Computational Photography Technology

I’ve just returned from a Photoshop World Conference(PSW) in Orlando, Florida. The conference four days of fast-paced Photoshop training. NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) produces two excellent conferences every year; one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast. For those readers who have never attended PSW, I’ll recap my trip to give you an idea of what it’s like. Read more…

ImageIngesterPro Workflow Diagram

Marc Rochkind has posted a wonderful article titled How to Back Up Your Personal Computer. I feel this is a must read for everyone who uses a computer. I’ve heard way too many stories of people losing all of their data for one reason or another. Very few users have bullet proof backup strategies, because it is more complex than most users know.

Marc is also the developer behind three very useful programs for managing image files: ImageIngester, Image Verifier, ImageReporter and SpanBurner. I’m using ImageIngester Pro and ImageVerifier, which together will cost you only $40. ImageIngester is saving us a ton of time processing files and Image Verifier is finding corruption in some of my early image files.
Marc is also very active on The DAM Forum which is Peter Krogh’s very educational Digital Asset Management forum.

It’s a shame to make a wonderful digital image and lose it. The pictures that I’ve missed or lost for one reason or another haunt me, so I have a healthy fear for the safety of every image I make. They say, “there are two kind of computer users, those who have lost data and those who WILL loose data.” At this point it’s probably more like those who have lost data and those who will loose data again, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Please post some comments on interesting ways you’ve lost data: Our most recent loss of data was from opening tiff files using Adobe Camera Raw(ACR) then saving them after adjustments. ACR opened these 17Megapixel files in 2.8Megapixel size, then we saved over the large files. We had to start over from the RAW files; two days of work down the drain.

Visual Content Recognition is the ability to recognize and utilize content within the image. This is affecting every aspect of digital photography. The technology is already being used in numerous ways and the future is mind boggling. In the example above, face recognition detects triangles created by eyes and mouth, then sets focus and exposure. Let me give a couple examples and show some MIND BLOWING LINKS to examples and videos. You may want to look at the MIND BLOWING LINKS first.

STITCHING TOGETHER IMAGES: Photoshop can recognize pixels that match up and put them together. This allows you to stitch together multiple images to make one “bigger” image. Bigger means wider angle of view, more resolution, more dynamic range, or more depth of field. This also allows you to line up multiple hand held images and combine different elements together. Three shots of a group portrait can be aligned, then the eyes can be changed on the blinkers. Photoshop is making good use of Visual Content Recognition with Photomerg, Auto Align Layers, and the Auto Align Source Images when making HDR images. Microsoft has a technology called PhotoSynth which stitches together multiple images from multiple photographers. It will find all the images it can of a subject stitch them all together to make a 3D representation of it. For example: Photosynth could go to flicker and find all the tourist images of the Washington Monument from all angles, then stitch them into a 360 degree view. Mind blowing link number one is a Demo of Seadragon and Photosynth done at TED 2007 by Blaise Aguera Arcas. You can try out the Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth tech preview at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

MIND BLOWING LINK #1 Seadragon and Photosynth Video

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ACR 4.3 (Adobe Camera Raw) will open Jpeg and Tiff file and edit them as well. This is a nifty and useful addition to ACR. You can set ACR as your default preference for opening Jpeg and tiff files. Go to Edit/Preferences in Adobe bridge and set the thumbnail preferences to “prefer camera raw for Jpeg and tiff files.” There is also a setting in the Camera Raw preferences for “always open jpeg files with setting using CameraRaw.” When you open up a Jpeg or Tiff file in ACR 4.3 it saves your edits to a sidecar XMP file. Only by clicking the save image or opening the image in Photoshop and saving it do you apply your actual edits to the file.

You can also use ACR to save jpeg or tiff files as DNG files. This has some real possibilities. There are lots of reasons to shoot jpeg as an original file format: speed, card space, wireless transmission, etc. I don’t know of any good reason to shoot tiff as a camera file format. I do of course use tiff as derivative file format. The issue WAS that you had to edit the original file and save over it or you had to save a new file if you wanted to keep your original in tact. The DNG file format puts the original jpeg, the camera raw editing info, a derivative Jpeg preview file, and metadata all inside of the DNG bubble.

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