Get Colormanaged » software

“Hacking” Grain settings into ACR and more

René — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:37:40 +0000

Noise

While most people in this digital age seem overly concerned with noise, and mainly want noise reduction, I tend to like grain: It can really improve a digital image, and even make it appear sharper. Until now I had to simulate it using Photoshop for instance.

No longer: Recently, Adobe released ACR 6.1 and LightRoom 3. In these there was a new option added: “Grain”, with three controls: “Amount”, “Size” and “Roughness”. It produced some pretty nice “film like” grain. Way better then a simple “add noise” in Photoshop for instance.
That could be a time saver and simplify the workflow quite a bit.
Of course, I’d need to upgrade to LR3 for this feature. But, along with the mayor improvements in IQ due to the new demosaicing and processing algorithms (Process Version 2010) that would be totally worth it to me. Some of the other new features would be the icing on the cake.

One problem

I’d need a new Mac to run it: LightRoom 3 and PSCS5 only run on an Intel Mac, not on my Dual G5 PPC.
Since buying a new Mac just for this is a bit over the top, I decided to see what my options were.

A while back, Adobe updated the previous versions of ACR and LR to ACR 5.7 and LR 2.7: These versions also support the demosaic algorithm from Lightroom 3.
From what I’d read on the web, these should render the file as seen in Lightroom3, but not allow you to make changes to the new Develop settings, like “Grain”.

A bit more researching led (as often) to the excellent site of Victoria Bampton, AKA. Lightroom Queen. She had a bit more detailed info: ACR 5.7 should use the same Demosaic, and match the new additions closely. She also mentioned “5.7 can read LR’s settings but there’s no UI to change the new settings.” Sadly, LR2.7 will ignore the new LR3 settings. (Why Adobe, why?)

Then I got an idea when answering a question on POTN. Would it be possible to “hack” an .XMP file to only adjust the Grain settings?

The answer? It is!

All you need is an .XMP file with settings applied in LightRoom3 (thanks Anouk!) and a text editor.
It really is that simple.

An .XMP file is simply a plain text file, with instructions for the Adobe Raw converter: “Set this slider to this value”.
The part we are interested in, is this:
58 30 59

All you need to do is copy-paste this into a “blank” .XMP file.
To do that, open a Raw file (not a DNG) in ACR 5.7. Then go to the “flyout” menu and choose “Save settings…”.

To make life easy on yourself, only save one set of parameters, for instance “sharpening”.
The advantage of doing it like this, is that all other settings will remain the same. So if you’d already made adjustments to the Raw, they will remain.

Close ACR.

Open the .XMP in a text editor. I like Smultron.
That gives you an .XMP that looks like this:

xmlns:crs="http://ns.adobe.com/camera-raw-settings/1.0/"> 5.7 5.0 62 +1.0 8 81 True

Delete the “Sharpening” settings, and replace them with the “Grain” settings you want.

You get this:

xmlns:crs="http://ns.adobe.com/camera-raw-settings/1.0/"> 6.1 5.7 50 30 60 50 True

Save this under a new name. “Grain50_30_60″ seems a logical choice in this case. You can of course save a number of different settings under different names.
Open a Raw file, apply the preset, and BOOM. You just added Grain

But wait, there’s more

So, what if you want to alter just one of the settings? Do you need to open a text editor every time?
No. It’s easier to create a few more presets, each only adjusting 1 parameter.

I created separate presets for GrainAmount, GrainSize and GrainFrequency, in different values.
So, if I open an image in ACR, it looks like this:

Then I apply three presets to set the Grain I want.

In this case GrainAmount80, GrainSize20 and GrainFrequency80. Not as flexible as sliders, but pretty close.

The other way around

In LR3, there’s another new addition that is lacking in LR2.7: There’s a point curve added.
In LR2, you could only adjust the (wrongly named) “point curve” as the ACR “Parametric Curve”. So it was not possible to create a curve to invert the image or set the black and white point to something other then 0 and 255. (Something quite a few people like to do, which makes absolutely no sense to me).

