Tundra Graphics

Unexpected Guest Tests Adobe Lightroom's New Dehaze Feature

Adobe just released their latest Camera Raw v.9.1. As CR and Lightroom share the same raw processing engine, the new feature set is shared between platforms. One of the latest tools is a Dehaze feature that can be found in LR's Develop module under "Effects."

Recently I experienced a unique test case of how the tool may be able to somewhat rescue images shot under less-than-ideal conditions. This morning I awoke to what sounded like a burglar at the back of our house. Here's what I shot quickly through our deck's double-paned glass and screen door slider:

It was thrilling to be standing there with just a couple of layers of glass and a Canon 5DIII between man and young bear. American Black Bear, that is. Here you can see him extending a tongue to get at the black oil sunflower seeds from a bird feeder that we forgot to bring in last night (we're normally fastidious about this).

The following before and afters of an earlier shot in the series gives you a hint at what the Dehaze tool, in combination with some basic tonal adjustments, can accomplish. I didn't spend too much time on this, yet I was still able to get somewhere with the original raw image data:

Not bad for a seriously optically compromised image.

Oh, and here's some of the small wreckage that remained after the bear saddled over the deck's railing, climbed 10 feet back down to the ground, and disappeared again into the woods. Note the drool (bear, not mine) on the inside of the feeder:

I can still hear the crunching noise that his teeth made while putting them through that plastic. I'm glad it wasn't my arm.

Arctic Summer and the Birds of Iceland

The Arctic summer is a time when one can witness birds that we only glimpse during the New England winter. During the colder months just off of the southern Rhode Island and Connecticut coasts, species such as the Red-throated Loon (or Red-throated Diver) can be spotted. But more often than not, these individuals will be adults in their drab, winter plumage. Come summer and migration routes north, however, things change and liven up during breeding season. Seeing such brightly-colored adults with their young allows for a broader visual perspective and general appreciation of avian life cycles.

Iceland, as a high-latitude, North Atlantic island also attracts pelagic birds, such as skuas, to briefly come ashore during the early summer months as well.

Both skua species are robbers that steal prey from other seabirds through aggressive, in-flight harassment. Biologists term this behavior, kleptoparasitism. Furthermore, the Great Skua can be particularly ferocious in its attacks and in its feeding upon eggs and young.

According to writer Lawrence Millman, the skua ...is the only bird that chooses to live in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and it's the only living creature other than crazed explorers ever seen in the vicinity of the South Pole. Observed firsthand, its flight has a spooky, unwavering directness and stroke. Though they are large and purposeful in the air, they can at times seem to appear from nowhere, rowing steadily just above the tundra or open water, their aim-point, a horizon ever stretched. The world moves out of their way. Their only known threats are eagles, and the orca.

Regarding the skua, Edward Forbush in his 1925, Birds of Massachusetts and other New England States, remarks:

...powerful of wing, it rides unharmed upon the storm, and so it keeps the sea...

Tundra Graphics Featured in Emerald Street

Gullfoss

Recently while in Iceland, I shot some short videos of Gullfoss on the Hvítá river. These were made handheld with a Canon 5D III and Zeiss Distagon 21mm f/2 combo. No external mic. No post-process editing. Just straight 1920 x 1080 HD 29.970 fps .mov from the camera > imported to Lightroom 5 > opened in HandBrake for H.264 .mp4 encoding > uploaded to YouTube. Depending upon your browsing bandwidth, YouTube will down-throttle the videos' native resolution to <720p mush. Just pause the video, rewind to the beginning, and toggle the quality settings' gear at the bottom right of the YouTube taskbar to 720p or full 1080p if you want to watch these in full-screen mode.

And here's one from the outcrop at the top of the falls:

66° North

Just returned from eight days in Iceland and have posted a new gallery of the island. Here's one of the weather warnings from that time:

Rising stream and river levels are expected on the Snæfellsnes peninsula, the Hvítá region (both west and south of Langjökull), around the Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull ice caps, and south of the Vatnajökull ice cap. Travelers are cautioned against fording rivers in these regions. Mudflows (lahars) could occur on the southern slopes of Eyjafjallajökull, for example on the Svaðbælisá river. Heavy rainfall is forecast for west, south-west, south, and south-east Iceland, beginning late on Monday and lasting throughout Wednesday. In these regions, the heaviest rainfall is expected around mountains and ice caps. Cumulative rainfall amounts could exceed 150 mm over 24 hours and heavy melting of snow and ice is expected.

