One of the problems with judging an image on the monitor is that most monitors are set too bright. This is especially critical if you want to print the image based on what you see on the monitor. When the monitor is too bright, it makes the images look brighter and more contrasty then they really are. When printed, these images viewed on an overly bright monitor tend to look dark or dull and washed out. To fix this (calibrate your monitor using a professional calibration device ) or if thats not an option due to cost, then set the brightness of your monitor as per the following instructions:
Display the link below on your monitor and adjust the brightness of the monitor until you can view all of the different brightness levels on the second row. You should adjust the monitor brightness (probably turning it down) until you can see differences in each box (especially the 100 box and 95, as well as the 5 and 0) Both ends of the brightness scale must be visible at the same time.
Also check the second from the bottom row (white scale from 15% grey to totally white) and the bottom row (100% black to 85% black). These rows can assist with fine tuning. Unless you have a professional quality monitor, you will not be able to see differences in the 100-95 range.
View brightness chart:
https://www.jeffgardner.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Monitor-Brightness.tif
Some older monitors may require contrast to be adjusted as well.
chflags nohidden ~/Library
My thanks to: http://macperformanceguide.com/SettingUp-UnhideLibrary.html
To turn this on in IOS6: Settings > About > Advertising > Limit Ad Tracking
Be aware the default is “off”.
www.jeffgardner.ca has been updated to have a more modern look and now accomodates display on iOS devices. Since Apple is dropping support for their MobileMe photo album service, I have re-designed the photo album from scratch and host it now on my site. I also sorted out all of my images. Lots more to come for the photos over the next little while.
The new site has been produced using CSS3 and HTML5 without using Flash. Lots of hard work went into it, hopefully it has a good foundation for future growth and should last a few years, then again with the speed things are changing, who knows.
Let me know if you have any suggestions…
Here is a link to a 40k word document that describes the current thinking around a draft document to assess and discuss the qualities of an image. Although specific to photographs, it could probably be used for most two dimensional artwork.
Dec 15 2011 – keep getting error message “Error Creating Profile” (as if that would help anyone). Called support, got folks that could barely talk. “Good bye” was not in their vocabulary.
Asked to send a Measurement file to then which I did. Was told I would get a call by next monday.
We will see.
Tuesday Dec 20: Wonderful news – I received a reply from x-rite – Oh wait – its a spam Christmas card! Something I can more time unsubscribing from – sure made my day.
We are touring the Marlborough wine country – at the north end of the South Island. NZ’s famous for its ‘young’ Sauvignon Blanc and now we are discovering that although they are still relatively new to wine making, they are also producing some quite fine Chardonnays and older ‘oaked’ Sauvignon Blanc. One of our favorite vineyards has been Cloudy Bay, which is very large, and today we discovered Seresin – a very small organic vineyard, both have wines available in Ont. We then went off to a green mussel farm – a boat tour of the Marlborough sounds that included a glass of wine and fresh steamed mussels eaten with the fingers right in the bay where they are harvested. Weather continues to be wonderful, sunny overhead with clouds at the horizon and turquoise waters.
Wed Feb 23 – Martinborough NZ – North Island
We arrived at our hotel yesterday afternoon to discover the small town quite distressed by the earthquake in Christchurch several hundred km to our south.
We are currently near the south end of the North Island. Christchurch is somewhat near the north end of the South Island, and really not that far away, however we did not feel the earthquake. Needless to say we have been affected by how much this event has had on a small country of 4 million. Most people here seem really deeply impacted.
From the press here, we have gathered that Christchurch is not the place to be and they will need a lot more time to fix things up. I assume the press there has all the details so I won’t elaborate – but the City does seem to be very heavily damaged. Had the quake happened a few weeks later, we would have been right in heavy damage zone, since we planned on staying directly across from the church that was so heavily damaged.
People here are quite kind; yet they are stoic and life goes on.
