The two images of the sunset below with both the sun and moon shining through the clouds (a few moments of magic light) where taken as two images of three bracketed EVs. I’d been busy and forgotten about the images but google+ seemed to keep them back and only just notified me of the autoawesome HDRs being available. Ok they are a little grainy but they seem perfect to try out in autostitch. There is a fair bit of noise, I lightened the final image a bit and it is not exactly an exciting view but the result is much closer to my experiencing of the moment than any single exposure.