Never fear, there is finally a solution. Well, the beginning of a solution. A solution in the early stages of beta testing, but a solution nonetheless, and it doesn’t involve uninstalling Lightroom and eating more cheesecake. Although you are welcome to eat more cheesecake anyway if that’s your thing.

No, friends, what I’m talking about is Knobroom. What is Knobroom? Knobroom is a plug-in for Lightroom written by Jarno Heikkinen. Now hold on, I know what you’re going to ask: “What is that picture to the right?” It’s a good question. That is a Behringer B-Control Rotary BCR2000 32-channel MIDI encoder panel.

Oh, you want to know what Knobroom does! You haven’t guessed yet? Knobroom connects the sliders in Lightroom to MIDI control channels. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and is essentially the standard by which electronic instruments communicate with one another (and with computers). The Behringer shown on the right is just one example of a MIDI control panel that would commonly be used to control volume, pan, vibrato, loudness, and other such attributes in music software.

Of course, it’s just a USB device that communicates through the well-documented MIDI protocol, so Jarno wrote a plug-in that takes that information and allows you to say “when knob 1 is turned, change the exposure slider.” This allows you to move settings up and down with the knobs without having to move the mouse or even have the appropriate panels in the develop module open.

How cool is that?!

I’m seriously considering the purchase of a Behringer BCR2000 as that is the model Max Edin used in his demonstration video, which sort of proves that it works. There are some issues and the software is in a beta stage of development so you have to expect some bumps in the road, but it looks very promising.

Read more on Max Edin’s blog: Using Hardware Controllers with Lightroom. Check out the Knobroom home page for more of the gritty details.

Few people in the world know any of this better than Scott Kelby. As the president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (by the way, you know your software is influential when a 70,000-member association springs up around it), he is intimately in touch with the pulse of the Photoshop user and the photography industry.

As a sidebar here, let me just say, from my personal experience through the years, that Adobe is a stand-up company, at least as far as publicly traded software companies go. This article is not meant to be open season on Adobe. I believe Photoshop Lightroom to be one of the greatest tools any photographer has ever had access to, and little could change that at this point.

Nevertheless, sometimes publicly traded companies make strange decisions. Strange as in, well, let’s just come out and say stupid. Stupid decisions. Such as Adobe’s recent decision to change their upgrade path for the upcoming version of Photoshop and Creative Suite (of which Photoshop is a component). The next version, which will ostensibly be 6, will no longer be available at an upgrade discount to users of any version prior to 5 or 5.5.

In other words, if you wanted to upgrade from Photoshop CS4 to Photoshop CS6, Adobe would essentially say to you, at least to the extent that a multinational corporation can speak, “No.” Or maybe it would use a more casual phrasing, like “No way, Jose!”

Adobe has always offered upgrade pricing for each new version of their software and, with few exceptions, if you had a valid license for a previous version you were eligible to upgrade to whatever the new version happened to be. Now, not so much.

To our aid, as though through the clouds like a spandex-clad superhero, flies in none other than Scott Kelby with a politely but firmly worded open letter to Adobe asking them to establish a more, how can I put it, reasonable upgrade path that accommodates folks who have been loyal and valuable customers to Adobe but who couldn’t see through to purchase Creative Suite CS5 or 5.5 because, let’s be honest, it’s freakin’ expensive.

If any single person out there holds enough sway with Adobe to really get something done about this, it’s Scott. One time, and I don’t mean to gloat or anything, but one time, Scott linked to an article here on my blog in a very routine “link round-up” article on his blog, and on that day alone I received over 2,000 unique views. It was a good day for me, personal victories, and all that.

What I’m saying is, people listen to him, they respect him, and that’s just us regular Photoshop users and photographers, the unwashed masses of the Internet. People inside of Adobe listen to him, too. We’ll soon find out, though, what that really means…

Have you ever wondered about that “gamma” thing you keep seeing? You nerd.

Really, though, gamma is important and you have probably seen the word all over the place in photography and design. It’s actually a really cool thing and when you understand how it works you will likely feel better about yourself, your photographs, and about the universe. Well, you’ll feel smarter, anyway, and you will be. You’ll also be able to add another item to your lists of:

1. Answers to questions nobody will ever ask you,
2. Greek letters you recognize, and
3. Awkward things to bring up on a first date

You can already check off number two if you look up on the right there. Yup, that’s gamma.

Additionally, if you are friends with other photographers and they don’t know what gamma is or how it works, you might come out of this looking like a rockstar. At least to the extent that rockstars are knowledgeable about non-linear power-law expressions.

So what is gamma? Aside from being the third letter in the Greek alphabet and a type of brain wave, the word “gamma” is used in imaging (photography, design, broadcast technology) to refer to “gamma correction,” which relates to adjusting the luminosity of an image as it is displayed on (usually) a screen of some kind.