We will be proceeding south to Wellington, crossing over to the South Island in a few days, going past Christchurch which is on the east side of the island while we plan to head down the west side. So, initially we will not be directly impacted by the quake but Christchurch was our intended departure point back to Auckland in mid March so likely will need to make changes as the trip progresses.
As for our vacation, the country is beautiful and we are enjoying it a lot. Chris and I have both caught colds and that has slowed us down a bit. Perhaps we are just getting on, but today – after a wine tour and a tour of olive groves, we just read the papers and stayed in our room which is really quite lovely, as is the town of Marinborough.
The next week will be spent in the wine districts – soaking up the various Sauvignon blanc which have been our NZ wines of choice. The weather continues to be good, the windows of our hotel are all open and we have a gentle warm breeze and we are in a farming valley surrounded by brown and green mountains. The town is small and sleepy and a dog barks in the distance.
I have hit the 2000 mark on photo shots and have been slowed down by the weight of the equipment, my cold and the fact that we are moving a lot every other day or so. Since this is not a photo trip, a lot of shots have passed us by while we just enjoyed looking the country side – and that’s ok.
Hope all is well with everyone back home
Jeff and Chris
Weather in New Zealand continues to be fabulous – mid 20s with refreshing sea breezes, bright days with cloud cover off in the distance, but sunny overhead.
We are ‘tramping’ (day hiking) the North island, making our way from Aukland to the ‘Northland’ (Paihia) followed by a return to Aukland and a swing around the Coromandel Peninsula and then into the central thermal area around Rotorua. Next we are off to the east coast at Napier, an art deco town, and the wine region of Martinborough before visiting the capital of Wellington and heading to the South Island for a trip down the west coast. Nothing eventful to report so far.
The people are friendly, but its like living in a time bubble – going back to the 50s. Most things are more expensive down here, with NZ wines being priced almost the same as at the LCBO. We found a rather larger wine store yesterday and did a bit of a tasting and stocked up.
Accommodation has varied a lot. The first 3 places were quite nice – well above average fully self-contained suites including a kitchen, one very high end, all with laundry facilities. Then we explored the other end of the spectrum with a motel that catered to bus loads of oriental tourists and facilities reminiscent of the Timmins Holiday Inn circa. 1950.
The past couple of days we have been travelling through the North Island’s “thermal area” at Rotorua and Taupo: geysers, bubbling, mud pool, brightly colored lakes with a gentle whiff of sulphur in the air (sometimes not so gentle).
The scenery is magnificent, especially the misty mountain ranges over the ocean (yes it really is Lord of the Rings country) and also the many varieties of trees and ferns. The giant kauri trees (picture with Chris standing in front of one) are a sight to behold and the kauri museum was fascinating: it included single, unknotted slabs of kauri wood 20’ wide and 50’ long – plus the chain saws and milling equipment needed to handle such wood. We are slowly learning the names of the native and introduced birdlife: pukakos, fantails, black swans etc. There are lots of cattle but, so far, surprisingly few sheep.
Internet is not hard to find, but its expensive, as is many things here and forget trying to keep something like an iPhone happy, download limits are very small. Quality of service is great but you do pay for it.
Will post again in a week or sooner.
Jeff and Chris
This is the second in a series of articles discussing methods of organizing work flow to prevent rework, improve quality by maintaing image resolution and colour detail throughout the life cycle of the image. Article 1 dealt with image capture and file management and can be downloaded at: http://www.jeffgardner.ca/NPC/Article1.pdf
Workflow
After importing an image from the camera into a cataloging system, the next steps are:
- Rate / Cull
- Image Adjustment and Editing
- Create Working Copies for various types of Output
- Backup
Rate / Cull – after image import from the camera, images should be rated to identify the best shots. Those not worth keeping (totally out of focus, ruined) should be culled and deleted to save space. Most tools have a rating scheme – in the case of Lightroom it offers:
- Flags (of which the most useful is: Flag for Reject, then Photo > Delete Rejected Photos)
- Colours – best used to flag the output purpose of the shot (for printing, web output etc.)
- Star Ratings – 1 to 5 to assist in ranking (for an advanced rating approach see details link at the end of this article).
