LensWork Technology Blog

Kindle Fire

   

Amazon announces the new Kindle Fire.

Looks like a LensWork Digital Editions device to me!

Amazon's web page went live this morning at 8am my time and they had my pre-order at 8:01. Supposedly shipping on Nov 15th. We will definitely work to make sure LensWork Portable Edition and LensWork Android Edition work on this exciting new device.

   

More tablets than Moses

I've said for some time now that the most interesting component of photography's so-called "digital revolution" is not our ability to create images digitally (i.e., Photoshop), but rather the means of distribution of images that are now possible via digital transfer.

We are in the midst of seeing this capability explode even further with the introduction — and now the initial phases of distribution — of a new class of tablet computing devices. First was the iPad, and now we are starting to see a number of Android-based tablets being shipped and gathering user feedback.

Of these, one of the more interesting ones appears to be the ASUS Transformer. The Transformer, like the iPad, is a touchscreen-based portable device ideally suited for the presentation of photographs. Unlike the iPad, however, the Transformer adds the ability to play Flash which opens it up to the world multimedia publishing — and in particular, Adobe PDF documents that include media components. In an earlier post I mentioned how the iPad could easily have been designed specifically to present LensWork. The ASUS Transformer, with its widescreen design and Flash capabilities, could have been easily designed specifically to present LensWork Extended.

It would probably be an exaggeration to say that the iPad is a ubiquitous photographer's tool. We certainly see lots of them around and lot of photographers using them. By itself, it was (and is) an important and popular groundbreaking technology — but a bit expensive and a bit restrictive to satisfy everybody's needs and interests. However, with all these new tablets adding to the excitement of the category, we're starting to see prices come down, features go up, flexibility increase, and most importantly, user experiences influence design and usability. The Transformer is lower priced, with additional features, and an impressive first batch of user reports and thereby seems already to be making waves (unlike the Motorola Xoom) in the emerging tablet market. I'm excited to get my hands on one and see it perform for myself. As both a photographer and as a publisher, I'm very excited and enthusiastic about this emerging technology.

As a publisher in particular, I've been amused by those who predict universal dominance of this technology. It would be far too easy to see this trend and all these new devices as the death of print. It is not; print is not going away. True, print may be struggling a bit to find its new role in the world in which digital distribution will play an increasingly important part. Print distribution of photography will change. It will have no choice. The $100 fine art photography book will find the $10 fine art PDF eBook on a tablet device a formidable competitor. This may not be the death of hardbound books for us photographers, but it is the beginning phases of a publishing and distribution opportunity of unparalleled accessibility for many of us. Ignore this trend at your peril.

Preserving a Body of Work

Robert Goulet, 1965, queue the music — "To dream the impossible dream . . ."

Some things are simply not possible, or at least so close to impossible as to be indistinguishable from impossible. Preserving an entire body of work would be one of these.

I'm back from Houston FotoFest where lots of interesting discussions were had. I attended a lecture by Anne Tucker (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and Ed Robinson (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), two of the most important curators in the country. One of the things that caught my attention during their talk was that major museums are not likely to want more than one or two pieces of work from a project. They simply don't have the room, resources, or funds to collect whole bodies of work. That got me to thinking: then who does?

I find there are few photographers these days not working with projects. Virtually every review I've done in the last dozen years has been a project. The days of the single "greatest hits" approach to photography is simply not being done by anyone that I've seen — not in ages. So, if everyone is working in projects of 10-200 images, how are these being preserved as a whole for future generations? How will we be able to see the project in its entirety?

This is not easy. Consider the alternatives …

Books are the kneejerk reaction, but books are usually produced in relatively small numbers; often considered "reproductions" of the artwork, not the artwork itself; very expensive to produce; problematic to market; often much smaller in scale than the original prints; require layout decisions that are often foreign to the original artwork (e.g., facing pages, gutter jumps); ink methods of reproduction often cannot match the full gamut of the original artwork. Books excel at preserving large numbers of images and their sequencing, but that is their primary virtue for preserving whole bodies of work.

