Lightroom Magazine a new magazine of photogrpahy for photojournalists, travel photographers and other layabouts
Last updated: 27 February, 2008 This magazine is written entirely by Jon Mitchell and is © Copyrighted content. Vol 25, Issue 5,000,000			Enter your search terms Submit search form   Web lightroom-photos.duoni.com If you are considering trekking the Everest region of Nepal, then take a look at my free online guide @ http://khumbuguide.info/
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Editorial New definitions of image quality With the change from film-based production of editorial photos to digital-based production, definitions of image quality have been in flux for some years. My career began in the days of Kodak Tri-X (usually shot at 320 ISO for medium speed, etc) and slide film. Then the non-wire photojournalist shot black and white for stock and colour slides for news magazines, who required higher quality than AP, Reuters and AFP could offer. Looking back, these were good old days for sure. Unfortunately, pictures were rarely seen by the photographer in the field, only when occaisionally visiting the agency office in London, New York or Paris - and only then if they were not "out" with the publishers. Worse, material was often lost. Darkroom production was also time-consuming, with piles of test strips and notes being the norm. Getting access to darkrooms was difficult in some places, so slide shooting was common. I used to favour 100 ISO Fuji slide rated at 200 ISO, for a slightly contrastier colour image and good medium speed, balanced with very high quality. These days, with most of us shooting digital, quality of the image has become obtuse. Modern 10-12MP digital SLRs now knock out image quality comparable with old 6x6cm Hasselblads or other medium format cameras, especially if you shoot RAW. Hence, image quality has been redefined, the camera now - effectively comes pre-loaded with the film stock in the form of the quality of the CCD in question. This for some agencies has led to "Megapixel Fascism" - as is the case with Jupiter Images who refuse to accept material from cameras without a 12MP chip! Such an absurd "quality bar" can only come from some moron with an MBA (Master Business Arsehole) who knows little about photo agencies, though a lot about boardroom BS. This presents problems for some of us who like to use compact, Leica M style cameras for our work, as many of these compacts do not offer the same image quality as film did (200 ISO pushed Fuji Superia for example was same, same in a Nikon SLR or a Leica M6). So what is a good quality image these days, with interpolation demanded by many agencies, the varying quality of CCDs on different DSLRs? It can be hard to discern and many of us do not have much of a budget to print out our results to check image quality. Some norms are emerging though, many editorial stock shooters use RAW and this helps to maintain image quality. RAW interpolation and indeed bi-cubic smoother is a quality method of interpolation and makes a good-quality file for most stock uses from even a 6MP CCD. The results from this technique often surpass a 100 ISO 4000dpi 35mm film scan and are more comparable with an image shot on 120 film. Hopefully, as technology progresses, camera manufacturers will realise that not all professional editorial images are shot on a DSLR. One new Sigma camera now offers DSLR quality in a compact body - unfortunately, at around the same price as a DSLR. This may create a better understanding by photo portals and clients of quality issues, which at the moment, can be a problem with some agencies. Unfortunately, the photo library industry has never been very clear about this since the digital era began and issuing clear quality definitions is fraught with difficulties. So the usual muddle persists, with some clients demanding original res digital files and others demanding interpolated, higher res versions than come off the chip. This makes it hard for the photographer, who has a confusing set of quality rules - often imposed by people who know little of the editorial photographer's lot - to deal with and still try and make money. Most agencies I supply prefer professionally-interpolated images and it appears that many editorial stock buyers do as well. Considering that many photographers interpolate as matter of course, it seems logical to go with this as a standard and if a client wants original resolutions, then better they plan to wait a little longer and get the photographer to supply an original res copy to the agency. This is getting more complex with the RAW format, with potentially photographers being asked to supply three copies of each picture (which is ridiculous) - one interpolated JPEG, an original res JPEG and the original RAW. Designers and researchers need to understand that demanding this and that from us is all very well, though completely impracticle from our end and totally unworkable. Better they work with what we can easily and efficiently supply. This is getting easier with the advent of features in Photoshop like noise-reduction and "bi-cubic smoother interpolation". Bi-cubic smoother interpolation offers very similar results to software like Genuine Fractals and the like (which often have a hefty price-tag) and allows designers more flexibility with image size in software they are likely to already own. Not all clients have Photoshop though and so supplying larger 60-70MB interpolated files makes more sense. After all, they can always resize them to the original res if needs require!		