Musings on Photography

Just this past week, Apple released a new version of Aperture, which now comes complete with a plugin that gives dodging and burning control. Today, Adobe releases into beta the next version of Adobe Lightroom, complete with (wait for it…) local dodging and burning.

And I’m here to tell you that while dodging and burning were the ‘de facto’ standard local controls in a wet darkroom, they’re not the right choice in the digital world.

In the wet darkroom, dodging and burning were strangely convoluted with the characteristic curve of the gelatin-silver paper. In the wet darkroom, the familiar S shaped curve of the characteristic curve (aka the H&D curve, or the Hurter-Driffield curve) had profound implications when we burned (increased exposure locally) or dodged (reduced exposure locally). If you burned down a shadow, you were forcing the tones in that region up onto the shoulder (highest density) portion of the curve, and so contrast would be reduced as you burned, and the more you burned, the lower the contrast got. Likewise, as you dodged the shadows, the tones would move onto the straighter portion of the curve, and contrast would increase as the tones in question moved off the shoulder.

Same thing in the highlights, but the other direction. As you dodged, things moved down onto the toe of the paper, and contrast fell. As you burned, things moved off the low contrast toe and onto the higher contrast middle portion, and contrast increased.

Sometimes those contrast changes worked to your advantage. Sometimes they didn’t, and you were forced to resort to other forms of prestidigitation to get the result you wanted. Things got easier with variable contrast paper, because you could dodge an area back during the main exposure, and then burn it in afterwards with a different contrast. In a very limited sense, using multiple contrast settings on a single print in the wet darkroom (something I did often) was equivalent to using a curve layer with a mask in Photoshop.

Every other technique (e.g. flashing, bleaching, or pouring hot developer on the print, or variable development) you might use in the wet darkroom means that you’ve started to employ tools that are much harder to control than dodging and burning. As a result, the vast majority of prints were made using the techniques of dodging and burning, and nothing else.

But it’s a mistake to think that as we move into the digital world, what we want is dodging and burning. We don’t, because dodging and burning have weak expressive power, and there’s an easy to use tool that can express every possible dodge and burn, plus a whole lot more.

That tool is called ‘curves’, and if we’re to be reduced to just one tool to do localized editing, we should run (not walk) away from dodging and burning, and instead rush to embrace curves with masks.

Let me demonstrate. When we burn an area down, we increase the ‘exposure’ and move all the affected tones down the tonal scale. This can be expressed with the following curve:

Likewise, a dodge moves all the tones UP the tonal scale, like this:

Once we have a way to express the action of burning and dodging, all we need is a way to restrict the action of the curve to a local region - and we do that by editing the mask for the curve layer.

That’s not the imporant point, because if that was all there was to it, we be better off with the simpler interface presented by the burn/dodge concept. The important point is that we can express a lot of things with curves that we can’t easily express using burning and dodging. In particular, we can limit the effect of burning and dodging not just spatial (by using a mask) but also tonally (by putting bends in the curve).

So, for instance, if we want to lighten the shadows, but leave the highlights and mid-tones alone, we might use a curve like this:

and if you want the mid-tones to increase in contrast, the shadows to get darker and lose contrast, and the highlights to get lighter and lose contrast (aka trade highlight and shadow contrast for mid-tone contrast), all without shifting the white point or black point, you use a curve like this:

The bottom line, here, is that by having curves and some way to control where on the image the curve is applied (and where it isn’t) you have the expressive power of burning and dodging, and then a whole lot more besides. There isn’t single tool I could deploy in my wet B&W darkroom that I can’t express simply and easily with curves and masks. Not a single one. Bleaching, flashing, variable contrast gradients, I can say it all with curves. And there are lots and lots of things I can express with curves and masks that were essentially impossible in the wet darkroom.

If you only get one tool, I’d suggest choosing the one that can do it all. It’s a shame that the developers of image editing software don’t see it this way.

