The Culprit: Broken 80GB Wester Digital DriveThree to four weeks ago, I got the shock of my life. I turned on my main Photoshop Computer that also holds all of my photographs in form of undeveloped RAW files. Suddenly my computer reported that it could not find any hard drive to boot from and it made loud clicking noises. One of my drives was trying to spin up but could not. It sounded very much like a head crash.

The next day was pure agony for me, when I had to wait to dissect my computer. Although used to back up everything to external drives, I had become lazy recently. My most recent backup was already several months old. I took my internal hard drive to usb adapter and hooked up my main picture drive to my computer. The adapter works with Laptop and Desktop drives as well as the new SATA drives.

Last week I spent an enormous amount of time updating this Website. It is the part of being present online that I like the least as it involves hours of work without much of a visible result. I finally updated the underlying CMS framework to a newer version, and since I had made many customizations, I had to spend some time changing the programming of the new version to suit my needs. The gallery system I use works completely different now, so I had to do some patching there too. I am usually a lazy updater and a later adapter, since I use so many functions that are not always available on the bleeding edge. If anyone really cares what it takes to run a site, I can add a few pointers later.

The main reason to go through with this now was actually the fact that I need to organize the data better. Finding articles has become harder as this website grew, so I have added all those tutorial links to the front page, in an effort to improve access, and I have added some auto discovery links at the bottom of many pages. It is just the first step, but I am making great progress now that I finished the programming work.

I even found time to upload a new gallery yesterday. I still have a long backlog from recent trips. I did upload some pictures of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. I hope you enjoy the new gallery and that you come back next week for more.

I will also start to write a few new tutorials soon. As always I am open to suggestions on what to write.

Someone sitting on the curb

Learn how to optimize pictures for websites without sacrificing quality.

The benefit of small pictures is immediately obvious. Requiring less bandwidth will reduce your cost and the cost to your visitors (time or volume charges). People will not remember your site as being slow and come back again (although slowness might happen for other reasons).
I also reduce the size of personal images I send via email to friends and family.
It is thoughtful not to waste other people's time and mailbox space.
The image on the left is only 13.8kB and can be loaded, even through a dialup connection, in a fraction of a second (the text on this page is bigger). Further optimization could reduce the size of this image to about 10kB without too much loss of quality. To save time, I have automated my workflow (including the final compression), leaving some room for further improvements.
I will demonstrate how to optimize your images with Photoshop, but you should be able to reproduce these steps with just about any Photo Editor

Preserve the Colors of your Images Recently Ron sent me an email and hinted me towards the fact that I missed the last mile on my workflow tutorials.
I was asked to give some more insight into the process of preparing images for web viewing and/or printing.
In this tutorial I am going to cover some of the basics of color profiling and in the next tutorial I am going to talk a bit about resizing and compression of images. After all you want your images to look good without annoying your viewers (and your wallet) by large data transfers. As you can see this site has a reasonable amount of graphics, but (hopefully) still loads fairly quickly. Part of the reason (besides a good host) is that I optimize my images for online viewing. Since I have automated the process, I forgot to cover this subject. You can use the same technique to send your pictures via email.

Color Profiles and Management

I am by no means an expert in color profiling, nor do I understand all of it. But I can give you some tips on what worked for me without drifting too much into technical jargon.
Color Management should be part of your digital workflow and it is tightly interwoven with all the applications.
Since different devices use different technology (an LCD uses light and color filters to render pixels while an inkjet puts ink onto a paper), you need color management to make the picture look the same on either of them. You want the picture to be printed the same way it looks on your screen. Today's consumer grade LCD screens are often too bright and too cold (blue/green tint). I guess the reason behind this is that manufacturers want them to look brighter in the show room. Unfortunately, this really messes up your color management, so if you are serious about getting the best quality from your pictures, check out my short article on LCD Color Calibration.

