Therapee for Photographers

As you know if you've been following my blog, I'm a girl on a budget, which means that my general philosophy when it comes to photo editing software is cheaper=better, free=best.  Of course, it's not a hard and fast rule; obviously a free program that doesn't do what you need it to do is pretty much worthless.  That being said, there are lovely, smart people out on the interwebs who have designed freeware that, admittedly, isn't quite as flashy and straightforward as the Adobe equivalent software, but still does an excellent job of performing the same functions as the very expensive Adobe software.  GIMP is the obvious example, here--the freeware answer to Adobe Photoshop.  Turns out, though, that there's also a freeware equivalent of Lightroom (you may recall I've been using Lightroom on a free 30 day trial, and my last post outlines some of the basic functions of the program if you're interested).  The program is called Raw Therapee, and it's available for download here if you'd like to try it out for yourself.

My initial impression of the program is, overall, positive.  The developers of Raw Therapee have clearly gone out of their way to make the program similar to Lightroom in layout and appearance, and a lot of the controls work in a pretty intuitive way: much like Lightroom, there are sliding bars for most of the functions, and you can enter a numerical value or simply click and drag to make adjustments to your photos.  The program also appears to have all of my favorite Lightroom functions--highlight recovery, luminance recovery, the ability to alter the black point separate from adjusting contrast, etc.  On the downside, the program seems to be struggling to open some of my photos--not many, but a few appear to be compacted, with the gap between the compacted photo and the original size of the photo filled by vertical lines.  Disproportionately this is happening with photos that have been scanned, but it has happened with a few I shot digitally as well, and, in some cases, it can display the original scanned photo fine, but struggles with versions I have edited in GIMP.  I've provided an example so you can see what I'm talking about below.  I'm not sure why this is happening, but it is a definite strike against Raw Therapee; I haven't had any problems like this with Lightroom. 

As you can see, though, the interface is fairly similar to the interface in Lightroom, so the program is fairly user friendly.  I haven't tested this out yet, but it is also supposed to tie in well with GIMP, and, like Lightroom, it allows you to develop images shot in RAW format (if you don't know what RAW format is, just ignore that; if you do, I'm guessing you already know what I mean by develop RAW images).  The other big drawback that I've found so far is that instead of exporting your edited image to the folder of your choosing without ever altering the original, Raw Therapee requires that you save the file using a "save as" function, which increases the likelihood that you could inadvertently save over your original image.  Another thing to note (this isn't necessarily a con for me, but could be for some people) is that there aren't a lot of preset edits in Raw Therapee (i.e. there is a massive list of adjustments--black and white 1, black and white 2, old fashioned, etc. that you can make in Lightroom), so if you rely on preset edits, you may need to do some digging online to find plugins for presets in Raw Therapee.  On the whole, though, it has a wide range of handy tools--as far as I can tell, you can do everything in Raw Therapee that you can do in Lightroom, and some that Lightroom doesn't have as well (and as soon as I can figure out what these tools do, I'll be more specific about that...).  I haven't found it as easy to figure out as Lightroom, but I'm sure with some concentrated time with the manual, things will become more apparent.  That said, I decided to run a quick test to see if the programs can produce the same results: I edited the image below twice--once in Lightroom, and once in Raw Therapee.  I leave you to judge for yourself (keep in mind I've spent about 15 more days with Lightroom than with Raw Therapee, so at least some of the differences you see are, I'm sure, due to my lack of expertise in Raw Therapee).

Lightroom:

Raw Therapee:

Dusting

Since about 2003 (I think), I've been shooting almost exclusively digital.  As much as I love the process of developing and printing with film photography, I simply don't have the resources for film photography these days.  Even beyond the cost of film, I don't have access to a darkroom, and who wants to take their precious photographs to the 1 Hour Photo booth?  Half the fun of shooting film is developing the film and enlarging!  So, my images generally go straight from camera to laptop these days. 

I did, however, pull a crazy all-night scanning session sometime during my transition from film to digital in order to digitize my favorite prints.  Well, my favorite prints of the ones I happened to be able to locate when I was struck with the scanning insanity (or, if you prefer, scansanity).  Anyway, it turns out that when you're sleep deprived and on a mission, you don't take really important steps like, say, cleaning the scanner.  So, as you can see below, I ended up with a big line down some of my photos, in addition to a lot of dust.  Bleh. 