[side note: Hurter and Driffield, the fellows who first graphically expressed the exposure/density relationship of photosensitive materials are two of my photographic heroes. Let me just close with a quote from them]

The photographer who combines scientific method with artistic skill is in the best possible position to do the good work

-Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield

Apple have released a new version of Aperture. It has what they’re calling a plug-in architecture, which allows you to buy third party software and it just fits right into Aperture. One of my favorite tools, Noise Ninja, has announced it will be available as a Aperture plugin sometime in May. The developers of other successful imaging tools seem queued up to offer their tools as Aperture plugins as well.

To borrow a line from Theodor Geisel, “This may not seem very important, I know. But it is, so I’m bothering telling you so.”

There are a couple of reasons.

The first big reason is that it seems that a lot of photographers are moving to tools like Aperture (or Lightroom, the competing product from Adobe). It’s a sort of one stop shopping framework for everything from ingesting the images off your memory cards (or camera) to making prints.

The big problem with such products is that it’s awkward to use tools that are outside this integrated environment. That is, it’s awkward if your noise reduction tool (say, Noise Ninja, the really great product with the really silly name) must be run standalone, because you have to save a version of the image, run Noise Ninja on it, then import the result of Noise Ninja back into the integrated environment.

The same problems occur if you want to use some other raw converter instead of the one directly supported by your image processing workflow. That’s why so many people use Adobe Camera Raw - it’s not that it does such a great job as much as it’s there and it fits into the workflow so well. Click on the raw file in Bridge, and ACR runs, and the output appears directly in Photoshop.

“But wait!” I hear you saying, “Photoshop has plugins! This is nothing new!” And indeed, Photoshop does have plugins. In fact, that’s exactly how I use Noise Ninja - it’s a photoshop plugin that appears as a filter. But plugins in Photoshop aren’t really first class citizens. Plugins, for instance, can’t be the basis for layers, the way curves can. Every plugin must , if needed, duplicate the effect of having masks.

But the fact that Apple have developed a significant part of the image workflow as a plugin (they’ve got dodge/burn/contrast/saturation/sharpen/blur done this way) makes me suspect that plugins in Aperture are more first class in the workflow. Plugins in Aperture 2.0 can work on raw files. So your favorite raw converter can be an Aperture plugin. Plugins in Aperture can start from more than one file, so HDR tools can be plugins, and be first class. I saw a really cool tool that takes a bunch of frames, does sub-pixel alignment, and extracts a result that has higher resolution than any of the original frames does, and that tool could be a plugin.

Now, from a strict computability argument, there’s nothing that can’t be done the old way that can be done in the new way. Photoshop has plugins, scripting, and so on, and strictly speaking it’s probably possible to integrate these new tools into Photoshop. But developers don’t do it, and I’m guessing that’s because Adobe have made it hard to do. Apple, on the other hand, seem to view this as the strategic goal for Aperture - and that tells me that they’re going to make it pretty easy.

The big question, really, is whether the local editing workflow in Aperture will be as versatile and workable as the layers model embedded in Photoshop. If so, it makes Aperture a big contender in the imaging world. It’s entirely possible that a really good, structured model like layers could be built as a plugin, in fact. Hard to tell at this point, but it’s an interesting idea.

Another reason why this is important is that Apple have apparently lined up some of the big names to do plugin versions of their tools for Aperture. If you’re a developer and your product competes against Noise Ninja, the pressure is on to do an Aperture plugin so you can compete. This isn’t a big chink in the armor of Photoshop dominance, but it might be the thin edge of the wedge.

Back when Aperture and Lightroom were introduced, I was still a Windows person. Now I’m a Mac person, and so I’m looking forward to getting a look at Aperture 2.1 and seeing what the image editing workflow looks like, and whether these plugins are more first class citizens than plugins in Photoshop. If so, I may be giving Aperture a whirl.

Many thanks to all those who offered advice on B&W conversions.

Some notes:

I don’t use Lightroom. I’m unlikely to start using Lightroom, for a host of reasons which I’ve already articulated.

