7 images of King Taksin's statue
It’s hard to get close to the equestrian statue of King Taksin in Thonburi, Bangkok. There’s too much traffic. Fortunately the #3 bus circles the statue. I shot a series of pictures from its open window as we inched our way around.
It’s a lovely Sunday morning in Bangkok. The sky is clear and it isn’t too hot or humid. I took some photos out of the window using the Nikon Coolpix P6000′s “Landscape” mode. That reminded me on a minor annoyance in Lightroom 2. I wanted to see if Adobe have fixed it in the Lightroom 3 Beta.
No, they haven’t, but it probably isn’t their fault.
But Lightroom 2 and 3 Beta both show Exposure Program Normal for the Nikon Coolpix P6000.
I assume this is because Nikon store this information in a non-standard format and Adobe don’t extract it from the file.
I checked my old Canon EOS-300D in Landscape mode. Lightroom 2 does not display an EXIF Exposure Program setting at all.
That may mean that the storage of this information in the EXIF is not standard and Adobe made a special case for the EOS-30D.
I tried searching my pictures for those taken in Landscape mode using Lightroom’s filters. It isn’t a standard filter and it does not work if I set up a text filter on “Searchable Metadata” or “Searchable EXIF” for the string “Landscape”. that’s a bit inconvenient. I’d like to be able to do that.
I tried it in both version 2 and version 3 with the same result. The fact that Adobe use the term “searchable” implies that some EXIF (and IPTC) fields are not searchable.
The problem is obviously not simple. My current guess is that “Exposure Program” is an enumerated type rather than a string and each manufacturer encodes it differently.
I know “serious photographers” don’t use these scene modes at all. On Canon cameras, for example, you cannot shoot in Raw if you use a programmed mode. I am a pragmatist. I’ll use whatever it takes to get the picture I want. I do draw the line at what I think are silly modes like “Food“.
Michael Willems has offered to answer any photography related questions on his blog. See http://blog.michaelwillems.ca/2009/10/24/ill-take-your-questions/.
If you’re reading this, zip over to Michael’s blog and test his knowledge!
After my test of the new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta “Grain Tool” yesterday I thought I’d do a comparison with the digital noise that is the modern equivalent of film grain.
I used my Nikon Coolpix P6000 and shot a similar scene. Again I used a tripod, aperture priority and varied the film speed through the camera’s range from ISO 64 all the way to ISO 6400.
Note that when the camera is in one of its auto modes it will set the ISO at values between these steps. You can also set a “fixed range” of ISO speeds. I normally confine it to choosing speeds between 64 and 200. That’s a nice feature given the noise that the small sensor generates.
Note also that the maximum size picture you can take at ISO 3200 and 6400 is 2048 x 1536 (2M). I guess Nikon is ashamed to make bigger pictures with so much noise. Thus the last two pictures in the gallery below are not comparable with the rest.
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Learning Center already has a load of short videos on the new and revised features of Lightroom 3.
Trouble is, I am not keen on learning by video – I much prefer a book or paper. Also the Internet is so slow here in Bangkok that it is a pain to try and watch / listen to anything streaming.
It is better to download the file and play it later. But that isn’t always permitted.
The online Help for the Lightroom 3 Beta isn’t up yet so these videos may be the only documentation available.
I guess I am showing my age by preferring something I can read to something that I can watch / listen to. I haven’t been enthused enough to listen to the rest of Chris Orwig’s Lightroom 2 Training for that reason. Chris speaks so fast it’s sometimes hard for me to keep up and pausing / rewinding / playing the video is a pain. With reading I set my own pace.
Video’s the current trend so I’ll have to run with it. I should look at the video on the Grain Tool since I used it with zero information yesterday.
Adobe added a Grain Tool to the Develop Module of Lightroom 3 for its recent Beta. They describe it thus:
While Lightroom’s improved noise reduction will give you incredibly smooth images, sometimes you want a little texture or grain in your images. We’ve added a grain tool that can add a natural film-style grain to your images to get that perfect look for your photo.