So, time for some editing, I guess.  Now, the dust is a pain.  I did the editing on this between Lightroom and GIMP.  The dust was time-consuming, but easy enough.  Lightroom has a healing tool which allows you to adjust your selection tool size and select the area you want to "heal".  Lightroom then picks nearby pixels to clone over the spot in need of healing.  It's not always perfect--sometimes it does a really bad job of picking the best pixels to copy.  However, you can easily adjust the area it selects to copy from by dragging the selection circle to another area of your choosing.  The giant, ugly line, however, was not so easy.  Now, maybe there is a very simple way to get rid of a nasty streak in your photo that I'm just not aware of, but that pesky line took well over an hour zoomed in about 1500% with the clone tool...and a lot of CTRL + Z action (for those of you who don't know what that is, it's the shortcut to undo--very handy when you clone something, hate what you've done, and want to delete it...repeatedly).  As you can see below, I managed to get rid of the line and the dust--it's not perfect, but I'm pretty pleased (yes, I also cropped a bit while I was cleaning the photo up anyway).  Lesson learned, though!  Save yourself hours by cleaning the scanner first!

Let There Be Light...for 30 Days

I know I've been going on non-stop about GIMP, due largely to the fact that it is 1) powerful and 2) free.  However, I've been persuaded to try Lightroom by Adobe on a free 30 day trial, and, I have to confess, I'm impressed.  Obviously there are a lot of things that can be done in GIMP--in fact, it may be that GIMP can do everything Lightroom can.  If so, I just haven't found a way of doing some specific things in GIMP yet.  That being said, I'm really enjoying Lightroom.  Granted, I haven't completed any tutorials, and I've only been playing around with the program for about two days.  Even so, here's my run-down, followed by some before and after examples so you can see what I'm talking about:

Pros:
1) The program is pretty intuitive and user-friendly.  As I said, I haven't done any tutorials yet, and I've been happily editing for two days.

2) The recovery feature is AWESOME if you have photos with high dynamic range.  In other words, there's a tool that allows you to tone down some of the highlights in your photo--so if your insanely blonde friend looks like her head is glowing while everyone else looks normal, you can recover some of the color and contrast in her hair so that she looks a bit less like an alien.

3) You can independently tune your blacks, so you're not stuck fiddling with contrast and washing out your highlights when all you really want is to make your blacks a bit blacker.

4) The heal tool certainly isn't perfect--GIMP is a better choice for cloning.  However, it's easy and quick, and does a great job on small spots and imperfections.  For touch-up jobs, you can spend seconds instead of hours correcting minor blemishes in your photos.

5) The luminescence tool allows you to ditch some of the graininess in photos shot in low lighting.  Crank it up too much and people begin to look like they've had too much plastic surgery.  On a low setting, though, you can make your photos look a little softer/smoother without losing clarity. 

6) There are lots of fun creative modes to play with to give your photo a unique look.

7) Lightroom won't overwrite your photos, so you don't have to worry about accidentally losing your originals.

8) Dodging and burning is a little different from the way it's handled in other programs, but it's quick and easy to learn, and you can do more than adjust exposure--you have options for brightness, clarity, sharpness, saturation, and contrast.  Nice, huh?


Cons:
1) Adobe programs aren't cheap.  In fact, I was ready to do a happy dance when I found Lightroom for $150 because on the Adobe site it's $300.  However, you can do a 30 day trial for free on the Adobe site (which I'm doing before I part with $150).

2) I'm not impressed with the Autotone function.  Lightroom is great for easily adjusting things by hand, but Autotone seems to like things to be really washed out and grainy.  I imported a few photos with Autotone on by mistake and I struggled to get them looking normal; I couldn't believe I had taken such bad portraits at a paid gig.  It was only when I reset the photo that I realized what had happened.  Among other adjustments, the Autotone feature cranked the brightness and fill light way too high, and turned the contrast way down, and the photos looked overexposed and unfortunate.

3) Perhaps I'm just not looking in the right place, but it seems that all zooming is limited to preset values, so I spend a lot of time and effort fidgeting with 1:2 vs. 1:4 vs. 2:1 vs...you get the idea.  Zooming into a specific area by a specific percentage seems to be an impossibility.  If you know something I don't on this front, I'd love to hear that I'm wrong because the zooming is rather frustrating.

4) The program can watermark on export--this is a pro, except that it doesn't look like you can adjust the position or opacity of your watermark.  Again, I'm new to the program, so maybe I'm missing something, but having the watermark in the lower left corner of the photo means that it will be pretty easy to crop out.  Defeats the point of a watermark...



Alright, enough talk.  Time to show you what I'm talking about.  Below are a few before and afters.  The first set of photos was from a film shoot, and when I scanned the photo,  it was covered in dust, it looked grainy, and it just generally wasn't a very good representation of the original photo.  Enter Lightroom.  Obviously, it's still not perfect--there was some dust I will have to remove in GIMP, and I'd like to clean up the background a bit.  However, for the speed and ease of editing, I was pretty pleased with the difference Lightroom made.  Note: luminescence was particularly helpful for reducing the grain, and the heal tool was used to get rid of some of the dust and the big scratch on her arm from the original photograph. 

