Underexposed

Updated 10:10 a.m. PDT with further Adobe confirmation.

Adobe Systems on Wednesday plans to release an update to its Lightroom and a related Photoshop CS4 plug-in for processing raw images, bringing the software up-to-date with many of the latest SLR cameras and fixing some bugs.

"The release and release notes will go live later today," Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty said. Specifically, 9:01 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, Adobe added.

The new software has support for several new SLRs, Adobe said: Canon's newer entry-level EOS Rebel XS and brand-new midrange EOS 50D, Nikon's freshly released midrange D90 and full-frame D700, Pentax's newest entry-level model, the K2000, and Sony's ambitious 24-megapixel full-frame Alpha A900.

Lightroom is used to edit, catalog, print, and export photos, especially the flexible but labor-intense raw photos taken directly from camera image sensors with no in-camera processing. The new support in version 2.1 go hand in hand with Camera Raw 5.1, the processing engine used in the brand-new Photoshop CS4.

In addition, Lightroom 2.1 fixes a keyword problem for people who had upgraded from Lightroom 1.x, cuts down on crashes while using the Web module on 64-bit Windows Vista, and speeds performance on Mac OS X machines, Adobe said.

Those features had been promised in the Lightroom 2.1 beta, released last month. More of a surprise, though, are several new camera profiles, a feature that has dramatically improved the appearance of my own photos. Indeed, I dearly miss it for processing some images I took with an Olympus E-3, which doesn't yet have profiles. The profiles are on Adobe Labs, separate from the Lightroom and Camera Raw.

Profiles essentially recalibrate an image's basic colors to better match camera settings, such as portrait, neutral, standard, and landscape, and using them can make it easier to match the punchier, more saturated JPEG images that cameras often produce. Newly profiled cameras are the Leica M8, the Canon 50D and PowerShot G9, the Nikon D90, and Pentax models, Adobe said.

For ordinary raw support, Lightroom 2.1. also supports some higher-end compact cameras that can produce raw images, including the Sigma DP1, the Olympus SP-565 UZ, and the Nikon Coolpix P6000.

And some high-end models also are on the list: Leaf, the Aptus II 6 and 7 medium-format digital backs and AFi II 6 and 7 medium-format camera bodies, and the unusual Fujifilm FinePix IS Pro, an SLR that can be used to take infrared and ultraviolet light photos.

Adobe already had added support for the newer cameras in Camera Raw 4.6, a plug-in that works in Photoshop CS3.

(Via Photography Blog.)

It's a boon that digital photos can incorporate textual information, leaving behind some film-era complications, such as having to separately record a photo's caption or copyright status.

But there are some problems handling this so-called metadata, and now Canon, Adobe Systems, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and Nokia have banded together to solve some of them.

The companies have formed the Metatdata Working Group and released a first set of guidelines that attempts to standardize some issues that can crop up as metadata travels from cameras to computers, software, and Web sites. On Wednesday, the group announced its work at the Photokina camera show in Germany.

"Whether you're a soccer mom uploading photos to a Kodak gallery, or a pro selling images on Getty, these are issues everybody deals with," said Josh Weisberg, Microsoft's director of digital imaging evangelism and the metadata group's chairman and founder.

For example, when moving a photo from one application to another, a vertically orientated photo can get rotated 90 degrees into a landscape orientation, or captions and descriptive keywords can get lost. Part of the problem is that there are multiple ways to record metadata, including EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format), IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council), and Adobe's XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform).

The working group has produced guidelines to try to bring common practices to metadata areas including keywords, description, creator, star rating, orientation, and location, Weisberg said. The group dealt with three file formats: TIFF, JPEG, and Adobe Photoshop's PSD.

The Metadata Working Group's guidelines are a free download from the Web site, and anyone is free to implement them without worrying about infringing any of the members' intellectual property, Weisberg said.

Being guidelines, others are free to handle metadata they way they want, but the collective clout of the working group members--the two major operating system makers, the top camera maker, and the top image-editing software maker--mean it's likely others will follow suit.

Up next: Handling raw images
There's more work to be done, though.

The working group got started on the current guidelines a year ago. Now, it's moving on to the next set of issues. "With the first version, we began with consumer scenarios. We're formulating a plan for a second version. It's our intent to address professional scenarios," Weisberg said.

One big issue is handling the profusion of raw file formats produced by higher-end cameras and commonly used by professionals and advanced amateurs. These formats are generally proprietary, so it's hard to handle their metadata. Windows does so by relying on software supplied by camera makers, but Adobe and Apple do their own reverse-engineering work to handle the metadata. So for example, unless a Windows Vista user has downloaded the appropriate support, the operating system's file browser software can't report when a raw photo was taken, even though that metadata is stored in the photo file.

"It is a goal to try to establish guidelines for where and how metadata is stored in raw formats," Weisberg said.

