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.

Getting Satisfaction ...or Ignored?

I hope Adobe know they really aren't helping me to stay loyal. I have put the creative cloud frustration behind me, by not using it! However I am still interested in upgrading to Lightroom 5, specifically I do like the new radial filter also the healing brush and upright are nice improvements, but the beta versions I have tried out so far (LR5beta, 5.1beta & 5.2beta) all seem to be a bit too sluggish and all have some inconsistent issues (I assumed these were bugs and would get fixed, so I am waiting for the bug free version to purchase). I have downloaded and successfully installed lr5.3 beta anticipating good things. Yet I can still see the sluggishness (at least on my windows 7, 64 bit PC with 4 GB RAM) compared with LR 4.4 on the same machine. However I have now noticed significant performance deterioration on lr5.3 when I leave it open while working on other programs, (eg word & powerpoint) and/or having the computer hibernate. Reopening lr5.3 is then incredibly slow and lots of disc activity. I wonder if this is memory leakage and just classic virtual memory disk thrashing? I have to exit lightroom and restart it to get decent response and occasionally rebooting the computer is required. So I'm not encouraged to upgrade just yet.

So I decided to put my observations on the Adobe user forums, and see if other are seeing the same issues. Well the old forums don't seem to exist and I was guided into community powered support (aka getsatisfaction.com) so I pressed on and tried to post my query. That wasn't so easy and involved not only supplying my adobe log in details but also signing up for a getsatisfaction account as a member of the photoshop family. I seemed to be going around in circles. However the code to authenticate my email address for getsatisfaction didn’t arrive until a day later, so I couldn't do that at the time. Also I was guided to look for similar posts in the forums (and there are actually a lot about sluggish performance) before mine was accepted as something different, new and accepted as a new post. I did get a link to my post via an email BUT if I try to find it in the forum menus I can't, so I'm guessing others won't either. I suspect my observation are just going to be ignored, such is life I guess.

I also made an effort to check that I was part of the "improve adobe products program", which supposedly collects anonymous data on how lightroom is used and it seems adobe does realise I already was registered. This is another of those worrying things with benign sounding names where you provide information but never actually see any results or feedback. A thank you for participating and this is a summary of what we found would be nice.


I am still interested if others have seen this behaviour, but I'm not so confident getsatisfaction photoshop family is anything more than deflecting support rather than supplying it. The emperor’s new clothes in a cloud based crowd sourcing new fabric.

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.

Unfortunately Everpix is Shutting Down

I was becoming quiet a fan of the everpix service, particularly the flashbacks which reminded me of the best photos from the same date one, two or three years ago. I actually didn't look at every such email but I did like that momentary refresh of what was going on in the past and particularly checking if did I get any good shots. I also used everpix a few times to get a different organizational view of my photos. It was nicely transparent in what it did. Will I have to find another cloud service that does this, probably not. If anything it makes me glad I’m not putting all my stuff in the clouds.
So what happened? There is more detail available on the everpix site, but the essence is they have not been able secure sufficient funding to properly scale up the business.

“We are heartbroken to discontinue Everpix. It’s a project that is very close to each and every one of us on the team. We cannot be more thankful to all of our customers who supported us over the years. We hope you’ve enjoyed Everpix. We will miss it dearly.”   …. everypix team

PhotoFriday :: Swift

Hawk swoops a crescent moon.

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Swift

Hung and open …”meet the artist” next weekend

My exhibition “An Artistic Journey :: In Search of Sir John Monash” is hung and open at the Highway Gallery in Mount Waverley. It includes a range of my works, few of which I have been posted on the social webs, so if you are in Melbourne and interested in my geological panels, photography, and photo mosaic collages please consider coming along to the “meet the artist” on Sunday 10th. November.

My Monash works follow on from my previous geological panels and paintings, on the surface they are firmly represented by earthly things, the soil and rocks. Yet they also reflect on three key aspects of Sir John's life. His military life, his life setting up the SEC and powering Victoria and his passion to build the Shrine of Remembrance. They have been created with the assistance of an arts and culture grant from the Monash City Council, which allowed me to learn about casting and moulding, to bring stronger dimensionality into my geological panels, experiment with a range of materials and hold this exhibition.

