If you don’t have an iPhone, these apps will also work on an iPod Touch updated to 2.x firmware (though some will require you to be located within a WiFi hotspot). If you don’t have an iPhone or an iPod Touch… you’re dead to me already. I’m kidding. But no, seriously, what are you waiting for?

Photography and the iPhone are, in many ways, a match made in heaven. Apple recognized this, and that’s why there’s a whole category in the iTunes App Store called “Photography”. Many of these apps are silly, novelty items – like Talk Bubbles, which adds cartoon-like chat bubbles over peoples heads. Dig deeper, however, and you’ll find some real treasures here.

PhotoCalc is one of them. It’s essentially a calculator and guide for photographers. You can calculate exposure reciprocity, depth-of-field and hyperfocal distance, and it has a flash exposure calculator. These are nice to have, but the real gem is that you can check what time the sun rises or sets. This app would be particularly handy if you tend to shoot with a lot of flash, and even moreso if you tend to shoot that way outdoors.

Speaking of outdoors, the iPhone comes packaged with a nice little Weather app from Apple that’s pretty handy to get a rough sense of the weather in the days ahead, but if you want a little more detail, well – it kind of lacks.

WeatherBug, which has been annoying me for years on the desktop PC, is a free and fantastic way to get that kind of detail on an iPhone, and includes a satellite map. It will also bring up weather cams if any exist for that area, so you can get an idea of the conditions outside on the fly, in case, you know… you don’t feel like going outside to check yourself. All kidding aside, it’s nice to be able to get cam views on areas that may not be local to you, and having the extra detail provided by WeatherBug can be invaluable when you’re trying to decipher which way a storm is headed.

Finally, if you’re concerned about the condition of the skies you’ll be shooting under, a great application is iCSC Clear Sky Chart, which shows you in an easy to read chart form whether you’ll have clear or dark skies overhead.

PhotoCalc, WeatherBug, and iCSC are all available in the iTunes App Store. PhotoCalc costs $2.99, but the other two are completely free.

Photosynth is a product being worked on by Microsoft Live Labs, and about two years ago they unveiled a tech demo upon the world which got everyone excited. In a nutshell, the application gathers photos from a source and using an advanced set of algorithms it creates paths between these photos allowing you to browse around geographically local environments, almost like a 3D virtual world. It was really cool, but now they’ve gone and outdone themselves.

The next generation of Photosynth (which technically really hasn’t had a generation yet since it’s unreleased) employs even more techniques to smooth the transition between photographs, including color correction and steadying effects. Here’s a video of it at work…

Now all they need to do is combine this application with a rich source of photographs, like Flickr or Pbase, and they might really have something. Maybe this is why Microsoft has been so persistent with their desire to acquire Yahoo (owners of Flickr) lately. One thing’s for sure – Microsoft really doesn’t have a great photo service of their own to draw from, at least not yet, but when they do – Photosynth will surely try to take advantage of it.

Well, yes and no. Ideally this would always be the case. In a perfect digital world, the picture would be perfectly sharp, perfectly exposed, and the color levels would all be perfectly recorded by your camera.

Sadly, the world of the digital photographer is often times less than perfect.

The sceince of photography is pretty fluid and the tools are not always calibrated exactly to our liking. Sharpening is almost always applied in-camera. A certain amount is dialed in by the manufacturer in-camera and is performed by the filter overtop of the image sensor. However, camera makers need to find a balance. Too much sharpening can cause moiré with certain subject matter. Too little sharpening will cause customers to complain about soft images.

That’s why most digital cameras have a sharpening control, to allow you to manipulate the amount of sharpening that is applied to the image. Usually the amounts that can be applied are harmless levels of sharpening, and won’t do any damage to the image. Still, the process of software sharpening In-Camera does alter the image in a way that cannot be repaired or altered unless you shoot RAW.

Going beyond that is sharpening done in post-processing. Technically this is the same process, but it’s performed a step later, with the difference being that it gives you a little more control over how the image will end up looking.

So should you use sharpening? Yes. The in-camera sharpening is likely set to a level that won’t harm your picture even if you crank it up and max it out. The post-processing sharpening in most software needs to be used with a bit more care, since too much sharpening can drop vital information and render a picture useless, but it’s also a handy tool when used conservatively.

With many higher end cameras, you can now connect a GPS directly to the camera if you have the right equipment. With Nikon cameras like the D200, D300, or D2X, or D3 – a 10-pin port allows you to connect a GPS directly to the unit (provided you have the right cables). The problem is that this can be unwieldy, and it typically requires a high end SLR that not all of us have.

