Hua Lamphong Station is my Muse

Hua Lamphong Station, Bangkok

Originally uploaded by Ian Fuller

I have been playing with the “Seim Effects” in Lightroom. Here I used “Vintage 1″ and “Dark Vignette”. What do you think?

Nikon Coolpix P6000 ISO Tests

I uploaded two test images to my Picasa Web Albums rather than Flickr. I did this because I am running out of upload ration for the month on Flickr and i wanted to test the latest PicasaWeb uploader Lightroom Add-In from Jeff Friedl.

Picasa Web Albums don’t seem to support a “Blog This” function directly so I am trying the two ways they offer to link to an album:

The simple

Click here

and the snazzy:

Nikon Coolpix P6000

Here are some notes on what I did:

• There are two tests – a “studio” image shot in my Bangkok apartment and a night view from the window of the apartment.
• In each case I took the same image with the P6000 on a tripod and I used the self-timer to virtually eliminate camera shake.
• I shot using the P6000′s RAW format – NRW – in aperture priority with the lens stopped down to F7.2. I thought this would produce the best quality image the camera was capable of. (I want to comment in another blog entry about NRW).
• When shooting JPEG files the P6000 supports ISO speeds up to ASA 6400. But in RAW mode the maximum is ASA 2000.
• I shot images at ISO 64 (base), 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and 2000. Those are all the options I had. Interestingly when shooting on Auto the camera often selects a strange ISO like 122 or 238. I haven’t seen a cemera do that before.
• Since I was shooting RAW I didn’t worry about White Balance. For the faux studio shot I put a Kodak gray card in the image and set the white balance to the colour of the card’s approximate centre in Lightroom.
• I imported all the images to Lightroom and only adjusted the white balance. I did no post processing on the out-of-the-window shots.
• I then printed the 7 images from each photo to JPEG files using a Lightroom template I made my very self. I am still learning about Lightroom’s capabilities here so this was good practice.
• The intention wasn’t to do a scientific comparison as the folks do at dpreview.com but I think I made my point. ISO 400 is marginally acceptable – anything above that is a disgrace to the Nikon name.

I am sure my “scientific method” leaves a lot to be desired. Trying it makes me admire the people who do this for a living. Please feel free to make suggestions and comments.

Lightroom 2.4 is Available

The Adobe download site is here.

There’s nothing in the update that I need. I wish I was waiting for support for my Hasselblad! I have not experienced any of the bugs listed in the release notes.

Nevertheless I tried downloading it in the Thai evening – early morning in California – and the download was impossibly slow and eventually stopped completely. It’s 130MB + and internet speeds from Thailand are not great. I miss my cable modem from when I lived in California.

I can wait to download it. The Adobe servers are sure to be heavily loaded.

It’s a pity that Adobe have to make users download 130MB mainly to support more cameras. Isn’t there an easier way of making updates more modular and smaller? Many big company vendors have the idea that downloads are always  fast and free: look at the number and size of Microsoft updates. That’s not true worldwide!

Paying For Lightroom Add-Ins

Today I decided to purchase the LR2Blog Lightoom add-in that I have been using in evaluation mode for a couple of weeks. The evaluation version is restricted to a maximum image size of 300px on the longest edge. That’s why some of the screenshots that I have posted here are a little hard to read.

I have no problem with paying for the useful functionality that these add-ins provide. I’ve happily paid for several of Jeff Friedl’s add-ins like the Flickr uploader that I use all the time.

Both Timothy Ames, the author of Lr2Blog and Jeff use PayPal to process payments. I think this is a good choice. I have a PayPal account and it is simple to use.

However, and there’s always a “however”, Tim’s implementation of the payment system is a bit frustrating. He requires payment in British Pounds. No problem there – PayPal converts automatically to pay from my US Dollar account and I think the exchange rate is competitive.

The first problem is that Tim requires an immediate confirmed payment whereas Jeff is more trusting. He allows a payment from my checking account (current account in the UK) which may take a few days to process. In the meantime he accepts the PayPal transaction id as proof of payment. That unlocks the full functionality of his add-in (for example a limit of 10 pictures per upload after a generous 6 week evaluation period).

Tim also restricts the functionality of Lr2Blog until you pay for it in contrast to Jeff’s method that downgrades the functionality a bit after the evaluation period.

For PayPal to make an immediate payment they either require a credit card number as backup or a credit balance in your PayPal account. I did not want to give PayPal my credit card information. I want to limit the number of entities that have that data and I don’t think it is necessary. So I had to do a transfer of funds from my bank account to a non-interest bearing PayPal account. That takes a few days and I only transferred a small amount to test the system.

I made the payment today and received a transaction id from PayPal. However, Tim’s add-ins don’t accept a PayPal transaction id. In his case a payment should kick off a process that sends me an email message with a separate serial number.