Color Proofing

Even after you calibrated your monitor, you still need an application like Photoshop that supports color management. As far as I understand the process, the monitor profile consists of two parts. One part is loaded in the operating system (the one that converts a standard color space to the color space of your monitor) and another part is used by the application.
All you need to worry about is that your application supports color management. On some LCDs (like my laptop screen) I can see a visible difference between an image that I open in Photoshop on the calibrated monitor and one I open with the Windows picture viewer.
In order to color proof your image for your printing service, you need an ICC Profile. Since EZPrints offers good prices and a color profile (EZPrints Profile), I am going to use them as an example. Simply download the profile and right click on the file. Select "Install Profile" and start (or restart) Photoshop.
In Photoshop open the picture you wish to color proof.
Go to View -> Proof Setup -> Custom
Under Device to Simulate select ezprints.icc (or whatever printer you want to use) and leave the rendering intent on Relative Colorimetric.
Now you can do two things:
1) You can go to View -> Gamut Warning and let Photoshop highlight the areas in your picture that are out of Gamut (that have levels of saturation your printer cannot reproduce). If you have a lot of those areas and if the color range is wide, you will see posterization effects. That usually happens when you try to boost the saturation too much.
2) Or you can go to View -> Proof Colors. Provided your Monitor is calibrated and able to reproduce the entire color range (that's usually the case, as a monitor has a wider color space than prints), you will be able to preview exactly how the final print colors will look like. Don't even try this with an uncalibrated screen.
I have also set up Photoshop to use ProPhoto RGB as my working color space (Edit -> Color Settings). For some reason, Photoshop only lets you select ProPhoto RGB after clicking the "More Options Tab" (which cost me quite some time to find out).

Color Spaces

Ron asked: "The instructors for Photoshop at the UC ext. courses there in Cupertino always said to use Adobe RGB color space. Now I see that people say sRGB might be better."

IPAQ Picture ViewerToday I am going to show you some mobile computing solutions for the Digital Photographer using a Windows Mobile powered Pocket PC.
You can use the Pocket PC as an ultra mobile RAW file viewer and editor, to calculate the Depth of Field and Hyperfocal Distance, to evaluate Exposure, take notes, attach voice notes to digital files or read a book while you are waiting for an event.
The possibilities are endless. You can do almost as much with this ultra portable solution then with a "normal" PC.

Unfortunately many vendors like Dell have withdrawn from this market, but you can still buy everything you need (often at bargain prices).

Hardware

A few months ago, I purchased a HP IPAQ HX4700 through an Auction. This is still one of the most powerful machines to date and has some features that I considered vital to use it as a portable photographic computing solution.
The features most important to me:

• Full VGA (640 x 480) resolution (the HX4700 is one of the few Pocket PC with that much resolution; it's 4 times higher than most "standard" PDA. The Display is 4 inches in diameter and is large compared to other devices.
• 624 MHz Intel Processor (this is still the fastest PDA processor on the market and is required for RAW file evaluation)
• Two Memory Card slots (Secure Digital (SD) card and Compact Flash (CF) card). This is important, since I can keep the SD card in the device for file storage and to install programs to (you need to do this, to keep the main memory free for image processing, otherwise it won't work). Since all my cameras (Digital SLR from Canon) use CF cards, I will keep the SD card in the device at all times. If your camera uses SD cards, use the CF card for your PDA. Many modern PDA don't even offer CF card slots anymore.
• WiFi connection (so I could check my website when I am on the road or research a location)

IPAQ SD and CF Flash CardsThe HX4700 was therefore a logical choice for me, as it had the most advanced features and would still have a very decent battery life, even though it has such a large display and fast processor. Just in case I also bought the larger battery extension pack, which I have never gotten below 70% charge after 5 hours of regular use.

Software

Photo Software

Resco Photo Viewer 2007 Thumbnail View
The IPAQ is in Portrait mode (vertical)All screenshots are just thumbnail views (since the device has such a high resolution). You can click any of the screenshot pictures for a full resolution view (make sure your browser doesn't shrink the vertical pictures) The pictures will appear larger than the display of the IPAQ, since computer monitors don't have the same pixel density.

I have often proposed shooting RAW if your camera supports it, for the added flexibility (white balance, sharpening ...) and the higher dynamic range. RAW is often considered less desirable because it needs special tools to view and convert the files into JPG files for printing and web viewing.

Today there are two programs that support reviewing RAW files on your Pocket PC. PocketLoupe and Resco Photo Viewer Professional. Since PocketLoupe isn't updated anymore, I will not review it here (it won't be able to support newer camera models).