Another possible issue is handling metadata for photo licensing information, which could bring some rights management order to the today's image copying free-for-all, but that's tricky. "We're in the phase of capturing the problem," Weisberg said. "There are no standards in the industry for licensing images that are widely adhered to."

CUPERTINO, Calif.--Apple, why hast thou forsaken me?

That, loosely paraphrased, is what some Aperture customers had been asking after Apple went too long without updating its higher-end photo editing and cataloging software. It got to the point where some were plotting strategies on Apple forums about how to flee to Adobe Systems' rival Photoshop Lightroom software with their photo metadata intact.

On Tuesday, though, Apple came back with the new Aperture 2.0, a version that addressed many common gripes, caught up with Lightroom in several important respects, and signaled that the company hasn't lost interest in the market. On the contrary, a price cut to $199 from $299--also Lightroom's current price--shows Apple wants to expand Aperture's use.

Apple's Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.

(Credit: Apple)

"There's huge interest from the hobbyist market," said Joe Schorr, Apple's senior product manager of photo applications. "It was clear this was the right price to make that more palatable to them."

He said Apple's October 2007 market research showed 54 percent of iPhoto users thought of themselves not as mere snapshooters but rather as photo hobbyists, some serious enough to aspire to sell photos. Apple is trying to bring those customers into the fold while also catering to the professionals whom the company initially targeted with Aperture.

Schorr bridled a bit when I asked him Wednesday about some people's fears that Apple isn't committed to Aperture. "Releasing a new version is as big a commitment as you can demonstrate," he said. "This is not a maintenance release. It takes quite a bit of engineering resources. Apple's commitment is unmistakable."

Aperture is designed to edit the detailed and flexible but unwieldy and proprietary "raw" image files taken unprocessed from higher-end cameras' image sensors. Apple was first to market with software that not only handles this computing-intensive editing task but also lets photographers sort images into catalogs and add metadata such as captions, tags, and titles.

However, since then, Adobe came on strong with Lightroom in 2007, outpacing Aperture's adoption among professionals in a matter of months, even after factoring out the fact Lightroom also runs on Windows. Apple has clout with creative professionals, but that's the center of Adobe's business.

Whipping Aperture into shape
Schnorr knows the company hit a rough patch with Aperture 1.5, which wasn't able to support many high-profile new cameras such as Nikon's D3 and D300 and Canon's 1Ds Mark III and PowerShot G9. Apple's new raw support only arrived this week, months after Lightroom could handle those cameras' raw files.

The problem: Apple's product cycle was out of sync with the camera companies. The new cameras "happened to hit when we were in the thick of replacing the entire raw engine...It was a perfect storm," Schnorr said.

Another big problem was performance. Processing raw-image files is a computationally onerous job, but Lightroom outperformed Aperture, and speed is essential for either to meet their potentially.

With the ability to manage images, edit them in large batches, and export them as Web galleries, Aperture and Lightroom have liberated raw images from the one-by-one plodding interface of regular Photoshop and other raw-processing tools. The vision was ahead of the technology, though: a free-wheeling editing style, jumping from one photo to another, only works if you don't have to spend a lot of time waiting for the computer to laboriously construct and update images from the raw originals.

Apple has done well with Aperture 2.0, based on my test of ingesting and editing a batch of my own photos on a dual-core iMac. On top of a general performance boost, it's got a new preview mode that specifically emphasizes speed by using only fast-rendering JPEGs instead of the full-on raw images. Lightroom and Aperture are geared to map a photographer's image workflow, but I generally take an extra step to review images with BreezeBrowser to cull out the duds before I import the rest into Lightroom.

I also liked the single-keystroke ability to switch editing controls swiftly into metadata controls. I find that adding tags and captions is a process that's not as far removed from editing as Lightroom's separate library and develop modes would have you think.

I'm not alone in noticing Aperture's kick in the pants. "I feel like someone snuck a new CPU into my machine," gushed photographer Josh Anon in a Wednesday blog posting about Aperture 2.0.

Plug-ins ahoy
One of the unknown factors for Lightroom and Aperture is what the future holds for third-party editing plug-ins. Photoshop has a rich supply, but the nondestructive editing requirements of Lightroom and Aperture throw a wrench into the works of an algorithm that permanently alters an image's pixels.

Lightroom's future here is fuzzy, though Adobe has released a beta version of a software development kit (SDK) for plug-ins limited to actions during the photo-export phase.

Aperture 2.0 will accept editing plug-ins, though, Schorr said.

"We've laid the groundwork for an image-editing plug-in architecture," he said. Asked about the difficulties of nondestructive editing, he said, "We've found a way of implementing a plug-in system we believe is very effective."

Schorr wouldn't share further details about the plug-ins architecture, but did say Apple will release its own SDK.