There’s a way around that as well: Open a CR2 file in ACR, adjust the curve as you like, and click “Done”. You just created an .XMP file with all the info you need.
Open that .xmp file in an editor, and look for the second entry for tone curve:

0, 255 255, 0

the first entry for “Tone Curve” is the Parametric Curve. Don’t mess with it, since LR allows you to adjust that.

0, 0 32, 22 64, 56 128, 128 192, 196 255, 255

Now, in LightRoom2, create a new Preset. Use only the “Tone Curve” setting,

Open this preset in a text editor as well.
It will look different then an xmp, but will be plain text as well.

s = { id = "847A699E-AEA0-4E00-BF19-F6E681D5EBD7", internalName = "Negative", title = "Negative", type = "Develop", value = { settings = { ParametricDarks = 0, ParametricHighlightSplit = 75, ParametricHighlights = 0, ParametricLights = 5, ParametricMidtoneSplit = 50, ParametricShadowSplit = 25, ParametricShadows = -5, ToneCurve = { 0, 0, 32, 22, 64, 56, 128, 128, 192, 196, 255, 255, }, ToneCurveName = "Medium Contrast", }, uuid = "F2FF3CF0-C863-43EA-B051-B624A8113D3A", }, version = 0, }

Remove the stuff you don’t want, and change it to this:

s = { id = "847A699E-AEA0-4E00-BF19-F6E681D5EBD7", internalName = "Negative", title = "Negative", type = "Develop", value = { settings = { ToneCurve = { 0, 255, 255, 0, }, ToneCurveName = "Negative", }, uuid = "F2FF3CF0-C863-43EA-B051-B624A8113D3A", }, version = 0, }

Restart LR2, apply the preset. You just inverted the image

Of course, there might be a number of other things you’d want to “hack” into either LR2 or ACR 5.7. Just give it a try! And be sure to post any nice results you get in the comments!

Canon DPP or Adobe Lightroom?

René — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:00:55 +0000

Or: Why I shoot Raw

I shoot a lot of Performing Arts. That often involves “difficult” lighting: Different light sources, with different color temperatures. And to make matters worse, they are fitted with colored gels most of the time.
While I mostly try to go for “pleasing color”, rather then “neutral skintone” (the lighting was done a specific color for a reason I think), this still poses some challenges every now and then.

Simply setting ‘tungsten’ white balance is an okay starting point, but with certain types or colors of lighting, I need to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the image where I want it.

For that reason, I choose to shoot Raw: Gives me the most flexibility, and allows me to change whitebalance without causing too much harm.

Raw converters

Most of the time, I use Lightroom 2 for editing these images: I prefer the workflow over using the combination of DPP and Photoshop: I can do local edits on the Raw file in LR, and I can save the DNG with all edits included. With DPP/PS, I have to save a layered psd file of each image (which might be about 100Mb or so. With hundreds of images, that eats up HDD space rather fast).
This might not make sense to everybody, but makes sense to me.

DPP offers better noise reduction and sharpening in my opinion, but most of the time LightRoom is good enough for the intended purpose (images for the web).

Sometimes not

Occasionally however, I come across an image that simply will not give decent results in LightRoom. Blue gelled lights often give problems: For one: No way to reduce noise without obliterating all detail on the process. A while back I processed one of those images.

Here’s what it looked like in LightRoom at my default settings (Camera Neutral):
Not the best rendering. Obviously, the purple causes some problems by “blocking up”, and the blue does horrid things as well: Details and sharpness are gone. (notice the faces? A bit further down are the images up close.)

One thing that might help some colors (but not blues in my experience) is switching the camera profile. In this case, “Adobe Standard” didn’t exactly help, and the ACR4.4 profile was so bad I won’t even bother posting the screenshot…

Adjusting white balance and using specific HSL adjustments helped the image quite a bit, but still, the details in the shadow stayed absent.