I like the B&W conversion layer approach. Even better, I like the idea of adding a whole bunch of B&W conversion layers to the image, and then editing the masks to get one conversion in one area and a different one in a different area. It’s like making VC prints and adjusting the contrast all over the print, something I did a lot in the wet darkroom.

Going back to editing images as B&W after a long period doing nothing but color is an illuminating experience. We do not ‘read’ images in B&W in even vaguely the same way we do color images, or at least concepts like contrast and tone take on different roles in color and B&W. I’m even more impressed than I used to be at folks who work with one foot in each world.

John Nack weighs in with Adobe’s definitive word on the upsetting business with Adobe CS3 apps contacting “192.168.112.2o7.net”, a domain name clearly chosen to look like it’s a local network address (although it’s not):

Q.: Why does Adobe use a server whose name is so suspicious-looking?
A.: I’m afraid the answer is that we don’t really know. The fact is that this SWF tracking code already existed on the Macromedia side at the time the companies merged, and it was adopted without change by a number of products for CS3. The people who wrote the code originally did not document why they used that server name, and we can’t find anyone who remembers. I’m sorry we aren’t able to provide a more solid, definitive explanation.

I would just like to point out that, now that they’ve had plenty of time to work this all out without the problems of having people on vacation over the holidays, Adobe has managed to come up with a definitive answer, and the answer is “Gee, we really don’t know.”

Boy, howdy, Adobe. You guys are really doing just exactly the right thing to maximally erode my trust and confidence. This is the best answer you can produce? I don’t know about anyone else in the world, but when you give me an answer like this, my conclusion is that you know the real answer, and you don’t want to give it, so you came up with a bullshit story like this.

Let’s just refresh our memories, with John Nack’s words from his original post on this subject:

As I say, now is the perfect time for people to throw around whatever wild assertions they’d like, given that so many people are out of the office and can’t respond.

Hey, John. It turns out it didn’t make much difference. Apparently an Adobe software development team at work doesn’t get answers any better than an Adobe software development team off on vacation and unreachable does. I think you’ll find it works better if you keep the whining about those annoying customers to a minimum. That’s probably a good thing for a senior product manager to know. And I offer it up, here, completely free of charge. Consider it a goodwill gift.

From the Adobe website referenced in John’s most recent post:

If you would prefer that the software not make these calls, simply disable the Welcome Screen in your Adobe software by selecting the Don’t Show This Again option in the lower left corner of the Welcome Screen.

This would seem to imply that turning off those welcome screens would mean that I could stop worrying about all this. But then I read, on the same web page:

…some Creative Suite 3 software contains embedded web browsers, any user action which requests Adobe.com content from such an embedded browser will cause the host software to make the tracking calls.

For example, clicking Bridge Home in Adobe Bridge CS3 will cause its embedded browser to visit an Adobe.com page and initiate this tracking. If you would like to prevent this from happening, turn off Bridge Home by opening Adobe Bridge CS3, choosing Edit > Preferences (Windows) or Bridge CS3 > Preferences (Mac OS), and deselecting Bridge Home under Favorite Items.

Uh huh. So turning off those Welcome screens means no more calls to Omniture’s servers. Except, of course, for all those OTHER calls to Omniture servers, like those that happen when I hit ‘Bridge Home’. One is left wondering, really, not just whether it’s possible to turn off all this crap, but whether Adobe actually has any employees who can muster the fairly minimal competence required to give us a definitive list of all the things we might do that will trigger this behavior.

And then, just as a final note, I followed the link from that web page to take a gander at Adobe’s Online Privacy Policy. And there, I found the following:

Please note that the practices of Adobe Systems Incorporated, its affiliates, and agents (”Adobe”), with respect to data collected and used by Adobe in connection with this website and all other Adobe.com, Acrobat.com and Acrobatusers.com websites of Adobe Systems Incorporated and its affiliates with links to this policy (collectively, the “Site”) and Adobe products and services available or enabled via the Site (“Products and Services”), are governed by this online privacy policy (“Privacy Policy”) as amended from time to time, and not the privacy policy in effect at the time the data was collected. [emphasis mine]

In other words, what Adobe are saying is that the privacy policy that applies is not the one in effect at the time they collected data from you. It’s the privacy policy that is on that website, which Adobe are free to change AFTER they collect the data. So they’ll give you lots of assurances now, collect the data, and then in the future, they’ll amend the policy, and do whatever they like.