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

For Your Eyes Only

Although I've been putting together a gallery of what I think are my best photographs, occasionally I come across a photograph that, much as I'd like to post it in my gallery, I cannot, either because the resolution is too low or because I don't have a property release to use an image of the building for commercial purposes.  However, there's nothing stopping me from sharing them on my blog, right?  So, without further adieu, below are a few of the images I can't sell, but I'd still like to share.  Hope you enjoy them.

This photograph shows the Michelangelo's  staircase in the Vatican--you walk down this staircase after leaving the Sistine Chapel.  Pictures of the Vatican can't be sold commercially, though, so this one is just for my enjoyment.  And maybe yours now, too?

Apparently both the Louvre and the pyramid in front of the Louvre (yes, the one made famous by the DaVinci Code) are also illegal to sell.  However, looking at them is, thankfully, perfectly legal.

This one was taken through one of the arches of the Colosseum in Rome.  This one isn't illegal too sell, but it's too small to make a print of a decent size and quality to be worth printing. 

Some Healthy Competition

I recently posted about the importance of self-promotion for getting a little recognition for your work.  I then whined a bit about the advice to sell stock photography, which I have been following (albeit somewhat grudgingly).  One form of self-promotion I think gets less attention, however, is photography contests.  Now, I suspect that there are plenty of shady contests out there that are just fishing for information or photos.  However, there are plenty of reputable photography contests as well.  Of course, there's no guarantee that you'll win, or even get any recognition.  But, so long as I steer away from those which charge an entry fee and watermark my images, what's the harm, right?  And who knows?  Maybe I'll have a bit of luck and someone will really like my photos.  Plus, finding an image which epitomizes the sentiment of the contest or category forces you to think about your photos in a different way, and to get cracking on editing.  With that in mind, I've decided to enter an online contest.  There are a few categories I'm having trouble picking an image for, though.  I've shown the photos below, and I'd be very grateful for some feedback. I've listed the category name along with the photographs I'm considering below.  I can only enter one photograph into each category with the exception of the portfolio category, for which I get to pick three photographs.  Obviously I'm planning to do some watermark work before I submit.  Also, if you see anything in my gallery that I haven't considered but you think I should, please let me know.  Likewise, some of these images might fit into more than one category, so if you think an image would be for another category, I would appreciate the insight. 


The Wild World (nature)

On Location (urban, city, using surroundings to enhance image)

Still Life

Breaking the Mould (anything weird or wacky)

Portfolio (3 images)

Getting Plugged-In

My original plan was to have another installment of Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates devoted to batch (i.e. applying the same edit to multiple photos at once) watermarking and resizing in GIMP and Picassa.  However, while that's a simple task in Picassa, I've had quite a bit of difficulty with the process in GIMP (and this is where the cheating comes back to bite me--incidentally, if you haven't figured this out yet and you were wondering, you can adjust the opacity of your text for your watermark using the layers dock; if you have no idea what I'm talking about, more on this later).  It turns out that you need a plug-in to do batch watermarking in GIMP.  There are a lot of special functions like this you can perform in GIMP if you simply install the appropriate plug-in.

If you're not sure what on earth installing a plug-in in GIMP means, think of it like this: there are certain editing and creative tasks users want that GIMP cannot accommodate.  So, users who are far more computer savvy than myself go and write little mini-programs that tell GIMP how to do whatever it is they feel GIMP is missing.  Then, these kind individuals are generous enough to post all of their hard work on the GIMP registry, where novices like me can download the files to make GIMP accomplish the task.

The problem is 1) installing a plug-in for GIMP is not as simple as clicking one or two buttons and 2) you need a program called Python installed prior to installing GIMP in order to get some of these plug-ins to run.  I learned this the hard way, which involved uninstalling GIMP, hunting for a solid half an hour for the appropriate files, sifting through a bunch of UNIX gibberish I won't even pretend to understand and, finally, with the substantial assistance of my fabulous computer guru (yes, he pretty much did everything for me while I stood over his shoulder going "oooohhhhh!"), locating and installing the appropriate files.  Let's see if I can make the process a little less frustrating for you than it was for me.  Here are the steps we took for Windows 7.  Mac and UNIX users, you're on your own (though this is probably a breeze for UNIX users anyway):

1) Go here and click on the third item down in the list under "Downloads":

• Windows x86 MSI Installer (2.7) (sig) 

2)  Go here and click on

pygtk-all-in-one-2.24.1.win32-py2.7.msi  

3) Go here and download GIMP, and don't forget to install the user's manual if you want it--it doesn't come with the program automatically.  The files to pick here should be pretty obvious.