There are two slightly better solutions around this, which we’ll discuss.

Though extra gear is not always the answer, sometimes I like new gadgets. This one was recommended to me by a wildlife photographer I talked to a few weeks ago. It’s a wireless adapter from Red Hen Systems called the BLUE2CAN device, which plugs into most high end Nikon cameras and will pull the GPS data via Bluetooth. I’m not sure if something like this exists for other camera manufacturers, but if it does, let me know in the comments.

The second method, which I like, is through the use of software. It requires no extra gear, because it means only having to record waypoint at a regular interval on your GPS while you take pictures normally. All the legwork of matching those waypoints to your images is done after the fact, by a program.

Mac:

Although Mac users won’t have as many options as PC users for geocoding software, they ultimately have the single best choice with GPSPhotoLinker, which is simple to use, supports most RAW formats, can batch photos easily, and gives you a nice view of the best matching track point as well as the one preceding and following that point.

Windows:

For those who use Windows, the choices are more abundant than for Mac, but they are all slightly less stellar. The best, free solution that I’ve found so far is GPicSync, which is fairly easy to use and will insert all your geocode information into your pictures EXIF header by matching the tracklog date and time with the picture date and time. GPicSync will also support elevation and will create a KML file for Google Earth. It also supports popular RAW files like those from Nikon, Canon, Olympus, and Pentax.

Now, get lost…

Just remember to take lots of pictures.

Keep in mind that while the Lightroom 2 beta is free to download and try out, it’s still in a very early stage and shouldn’t be considered as production software. This is strictly for testing and providing feedback to Adobe, and shouldn’t replace your current photo software at this point.

You can download the LR2 beta from here.

While there are plenty of color spaces available out there, the two that are most often available on digital SLR’s are Adobe and sRGB. While you can convert these to any other space in post processing, there’s typically not much benefit, so the question is – sRGB versus RGB (or Adobe RGB)… what’s better? What are they?

If you were a painter, the color space would be your palette. It’s the choice of color your camera has to choose from when recording an image. sRGB is a smaller palette than RGB… it has fewer colors. It may, however, have access to colors that RGB does not, depending on how the sRGB space is skewed.

JPEG is an 8-bit file, and as such, should always use sRGB because it won’t benefit from the enhanced choice of color offered by RGB. It doesn’t have the space to store that kind of information. With an 8-bit file you are restricted to 255 levels on each color channel (Red, Green, and Blue).

With a RAW file, you can convert it to 16-bit on your computer and it will then have thousands of levels of color. A definite advantage, if you have the equipment to utilize it. Many screens and printers won’t be able to reproduce those extra colors provided by Adobe RGB – and even with it’s narrower color gamut however, sRGB is still considered wide enough for most applications.

So what to choose?

Because the spectrum of color is restricted somewhat is sRGB (in some ends of the spectrum) these images will typically “pop” a little more without any editing consideration. That’s because the color is not spread out over as wide an area. Also, if you work with 8-bit JPG’s, you’ll want to choose sRGB.

If you’re working with 16-bit files, you should likely choose Adobe RGB. Your printer or screen may not utilize all the extra color provided by this color mode, but you likely don’t want to eliminate them as an option without knowing if they’ll be used or not.

The Apple Store has been down for a little bit, but when it came back up… it had Aperture 2 details, with a lower price point at $199 plus a redesigned interface with some new shortcuts. Let us know your impressions if you get a chance to use it.

Apple Releases Aperture 2
Major Upgrade Features Improved Interface, Faster Browsing & Enhanced Image Processing

CUPERTINO, California—February 12, 2008—Apple® today introduced Aperture™ 2, the next major release of its groundbreaking photo editing and management software with over 100 new features that make it faster, easier to use and more powerful. With a streamlined user interface and entirely new image processing engine, Aperture 2 also introduces new imaging tools for highlight recovery, color vibrancy, local contrast definition, soft-edged retouching, vignetting and RAW fine-tuning, and lets users directly post their portfolios on the .Mac Web Gallery* for viewing on the web, iPhone™, iPod® touch and Apple TV®. At a new low price of $199, anyone can easily organize, edit and publish photos like a pro.

“Many of the most respected photographers on assignment all over the world trust Aperture to organize, edit and deliver their images,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Product Marketing. “With its simpler interface and lower price, anyone can take full advantage of Aperture’s power.”

