May 2013 - colorsync-users - lists.apple.com

Primer on photographic exposure, etc.
by Ben Goren 14 May '13

14 May '13

Here: https://trumpetpower.com/photos/Exposure is a first attempt at a document I've been meaning to write for a while. I'm afraid I don't have the time right now to further put into refining it; it's much too long and ideally needs to be broken apart and probably have different parts re-written multiple times tailored for different audiences -- and I *really* don't have the time for that sort of thing. But, still, I hope it answers many of the questions I've had asked of me of late Cheers, b&

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Debugging inkjet profiled printing
by edmund ronald 13 May '13

13 May '13

Hi Guys, I've put up a blog post on debugging inkjets. As we all know it's a nightmare. Please comment. http://photofeedback.blogspot.fr/2013/05/an-easy-check-of-profiled-printing… Edmund

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Re: The Creative Gouge
by Jesse Volner 11 May '13

11 May '13

At $50/mo, you're paying $600/yr. Design Premium was what, $1200? Upgrade was $600? So, $1800 over ~3 years, BUT then $600 upgrades from then on, and you could skip a version or two (until recently). $600/yr over 3 years = $1800 + now $600/yr even if you don't need the upgrade. Unless you were someone who bought every master suite, you're paying about the same now, but probably more. Two years from now if/when they say "due to development costs, etc… the price is now $55/mo", then 2 years after that, "67.95/mo", etc, etc, etc. At some point if you object to the price and you don't pay, you can't work. You're out of business unless a suitable competing product springs up. If you owned a disc, you could simply choose to stick with whatever feature set you currently owned. We don't have that option after this. Some of you don't mind, but others will be in a pinch. I've found enough apps to substitute, so when my 2nd year contract ends next May, I'm not going to renew. There is no emotion involved in this decision. I've simply found I do everything I need to do with Aperture, Pixelmator, Hype, iDraw, Acorn, Sketchbook Pro, Espresso, iBooks Author, FCPX, Motion 5, Logic Pro, ColorSchemer Studio, xScope, Keynote, etc. I've owned many for 4 years with no upgrade costs, and far more flexible licensing terms. Better customer service to boot. At least two of those apps were so innovative that Adobe shamelessly copied them (Aperture & Hype). I don't care if someone decides to call me names and says that me and my point are invalid. You can even reply in a condescending tone if you wish. I'm not fired up over this one way or the other. I'm just saying, after today, should they decide they want to charge more, we have no choice but to accept or immediately go without, and as it is, a lot of us are going to be paying a lot more than we have been for features we don't need. I can understand why many are upset. So, why take away a choice many customers value? This move is going to be good for the competition, and I have a feeling they're going to double their efforts to win people over with features. jesse

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Re: The Creative Gouge
by Pete MacKenzie 11 May '13

11 May '13

As a lurker on this list I have followed this thread with interest. For me, Adobe's move doesn't seem an enticing prospect. To illustrate my apprehension I offer my experience with a cloud based productivity app. I bought into Gridiron's Flow project tracking software which tracked Adobe CS products in particular. It was a bit buggy in its first iteration but it did enough to make itself useful. It was offered on disc or download with license, and updates came along now and then (some including modifications based on my discussions with their support). After a couple of years version 2 was introduced. This represented a fundamental change as although the free core software was installed on my computer the database that served it was in the cloud on the Gridiron servers. An internet connection was needed for the database to function properly. All the really useful functions were now offered as subscription add-ons to the basic app. It worked better than version 2 and I decided, slightly reluctantly, that it was a useful productivity tool that I would buy into again. I was a bit concerned that much information was stored on a remote server beyond my control but thought also that this was the way software was progressing so better get used to it. Two years later it was gone. With little actual explanation the demise of the service was announced and a deadline was set beyond which the whole system, along with all user information would be shut down. The data couldn't be saved because the system was proprietary and version 2 data was incompatible with version 1, so no going back. To say i was p****d off would be an understatement. Would I like a repeat of this scenario - of course not. And yet placing all control of the tools that form the background of your trade into a monthly subscription and cloud based service is precisely what we are being asked to grant. I don't think the more pessimistic posters on this thread are wrong to be concerned or to imagine the worst case scenarios. Squaring up to that worst case seems the most sensible thing in the circumstances. Cheers Pete

