I’ve been managing color on Lightjet, Durst, ZBE Chromira, Agfa, Kodak and Noritsu machines since the mid-nineties. As a color management consultant with a background in photo lab work, this is close to my heart and an area of specialty for me.  I’ve traveled across several continents consulting with some of the most demanding photo labs in the industry. I’ve also enjoyed a close relationship with Noritsu for over 10 years and have lectured, consulted and trained with them internally. So perhaps I am in a decent position to respond to some comments that I am surprised to hear people make on forums and elsewhere.

“If you want a fully color managed workflow I don’t think any silver halide process will provide that” – anon

Safe to say I’ve implemented fully color managed workflows with every silver halide machine on the market. It’s totally doable and has been for many years, but unfortunately some exceptional know-how can be required. (more…)

1 ) Make adjustments in the proper order working from the top down. Set white balance first, then Exposure, etc. Don’t skip around.

2 ) Ignore the midtones when adjusting Exposure and consider only the white clipping point. One must ignore the midtones as they will be adjusted via Brightness later in the workflow. If some whites are clipped at 0, option/alt drag the Exposure slider to the left until all colored pixels are removed.

3 ) Skip or be modest with Clarity. While lots of clarity creates a look that’s trendy right now, you might be surprised at how poor it can look when printed and compared to other images. I find that small prints (4×6, 8×10, etc) don’t need any clarity but larger prints (20×24, 60×94, etc) benefit from greater amounts. It’s worth considering scaling the amount of clarity with the size of a print.

4 ) In HSL, adjust Luminance first, Saturation second and Hue last. Be modest with adjustments and zoom to 1:1 looking for problems along edges.

5 ) Don’t skip correcting for Chromatic Aberration in the Detail panel! Chromatic Aberration is one of the most overlooked features yet it can easily improve the sharpness of an image in addition to removing unwanted color fringing. Hold down the Option/Alt key and look at the corners of your frame at 1:1 while adjusting chromatic aberration.

6 ) When applying a dark edge vignette, use a Post Crop vignette with a feather amount close to 80. The default feathering value of 50 is too low.

7 ) Pro users should consider making custom DNG profiles for their camera(s) with the XRite ColorChecker Passport. If not, the “Adobe Standard” is more likely than the other profiles (Camera Landscape, etc) to render pleasing results with a wider variety of images.

8 ) Develop images in Color mode before switching the treatment to Grayscale. Not only will the final grayscale product look better but the image will be ready for color printing should you decide to do so in the future. After applying a Greyscale treatment, re-adjust contrast (if necessary) and use Grayscale Mix (in the HSL panel) to simulate in front of the lens filtration (yellow filter, red filter, etc). This greyscale procedure will yield better results than a haphazard one.

9 ) Use Snapshots to save different versions of your images (ex: grayscale and color, cropping for different aspect ratios, etc). Saving snapshots with numbers is quick and can show a progression of development (when appropriate). Example: 1, 2, 3, 4color, 4grayscale, Import.

10 ) Uncheck the “Apply auto grayscale mix when converting to grayscale” checkbox in Lightroom’s preferences under the Presets tab. Auto=Yuk.

11 ) Set the background to white. You can do this by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on the background color around the image area when set to “Fit” to screen. While a white background may not be as pretty as the default dark gray, it will give you a better idea as to how an image’s highlight and mid-tone densities will appear when printed. A juxtaposition with paper white is critical. Toggle between white and dark grey if you like, but always view and adjust with a white background before printing or exporting.

12 ) Print! Image development can only be mastered by producing gorgeous prints. A lot can and will be learned along the way.

Fortune Cookie of the day: Moderation is good for all things in life, especially with clarity, saturation, vignetting and HSL adjustments.

Eric Chan has generously responded to a need in the color community by bringing his “Convert to MonacoLAB” application to the Mac OS. Convert to MonacoLAB allows color geeks to measure Bill Atkinson 1728 or 4096 RGB printer profiling targets in either MeasureTool or ColorPort and convert the measurements into the LAB format that MonacoPROFILER requires.