****	Hello readers, Here is another thrilling installment of Lightroom Magazine... Alternatives to Photoshop? It is rare to find a professional editorial photographer who does not use Adobe Photoshop. Or is it? The (sorry I am just going to bang my head on the wall as so I don't write uber-software!) package of choice for many, is now facing stiff competition for straight image editing. Rich photographers increasingly use Apple Apeture or even Adobe's own Lightroom (yes, I did come up with the name long before that!). The problem with Apeture is you need the latest Mac and skint photo-journalists can't afford the new Mac Books so easily. Hence, while it looks good and the price is a bit more reasonable than Photoshop, it remains beyond the financial pale for many. Do other apps do the edit job so well? The answer is both yes and no, and it is also dependent on what system and hardware you use. My modest setup is a G4 Mac Powerbook with 512MB of RAM. This is getting hard to work with as the PPC (as opposed to the new Mac Intel processors) is slowly going obsolete and the RAM has it's limitations. However, due to budget constraints, many of us still use slightly older computers and upgrading is a major investment for most photographers. Especially me! I recently downloaded Fotostation 6 to have a look at what Fotoware are up to. It has changed a lot since I last played with it several years ago. One thing I noted though, is while it is a good editing and image-management program in many ways, it is massively unstable and crashes on almost every session. Perhaps it would work better with 2GB of RAM, though I can't afford that either. Indeed, I can't afford Fotostation 6 anyway, with it's ridiculous price-tag of US$600! To be fair, one thing Fotostation is good at - when it works - is managing a large archive of thousands and thousands of digital images. It's offline archiving and web tools are very handy and more expensive packages can put up a useful high-res database on your web site. Again though, Fotoware charge a small fortune for this, so it becomes too expensive for the sole-trader freelance. It always surprises me that software developers are a bit like highwaymen of yore...They hold you up on the information super-potholed highway and demand silly amounts of money. Hence many photographers take to the cyber high seas and use pirate software instead. The problem with waving the Jolly Roger above your system is lack of technical support, malware risks and no updates, etc. I'm sure Adobe et al would make just the same amount of cash if Photoshop CS3 was just US$20 (how about Micro-software licenses!) and then we would all be legal. This is logical when you consider countries like Nepal, where there is no copyright law, so theoretically, a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 costs a mere US$6 (bascially enough to buy the fellow who copies it for you a drink and cover the price of the DVD!). No Nepalese photographer ever licenses their software, as it simply is economic madness (as are the prices of this widely-used software) to do so. Even the publishing houses in many Asian countries use a bent copy. This is also the case in most of the world. So why the huge prices? Well, if you get your calculator out, it is simply greed. Adobe are a great company, but greedy pigs too. Some software developers are understanding that cheaper software means more customers. Even a Nepali photographer, for example, can afford about US$20 for a application. These applications are used by millions of people, so say Adobe Photoshop CS4 would under such a reduced-price license have several million licenses sold, maybe even tens of millions. Even a few dollars profit on each license would more than cover the expenses of updating the program. Hence, Adobe would not be much out of pocket when you consider that only a fraction of people actually buy the legal license in whatever country (I know very few sole-trader freelancers - who have trouble most of the time paying their house rent - who lash out US$600 or so on a program like Photoshop - mostly they somehow aquire an illegal copy). These high prices are more understandable in specialist areas (and image editing is not that specialist) such as medical imaging, etc. But not in a popular area of the software market like editing pictures, especially in this era of affordable digital cameras. Though the RAW editing software developers are less greedy and offering programs that are sometimes as good or better than Photoshop, they still charge a fortune for what they offer (software takes a long time to develop initially and hours and hours of work, though once done, it only needs upgrading, so the price should fall in the long-run, though it does not). RAW Developer (see January 2008 edition of Lightroom Magazine) is a great image editor, though again a it expensive at over US$100 (and it is dedicated to the RAW format). It would be nice to see these RAW developers pan out and make their applications more useful for general workflow and picture editing, rather than a specific editing process like RAW conversion, etc. And again, the cheaper the app, the easier the company would establish a solid market presence and make a reasonable profit. Camera companies are increasingly in on the software game. Canon gives users free software, though it varies in it's usefullness. Canon RAW processing is not very good quality, for example, though the panorama maker may be very handy and it's image browser is not bad (and the software at least works, which is more than can be said for Nikon's offerings, which I could not get to work on a Mac or PC! Nikon's Capture NX is a good program in terms of image quality, though does not work so well on my G4 Powerbook and has horrible cache problems. On top of that, you have to fork