Image straightening, DPP wishes, and kill Zoombrowser

The latest version of Canon's Digital Photo Professional software (v3.8) is due to be released soon, and it's bringing the ability to straighten images -- a feature whose absence has often added steps to my own workflow. It probably won't be as easy as Lightroom's straighten tool, where you basically just draw a line across the image and LR rotates the image until it's straight, but however they implement it will be a lot easier than moving the whole image into a second editor.

DPP is pretty handy. I wish the Edit Image and Main windows were better integrated, and until it lets you edit metadata it's going to be basically useless for most serious workflows, but it's not hard to use and the image quality is fantastic. There are a few things I would really, really like to see though.

First: Smarter sharpening tools. I don't mind if they're a bit slower than Lightroom's fantastic mask-based sharpening tool or a high-pass filter overlay in Photoshop, but they do need to give similar control. Right now the sharpening tool is a blunt instrument that beats your image softness into submission, instead of a subtle precision tool.

Second: Better batch tools. There's no easy way to copy individual settings across multiple images. You can copy and paste a 'recipe', as Canon calls it, from one to several, but you can't tell it what that recipe includes or excludes. I may want a consistent white balance across a whole shoot, but groups of photos with different exposure and sharpness needs. This should be an easy feature to add, so perhaps I'm just missing it.

Third: Ditch Zoombrowser and integrate metadata editing into DPP. That's the only thing ZB can do that DPP and EOS Utility can't. Zoombrowser might have a place for point-and-shoot users who aren't shooting RAW and just need basic editing and library tools, but there's really no need for it to be part of the EOS software suite, except for metadata. And honestly, given the alternatives out there, Zoombrowser looks and feels like legacy junkware: iPhoto, Picasa, and the built-in Windows media tools, all handle basic adjustments, library organization, and metadata better than ZB does. If it's easier for me to deal with keywording after I've uploaded my images than it is to use the bundled software that handles keywording, then there's something wrong with the bundled software. DPP should have a metadata tab in the Edit Image window, and it should be easy to batch edit multiple images.

(I know that one was a bit of a sidetrack, but as long as Canon thinks of Zoombrowser as a useful part of the EOS software suite, DPP's not going to get decent metadata tools.)

My last and biggest wish for DPP is smart noise reduction. I'm actually really happy with the NR tools in general, but there's an opportunity here for Canon to make them even easier and faster. Here's my thinking: Canon knows how my 40D's sensor generates noise in response to ISO and exposure adjustments. It knows how that's different from the sensor in a 1D or 1000D. What I want DPP to do is look at those factors in each RAW image and figure out how much luminance and chrominance noise reduction to apply. Give us defaults to tell it what baseline to go for, like "light", "average", or "heavy", and then DPP can set the NR sliders for us. It would take some cleverness to add this feature, but the hard part -- understanding the sensors and the RAW data -- is already done. It'd be taking advantage of Canon's main strength in the post-processing arena, which is why you'd use DPP in the first place.

I don't honestly need DPP to connect to online services or handle other post-export file handling, though I wouldn't necessarily mind it as long as my other wishes come true first. I don't really need brush adjustments either. There are things that Lightroom and Aperture will always do better than DPP, and for the price I don't mind going over to GiMP or some other third-party program to do them. The fine line, for me, is where the third-party programs sit in the workflow. If I'm moving an image to GiMP, I don't want to spend more time waiting for it to open than I spend actually doing whatever it is I need to do. So picking out dust spots is fine, but sharpening is not.

Portfolio

Smugmug added a new feature this week that it's calling Smart Galleries, essentially a way to place virtual copies of an image into more than one gallery. It's something like Flickr's sets and galleries in one.

Anyway, I've made a "best of" gallery as a portfolio for my nature photography, so when I point someone to my website, I can give them a single link that shows off what I'm most proud of.

Check it out here!