“At the end of the day, it’s all about the quality of the image,” said Sports Illustrated contributing photographer David Bergman. “Even before I begin making adjustments, Aperture’s new RAW processing gives me better images with more visible detail and better color rendering than any other program I’ve tested.”

“I used to have so much stress about post-production on a shoot, having to juggle multiple applications to make sure they all worked,” said Bob Davis, PDN Top Knots Wedding Photographer 2007. “With Aperture that’s no longer a factor. I can do everything all in one application.”

Featuring a new, easier user interface designed to be more intuitive and accessible, Aperture 2 now lets users navigate between Viewer and Browser modes with a single key command. Screen real estate is maximized for images with an all-in-one heads up display that allows users to toggle between library, metadata and adjustment controls in a single tabbed inspector. The All Projects view, modeled after iPhoto’s Events view, provides a poster photo for every project and the ability to quickly skim through the photos inside, and the integrated iPhoto® Browser offers direct access to all the events and images in the iPhoto library.

Performance has been enhanced in Aperture 2 so it’s faster to import, browse and search large volumes of images. Embedded previews let photographers caption, keyword and rate images as they are being imported, and with the ability to export images in the background, photographers can continue working while images are processed to JPEG, TIFF, PNG and PSD file formats. Quick Preview allows users to browse RAW images in rapid succession without having to wait for files to load, and the Aperture library database has been re-architected to provide fast project switching and near instantaneous search results, even when working with extremely large libraries of 500,000 images or more.

Aperture 2 delivers powerful new imaging tools for getting the most out of each photograph. Apple’s next-generation RAW image processing is at the core of Aperture 2 offering uncompromising image quality and precision controls that let users fine-tune the image profile for each of their cameras. New tools for improving and enhancing images include Recovery for pulling back “blown” highlights, Vibrancy for selectively boosting saturation without adversely affecting skin tones, Definition, which offers local contrast for adding clarity to images, Vignette & Devignette filters for providing professional visual effects and a true soft-edged Repair and Retouch brush for quickly and easily removing blemishes, cleaning up sensor dust and cloning away problem areas.

Aperture 2 works seamlessly with Mac OS® X, iLife®, iWork™, .Mac and Apple print products, so any image in the Aperture library can be accessed directly from within other applications, such as iMovie®, Keynote® and Pages®, and even from within Leopard™ Mail. Now with .Mac Web Gallery support, Aperture users can publish their photos once to view them on the web, iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV. Books in Aperture 2 feature new theme designs, layout tools, customized dust jackets (including full-bleed) and foil stamped covers.

Pricing & Availability
Aperture 2 is available immediately for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. Owners of previous versions of Aperture can upgrade to Aperture 2 for just $99 (US). Full system requirements and more information on Aperture 2 can be found at www.apple.com/aperture.

You may have seen these in programs you use, or on the back of your camera. They are histograms, a visual representation of data in your image. A histogram is a bar graph that shows you the distribution of luminance values in a digital photograph.

The horizontal scale of the graph is broken into 256 increments showing you tonal values, from black (0) on the left, to white (256) on the right. The vertical scale represents quantity of data at that increment, and is dependent on a number of factors including bit depth, color space, and file compression (if any). Generally speaking, though – the higher the peak at that tonal level, the more data is available there. A low key image, one that is generally underexposed with lots of dark information, would be heavy on the left side. Highlights and bright areas show up as spikes on the right side.Furthermore, histograms can be broken down into a master channel, and into the various color channels (Red, Green, Blue). Here’s an example of two shots – one dark, and one bright – in Adobe Lightroom. Notice where the most intense peaks fall in both images.

Notice the difference in the color of the histograms as well. Lightroom (as in Photoshop when you have your histogram in the expanded view) will show you not only a master histogram (usually depicted as grey or white) but also the colored channels, giving you an idea of the amount of luminance information in those particular channels. In the first picture of the candle, there’s a lot of yellow and red, but no blue. In the second picture, there’s a lot of blue and yellow, but not so much red. Bear in mind, these histograms are made up of three layers of color that represent the Red, Green, and Blue color channels. Gray appears when all three channels overlap. Yellow, magenta, and cyan appear when two of the other RGB channels overlap. Yellow is made up of the Red + Green channels, Magenta are the Red + Blue channels, and Cyan equals the Green + Blue channels.

This is handy information to know, and Lightroom will go so far as to let you drag parts of the histogram to make changes. They’ll even break down the horizontal scale for you in terms that photographers can easily understand… so you can see whether you’re dealing with blacks, fill, exposure, or recoverable highlight information.