You have probably heard or seen things like “gamma 1.8” or “gamma 2.2” thrown around, especially in the photography world, and that’s where the math starts to creep in. But before I get all numeric on you, let’s take a look at what gamma correction really means, how it’s used, and why it’s important to you.

Gamma Correction, What Does It Mean?!

The truth is that gamma correction is pointless. Gamma correction is one of those things that was invented to solve a problem (and just in time, too), and then its use spread throughout the world and was written into standards that were carried through generations of technology until we reached the point where it wasn’t necessary… But it was already too late. So even though gamma is a vestige of a problem we more or less no longer have, we can’t stop using it or we’ll create even more problems.

Gamma correction is a way of adjusting the luminosity of an image in a non-linear way, which means that the change in luminance for a particular value in a source image depends upon that value. Uh oh…

Here comes a graph, look out!

Gamma 2.2

Now, the first question you should be asking is Why would you want to change the luminance values in an image? and the answer is quite simple. CRT technology.

Remember CRTs? Cathode ray tubes? Those big, heavy, glass picture tubes used in every single television set and computer monitor from around 1922 when they were first commercialized until about 2007 when LCDs first overtook CRTs in overall sales?

This is what a cathode ray tube looks like when it's drawn in MS Paint by a crippled giraffe.

They had a pretty good run, I’d say. Well, cathode ray tubes have what they call a “triode characteristic,” which basically means that the relationship between the input voltage (incoming image luminance) and the luminance on the screen itself is not linear. In fact, at low voltages, the luminance is far too low, and as the voltage increases the luminance does not quite increase in step.

This is demonstrated by the green line in the graph above. The “input voltage,” or “source luminance,” is on the x axis, across the bottom, and the luminance seen on the screen, or “output luminance,” is on the y axis, up the left side.

You can see that the output luminance is severely depressed, and you would be, too, if you were trapped inside a cathode ray tube. Anyway, to make a long story only slightly shorter, this is a big problem. This is a problem because you can’t just brighten the entire image or all of your very light areas basically get overexposed and wash out. What you need to do is “reverse” the effect of the triode characteristic… Which is exactly what gamma correction does.

The red line is the mathematical inverse of the green line. If you process your input image according to the red line and display it on a CRT, the image’s luminance will even out to the black line, which is what you want. A perfectly linear relationship between the image data you send in and what you see on the screen. Brilliant.

The Math

Let’s just talk about math for about one minute more. Remember equations? Right. An equation is what mathematically describes your output luminance based on a particular value of your input luminance. For gamma, it’s pretty simple:

Output = Input^gamma

The output luminance is equal to the input luminance raised to the power of the gamma value. In actual textbook mathematics of course they would use the actual Greek symbol “gamma” up there, but this is a photography blog. To get the opposite curve, you just replace “gamma” with its reciprocal, “one over gamma.” So, for the curves up above, this is the equation I actually used:

Output = Input^2.2

The infamous 2.2 gamma! Indeed. So when folks talk about a “gamma of 2.2” or a “gamma of 1.8,” what they are talking about is how much luminance correction is being done. You’re learning so much already! And I’m not even done yet!

What Gamma Setting Should You Use?

Powerrrr!

Once upon a time, when early Macs were the first home computers to have color screens and the ability to view and print color images, Apple engineers encountered this triode characteristic. Expectations were a lot lower then when it came to computer graphics, but when someone opened a picture on their snazzy Mac and then printed it on their equally snazzy color LaserWriter, they expected it to come out looking more or less the same as it did on the screen. But this was hard to pull off when the screen was lying to them about the luminance values.

Back then, Apple was not concerned with how accurate the color was in a universal sense—in the ICC color profiling sense that would come much later. They just wanted the images to look the same when printed on the color LaserWriter. So, they did some experiments and they found that a gamma correction of 1.8 would get it right in line with what came out of the printer.

A bit later on, another group of bright folks got together with a different purpose. They called themselves the National Television System Committee, or NTSC for short. The FCC created the NTSC in 1940 to standardize black and white broadcast television. By 1950 they were getting together to standardize color television. Ultimately they developed what is still referred to as the NTSC standard (or NTSC color television standard, sometimes), and saved the world of television. Alright, not really, but they certainly knew all there was to know about TV and they were intimately aware of the gamma problem.

Their solution was to use a gamma correction of 2.2 to make TV images look correct on your home screen in your darkened living room. When Microsoft Windows came out and started pushing more color computers into the home, they adopted the NTSC’s 2.2 gamma recommendation.

With the differing gamma values of 1.8 and 2.2 being used by Macintosh and Windows-based computers, an image that looked correct on one would often look too bright or too dark on the other. This is the way it was all the way up until last year when OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” was released and for the first time ever set the default gamma on a Macintosh computer to 2.2.

So What?

You just read 1,300 words about gamma correction, viewed a pretty graph, and learned a bit of history. So far, you have a handful of Trivial Pursuit ammunition and a radical ice-breaker for your next blind date, but none of this really helps you in your quest to be the world’s most awesome photographer (although reading my blog is always a good first step!)