Late Afternoon Spring Light

The spring weather, particularly in the period from the grand final until the Melbourne Cup is normally pretty special. A great time to enjoy the garden and wonderful lighting for keen photographers. This year the weather have been fluctuating been cold wintry days and hot almost summer patches. Today however it was near perfect,

The Importance of Provenance

I have been watching the great ABC TV series where Edmund Capon tells the story of the Art of Australia. Given that the series is only in three parts it is not surprising that the works presented are just a snippet of what was going on, albeit a handpicked subset that tries to represent the import works that bought change. However it was watching the discussion of the intense group of artist in the Heide Circle that bought home to me one very important aspect of photography for artist, often overlooked. That is the important task of just recording what is going on, establishing provenance, where did the works come from? why where they created? or simple what is the work behind the artist’s shoulder? Not every one will be famous and have future gallery curators forensically combing through their old photo collection, perhaps it will be more like someone interested in your art checking the social web. Galleries of your works are probably not going to please them as much as a picture of you working of some important piece (especially the work they want to buy!)

These are a couple of photos of me working on the clay pattern for one of my bas-reliefs of John Monash for my next exhibition “In Search of Sir John Monash” to be held at The Highway Gallery, Mt. Waverley, 2nd to 15th November 2013.

lovelocks or just another form of graffiti?

who gives a TOS?

Google are about to updated their terms of service (TOS) and it is very refreshing to see an on-line service provider, firstly notify its users about the changes and also focus on those aspects that let the user control what is to be shared. However the common click to accept terms, expressed in very verbose legalese, are seldom read by most of us. we just want to join up not spend half and hour or more trying to figure out what is meant.

If you are creative type and produce original works it is really in your interest to review the TOS of all on-line services you use. Many services assume ownership of anything your uploaded into their services, Facebook and Instagram assume you given then very draconian rights over redistribution, Dropbox which one held part of the middle grade have recently changed to claim more rights over your content.  Flick/Yahoo! and google+ are generally considered better. Terms of Service are fine, and necessary, they cover such things as the services right to cancel your account if you do bad things and the fact that they may take little or no responsibility for what you upload, most don’t claim they own your content but that statement will probably be followed by a clause that you “grant them non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post”. If you are not ok with this perhaps it is best not to use that service!

If like most of us you have tried to read the fine print and are still uncertain, here is a community (ToS;DR Terms of Service Didn’t Read) and website that understand and they aim to address and fix the biggest lie on the web “I have read and agree to the Terms” in one click!

Flickr …further into the darkness?

Flickr has begun unveiling some more changes, specially at the moment it is a different layout for the main photo viewing page. Its darker, and more “pictorial”, a lot of the text information that was spread around the original format loaded into the sidebar with more icons. Is this more intuitive? I’m not sure, but the images are clearly dominant now. The Photo Page is probably the most important display in flickr, so I want them to get it right, they can take their time and not overwhelm us with change for change sake. What I noticed is that quiet a few features that where available under the three dot icon aren’t their yet, so for the time being after you had a play with the new layout you will probably want to get back to the old layout, which is the bottom option when you click on the blue help & feedback button on the lower left.

Where are these weird links coming from?

Looking back through my blog post I have come across a number of weird links, Not all are like this but this one is really weird. I can only assume either google has been doing some “recoding” of links to other items in blogger and picasa web albums or some entity (a hacker or scammer) has managed to access my google account. Just in case of the later I’ve changed my password yet again! It is possible theses are related to changes in google+ photo. They seem easy enough to fix once you know which are the broken links, you can just edit them with the correct link location, which in the case of photos is a bit or work BUT I don;t feel link searching through every link in my 1480 posts and manually fixing the ones that are broken! 

This not one of the typical messages given in google’s help for hacked sites. Has anyone else seen massages like this?

In light of the adobe hack it is probably that now id the right time to change your passwords on every social site (and close the accounts on those ones you not regularly using)..

Catch 22 on the way to Error 500 and other nightmares

I was trying to forget about my frustrations with adobe and do a bit more testing on uploading RAW files to Google+ for a blog post. Alas I hit further frustration there as well, in preparing my blog post about which format I use and why I took a series of comparative photos and realizing that any posted images would just be jpeg version I decided to upload them as RAW files via my google drive. All nice and easy, just takes a little time the sync the files, The problems started when I tried to share the directory and get a link for my blog post to the album I had just created. If I tried to do this via google+ I just get a post into google+ and I can not figure out what the hardlink to that post might be, If there even is one. So then I looked in the picasa web album view, but attempting the old share now goes into the google+ share only now it doesn't work and I managed to get the error 500 a few times. What I could do was just connect to the album in picasa web and copy that link into my blog post. Trying the same approach in google+ photo, gets a much longer link string and at first didn't work and then it did! This prompted me to remember that strange warning about the address being changed when I was first investigating the updates in google+ photo. Ok I still don’t know what this means but as I look back in my blog a lot of the images are not displaying correct in the blog but do display when clicked on. They have very weird link names? Very puzzling?

