New Panorama from Canyonlands

I finally got around to creating another panorama at Canyonlands. Taken just after the sun had gone down. I needed to combine two sets of images two stops apart to two different panoramas and do some simple HDR-like processing (just a blurred mask based on the lightness) to get detail in the canyons and the color in the sky not blown out. I did some PP in Lightroom. Luckily I had shot three sets of exposures at -2, 0, and +2 stops on the tripod, so I just had to combine the panorama once for one set of exposures and simply use a texteditor on the hugin file and combine the second set of exposures. The only thing I needed to do was to make sure the handheld nadir was correct (which was unfortunately not very sharp because of the long shutter). Anyway, here it is: Click on the photo for a larger version at flickr if you care to see it. This image should only be seen large!

Printing to jpg from lightroom

EDIT 2/13/2011: for some strange reason this is one of the most visited pages on my blog with something like 100 hits a day. People should not be using this hint anymore. It is very much outdated as Lightroom has a print-to-jpeg function in Lightroom since v2 that works much better than this hack that was necessary in v1.


I was inspired by some posts on the Lightroom feature request forum to make a nice Automator workflow to automatically generate jpegs in srgb (or any other desired) space from Lightroom. Lightroom's printing panel is very nice but I do not own a >$1000 printer to actually take advantage of it. So, if you could print to something like a jpeg and then send it to a development service that would be great. There were a few examples already noted there but none actually did the essential step of converting to another profile as otherwise you end up with an image in Generic RGB, which will print way to dark from most printing services. So here is a workflow that does that. If you do not see the entire screenshot, make your window wider. There is a larger copy in this link.



To recreate this, first drag a render pdf as images action into the right part, select color model RGB, format jpg and a high resolution and high quality. Then drag the Apply colorsync profile to images below it, select an sRGB (or any profile you desire, such as maybe a profile supplied by the printing service) profile (there are typically several, it doesn't matter which one you choose). Lastly, drag the New folder action below and set it up as you want. The service will create this folder if it doesn't exist or simply throw the files in the folder if it already exists. Now save the workflow as a plugin for "Print Workflow."
Now, whenever you print, you can simply select this workflow as in the screenshot below



And you'll end up with nice jpg files directly from the Lightroom print module in a usable color space! You can add borders, put multiple images on the page and add your logo!

UPDATE 9/7/07: Apparently, this action might fail if you have enabled FileVault on your machine. If you have that make sure that the folder you export to is outside of your home folder.

UPDATE II: More info here.

UPDATE III: A method to add logos and such to exported images

Leopard late (October)

Just read that Leopard will be late. That is a major bummer. As rumored, this will also delay the highly anticipated (by me at least) Keynote, which I use extensively in my daily job and for photography presentations. Apple writes that this has to do the iPhone. If true, that is very annoying as I couldn't care less about the iPhone, but I do care about the Mac OS. On the other hand, if you want to make some money in the stock market, wait for the inevitable plummet in Apple's stock prices and start buying. Maybe then you can actually afford one of those silly iPhones.

Moonlight

I took quite a few pictures by moonlight in the park last weekend. The moon was superbright every night. One set of pictures I found interesting was an image I took at sunset (left), which turned out to have a companion taken later at night when only the moon was out(right):

Check out the larger sizes available on flickr to see the amazing detail captured at moonlight and the clear visibility of the snowcapped La Sal mountains in the background.
Another image I took in another location is the following:

The long exposure causes the stars to be streaked across the sky. Unfortunately I didn't think to walk to the other side of the canyon and try to shoot a north star shot. Clichéd, but fun. Another cool shot is the following one of Mozes and Zeus after sunset. The light here is coming from scattered light from the sun that was long below the horizon and light reflected by the moon visible in the upper right hand side of the shot.

More moonlight shots later when I get around to putting them on flickr.

Mountainbiking White Rim

I spent last weekend Mountain biking with good friends around the White Rim trail in Canyonlands National Park. Highly recommended. We had two days with a good distance (>40 miles) and one morning with a short but good uphill out of the Canyon. The two campgrounds we stayed at were White Crack and Taylor. Both single-site campgrounds in crazy settings. The presence of a support vehicle made it possible for me to take most of my photogear. While I did not take many pictures during the riding (I have no pictures of people on bikes funnily enough!) I was able to get up before sunrise each day (Brrr cold!) and shoot some, I think, awesome images and panoramas. Here is one for example:

See more in my Canyonlands set on flickr, or in this temporary gallery. I am also trying to sell a few of these images as prints on ImageKind.

Color profiles in ImageKind

Turns out that I am wrong. They do support arbitrary color spaces! Now up to see whether they will automatically convert to sRGB for web display. My guess is yes.
Update, big surprise! It does not convert the preview images to sRGB. This means desaturated colors in the preview image if you are not using a color-managed browser as 95% of the web-using public is! A little unfortunate.

Imagekind observations

Just started peddling prints over at ImageKind. My first impressions are pretty good. The focus on art and presentation is really nice. The selection of papers, canvases, mattes, and framing is quite extraordinary. This being a new site, there are some annoyances however. I. signing up does not work in Safari, the best browser out there, but the site does not warn you about this. Fortunately, my second choice, Firefox, works fine. Firefox, however, does not do color correction of images on web pages. II.Images on the ImageKind webpages are in untagged color space, even if you upload a tagged image. This is bad form (see here for an example why this important. Luckily, when you click on an image, the resulting large preview is in a tagged color space. This is good, however, it causes color shifts between the small framed preview and the larger image. Flickr, for example, keeps the color space tag intact in their scaled images, assuring correct color in smart browsers. This is a little disappointing for a fine art oriented website. It is details like that that make me love flickr. III. They do not seem to support wider color spaces than sRGB, at least I cannot find any evidence of it. Now I could be wrong, but if true, this is strange for a website that sells prints from fine art, which very generally falls outside of the very limited sRGB gamut! IV. When uploading images, the website ignores all the exif tags, so all the keywords you assign in advance are ignored, just like the title tag. This causes a LOT of extra work tagging and describing your images. Again, flickr gets this right. Now, I really appreciate the service, but they need to address the pesky little details.

Imagekind

I found this very promising website that delivers the awesome service of selling prints from my digital files. They print on an amazing variety of papers and will even frame the prints for you. I am trying out their service with a small gallery of images to start. Please check it out over here. And buy a few prints while you're at it ;).