PDFs and all the other digital media come to mind, but there is the looming question of long-term access both to the PDF file format and to the digital medium it is stored on. PDFs are inexpensive, preserve sequencing, can include other media components like audio and video, and are easy to reproduce. Great. They are also not the original medium, rely on an ever changing technology to be seen, present innumerable problems about reproducing color accurately, and require compatible hardware to use them. Short term viability is assured, but beyond a dozen years or so gets very dicey.

Collectors (those beneficent, well-heeled mystery class who are curiously difficult to locate in the flesh) might be the answer. But how many of them are there, how do you convince them that your project is worth preserving in its entirety? How will they preserve work for a larger audience? Do they collect whole projects, or only the investment-worthy 5-star images from a project? Hmmm …

There is your closet and the stack of Light Impressions boxes you keep there. Your project can live with complete integrity there, in the dark, all alone, with all your other projects as its only company. [Soft violins in the background.] Sort of like a benevolent jail. And then your heirs can figure out what to do with all that work after you take up residence in that great darkroom in the sky. [Sniffles and hankies. For the poor suffering artwork, that is.]

I can't help but think that the only answer is to not play the game. The entire concept of preservation is based on the assumption that someone in the future will care about our work. Perhaps. More likely not. Instead, why not put all our energy into finding an audience for our work today? If we can't interest folks in our work today, what makes us think folks a hundred years from now will care about it? From whence do we imagine all this fascination for our work will bubble up if we can even approach a gentle simmer of interest in the here and now?

Seems to me the best strategy for preserving our work is carpe diem. If we are lucky and deserving, perhaps our work will live in the imaginations of those we touch right now. As to future, in the memorable words of that noble philosopher Alfred E. Newman, What? Me Worry?

Who Controls Time?

We are asked with some frequency why LensWork Extended is not available in DVD format for playing on a television like a DVD movie. The technology is relatively easy to create and it's not a matter of difficult authoring that prevents us from doing so. Rather, it's a matter of timing in the sense of the viewer's experience of time.

In the world of technology, there is what I think of as "the great divide" — those media that are viewer-timed and those that are author-timed. Movies are author-timed; PDF slide shows are author-timed; live lectures are author-timed; music is author-timed. In my way of thinking, photography is best when it is not author-timed, but when the viewer sets the pace of viewing. It's enough for me as a photographer to control what is seen, and perhaps in what sequence it is seen. But, I don't feel a compunction to control how long a viewer sees any given image. In fact, it's perhaps as a viewer of photographs that my prejudice was formed — I want total control of that characteristic for myself when viewing photographs, primarily because I find I prefer to spend far more time with an image that most people do.

Why? I've always thought that viewing photographs is more of a dialog that an entertainment. As a viewer, my responsibility is to look, ask questions, think, place the work in context of my life experiences, ask more questions, even ask that most leading of all questions, What if?

This kind of dialog only happens when there is enough time to do so. Sometimes, I feel a photograph is worth a minute to two. Sometimes an hour to two. Almost never do I think a photograph (I'm talking about serious artwork here) is worth a fraction of a second or two as is so often the case now in our age of the quick cut.

Author-timed media has accelerated in my lifetime to rates that would astound and confuse our grandparents. I'm not sure this is a virtue. There is a lot of power in the pregnant pause that is all but absent from today's author-timed media. This is where the book, the PDF, the still photograph can still be of value — providing the time to think and react that is missing from author-timed media.

Of course, there is a risk for us photographers when we let go of control of time. Viewers can be fickle. Work we intend for leisurely viewing replete with meaning and counterpoint may be consumed in a glance, discounting all the subtlety we worked so diligently to include. It's a risk I think is worth taking for this simple reason: the best strategy as a producer is to create for that subset of viewers with whom we connect at the deepest level. I know of no other philosophy of art making that promotes the core of art's dual purposes — experiencing and sharing with the pursuit of excellence.

Besides, I'm pretty convinced that the author-timed media creators have the same problem. One can watch a movie while cooking, doing homework, talking, or otherwise distracted from full immersion in the artwork. Media does not determine connection; connection determines connection. You may quote me on that.