I think that’s unspeakably scummy.

From Uneasysilence.com, we read

The sky is falling, the NSA is listening and Adobe is watching how many times you open your programs. Okay, the first two can’t be PROVEN but I can show you that Adobe is spying on users application habits.

When you launch a CS3 application the application pings out to what looks like an IP address - and internal IP address: 192.168.112.2O7.

That makes sense, right? Adobe wants to be sure you aren’t running multiple copies of their programs…. Wait something is wrong here.

The first clue something is fishy is that I don’t use a 192.168.xxx.xxx numbering scheme in my network. Secondly, if you look at the address Little Snitch is displaying, the last “numbers” of the IP address (2O7) look funny. Also, IP address don’t end in any .com/net/org suffix.

Turns out that 192.168.112.2O7.net is owned by Omniture, a huge behavioral analytics firm. Hmmmmmm, anybody curious why Adobe is doing this? Anybody care to sniff packets? I sense an invasion of privacy here!

John Nack responds on his blog here, and here.

One thing I find particularly snarky is John’s complaint:

This year it’s “Lies, Lies, and Adobe Spies”–a story noting that some Adobe apps contact a Web address associated with Web analytics company Omniture. The story is getting echoed & amplified on Valleywag (”You’re not the only one watching what you do in Adobe Creative Suite 3… Adobe is watching you, too”), CenterNetworks (”I am not suggesting that Adobe is doing anything wrong…” but then “Shame on Adobe, shame”), Daring Fireball (”Assuming this is true, it’s a disgrace, whatever the actual reason for the connections” [emphasis added]), and I’m sure elsewhere.

Whoa, Nellie.

As I say, now is the perfect time for people to throw around whatever wild assertions they’d like, given that so many people are out of the office and can’t respond.

Well, John. I’m so very sorry that this little hidden behavior of your company’s applications was discovered at a time when Adobe employees find it inconvenient to respond. Isn’t that just rude? I mean, here they are, using your company’s software during the holidays, and they find this very suspicious behavior, and instead of waiting for #$&*&^%$#$%^& HOURS on hold trying to connect with Adobe’s famous crappy customer support they choose to notify other users of Adobe software of the behavior on their blogs. And they have the temerity to voice their opinion of that behavior, too! Of all the nerve!

John, welcome to the grown up world. Your customers don’t have any obligation to you at all. They paid their hundreds of dollars for your software, and when they find out that it engages in suspicious behavior that’s been hidden from them they don’t have to do things the way you’d like. They’re free to say whatever they please about the behavior. They’re free to say it whenever they please, even if John Nack finds the timing to be upsetting in some weird tinfoil hat “clearly there’s some conspiracy to complain about things while everyone is on vacation” way. The fact that they complained when you personally found it inconvenient is bad news for you but has no bearing on the merits of their complaints.

If they find the behavior of your app phoning home sufficiently offensive or upsetting, for whatever reason, they’re free to complain, to be discontented, and to spread that discontent as widely as they please. Realistically, there isn’t a thing you can do about it. I suggest that you wake up, smell the coffee, and start blaming your own company for this little brouhaha. I make that suggestion because the amount of impassioned discontent I see that’s directed at Photoshop and its stranglehold on the photo world makes me think that your days of charging $600 for the application are numbered, and the number is surprisingly low.

Finally, you might want to change your wording. You call these ‘wild assertions’, a wording which suggests that these claims are unsubstantiated. Well, John, I’m guessing that, given that UneasySilence actually caught InDesign in the act of doing this, it’s not unsubstantiated and thus very much NOT a ‘wild assertion’. It’s established fact, and no amount of spin on your part is going to change that.