... a rather deep low is forecasted in the southwest and west of Iceland. Southeast winds, 10-18 m/s are expected in the southwest and west with wind gusts up to 35 m/s (i.e. 80 mph)....

Here's what that looks like, from the Reynisdrangar sea stacks along the south coast:

Fast facts from the journey:
1) Total distance driven around island: 2,100km (1,300mi)
2) Car Model: 2014 Nissan Note
3) Furthest Point North: Húsavík (66°03′N 17°19′W)
4) Exchange Rate of US Dollar to Icelandic Króna: 1 USD = 113.730 ISK
5) Best Meal: Tie between Arctic Char and Shepherd's Pie (at Guesthouse Hoffell)
6) Coolest Birding Moment: Watching an Arctic Skua at Jökulsárlón try to steal food from an Arctic Tern with a freshly-snared capelin in the tern's bill.
7) Best Quote From Laconic Icelandic Innkeeper (while describing those who drive in to try to make last-minute arrangements during high season): That is bold.
8) Needed Last-Minute Arrangements (personally): 0

Husky Works Mushing Co.

As both a nod to the passing last May of our beloved husky, Tundra, and a look towards the future, I thought that I would get Tara a dog sledding ride for Christmas. Scheduling it for Valentine's Day weekend was an accidental double-dip score for my calendar-challenged brain.

Husky Works Mushing Co. out of West Wardsboro, Vermont is run by the husband and wife tandem of Jeremy and Laura Bedortha. They and their 30-plus Siberian Huskies are really quite wonderful. Every step in the process, from selecting the teams for a given run, to hooking them up, to the various commands the dogs are given, is all gone over in detail.

The ride itself climbs up the side of a small, wooded mountain on the Bedortha's land to a timber-framed cabin milled and built by Jeremy that overlooks Stratton Mountain in the distance.  There we stopped and gave the dogs a well-earned breather, while Laura served up hot chocolate and cookies to the non-canines in the bunch.

On our descent, the huskies really hit the jets and had us pitching to and fro as we weaved between the maples and birches along trails that Jeremy had cut over time.  Overall, it's a really memorable experience if you enjoy the company of working dogs, like the snow, and don't mind being outside for a couple of hours on a crisp New England winter afternoon.  Thanks again to Jeremy and Laura for their expertise and low-key Vermont hospitality.  And thanks to all of the dogs for being the engine that drove such a good time!

What Is (or Isn't) Good Enough? Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I began to broadly inquire about what may be some of the longer-term ramifications of recent trends in cultural heritage digital capture. For instance, what results when speed and outsourcing are at the absolute forefront of memory institutions' decision making? What is "good enough" by today's standards? Or more interesting perhaps, what are the results of that which isn't good enough?

Last month in his New Yorker article, The Artful Accidents of Google Books, Kenneth Goldsmith examined some of the more startling phenomena that can creep into such sped-up endeavors as Google's mass-digitization initiative. There he found a growing group of artists and digital artifact collectors leveraging the residual physical capture and/or post-processing algorithm errors that such speed and less-than-optimal quality control can bring. Here are just a few examples:

Google Earth has also had its share of anomalies...

Though Goldsmith's main focus was looking at what can be creatively done with such raw materials, he does go on to make the point that, "Because of the speed and volume with which Google is executing the project, the company can’t possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface. There’s little doubt that generations to come will be stuck with both these antique stains and workers’ hands."

Both the Google Books and Google Earth examples are similar in that they exhibit what we perceive as errors. Their errors, however, are different in origin and remediation. Google Books image problems derive mostly from capture errors related to excessive workflow speed. Google Earth errors are mostly algorithm errors in their texture mapping implementation. Algorithms can be fixed through code tweaks. Such tweaks can in many instances be applied globally and can simultaneously solve many individual problems in a batch. Capture errors, on the other hand, are mostly unique, require individual re-capture and all of the inherent prep, set-up and re-processing steps that are necessarily involved. Hence, Goldsmith's assumption that we will be "stuck" with the technicians' latex-clad fingers through time is most likely accurate. That can be a tough realization for a memory institution involved in such outsourced initiatives to arrive at. Fingers and institutional ownership stamps don't go well together. Throw into this equation the time-honored trust by patrons in the authority and comprehensiveness of libraries' and archives' collections, and you have a possible friction point.