Unlike the previously popular “Extract Monaco LAB” applescript, “Convert to MonacoLAB” is Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6.x) compatible. The Windows version is compatible with XP and Vista; it should also be compatible with Windows 7, though it has not yet been tested on that platform.

“Convert to MonacoLAB” uses a convenient droplet that allows the user to drag and drop a measurement file onto the droplet icon for processing. The processed measurement file retains the original file name and conveniently adds the “MP” suffix at the end of the filename.

You can read more about and download the Mac and Windows versions of Convert to MonacoLAB at Eric’s website. Here’s the direct link to the Mac download and the Windows download.

I’m a big fan of Bill Atkinson’s 1728 profiling targets and have been using Eric’s application in Snow Leopard to get measurement data into MonacoProfiler for generating printer profiles. I’m also a big fan of Eric’s work at Adobe. A big thanks to him for making this utility.

I’m pretty impressed with LR3’s new demosiacing, sharpening and noise reduction in LR3’s new process rendering. To the right is an image taken at this month’s workshop in Mono Lake (larger view). This is a 15 second “star points” exposure taken at 1600 ISO with a 5Dmk2.  Below is a side-by-side detail comparison, processed in LR2.5 on the left and LR3b on the right. Click the image below to view at it’s full resolution.

Tom Hogarty, Lightroom’s Product Manager, has lots to say about this beta in his blog. In it he says:

“We’re only halfway through our noise reduction efforts but believe that you will be very pleased with the results so far. We’ve actually disabled the previous Luminance Noise Reduction so that you can focus on evaluating the Color Noise reduction implementation.”

I’m finding a few reasons to actually increase luminance noise reduction on high res long exposures in low light, so I’m yearning to see these sharpening tool evolve a little further from where they are in this beta. But I’m impressed with the results so far.

Tom also points out that images previously developed in previous versions of Lightroom will initially appear the same in LR3 with a warning triangle that appears above the upper left hand corner of the Histogram. If this triangle is pressed, the image will be re-rendered using LR3’s new processing, including the new demoasiacing, sharpening and noise reduction algorithms. The screen grabs above were taken before and after clicking this triangle using LR’s detail panel defaults. It appears that LR3’s new process quality improvements are best seen on high ISO images, especially those from 20+ megapixel cameras files.

Q) Which is better for scanning – negative or positive film?

A) Generally speaking, color negative (C-41) film is a dream to scan relative to transparency (E6) and black and white films. Color negative not only captures a huge dynamic range but compresses it to a very small dynamic range that’s easy for scanners to extract.  Color negative film allow allows the photographer to print in either color or black and white. Images can be scanned in color mode and in front of the lens filtration (yellow filter, red filter, etc) can be simulated during the process of converting the image to a grayscale mode. Fuji has concentrated recent efforts on tweaking their new color negative films to be even more optimal for scanning. Some B&W neg films (like TMAX 100) can be problematic because they can exceed the dynamic range of the scanner so you have to loose some of either the highlights or shadows.

Now, there are always exceptions. Some scanner software applications aren’t great at handling color from color negatives. Some drum scanner applications, for example, just don’t know what to do with the orange mask and it would take a super skilled operator to overcome the software limitations to get good scan out of it. Most drum scanning applications were designed to scan transparency films so you might hear an operator say E6 is best for scanning (at least on *his* scanner system). Finally, some people might prefer to shoot their favorite B&W neg film for the sake of the unique grain structure.

Imacon/Hasselblad and Nikon scanners are great for color negative scanning and with those scanners you’ll probably want to shoot color neg, especially Fuji’s latest flavors.