4) Run each file you downloaded in the order of the download.  So, first python, then the pyGTK package, then GIMP and the user's manual. 

 Given what a pain this is, I'm going to consider this post my good deed for the day.  Hopefully you'll find it helpful. 

A Little Fun Before the Work Begins...

Alright, so one of my professed reasons for starting a blog was to push myself to learn more about digital editing.  A lot of the image editing I've done to date has been simple touch-ups in Picassa--I've picked my best photos and fiddled around a bit, but didn't really have the skills to take it any further.  I've picked up a few books on the subject, and I'm ready to take my digital editing to the next level, but I decided to fiddle around in Gimp a bit and just familiarize myself with some of the menus before picking up my books and getting serious.  I've had a bit of fun messing around with some of the functions in Gimp, and I've shared the before and after images below.  Just above the after images, I've provided the menu commands I used to produce the effect you see.  I'm not sure how many of these I would actually use regularly, but it's fun to see what the program is capable of.    

Before:

Filters-->Edge-Detect-->Neon

Before:

Filters-->Artistic-->Cubism

Before:

Filters-->Distorts-->Mosaic

Free Lens, Anyone?

This one is short and sweet--for those of you with SLR cameras, here's a great opportunity to win a new lens (other awesome prizes include the opportunity for some online mentoring sessions).  Just check out the blog below.  Also, there are some really beautiful photographs!

http://cravemyphotography.com/blog/

Is a Stock Photographer an Artist?

When I first started taking photographs, I never fancied myself an artist.  I just enjoyed the feeling of being behind a camera.  Looking through the viewfinder completely changes the way you see the world--you pay more attention to the colors in the evening sky, the way a shadow falls across an otherwise ordinary object, the way kneeling down to look up at an object can suddenly make it feel so much more imposing and powerful.  Now, I still don't jump to label myself as an artist; I'm a bit worried that self-labeling may open the door to pretentiousness and hubris, and I'm the first to acknowledge that I'm largely a self-trained amateur, with the exception of one photography class in high school.  I'm fully aware that I have yet to prove myself.  Still, I've come to recognize that my photographs (at least some of them--probably not my endless catalog of every cup of coffee I've ever consumed or cake I've baked) are enjoyable to a broader audience than just myself.  I've also realized that living in Europe isn't cheap, and a girl's got to eat!  So, I started reading some tips on becoming a serious photographer and getting your work out into the public eye.  In addition to opening an online gallery (here) and asking local businesses to place your prints on display, the resources I read also suggested selling images to stock photography websites in order to gain name recognition.  I've heeded this advice and submitted a portfolio to a stock photography site, but, while my portfolio has been approved, I have my doubts about how sage this advice actually is.  Now, perhaps I've simply chosen the wrong site for my stock photos, but it seems that the prices offered for the photographs are far below what I could expect to earn selling the images independently--especially once the steep commission the website collects is taken into account.  More fundamentally, I wonder about the artistic implications.  I'm required to sell the photos exclusively on the website, and I find myself selecting less artistic photographs because I'd prefer to display those in my personal gallery. 

So, if the point of selling the stock images is to promote my work (stock photography doesn't look particularly lucrative so far), am I selling myself short by refusing to post the work I'm proudest of so that I can display it in my personal gallery?  What name am I making for myself by selling images of wedding cakes and cappuccinos?  Beyond that, the site editors review each individual piece posted, and reject photos which a) are not aesthetically or technically adequate, b) are not well-composed, or c) do not provide utility for potential buyers.  Of course art is subject to critical feedback, and I accept that I may face rejection and harsh feedback.  The point of such criticism, to me at least, is to push my photography past my current limits--to allow me to view my work from a different perspective, and to improve in areas that need to be addressed.  However, because 1) I am not displaying my best work and 2) the feedback provided simply states that rejected photos do not meet one or more of the requirements (without specifying which requirement), the utility of the feedback provided in such forums is limited at best.  Should I be concerned that the composition of the photograph is substandard?  Are there technical and aesthetic errors I should be made aware of?  Or is the site simply flooded with too many photos of butterflies and flowers?  So, I ask you sincerely--is a stock photographer an artist?  Is there untapped potential for artistic growth in the stock photo industry?  Below are a few of the images that have been accepted, interspersed with a few that have been rejected.  Perhaps I'm missing something here--can you tell which were rejected?  Constructive feedback is genuinely appreciated...