I am starting to worry I’m just becoming a bit of a grumpy, and I’m not going to waste more time investigating in the hope it will all be fixed,  Now as I am writing this I got a notice that google+ has Auto Awesomed me! Not the original photos in google drive but via the jpegs in my blog post? Its all a bit to incestuous, They are meant as comparative photos not a animated movie btw.

Really google does your right hand know what the left is doing?
Please leave Picasa and Picasa Web uncompromised.

.JPG vs RAW (.PEF) vs .DNG

arning, I must preface this post with the advice that this is very much my personal view, based on my experience rather that on a calibrated benchmark comparison. I have the choice of using jpeg, two types of propriety RAW  and .DNG as an alternative Raw format on my Pentax K20D. I have found the decision as to which format to standardize on hard to resolve and opted to save both RAW+jpeg where there is the such an option. So here is a little about my (in)decisions and why.

All my current and past digital cameras and cameraphones have all captured .jpeg files and my photo collection is dominated by that format. I have come to appreciate picasa as the very best way to manage jpeg files, its fast, simple and behaves. My many mistress project has lead me to see that previewing jpeg thumbnails is by far my preferred way to cull and organise my photos as I load them. At this stage whilst I might do a little cropping I tend not to do any elaborate post processing. Occasionally at this stage I will email images and very occasionally upload them to the net which generally require resized jpeg version (again picasa does this well) without much photo retouching.

There is also no doubt in my mind that you can coax much more out of RAW files than you can get out of the equivalent jpeg. The reasons for this is buried in the image "development" process happening in the camera, to take the sensor readings and produce an image. There are several steps, demosaicing of the Bayer array, white balance assumption, tone mapping, colour saturation and contrast, then image compression before it is written to the camera memory card.. Probably the biggest limitation is that the image must be packed into an 8 bit representation. Each step requires interpretive decision about how to preform the development and many are not easily recovered if the steps lead to less than desirable processing. That’s where having access to the original information in a RAW format file is a big advantage, but now the steps must be specifically undertaken by the photographer, which takes time and experience. Often a lot of time! The jpeg representation, or at least a suitable small sized thumbnail of it, is also needed at the camera itself to be display on the LCD screen on the back of the camera. 

Pentax JPEG *** (5.9MB)	Pentax JPEG **** (10.0MB)

There is a trade off between the time take to write the large RAW files and the smaller jpeg files, which can mean that you can take fewer images per second, because there can be a bottleneck writing to the card, When you just shoot raw, the jpeg development steps are likely to be run anyway, not only for the image on the LCD screen but most Raw files also include this jpeg thumbnail, for use in quickly previewing the Raw file contents. So in RAW+jpeg both file formats must be written to you to your memory card and it is then just an issue of time taken to write both and extra space required. So fewer unique images fit on the memory card before it is full. Rather than opt for a larger memory card. I've chosen to have several 4 & 8GB cards that have faster read write access, so other than having to change cards more often I probably don't see much difference. There is one exception which is tracking birds in flight and I'll discuss this in a future post.

Pentax RAW  .PEF (13.2MB)	Pentax RAW  .DNG (23.1MB)

I have a Pentax which is one of the few manufacture that offer DNG as an alternative RAW format, Leica and Hasselblad are the only others I know of that can save to DNG in the camera. DNG can have one significant advantage, in my view, the files can be 15 to 20% smaller than the equivalent RAW files if they are lossless compressed. This is may be why many photographers have chosen to convert their RAW files to DNG on import. Anyone that has tried the convert on import into lightroom will know that this is simple but a very time consuming process, On a full card this is not just time for a quick coffee this is tme to have dinner and some. However when I choose that format on my Pentax K20D camera, the DNG files are uncompressed and they are almost double the size of the PEF files. Against this there are some differences, just differences not improvements, in how the images are rendered particularly in lightroom and I can't see any advantage capturing in DNG

Cannon JPEG (4.5MB)	Canon RAW .CR2 (16.8MB)

Because of the time/file size trade-off I have stuck with using more compressed versions of the jpeg files (on my Pentax this is the JEPG *** rather than the uncompressed JPEG**** format) when using the RAW+jpeg. This compressed option is the only one available on my canon when using RAW+jpeg. The images posted above are all jpeg files of reduced size, so they can be dispalyed on the web. So it is not possible to show the subtle details and differences here. I have also uploaded the unedited files to my google+ JPEG vs RAW vs DNG photo album. If you are interested this may given extra insight.

