Lr CC …curiouser & curiouser II

This snippet from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a perfect metaphor for how I feel, trying to understand why Lr CC doesn’t seem to want to play with me. All the prominent sites claiming super performance have left me bewildered and assuming it has to be my hardware! or just me!

Well the hardware assumption seems to be correct. The clue was under Edit/Preferences then under the Performance tab (evidently it is my graphics card is the thing that doesn’t want to play). Lr CC had ticked to use it by default and then reported that it had been disabled due to errors. OK So I started looking through the Adobe Community help and found this post regarding Issues with Lightroom CC/Lightroom 6 and AMD graphics cards. I haven’t tried reverting to an earlier version of my driver (which doesn't seem very logical advice). However just deselecting the use graphic processor box has certainly seen LR CC become better behaved. Ok its still not fast but it has stopped crashing and thrashing.

But why not just do the deselection, if Lr CC recognised errors?

Perhaps Absolem will know?

LR CC Seriously where is the speed?

My Trial of Lightroom CC has not lasted very long. I must preface this with I am only running the trial version on a Windows 7 machine, it is 64bit with service pack 1  and 8GB RAM and has a reasonably standard graphics card (an ATI Radeon HD 5450). Maybe its the fact that I have a conventional “spinning disk” hard drive not a SSD, solid sate drive.  Seriously I can’t see any massive performance improvements. Possibly I’ve gotten used to the snappier browsers in After Shot Pro and Perfect Photo Suite. So to be fair I set up a test against LR 4.4 on my studio computer which is an older laptop still running Windows Vista 32bit operating system, and 4 GB RAM. The test involved loading just 22 photos (in both Jpeg & RAW so 44 images imported but lightroom only displays the RAW files) from the same SD card, same card reader and processing the same two images(shown below). I had new blank catalogues in both cases and I’m not using face recognition, HDR or panorama merge. SADLY the very old studio laptop and LR4.4 are giving me better performance!

	Lr CC	Lr 4.4
Load 22 photo from SD card	0:36	0:33
Edit 1 ( Crepe Myrtle)	1:22	1:17
Edit 2 (Moon)	1:42	1:30

Time is in Minutes:Seconds

I’m not using smart previews and I’m only doing some very simple post processing. There might be faster refresh on some action to start with but I have the feeling once I do more that three or four steps the performance dies. I was a little bit surprised at the difference in edit times, but I did start the timer from selecting the photo in the Library module and there does seem to be a distinct lag getting to the development module in Lr CC. I realise these test may not be rigorous but they are typical of things I might do and taking 10% extra time to do it does not appeal.

 

What was really disturbing was the performance dive on the rest of my system. These Lr CC sessions were accompanied by much disk whirring and I recognized it was virtual memory thrashing on a grand scale. Changing a web page took minutes, opening this blog post in window’s live writer took 10 minutes. Chrome kept crashing, and then would not reappear (I suspect it was trying to display outside my screen). Word and Excel became unusable. Whenever I saw lightroom’s “not responding" message the whole system would freeze for an extended period. I suspected that somehow lightroom was grabbing all memory and CPU resource but even task manager was bought to its knees. Don’t even get me started on the number of lightroom crashes. Something is clearly wrong here,  can I be the only one? and clearly I’m not!

Ok with that major disappointment out of the way, what about the great new features? Many of those where on the list of desirable items I posted previously, was it really 2 years ago. The really important capability missing from this release is still the ability create catalogues on network volumes, either for personal or collaborative use. Lightroom is still a one computer one user mistress, expecting to share a library of images through the creative cloud is little more than the Emperor’s New Clothes.

The two photo merging features interested me most as I routinely do both tasks, using other softer dedicated applications. I take a lot of bracketed exposures and create HDR images often so I was keen to try out The HDR option. Unfortunately it very tame, not many controls and the preview window is probably a bit small. I missed the fact that the de-ghosting over smoothed the background (see image on the right) because the preview window didn’t show that detail and you can’t zoom in. Whilst I had my camera on a tripod for this shot the wind was blowing so there as ghosting in the basic merge. However this HDR does a reasonable job for the majority of bracketed photos. It does take control, there are very few switched and no sliders but it doesn’t do the lurid tone mapping for which HDR has got such a bad name. Instead it takes the images to be merges and builds a 16bit colour space version with a much broader tonal range than any of the individual photos and this can be then processed like any RAW photo. Definitely you should be able to get an image close to what your eye sees.