Nack then writes:

PS–Tracking user habits can be a good thing that benefits customers by helping software creators notice trends & improve their tools. When Adobe has pursued this kind of thing, it’s always been on a strictly opt-in basis.

Horsehockey. I’d suggest that if John really feels this way, I’d like to install some software that tracks the banking habits of all Adobe employees. I’m pretty sure that I would find trends that would help me ‘improve their banking tools’. You’ll have to trust that I won’t track anything you’d find violated your sense of privacy. To make it easy, I’ll hide this tracking so that you won’t know about it and thus won’t find it upsetting.

If Adobe has some legitimate goal here, there’s no need to hide that goal from users. It should be emblazoned in really big type on the initial splash screen when the application is first installed. And it shouldn’t use the domain name ‘192.168.122.2o7.net’, which is clearly a bad choice because it’s exactly the sort of thing the really bad guys would use and so using it pretty much drives people to a conclusion that you’re up to no good.

In the comments, Nack then responds to a comment (Nack’s response in brackets):

Adobe apps can call various online resources (online help, user forums, etc.), and those requests are logged.” Heavens, how could anyone equate that with “covertly phoning home”?

[I don't know, because it's not covert. The app only connects to those things if you ask it to do so, by selecting the appropriate menu item. There's nothing covert about it. --J.]

Ok, John. Without telling you, I’ve installed something on your computer. I haven’t told you what I’ve installed or revealed that I installed it or revealed what it does. It does it when you do something, but I haven’t told you what things trigger it. But you’ve just discovered that when it does it, it contacts a domain with a very phishy sounding domain name that appears to be intended to confuse people and firewall rules.

Two points come to mind:
1. If I did this, you’d be pissed as hell, and you know it. And you’re surely agree it’s ‘covert’. If you’re unsure let me direct you to the definition of covert.
2. Your claims that this is not covert because it only happens when you do some things and not others is nothing but meretricious, unadulterated crapola. And your claiming that it isn’t covert is offensive - not a surprise coming from the company that’s blazing new trails into the land of “We Pissed Off Our Customers Because We’re Arrogant Asshats”.

Bottom line: let me make a Modest Proposal to Adobe. If this information is so valuable to Adobe and isn’t something that would make users uneasy, then issue a software update for the CS3 apps that adds two menu items. The first menu item will display all the information that’s been forwarded to Adobe. The second menu item should offer users a choice of two options 1) users can opt in to sending this info, and Adobe will pay them for the info 2) users can opt out. If this information is so valuable to Adobe, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to have Adobe compensate the users in exchange for the data, instead of just taking the data for free.

I really, really wanted to like Adobe Lightroom.  After taking it for a  pretty solid spin around the block, though, I’ve finally given up.

The primary reasons for giving up are:

• It has silly limitations (like the 10k pixel limit) that prevent me from using Lightroom for all my images.
• It’s just too slow.  My main machine is reasonably fast (2.2 GHz dual processor, 3GB of ram) and Lightroom is often frustratingly slow there.  On my laptop, it’s a slug.
• The image editing toolset is so limited that I’m still forced to use Photoshop for all but a very few photos.  This reduces Lightroom to a bigger, more powerful browser with excellent keywording, grouping, etc. and with features (like the slideshow stuff and printing stuff) that I never, ever use.  Lightroom is even inadequate for generating the jpgs I use for web display.
• Lightroom has strong ideas about what files go where, and it’s pretty stubborn about it.  I like to have the base level raw files in one place, the photoshop files that are descended from them in another, and so on.  I like my way of arranging things, because it integrates with my backup strategy, etc.
• The one feature I really, really like a lot is the much improved Camera Raw, with highlight and shadow recovery, etc.  But I will get this in the future just by upgrading Photoshop, which I’ll do anyway.  I get the one really compelling feature even if I ditch Lightroom.

I’m hoping that future versions of Lightroom will address these problems.  For now, though, by take is that it’s a not quite ready for prime time piece of software.

