Greek Shrine

• Link to step one of this set of posts
• And to step 2

Step three: learning to edit.

OK you have been taking lots of photos, you’ve been using jpeg + raw as your file formats. And you have been using the jpeg files to upload and do any printing. You are now ready to move up to some editing on the files. You can start with edits on your jpegs but in some ways that can be more difficult than editing raw files. Jpegs can take light editing, some sharpening and maybe some tonal adjustment. But any serious editing will cause the images to develop very ugly artifacts like banding and posterization. We will get into that when we talk about raw files in another post. Right now lets list some of the available free editing software on the web. So far as I know these editors will only work on non-raw file formats. Jpeg and .tif formats mainly. Some of the best known are:

• Paint.net an excellent light editor for Windows developed by MS but now open source
• Photoscape another pretty good Windows editor
• Serif Photoplus another Windows editor
• Adobe Photoshop Express online editor (this is not Photoshop) but it comes with 2 GB of free storage.
• Picnik a web based editor.

And Mac users have a freebie that is included on their system, iPhoto or some such. Your camera also may have come with free editing software of modest capability. Canon cameras come with DPP and Nikon users can get the pretty good Nikon editor but it isn’t free.

Paint.net is an open source project and it has developed a large community of developers who are supplying a good variety of plugins which have greatly extended the capability of the basic product. This is a good choice for a basic editor.

Adobe Photoshop Express comes with 2 GB of free gallery space, and a free photoshop.com address, and it connects directly with Flickr, Photobucket and some other online galleries. The tools allow you to do basic editing like sharpening, cropping, resizing and other simple tasks. These are implemented with a wizard type interface which is simple and easy to use. If you select one of the tools you will see a string of thumbnails at the bottom of the image showing how different levels of the tool will affect the image. You click on the thumbnail to apply that level of the adjustment.

Editors with raw support.

Sooner or later you will want to move to real editor. And the three best supported editors are:

• Photoshop Elements 7
• Adobe Lightroom 2
• Photoshop CS4

Why Adobe products?

Why do I limit the list above to Adobe products? The primary reason, in my mind, is the fact that there is a vast online support community for these products. You will find literally thousands of online websites, tutorials, podcasts, and video tutorials on these editors. If you participate in online lists almost all the users will be using one or another of these products and you will easily get help when you get stuck. I have never failed to find a number of online tutorials or other help when I use Google to search for a way to do something in one of these apps.

Besides online user help Adobe itself provides a very comprehensive online support capability including forums and user groups and there are literally hundreds of published books available on each of these editors. Amazon shows 183 books for Photoshop CS4 and 202 books available for Photoshop Elements 7. Corel Photo Paint X3 by contrast has 3 books available. GIMP 2.6 has 14 books. Apple Aperture 2 has 26 books.

Elements

PSE 7 is the current version of Photoshop Elements and it will allow you to do raw file conversions and just about all basic editing on your images. PSE has a lot of wizard type interfaces to guide new users. And it comes with a pretty good photo organizer. I think this is the best choice for new users who need raw support or who want better editing capability. If you work at developing your editing skills you will eventually start wanting to do things that cannot be done in PSE and that is the time when you should start thinking about moving up to Photoshop. A good online community for PSE is found at this PSE group.

Some good introductory books:

• The Photoshop Elements 7 Book for Digital Photographers by Kloskowski
• Advanced Photoshop Elements 7 for Digital Photographers by Andrews

Lightroom

Some people find Lightroom to be a middle ground between PSE and Photoshop. But it seems like every Lightroom user I have heard from also owns Photoshop and uses that for the more intense editing procedures. Lightroom is aimed at production photographers, people who need to batch process large numbers of photographs. Perhaps someone who is shooting senior portraits by the hundreds. You can easily apply the same corrections to an entire batch of shots. This is possible in PS but not as easy and I’m not sure how well it would work on large batches. LR also has a very powerful photo archiving ability, it makes it easy to find your photos whether they are on your hard drive or have been moved to an external storage device. LR has the same raw converter as Photoshop: Adobe Camera Raw. Lightroom lacks the ability to select certain parts of the image and apply effects just to the selected area. That is when LR users move over to PS. Glenn Michell has some thoughts on the two.

Online support: Yahoo Lightroom group

Some good introductory books:

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers by Kelby
• The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Evening

Photoshop

Photoshop is simply the best editor available. Over the years many competitors have attempted to catch up with PS but they never succeed. I think the reason that they fail is this: they usually come up with a fairly good basic product. Maybe something in the PSE range plus a few more features. But to catch up with the vast capabilities of Photoshop they need a large group of programmers and time to write and debug all that code. So they need to sell copies of their first effort to finance the further development and they always seem to run out of money before that happens. Now PS is the best, but it also has a huge user community who has been using it for a decade or more. As new features are added many of those users are used to the arcane and difficult user interface and vociferously resist the least change in the way things work in PS. That means that new features are grafted on to the current user interface making it that much harder to learn. Old features never go away. John Nack has commented on this built in resistance to change from the user community.

