Monthly Archives: August 2008

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More Lightroom 2 goodies: Camera Profiles

August 29, 2008 – 10:34 pm

I will soon write about a small project I did that had me using the local adjustment features in Lightroom 2, which are quickly becoming something I use regularly.

Today I just wanted to note a slightly more obscure feature — made more obscure because it is not really shipping with Lightroom…  Well, the mechanism is shipping but the data you load into it is in beta.

Lightroom is my fourth digital workflow engine.  The first was a great little PC program called xxxxx.  Then I moved back to the Macintosh and used Capture 1 Pro (v2 and v3).  Then I jumped onto the Aperture bandwagon, until it started to flounder (although I get the impression Aperture V2 fixed most of the issues I had with it), and now Lightroom V1 and V2.

While I really enjoyed working with Aperture and Lightroom, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Capture One raw image processor.  At the time (and perhaps now for all I know) it really did a spectacular job particularly in the area of color and contrast.   It used “film response” profiles to easily establish neutral or higher contrast looks for photographs.  Pick the high-contrast film curve, find the black point, tweak the saturation a bit and you were on your way.

Color is very personal, but for me C1PRO’s colors had a nice neutrality to them, yet an inherent vibrance that worked well.   Maybe it’s just the color temperatures I prefer - who knows?   Whatever it was, I found myself frustrated that no matter how much tweaking I did I couldn’t reproduce the “C1 look” with Aperture or Lightroom.

Along comes Lightroom V2 and a really smart and passionate MIT-based engineer and photographer, Eric Chan, is hired by Adobe to come up with camera profiles beyond what the default Adobe Camera Raw profiles that Lightroom and ACR use.    You can download these profiles from http://labs.adobe.com and load them into Lightroom (and I presume Camera Raw).

Eric’s task was to make these additional profiles behave as close to the manufacturer profiles burned into the firmware (which really only manifest themselves in JPEG images or if you use the camera’s software to process the raw files - like Canon’s DPP program).

I never really had an interest in these profiles.  Canon’s taste in color leans a bit heavy into magenta.  Interestingly (to some) this even extends to video — my XH-A1’s default parameters have a magenta cast.  And yes, I have a different profile loaded into my video camera now…

Anyway, back to Eric’s work.  He created these profiles to match what Canon ships and, lo and behold, one of them seems to be a pretty good match to the C1PRO film response settings.    This was just an emotional response when I first saw it (”hey, I’ve seen that color rendering before!”), and I ran C1PRO for the first time in 2 years to create a test image just to see if my memory was accurate.    Remembering color is notoriously improbable, but I had a specific image that bothered me last year.

Last April I was in Colorado with Charles Glatzer at his Wild Mustangs workshop.  He published a photo from that workshop which I also happened to have — in the sense that he was 4 feet to my left and our cameras were simultaneously bursting at the scene.  So give or take a few milliseconds and a handful of degrees, we had the same source image.   Chas uses C1 and, try as I might, I couldn’t get my color to match his.  Close, but never on the mark.   I knew it had to do with the profiles being applied and that would be a big wall to get over.

Below are three images: the first is Lightroom processing with the default ACR 4.4 profile.  The second image is the exact same set of develop settings except that the beta Canon Neutral profile (beta) is used.  The third image was generated by C1PRO with the high-contrast film response curve and a similar white balance, plus a few tweaks to approximate the saturation and contrast of the image.  The result was pretty darn close  (the Lightroom images are cropped, so the image looks a bit different).  Close enough for me to consider thinking about using the neutral profile now and then (it still has that slight Canon magenta cast absent in the C1PRO image — but I might be able to compensate for that with the white balance control if it bothers me).

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So whether you like the additional profiles or not, I really appreciate Adobe making it easy to add these new crayons to the box.  And thanks to “madmanchan” Eric Chan for going through the meticulous process of reverse engineering these profiles as a starting point.  Bravo!

By Dave | Posted in Photography, Technology | Comments (0)

Barred Owl B-roll

August 25, 2008 – 9:56 pm

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As part of the Water Wise Workshops a few weeks ago, Sally Farrow from Mass Audubon enthralled the kids with some animals that live in the watershed.  One of them was a beautiful Barred Owl.   Owls, to me, are simply beautiful birds and it was great to be able to capture some pretty nice video of this bird up close and personal.

The video is simply some b-roll of the owl as Sally talked about it to the kids (you can hear her talking in the background).  We had great light that day and I thought the footage came out pretty well.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/1604068[/vimeo]

(I have to say, the compressed version you see here from Vimeo does not do justice to the original.  If you really like this try the HD version on the Vimeo site or, better yet, download the full file from Vimeo — heck, even that has some compression artifacts in the feather details.  Tough subject.)

