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DAFOS Photo World

Why??

To catalogue my thoughts and experiences on things photographic and related topics, aiming to promote open-minded creativity and respect that hopefully contribute in some way to general peace and well-living.

Capture One Pro

Things Digital Posted by Alun FosterPosted on Thu, May 25, 2017 18:20:20

Recently, I was asked to give an overview of my favourite imaging processing software at the viewfinders club. This is Capture One Pro. For this I gave a small demonstration of the speed and ease that images can be stored, sorted and adjusted. That sequence seemed quite popular (maybe because of the model! smiley) – it is:

Original image from camera. Not bad, but too much messy background.
Cropped a bit. Background still too messy for my taste, so …
Darken everything ….
Then use a large, soft brush to make a mask to bring up the subject… Not bad!
Make a variant of that in B&W – because I said so! smiley
Still just a little more trimming… Can’t quite get rid of that can top in the lower right… smiley
… So use a “healing” mask to brush it away. (I used the face from the other part of the place-mat to cover up the can top, though it’s almost invisible). Et voilà! smileysmileysmiley

(In real time, it took less than 3 minutes to get to a really presentable print. Capture One Pro rules!)



Scrambled Eggs and Hashed Browns

Things Digital Posted by Alun FosterPosted on Mon, May 01, 2017 19:19:51

This is something for the true geeks…

I’ve recently been upgrading my website (dafos.be) to be friendly for
mobile devices (using the “Bootstrap” library, if you’re into that sort of thing) and came across a trick I used to make a secured area for customers. It’s secure enough to stop anyone except a really dedicated hacker who actually breaks into my account, yet didn’t cost me an arm and a leg in high-security software to implement.

The problem with most cheap solutions you find on the hinderwebs is that they store the usernames and passwords as plain text inside the code that’s loaded with the page. It takes no more than “show source” in a web-browser to get a list of the users and passwords on that particular website.

So, I applied a bit of a trick used in my data modem days (remember those funny warbling sounds going over the telephone?) – a “scrambler” would be used to break up repetitive sequences of data that could cause the modem to essentially get it gloriously “wrong” and drop out. By similarly scrambling up usernames and passwords, they can be stored in an encrypted form. By doing the same scrambling when the user enters a name and password and looking for the same scrambled sequence in a list, a valid user can be identified while those absolute cads who’d want to break in to my website and steal my customers’ photos have a harder time.

I’d need a real cryptologist to check this, but I suspect that the scrambler I used is non-reversible (can’t run it backwards to get the original user/password out of it) which means that even if someone does look at the page source and figures out how it works, they still couldn’t recover valid user-names and passwords.

In fact, I suspect that the same crypto-expert would object to the term “Scrambler” and would probably choose “Hash” instead!

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Hypergeek – Floating Points…

Things Digital Posted by Alun FosterPosted on Sat, May 07, 2016 12:25:57

Just wondering. Do image processors like Capture One or Lightroom etc… use floating point for their internal maths?

I got to asking this when I was having trouble making a nice print of this portrait. Pushing contrast and graded filters to the end stops seems to make the image quite sensitive to digital rounding errors. Printing it using the standard (8-bit) printer driver resulted in awful banding in the greys. Luckily my Canon printer comes with an “XPS” driver that supports 16-bit images, and this made a nice clean print from a 16-bit TIFF.

Would such quantisation errors maybe cause problems during processing, too? Would this explain a few weird things we see from time to time? (Like a green ring around the sun that I could NEVER get rid of? Threw that one away in disgust…). Would floating-point arithmetic help?


(Bert De Colvenaer – Executive Director of ECSEL Joint Undertaking. Image (c) me).



“Nice photo. You must have a really good camera…”

Things Digital Posted by Alun FosterPosted on Fri, May 06, 2016 19:06:55

Anybody who has ever worked as a photographer comes across this one. We know it’s a statement made (if a little misguidedly) just to be friendly, but can still get irritated at times. So, I’ll come clean. I do have a Really Good Camera – just like most people, actually.

Today’s technology has put the ability to capture a technically “correct” image into everyone’s hands. A “dilution of the art”? Maybe, but it does mean that more and more people are exposed (excuse the pun) to just how hard it can be to capture that image, so I prefer to see this as a very positive trend.

When I set up as a pro, (and after the unfortunate theft of all my kit and laptops and everything… smiley ) I invested in a Canon 5D-II and 7D body, with 24-105 L and 70-200 L f2.8 lenses, with some third-party wide-angle lenses to complete the set up. I later bought the famous “nifty fifty” f1.4 for night-time walk-abouts. And that’s my kit and (though I say so myself) I get very nice results from it thank you. Still: even when manufacturers throw ever more tempting kit and compact mirrorless bodies and this and that at us. My kit lets me take reasonably good photos and I’m happy (as are clients…).

Why Canon? They make excellent cameras (as do others) that understand how a photographer needs to work (as do others) and I already had a bunch of Canon accessories dating back a million years (give or take)… That’s the main reason. And I’m happy so don’t don’t feel the need to change. For now, at least…

I did invest in Capture One Pro though. I’ve never got on with Adobe software somehow. I’m an engineer and it doesn’t “talk” to that side of me. All these layers an things… Phase One – who make delectable cameras with monster pixel counts and oooh-if-I-ever-get-another-camera-oh-my-that-would-be-IT – are kind enough to support a huge range of pro cameras with their Capture One Pro image management and processing software: it’s kind of “Lightroom” equivalent, but then some (from what I have read). I used Canon’s own “DPP” for many years, which is solid (if a little slow) and gets the job done. But wow, what a revelation a truly high-end RAW converter can be…

Over the years I’ve applied my own technical knowledge alongside fantastic experiences at workshops (from some amazing people who are of international renown as photographers) to try and get “better” at making photos: photos for whatever reason happens to be important at the time (a job, pleasure, posterity, a duty, fun. Yeah, fun’s a good one). One technical item which stepped up my perception of making a good image was the switch to a truly professional post-processor like Capture One Pro. It’s so intuitive to use for me (as a computer geek) and gives such spectacular results in a logical way that it works as its own reward for making better images. Seeing one of your “fav” shots from a day go from “something not quite like I remembered it” to an image that really pops off the screen is just amazing…



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