I did not receive the email message and several hours later I still haven’t. You can access a web page that attempts to get your serial number from the add-in. It takes either your PayPal transaction id or your email address. I entered the transaaction id and got an error message: “Sorry, No records have been found with that email address/transaction ID.”

I entered my email address and got a success message: “Thank you, an recapitulative email has been sent to …”. (Is recapitulative a word?)

But I didn’t get any messages so I still don’t have the prized serial number. I’ve tried this a number of times with the same results.

I am guessing there is some foul up in communications between Tim’s download site / PayPal and his server that produces serial numbers. I will probably get a flood of recapitulative emails soon. If I don’t I’ll have to try to contact Tim.

This is a bit frustrating but these things often are. I must remember that I am sitting in Bangkok Thailand trying to pay money to a developer in the UK from funds I have in the USA. That fact that it ever works is bordering on the miraculous.

My hat is off to Jeff Friedl for his smoother payment process. He must have some way of validating a PayPal transaction id in real time. He’s also a bit more trusting than Tim. If my payment fails I don’t know if he can cancel my registration.

Adobe has left the download and payment for add-ins very much up to the developer. I hate to think how much work Jeff and Tim had to do to support the “donationware” model. I wonder if it would be better for Adobe to develop an equivalent to the iPhone App Store. Amongst other things Apple handles all the payment processes in a standardized way for a cut of the proceeds. I wonder if Lightroom add-in developers and users would go for that?

Of course the Lightroom add-in market is minuscule compared with that for the iPhone and always will be. I guess Adobe do not think it is worth their investment for no more than a few hundreds of add-ins sold to Lightroom users in perhaps the tens of thousands worldwide.

Lightroom Import (Part 3)

Lightroom makes what is to me a strange choice of directory names when I choose to backup my imported files. I would have expected it to use the same folder structure as I chose for the images to be catalogued by Lightroom. That is what ACDSee does. But instead Lightroom invents folder names “Imported on ” + a text formatted date. I wonder why they did that?

So today Lightroom added a directory called “Imported on 24 June 2009″. I guess they use the Windows locale to decide on the date format – mine is set to UK.

TrueCrypt

I posted before about my Seagate 320GB USB drive that I use to store all my images. It slips into a pocket which is both very convenient and a huge danger. It is so easy to steal.

I decided to encrypt the whole drive using the TrueCrypt encryption tool. TrueCrypt is an open source free tool that works on Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux. It is a small, straightforward tool that does exactly what it is supposed to do with no fuss. It has never given me any trouble. That’s the greatest thing you can say about utility software: most of the time I don’t know it is there.

TrueCrypt allows you to either encrypt a whole drive or a file that acts as a virtual drive. It has lots of other features but these are the ones I use. Here is the top level feature list from the TrueCrypt web site:

Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.

Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive.

Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication).

Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.

Parallelization and pipelining allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted.

Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password: Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system.

Encryption algorithms: AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish. Mode of operation: XTS.

Now I have encrypted my Seagate backup drive, if anyone steals it and mounts it on their computer it looks like an empty volume. There’s no hint on the disk even that I used TrueCrypt. If my PC annoys me and I do what so many advise: ‘get a Mac’ I can attach my Seagate drive, transfer my backed up Lightroom catalog and be up and running in no time.

I have also encrypted about half of the 250GB drive on my Compaq laptop. I store all my data there including the current year’s photos in Lightroom. So Lightroom sees that volume on my laptop (drive M:) and the 2008 photos on the attached drive (drive N:). When 2010 comes I will tell Lightroom to look on N: for the 2009 images, delete them from M: and store 2010′s images there instead with a backup on N:. This is a bit hard to explain but it works for me.

I know that Windows XP Pro and Vista support encryption. I used that with my Thumbs Plus setup. The problem was when my old Sony laptop crashed and I wanted to use the external drive I was then using with a new PC. With Windows the encryption is linked to the user that encrypted the volume. This makes it a bit more transparent but it means that if I want to mount the encrypted files on another machine even with the same user name/password Windows will not decrypt the files. (Windows identifies the user using a GUID, not the name).

I am sure Microsoft thought this through when they designed the encryption facility, but they did not consider my use case. Fortunately I had an unencrypted backup on CD so I didn’t lose all my files but it was a close run thing.

One annoyance whenever you buy a disk is that the actual capacity is far less than the published capacity. Seagate says I bought a 320GB drive but TrueCyrpt only sees 298GB. I don’t know where the other 22GB – 7% – went.

I would have encrypted my entire PC drive but TrueCrypt doesn’t support that under XP – only Vista. I am sticking with XP for reasons I may explain in another post.

ThumbsPlus 8 Beta 5

ThumbsPlus 8 Beta 5.