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By Dave | Posted in Environment, Photography | Comments (0)

Water Lilly Time-lapse

August 24, 2008 – 6:03 pm

There are rare times when you can really multi-task, but this was one for me.   While we were paddling on the Concord River (desperately hunting for something to photograph) my venerable 10D camera was quietly taking an image every 15 seconds in my backyard.

I’m still very much a novice at this, and this would still be considered a test — but I thought it came out well enough for others to see.    I hope you enjoy it.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/1595523[/vimeo] 

By Dave | Posted in Environment, Photography | Comments (2)

Lightroom 2 fixes uneven stage lighting

August 17, 2008 – 2:56 pm

I just finished processing last night’s Stone Mountain LIVE show (a rather eclectic tribute to the music of the 1950’s).

The Stone Mountain Arts Center is renown for its live music and sound system (as it should be) — less so for the stage lighting.   When you have a large group playing, and they often do, the performers off of center stage drop into the shadows (easily a one-stop drop).

While editing the photographs I realized that Lightroom 2’s new graduated neutral density (GND) filter tool might easily tune the wider-angle stage shots and bring it closer to what an audience member would see.   Now, doing this kind of exposure adjustment was always possible in Photoshop, but I don’t have the time to go through that process for what could be dozens of photos.   With Lightroom I set up a half-stop increase in the exposure and set it at an angle — almost as if I was adding a light to the stage.  The result created a much nicer balance (see the sample image below).  And I could sync this adjustment to the photos that needed it, fine tuning the position of the filter for the composition of each shot.

I’ve done some other work with the LR2 local adjustments, diddling with the masking tool, and I’ve found some uses for that — but for my workflow I think the graduated neutral density filter adjustment tool will turn more bland photos into selects than any other new toy in Lightroom.  Between this new tool and the improved sharpening, it is well worth the cost of upgrade.

Sample: The “stage left” lighting leave sax players Paul Ahlstrand and Tom Hall in the dark.  A somewhat narrow GND filter centered just over drummer Billy MacGillivray’s head makes it appear a new stage light was added.

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By Dave | Posted in Photography, SMAC | Comments (0)

Was this what it was like?

August 12, 2008 – 11:36 pm

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In 1852, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal about some walks he made up the Assabet River in Concord ( and he wrote about the sandy bottom of the river, the clear water, and the ability to see every detail of the bottom.  He also wrote of the weeds that grew on the bottom that remind you of the sea.

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to, perhaps, visit a place that recalls the river that was.   We paddled a section of the Swift  River in central Massachusetts.   The Swift River has the rather unique distinction of being the primary source of water for Boston — the river was dammed in the 1930’s to form the massive Quabbin Reservoir.  But the fine folks of Boston don’t manage to drink all of the water and so a little bit is allow to continue down the river and it’s just a great place to visit.

I really was in awe paddling on this water.  Whether the water was two or twelve feet deep, I could see quite clearly to the bottom.  Instead of the more typical dark, almost brown, plantlife I see in other rivers, this part of the Swift was dotted with verdant green gardens of various water plants — all teeming with fish.

To realize that, at one time, the river in my backyard shared similar qualities was really a mind-opener.  As an advocate for our river I’m constantly trying to find ways of connecting people to it — particularly through my photography.  I lacked the ability to capture what I experienced on the Swift River that afternoon, but I’m going to go back one day soon and try — because I think it represents what we’ve lost and what we might be able to give back to our grandchildren (actually, that might be aggressive — we’ve got about 100 years of use and abuse to try to reverse).

It has been gone for so long, I don’t think people realize what we’ve lost (and what we have to gain by coming to terms with what we’ve done to the river).  This isn’t the image that will tell that story, but there’s a picture that will and I’m going to go and find it.

By Dave | Posted in Environment | Comments (2)

Camping at DAR

August 12, 2008 – 10:59 pm

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We spent the weekend at DAR State Forest out in western Massachusetts - mostly kayaking at different spots.  I did take a few photos at the campsite.  This one is obviously processed a bit, but I think matches the feeling of the mixture of light and campfire smoke more than the original image does.

By Dave | Posted in Photography, Staring | Comments (0)

Light as a feather

August 6, 2008 – 9:57 pm

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We had a party here over the weekend (a baby shower for our daughter combined with a family picnic) and pretty much the week beforehand was spent getting the yard and house ready.   I was working in the backyard, literally covered in dirt and sweat, happened to look up, and saw the biggest downy feather I’ve ever seen.

Dirty, sweaty guy aiming his camera at the sky — yeah, I’m sure my neighbors think I’m nuts.

By Dave | Posted in Photography, Staring | Comments (0)
AJAXed with AWP