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RE: Big Tiff files
by Chris Cox 10 May '13

10 May '13

Photoshop CS6 reads BIGTIFF, and is tested against the BIGTIFF samples from available libraries and applications. But we were unable to complete testing of writing BIGTIFF because there were not yet enough implementations to test against (my QE is kinda picky). > Although Adobe "officially" owns the TIFF specification, I believe that the > support and evolution the TIFF format has primarily been handled through the > open source LibTiff project. That would be incorrect. Adobe still owns the TIFF standard, and works with other parties looking to extend TIFF. I have been working with the libtiff people for many years to make BIGTIFF happen. We have not yet had a chance to update the official TIFF documentation to include the BIGTIFF effort. (I keep asking for a tech writer to help with this huge document, and keep not getting one) Chris

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Generating X-Rite DNG camera profiles for LR. Did I miss something?
by Paul Schilliger 09 May '13

09 May '13

Hi, Some of you had warned me that the DNG profiles were not near as good as the proper ICC camera Profiles. Since there is no other way to calibrate the camera sensor for LightRoom, I got the ColorChecker Passport to give it a go. I hastily made some DNG profiles via the X-Rite 1.0.2 export module (out of unprocessed zeroed RAW). Here are my first impressions, tell me please if you think that I must have missed some important step on the way, or if that's simply the way it is. What strikes me, is that contrarily to the ICC profiles I have previously built for Capture One for instance, the DNG camera profiles seem to only affect the chroma values and they leave the camera to RAW gamma curve mostly unaffected. Since the hues aren't automatically pinned at their proper place on a corrected luminance curve, they seem to be floating and the result can be caricatural sometimes. Attempts to reinforce the gamma curve on images linked to those profiles bring up inevitably an over-saturation, since this affects the RGB channels and not a Lab L curve. The profiles leave also the white balance shift uncorrected. Does that first impression merge with what others have seen, or did I miss perhaps some step on the way to producing those test profiles? Paul Schilliger

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Re: TIFF format (was The Creative Gouge)
by Andrew Rodney 08 May '13

08 May '13

On May 8, 2013, at 2:54 PM, Jonathan Taylor <jtyr71(a)gmail.com> wrote: > In terms of professional imaging applications, what are some of those software titles? Let's define professional imaging. Top of the heap is Photoshop right? It's the ONLY application that allows you to edit it's layers right? And what formats can you save the layers? TIFF or PSD. My point is, saving TIFF opens up more options to view the flattened data outside of Photoshop than that other format. It cost nothing for a software developer to read or write TIFF and the opposite is true for PSD. We've got only two formats to pick today if we're dealing with layers. One's an open, comment format, the other is a proprietary format everyone else has to pay to use. Both provide identical support for stuff like layers. Given these simple facts, why save in PSD? Just what advantage is there? > What is silly about using lossless JPF/JP2? No layers for one. So if you wish to go back and edit that kind of data, that's not going to fly. 2nd, it's far less supported in 3rd party products than TIFF. Andrew Rodney http://www.digitaldog.net/

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Re: crank the saturation
by Ben Goren 08 May '13

08 May '13

On May 8, 2013, at 3:07 PM, Spinnaker Photo Imaging Center <spinnakerphotoimagingcenter(a)dnmillerphoto.com> wrote: > Also, N8 patch is equivalent to a patch in the 24 patch target? GAH! Did I really type, N8? Yes, I did.... Sorry, I meant to type "N5," meaning the patch with that Munsell color, which is the one next to the yellow patch. And there's another caveat...the proper RGB values depend on the working space's gamma. In most working spaces, the gamma is 2.2 and the proper RGB values are R=G=B=118. But ProPhoto uses a 1.8 gamma (which is one of the many problems with it as a working space), and there you need to use R=G=B=100. You can figure out the proper RGB values for any color space by using the color picker in Photoshop. Either create or convert or assign a document to that space and then use the color picker to set the color to L=50, a=0, b=0 and see what the RGB values are. Cheers, b&

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Re: crank the saturation
by Ben Goren 08 May '13