As mentioned above, this information is usually also available on your camera. Some cameras will show a simple composite histogram, and newer or more advanced cameras will let you break it down so you can see the Red, Green, or Blue channels separately. The rule of thumb is to expose for the highlights. Highlight information, on the right, can easily be clipped by the method in which a digital camera meters a scene. If it is, you’ve likely lost that information, so underexposing a small amount is preferred.

This is most important if you’re shooting something that’s intended to be white – like snow, or a white wedding gown. The way a camera meters is by trying its best to balance the luminance levels in a scene. If you underexpose by a third or half stop, you can then preserve those brighter details and using software, you can bright them up to an acceptable level manually.

Some higher end SLRs (like the Nikon D300 or D2X) allow you to actually connect your GPS unit to the camera and automatically geotag your pictures with latitude and longtitude information.

However, this means having to attach the GPS to the camera, usually through the use of a specialized cable… and not every camera has this function. Though it’s handy (since the information is recorded “on the go”) there is another way which is a little more work, but a lot more flexible.

Geotagging can be done as long as you have the tracklog from your GPS and a program that will read it. In a Mac environment, GPSPhotoLinker lets you download your GPS track log, and then matches up your photos to the GPS data. It does that by comparing the timestamp in your photo’s Exif data to the timestamps in your GPS track log. Once done, it can create a GPX file. For a Windows machine, RoboGeo is your best bet, and it basically does the same thing as the GPSTrackLog application for the Mac, and also exports a GPX file.

The benefit of having the GPX file is that you can export these with many third party GPS applications. You can create Google Earth KML or KMZ files, or upload the pictures to Flickr where they will be automatically geotagged. Also, once you have a GPX file, you can then integrate that information into the metadata of the file as shown in Adobe Lightroom.

After you’ve run through and embedded that geocode information into the Exif, you want to Save Metadata to File in lightroom. This causes Lightroom to update the XMP file. You then select Read Metadata from File and Lightroom will pick up the updated Exif, which includes the Geotag information.

A good idea is to then add a keyword like “Geotag” or “Geocode” to those files that have the new updated GPS information embedded. That way you can easily see which ones have and have not been updated.

Typically this king of control requires special software to get any kind of use out of it. Nikon offers software called Camera Control Pro for their SLR’s. Canon has their EOS Utility. I’m sure other DSLR manufacturers have software of their own, as well… but many people go outside their manufacturer software and use something third party. One popular choice is Bibble Pro. It’s even fun to say! You can also check out ToneUp S3. Unfortunately it doesn’t allow as much control or support for custom tone curves. A third alternative is Capture One from Phase One, which supports many Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Pentax, and Olympus cameras (and more) – and is both Mac and Windows compatible.

Whatever software you end up using, make sure it does what you want it to do. Controlling the camera and simply downloading pictures from the camera while tethered are two separate functions – so ensure your software choice handles them.

As far as connectivity goes, remember that when you plug in with a cable – the length of the cable will greatly impact your download speeds. You’re bypassing the flash card here, and you want the fastest possible connecting so you aren’t waiting for images to land on your computer. Make sure you’re plugging in directly to a USB 2.0 High Speed port, and not going through a hub or other device.

However you end up getting yourself connected, you’ll find that the procedure of tethering is really handy because you can take your laptop on location and get those images in full-screen seconds after shooting them. Unleash your cameras full power and tether yourself!

Click here to download.

Noise is a result of our technological limitation to developing a sensor that can handle low light. Camera companies are building the best sensors they can, and they are getting better (see the Nikon D3) but they still have limits. If you turn up the sensitivity of the sensor too high, you’ll see that limit in the form of digital noise. A speckled, multi-colored mess of pixels overlaying the image (mostly in the dark portions of the image).

Film had these same limits, but it resulted in grainy images, which could have some charm to them. Noisy images have no charm. They look terrible. So, while we are certainly improving the cameras ability to handle noise at higher ISO’s, we’ll still get some if we venture to those limits, and beyond.

The limit of your particular camera will depend on the model, but todays cameras start seeing noise typically at around 800 ISO. If you need to shoot higher than 800 ISO (or whatever you’ve determined is the limit of your camera), and your image becomes noisy, you want to do your best to minimize it. Some cameras will have a “High ISO Noise Reduction” feature you can turn on to help out. It’ll kick in at a predetermined ISO setting to reduce noise, at the cost of a longer wait time to write the image to the card. You might even have the equivalent for long shutter speeds, which also cause noise.