So, I prefer to have faith; faith that some viewers, albeit a few, will want to take time to connect with what I produce; faith that allowing them control of the time they spend with my art work will foster connections that are appropriate for them, long or short; faith that what I produce will, indeed, connect with someone, somewhere, in spite of this philosophy being in such opposition to the zeitgeist of our times.

Acrobat Portfolios, Part 2

I did a little tutorial yesterday for inclusion in LensWork Extended #87 that's off for duplication tomorrow and thought I'd just add it to the website for anyone interested in seeing a portfolio in action.

Here is a link to the tutorial video.

Acrobat Portfolios

With the introduction of Acrobat version 9, Adobe has introduced a new feature called "portfolios" — a confusingly bad choice of terminology for us photographers, but a very interesting concept.

Imagine gathering a number of documents together into one all-encompassing container-of-a-PDF. That's a portfolio. The documents gathered could be PDFs themselves, Word documents, spreadsheets, videos, audios, in essence almost anything. The encompassing PDF acts like a container to hold all these disparate components and creates a unified interface for viewing all of them. Acrobat portfolios are binders with intuitive and easy cross-document navigation built in. They are just a PDF, albeit "super PDFs."

We've been experimenting with this concept for a while now and found a number of uses that are quite interesting. One example is our LensWork Folios Catalog — a collection of separate PDFs, one for each folio we've published, all bound together into a catalog via the Acrobat Portfolio concept. You can download this file (61 mb) and take a look at this new concept. (Remember, this is an Acrobat 9 feature, so you'll need Reader version 9 or greater to open this file.)

I could easily see this as a way for a photographer to gather a number of separate publications together into one PDF for easier distribution. Or imagine a main PDF publication that also includes a number of support documents — say a video, or a printable sample, perhaps a form your client needs to fill out, or publicity photos.

Did I mention you can add simple JPEG files as a component of a PDF portfolio? Say you want to send out a show announcement as a press kit. You could include a PDF inside the portfolio that contains a selection of the exhibition images, a Word document with details about the show, a couple of JPEGs as press kit images, and a video invitation to the opening. All these would appear inside the PDF "portfolio" as separate documents, but all obviously part of the single press kit. (Any of the component documents can be extracted by the viewer from the Portfolio container. Be sure you've added security to any PDF before you drop it into the portfolio. BTW, the portfolio PDF itself can also be secured with a password.)

It's an idea that has lots of potential. Check it out.

Adobe PDFs and the Bad Guys

The Acrobat PDF platform has been a wonderful publishing file format and will continue to add richness to the world of digital publishing. But, because there are bad guys out there, Adobe has had to beef up their security protocols. I have two comments: "Yay!" and "Damn."

Why is this a problem? For two reasons that both have the same root cause. Bad guys with nefarious intentions can fool you by making PDFs that look like something else (say a web page form) and then ask you to input information you'd just as soon not share with the bad guys. This is complicated with Acrobat's use of fill-in-the-blank forms and embedded javascript.

So, Adobe has taken steps to increase the security of PDFs with Acrobat version 9.3. It's good they did so, and we support their changes, but there are a couple of implications for us publishers.

• Full screen mode PDFs must be "approved" by the reader. That's you. Be sure you trust the publisher before you accept full screen mode in a PDF. This isn't new, but is sure being encouraged in all the literature on "best practices."
• In an even bigger change, external media* (audio and video) is now being strongly discouraged in PDFs. Adobe is pushing embedded Flash media files as a more secure way of including media content in PDFs. Links to external media will be blocked by a "yellow bar of death" warning until you approve the media.
• The really bad news is that the yellow bar does not appear when the PDF is in full screen mode. Not anywhere. Instead, media just doesn't play, period. Damn. How confusing! If you exit Full Screen mode and then click a link to play the media, the yellow bar pops up, you can approve the media (for this link or for the entire document), go back to full screen mode and you won't have any problems from that point forward. It's not difficult, but what a hassle for the 99.8% of us who are honest. I just hate these kinds of concessions to those 0.2% bad guys. Did I mention, "Damn!"?

We've always used external media like QuickTime MOV video files, Windows WMV video files, and MP3 audio files. It's worked flawlessly for us in all our PDFs since LensWork Extended #57. We will, however, be making a change to bring our publications in line with the new security protocols.

