Tag Archives: software

Lightroom’s New Panorama Feature

Lightroom CC comes with a number of new features. High on the list is the new panorama feature. Previously, if you wanted to stitch a panorama, you would select the shots in Lightroom, make sure you had them synced up for any exposure edits and white balance corrections and then send them to Photoshop. Photoshop had a Photomerge function that you could use or you could open them as layers in a document and carry the merge out yourself with a bit more control. This was the approach I used and I wrote about the technique here a while back.

The new Photomerge in Lightroom CC is designed to do without Photoshop. It takes your original files and then makes a new DNG file which is the stitched panorama but, as a RAW format, it still allows you to edit the image using the normal editing tools. I had to give this a go so, how well does it work?

The answer is a mixed one. In many cases, it works just fine. It stitches together the shot nicely and you can go on your way. While the initial preview process takes up a little time, the processing of the final stitch is done in the background so you can get on with something else – something I find very handy. However, it does have some shortcomings.

First, it doesn’t always find the way to stitch the shots. I have had a couple of times when it couldn’t work out the alignment. When I tried the same shots in Photoshop, they worked just fine. Not sure why these didn’t work but the algorithms must have some limitations. Next, it doesn’t always deal well with curvy edges. I have had a couple of stitches that I tried where the aircraft fuselage, although a smooth curve, ended up with some kinks at the area where the stitch took place. Photoshop never caused me trouble with these either. Big panos also seem to make it unhappy with some very odd alignments being chosen (after a long time processing) so they may have to stay in Photoshop for now.

The last problem is cropping. You have the option to have the whole stitch or to have it crop in automatically (or you could crop manually afterwards). Cropping pulls you in to the shot more aggressively to get rid of any blank pixels. You can fix this by shooting a lot wider to have more to work with. However, having been used to being able to fill odd little gaps using Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop, not being able to do so in Lightroom is a limitation. I can, of course, open the file in Photoshop and do just that. However, if I do so, I might as well use Photoshop to do the merge in the first place.

Overall, it is pretty good. I suspect there will be some tweaks behind the scenes as CC gets updated progressively so I might not even know that Adobe have fixed some of the issues. The Fill issue will be more obvious though. I shall probably keep using it unless I feel the Photoshop is merited and it is a good addition but I hope they take it further so I don’t have to consider Photoshop in the future. We shall see because the new update of Photoshop is out and includes Content Aware Fill of the gaps in panos which might be enough to sway me back.

Time Lapse Tutorial

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I have mentioned in the past some of my interest in time lapse. I recently posted a sequence on here and a friend of mine asked me to put together a guide to how I had gone about doing it so here you go.

When putting together a time lapse, the first thing is trying to establish what will be special about what you are shooting a sequence of that will make a time lapse more interesting than any other form of presentation. Usually this involves something that changes slowly in real time but becomes more dynamic in a time lapse such as a sunset or storm cloud development. Alternatively, it is something where a lot happens over a long time that isn’t terribly dramatic on its own but, when speeded up, becomes far more impressive. This could be a sequence of activities with multiple people or launching airplanes as was the case for the one I recently made.

Once you have established what it is that makes it interesting, then you have to decide how best to portray that. Choosing your location and your angle of view are the next challenges. I was shooting departing and arriving aircraft at SFO so I needed an angle that gave me a good view of them and a field of view that allowed plenty of the movement to be seen without everything being too far away to be noticeable. In this case, shooting at night works well because the lights stand out far more making the aircraft more conspicuous than would be the case during the day.

Now it is time to get into the technical issues. How long a clip do I want to make? Shooting time lapses means getting a large number of still shots which will each be a single frame of video. Video frame rates vary but I used 30fps for the sequences I make. Therefore, 30 shots will give me a second of video. If I want a minute of video, I need to shoot 1,800 shots. That’s a lot of shots. Also, figure on shooting more before and after the main action since it is nice to have some spare video at each end to play with in future editing.