So I hope you understand why I choose to store RAW+jpeg and have opted to stick with the PEF format (and .CR2) rather than use DNG from the camera. I do use the DNG format in some special circumstances but that’s for another post.This discussion is prompted by to my thinking longer term focus

 Thanks again to Jessica Hische for her great drop caps.

Ahhh! Adobe, why didn't you tell us?

On Friday my patience with adobe ran very thin.. I have had enough of the message that my beta test had run out, every time I start my computer, especially as I was never able to install it. Then I got the following message as I tried to log into creative cloud. I wanted to use Kuler to finish an art project for a self imposed deadline to print works for an upcoming exhibition.

The message looked authentic but seemed suspect to me, why was the only option to change my password and why was this necessary but on checking the links names I followed the instructions, and waited ...and waited …and waited for the promised email. After 20 minutes I gave up and did other things. About half an hour later the email had arrived and I followed a new clink on link which only gave me the option of typing in a new password and a duplicate. Now this made me really suspicious! Being sent a false login page to capture your password is a very common phishing scam. However on investigation I again felt that the link address I could see and the mysterious email address cs-auto from adobe were possible legit. So I did some what cautiously change my password. Ok no drama after that, other than I missed my self imposed deadline. I also suggest if you in the same position, consider changing your password a second time, like I did, but  this time accessing adobe.com and my adobe directly, not by a link from an email!

Now I see what was going on, Adobe has had a massive hacker attack, and only today can I find information from them about their "Customer Security Alert". If Adobe knew about this on the 17th September why didn't they notify their subscribers back then?

More importantly why did adobe choose to run something to force everyone involved to change their passwords,

1. Without telling them why ?
2. Doing it such a scammish fashion?

So what am I doing now, making plans for an “adobe free” studio computer!

Not so busy

This corner is supposed to be Melbourne's busiest, wasn't so busy at lunchtime yesterday, just one horse and cart?

Popular Image formats

opular image formats, change with time. At the moment jpeg and raw are the dominant players in storage of photographs from digital cameras. Actually RAW is not a format per se it just means the camera manufacturers format for the complete exposure information has been stored directly from the camera sensor, it is general uncompressed (and therefore large), not enhanced in any way (it will usually look flat on first view) but will have a higher dynamic range and often a higher bit depth than the equivalent Jpeg image. RAW file are often described as digital negatives, which is not truly correct in detail but is a good analogy because, like a film negative a raw file typical require some development or processing before it can be shared on the web (usually after being exported as a jpeg file) or Printed.

Adobe’s DNG (Digital NeGative) is heavily promoted by Adobe as the “standard” RAW format, yet few camera manufactures, especially the bigger ones have not yet embraced it. I have a pentax which does offer DNG as an alternative RAW format, Leica and Hasselblad are the only others I know of that can save to DNG in the camera. DNG does have one significant advantage, in my view, the files can  be 15 to 30% smaller than the equivalent RAW file when it is compressed. So many photographers convert to this format as they upload there photos. Another advantage, which is a two edged sword, is that the metadata and details of how an image is processed can be save in the DNG file, where as no camera metadata and processing details normally have to be stored in a separate file (eg an .xmp side car file) for propriety RAW format. The hidden danger here is you can unintentionally overwrite your original image with new edit and potentially degrade your image in an unrecoverable way.This also makes the DNG file less like a negative and more like a digital print.

JPEG  (.jpg, or .jif) is by far the most popular format for the capture of images on cameras and smart phones and their display on the web. It uses lossy compression, which means some detail is discarded to enable smaller file sizes. The degree of compression is generally selectable and is a trade-off between size and image quality. There are several variation but the common format adopted by camera manufacturers embedded metadata about the camera setting in the file header. It also contains delails of the colour space to be used. Virtually all photographic software and browsers are be able to read and render jpeg files.

PNG was designed as a lossless successor to the gif format, largely because of l;licencing fears over the gif format, and it is probably still the most wisely used lossless format for web display being supported by all browsers. Unlike gif it does not support animation, but it does support extended pelleted colour scheme (eg 324bit RGB & 32bit RGBa). It does not store metedata about the image, which may explain why it have been ignored by camera manufactures Its popularity is mainly in computer graphics and illustration, but can be used for saving photographs to be displayed on the web.