The most common question asked about gamma is, “What gamma setting should I use?” Since OS X now defaults to 2.2 and Windows has used 2.2 for decades, the answer is 2.2. You will probably not gain anything by using a different value unless the lighting conditions where you’re sitting are totally extreme. Like the beach in July. Or a cave deep beneath a granite mountain (which is where my evil lair is located).

Thanks to color correction systems, ICC profiles, and soft proofing, you really don’t have to worry about gamma too much. Images in Photoshop (and Firefox 3.5 as well) will be adjusted based on their embedded profiles (assuming they have profiles).

The Most Important Thing

The one thing you need to remember is this: when you are exporting photos for use on the web, always, always, convert them to the sRGB colorspace and tag them with the sRGB profile. The profile itself contains a gamma setting (typically, guess what, 2.2) and folks on the web using Firefox will see the image properly adjusted while folks with browsers that don’t support color management will see the closest to what you would expect. sRGB is very reliable when it comes to this.

If you have any questions about gamma, if I didn’t explain something very well, or if you want to lavish me with praise, please leave a comment. I do read them. I really do.

Genia, AKELstudio's Photoshop Mastermind

Anyway, I really enjoyed Alex’s high-key macro behind-the-scenes and some of his in-studio video tutorials on shooting products under water (if you want to check that out you can read it here), and then I found out that his wife, Genia, is actually the Photoshop mastermind behind all of AKELstudio’s post-production and has her own blog, too!

You may not know this about me, but my first contact with Photoshop was in my middle school’s computer lab. They had version 2.5, which was the first version that shipped for Windows and also the last version that didn’t have layers. Version 3 was shipped in 1994 and introduced layers for the first time. I have been using Photoshop on and off since then, and almost on a daily basis since version 5 or so. Needless to say, I’m sort of a Photoshop junkie. To say that I “like” Photoshop would be an understatement.

Another thing that has really excited me lately is HDR (or compressed dynamic range, as it should properly be called, but that’s a discussion for another time). I just caught wind of this article Genia posted back in June of outdoor HDR images that Alex photographed and she put together using Photomatrix Pro (my favorite HDR program, by the way, you should buy it from Amazon right now) and Photoshop.

Go and check out this HDR images. I really appreciate HDR that you can’t quite tell is HDR, though Genia does enjoy the more exaggerated HDR effects as well, which is cool, I’m into that. You can hover your mouse over each image to see one of the exposures from the “before” that contributed to the final version.

You can do so much with Photomatix, I would highly recommend giving it a try. You can download a trial version from HDRsoft and if you like it, please please please buy it from Amazon so I can keep paying my web hosting bills.

High Dynamic Range Images Before and After via The Perfect Photo Blog

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m out here in the great American west—“big sky country,” if you want to call it that—and some of the sights I’ve seen were nothing less than demanding of a panoramic treatment. On top of that, I suffer from a devastating case of technolust and wanted to really put “AutoPano Giga” through the paces. Well, I sure did. I also probably melted the heat sink off my poor laptop’s CPU…

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the case of AutoPano Giga, I think he was wrong; I think it actually is magic. I have tried a few panorama tools out there; the free and open-source Panotools, a couple of Mac-exclusive ones, and so on. AutoPano Giga is so easy and so fast and so accurate, it blows them all out of the water. Of course it also costs an arm and a leg, but at least you know why.

After the break, actual panoramas!

One of the awesome things about AutoPano Giga is that it reads the EXIF data from your photos to figure out what kind of lens you used, and then adjusts for distortion based on that information. Essentially, this makes it totally kick ass at stitching together fisheye photographs, which normally do not directly overlap whatsoever. The edges have to be flanged out before two fisheye photos taken side-by-side will match up.

This one, taken at “Black Sand Basin” in Yellowstone, was stitched together from only two 15mm fisheye images (I wanted to limit the number in order to take them rapidly because the steam was moving quickly and when parts of the scene move a lot from one image to the next it can cause ghosting and stitching issues). Click for a larger view.

I think you get more of a sense of the vastness of a space from a good panoramic image. This place is as big as it looks.

While leaving the Grand Teton national Park earlier in the week, we stopped by the site of the “Cunningham Cabin,” which is exactly what it sounds like it is. The cabin itself, though, wasn’t much to look at. I was more intoxicated by the mountain range in the distance and the clarity of the sky and clouds. My New England brain, drunk on what is actually a somewhat average afternoon sky in Wyoming, required the capture of a panorama.

Of course, what you can’t tell by looking at it on this blog is that at actual size, it’s this big:

The total dimensions of this panorama are 11,154 by 3,186 pixels. I could make a very respectable five-foot-wide print of this image with perfect clarity!