Time to try a different Raw converter…

DPP

Canon’s own DPP is a very different piece of software then LightRoom: It has no DAM capabilities, and only offers global adjustments. So any local editing must be done in Photoshop. For instance by doing multiple conversions and use masks in PS.
Also, the user interface is very different and seems to be a case of “you love it or you hate it”.
Most importantly however, it rendered this image quite different from LightRoom

DPP “As shot” looks quite “neon”, but it clearly contains more detail:

The lack of detail in LR is not caused by noise reduction: If NR in LR is set to 0, the difference is still apparent. Setting Color NR higher then about 7 does obliterate any detail that was left however. Clearly, LR Color NR is not just targeting color noise… Luminance NR doesn’t help the image, but doesn’t destroy it either.

In comparison, DPP does much different: you can set a fairly high amount of Chroma NR before you start losing detail, and it actually removes color noise. However, setting a Luminance NR of something as low as 2 visibly removes detail: Avoid this like the plague.

Finishing up

Setting a higher color temperature, different color tone, and using “tune” to shift the image toward green/yellowish helps colors in DPP, although some transitions in the beams of light still look quite harsh. LightRoom does better in that respect.

The most striking difference (apart from the loss of detail in LR) is that the smoke appears to be almost gone in DPP!

Sometimes neither works alone

So, this appears to be a case were neither Raw converter gives satisfactory results… DPP gives detail, but no smoke. LightRoom gives smoke, better transitions, yet no detail. RIT handles the image like DPP does, apart from the fact that is seems to do some noise reduction by default, with no (working) option to turn it off. So no sense in going that route: RIT is a bit more constricting then DPP (you can only adjust what you could adjust on the camera) and the user interface is horrid.

I finally decided to open both the LR and DPP conversion in Photoshop, and blend them together, thus getting an image that contained both detail and smoke:

If anyone wants to give this image a try, the Raw file can be downloaded from here.

Please respect my copyright, and only use the image for evaluation purposes.

Tethered shooting with a Canon camera

René — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:36:49 +0000

Why should you?

If you are shooting portraits or architecture, it can be very useful to be able to view the images on a larger screen then that on the back of your camera: You can better judge focus, expression, exposure and composition for instance. Not only because the screen is bigger and of better quality (not to mention calibrated!), but also because the software you use might have some visual aids (clipping warning, grid, 100% view, stuff like that)

What do you need

Obviously a camera and the proper cable: USB for most consumer models and the Eos 1D(s)3, Firewire for the Canon 1D(2) and 1D(s)Mk2(n).
Apart from that, you’ll need some software to connect the camera to the computer and some kind of viewer or raw converter.

The software

There are a few options: Capture One Pro is highly regarded, and does all in one package, but the price is fairly steep.
Then there’s Bibble Pro. Quite a bit cheaper and supports more (older) cameras then C1Pro. Both of these support Nikon and Canon. Bibble also supports other brands. Both are available for Windows and OSX, Bibble also for Linux. Neither allow remote control of the camera, but Capture one allows you to fire the shutter remotely.

Free

Lucky for us that Canon also offers a free solution: Eos Utility. It came on the disk with your camera. If it didn’t, or you lost the disk, you can download it, following the instructions here.
Once installed, you’ll also need a viewer. I prefer to use DPP on my laptop, since that’s ~~a dinosaur~~ an old Powerbook G4 with a 12″ screen. Others prefer to use Lightroom. I’ll explain how to use both:

Step by step

First, start Eos Utility and go to the preferences: (Do this before connecting the camera. On my Mac (OSX 10.4.11) at least, it won’t complete start up, and needs to be force-quit otherwise)
Since I use DPP mostly for tethered shooting, I set up my Folder and filenames to be meaningful here. If you use Lightroom, you can skip this name customization.

The name is pretty self-explanatory I think. I use 3 lines for Year/Month/Date, since the preset “Shooting day” will add a few underscores I don’t want.

Again, pretty obvious naming scheme: My initials, the date and a short description.

Then set DPP as Linked Software.