The TIFF format is one of the first image formats, it can use lossless as well as lossy compression and does have higher bit depth for its colour rendition (ie 16bit rather than 8bit). It was for a while the format of choice for very large images and a few camera manufactures did have it available as an optional format. It can be processed by most (but not all) photo management software and is still popular in the graphics, digital illustration areas, as well as the output format of choice from some HDR programs. Most web browser will do a reasonable job rendering tiff files, The underlying tiff standard has nit had a major updated since the early 90’s, but it is another format under the control of adobe.

GIF was once a very popular format to display of images on the net, because of its generally smaller size. It is still popular for some aspects of web page design because it can incorporate transparent zones within the image. a variant of the format also allows animated graphics to be created, and these have become very popular (overly so). If you load 3 to 5 similar images into google+ it will create an autoawesome, which is an animated gif stop motion style animation from those photos. I’m not aware of any cameras that capture photos as gif (some wencams and scanner can). There has been a lot discussed recently on how to pronounce the name of this format I still favour Gif (the sound G sound as in giraffe) but apparently one of the developers of the form prefers Jiff (pronouced with a soft J as in Jill)

Webp is a new format, specifically developed for web display,that is being developed by google but as opensource. It offers significantly small files and faster download. It is available in both lossless and lossy formats to give greater compression removing some detail. It does provide for storage of metadata. It is not yet widely supported but the chrome browser and applications like everpic can display it now. And while on pronunciation this is often called "weppy"

The variation of RAW, DNG, GIF & TIFF are all propriety formats potentially under the control of specific companies, and some worry that if and when these companies fail or probably worse they suddenly enforce strict licensing on patents, then these formats "could" potentially become difficult to use and exchange. I suspect the large number of existing images in these formats will ensure ongoing support.

Finally this is not a comprehensive list of image format, see this wikipedia comparison page to find other formats, but the formats discussed here are probably the most common ones you will come across.

Show which formats do I use?

Thanks again to Jessica Hische for her great drop caps.

PhotoFriday :: Natural Mirror

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Mirror

More experiments with RAW on Google+

Despite the fact that I couldn't yet see any compelling reason to go over to uploading RAW images into google+, I still wanted to have a play and see what it can offer. So I went an took a couple of pictures of the gingko in my cretaceous garden. I had been a bit worried because it has not spouted any leaves and it its well into spring. Luckily they appeared two days ago and are developing well. The first set where taken with my pentax, which lets me save files in either the pentax propriety raw format .pef or adobe's .dng format, I've also uploaded the .jpg  version captured at the same time. I was actually a bit disappointed because whilst I thought the background was out of focus it was a bit strong (more on that later)

I then took another two photos with my canon this time with the aperture wide open to dramatize the depth of field blur.

Normally I upload to google+ via picasa but trying to upload raw files from it triggers a jpeg version to be generated in the process, not what I wanted so I decided to do this via my google drive. You can also upload via your browser, but that is a bit more work. Whereas yesterday auto enhance seemed to be toggled off, today it was toggled on, so this turned out to be a fairly low effort way to get half decent renditions of my photos. The downside is the background sync from my google drive took several minutes, so its a case of copy to the google drive locally and go and get a cup of coffee.

Whilst once I was very interested in the "auto fix" features of photo processing software I've come to prefer to tweak the sliders myself. This of course take time. The google+ plus path is classic google (I'm feeling lucky) where its all done for you behind the scenes. I must admit it isn't bad but I still prefer to do my own adjustments so I had a look how I might be able to fix the background dominance. I used the .pef file and I chose the selective adjust option which allows you to select a part of the image and this will find similar pasrt of the image to be selectively processed, You can adjust the size of a circular area to work with and the effect feathers off outside that (its shown in red above). You can also have more than one selective area. It does not offer blurring as an adjustment but I was able to decrease contrast and reduce saturation to take the background dominance away. Achieving something closer to what I remember in the view finder as I was photographing.

I'm impressed there is a lot of power here, if you are already have good software for processing RAW files I'm sure you'll be able to do better.  However if you are new to RAW, have it on you camera but have been afraid to try it, give google+ photo and google drive a go, they are free after all, you just need a google account and be using a chrome browser. Oh that's right, also make sure you have a good data plan first because uploading the large RAW files will be a bandwidth hog.