From the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom User Guide:

Note: Lightroom 1.0 currently supports photos up to 10,000 pixels in length or width for a maximum image size of 100 million pixels.

and

TIFF format

Tagged-Image File Format (TIFF, TIF) is used to exchange files between applications and computer platforms.  TIFF is a flexible bitmap image format supported by virtually all paint, image-editing, and payge-layout applications.  Also, virtually all desktop scanners can produce TIFF images.  Lightroom supports large documents saved in TIFF format (up to 100 million pixels with pixel dimensions of no more than 10,000 on a side). 

So Lightroom cannot deal with any image larger than 10k pixels on the longest side.

I suppose that I can use Lightroom to play with things, but as a serious tool for serious image management, these limits are hopelessly inadequate.  There are lots of folks out there scanning 4×5 film at pixel densities in excess of the 2100 pixels/inch that would put their images over the limit for Lightroom.  Anyone working with 5×7 or 8×10 or larger, and scanning the film at even modest resolutions will not be able to use Lightroom.  A friend of mine hit this when Lightroom refused to import several very high resolution scans he’d made with resolution doubling on a Nikon scanner, from 35mm negatives, for pity’s sake. 

 If you’re stitching multiple frames together to make panoramic images, it’s commn to produce an image longer than 10k pixels.  And trust me, there are plenty of pros out there who are now using stitching to produce really large images for murals, large prints, etc.

Until Adobe fixes this, Lightroom is just a toy. 

The package containing Adobe Lightroom arrived late on Saturday.  Naturally, Sunday was scheduled solid, with a two hour drive to Yakima, one and a half hours of Artist Reception, and then two hours drive back, followed by two and a half hours of meeting about trying to form a Snoqualmie Valley Artists Guild.  After that, I got home, and pretty much went to bed.

Today I browsed through the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book by Martin Evening, felt hopelessly confused, and decided to just install the software and see what the heck happened.

First complaint - one of my rules for software is that software should not conceal from users where data are stored, ever.  If Lightroom is going to create a huge database file and save it away on my computer, it should let me know, up front, where the heck it’s putting this thing.  Furthermore, if you’re going to create huge files, you must make it fairly straightforward for me to cause those files to live in some place more acceptable to me. 

HINT TO LIGHTROOM DEVELOPERS - many, perhaps most, photographers have attached to their computers various arrays of disks, and they expect that they will be able to easily and without much in the way of head-banging frustration cause your application intended to manage huge amounts of data store said data on some specific disk in some specific folder.  Assuming that the owner of this sophisticated computing system which stores hundreds of gigabytes of photos will want to store things in the place dictated by Windows (and thus not on any of the really large secondary disks) is probably a bad bet.

SECOND HINT TO LIGHTROOM DEVELOPERS - when confronted with the fact that Lightroom has placed data in what I consider to be a rude and inappropriate place, I do not particularly like it when I cannot easily find a way to coerce your damn application into storing the data where I want to store it.  In particular, designing your application so that the way to create a new library is to hold down the eff-ing ‘alt’ key while starting the application is, well, let’s just say I have quite a lot to say about your parentage and whether you are in fact smarter than a plate of boiled broccoli.  You decided this was a better plan that a menu item called ‘create new library’ because you were, what?  In the throes of some massive neural seizure?

The second bit of consternation came when Lightroom announced that it could not import a bunch of .psd files that I have created with Photoshop, and suggestedthat I open the files in Photoshop, and then save them with ‘maximum compatibility’ checked in the preferences.  THIRD HINT TO LIGHTROOM DEVELOPERS - I do not consider it to be a good omen when one Adobe application announces that another, highly related Adobe application’s files can’t be read because they were not created in ‘maximum compatibility’ mode.  Especially when the documentation for that option says that it’s needed to make the files readable by OLDER versions of software, and not ensure forward compatibility with software to be written and purchased in the future.

I have lots more to say about Lightroom but this is too long already.  I am impressed by many of the features and capabilities of Lightroom but I am wondering somewhat whether this application is actually ready for prime time.