I also take a lot of multi image panoramas, and Photo Merge/Pano was something else to try out. It did a good job when I only stitched 2-3 images. It refused to stitch some sets. Then I started to test with a few large sets like the 17 vertical shot of about a beach (shown below). Basically it has left out a lot of images and mismatched in a few places. it also took a long time to actually generate. Once again there are very few controls and no sliders. Ok Interesting but there are much more mature panorama stitchers around.

Both these photo merge options create DNG files so you basically have full size RAW files that you can edit further. They can be BIG files

The Face Recognition is “another also ran” feature, for me it struggled to get more than about 70% of the face correct. It is also very slow and I soon turned it off.

Lightroom Mobile, might be ok if you want to preview your photos, say on an IPad. However on an android phone it left me struggling to find anything nice to say about it.

I am a great fan of using Albums (aka collections in Lightroom) to organize photos. So the inclusion of an Add to Collection tickable Item in the file handling dialogue during import is a very nice feature. Pity is I have lost confidence in lightroom keeping track of my collections.

The other nice feature is the ability to mask gradation and radial filters, so for instance you can follow and mask the filter from applying  to a strong silhouette in the foreground or strong tree lie of mountains in the background. It almost gives the feel of being able to work with layers, instead it just works selectively paint out part of  these two overlay filters.

However my desire to investigate further is killed by yet another crash.

If this was called Lightrooom CC beta I might have given her a fairer trial. Hopefully the reliability and speed issues might be easily fixed. However Adobe please rethink this release.  Its appalling!. BIG #FAIL

Lightroom CC :: Back to the future

Quiet a while ago I expressed my disappointment with the LR 5 beta, and I actually haven’t bothered updating lightroom since then. Having being a little more at ease with her now and seeing a fair bit of hype about the new version LR 6 or CC, I decided it is time to give this version a trial.

So I began at the adobe site and then the lightroom version 6 page and selected the trial option, which took me to the CC version (not the standalone version). This wasn’t really what I wanted but I could not find any way to download Lr 6 as a trial, it was only the Lr CC(2015) that was available as a download trial. So that will have to do. Ok its actually a three step process that involves firstly downloading the full creative cloud setup. As I already have an Adobe ID I used that rather than setting up a new one. That took quiet a while so I went and got a coffee, then a second. Next I had to logged into creative cloud again and then selected to try Lr CC (2015), the message I got seems to indicate I’m about to download Lr CC (2014) so I cancelled that and logged into creative cloud yet again with my same Adobe ID and check yes I definitely asked to try (2015) and got the same warning that I was about to download version Lr CC (2014). Ok I will give that a try, and this time I didn’t even have to re-enter by Adobe ID yet again. Now the status screen did indicate it was downloading LR CC (2015) but it sat on 0% download for a long while, more coffee,  and a very long break.

So its two hours since I started trying to get the trial version and …..lightroom cc(2015) is just 23% downloaded.

Well I have plenty of time to write this blog post then. Another hour later and 42% downloaded I get another warning of an installation conflict. Ok that’s simple to fix I still had lightroom open because I had started then with the upgrade menu. I did remember to ask for a backup, more delays with my hard disk whirring away.

Four hours after the start finally! I can try something, No I definitely don’t want Lightroom to upgrade my catalogue! Why only 18 days on the mobile app trial? Synching to mobile phone (hey I didn’t authorize that!!) Now my phone “hung up””, Yet another wait!

The feelings of being underwhelmed yet again is very strong but I will follow through.with giving Lightroom dressed in her new version a fair try in the sun.

This could make a big difference

The creative cloud/photography bungle for $9.99/month, which give access to both lightroom & photoshop, at least while you pay the subscription BUT a lot of internet comments are focused on what happens if you stop paying? Lightroom is a non destructive editor so the original photos will always be there, however lightroom shores all the processing in its catalogue and if that is gone you will loss all your processing, ranking, metadata etc. From personal experience this is not a happy moment. In photoshop you have to save your edits to that’s not such an issue there.  Well starting with LR 5.5 on creative cloud and lightroom downloaded to your desktop will be still useable, in terms of viewing, printing and organizing your photos even if your subscription lapses. You get can still use all the models (except Develop & Map) which means lightroom will work but you can’t edit you photos further of geotag them. This is a big concession from adobe and may convince many the $10/month is a reasonable deal.

I’m not rushing to take up the deal, at least for a while I’m staying with LR 4.4. I’m still a bit miffed that adobe have nobbled the free aspects of Behance so much and I’m definitely not paying their black mail price for Behance Pro!