out again more cash for a program that you use for one part of editing. I did and the serial number would not work and so back to Jessops it went! Nikon's "customer support" - if it were a crutch - would certainly leave you on the floor for several days. To some photographers, US$150 is not a lot of money, though to poor people like me, it is. With new RAW formats being camera specific, it is getting harder to find cheap software to edit your material - unless you are a Linux freak and use the increasingly popular GIMP. The GIMP has good reviews from many and is a good, free alternative to Adobe's king's ransom, though installing Linux is still a bit tricky and packages are easy on some versions like Ubuntu, though harder on others. Arguably, Linux is becoming the best option, as it has some great open source software (aside from the GIMP like CinePaint Film GIMP - widely used in Hollywood for film editing, though also good for stills) with which to process images and removes you from Apple's and worse, Microsoft's horrible grip on the Operating System market. Linux also tends to be more efficient with data, which translates as faster workflow. Mainstream upload widgets and add-ons may not be available though. If you stick with a regular OS from Apple or Microsoft, then there are many viable alternatives to Photoshop emerging. One is LightZone, another is Arc Soft - who make some very useable image-editing software. It is possible to edit in iView, though it's editing tools are not a patch on it's rival Fotostation. Saying that it is a far more stable piece of software, though again, pricey for what it is. One other drawback with iView is while captions are a doddle to enter onto the file, the key word entry is plain silly. A noteable offering for both Mac OS X and PC platforms is Pixelmator - which is very similar to Photoshop and does many of the same things for a more sensible price (though still high in my opinion) of US$59. It handles lots of formats and has all the features you need for standard image editing. Though seems not to be too up with RAW processing. I hope to post a review of it in the coming weeks in Lightroom Magazine. Should you be one of the 0.0001% of photographers who does not use a pirate copy of Photoshop, then my advice is to search high and low on the Internet for something that meets your needs and works well with your system and is affordable. Often workflow is better with several applications, rather than one, though it is simpler to do everything in one app if possible. This can take ages to sort out and even involve switching to Linux (you can always partition your drive to run two or even three OSs!), though the advantage of testing and evaluating many programs is that you may end up with a super workflow system that makes your editing more efficient. With most of us now spending 80% of our work-time as photographers behind a computer screen, this may turn out to be a wise investment for many... QC ("Quality Control") - a new form of censorship? Are you a sad pendant who is no good at taking pictures? Hate photographers with a passion? No good at traditional picture editing and poorly educated in photography as a whole? If you can answer yes to these questions then it is guarateed you will walk straight into a job at a picture portal as a "quality controller". In the past few months, I have met many such idiots who have multiplied onto most photo portals. First it was amost every US-based Microstock site telling me that a picture has been rejected because of "noise issues" (when it was taken on ISO 200 on a good quality camera) or worse "poor composition" (not something I am known for!) and the Alamy classic "slight fuzziness when viewed at 100%" (perhaps it was the Digital ICE on the Nikon 4000 dpi neg scanner!). It would be comic that such piss-poor standards of picture editing exist in these photo archives (it never happen in my youth days of slide and print!), though the final result is censorship. So don't like your competition down the road? Are they sending to Alamy too? Then simple, just bribe the QC idiots and they'll never get a pic on the site! Of course, this works very well if you work at GCHQ or the American NSA. So are the new badly-trained and badly-educated legions of "Image Quality Control Operatives" agents of evil? Yes, in short. There is little you can do about it though. Complaining to the CEO may work, though if that sad character James West is anything to go by, you may as well try urinating in the nearest strong breeze. RF Microstock sites are terrible for this, as you often have no redress at all, which means unfair and downright biased editing (especially when they themselves are contributing to the same site) becomes par for the course. Many RM and traditional RF sites are now behaving the same way. This is censorship - as some moron (perhaps in the pay of a secret intelligence service, political party or even the local masons) with no brain gets to decide if your image makes it onto the server or not. What if it is an image of George Bush beating up some Arabs with a baseball bat at the ranch? Or Gordon Brown doing a line of Coke? Tony Blair misbehaving with a sheep? Etc, etc. (NB Lawyers please note - these are just examples!) If not serious in terms of freedom of the press (increasingly a joke in many countries), then this hits your earning potential too, as the picture needs to be marketed elsewhere. I loose a small fortune thanks to some dweeb at Alamy - as these silly comments came on my "Initial QC  Submission". As a professional photographer for almost 16 years, I know quite well what a quality pic is and it is also insulting to have some complete moron reject