You know how many shots you need but how long in real time do you want to cover? Are you starting before sunset and finishing well after sunset? Do you have a peak period of activity that you want to cover? Now you can see how many shots you need over a given amount of time so you will work out how long the interval between each shot can be? The interval between shots is critical but you must also factor in how long a shutter speed you want. This is where shooting at night is a lot nicer because you can get nice long shutter speeds. These make for smoother looking videos because there is no jerkiness. Shooting on a sunny day with a very short shutter speed and a few second interval will result in a jerkier output. The “rule” is to have the exposure time at least half the interval. Doing that during the day may require some neutral density filters. At night it is a lot easier to manage.

Now to mount and control the camera. Obviously a tripod is a necessity to make a stable platform for the shots. A cable release is a must have and preferably one with a timer built in so you can program the intervals. However, if you are shooting at night, you can get away with putting the camera on burst mode with a shutter speed to match your interval and then lock the shutter release open. It will then just keep shooting. The other camera thing to consider is image stabilization if you have long shutter speeds. IS can wander around for long exposures making everything blurred. Keep it turned off. I would also switch autofocus off once you are happy everything is sharp to avoid the focus getting changed by the camera. If the conditions are changeable, you might go with something like aperture priority to accommodate changing exposures. At night, manual might be your best bet. Always keep an eye on how the exposures are doing if in a programmed mode to ensure you aren’t exceeding your interval with your shutter speed. There are complex bulb ramping tools available to use if you want to get advanced. I haven’t tried these since they haven’t been necessary for my purposes so I can’t give good advice. I do have the functionality in a cable release device that connects to my iPhone called Triggertrap but I haven’t ever pushed it to its limits.

One thing you will discover is that fixed apertures are not fixed. Cameras will go to a slightly different aperture for each shot which can result in slight variations in exposure. This “flicker” can be managed by clever manipulation of the lens position but I prefer to use software to fix it. The software will also help if you end up tweaking the camera settings during the capture sequence.

Last piece of equipment advice is bring a chair. Once everything is at work, you don’t have much to do. You can shoot with a second body of course or you can sit back and relax. If you have a buddy along, that is not a bad thing! I shoot all of my sequences in RAW format. For night shoots this gives you a lot of latitude for tweaking the exposures. It does use up a lot of memory but storage is cheap these days. With charged batteries and big cards, you are good to go.

Once the shoot is done, you get home with a ton of images that look remarkably similar. First I import them into Lightroom. I will keyword them in the same way as anything else from a shoot including adding a time lapse keyword. Then I will make sure all of the time lapse shots are in one subfolder before jumping over the LRTimelapse. I am not going to try and write a tutorial on using LRTimelapse. The website for the software has far better guides to how to use everything. However, I will focus on the key elements I go for.

The main one is the Deflicker process. This is a routine that analyses each shot and applies little tweaks to the exposure to avoid any visible flicker. You can draw out a box in the image preview to tell it where to analyze. This means you can pick an area that is constant in the image as a reference and avoid areas where there is a lot going on. If the image exposure is gradually changing, it won’t affect that. It will just take out the individual variance. You can see a trace of how the overall exposure tracks during the sequence.

The other element I sometimes use is panning. You can define keyframes in the sequence and jump back into Lightroom to crop each one as you wish. Back to LRTimelapse and it will calculate the individual crops for each frame to make a smooth pan between your chosen keyframes. Quite nice to provide a little variety if you wish. I always crop the images to a 16×9 format since that works nicely for HD output formats.

When all of your tweaks are fixed, you save the metadata files and go back to Lightroom to reload them. (There can be a bit of back and forth like this throughout the process.) In Lightroom, there is an export dialog from LRTimelapse which then renders out the individual files from each shot. These will then be taken by LRTimelapse and rendered as a video clip.

Sounds really simple that way and, to be honest, it is pretty straightforward. A little practice helps of course. When it works out, the result can be very satisfying. Of course, a lot of times, you see something that you really wish you had done differently. That is something you will have to put down to experience and try to remember next time you are out shooting.

One last thought – if you are shooting something that involves light trails at night, consider making each image a layer in Photoshop and blending them together as a stack to see what happens. It can work pretty nicely sometimes. However, you can end up with a pretty huge Photoshop file so your computer may groan while processing it. Happy shooting!