The Gaia Birds Revisited :: My PhotoImpressions Method

It is a while since I created my first photo mosaics of parrots, for a group challenge on Redbubble. I have recently returned to the theme for inclusion within My Monash Exhibition at the Highway Gallery. However my PhotoImpression technique has developed a lot since the original Gaia Bird series back in 2005So I figure it is time again to explain some of the processes I use and why I am applying them. I actually adopted the term photoimpression to describe my process back in 2006, and I have noticed that the term is used a lot now for other photo related things, including as the name for a few competing phone apps which have nothing to do with my process. Further the wide spread use of “magic” filters and photoshop trickery means that a lot of people seem to believe I am just using a one click style filter or pre-set. Nothing could be further from the truth, so I’m taking this opportunity to explain my steps and why I do them. My focus of late has been on trying to look at the photographic processing as an artist might. In this series I have refined my workflow into four basic steps which map into four processes any artist might recognize and probably uses.

1. The Sketch, the first step is to look at the composition and tonal values of the image. Not all images make for good photomosaics, they need to have a strong compositional toning. I have found the easiest way to construct my sketch is to work in black and white. There are dozens of methods to create a black and white image of your photos, including a lot of presets and filters. In fact it is a bit of a holy grail to many traditional photographers, that perhaps yearn for film days. A lot of these conversions try to closely match the original film look and many of those popular films had different responses to different colours, for example red are often represented by darker tones and some blues or greens will appear lighter. This could misrepresent my tonal composition, so I have found I like to do my black and white conversion myself just by bringing saturation right done (moving the slider fully to the left). Most photo editor let you do this and it is very simple in picasa or lightroom. I might crop my image and possibly use the tonal sliders to better balance the highlights and shadows. At this stage I also like to generate a test mosaic, for which I still use mosaic creator. I pay particular attention to the shape of the tessellations I am using for the mosaic tiles. In the case of this series I liked a simple diagonal diamond tile which compliments the birds feathers. What has happened now is the photo has been largely deconstructed into a very pixelated image that still has the lorikeet just visible but you will probably only see it if you know it’s there and half close your eyes. 
2. The Kuler Palette, the next step is to mix my colours. Whereas in the past I have used a conventional colour wheel and the theory of harmoniously and complimentary colours or computer based palette pickers (such as now in many web design tools). Adobe has such a utility called Kuler and under their Creative Cloud Service, the new version now has the facility to select the colours directly from your photo in a variety of moods from colourful, deep, dark or muted. This chooses 5 colour in a suitable palette and indicates the area on the photo that was used. You can also move these point to get subtly or even radically different colour schemes. You can save and edit these schemes in the more familiar colour wheel format. There are a few images on lorikeets in my series so I created a set of complimentary colour palettes, some harmonious some complimentary around the Lorikeets and their forest background  I thus choose my palette from a number of related images not just the photo I had selected to process. This hopefully reflects the way an artist might take in the atmosphere and ambience of a place, when painting “en plein air”. Not just "copying" a single photo.
3. The Brushes, my next step relates to how I make my marks, the type of brush strokes I wish to use is a simple artistic analogy. My objective here is to use the limited colour palettes I have selected above and introduce a little variety in the texture of that “brush mark”. I know that it is frequently this strength and direction of these small textural details that make the work of some artist so distinctive, appealing and interesting. In essence it is these marks that let you see the artist’s hand. For this aspect I have been experimenting with using mathematical patterns based around fractals (geometric shapes first identified by Benoit Mendelbrot that have special dimensional aspects) With the aid of a computer these crumpled shapes can be simulated in theoretically infinite detail and echo many real world phenomena. For this series I have use a open source program called Apophysis since it not only allows me to select and control the shape of the fractal trace it also allow the selection of the colours of the rendering, for both the background and the gradient of colours mapping the multidimensional fractal into a two dimensional rendering. I took care to use a strong triangular seed shapes for the fractals and thus into the patterns generated so as to compliment the diamond lozenge shape of the tilling for the mosaic. For this series I generated these  tile patterns in considerable detail (over 3000 pixel wide). I also generated over 350 coloured and textured tiles to give the mosaicking process a decent range of brush strokes to selected but limited palette of colour.
4. Applying the Paint, this is the final step and again carried out in mosaic creator. This time the resolution of the image to be generated is increased and the library of new coloured fractal tiles is used to infill the photomosaic, but within the same tilling as the preliminary grey scale mosaic. I return the colour (Hue) and use not only the best match for tone but also a closest match for colour. Many colours in the original photo thus needed to be “shifted” slightly to match the selected palette of colours and the degree to which tone is matched is also refined making the matching within the mosaicking process by going from minutes to almost hours for this final render.