Adobe of course has the large developer force, time and money to make sure that they stay far ahead of any competition. They have been steadily adding more power and capability to each new version. And I have yet to feel like a version upgrade is worthless from them. New versions are on a three year schedule lately. So Photoshop is difficult to learn, partly because of all the baggage it is carrying around from the past. It is also darned expensive, about $650 US for a new purchaser. Upgrades are running around $200 every two years.

Also Photoshop has a schizophrenic nature, it is both a graphics editor for graphical artists and it is a photo editor. Photographer may well never use many of the tools in PS since they are targeted at graphic artists. But it can do things that no other editor can do, and it can usually do those things in many different ways. But that will come at a cost to you.

Lynda.com has many online tutorials for PS (as well as many other applications) and they have 30 plus hours of video tutorials just on learning how to use the selection tools in PS. 30 hours for one feature. I watched them and worked thru the examples but still don’t think I understand everything about the tools. So this is why I urge people not to spend that $650 unless you are sure that you are ready to tackle this difficult editor.

A major online community for PS can be found at: listmoms

Good books for CS4

• The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers by Kelby
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers: The Ultimate Workshop by Schewe

Editing webpages

There are some excellent websites that cover editing technique. Like mostsites they are specific to Photoshop but if you know your editor you can probably adapt the techniques to your editor.

Cambridge in Color which is Sean McHugh’s site is one of the best that I know of. It has a slightly technical reading level but has very good coverage of a most basic Photoshop techniques. Be sure to look at Sean’s photo galleries while you are there.

The Light’s Right the site owned by Glenn E Mitchell has a great set of tutorials that probably a bit more advanced than Cambridge. He has a 300 page ebook on sharpening for example. There are also a number of video tutorials. The essential read on this site is the ‘pop’ series of articles but you will want to read more than those. Mitch also has a blog and some excellent photo galleries.

The Luminous-Landscape is owned by Micheal Reichmann and a lot of other writers often contribute including Jeff Schewe. He has a set of video Magazines that can be downloaded (not free) that have some intensive looks at various aspects of photography. He also has the best intoduction to Printing and Color management that I have seen. It’s a 6.5 hour video which he sells on site. This is call From Camera to Print, and it is on the advanced side and probably of little value unless you have Photoshop and a serious printer.

There are many guides and tutorials on this site but they are not as well organized. You have to look for the gems. The trip is well worth the effort. Try the Understanding series.

Commercial Tutorials

Lastly let’s look at the two major commercial tutorial sites.

The first is Lynda.com. They offer a wide variety of video tutorials covering most Adobe and many other software packages. The instructors are excellent on the whole and the price is reasonable: $25/month for full access.  Lynda is mostly limited to software training tho they have a few more general photography sets. You can get a free month of Lynda as a gift when you register CS4. The courses range from the basic to the advanced and can get very advanced.

KelbyTraining is Scott Kelby’s site and I have only used it when they were offering a free look when they started up. At that time I thought it was very limted and Nikon centric, but I hear that they have added many new instructors and have photographic technique as well as software training courses. Cost is $20/month. I’ll give it another whirl sometime soon. Kelby is the author of many very popular photography books and his books often live at the #1 position on Amazon.

And that wraps this post up.

Lake Eaton at Night-from the camera

A quick look at editing

Let’s take a quick look at editing. I say quick because I haven’t figured out a way to squeeze this into a reasonable length post if I go into great detail and add screen captures to show the steps in Photoshop. If there is any interest in that I’ll give it a try.

Look at the image above, it was taken at Lake Eaton in the Ocala National Forest this last Friday. I took my son there on a scout camp-out. The light on the horizon is the urban area to the west.  You can see some stars in the sky but it is basically black. As is the foreground. The whole image is dull and low contrast.

After ten minutes in CS4 we get this below:

After some work in CS4

This is still no great image and it does look a lot better in larger sizes. But now we can see that there are a lot of stars. The sky is midnight blue. The lake water now pops out in a reflection of the orange sky and clouds. There was a large forest fire to the east of this area and that was imparting the smoky orange tones. There is now a boat visible in the right foreground. Let me note that this shot was a 3 minute exposure but the histogram was mostly to the left since I actually shot 6 of these images and intend to stack them. But that is for another post.

How did I get from the first image to the second image?

