Jacken's Blog » Photography

Prepare images for blogging on iPad

Jacken — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:36:21 +0000

Image editing for blogging on iPad

When I first got my iPad I thought it was great for consuming media, but not for creating it. But after a year I do most of my writing and blogging from my iPad. With a connected Bluetooth keyboard it’s an excellent tool for writing. No spinning hard drive, no fan, just comfortable silence. And with apps like Writing Kit and Blogsy, I can do all the things I need for blogging. But handling images isn’t that easy. Here’s my tips on getting your images in shape directly on your iPad.

Color correction

My favorite image editor is Snapseed, who got Apples iPad app of the year award 2011. I’m not so interested in the filters, but the image editing features. To adjust brightness, ambience, contrast, saturation and color balance, you use the Tune Image feature. You select what you want to adjust by dragging up and down, then you set the amount to adjust with a left and right swipe.

Crop

Snapseed has a crop feature that is equally easy to use. There’s also an excellent sharpening feature.

Change size

Here’s the snag. There is no resize function in Snapseed. So you need to save your corrected image to the photo library and use another app for that. There are some free apps available, but I like to use Photoforge2 for that task. It also have some great features for advanced image editing, but I think that for most of the editing, Snapseed is faster and easier to use. The apps aren’t expensive, and you do remember what you paid for Photoshop, don’t you?

Upload the image to the blog

When the image is finished, I use Blogsy to upload the image. I then export my markdown file to HTML from Writing Kit and paste it into Blogsy.Now all you have to do is to post it, and feel happy about doing it all on your iPad.

Geotag your DSLR images using your iPhone GPS and a Mac

Jacken — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:44:52 +0000

Geotag images using an iPhone

One of the nice things about modern camera phones and even some regular cameras uses GPS to tag photos and embed the coordinates in the pictures EXIF data. But wouldn’t it be great if you could do that with your fancy DSLR camera photos as well? Programs like iPhoto, Aperture and the upcoming Adobe Lightroom 4 can show you your pictures on a map. Many online photo sites like Flickr also uses the GPS data in the pictures to display them on a map.

Use your iPhone to geotag pictures

There’s an easy way of adding the GPS coordinates to your RAW or jpg images using your iPhone as a GPS logger. To get it to work correctly, make sure that the clock on your digital camera is the same as your iPhone. This will help when adding the coordinates later. There are some free alternative apps for iPhone like Gps Stone GPX, but I’m using an app called MotionX-GPS for logging when I walk around taking pictures. All you have to do is to start the app and create a new track. Turn off the display and put it in your pocket. Just have the app running while you photograph. After you are finished, use the share function in MotionX-GPS to send the track data by email to your Mac. You get some statistics in the email, but also two included files. One .kmz file for Google Earth, but it’s the .gpx file your interested in. Just save the file to your hard disk. Download your images to your computer. I usually use Image Capture, a very underrated program, and download the images to a folder on the desktop. Start up GPSPhotoLinker, a free program for Macintosh. Import your .gpx track data and photos and use the automatic batch function in the program to save the GPS data into the image. Now you are ready to import your images to your favorite image handling program like iPhoto, Aperture or Adobe Lightroom. So now when you upload pictures to Flickr, the GPS location is embedded in the image.

Great video for learning strobist Canon EOS flash photography

Jacken — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:03:17 +0000

People who use Canon cameras know the EF flashes can be a bit overwhelming trying to understand ETTL II, and how to compensate for background and foreground exposure. Setting up multiple flashes isn’t always easy either. Here’s a great video, explaining all the ins and outs of Canon EF flash photography.

Favorite Canon lenses

Jacken — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:12:24 +0000

Upgrading from the Canon EOS 20D to the full frame camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II has really changed which lenses I like the most. When using the 20D, I used to have the Canon EF 17-40mm f4L lens on as my standard lens. But the full frame really makes it to wide for my taste, and the 17-40mm is a bit too soft at the edges. Now I usually have the Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM lens as my standard lens and use the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L a lot more than before. The high resolution of the 5D shows every fault with the lens. The 70-200mm shines as the best zoom lens I ever had and is perfect for portrait photography.

My next lens will be a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM lens which I think will be the perfect all-round lens. I just wish there was a way to try out a couple of lenses to find a sharp one, because my experience with Canon lenses is that there can be quality differences between them. With some luck I’ll find a dealer that let me test before buying.

GPS tagging on the cheap

Jacken — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:58:49 +0000

I just love gadgets. That’s why it’s nice to find that I bought a Garmin eTrex a long time ago. Haven’t used it in years, but then when Apple released the latest version of iLife 09 with the map function in iPhoto I realized that it is very cool to have all the images geo tagged. So I found a program called GPSPhotoLinker, a program that downloads GPS data and pictures and by the date/time on the pictures manages to add longitude and latitude information in the picture info. When you import pictures with this information iPhoto can use that to show it on maps and make it searchable. And when you upload pictures to Flickr, it also uses the location information place your picture on a map. Very cool.