images you have worked hard on because they are a hard on. As a result, I can login into Alamy.com, though will not bother uploading anything as it is sure many would be rejected reasons that are firmly within the realm of bullshit. While many US RF Microstock sites abound with sub-standard images from total amateurs, I had so many spurious rejection excuses that I stopped supplying any of them. It is the same with the Sweedish Micro RF portal I now supply (sometimes) stockphotomedia.com. The latest was a pic of a mountain goat, they are vague about it (the reason) at stockphotomedia.com, though they only take about 60% of what I send them, despite them being carefully edited files sent on a limited Internet connection (I am still working in the Everest region). Even more worrying, is that the image remains on the server - which means it can be nicked and the credit changed and uploaded elsewhere. Differing opinions about image-quality standards do not help and the stock photo industry is pretty useless at establishing these, with reason as many have different opinions about it. One editor on a portal recently said he does not like non-DSLR images, which I explained was a bit disingenous - as photojournalists in particular shoot a lot on Leica-type compact cameras. Many compacts have very good image quality - at least for editorial use and I suppose the RF Micro market - upto 400-800 ISO and are fine for candid street pics and the like. I have had many published in various newspapers and magazines with no complaints, as the camera was used by me - a professional - and what these pendantic QC morons often fail to understand is that I know the quality boundaries of the market and take that into account when using any camera - just like in the days of film. Back then, shooting colour negative was problematic and people who wanted very high quality would not accept 35mm slides or prints from that film. These digital days are more complex, and not helped by built-in anti-professional features which those lovely camera execs are so fond of. Jupiter Images have the most idiotic policy of not taking on photographers without 12MP+ cameras! Which means you are out of luck if you shoot with the 10MP Leica M8! Megapixel fascism if ever I have seen it. So it is a tricky problem, as stock photography is very competitive and photographers have little redress for unfair and stupid "editing" decisions. You can write to the CEO and show them the error of their staff's ways, as it may have an influence or best to look for another career. More worrying though is the impact this new style of amatuerish editing has on editorial content as a whole and thankfully, few press photo agencies are adopting this, though a recent test submission to Citizenside.com in France met with a similar response. Hitler and Stalin, I'm sure would have been fond of such a technique of image censorship... Save cash on memory cards with a portable hard-drive! You've just got your new baby out of the box, stuck the lens on and dash out with it on your next assignment. Only problem? You only have a few 4GB memory cards and shooting RAW+JPEG is eating them up fast. The solution? Easy, a portable hard-disc drive. These are becoming increasingly affordable and indeed an essential part of the modern camera bag. Along with my D40x I bought two 4GB SD cards and a 120GB portable HDD. Even up in the High Himalaya, it worked well to store my copious amount of data that I soon accrued. These devices are also great to plug into an ageing laptop with a 20GB or 40GB drive. One disadvantage of the RAW format is that it gobbles memory up. So having an extra 120GB or more as an extension of your system is a boon. A portable HDD is also handy for reinstalling your OS (or new ones) and they cost just a few hundred bucks, depending on the capacity you need. Many different brands are available and some have small LCD screens (though they use more juice which is not handy if you work in remote areas). The card goes straight into the drive via most normal card-readers and then you later hook it up to any computer which has a USB port. Best to look on a site like Froogle for a good deal and to decide what is best for you. One good brand is the Korean Nexto drives, though there are many others of similar quality on the market. If on a budget, then you may find a used one cheaper on sites like eBay. You can format these drives before putting them into use. Most have a UNIX OS built-in and do not require any special software save a driver (if using Windows). It is best to back-up your images on DVD too, though leaving them on for editing is a good idea or even transferring your files onto your main HDD on your computer to improve processing speed. Once you process the RAW into TIFF, the portable drive is a good method of temporary storage of partially-edited files. Economically speaking, they are also cheaper than memory cards on a per GB basis. Only problem is that you need to actually sit down and edit all that stuff sometime!
Lightroom Magazine Archive February / March 2007 - Issue 1 April / May 2007 - Issue 2 June / July 2007 - Issue 2 & 3 (well for £7.50 from google adsense - what do you expect!) August 2007 - Issue 4 January 2008 - Issue 5
Lightroom Magazine is published and edited by Jonathan Mitchell  © 2008 All rights reserved.			If you have any comments about the articles in Lightroom Magazine, or would like to reprint any of them or have any requests for future stories, then please feel free to email them to me, the editor at jonstmchl@gmail.com If any interesting ones come in, then I will print them in future editions, so please include your full name and where you are writing from.