Edits

In ACR5

• Increased fill light to +67
• Added contrast and just a little more exposure
• Added clarity and vibrance
• Decreased the color temperature to 3050
• Use 5 adjustment brushes
• Reduced noise

In CS4

• added a layer copy
• used noise ninja on the whole layer

Starting with the ACR (Adobe Camera Raw 5) work. The histogram was pushed to the left (Histogram 1 below), so I pushed the fill light slider far to the right from almost zero to +67. That moved the histogram a little to the right (Histogram 2) and brightened the stars and foreground. This revealed the boat.

Histogram 1

Histogram 2

The only reason I can do this is that this shot was captured as a raw file. That gives you 1.5 to 2 stops of leeway at both ends of the histogram. You can recover both shadow detail, as I did above or recover blown highlights on the right side of the histogram. In a jpeg file this is not possible.

I then add just a little more exposure and some contrast which makes the stars pop out a bit more. I reduced the color temp from 3150 to 3050 to make the sky more blue but this makes everything else bluer too.

Why dod I pick the various adjustments? It is just from my experience working in ACR. I make adjustment until I like the effect. You can always go back on these adjustments if you think you went too far.

All of this can be done in CS3 and ACR4. But in CS4, Adobe added adjustment brushes to ACR5 and you can use these brushes to add local changes in exposure, contrast, clarity and several other adjustments to the image by brushing them in. I used this feature five times to brush in more contrast and less exposure to the sky. More orange and adjusted the exposure on the lake with another brush. And used a third brush to do similar adjustments to the skyline and clouds just over the trees. A last couple of adjustment brushes dimmed the foreground weeds and lightened the boat.

All of this added a lot of noise so I used the noise reduction feature in ACR to reduce this. And then moved to CS4.

All I did in CS4 was do a single run with Noise Ninja to reduce the noise further. And I added a copyright watermark.

Why work in ACR?

Everything I did in ACR could be done a different way in CS4 or CS3 (and probably earlier versions of Photoshop). The adjustment brushes could be duplicated by selecting the area and creating a mask. You could then use dodge/burn, curves and saturation to recreate the effects. But by working in ACR you are working in the raw linear data and changes are easily reversible and do not introduce as much image damage.

You could also duplicate this in other editing software. The ability to use layers and masks would make that easier.

So I wanted to give people a brief look at what I do in editing. I probably could have picked a better sample image to work on. I have no hesitation to do any sort of editing that I think improves the image.I never claim that my work is a representation of the scene as it naturally appeared.  The sky was black, the only star really visible was Venus and the boat was dimly visible to my eyes. But it is a representation of my ‘artistic’ vision of what I want to create.

Suwanee River Cooter

Your First Line of Defense

The EXIF file which is attached to all of your photos right out of the camera is your first line of defense in the war against thieves. EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File. This is a file that is invisibly attached to every photo that comes out of your camera, it was first created by the Japanese camera industry more than 10 years ago and the current version dates from 2002 and is version 2.2. This is called metadata, data about data.

The EXIF contains many fields but the most important to this discussion are the: Creator, Creator Address, Phone Number, Email Address and several other similar fields. Filling out these fields with your name, address, email address and other personal info, will brand the image as yours. There are many other fields in the EXIF file, your camera will automatically add information about the exposure, shutter speed and quite a few other items. And there are fields with info about where and when the photo was taken that you can fill out. Those are helpful as keywords when you are searching for a particular image. And Adobe Bridge automatically adds keywords to the EXIF file when you use them.

Now can the thief change this info? Yes they can. But that assumes that they know that it exists. From my observations of these people I’d say most of them are ignorant of any such knowledge. Most of them seem to be barely literate. I think that most people who know about EXIF files probably have plenty of their own images and are less likely to be engaged in stealing. Even if it is changed you still have your original copy that you can show is marked as yours.

How do you add the EXIF data

Now how do you add this information to your photos? If you are using Adobe Bridge you can assign metadata semi-automatically by using the Photodownloader applet to download the files from the flash card to your computer hard-drive. To create a template, open Bridge, go to the Tools menu and click on ‘Create Metadata Template’. Fill in the fields with your name and as much of the address as you feel comfortable using. I just use the City, State and Zip Code on mine and do not fill in the phone number. I do use the email address. You should use an email address as an Orphan Works protection device, more on that in another post.

Scroll down to the Copyright notice field and add your copyright info. This must be in a specific format:

* The Copyright symbol: © or the word spelled out as ‘copyright’ not (c)

* The year:  ©2009 (the year the photo was created)

* Your name:  ©2009 J Bryan Kramer (in my case you should put your name here)

* and supposedly adding this term will give you some extra protection in some other countries:

* ©2009 J Bryan Kramer all rights reserved

You can make the © symbol my holding down the ALT key while you type 0169 on the number pad, not the numbers at the top of the keyboard. Macs do by Option+g.