In order to support Adobe's more secure-conscious PDFs, we will be using only embedded Flash audio and video starting with LensWork Extended #87, now in production. As far as you guys are concerned, this will only improve your experience when viewing LensWork Extended media components. No harm, no foul. For us, it will simply change our workflow, but not cause any delays. Whew! It's a good change, not too onerous, but definitely one that is necessary thanks to the bad guys.

I encourage any of you who are publishing PDF media to consider converting all your media to embedded Flash, too. It makes sense from a security point of view, makes for a smoother and less intrusive viewing experience, and will keep you in-step with Adobe's new security initiatives. It also has the added benefit of making PDF production faster and overall file sizes smaller. We used it with our Folios Workshop and have had no reports of problems whatsoever.

* By the term "external media," I refer to links in a PDF document that call for media in a separate file to be played by an external media player, e.g., QuickTime or Windows Media Player. All the audio and video media in LensWork Extended has been linked in this way for faster playback — before Adobe incorporated Flash into Acrobat version 9.

Monitor versus Print, Additional thoughts

It occurs to me that using the "two-state" strategy I discussed in the previous post there are some fascinating implications.

• If I make visual judgments that determine the master file based on my monitor view, wouldn't that version of my artwork be considered "the original"?
• If this is true, what happens to my "original" if I change monitors, say from CRT to LCD, etc.?
• The print is always different — and rarely better. There is always a greater dynamic range in the monitor view, often more shadow detail, and definitely richer colors, always. So, isn't the print a compromise? I'm very uncomfortable with this because I was trained that the print is highest quality presentation of my photographic artwork — higher than, say, the reproductions in a poster or a book. But, if the print lacks the full color and dynamic range of the monitor view, it is unquestionably a compromise. This jars me, and for some time I've been struggling with the implications.
• Yes, but, the print might have more detail than the on-screen image, I say to myself. But in a PDF, the encoding of the image can allow for high resolution images that reveal more and more detail as we zoom in to look more closely — something that we can only do with severe limitations when viewing a print. So does a print really have more detail, or is it an illusion based on the assumption of only a single viewing distance/magnification?
• I console myself that most people who see my prints won't see the (better) monitor view that I do when I see my images on-screen. What they don't know they are missing won't be missed, right? But what about web images, PDFs, etc.? In fact, they may indeed see screen versions of my images if they download my PDFs or shop my online store. What are the implications of trying to shop for and purchase photography online?
• Technology is constantly changing. Will there be even better monitors in the future that will substantially change the way our images appear? Are we now producing digital artwork for a medium we cannot now see or predict? Think posters of Monet paintings or websites (and T-shirts) with images of the Mona Lisa and you'll understand my point.
• "Monitors" are not a single, unified thing. CRT, LCD, iPhone screens, e-Readers, netbooks, HDTVs, yowza. And on the horizon are new view-screen technologies that will undoubtedly supplant these old familiar versions. As an image-producer, for which technology should I tweak my image tonalities?
• As I produce various on-screen image presentation, e.g., PDFs, how do I deal with the fact that some of the viewers of my work will be doing so on uncalibrated monitors? I suppose this is no different than people viewing my prints under various lighting scenarios, but for some reason it's more bothersome to me. I can't control it. And I want to. Letting go of this need to control the viewing situation is mandatory in the digital world, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

  In the end, I get frustrated when all these thoughts run around in my cranial squirrel cage, so I just give up, do the best I can, return to producing artwork — and having fun. What else can we do?

     

     

Cross-platform strategies

One of the best virtues of the printed book is that it is a perfectly all-platform medium. If you have eyes, a photobook is open to you, even if its language is foreign. If only computers could be so equally accessible.

I've made it a habit over the last 15 years to pay particular attention to cross-platform computer technologies. Among the most important are PDF, MP3, and now Flash. With these three we have almost the perfect triad — layout capable documents, universal high-resolution stereo audio, and — finally — a practical, universal video. This is a godsend for us photographers. We can now produce just about anything we can envision and it can be seen by almost anybody.