Resco Photo Viewer Professional

Make sure you will get the Resco Photo Viewer Professional Version, since only this version supports RAW files (RAW, CRW, CR2, RAF, MRW, NEF, ORF, PEF).

Usually I open up a folder on the compact flash card and look at the content via the Thumbnail view to get an overview about what's on the card.
Basically the Resco Application supports all things you would expect from a PC Application like Thumbnails, Exif Information, File Information, Zoom, Rotation, basic editing plus it supports features that many PC Viewers don't have (but the photographer needs) like Histograms and RAW file support.

It can be a very useful tool for the landscape photographer to evaluate one's photographs. However often there is no time (the light changes fast, the situation has changed), so I use it mostly to review some photos in my hotel room or to convert and email some of them or even put them in the blog (I am too lazy to write an entire blog post on the PDA, but I could.

Resco Photo Viewer 2007 Screenshot Image view with Histogram (blue channel) Device switched to Landscape Mode (horizontal)

Resco Photo Viewer 2007 Menu Brightness Histogram and Menu Device switched to Landscape Mode (horizontal)

Every travel photographer knows the scenario. While most photographers advise not to shoot during the harsh light of the day, we often have little choice. Often I find myself at a place and I know I will have to move on, either because I have a travel schedule or because I am on a weekend trip and have to get back to my daily routine. Believe me, if I could afford it, I would follow the good advice and spent a lot of time on each location waiting for perfect conditions to make my photos shine.
In situations such as this, the best would be to put your camera on a tripod and bracket your exposure. You can then combine the pictures on your computer. However you cannot take your tripod everywhere (it may not be allowed) and it is very cumbersome.
In the past I have often written about RAW processing and I have stated that you can make good use of the dynamic range captured by your camera. Almost every Digital SLR camera and many of the better Point and Shoot models alow you to record RAW files. A RAW file is the data captured by your Camera's sensor that is not processed yet. It does not contain color information (yet), which is very useful to adjust white balance at the computer and apply sharpening and other enhancements the way you like it (check my other Worklfow Tutorials for more information). A 12-bit file contains 16 times more levels then a 8-bit JPG file. This is the main reason why I only shoot RAW.

Finally my big Desktop Machine gave up. What a horrible scenario. I have about 600GB of data in that machine (not all are images) and a ton of programs running on it. So far, I have always been able to save it, even when it mysteriously erased some dll files. This time the problem seems to be more severe. As soon as windows starts the monitor goes completely dark and I am unable to access the Windows boot menu.

I went in through the remote desktop and I have been trying to fix the problem without much luck. So I have started to clean up some external drives and backed up the main Hard Drive (about 300GB).

I found a pretty cool tool to build a CD containing all Windows updates, that I will be using before even connecting to the Internet (see picture, it is pulling all Windows updates).

So I spent all weekend with this instead of working on my pictures or website. I had my eye on a small IPAQ server on Ebay but I even missed to buy before the auction was over. I need to set it up to run a couple of cron scripts and automatically backup some databases across the internet (incuding the database for this website) as well as data feed creation and a bunch of other useful things.

Looks like my main machine is going to keep me busy for a while until I have everything up and running again.

Today we are finally going to take the RAW images that we converted during the last 3 tutorials and do some Photoshop work on them. I know this is probably starting to get more interesting then RAW conversion for most of you, but I urge you to read my last blog entry with the title Photoshop it Later.
The digital workflow is just as important as taking the photos. I have refined my workflow over and over again. Each photographer uses his/her own techniques and I urge you to develop your own. This tutorial will help you to get started on this. In this tutorial I will introduce you to some basic techniques to digitally enhance your photos. Until I write the next tutorial, I recommend you download the Photoshop Action (below) that combines everything in this tutorial into one clickable action (for automation) and modify it to your liking. It is just a rough framework.
One of the most important things is automation. Photos shown on this website area all run through automation scripts. I simply convert all RAW files to tiff (automatically) and then run an action on those to generate JPG files (no need to spend all this time on each image).
Often forgotten but one of the most crucial and important steps in this process is color proofing. Many people are not even aware of the process. It is a way to guarantee that the output from the photo lab really matches what you see on your screen. I will end this tutorial with an introduction to color proofing. (The picture is from my resent deserts trip that I will upload tomorrow).