Fill in any other fields that you want. Then save the template with a name you like, I use Norm 2009 and change it every year when I update the year.

You can tell Photodownloader to assign a default template of exif data to all the files it processes. Here is a 3 minute YouTube Video by Ellen Anon on the how to do that:

Using Photodownloader Video

I assume that other editing programs have similar functionality but you will have to find the way to do that on your own. One warning about Photoshop, if you use Save-For-Web then photoshop will strip the EXIF data from the file. Undoing your work. So don’t use that. In CS4 you can reportedly turn off the action that strips EXIF data when you use Save-For-Web. You can use the batching function in Bridge to tag any files with template data if you missed doing that.

Canon users have another line of defense, you can embed your name in the camera firmware and it will brand every shot with that info.  You use the EOS Utilities that comes on the CDROM included with the camera, look at tab 4 on this site for instructions:

Embedding your name

This also protects your camera if it is stolen since you can show the police that your name is in the camera as the owners name. This is much harder for a thief to change since they would have to know that it is there and have the right software to change it. I have put out a call on some mailing lists to find out if Nikon or other camera brands have the same capability. If you know, then put it in a comment.

That finishes up this entry, next entry will cover how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can be your friend too.

UPDATE:

I got some comments from Nikon users, apparently you can (at least on the D80 and up) embed a comment directly from the camera to an image file. I am not sure if this provides the same functionality as the Canon feature but the comment seems to be saved in the camera firmware.

Greek Shrine

Protecting your photos online

Is this a distant concern, do your really need to worry about people appropriating your work? Unfortunately the answer is that it happens every day. I hear reports all the time of people finding their work on other people’s websites. Indeed there are whole websites that not only post stolen images but provide tools to make it easier for their users to take images.

There is a tool, in beta at the time of this writing, which will search some of the web, for your images. It is called TinEye .

TinEye will scan for your image across the part of the web that it has so far indexed. The number of indexed sites seems to be limited right now but hopefully it will expand. The service scans for a digital fingerprint of the image not for the image title.

In the US and many other countries your photos are copyrighted the instant that you press the shutter button. And even though they are copyrighted, the images are essentially unprotected since there is no enforcement mechanism in place to protect your rights. Copyright violations are a civil matter in almost all cases. And being a civil matter; that means that it is up to you to protect your own rights by bringing a suit in court.

The problem is this. Most of the time people who steal your images will not be living anywhere near where you are. They will often be in a different state and sometimes will be in a different country. That means a trip down to your local small claims court won’t get you anything in your pocket or force them to stop using your image. And in the state that I live in, it can cost well over a $100 to file in small claims court. So your next step involves getting a lawyer to do the suing for you.

No surprise, but lawyers like to get paid for working. And unless you are going to pay one out of your own pocket, and that can easily amount to thousands of dollars, they want to see some profitable result at the end of the process. That would mean they need to see a big judgment ahead that they will split with you as payment for their efforts.

However with the type of copyright that attaches to your images when you press the shutter button, all you can expect to get from a court is your actual damages. You have to prove that you lost money by someone taking your image. That is fine if you are a well known photographer who gets $10,000 to take photos of some celebrity. But for the other 999 out of a 1000 photographers that means you would only recover a pittance, chicken feed and chump change. You could spend $1000 in legal costs and recover $25. Not so good.

There are a several things you can do to protect yourself. None is perfect but they can improve your chances of stopping theft. Or possibly you could even profit from the theft. I’ll cover those starting in the next post.

Let me post the obligatory I’m not a lawyer notice. I’m not one and you are always better of paying one to advise you. Poorer but better. Unless you hire Huey, Dewie, Cheatum and Howe.

UPDATE:

Someone mentioned in a comment that PicScout is available to search the web for your images. I took a look at their site at:

PicScout

However for photographers it seems to be limited to commercial sites only and costs $15/month for up to 500 photos. Their site makes it quite difficult to figure out exactly what they are offering.

Digimarc has been around for a long time, Photoshop users used to get a free plugin and short subscription to the service:

Digimarc

Digimarc seems to be more powerful than PicScout, but since I’m not quite sure what PicScout offers, that could be wrong. Digimarc embeds a invisible watermark on your images via a Photoshop plugin. They track where your image appears on the web and users can read that info via a utility. Again this is a paid and quite pricey service. Neither of these makes any sense to me, except for people who are making quite a bit of money from the sales of their work online. Probably you would have to be making thousands of dollars to see a return on these services.

Another update: I lost all the comments after upgrading Wordpress so the comment with the suggestion has vanished