The second phase of noise handling is done on the computer. Running all my images through a good noise reduction filter is usually my first step in post, even if it’s minimal noise (in which case, minimal reduction will be applied).

In Photoshop you’ll find your noise control under Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise. In Lightroom you’ll find it under the Detail tab in the Develop view. In Optics Pro it’s under the Enhance tab under DXO Noise. Most good photo editors will let you adjust and manipulate a noise filter. Some, however, don’t have that feature – so you may want to look at a program just for noise.

Noise Ninja from PictureCode, who tout their software as “the gold standard for image noise reduction”, has a fantastic noise filter, but it unfortunately has no RAW file support (at least not yet). Still, if you want to see what Noise Ninja is capable of, here’s a portion of the same photo without the Noise Reduction (I’ll let you guess which), and the other is with it.

There are other options as well, including Neat Image and ASF GEM. In the battle of photographer versus noise, you do have some tools to help you out, it’s just a matter of finding them.

For accurate color, Adobe Camera Raw has a great feature that will let you calibrate your color, through the use of a ColorChecker chart and the AcrCalibrator script from Chromoholics.

You’ll need Photoshop CS2 or CS3 for this to work, and you’ll need a MacBeth ColorChecker like the ones available here.

You will also want the AcrCalibrator script, which is available here, and then follow the steps
located here.

Something happened around the late 1990’s that saw a dramatic decrease in the number of black and white pictures being published. Though there were still a good number monochrome pictures being produced, it suddenly became more trendy for commercial photography and photojournalism to be shot in bright color.

I think with the loss of film, many of us started losing our taste for black and white images. Maybe that’s because it’s trickier to get a good looking black and white image now, as the one-stop “convert to black and white” button in cameras rarely do a stellar job.

Though black and white is still a very popular way of finishing a picture, within the realm of digital photography it’s more realistic to shoot in color and convert the picture in post-processing after the fact. This can be done differently in different software, but we’ll approach the Photoshop and the Lightroom method. Any application that gives you control over color channels and a conversion tool will allow you to get similar results, though.

Photoshop

The most common (and quickest) way of turning a color picture to a black and white is through the use of the Desaturation option under Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. This method gives you no control over how the colors are shifted to their monochrome level – so you end up with poor results. Despite this, it’s the most popular method of doing the conversion.

Instead of giving up all control to Photoshop, you can use the channel mixer to specifically alter each color channel seperately, thereby allowing you to increase or decrease the amount of control on tonally different locations within the image. In other words, you’ll end up with a stronger black and white shot.

In Photoshop you can go to Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer to open it up. Check the box called “Monochrome” to make the initial conversion. Now you can adjust the Red, Green, and Blue sliders independently. Try playing around with them a bit, but use the 100% Rule as a guide. All the channel percentages should add up to roughly 100% to keep the same level of brightness and contrast in the image.

Lightroom

Because Adobe Lightroom is designed with photographers in mind (as opposed to Photoshop which is first and foremost a graphic design application) it’s a little easier to make these sorts of adjustments in this application.

When you open a color photo under the Develop view, you’ll see an HSL / Color / Grayscale palette on the right. By clicking on Grayscale you’ll do your initial conversion. The same kind of controls you get in Photoshop with the Channel Mixer are right there as Grayscale Mix in that palette, allowing you to independently control the various color channels (broken down further than in Photoshop). By moving a color slide to the right, you increase the brightness of that channel, and decrease it if you slide left.

I like a little extra contrast in my pictures, so I’ll usually bump that up, as well as the blacks.

There are also several presets on the left side of the same view in Lightroom, allowing you to quickly convert to Antique Grayscale, typical Grayscale, Sepia, or others. Rolling over these presets will give you a preview of the effect in in the Navigator window. You can also save your own Grayscale Mix to the presets list by clicking the plus symbol next to the Presets header.

Making sure the color looks the same from editor to sharing app is important for us. Certain other browsers let you do this, like Opera, so it’s certainly been a shortcoming of Firefox up until this point.

Now, thanks to the nice folks at Mozilla – with the newly released Firefox 3 beta you can activate color management (which is turned off by default). Just get into the address bar and type:

about:config

Then search for this line:

gfx.color_management.enable

…and set it’s value to ‘TRUE‘. After this is done, restart Firefox and BAM, you’re browser is using the ICC color management profile it inherited from your camera (or your editing software). You can download Firefox 3 Beta 2 from here. Remember, at this writing – version 3 is still in beta… so not all your extensions may be compatible.