Funky Cloud Processing

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Part of a run back into Oakland recently came across the bay but it was unfortunately covered in cloud. However, the cloud was sitting in very distinct locations with a clear edge as you headed down the bay and a similar edge near the shoreline on the Oakland side. Since we were not high above it, this looked pretty interesting. Even as I photographed it, I figured the shots would need something a bit different when I got around to processing them. Having a more contrasty look seemed the best bet and a black and white conversion also seemed likely. That is what I went with and I was quite pleased with how it turned out. See what you think.

Updated Approach to Lightroom Catalogs

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I have been a user of Lightroom since Adobe release version 1 quite a few years ago. It has been a very useful tool for me and something that dominates my workflow. In the early days, there were issues with the number of images that a catalog could have before it started to respond sluggishly. Consequently, I created a series of different catalogs for different subject areas. Military aircraft were in one, civil in another, wildlife in a third, sports in a fourth and so on. This system was fine to use although it had a few minor drawbacks in that some images would be in more the one catalog. I would import them to one and then export them to the other. However, as I edited one version, the other one did not always keep up despite saving the sidecar files to disc.

At some point, Adobe updated the functionality of the application and it was no longer so constrained by the number of files in a catalog. However, I had a series of catalogs that I was familiar with so I didn’t pay much attention to this change. However, over time, it occurred to me that I was making my life more complex than it needed to be. I could probably cut down the number of catalogs dramatically and make the workflow a bit simpler.

I decided to have one catalog for all of my aviation related imagery and the other for everything else. To do so, I created a new catalog for each of these and started importing from the other catalogs. This was not as smooth a process as you might have imagined. There were duplicate images as I knew and you could set the system up to make these virtual copies so nothing got lost along the way. However, sometimes the import did not go well. They were large catalogs coming into an even larger catalog and this caused some struggles. I had to delete and start again at some points but ultimately I got it to work. I did have to recreate some of the collections which did not transfer so easily in some cases but it is now done.

Did it make life easier? Yes, it did. Having just two catalogs is now a lot more straightforward. Do they run just as well? No. The aviation catalog does seem to be a bit sluggish sometimes. Usually it works fine but it is definitely not as responsive as the individual ones were. I shall see how this develops over time. A new machine is in the works so whether that will make a difference or not, we shall see.

LRTimelapse

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I have previously written about some time-lapse software that I use based on a recommendation from my friend Jo Hunter. I used this software for a while before the creator, Gunther Wegner, updated it to a new version and deactivated the version I had. I was a bit miffed by this but I was able to continue using the export settings from his application within Lightroom but with me having to manually manage the file cropping. All transition and smoothing capability was lost but I could still make a basic time-lapse.

Sadly, the latest versions of Lightroom have done away with that as well and now I couldn’t even render the video. Therefore, I decided to take a look at the latest version of his software. It is now on version 3 so I have skipped a version en route to this place. I had shot a few sequences recently and wanted to be able to manage them properly so decided to come back and have another go with his application.

There have been some improvements in tidying up the software so the workflow is a bit better. There is still a certain amount of effort as you switch back and forth with Lightroom. You have to put all of the images into a single folder while working on them. This means a modification to my storage strategy but it isn’t difficult to manage in Lightroom and, when you are done, you can revert the images to their original locations and still render the video output. It might be nicer if he gave you a more flexible approach to selecting files but this is not a hardship.

It has changed a little from what I am used to since now it starts out analyzing the files before you have created keyframes. Once this is done, you save the xmp files out and reload them in Lightroom. Define your keyframes and make any edits to them that you want and save xmp again. Back to LRTimelpase to load the changes and now it does its smoothing very quickly. Save xmp again and back to Lightroom and now there is an Export setting along with all of the other export options. No going to the Slideshow module any more.

The results are pretty good. The new export functionality actually generates a sequence of still images which it stores. You then head back into LRTimelapse where you have a series of options for rendering a video sequence from those stills. You can have it automatically delete the stills when it is done or keep them and render again using different output options. This is pretty flexible although it means you have to pay attention to what you have used so you don’t end up with a ton of stored intermediate images. The video output looks good. I am not using the product commercially so do not have the full commercial license. That will allow output in 4K formats. I only wanted 1080p HD format for my purposes. It is a little interesting that 4K is automatically assumed to be commercial use. With people able to record 4K on GoPros these days and 4K TVs showing up, I suspect this is going to be a more mainstream format before too long. Maybe it will be in the personal use license of future versions of LRTimelapse. We shall see.