Back-button Autofocus

If you're shooting with a camera that supports it, look into using back-button autofocus, which separates the autofocus system from the shutter button.  Then, the shutter button starts and locks the light meter, and the AF button, pressed with your thumb, starts the autofocus magic. 

Mid-range and pro Canon DSLRs will often have a dedicated button for this ("AF-ON"); the Rebels can use the AE-Lock ("*") button for it.  They all have a custom function that can let you select, basically, which of all these buttons do what -- there are actually several ways to map different functions to these buttons besides the one I'm talking about here, one of which might be even more perfect for your work style.  I can't speak to Nikons from personal experience but I know they have this ability, and I assume other brands do as well -- my EOS A2 can do this, so it's not a new idea.

It takes a little bit of effort to retrain your thumb and forefinger, but not much.  And for a lot of photographers, it's worth it.  If you think about it, having one button control the focus, the light meter, and the shutter all at the same time doesn't make a lot of sense to begin with.  A lot of times, the subject of your image is going to need be in focus and exposed properly, sure -- but that's no harder with back-button AF, whereas photos where that's not the case are going to be much harder to manage without it.

Imagine trying to shoot a person against a bright, colorful sunset with fluffy clouds, and mackerel sky.  You're visualizing a mid-distance portrait with her silhouetted against the background, so you switch over to partial metering, because you don't want the light meter to find some ugly middle ground by looking at everything: this scene is about contrast and color.   So in aperture-priority mode* for shallow DoF, you meter off of the sky to bring her exposure down by two stops, full black, and AE-Lock it.  Then you autofocus on the person, but the light meter wakes up again: your shutter speed drops to bring her exposure up higher than you want, the sky gets overexposed, and everything is either noisy or blown out.  With back-button AF focus, you could have held the exposure with the shutter button, then focused with your thumb, without the light meter knowing or caring.

*Shooting in manual mode would also avoid this sort of problem, except of course that the light is fading fast in this hypothetical situation, and somebody's got to keep an eye on the light meter, whether it's you or the camera.

Another situation where this comes in useful is when you're shooting in low but shifting light, where the AF drive has to work hard to find its subject in the first place.  Imagine shooting a street corner on a cloudy day, with the street signs in focus and readable, and moving cars and pedestrians around it.  You get the street sign in focus easily enough, but clicking the shutter button will send the AF hunting back and forth for whatever it thinks you want.

Sure, you can switch the lens AF off, but that's is a workaround, and it's easy enough to miss a shot because you forgot to switch it back on again.  Back-button AF means you don't have to think about working around slightly complicated, everyday focus/metering issues like this because they just don't come up.  It's no harder than having the shutter button do all the work, and in many cases it's just a lot easier.

2:1 magnification

I picked up a set of super inexpensive Pro Optic Extension Tubes. They feel pretty cheap and I doubt they'll last for years and years, but they come with electrical connections at half the price of the Opteka, a third the price of the Kenko, and a hell of a lot cheaper than Canon's.  If I could afford the Kenko tubes, I'd probably have gone with them, since they'll last a lot longer, but as long as they keep the lens on the camera and pass through information to stop down the aperture, extension tubes don't need to be fancy.  There's no glass in them: they work by moving the lens farther from the sensor, so it projects a larger image.  It's a lot like a film or slide projector, where the farther it is from the wall, the larger the picture.  But dimmer too: you have a fixed amount of light making up the image, and the larger that image, the 'thinner' it's going to be.

We're covered in snow and slush here in Boston, so my macro expeditions have been limited to the far corners of the kitchen, where I found the exotic Chlorophytum comosum: the spider plant.  With the 100mm f/2.8 USM macro lens, the full set of tubes gives about 2:1 magnification.  At this point, you really need buckets of light in order to get an aperture with a reasonable depth of field: my flash was set to 1/4 power and was only a few inches away.  Unlike bugs, spider plants don't run away from the camera, so I used a tripod to make these a bit easier.