The sRAW (small RAW) format is gaining popularity among 20+ megapixel camera owners that occasionally don’t want as much resolution or such a large file size. sRAW files are half to a quarter of the resolution of a full RAW and this equates to smaller storage requirements and faster processing for projects that don’t require as much resolution. sRAW files do maintain a nearly all the development flexibility of a true RAW file, and therefore are often more desirable than a less flexible JPEG.

sRAW files aren’t actually true RAW files. The sensor’s true RAW data is demosaiced and rendered to a lower resolution file and saved in the YCC color mode. For this reason the final file size isn’t quite as small as one might hope (IE: quarter resolution sRAW files are about half the file size of a full RAW file). Unfortunately, when these files are currently converted to DNG, images are converted to less efficient RGB space and the file size increases – negating some of the file size and processing benefits.

The chart adove illustrates the file sizes of a full res (resolution) raw file, a half res sRAW1 file, a quarter res sRAW 2 file before and after conversion to DNG, and a full res large JPEG.

Perhaps the DNG file format will be updated to include YCC sRAW files at their smaller file size. In the meantime, if you wish to keep file sizes small when shooting sRAW, I recommend sticking with the proprietary sRAW format that your camera uses (CR2, NEF, etc).

Apple’s long anticipated 10.6 “Snow Leopard” operating system is now shipping. Snow Leopard’s modern cocoa code base promises system-wide responsiveness, reliability, smarter multiprocessor utilization and multitasking on existing Intel based hardware. Geek Mac and Windows users alike should read this in-depth article on Snow Leopard’s under the hood technologies. As with any major operating system upgrade it is important that we make a list of our applications and printer drivers and check for compatibility before making the switch.

Printer driver compatibility is probably the main issue that will force some users to delay upgrading. Snow Leopard’s CUPS printing structure is different enough from the previous version that existing printer drivers may not work. While Apple has their generic “Gutenprint” driver for many common printers, professional will want to wait for the official drivers from the printer manufactuers. Printer manufacturers are weary of releasing 10.6 compatible drivers before they’ve had the chance to test them throughly with the final version. I’ve been told to expect 10.6 compatible printer drivers for currently shipping printers to be released 2-6 weeks after Snow Leopard’s ship date. Expect a slightly longer wait for printer drivers to older, discontinued printers.

Caution is advised when upgrading to Snow Leopard. So far I have seen several color management issues that involve printing in Snow Leopard. Check for compatibility of your applications and printer drivers at the Snow Leopard Compatibility Wiki prior to upgrading. Users should test 10.6 throughly on an extra computer before upgrading production workstations. At the same time, mac users shouldn’t wait too long – this new operating system is ground breaking and will bring significant advantages that will be further realized in future applications (Creative Suite 5 for example). 100 Gigs of RAM, 100 Terabytes of hard drive space and 100 core processors might sound crazy today but Snow Leopard foresees this future.

Having used several cameras for a lot of night photography lately, I think the Canon 5Dmark2 is quite likely the best camera on the market for night photography right now. Here are some of the highlights:

6400 ISO for testing
Being able to take photos at 6400 ISO has huge benefits for the night photographer. Night photographers tend to waste a bunch of time taking long exposures only to discover they need to reshoot with a better exposure. Testing exposures at high ISOs can save huge amounts of time but doing so has been clunky as it requires complicated math when using a camera that has a ISO ceiling of 1600. Now that that ceiling has been lifted to include 6400 ISO we can make a direct translation from ISO 6400 exposures in seconds to ISO 100 exposures in minutes. For example, a 15 second exposure at ISO 6400 is the same as a 15 minute exposure at ISO 100 (Canon’s native ISO). Nikon users can figure that a 15 second exposure at 12,800 ISO is the same as a 15 minute exposure at ISO 200 (Nikon’s native ISO).

Either way, this means a night photographer can quickly determine the optimal exposure at a high ISO before committing to a long, final exposure at the native ISO. This has provided me with significant time savings and more optimal exposures on the 5Dmark2.

Low noise
To make a long story short, the noise levels are shockingly low, even during very long exposures (like 30+ minutes at ISO 100). Even 6400 ISO images are less noisy than one would expect, (more…)