Was it worth the upgrade? Yes. Not least because I wanted to have the capability back that I had lost when Lightroom changed its output but, even so, I have found the new version to be quite a bit more friendly to work with. I think it will encourage me to work on a few more projects.

RescuePro Deluxe

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Today we have something of a product review combined with a workflow experiment. None of this was something that I wanted to do but circumstances dictated it was time. I had been out for the day shooting some wildlife including some sea otters – that will show up in a future post – and, one returning home and downloading my images, a few of the shots showed up strangely with no preview in Lightroom when I started to import them and were apparently corrupted on the card. Not sure what the cause of this was. The body had just come back from an annual service at Canon and the card was a new one. However, they both worked fine for the majority of the day with just some minor problems with a couple of dozen shots. I shall try and sort that out later.

So, to the problem at hand. I use Sandisk Extreme cards and have had virtually no problems to date. Therefore, I was in new territory. One thing that I do have as a result of using these cards is a bunch of coupons for RescuePro Deluxe. This is software for retrieving lost files from cards. I had used it once many years ago when recovering some shots that had been deleted on the card but not formatted and it had worked well. That was my issue then. Now I needed it due to a problem I hadn’t created.

My first minor problem was that the software defaults to recovering the images to a folder on the C: drive. Since my desktop has an SSD running the OS and everything else on other drives, it isn’t overloaded with space so dumping 32Gb of images on to it caused a minor hiccup. A kicked out of the program, restarted it and found how to change the output directory and then we were off and running. However, now I came across my next issue. It found all of the files on the card, not just the ones that were lost. This is where the brain had a small “doh” moment. I figured if I opened up the card in Explorer and deleted the good shots, it would mean the search would be a lot quicker. Of course, if you are using software designed to find files that have been deleted, it still finds them all. Why didn’t I think of that at the time? Oh well, no big deal since this was all running in the background.

The result of the scan is that all files on the card are now stored in a folder. Unfortunately, they are named sequentially File001, File002 etc. This makes working out which are the missing files a bit more tricky. So, two things were needed for the next step. First, find out the filename for the first file on the card. Then import all of the files into Lightroom by adding them where they are rather than copying them to a new location. With them in Lightroom, it is a simple task to rename them all to their original names using the rename function and making sure you start with the filename of the first file that we found a moment ago. Now all the files have the right name and are still in the recovery folder.

The next step might seem counterintuitive. I delete them all from Lightroom. I don’t delete the master files; just remove them from the catalog. Next – trust me, I haven’t gone mad – I them re-import them all. At this point, Lightroom sees the files with the right names and details and so automatically recognizes which ones are already in the catalog. It then will pick out the ones which were the original missing files and you can import them properly to wherever you want them. Now the recovery folder can be deleted (subject to your normal backup protocols). It sounds a bit complex but, if you work through the process, the longest part of it is the scan of the card for the files in the first place. After that, it all happens pretty quickly.

While RescuePro Deluxe is not the most user friendly piece of software, it did do what was required and I got it free with the cards I have. You don’t own the software. You get a one year subscription with the coupon. Hopefully I won’t need it again this year but it is there if required. I have a bunch of these coupons from various card purchases so I imagine I will be in good shape as long as required. If you have gone through something similar and have a better way of dealing with it, please do let me know. It is always good to learn from the experiences of others.

32 Bit HDR

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While HDR might be a topic that causes all sorts of heartache for some people (they either love it or loathe it), I find it to be a really useful tool in some situations. I have played around with some really over the top processing in the past just for the fun of it but my main interest has been in getting an image that can cope with the wide range of lighting that sometimes shows up in images. While I have experimented with some of the third party HDR packages, I have ultimately ended up using the HDR Pro functionality of Photoshop.

This has been working okay for me but I was always a little less than satisfied with the results. I have understood that the HDR merging process is only the first part of the technique and then the Develop settings in Lightroom (or ACR) are required to make the whole thing work a lot more effectively. However, the slightly flatter look along with a level of desaturation that it was hard to bring back meant I was almost there but not quite.