I received an email message from Cerious Software today saying that the Beta 5 release is now available for download.

The message said

The major infrastructure changes are complete and I should be able to finish the remaining changes and fixes fairly quickly.

I wish Cerious success. I expect they had to do some major re-architecting of the software to support the new features but it has taken them a long, long time.

I may well upgrade to see what they have done, but I doubt it will persuade me to abandon Lightroom now I have made the switch. For one thing I have 28,000 and rising images in Lightroom I’d have to bring back to Thumbs Plus. Maybe their XMP support would make that easy. But from what I have read the XMP spec is a mess and it’s highly doubtful a cross-platform migration would DWIM (Do What I Mean.)

Note they say they now support the SQLite 3 database. Maybe that will allow them to support the Mac. That must be a big opportunity for them.

Lightroom: How Many Photos Can I Have In A Catalog? [Foto-Biz.com]

Lightroom: How Many Photos Can I Have In A Catalog? [Foto-Biz.com].

I was going to write my own entry on this subject, but the Foto-Biz blog beat me to it.

I think the post has a misunderstanding about the SQLite database that Lightroom uses. SQLLite, to quote their About page is

SQLite is a in-process library that implements a self-contained serverless transactional SQL database engine.

To me that says that you compile the database code into your application but it doesn’t mean that the database itself is all in-memory (virtual or real). The Lightroom catalog is a true database with indexes and tables all in one operating system file. SQLite manages that file.

One analogous PC product is Microsoft Access. Thumbs Plus uses Access for its database. The major drawback with Access is that it isn’t cross-platform and Adobe needed something that works on the Mac.

Enterprise databases like Oracle and SQL Server use a separate database server process. That makes them scalable to many users but it so much more work to administer. Lightroom is simple, but in its current architecture it will not scale to support multiple users of the same catalog.

Interestingly Thumbs Plus is more scalable than Lightroom: you can use any ODBC compliant database with it. I experimented with that using the popular free open source database MySQL. It works but the database administration was too much trouble for my single user environment.

The Foto-Biz blog further says:

Backing up does garbage collection and shrinks the catalog

I don’t think so: I believe a backup is a pure file copy. To shrink the catalog you need to Optimize it using the facility presented in the Lightroom Catalog Settings / General tab.

There’s a brief discussion of this at the Peachpit Photoshop Lightroom Reference guide here.

I don’t want to be too rude but I think the Foto-biz post contains a lot of mis-information.

For myself I want to have all my images in one Lightroom database and damn the disk space! I want to be able to find any photo I have taken at any time without having to think what database I stored it in. But I will never have time to import and index all the photos in my old Thumbs Plus database.

But from here on out I do not intend to use more than one Lightroom database. I want the catalog I have now to index every photo I take for the rest of my life.

Kodak to Retire Kodachrome, Its Oldest Color Film Stock – NYTimes.com

Kodak to Retire Kodachrome, Its Oldest Color Film Stock – NYTimes.com.

I rarely used slide film back in the days when I used film. I think the last time was when I took a Photoshop Class at De Anza College and the instructor asked us to use it for one project. I had to resurrect my trusty Canon A-1 for the purpose. Happy days.

Nevertheless I cannot help but feel a bit sad at the passing of an era. I wonder if Kodak could have sold the intellectual property and equipment to a small company who’d continue the product in a lower overhead environment.

Did Nikon Intentionally Cripple the Coolpix P6000?

I did some tests this evening to evaluate the image quality of the camera at various ISO settings.

I’ll post the results to my Flickr account. In summary anything above ISO 400 is pretty horrendous and ISO 2000 is unusable even in emergency.

This isn’t news – every review I have seen mentions it and I don’t think the P6000 is worse than many of its competitors.

BUT …

I do not know now a tier one manufacturer like Nikon can approve a camera for production with such low quality at relatively moderate ISO. This is their top-of-the-Coolpix line camera. It costs almost as much as an entry level DSLR.

I cannot understand what their product managers are thinking. Do they believe their customers are such idiots that they will buy a camera based only on the stickers in the store? Reviews and sample images are everywhere and I am sure anyone in the market for such a camera will have done some homework first.

As I confessed in an earlier post, I bought the camera for its integrated GPS. I knew its high ISO performance would be poor and was prepared to work around that. But seeing the results in a test of my own devising still makes me cross.

I can’t help thinking that maybe the DSLR lines are the most powerful at Nikon. Therefore they were able to tell the Coolpix product team to essentially cripple their offering so that it didn’t compete so much with the low end DSLRs that are more profitable (as a product line because of the add on sales of lenses and accessories. I bet not many people buy accesories for a Coolpix.)

I have zero factual evidence for this but it seems to me that there is no unavoidable reason for its low quality images at higher ISO, its sloth and strange gaps in its features at its price point.

I expected better of Nikon.