Now for the shooting

Exit the prefs. That get’s you back to the main window. Choose “Camera Settings / Remote Shooting”

You get this: Note that, unlike other tethering software, Eos Utility gives you complete control over the camera. Very, very nice if the camera is at a position where you can hardly reach it (high on a tripod for instance).

Take a shot. If the “quick preview” window opens, click it away, since you won’t be needing that. It will stay gone as long as you don’t restart Eos Utility.
The image will now automatically open in DPP, in thumbnail view.

That’s not my preferred way of working. So I hit Cmd+A (select all) and Cmd+right arrow (open in edit image window; no shortcut for it on PC). That gives me this:

Cmd+T gets rid of the tools. All consecutive images will open in the edit image window now. At whatever zoom factor you choose.
You’re all set. So shoot away.

Lightroom

In Lightroom it’s a bit ~~more complicated~~ different.
Set everything the same in Eos Utility, except of course the linked software. As said, you also don’t need to worry about folder naming, because that is taken care of in Lightroom:

Then open Lightroom. It will open with the images you last edited / imported. Enable Auto Import, and set up a watched folder like this, in the very logically named “Auto Import Settings”:

Note that your images will get moved (not copied) by LightRoom into the folder you specify here. No way around it, so the whole naming scheme for folders in Eos Utility is kinda redundant in this case. I’d strongly recommend using a meaningful foldername. You can use either LR or Eos Utility to manage the filenames, depending on what you prefer.

Take a shot:

Note the image in the background is still the old image. If after the shot you get “No Photo Selected”, click a thumbnail in LR.
That’s it. Lightroom will now keep an eye on that folder, and import every image that lands in there. A bit slower on my laptop then DPP, but it works okay.

The drawbacks

Tethered shooting causes the battery of your camera to drain faster. With some cameras (the 1D comes to mind) that’s not something you desire…
Obviously, you also need to lug a laptop with you, but IMO that’s well worth it.
Lastly: Eos Utility does not like it when the camera goes to sleep, or is disconnected: It’ll crash. No idea why it’s buggy that way, probably because it’s free.

Black and White

René — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:58:56 +0000

What do humans see?

The human eye is most sensitive for yellow-green light. Take a look at the next gradient for instance:

To me, indeed the green-to-yellow part looks brightest. Not so to Photoshop however.

About a hundred ways to loose the color

Well, maybe not thàt much, but quite a few anyhow. The easiest way (but offering zero control) would be to go through Image > Mode > Grayscale. That’ll give you this:

Your image just became 1/3 of the original size, and that weight loss is caused because there’s now only a ‘gray’ channel instead of a red, green and blue one.
Big drawback of this method, is that it’s destructive: You indeed loose the color: It’s gone for good. Since you also have zero control, I’d never use this method.

Layers

So, we want something that’s reversible. Lots of ways to do that, using (adjustment) layers, but not all of them good… Let’s start off by naming just about the worst way imaginable: Desaturate. What this does, is that it removes all color information from an image, without the option for any user intervention. While that may or may not be important to you, this should be: All colors are treated as if they were equal.
While equality is a great thing, in this case, it isn’t, since to us different colors aren’t equal.

What does Photoshop see?

Simply put: Numbers. If you’d open the above color gradient in Photoshop, the eye dropper will show you what it’s made of: A simple gradient in each channel. The image below shows the channels:

To understand what Photoshop sees a bit better, have a look at the info palette, and in particular the HSB values there. The only thing changing there is the hue angle! Saturation and Brightness remain at 100 percent in the entire gradient.

Not vastly surprising then, that this is what you get when you do a ‘straightforward’ desaturate:

Hue and Saturation are at 0, Brightness is at 50 percent. This might be correct “by the numbers”, but it’s not what I’d want for making a nice black and white image…

A better way

As with most things in Photoshop, there’s plenty of ways to convert a color image to a grayscale. I’m going to show a few here that do a better job then desaturate, and offer more control then ‘Image > Mode > Grayscale’.