Finally, on the last morning in Yellowstone, I wound up on this snow-covered road on the east side of the park and just had to try a crazy panorama. By “crazy” I mean that I didn’t just turn around, taking each photo beside the last. I tossed in a total of 53 images, some pointing up, some down, some tilted to the side a bit… Just to see what AutoPano Giga could do with them.

Click to embiggen!

I did this one on my laptop, so in order to make it possible I exported the original 53 images from Lightroom at about 800 pixels wide. If you look closely on the right side, you can see a little stitching error causing a notch in the far side of the road. I am convinced that this happened because of the limited detail in the smaller input files; when I get home to my big desktop I will attempt it again with 53 full-size 22-megapixel images.

Some of the things about AutoPano Giga that make creating these panoramas easier (or in some cases possible) include:

• The ability to augment the software’s automatic “control point” detection, which is how it links features in one photo to those in another (the core of the “stitching” process); for what it’s worth I’ve almost never had to use it, the SIFT key extraction of APG is extremely good,
• Center point, horizon detection, and vertical correction tools, which allow you to basically coach the software as to what you want the center point to be, or what feature(s) you ultimately want to be horizontal or vertical,
• Numeric yaw, pitch, and roll adjustment, which permits you to tweak the projection of the final image such that the perspective appears the way you want it to,
• Mercator, planar, spherical, and cylindrical projection models, which—although my understanding of projection is limited—essentially gives you a few basic effects to choose from when mapping the images into a flat environment.

With regard to the projection models, cylindrical tends to work best when you have one or more rows of images taken very evenly, whereas spherical and Mercator tend to work better when the images are somewhat more chaotic. I know that’s not an entirely accurate statement, but if you want to know more about projection models… Wikipedia is your friend.

The real challenge of panoramas is that once they’re stitched together, you inevitably wind up with a weird patchwork of images that needs to be cropped down. Here is what the Cunningham Cabin panorama looked like before cropping:

As you can see, you generally want to photograph beyond the edges of what the final panorama will include, because after distorting and stretching the images to fit together, you lose a lot of corners.

One other thing I should mention, although I haven’t yet tried it myself, is that if you bracket¹ each image in your panorama, AutoPano Giga will also “fuse” the exposures, preserving more highlight and shadow detail. Now, you don’t have a ton of control over that process; it’s very hands-off, unlike Photomatix Pro or some of the other actual “HDR” software out there, but it sure makes the whole panorama creation easy!

That’s all I have right now for panomania!, but if you folks have any questions or comments, there are a couple of boxes down there at the bottom that you can use to share them, and I continue to encourage it!

1. Bracketing means taking the same photo with different exposure settings, generally something like -1 EV, 0 EV, +1 EV

What happens is roughly this: you open the program and the splash screen remains indefinitely. If you click it, it disappears, but Lightroom’s main window does not open. You receive a very minimal menu bar including “Lightroom,” “File,” “Edit,” and perhaps “Window.” The File menu is shortened and only allows you to open a catalog. I presume that this is what Lightroom would look like if you could put it into a state where it has no catalog open. During normal operation, you basically always have a catalog open.

Once there, you can try to open your catalog, but as soon as you do, you will receive the error: “An error occurred when attempting to change modules.” Feel free to click OK on that message, it will simply drop you into a weird, incomplete Lightroom interface that has no side panels and no film strip.

Having battled this error two different times now, I am confident I can offer some advice.

The first time I encountered this error was in Lightroom 1.1. I normally import my photos using Image Capture so they receive custom icons (Image Capture’s cool like that) and I had just finished importing a big batch from a recent trip up to Boston. Opening Lightroom, I received the Terrible Module Error and the incomplete Lightroom interface that I might be tempted to call “the gray screen of death.” At first I had a panic attack because I’ve put so much into my Lightroom catalog since Beta 1. I have so much metadata it hurts to think about losing it.

Reinstallation of the software is usually step number one when this type of thing happens, and it’s one of the most widely suggested remedies on the Adobe User-to-User Forums and on the one or two Flickr discussion threads where it has come up. Between you and me, it doesn’t work. I’ve been through this error twice and both times I faced it, reinstalling the software a few times didn’t solve it. But it can’t hurt, right?

If you want to reinstall Lightroom all over again, here is what you have to do:

• Delete the Lightroom application. Go into your Applications folder, drag Lightroom to the trash, and empty the trash. Or, if you’re a slick keyboard nerd, select Lightroom and press Command-Delete (that’s the key that old-schoolers call “backspace’). Don’t forget to empty the trash either way.
• Delete the Lightroom preferences file. Go into your home folder, then into Library -> Preferences, and delete com.adobe.Lightroom.plist from within it using one of the methods above.
• For giggles, you can also delete the Lightroom support folder if you want, which is located in home -> Library -> Application Support -> Adobe -> Lightroom.
• Last, but definitely not least, you need to delete the installation receipt, which is what tells the Lightroom installer that the software is already installed. It will not let you reinstall it if it finds the receipt. Open up your hard drive then open Library -> Receipts and delete Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.pkg.

Once you’ve done all that and your trash is empty, you can install the software again. But like I said, it’s probably not going to help you.

The first time I solved this problem, it was a stroke of luck. I had reinstalled the software a couple of times to no avail and I was getting to the end of my leash. Each time, however, I installed version 1.0 off of my retail CD and then immediately upgraded to 1.1 using the downloaded upgrade app. Eventually I got a clue and figured I’d try installing 1.0 and actually running it before upgrading just to see what would happen. So I did that and I got an entirely different error. This time it said “There isn’t sufficient hard drive space for Lightroom to open” or something like that.

OH REALLY.

Sure enough, importing my last batch of photos completely filled my hard drive. Once I fixed that problem by deleting a bunch of really bad music, the error went away and I was back up and running with version 1.1. This is a symptom of pretty bad error trapping by Adobe’s development team. Obviously the hard drive being full caused some type of exception, but rather than that error bubbling up to the GUI level, it proceeded to cause a cascade of problems until the very last issue was reported to me, which had to do with changing modules.

That would be like going to the doctor and having him tell you that your eyes are red because of sinus pressure or something. That’s interesting and all, but wouldn’t it be better if he could tell you that your eyes are red because you have sinus pressure, which is because you have a cold? That makes it a bit easier to treat the problem, wouldn’t you say?

It seems to me that the main reason why this error is seen so often and in so many varying situations is because it’s the very last thing that goes wrong in nearly every chain of exceptions within the software. Bad exception handling.

Okay, that’s all well and good, but I did have this happen to me again (last night, actually). This time it was version 1.2 I was using and this time my hard drive was clearly not full. I even double-checked it. So, once again I hit Google to try to find out what other sorts of problems people have had. There is remarkably little to be found on this issue. I did find some interesting suggestions, but none of them worked for me.

I had messed around a lot with installing different versions of Photoshop and the Creative Suite (as I mentioned in my recent article Photoshop CS3: Overrated) and figured that all of that activity with related Adobe software probably messed up some files somewhere. So, I performed one of the tests outlined by someone on the Adobe forums.

I created a new user on my system, granting them administrator rights, and I logged into their account and ran Lightroom. It ran! This narrowed the problem down to something in my local home directory because both users were administrators and had access to every other file on the system. So, I copied the Lightroom preferences file and a couple of other files from the new user’s Library folder into my own Library folder, hoping that it would solve the problem. No such luck. Back to the drawing board.

Having no other apparent course of action, I searched out and deleted every single Adobe-related file on my entire computer. I wiped it all out completely.

I even restarted, which I really think is unnecessary, and installed Lightroom for only the fourth or fifth time that night. And I got the same error! By that time I was getting pretty desperate. The one thing I hadn’t tried was messing with my actual catalog files. I was very apprehensive about touching them because, well, they’re my lifeblood.

What I did was, I renamed my whole Lightroom folder to Lightroom.old and started it up. BAM, it created a new, empty, default catalog and opened like a champ. Go figure. With the program still open, I deleted the Lightroom folder and renamed Lightroom.old back to Lightroom. Then I was able to go through File -> Open and open my actual catalog and guess what? It worked.

There is something tremendously fishy about this whole situation, but I hope that my experience with it will help folks out there who have run across this problem and spent late nights banging their heads against their desks as I did.

If you have run into this problem, solved it, or not solved it, leave a comment!

Originally, I used Photoshop to create everything from promotional stickers and web graphics to letterhead and stationery. Eventually I moved to Illustrator for layout/drawing stuff, but Photoshop remains a huge part of my daily life. As the owner and sole employee of Fisheye Multimedia, I am called upon to repair and modify photographs for my clients and to manipulate newspaper layouts for framing. As a photographer myself, I spend hours upon hours in Lightroom and Photoshop, tweaking masks, adjusting curves, cloning and healing, and so on.

I am a very particular Photoshop user with specific needs and expectations established by years of use. Photoshop CS3 is a piece of crap.

I moved to Creative Suite 1 a good while after its release and it really fit the bill for me. Its adjustment layers and effects layers were immensely helpful in my professional photo restoration tasks and the program was about as efficient as I could expect it to be. When Creative Suite 2 was released, I was peripherally excited about its new features, but because I had no direct application for most of them, I didn’t jump on it. Creative Suite 3 was released six months ago and again I looked at the features and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of rocking the boat… My very efficient and comfortable boat in which everything worked precisely as it should.

Then I bought a new computer. An 8-core 3GHz Mac Pro with five gigs of RAM and the 30-inch cinema display; the works. After six years with the same dual 1.24GHz G4, I figured it was time to go cutting edge. My G4 was cutting edge when I bought it, but then I watched the G5s come and go, and then the transition to Intel processors, and I felt a bit left out. My machine couldn’t even run Aperture because Apple made an executive decision that you must have at least a G5 to run it. Bummer!

With the new computer I thought I would finally upgrade Photoshop and give Creative Suite 3 a try. I’d heard a lot of great things about it from other photographers, notably my colleague Chris Blake. It seemed to work for them, so it should treat me well. I downloaded a trial.

In the defense of Photoshop CS3, I think the new GUI layout with the palette wells and everything else is top notch. It’s high time they made the floating palette system more efficient and I love the highlighting of certain menu items and re-arranging of palettes based on workspace presets. I was very excited at first, as I usually am when I get into some new software or hardware (nerds are so easy to please). That is, until I tried drawing something.

I agreed to do a quick cartoon logo for a friend’s up and coming e-commerce site, so I settled in to do some sketches. As I started to draw, I realized that the brush strokes were lagging behind my cursor as though my computer was too slow. Couldn’t be! I gave up on the project and did some research.

All I could find of any use was this thread on Adobe’s “User to User” forum. I do believe that the original poster of this thread had my exact problem, but nobody could produce any successful fixes for it.

Among the suggestions were:

• Install the Force VM Buffering On/Off Plug-In from Adobe (Read Me)
• Enable the “Bigger Tiles” Plug-In (included)
• Set the “cache levels” setting 5 or lower (default is 6)

I tried each of these suggestions and none of them changed the responsiveness of the paintbrush.

Having exhausted currently available options on the painting score, I went to install my scanner. After installing the software, I was able to run it in standalone mode (I have an Epson Expression 1680) and scan images just fine, but the scanner itself never appeared in the File -> Import menu in Photoshop CS3.

From what I gather, either the scanner’s TWAIN interface software and/or associated utility application (EPSONScan) is not a universal binary (CS3 runs natively on Intel Macs) and Epson lied about it (because it says it IS a Universal, native Intel build).

Either way, I had reached a dead-end with CS3. Perhaps they will resolve these issues in the future (and I’m addressing both Adobe and Epson here). I’m really glad I didn’t jump on that $800 auction for CS3 Design Standard on eBay last week!

My solution was to go back to Photoshop CS2, which has thus far been 100% faster with everything, regardless of whether it’s running natively or emulated through Rosetta. I probably have eight cores running at 3.0GHz to thank for that, but I still wish that Adobe would get their act together and fix this laggy drawing problem in CS3 so that those of us who suffer with it can use their native (universal binary) version.

Adobe has finally released the first upgrade package for Photoshop Lightroom, which brings us to version 1.1. I say “finally” because this upgrade introduces at least one feature that we hoped against hope would be in the first release, the ability to merge libraries, among other enhancements.

First, if you have Lightroom and it hasn’t already popped up and told you to download the upgrade, you should seriously click over there and do that.

When I went out to Yosemite National Park and Santa Cruz, I brought my laptop with Lightroom on it. Because my home Lightroom library (now called a catalog in v1.1 and also in the rest of this post) is tied to photos saved in certain places on my home network and also because it’s gigantic, I started a fresh new catalog on my laptop. It was great to be able to use Lightroom to import the RAW files, do some work on them, see which ones were going to work out, even edit a few to completion while on the road.

However, upon returning home, I had two Lightroom catalogs. Lightroom has always supported switching between catalogs, which is nice, but never merging them. That feature was supposed to have been in the 1.0 release, but the developers decided it wasn’t up to snuff, so they nixed it until it was more fleshed out. I was very excited to see the new options available in version 1.1 for importing photos from one catalog into another, satisfying my every desire. Last night I imported all of my Yosemite and Santa Cruz photos into my primary catalog, which took a good ten minutes to process on my older G4, but I now have a nice, solid, unified catalog.

As a workflow tool, it’s excellent to be able to create a new catalog on, say, your laptop, take it where you’re going, do what you need to do, and then be able to merge that into your home catalog when you return. Did I mention that the “import from another catalog” feature imports only the photos you select and puts them where you want them (or leaves them where they are), just like importing from anywhere else? They thought of everything.

There are a variety of other new features, including a really slick “spray can” tool (replacing the rubber stamp) within the Library module that allows you to “spray” photos with keywords, ratings, flags, labels, develop presets, metadata presets, or rotations. As soon as I saw it I actually giggled a little bit. Out loud. I’m a huge nerd.

To see what else is new and review known issues, read the Lightroom 1.1 release notes (pdf).

You have a bunch of pretty photos; shouldn’t they have pretty names?

I always name my photographs. Even if the names are sometimes trite or clichéd, I think that any photo that has worked its way into the gallery deserves a name. When I put photos into my gallery, I like to name the files themselves with the name of the photograph so that the URLs are pretty. It makes more sense to see a URL like /Places/Chicago/MillenniumPark.jpg.html than something ugly like /plc/chg-il/chg-mp-01.jpg, don’t you think?

One thing I hate is to do things more than once. Isn’t that why we have computers? “So,” I thought to myself, “if I’m going to enter the names of the photos into the Title field of their metadata anyway,” which I do, “shouldn’t I be able to read that out somehow and name the file with it?” Yes, yes I can. This is because I am a nerd. It is this power that I will give you today. Nerd power.

Getting the Programs

First, you’re going to need a working installation of MacPorts. In my previous article I explained how to get that working, so go over that part again if you need to. I will assume you have it installed, even if you didn’t install the ports I talked about last time.

Now install a program called exiv2, which is a terminal utility for reading Exif and other data out of (primarily) JPEG files. Installing it should be as easy as opening up your terminal program of choice and typing:

Remember, you’re only typing the part after the dollar sign. You will probably be prompted for your password and then it’ll run off and download things and install them for you. Once it’s done, make sure it worked by running the program:

It should look more or less like that. If you get a -bash: exiv2: command not found error, that’s not good, so you should look back at what MacPorts told you during the installation to find out what went wrong. Now that you have exiv2 installed, you can use it to read information out of files. Here is what the basic output of exiv2 looks like if you don’t specify any extra options:

But wait, there’s no image name in there, only the filename! By default, exiv2 only prints out the Exif data, not any of the IPTC data, which is where things like the image’s creator, URL, title, etc., are stored. We can tell exiv2 to print out IPTC data by using the -pi switch. By the way, you can find out what else it can do by asking it for help with exiv2 --help.

Shelling out the Name!

You can see that this JPEG has been given a title (in the IPTC spec. they call it ObjectName), a couple of keywords, a byline (the creator’s name, usually), and a copyright notice. What we want is just the value of ObjectName. We can get this with a piece of shell scripting like so:

I’m not going to explain how this works; the fun of bash is looking up each command and figuring out how it all comes together. If you want to figure it out, I’m confident that you will. If not, that’s okay, you can still use it! Suffice it to say, that line should output only the title of the image, or nothing if there isn’t one. We need to save that into a little script so that it can be given a filename to work on and so it can check to make sure everything works the way it’s supposed to. To that end, here is the script:

Note: You may have to change the path to exiv2 in the part that starts EXIV= if MacPorts installed it in a different place than where it is on my system. In all likelihood it’s in the same place, but you can check by running which exiv2. Use the path printed by that command in your script.

This script takes the filename of your photograph as an argument and renames the file with that name. It also removes any non-alphanumeric characters from the title to make sure the filename will be valid. If you wanted to change spaces into hyphens instead of removing them or something else along those lines, you’d want to examine and alter the tr portion of the long command at the beginning.

Save that script into a file and make sure it’s executable by running chmod u+x yourscriptname, and you’re done!

Making a Droplet

Well, almost. Wouldn’t it be handy to be able to drag and drop a bunch of photos onto an icon and have this thing rename them all at once? You bet it would. We can easily make an AppleScript droplet that will do that, just like I showed you in the previous chapter! Here’s the code:

Hit Save As and make sure to select “application” as the type and also make sure that the “Startup Screen” option is unchecked. You really don’t want that one.

If all has gone according to plan, you should be able to drag photos onto the droplet and they should be renamed for you! Of course, they must have title information in the IPTC header; Lightroom calls the field Title and will export that data with your images automatically.

If you felt the urge, you could integrate these AppleScript commands into the post-processing script for Lightroom that I showed you how to set up in the previous chapter. I will leave that as a challenge for the adventurous reader.

Until next time, fellow photo-nerds.

In this series of articles, I will discuss the down and dirty mechanics of how I’ve automated a good deal of my workflow. I’ll probably continue to add chapters to this series as I figure out new methods, but hopefully you can start saving time right off the bat with some of these tips!

Today’s topic is exporting and watermarking.

For starters, I’m using a Mac and I’m using Adobe Lightroom 1.0. If you use different software or a different platform, a lot of this probably won’t work for you. If you manage to port some of my automation processes to a different platform or software package, please share with me!

What we’re going to do together right now is build an AppleScript application that acts as a droplet, which allows you to (as you might expect) drop image files onto it to watermark them. This droplet takes all of the overhead of Photoshop and the monotony of manual labor out of the watermarking process, which I think you will come to love as much as I do.

As a bonus, we can set up Adobe Lightroom to use this droplet as a post-processing filter (and I’ll show you how!), so the activity of applying a custom watermark to your images becomes tightly integrated into the activity of exporting from Lightroom. If you don’t have Lightroom, or don’t even like Lightroom, you can still use the AppleScript droplet to watermark a bunch of photos at once.

The first step is…

Building the Watermark

The first step in automating the watermark process is to have a watermark graphic you want to use. You will need a standalone graphic file that will work in any photo scenario. In other words, if your watermark uses transparency and the text is white, you probably won’t be able to read it if it’s applied to a very light photo.

For my watermark, I have gone with a very small and very controlled image, which I’ve named simply copyright.gif:

The only technical considerations when composing a watermark image are:

• It should be narrower than the smallest for-web image you will export, so that it isn’t cut off. I always export my images for this blog at 600 pixels wide, so I’m safe with this watermark (which is 310 pixels wide).
• It should be legible on any image, regardless of the image’s lightness or darkness. To solve this problem, I’ve used a black background. I experimented with different approaches and found this one to be the most reliable, even if not always the most attractive.

Now that we have a workable watermark image, it’s time to…

Install ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a command-line image manipulation suite originally developed in the Linux community. It’s free, powerful, and could serve you in more ways than watermarking, so let’s get this thing installed! The easiest way to install ImageMagick is through the package management system called MacPorts (formerly known as DarwinPorts).

Pop over to MacPorts and download the latest version. You install MacPorts in the same way you’d install any other Mac application: open the .dmg file, run the installer, wait a while, and there you have it. Now that MacPorts is installed, it’s time to delve into darker territories: the terminal. If you are unfamiliar with the terminal, don’t be too intimidated; I’ll show you exactly what to type.

Open up the terminal (the default Terminal application or your choice of replacement terminal) and make sure MacPorts is working properly:

Note that your prompt will look different than mine; the only part you need to type is port. Press return and, if everything has gone according to plan, you should see the default output of the port program:

Installing ImageMagick should be as simple as:

The sudo command allows you to run a program as the superuser, which is required in order to install things into locations within the OS X system folders (much the same as entering your password when running certain installer packages). You will be prompted for your password; enter it and press return. It will take some time to download the required files, decompress them, etc., etc. When it’s done, it will let you know. If you get any errors along the way, you will want to refer to the MacPorts website or search on the Internet for solutions; fixing MacPorts problems is too vast an area to cover in this article.

You can now confirm that ImageMagick is installed by trying to run one of its included tools, convert. Just type that in and see what happens:

A whole bunch of stuff should print out. Don’t worry about reading it. If you get an error message like -bash: convert: command not found then try closing and re-opening the terminal. If it doesn’t work after that, well, something must have gone wrong with the installation and you should try to figure out what that is. There are a lot of resources available through the MacPorts site and through The Google to help you out.

Now that we have ImageMagic set up, we need to write some…

AppleScript

I love AppleScript. What we’re going to do now is write a small script (or “droplet”) that opens images and places your watermark image on them. Here is the code:

Beware. I have broken up a couple of the lines to make it appear properly on the blog. The linebreak character, which should look like the upper right corner of a square, might not appear properly in your browser.

If you want, you can just download the script from my site. You should be able to open this file in Script Editor and change the paths to suit your environment (mostly change the path to your watermark file), and in fact, you must change this path or the script will not work. In the above code, /Users/airborne/Pictures/copyright.gif is the part you need to change.

I will now explain the code in greater detail for anyone interested. If you couldn’t care less how it works, skip the next couple of paragraphs. The first part, on open theObjects means that this script expects to be opened with files passed into it, either by dragging and dropping files onto its icon in the Finder, or by being triggered from Lightroom, et al. (Image Capture can also use post-import scripts and they work in precisely the same way). When the script runs, theObjects will be a list of files to do something with.

The following block (repeat with) is then repeated with each file that was passed in. The composite program included in ImageMagick is used to layer an image on top of another image, so we call that with the do shell script command, which basically simulates typing something into the terminal. The -compose Over option tells it to place the second image on top of the first, and -gravity southwest means to place it in the lower left corner. I then supply the paths to my copyright.gif and the POSIX path of each of the files opened by this script (the ones dropped onto its icon or passed in by Lightroom). If any of this is unclear, leave a comment.

If you are re-creating this script for yourself, just be sure to save it as an application. In the “save” dialog, you can choose a few different formats to save the script in, but only “application” will give it the ability to operate as a droplet (a program you can drop files onto).

Great, now let’s make it run automatically from Lightroom!

Configuring Lightroom

When you run the Export command from Lightroom, you are presented with a dialog box much like the one you see below. We are chiefly concerned with the option highlighted in this picture.

When you open that menu, you will want to choose “Go to Export Actions Folder Now” as shown below.

Note: disregard the “Watermark+Upload” option; that is a modified version of this Watermark script that also opens Transmit and uploads the photos to my website. I’ll cover that functionality in another article. See, AppleScript rules!

When you choose that option, the Export Actions folder will be revealed in the Finder and you can then place the Watermark script into it. Make sure it’s in the Export Actions folder and not in the Lightroom folder! If you cancel and re-open the Export dialog, you will now be able to select Watermark in the list. Exporting photos using that post-processing filter should now automatically apply your watermark image!

This has been a long-winded and very technical article. I realize that all of you are coming here with different levels of familiarity with the terminal, ImageMagick, AppleScript, etc., so I covered what I thought were the most important points. If you have any questions, just leave a comment and I’ll be glad to explain anything I left out.

Good luck and happy watermarking!

P.S. Learn even more about scripting in Automated Workflow II