Assuming they have a computer. Assuming they are running either Windows or the latest Mac OS. It's still a bit dicey in the world of Linux, Ubuntu, iPhones, and who knows for sure about iPad or small-screen netbooks. Windows 95 and OS9? Forget it. Okay, so our triad is not actually universal, but it's a lot closer than back in the days of Word documents, Real Media, and MOV/WMV/MPEG2 video files. Progress, yes, but ultimate destination, clearly not.

However, I might suggest this should not prevent us from forging ahead. Perfection is not a requirement for the pursuit of excellence. Along with our camera skills, our image creation skills, and our matting/framing skills, it seems it might be just as important to develop PDF, MP3, and Flash skills to supplement our arsenal of tools. By learning these three cross-platform delivery technologies, we can develop an audience for our work even if it's not one that can include everyone, everywhere, always.

The learning never stops.

Lightroom's Print module

I've been experimenting with a similar schema recently using a Lightroom based workflow, piping my output into Apple's Pages layout application and thence into PDF format. I know you use InDesign for this, but frankly I'm not convinced it can do a better job, and it is more expensive than I care to pay for the uses I would put it to. I'm having good success with the concept so far, but a couple of questions have come up that I hoped you might respond to.

• In exporting finished work from Lightroom for your InDesign workflow, how do you size the output for specific layout target sizings?
• Again in the export, do you pick TIFF .. 8 bit or 16 bit, or JPEG, and sRGB or Adobe RGB profile?
• The resulting PDF you create out of InDesign ... how well does it scale for a range of print sizings? Or do you make a PDF file specific for each of your print products?
• Have you considered Lightroom's Print module and its capability to save printing templates coupled with image collections vs the InDesign printing workflow? Obviously, this would not have all the bells and whistles for page layout that InDesign or Pages might, but for simple layout and annotation purposes it might prove effective for a lot of work.

Thanks for your thoughts!

—Godfrey DiGiorgi

   

My workflow relies heavily on a simple strategy that is Lightroom-centric in its basic concept:

Masters

• The master image is a full resolution file at the native camera pixel dimensions or scan dimensions
• These master images are, of course, all ProPhoto color space, the native color space for Lightroom
• I always scan negatives as 16-bit, typically at 1,200 dpi. Archive prints are scanned 16-bit, 100% size, at 600 dpi.
• Images from the camera are whatever the RAW output is, typically 8-bit, but could be 12-bit if the camera uses it. (Do any cameras output 16-bit files? Not that I'm aware of.)
• Camera RAW files are converted to a DNG file when I import them into Lightroom. The original camera RAW format file (SR2, RAF, ORF, RW2, etc.) are archived on an external drive should I ever need them.
• I'll do as much finishing "darkroom" work in Lightroom as possible so as to take advantage of its non-destructive editing. Often, I can finish an image entirely using only Lightroom adjustments.
• If I need to open a DNG file in Photoshop for some reason (see below), these are usually 16-bit PSD images, but I sometimes cheat and use 8-bit if I know I won't need the extra data (e.g., for smoothing out gradients or for lots of post-processing).
• The most common use of Photoshop for me is when I need to do more controlled noise reduction than I can achieve in Lightroom (version 2). In Photoshop, I use Noiseware Pro.
• I'll move an image into Photoshop if it needs: heavy spotting, noise reduction with Noiseware Pro, layers or sophisticated masking, extensive cloning, stitching, or other pixel remapping. I'll still keep the DNG and its Lightroom adjustments, but the PSD file becomes the new master for output from Lightroom as needed for specific projects.
• So, my Lightroom masters are either DNG files (digital capture) or PSD files (scans or Photoshopped DNG offspring).