I don’t know that I am the kind of photographer who wants to add grain to his pictures but I thought I would play (sorry, experiment) with it.
I took a picture of my “standard” test setup – a frugal photographer’s version of the Studio Shot used by Dpreview.com.
I used my Canon EOS-30D with the “best” lens I possess – the Canon EF 100mm F2.8 Macro. Of course I put the camera on a tripod, used a cable release and even locked the mirror up. I focused on the centre of the picture and took a series of pictures at different apertures.
I imported the pictures to Lightroom 3 Beta and selected one of them for the experiment. It was taken at 1/60 sec at f / 4.0 with an ISO speed rating of 100.
I converted the picture to Black & White (a LR 3 terminology change: it used to say Grayscale) and applied a series of carefully considered Grain adjustments to different virtual copies. I thought the grain would be more appropriate with a B&W picture.
Actually, the settings were not very carefully considered. The tool has three sliders:
If Amount = 0 then the other two sliders are disabled.
I was not fully sure what they meant but I tried these values
I made crops of the centre of the picture (a jar of Moccona instant coffee) and present them here as a WordPress Gallery.
You be the judge.
As I said, I’m not the target photographer for this tool. I can get all the “grain” I want using my Nikon Coolpix P6000 at 400 ASA or above. Yes, I know that digital noise isn’t the same as real film grain but I am not that sensitive to the difference.
I expect somebody will come up with develop presents that emulate the grain characteristics of different classic films using this tool, but I am not sufficiently knowledgable to do that.
Lightroom 3 Beta displayed some annoying little bugs while I was doing this experiment. It refused to go into Crop mode many times when I selected a picture in Grid view and pressed the “R” shortcut. It came up in Develop mode but with the message “No picture loaded”.
I quit and restarted Lightroom and it was okay after that.
Shutterstock :: Make money with your photos!.
This is a very good summary of best practices for stock photographers. The last one is appropriate for me:
Don’t be discouraged by rejections. Understand why they occurred and learn from them.
I was discouraged and I have not submitted a second batch of photos for their consideration. I’ve got two reasons for that:
This is my first upload to Flickr using the Lightroom 3 Beta.
Everything is going well so far. The install was very simple apart from a confusion where it put up a dialog box (on Windows XP) saying I had to reboot my system, yet started the product anyway.
I don’t know why an application like Lightroom would need to restart the system. What drivers or other low-level system software is it installing without telling me?
Although it is a separate database (catalog) it picked up certain things about my Lightroom 2 installation, for example all my Develop presets.
I don’t know if it made a copy of them. Typically Lightroom shares presets between all databases for the same machine. My concern is that if I update a preset in LR 3 will it still work in LR 2? I would have kept them completely separate.
I see they have changed the backup option to “backup on exit” rather than “backup on start”. That’s more logical, but I wish they’d keep the old options for backwards compatibility. I don’t like being forced to work a different way.
The “Publish” feature is not near as powerful as Jeff Friedl’s “Upload to Flickr” plugin. I wonder if Jeff will be able to work with Adobe to merge the two? That’s surely the best solution for end-users. I bet Jeff helps Adobe’s sales with his powerful additions to the product.
The thing LR 3 offers that Jeff does not is two-way comment synchronization. I am not sure yet when and how the synch occurs. Surely Lightroom must query Flickr from time to time. I wonder how well that will work if I have thousands of pictures uploaded.
One of my first questions about Lightroom 3 is whether it will support existing plugins and how the new “Publish” feature relates to his existing Flickr plugin that I have used extensively.
The excellent Jeff Fridel has addressed both issues here. In a phrase “it’s too early to tell”.
I think I will start a new Flickr account to test the LR 3 Beta Publish tool. I don’t want to mess with my existing photostreams and I want all the information in my production LR 2 catalog. I like the idea that with LR 3 I will be able to see Flickr comments in Lightroom – two way integration.
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