Or not? Certainly the argument can be made that this is simply the price you pay for "good enough," and that the overall good of Google's efforts in this regard outstrips the bad which is naturally bound to rear its head when the law of averages factor into the massive scale of the project. However, as Paul Conway noted to the audience at the IS&T Archiving 2013 conference last April, most mass digitization images are good enough, unless you are the unlucky scholar who needs to read and cite the content from one of the pages with fingers all over them.

One of the common shibboleths of this work is that the re-capture of archival objects is always an option if you need it. Reality inconveniently can say otherwise. Such large scale initiatives as Google Books can be closed-loop systems that are engineered for volume-level, linear, one-time processing. Once in the system, it can be difficult to replace single page elements as the existing workflow architectures aren't necessarily built to retrospectively deal with isolated (but numerous?) exceptions. Additionally, many archival items are incredibly brittle and fragile. In turn, the opportunity that you have today to digitally convert such objects may be the best or the last chance that you will ever get. So, it is often wise to make the most of that opportunity if you can.

With this all said, there is no doubt that it remains imperative that we work to scale up digital content creation to meet expanding usability and digital scholarship needs. However, when also faced with the broadening fidelity requirements that such scholarship increasingly demands, the ever improving display devices that allow for such deeper examination, and the large costs of overall digital preservation, it follows that we have to strike a balance. In a world of ever tightening budgets, it is difficult to justify the preservation of avoidable errors.

What Is (or Isn't) Good Enough? Part 1

A recent exchange of reader comments on Beyond the Scanned Image: Assessing Scholarly Uses of Digital Collections has gotten me thinking once again about the general notion of just "what is good enough." Voltaire's roughly translated, "best is the enemy of the good," has in recent years been ecstatically appropriated by such initiatives as the Google Books mass digitization initiative and the "rapid capture" movement among archives. As the actual production results of these decisions have come into sharper focus, digital archives practitioners and researchers like Paul Conway have started to more critically ask, what are the actual ramifications of putting speed and outsourcing at the absolute forefront of our decision making? Or more acutely, what are the results of that which isn't good enough?

Peter Leonard’s recent work on The Chicagoan’s cover design trends over time (starting at 16:14) is a unique case of the importance of "accurate" digital imaging. Traditionally, color and tone-accurate imaging has held tangible importance for such outputs as print and web production. Museums want high quality and accurate exhibit catalogs for their patrons. Archives and other memory institutions are charged with the preservation (both analog and digital) of their collections from the ravages of both physical and digital decay. Decay leads to a compromised, distorted representation of the original object. This can take such common forms as the physical brittle book, or overly compressed, blurred and/or color inaccurate digital image. In this last instance, color inaccuracy can actually skew the research results of such digital humanists as Leonard who are beginning to treat digital still images as large aggregate data sets that are ripe for novel research methods. In Leonard's case, he was interested in the discrete data points of hue and saturation in the magazine cover images that he was analyzing.  Inaccurate original digital capture of these covers could naturally lead to random variance of these metrics and compromised research conclusions.

Capture accuracy in the digital realm is a product of thoughtful workflow planning and proportioned follow-up quality control.  What can occur when such planning and control are either ignored, overly rushed, and/or blindly outsourced?  That will be the topic of Part 2...

Scanning 50-Year-Old Ektachrome: Technical Observations on Personal Digital Archiving, Part 1

Of late I've been scanning a number of roughly 50-year-old family photographs that were originally shot with Kodak Ektachrome slide film. Most of these slides date from 1962 through 1968 and most employed flash lighting. It is my guess, based upon vague visual memories from the time, that they were most likely shot with an inexpensive Kodak Instamatic camera, probably a 104 with flashcubes. The Instamatics had slow shutter speeds, used poor quality, fixed-focus plastic lenses, but were able to take the then new Kodapak 126 cartridges loaded with film stock like Ektachrome and Kodachrome. The 126 magazine was a clever design that answered consumer complaints on the difficulties of loading and unloading regular roll film. With 126, you could just drop in the sealed cartridge and be up and running. Its asymmetrical design guaranteed that you couldn't load it wrong. Here is a great Kodak promo of the combination from the era. So, grooovy!

