Two recent photofinishing tools, Adobe LightRoom and Nikon’s Capture NX have set a new back-to-the- future direction to photofinishing. Neither of these tools has either layers or masks or filters – the concentration in both is rendering a photo finished – not composited, filtered or gardened – finished.
My brother Greg has raised the following essential issue – why do camera RAW and other digital images whether from my own CanonDSLRs or my colleagues’ Nikon D80s and D1s – why are these images so … raw? So less than what was expected or what I thought I saw? When I take videos of the same scene at the same time and nearly identical lighting conditions the videos inevitably appear to be closer in brightness, color and saturation to what I originally saw – while the videos are much closer in color, brightness and saturation to what I originally pictured – and they come at 32 frame per second.
Because still images, even taken from elite digital cameras, are stillborn – they need photo finishing.
Also because our eyes regularly lie to us.
The latter condition engenders the need for photofinishing. Our eyes and brains are constantly playing trompe d’oeil on ourselves. Converting the raw incoming light and assembling it in our heads in such a way that our perceptions are better able to comprehend what we “saw”. But that may and does differ from the raw light stimulus – hence the difference between what a camera “sees” and what we as human beans “see”.
But there is more. Human beans perceive colors differently. 85.5% of people have normal color vision – we would generally agree reasonably closely on test of colors hues – but would diverge a bit more on questions of brightness and saturation. However, 5% of men and just about 1% of women have Deuteranomaly in their color perceptions – causing them to right shift hues on the color wheel about 5 degrees from what the consensus would be among those with normal color vision. Another 1% of men have Protanopy which right shifts hues on the color wheel by about 30 degrees – bright orange becomes a slightly less saturated yellow green. And another 1% of men have ….
You get the jist of what is a long list of human color misperceptions. Ditto for brightness and and contrast – our brains are not always telling us the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God. Hence the need for photofinishing. And its all the camera makers fault.
Enter Digital Camera Makers
Digital camera makers have taken an optics approach. Let the science of optics determine the quality of what is being recorded especially in camera RAW images files. When camera makers convert to JPG they do some conversions to a bit more punchy and saturated colors influenced by the users white balance and contrast settings. And now in handheld cameras, the makers now have as many as a dozen setting such as macro, portrait, landscape, and many others for which they will make default/preset adjustments to the HSL-Hue, Saturation, and Lightness when rendering the images into .JPG files. And the processing is getting ever more sophisticated, as areas of high versus low brightness are processed differently, etc.
This RAW(NEF for Nikon) to JPG converter concentrates on the brightness, saturation, contrast and the other important color and lighting corrections.
And although CaptureNx does have masking (but not layers) , it does provide both color and black-white – neutral Control Points to further refine and simplify the basic exposure and HSL-Hue Saturation and Lightness corrections. CaptureNX is designed to speed up the processing of not just one but several, similar exposure images with batch processing allowed for preset adjustments . The emphasis here is on getting thebasic image photo finished.
Enter Adobe with LightRoom
LightRoom goes further and provides the ability to download images from a camera and organize them into folders while adding metadata to each image. In addition, LightRoom has a Library Module that allows grouping images into user named and customized collections from a vaiety of folder sources – and then attach ratings, descriptions and further metadata. Finally, LightRoom covers the classic photographer workflow allowing preparations of contact sheets and fine quality print proofs as well as HTML based web galleries or other presentations.
Note what is happening in both products – re-dedication of processing to individual images and as they emerge from the camera. Both programs are technically sophisticated and render excellent results – they will be alternatives to basic photo editing tools. They will not challenge the higher tier programs like Photoshop CS or Corel PaintShop Pro or Xara Xtreme Pro that provide sophisticated masking, layering, filtering for multi-image, collage, or stitched together panorama shots and images.
But inevitably they will redirect some customers away from Adobe Photoshop Elements or Ulead Photo Express and other automated photo editors that specialize in Wizard based auto color and brightness adjustments. Users will find that CaptureNX and LightRoom provide fairly intuitive yet very sophisticated color and brightness adjustments with noise reduction or sharpening thrown in. In sum, with these products photo finishing is returning to its core, full image roots.
(c)JBSurveyer 2007 – If you liked this, let others know:
