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

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).

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