The software is free to download here. If you have an old GPS receiver like me, you need a serial cable (I made my own because of the very high prices for ready made cables), just check eBay. You also need a USB to serial converter, like the “Keyspan High Speed USB Serial Adapter.

To start tagging, just power on your GPS receiver when you start (I just put it in my shirt pocket) and then photo away). Set the clock in your camera (check the GPS clock, it’s VERY exact ) because this is information that is used to sync position information.

Download all your pictures in a folder, connect the GPS, start GPSPhotoLinker and download data from the GPS, and then select the folder with pictures you took. Press “batch” and your done!

iPhoto 09 map showing my short walk today

Map with my pictures in flickr

Who would have thought?

Jacken — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:53:34 +0000

Over a year ago this guy contacted me to get permission to use this picture for an album cover. I sent him a high res copy and told him that he could use the picture but that he had to send me a copy of the album when it was finished. My guess was I would never hear from him again. But to my surprise I got an email from him yesterday asking for my address and if I wanted the album signed by the artist! Things like this makes me believe in the human being again. I just assumed he would forget to send the album, which is what I probably would do.

FotoMagico

Jacken — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 23:13:02 +0000

There’s been a lot of discussions about the MacHeist bundle. And I must agree with some of the critique on how to share the loot between the MacHeist gang and the Independent developers. But one thing is for sure, If I had not bought the bundle, I would never have discovered an amazing piece of software called FotoMagico. The kind of quality it gives you when making a photo presentation is mind blowing. And the interface is so easy to use, it’s almost spooky. Recommended.

Aperture huh?

Jacken — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 23:24:49 +0000

So I have tried Apples new photo managing software called Aperture. I uploaded some pictures into it to have something to work with. I also downloaded pictures

that I had taken during the day. The next time I started Aperture, I got a message that the project I had downloaded needed to be repaired. But when it was finished, there where two folders with the same name. One is empty and the other one had all the pictures. So I delete the empty project. And now I couldn’t open the pictures in the first folder. Thankfully I found the missing pictures in the trash, I guess the deleted folder really wasn’t empty after all. So this program has the same basic design flaw that iPhoto has. One central database with all the pictures in it. One thing you really have to be able to do is to trust your photo managing software, and so far I’m not impressed. The rest of the program is very nice. If you have a fast machine. Unfortunately the RAW conversion is really bad. And you can’t make Aperture open the raw file in Photoshop CS2 that has a superior importer. That’s plane stupid. I can understand Apple for wanting to use CoreImage for all the processing, but you really need sharpening filters like NIK Sharpener 2, but without a plug-in architecture that’s something that won’t happen.

I realize that this is a 1.0 version of a program and is certainly going to get better. But the idea of using a database for storing pictures seems fundamental for Apples design, and so far I got burned by both iPhoto (twice) and now Aperture. So I guess I’ll go back to Adobe Bridge for manage my photos.

Looking forward

Jacken — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 23:00:46 +0000

It’s been a long time since I looked forward to a program as much as I do with Apples Aperture. I’ve tested C1 Pro and Raw processing with Adobe Photoshop, but none of them feels like they fit in to my workflow habits. The only thing that worries me is that it doesn’t look like Aperture supports plug-ins, so I will not be able to use NIK Sharpener Pro 2.0. And to output anything to print has to go trough NIK Sharpener Pro, trust me.

My normal workflow now is to use Adobe Photoshop CS2 to color correct and to touch up the image. I then use NIK Sharpener Pro 2 to do a raw pre-sharpening. Then I save the image in Photoshop format. This is my finished image. I have stopped printing my pictures on an ink jet printer because of the price per print and all the problems, so I now send all the prints to a processing lab instead. It’s incredibly cheap. There’s a great preset in NIK Sharpener Pro 2 where you select the output to print lab and select the dpi of their service (information that’s not always easy to get hold of). On screen it looks horrible, but the output is perfect. The plug in adapts using the image size and the output media. So make sure you select the output size before using the plug-in. With this you get razor sharp images. For me, the NIK Sharpener Pro 2.0 is the perfect plug-in. It focuses on a specific task, and performs it to perfection.

So hopefully my workflow will be Apples Aperture for selecting, organizing and doing backup and Adobe Photoshop for touching up and make the print ready for printing.

Update coming when I get my greedy hands on the program.

C1 Pro tethered with a Canon 20d with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

Jacken — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 23:31:10 +0000

I started to try out the tethered function of C1 Pro v3.7 with my Canon 20d, but couldn’t get it to work. Had to roam the support board to find out that this does not work with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger yet. There’s an update coming.

So what’s tethered? You can connect your digital camera (at least the supported once) with a Firewire or USB cable and have the camera dump the pictures you take immediately to the computer where you can check sharpness and exposure with a high resolution screen. I’m going to use this when photographing stilleben, food and portraits in a studio environment. First you have all the storage space in the portable computer, and then all the ability to do measure for whitebalance and such.

I’ll give you a rundown on how it went when they release the update.