A recent change that has been introduced and which it took me a while to get around to playing with was the 32 bit HDR approach. In this, the original files are merged to create a 32 bit TIF file. Getting to this from Lightroom required me to tweak my settings slightly. I always had the file edit settings laid out to make a PSD file. I had to tweak them to make TIF the preferred file. I have to remember this so that I don’t always have TIF output instead of PSD which seems to have a smaller file size.

Once you get into HDR Pro, the choice in the tab at the top covers whether you want 8 biit, 16 bit or 32 bit output. I had previously been using 16 bit. This includes a lot of sliders that give you options as to what you want the output to look like. If you change to 32 bit, there is a single slider. It shows you an effect of changing the white point but I don’t think it actually changes the output file. You decide whether any ghost removal is required as with the 16 bit file and then click to get it on its way. Once the final file is created, I just save it and go back to Lightroom.

Here, the Develop module is changed in its functionality. You can make some pretty aggressive changes with the sliders compared to a normal RAW file. You can work with the exposure, the shadows and highlights and the contract as well as using the Clarity and Vibrance to punch up the image. The nice thing is that the results are a lot more natural looking. You don’t have the really crazy styles and you don’t have the flat look that sometimes is the result with the traditional approach.

HDR is not a huge part of what I do but I am interested in having a better result. I am not interested in investing in new software to achieve this when it is an infrequent issue for me and not usually something that a client cares about. However, the fact I can now do a better job with the software I already have is a great step forward. As for these three examples, the top is the new process, the middle is the old way and the bottom is using Lightroom to try and get detail from a single RAW file.

New Gallery

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For a while I have been looking at changing the gallery software I use on this site. The gallery is a relatively fixed part of the site. New images are included as posts are published but the gallery is relatively unchanging over time. However, the previous software I had used was based on Flash technology. A look at the demographics of those visiting the site shows that a significant number are now coming from mobile devices, particularly those running iOS.

Consequently, a large portion of the visitors would get nothing if they tried to see the gallery. This wasn’t something that I could accept. I have now introduce a new gallery that runs on html5 as opposed to Flash. Configuring it took a little work but it seems to be running now. Therefore, it is now live. If you click on Gallery above, you should be able to see the new format irrespective of your device. However, I don’t have the resources to try it on every operating system so please let me know if it doesn’t work on whatever you are looking at.

Thanks

Rob

SF City Hall

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A meeting in the heart of San Francisco meant a bunch of our team were meeting downtown. A few of us got there a little head of the meeting and, with a couple of minutes available, I wanted to check out the City Hall building since it was only a couple of blocks away. As an old City, San Francisco has some classic architecture and this is no exception. For some reason, despite the numerous times I have been to the city, I have never been to City Hall before.

A group of school kids were playing some orchestral music in the main hall and plenty of family members were there. I wandered around taking a look. Since I didn’t have my normal cameras, the phone had to serve duty. Fortunately, that also allowed me to try another one of the 360 panoramas. I suspect I shall be carrying another camera with me when I am next in the area.

Pano 360

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There is an app I have had on my phone for a while called 360 which is for taking panoramic photographs. I have had it for quite a while and have mentioned it before here but they have progressively introduced new features over that time. While the new operating system has a pano function built into the camera (if your phone isn’t too old), it is rather basic and nowhere near as good as this one.

Taking images requires a little planning since you are able to take a full spherical image. Doing this without having the whole thing look strange in close requires you to keep the camera point itself unchanged as you turn around. This is harder than you think. The software can compensate a bit but you need to try and get it right in camera as much as possible.

It shows you a grid of the total shot and so you can see which bits you have shot and what is needed to fill it all in. It gives you a live preview as you shoot including looking straight up and down when required. Once the image is complete (or as much of it as you want), it processes it and then you can upload it to a website to view later. The links here are from that site. It is a great app and fun in some situations and valuable in others when showing off a wide view is hard to do any other way.

When checking this examples out, don’t miss out on a cool feature. At the top of the viewer are three buttons. It starts on the middle setting which allows you to pan around. If you click on the left button, it creates a view from the ground up. The right button creates a view looking straight down. (This only works properly if I have shot a full 360 image.) This looks like the work that Gerry Holtz has done and I blogged about here although his is far superior.