RAW development rubs me Raw

I’m exhausted. For the last four nights I’ve been up late Lightroom’ing the pictures I took on my little Arizona annular eclipse trip. I’m a new Lightroom user and I’m not entirely impressed with the program. It’s a first class general RAW developer but I don’t think it’s as good as Capture NX when working with Nikon NEF files. For the nonce I will keep Lightroom’ing away; you have to master something before you can have a valid opinion about it!

Lonely Lake Powell boat at dusk

As annoyed as I am about Lightroom I know, from bitter experience, that when I first process images I only see problems. The composition sucks. The colors are off. Things are too dark or to light. After a few dozen disappointments the mood darkens and I wonder just who the fuck took all this shit? But I solider on, waging relentless pixel warfare, because in few years, when I’ve forgotten about light curves, sharpening parameters, edge masks, color spaces and all the technical hoo-hah that goes into digital image making, I start seeing the pictures not the flaws. I sometimes catch myself looking at my old pictures and wondering just who took all these great shots. You change your mind about pictures!

This is why I don’t use “star” ratings. Most image management systems have ratings. Lightroom has a five-star system, Thumbsplus does something similar and every image management tool I’ve looked at has a comparable feature. Obviously the masses expect and demand ratings. Too bad the masses are wrong. In the long run ratings are meaningless. You really see this with restoration projects. I’ve spent days restoring pictures that what I would rate as total crap if I had just shot them. Yet here I am spending long hours on yesterday’s crap.

Restoration work also changes your attitude about duds. In my film days I ruthlessly pruned my slides and negatives trashing exposures that didn’t meet my standards of the time. Now I curse that delusional jackass for throwing away my precious originals. It’s surprising how useful duds are; they fill in missing details and remind you of your ever-changing opinions.  Save your duds I guarantee you will feel differently about them in a few years and, of course, others will have completely different takes.

Annular eclipse fans

The Joys of Photographic Waybacking

Remember Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine. Mr Peabody was dog, with a pet boy Sherman, that used his Wayback time travel machine to visit the past. I’m not sure if he ever visited the future; that’s a question best left to Rocky and Bullwinkle historians. Well, I have Wayback machines; they’re called film and flatbed scanners. I spend way to much time scanning and restoring old photographs. Over the years I’ve scanned thousands of images. It only takes a few minutes to get a high quality scan but it can take days of image editing to restore old damaged originals. Hence, I always have a backlog of scanned pictures to fix.

My enthusiasm for this endless task waxes and wanes with my general photographic energies. A few weeks ago I upgraded my arsenal of DLSR cameras and lenses. New lenses always give me boast. So lately I’ve been out pixel harvesting with a lovely little f2.8 macro lens.  I think she I will be an item for years to come — wide open her bokeh is beautiful. While I enjoy working with my spanking new crystal clear digital images I find myself wandering in my vast image file directories and picking out old scans to work on. Today I whiled away a rainy afternoon restoring pictures I took over forty years ago. Here’s a shot from my ACS Beirut Lebanon boarding school days. This is from an old Instamatic camera. I believe it was my second camera. Over the years my cameras have gotten better and better but they still cannot go Wayback in time.

Lying on my bed and trying to look tough for the camera. I don't think the pajamas are helping. This image is from an old Kodacolor Instamatic slide taken in 1968. In the original scan fingerprints are visible. I take good care of originals but accidents happen. For more before-after diptychs click.

Blogging off for Christmas

J Christmas Wallpaper

I am celebrating Christmas by combining two of my favorite things: the programming language J and the superb image editor Picture Window Pro. The other day the good folks at Digital Light and Color announced 64 bit versions of Picture Window Pro. I was delighted. PWP is my favorite image editor. It’s had 16 bit image support since the cows came home and it simply nukes Photoshop when it comes to flat-out crunching performance.  I was afraid that the good old-fashioned C programmers that had crafted this program were retiring: perhaps overwhelmed by a sea of mediocre consumer oriented overpriced sludge — yes Photoshop Elements I’m talking about you! Fortunately it’s not to be! 64 bit multi-core versions of PWP will dramatically extend the lifetime of PWP for this loyal customer.

Speaking of superb good old-fashioned C programs I must give a shout out to J. I’ve been busy preparing a talk for the up coming J conference so J has been on my mind more than usual. Still all work and no play makes J a dull boy! This morning I rooted around in the J bin directories, sucked some J icons into PWP, and then twiddled transformations to generate some Christmas J monitor wallpaper: download and decorate at will!