One simple way would be to use blend modes: Duplicate the background layer, desaturate the duplicate layer and set the blend mode of the top layer to color.
This can all be done using keyboard shortcuts: Cmd+J, Shift+Cmd+U, Shift+Opt+C, so is very quick.
Disadvantage of that method is that it doubles the file size.

Photoshop is acting more then a bit goofy here by the way: If you desaturate the top layer, you essentially fill it with medium gray. However, if you create a new layer and fill that with medium gray (or black or white or whatever shade of gray in between) by using the fill command, the file size does not double. Very weird indeed.

So the fastest way to go black and white without doubling the file size would be this: Shift+Cmd+Opt+N, Cmd+Backspace, Shift+Opt+C.

Control

All nice and fast, but this doesn’t give you much control. So let’s try a different method. Make a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer. Set saturation to 0. Now you have the uniform gray image of the example above. Now, set the blending mode to ‘Color’ (Or Hue, or Saturation. Doesn’t matter in this case.) Same as when you use that blend mode on a layer filled with pixels! Yet still no control.
To get control, add another hue saturation adjustment layer between this one and the background image. Set the blend mode to ‘Luminosity’. Do not touch the Saturation slider here however. Instead, use the ‘Hue’ slider to alter the grayscale image.
The example below shows the effect of a shift in hue of +40:

Alternatives

As said, in Photoshop there are more ways to do this.
You could for instance just copy the contents of one channel into the image. What works better then that, is to use either the ‘Calculations’ command or, more flexible and a bit easier to understand, a Channel Mixer adjustment layer.
Tick the grayscale box there, and PS will default to these values:

You can then drag any slider to wherever you want, creating the type of black and white image you want. For instance for a portrait, using more red will result in lighter skin tones, using more green will give more contrast… As can be seen in the screenshot, Channel Mixer will warn you when the total of channels goes over 100 percent. However that does not mean that you must never go higher. Depends on the image really… The Histogram is your friend here.

The two gradients made with channel mixer: First default setting, then the altered setting:

Channel mixer has the strangeness that if you untick the ‘Monochrome’ box, the values for all channels stay at what you set (83, 24 and 5 percent in the above example). If however you then tick the ‘Monochrome’ box again, you’re back at the default values! Not the brightest decision Adobe ever made I think.

New to CS3

In PSCS3, Adobe introduced the ‘Black and White’ adjustment layer. It’s quite a bit like a Channel mixer, but is adjustable for 6 colors, instead of 3 channels. So it offers more control (and more options for the user to screw up).

Apparently, someone at Adobe must have been watching Spinal Tap, since the sliders of this adjustment layer range from -200 to +300. ‘Goes to eleven‘ indeed. For the adventurous: There’s also an ‘Auto’ button.

New to CS4

In PSCS4, Adobe included the new ‘Vibrance’ adjustment that was first introduced in Lightroom and ACR. That adjustment also features a ‘Saturation’ slider.
If you use that slider to desaturate an image, it quickly becomes clear that this is working different then the ‘Hue Saturation’ adjustment. You could say it’s actually working nice.

This is whet you get if you drag the Saturation to -100: A contrasty version of what you get using ‘Channel mixer’.

Some tips

If you set any of these adjustment layers to blend mode ‘Color’, you get the exact same result as in the above example with a gray pixel layer set to blend mode ‘Color’: A standard B&W conversion.
This can be useful as a quick way to compare your conversion to a ‘standard’ grayscale conversion to see if your version is actually better…
Blend mode ‘Color’ will also work for a ‘Solid Color’, ‘Gradient’, ‘Gradient Map’ or ‘Pattern’ adjustment layer. While I cannot think of a use for ‘Pattern’, the first two work similar to a gray pixel layer set to ‘Color’, while the third offers interesting possibilities. Maybe not what you’d want for your average, day to day grayscale conversion, but nice to experiment a bit.

I leave you with an example of that: A ‘Gradient Map’ adjustment layer, using the preset ‘Copper’, then set blend mode to ‘Color’, on an actual photo: