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December 15, 2004  Photography 2.0: Raw Processing

I recently spent three days in an advanced photography class with members of the Photoshop team. Eddie Soloway, who teaches at the Santa Fe Workshops, came in and walked us through everything from the basics to more advanced concepts in photography. I got a chance to put my Nikon D70 to the test and shot about 300 pictures over the three days.

So this is where Photography 2.0 comes in. Everyday I would come back from a shoot and use a prerelease copy of the new version of Photoshop to do all my work. I can't go in to the details of the new version for obvious reasons, but what struck me was that the raw processing workflow was much, much smoother and more pleasant than in the past. We've hit the point where you shoot raw not just for the added control, but for a user experience that you can't match by shooting TIFF or JPEG.

What is raw processing? It is the combination of a file format and a way to interpret the information within the file format. For example, my Nikon can save files in NEF format. This is a Nikon specific format that encodes the low-level camera information directly in to the file. This allows me to modify important attributes such as the White Balance or Exposure after the photo was taken, and do so in a non-destructive way. Photoshop's Camera Raw dialog allows me to revert to the original camera settings or save my settings as a profile to then apply to other images that I took (which is helpful if you're forgetful like me and don't remember to change your White Balance until after you've taken five or ten shots).

There is a lot of debate surrounding raw file formats, largely because they are proprietary and different for each camera and camera manufacturer. Nikon claims that they will provide backward compatibility and archival capabilities. Nikon has been around for 80 years and manufactures lenses in this way, which gives them a fair amount of credibility. Thomas Knoll has also introduces a new raw format called DNG which is publicly documented and, therefore, more suitable for archival. None of this will shake out any time soon, but it is clear that moving forward photographers will be spending more and more time working with the raw data and less and less time in what was the traditional color correction environments. From my experience, Thomas Knoll seems to understand this better than anyone else in the world. In a way this is what you would expect. I mean the guy did write the original version of Photoshop.

Posted by johnnie at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

December 03, 2004  In My Dreams

Bruce Chizen: "Hi, can I speak to Eric Schmidt please?"

Eric Schmidt: "This is Eric."

Bruce Chizen: "Hi Eric, this is Bruce over at Adobe."

Eric Schmidt: "Hey Bruce, what's going on?"

Bruce Chizen: "I've been thinking about Avalon and XAML recently."

Eric Schmidt: "You mean the Microsoft stuff? XML-based markup language for describing interfaces and the hardware accelerated rendering engine?"

Bruce Chizen: "Right. Well, I keep hearing about you guys building a web browser over there based off the Mozilla code base. And I got to thinking… what if we helped you guys by building a hardware accelerated GUI rendering engine for that thing? I'm talking 32 bit floating point interfaces rendered at 60 fps. We'd use SVG as the base just like what Microsoft is trying to do with XAML. And now instead of Avalon, people would have something that works across operating systems."

Eric Schmidt: "Hmm… that would be cool. Gmail would blow the socks off of Outlook if we have that kind of engine. What's in it for you?"

Bruce Chizen: "We're building out our enterprise platform. A lot that revolves around PDF, the web, servers. I'm tired of IE. We need to be platform agnostic. With teamwork we could get a lot farther than if we work alone. You know, I'm sure a lot of people will say I sound like Marc Andreessen circa 1995. It's true that the issues may be the same, but the context is different."

Eric Schmidt: "This is true. I've got a meeting right now, but how about I stop by San Jose tonight and we sketch this out?"

Posted by johnnie at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)