08 May '13

On May 8, 2013, at 2:38 PM, Spinnaker Photo Imaging Center <spinnakerphotoimagingcenter(a)dnmillerphoto.com> wrote: > Hi Ben. I tried this exercise and did not have the extra patches. Do the extra patches make a difference. If you've got them, they help. It works without them. > Also, where in the exercise is the saturation cranked high? Guess I don't follow in what software is all this being done in. You'd be doing this in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, Canon's Digital Photo Processor, or a similar raw development application, and you'd be doing it to set the white balance. The idea is that, by increasing saturation, you make it that much more visually obvious how far off the white balance is. It's especially visible in neutral patches. Small errors in white balance that aren't very noticeable with normal saturation tend to stand out a lot with the saturation cranked all the way up. That's where the extra patches in the Passport come into play, as they're only very slightly saturated and they're right on the black body color axis. If one of those looks neutral, you know you've got a problem because it's not supposed to be neutral. You also have a good idea which direction to shift the white balance in to fix...though, really, just fiddling the knobs until you can't make it any better is as good a strategy as any. To clarify: the idea is to adjust the white balance (and only the white balance) with the saturation at its maximum setting until the image, especially the neutral patches, appears to have no (or minimal) color casts. Obviously, it's still going to be ugly with the saturation all the way up; your goal is to adjust white balance until the ugliness is minimized, and then return the saturation to normal. The problem with using the eyedropper to set white balance is that you're just neutralizing that one single patch. There may well be -- and virtually always is -- some sort of a very subtle color cast affecting that particular sample. By cranking the saturation and using your eyes, you're adjusting the overall white balance of the entire scene, not just of that one single patch. Exposure and white balance can interact with each other. I'd probably recommend starting by using the eyedropper to get white balance close; then adjusting the exposure slider until the N8 patch is as close to you can get to 118/118/118; then cranking the saturation and adjusting the white balance that way; then returning saturation to normal and re-adjusting the exposure, and to continue bouncing back and forth between the two until you're no longer making any adjustments. You can also do this with shots without a reference chart, but it's easier for the eye to get fooled in general scenery than with a standard chart with a bunch of neutral (and near-neutral) patches. Later this week I hope to have time to do a proper writeup on my workflow, which includes a guess-free empirical method to normalize exposure and white balance both. But it doesn't work in Adobe products.... Cheers, b& P.S. I'm copying the list because I think others might benefit from a bit of clarification on the matter. b&

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Re: Colorsync-users Digest, Vol 10, Issue 79
by Barry Gorrell 08 May '13

08 May '13

Fully agree with Andrew's point. Vote with your wallets folks... Current users can survive much longer with their copies of CS6 than Adobe can survive without enough new "subscribers". Nothing very compelling about Adobes'new CC offerings. Our students are already asking about the best Adobe alternatives... Gimp for mac OSX is a good one. Here are some others... Acrobat Pro - PDF Pen (SmileOnMyMac) Photoshop - Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com/) Illustrator - iDraw (Indeeo) InDesign - Swift Publisher (Blight) Flash - MotionComposer (Aquafadas) Dreamweaver - Rapidweaver (Realmac) Premiere - Camtasia (TechSmith) http://gigaom.com/2013/04/06/how-to-build-your-own-adobe-creative-suite-wit h-cheaper-mac-app-alternatives/ Barry Gorrell _________________________________________________ On 5/8/13 10:05 AM, "colorsync-users-request(a)lists.apple.com" <colorsync-users-request(a)lists.apple.com> wrote: >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > >Message: 1 >Date: Wed, 08 May 2013 07:38:53 -0600 >From: Andrew Rodney <andrew(a)digitaldog.net> >To: "'colorsync-users?lists.apple.com' List" > <colorsync-users(a)lists.apple.com> >Subject: Re: The Creative Gouge >Message-ID: <FD4ED051-4AFA-45D2-B058-A1422B11EC63(a)digitaldog.net> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > >On May 8, 2013, at 6:42 AM, Martin Orpen <martin(a)idea-digital.com> wrote: > >> What happens when you decide to stop paying the monthly fee? > >Exactly the same thing that happens when you stop paying your phone bill, >your ISP bill, or any subscription, the service stops working. > >There are some advantages and disadvantages to this new mode. It's not >black and white. But the bottom line is simply: If you don't like the >model, don't buy into it. > >Andrew Rodney >http://www.digitaldog.net/

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