Image Adjustment and Editing – after selecting the images worthy of further attention, editing tools are used to make adjustments. Basic editing is performed at this point such as: Crop, Exposure, White Balance etc., then noise reduction and sharpening is performed. After that, optional advanced editing may be performed on selected images. One question often asked by advanced users is “which software should be used to do what?”:
- Cataloging thousands of Images: Lightroom or Aperture are the common products. If you don’t have that many images, a file folder structure may be sufficient.
- File Management during editing process: 10-30 images – Adobe Bridge which is tightly coupled with Photoshop. (Tip: Bridge also handles non image files such as Word docs, thus allowing instructions or workflow notes to be recorded in the same file folder as images)
- Camera Raw editing – Lightroom or Aperture. Only use Adobe Bridge if the other products are not used.
- Basic Image Editing: Lightroom or Aperture
- Advanced Image Editing – Photoshop or other.
Image Editing tools are split into two categories:
- Non Destructive – those tools that record sets of instructions (XML) to modify the image without actually changing the pixels (Lightroom, Aperture, Bridge)
- Destructive – pixel editors, where the actual file content is changed, often making it impossible to recover previous steps. Photoshop and most camera manufacturers’ basic software fits into this category, as well as web based products such as Picasa. The workflow must be modified to accommodate the need to recover previous steps and to allow for variations in output which is required for advanced processing. See the link at the end of the article for details. Once using Destructive pixel editors, avoid switching back to non destructive. For example, if editing in Lightroom and then Photoshop, keep all edits in photoshop, otherwise layers will disappear if you then start making changes in Lightroom again.
Noise Reduction – Noise is comprised of random pixels, either in brightness or colour. Film photographers could not do much about distortion when shooting at high ISO settings but many digital images need noise reduction (especially at high ISO, although the better cameras produce much less noise then point and shoots). Most tools have noise reduction settings. Be aware that over-doing the noise reduction on brightness (luminosity) can blur an image, while there is not much downside to over-doing the colour noise reduction.
Sharpening – This is an area where many photographers need to focus some attention. Digital cameras have an internal filter that slightly blurs every image. JPEG images may have been sharpened in camera, but all Camera Raw images need some sharpening, since this will not be performed in camera. Most photographers either ignore this step or over-sharpen producing either small halos in detailed areas (bad) or a frozen “ice covered” look which is even worse. Update: Jan 12/2011 – Note – in a previous post I forgot to mention that Sharpening should be performed after Noise reduction, otherwise you are sharpening the noise. Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom will handle the order automatically, but take note of the sequence in Photoshop or similar tools.
Sharpening tools should be used at 100% screen view. The image is sharp when edges look sharp – be subtle. Keep sharpening until detail looks over sharp (as described above) and then back it off a bit.
Colour Management: In Article 1 I mentioned that the camera should be set to Adobe RGB which has a greater colour range than sRGB. After import into an editing tool, the colour space should be expanded again to the widest colour space available. Adobe users should preserve colour by using the ProPhoto RGB colour space. If you have sufficient computer power, 16 bit does allow for a wider colour depth but 8 bit saves considerable disk space. Ensure that your output device handles more than 8 bit should you decide to use 16 bit, otherwise considerable processing time and disk space is simply wasted.
Resolution: Use the best file format available to you to retain full resolution while editing. The TIFF file format is best and allows for maximum flexibility while retaining full image quality. PSD files are fine but have some restrictions while JPEGs should be avoided since they will lose detail.
Output: This will be the subject of the next article including: why it’s often necessary to sharpen again, when to flatten an image, saving different output steps, how to handle colour profiles and what type of file format is appropriate.
Backup: Naturally, you are backing up all the files as workflow steps are performed, so that any hardware or human errors can be recovered from – right?
Note: Backup software cannot successfully restore a Lightroom Catalogue unless that catalogue is closed at time of backup.
For details on the above techniques, please see: www.jeffgardner.ca/NPC/Article2.pdf