If you now look closely the individual diamonds in my tile tessellations are now replaced with the swatches of the fractal flames, which add new colour and texture back into the image. The magic is that your eye now sees the photoimpression (see first image above for the full image) as having nice detail and the colours as perhaps richer but the bird is again realistic, it just no longer has the detail or exact colours of the original photo. These have been refined as if by an artists eye.

Adobe Hack Worse than originally reported

News about Abode Hack isn’t getting any better. Apparently the number of users whose information was stolen is now closer to 38 million, not 2.9 million as originally stated. More confessions on what was “illegally accessed” trickle out, at least part of the source code for Photoshop was also amongst the items taken. This is probably adobe’s core product and thus a bit risk for them. However checking their website, there is very little about the hack and it looks like business as usual and full steam ahead on the subscription model. That creative cloud is still looking very stormy where where I sit.

My favourite sub-story was the fact that some security “experts” where able to find the stolen information on-line and do some analysis of the most common passwords.Can you believe 1.9 million adobe customers have “123456”.
Even is you password is not in this list, if you have (or had) an adobe account it is time that you changed your password. Further if you use the same password elsewhere change those as well.

More Strange Lightroom Happenings

Lightroom on my studio laptop computer is misbehaving again. This time as I restarted lightroom, it wanted to update the catalogue it has already created in LR 4.4, which took a while then it took me through its introductory guide to the screen layout and program feature. As if I was doing a fresh install, which I wasn’t.Then all the folders in the catalogue showed the grey question mark indicating the files were missing, yet they where all there! Using Find missing files required more time but the catalogue seems fine now. Can’t help feeling that some sort of hidden update  has caused this and creative cloud is still my candidate for this mischief, but the plot thickened the next time I started lightroom when I got a warning about my beta test was about to expire, but I was not able to load the LR5.2 beta because the computer is still running Vista! My patience with adobe is being tested.

Was Creative Cloud to Blame?

Lightroom on my studio computer has suddenly developed a horrible server busy errors and any time I tried to run lightroom on that computer I just an endless series of switch to or retry messages. I had to use Task Manger to end task to escape the cycle. I hadn't loaded any new software but I suspected I must have some sort of malware problems but I try as I might I could not find any evidence of anything like that. I was contemplating reinstalling lightroom and decided to setup the lastest beta version of LRB5.2, alas this beta version won't run on windows Vista! Then yesterday I actually logged into Creative Cloud for the first time in a month or so and suddenly lightroom was working again?
Does this mean that the creative cloud has taken over ownership of my lightroom even though it is a purchased standalone copy and not one downloaded under the creative cloud subscription? Not sure how I'll test this, perhaps I'll just have not to use the creative cloud app for a month and see if the problem returns?

Thinking of colour as an artist might

The latest email news from creative cloud discusses a utility called Kuler. I have looked at it briefly but before its current format and iPhone app look a lot like the nice color scheme app I have on my android phone. Once I read Kuler could now look for various colour scheme from photos I figure it would be perfect for my next round of photoimpressions. However I decided to try it out on a more mundane example. I have often speculated that photographers could do a better job if they considered colour like an artist might.
The nice feature when building your colour scheme with Kuler is you have a range of automatic select colour modes (colorful, bright, dark, deep, & muted) which select a complimentary colour scheme from parts of the image. You see little circular spots above the parts of the image that colour appears. You can also just drag the dots to any part of the image you like and that colour becomes part of your custom swatch. (I have added the lines below to highlight the colour dots)

If you save the swatch, but you have to have an Adobe ID to do that, you can then edit the swatch. For example below I did alter the green to add more yellow, to bring the main colours into a more harmonious triad style. I left the brown beige (which has a yellow orange tint) as a compliment to the blue. Since the photo was a little dark I lightened the tones a little by dragging the circle in the colour swatch to the right on some of the colours. Like the impressionist I’m attempting to use colour to add light!

The next step was a bit of a shortcut, which involved using corel painter essentials which has a really neat palette matching facility feature. The downside was I have to “paint” the image by sampling the original photo but using a brush with the transformed colour. Its actually a fun process, albeit very manual and results in a much nicer image than any of those artistic filters built into phone apps and on-line editors. In this case my “brush” acted like a a flat soft pastel. My next task is to figure out how to use the downloadable .ase (Adobe Swatch Exchange) files. At the moment I can not find a way to read them into lightroom or photoshop elements, it would be nice if I could perhaps write a preset to undertake this palette guided colour adjustment directly on the photo there!
 
I’m quiet happy with the result. What do you think?