Finished images/projects

• I export new images out of Lightroom from these masters for specific needs.
• Each export is sized (pixel dimensions) with the required resolution (ppi) for that need.
• I do not try to make a single image that can be scaled as needed in a variety of projects. I tend to think of each project independently and prefer to make images for each project that fit its particular needs.
• I'll almost always output images from Lightroom as 8-bit, Adobe RGB (1998). For printing, I output as PSD at 300 dpi, sized for placement into InDesign at 100%. I don't use TIF files (see this post and its comments). For PDFs, I output JPGs at 200 dpi, again for placement in the InDesign file at 100%. In either of these cases, if I later decide to use a smaller image, I just resize down in InDesign and let the PDF export do the secondary JPEG resize and compression. If I later decide to make a larger image in my layout, I return to Lightroom and re-export a new image. I never upsize or upres in InDesign or in exporting from InDesign.
• For large web images, I use JPEGs output at 96 dpi, sized to a specific pixel dimension as needed in the HTML layout. Again, I export into the Adobe RGB color space. I've never used sRGB in spite of the fact that this is the recommended color space for web images, but I suppose there might be some reason I should. Since most of my work is (toned) b/w, I've never felt there was much advantage to such hair-splitting in the color space selection.
• For small web images, thumbnails, other graphics, I use PNG because the file sizes are smaller in small images.

I looked at Lightroom's print module, but for my use there is no advantage and quite a number of disadvantages. Layout is such a crucial part of my workflow that I can't think of a single reason I would give up the control available in InDesign.

There is one other factor that comes into play in my workflow. I almost never print my own images. My assistant, Crystal, does all my printing for me and then simply brings me the printed images to approve or reject, go back into Lightroom or Photoshop to tweak, or to simply accept and sign. We've found it's much easier for her to print from a finished PDF file. All our printer-ready PDFs reside in folders on our server that contains only printer-ready test files or printing-approved final PDFs.

And, odd as it sounds, on the rare occasion when I do some printing myself, I find the "finished PDF" a better workflow for me, too. The PDF encapsulates everything I did to finish a print at the time I created it. If I need to make a print six months (or six years) later, I don't have to remember how to do it, or what settings I used, or whether or not the Lightroom template has been modified, etc. The PDF is a great way to avoid all such reliance on trying to repeat what I did back then.

Also, my work evolves over time. Today I might make different decisions about how a print needs to be made than I did six months ago. Maybe I'm seeing things differently. Maybe my creative vision for the image has changed. Maybe I'm now using a different paper or a different printer. As the "editions" of an image change over time, each PDF of the printer-ready layout encapsulates the evolution of the image, creating in essence a history of that image. Since the PDF is a self-contained file, it leaves me free to make adjustments to the image in Lightroom/Photoshop without losing any history over the years. I could, I suppose, rely on the InDesign files, but linked images are subject to broken links and lost files, InDesign version updates have been known to change text layouts subtly, and if my computer no longer has some specialty font or if a font version has been updated, the layouts in InDesign might require attention to bring them back into printable form. All of this is avoided by simply producing and preserving the PDF as the master archive for each print or project.

One other thing occurs to me that might add to this discussion. I'll often need an illustration of a print layout — say for a web page sample, for use in a Premiere Pro video project, or to include in an email. Rather than send a JPEG of the photo only created from Lightroom, I can export a JPEG right out of InDesign of the full layout. Multipage InDesign documents will create a separate JPEG image for each page — handy! (BTW, exporting out of InDesign as a JPEG can be done at any resolution and on occasion I've done 300dpi JPG exports and then just printed the JPG from any old program. Crude, but it works.)

Lastly, what if I need to send an email of a printer layout to someone and I don't have the original InDesign layout? Believe it or not, you can take a high resolution PDF that was created for printing and export it from Acrobat Pro (not Reader) as a low resolution PDF. Alternatively, you can export from a PDF to a JPG, PNG, or TIF image of the PDF at any resolution you want. I can also size the printer-ready PDF on my screen to whatever size I need and then just do a screen capture and paste the screen image into an email. Lots of ways to get from a PDF to what you need from a PDF. Any of these ways will preserve the layout with all its text and graphics. PDFs are incredibly flexible and useful in so many ways that they've become the core of my creative output.

In short, the three-step workflow is:

1. Lightroom/Photoshop (images)
2. InDesign (design and layout)
3. PDF (printing, repurposing, and archiving)

It's a workflow that fills every need I have at every level — allows unlimited image control and creativity including non-destructive preservation of my image originals, provides flexibility in repurposing at every step along the way, enables easy archive paths, facilitates staff sharing and workflow simplicity, and allows me to concentrate my energies on the creative process rather than the technical hoop jumping. Not a bad payoff for graduating from the initial learning curve.