For both this family archive, mostly shot by my parents, and my own personal 35mm negative film archive from the 1980s-1990s, I use a relatively novel digital conversion workflow that employs an Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner, VueScan software, and linear DNG files imported into Adobe Lightroom. Generally speaking, here are some of the benefits that I see.

The Epson V500 is a great scanner for the money that uses contemporary LED lighting technology. LED is superior to the older Xenon gas cold cathode fluorescent lamps mainly because LED illumination is brighter and more even, which allows for the better extraction of a given film's shadow detail. With VueScan, you can choose among a number of film profiles to suit the media that you are scanning which is important for getting close to "good" color as a starting point. Absolute purists like medium and large format film artists who meticulously process one converted image at a time will argue for "raw" scans that simply capture the film as is (sometimes even including the IR channel data used in auto dust/scratch removal). Such raw scans are also possible with VueScan. However, when working with family photos in bulk quantities, this isn't a scalable option. In the particular case of my own color film days, 35mm negatives have an orange mask that needs to be accounted for through color-correction of some sort in order to realize good, baseline, positive color images.   A VueScan film profile helps to get you there without a complicated trip through Photoshop.

A clarification...  By "baseline" I mean something like "use-neutral."  "Use-neutral" is a term borrowed from the more stringent realm of the FADGI Technical Guidelines that we follow in the University of Connecticut Libraries' digital still imaging lab that I manage.  In the context of old family photos, I use the descriptor more in the narrative sense, without the inherent FADGI quality metrics strictly attached.  So, what I'm aiming for with these old family shots are baseline positive images that can be archived as-is and that then require only minimal post-processing tweaks for web, print, etc. as needed.  In essence, I want to be 90% of the way "there" as these images come off of the scanner.

Getting back to VueScan.  Another one of its favorable attributes is its ability to create .DNG files direct from the scanner.  Though these are, by virtue of scanner sensor design, linear (i.e. RGB-encoded vs. "raw" undemosaiced) and conform to the older DNG v.1.1 specification, the VueScan DNGs include the same basic embedded metadata tags as regular camera raw DNG files.  This singular schema is useful once both camera DNGs and scanner DNGs occupy the same digital asset management ecosystem like a Lightroom catalog.  In turn, most color/tone editing, descriptive metadata work such as Geo-referencing and keyword tagging, and final publishing (print or web) can mostly be done seamlessly under a single software roof for all of one's image archive.  In seeing the identical embedded tags from a homogeneous DNG collection, Lightroom will present uniform slider labels and scales for options like white balance adjustments between both scanner and camera images.  An additional scanner DNG attribute is that these files can be losslessly compressed according to the DNG specification's options.  So, for the same data that is contained in an uncompressed TIF, you can also enjoy a smaller storage footprint.  This is important particularly if one is scanning large volumes of images at a high sampling frequency, to a large color space, at 16 bit/channel.

More to come...

New Design, New Images

Been working on the new site design while battling a nasty cold that I picked up over the weekend. Koken, the CMS that I migrated Tundra Graphics to, is pretty great once you get it to play nice with your service provider's CPU and memory quotas.  Perhaps a short white paper on some of the technical issues that I ran into and the overall rationale behind the move would be worth the effort.  We'll see.

In the interim, a few of the newly uploaded images are featured as a slideshow on the homepage.  For better looks at these images, find them in their specific albums.  Feel free to poke around the site and let me know if you run into any problems or have any thoughts.  I've installed Disqus, so bang away there if you like.  I've allowed guest logins which are pretty painless.

The new architecture is particularly high res screen friendly, so hardware that offer HiDPI/Retina screens, which include the iPhone 4+, iPad 2+, MacBook Pro and more should fire up quality versions of these images.

Cheers.