Raw engine overhaul
Aperture 2.0 got several of its new editing abilities through Apple's new raw-processing engine. So what's so great about the new raw engine? Schnorr points to several changes:

• It handles highlights better and lets photographers use a recovery slider to pull back overexposed regions.

• It handles noise better, preserving details and changing the turning speckles into a something closer to the grain of high-speed films of analog photography days.

• It preserves more detail in shadow regions rather than blocking them up into a dark murk.

• It's got changes in color rendering to handle skin tones better.

The flip side of the new raw engine, which is is that it requires the latest software to use it. That means Aperture 1.5 users will have to pay the $99 upgrade fee if they want the new camera support, Schnorr said. For iPhoto users, the newer version 7 released last fall, is required.

Apple has supported many cameras much closer to their debut in the past, sometimes even releasing new camera support software independently from operating system updates. With the new engine now done, adding support for new cameras "should be easier for us," Schorr said.

• Field of view diagram from Digital Photo Professional magazine - A nice diagram showing what kind of focal length is required to get a 47-degree field of view with various cameras, e.g. full-frame, APS-C, medium format, Four Thirds. (Judging by the Four Thirds logo, this might be from that Olympus-led group.)
• Leaked? The Samsung GX-20 DSLR - 1001 Noisy Cameras - Roundup of links to GX-20, presumably derivative of a new Pentax model. would-be photo, specs here: http://www.aronsen.no/default.asp?ArtID=428
• Getty Bolsters Its Web Presence (subscription only) WSJ.com - A longish look at Getty's attempt to remake itself through royalty-free photography, including iStockphoto.
• Washingtonpost.com on snitching photos from Flickr etc. - Bloggers to the rescue? "What's noteworthy in each of these cases, Lessig says, 'is that bloggers, a community typically associated with piracy, are rallying in support of copyright.'"
• OLPC Tells Nigerian Court: We Don't Use LANCOR's Keyboard - Groklaw - OLPC answers the patent-infringment complaint.
• Novell's top lawyer is leaving - Joseph LaSala, who's been involved in litigation with The SCO Group and the controversial patent deal with Microsoft, is headed for Discovery Communications. Novell said deputy general counsel Ryan Richards will take over for now.
• Olympus E-3 Review - PhotographyBLOG - Generally favorable review. Modest jabs about its size--so much for one of the advantages 4/3 cameras have over Nikon and Canon. "The amount of time you'll spend penitently wading through the manual will reward you with some seriously good images."
• ExifTool by Phil Harvey - a photo tag editing utility - Perhaps this will be the way I transfer geotags from one photo to others. Looks like a pretty powerful utility, and it supports DNG and various raw file formats.

Updated: Microsoft now says image uploads to non-Microsoft photo sites will be possible.

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Microsoft developed Windows Vista in part to make it easier for people to manage their digital photos. Now it has released beta software that's trying to refine that experience further.

Windows XP leaves much to be desired with photo management, Mike Nash, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Product Management, said Wednesday in a talk here at the InfoTrends Digital Imaging conference. On the list of gripes: XP lacks abilities to edit, archive, search, tag and edit images; it can't support the higher-end but unprocessed "raw" photos; transferring images to PCs is "slow and cumbersome"; and "color management was sketchy at best."

Windows Vista is designed to fix these shortcomings, Nash said. But newer software called Windows Live, in public beta testing since earlier this month, is geared to expand photo abilities even more--in part through improving what the PC can do on its own and in part what it can do with the Internet.

"The notion of live services is a critical part of Microsoft's strategy," Nash said. "Our mindset is that the value proposition of Windows Vista is a combination of the core operating system and those online services."

Of course, XP isn't the only comparison to Vista that can be made. Apple's Mac OS X includes many photo-friendly features already.

Dave Block, Windows senior product manager, demonstrated the photo-related components of the Windows Live software. Windows Live Photo Gallery augments Windows Vista Photo Gallery with the ability to sharpen images and to view a histogram that shows an image's distribution of light and dark tones.

The software also adds the ability to upload photos with two mouse clicks to Windows Live Spaces, an online site for blogging and sharing photos. Eventually, Microsoft plans to "expand publishing options for Windows Live Photo Gallery to other sites in the future," so those who use services such as Flickr or Shutterfly need not despair.

Windows Live Gallery, part of a suite that includes other components for blogging, mail and other tasks, takes over from the Vista Photo Gallery when installed, Block said in an interview.

Microsoft may not think as much about photo handling with Windows XP, but there's one feature from the earlier operating system that Microsoft is adding back into Vista as a result of customer feedback. In XP, the photo-import process let people select which photos they wanted to transfer to the PC and which photos they wanted to delete or leave on a camera. With Vista, it's an all-or-nothing affair.

"A goal with Vista was to make photo import really simple. But we got feedback that people wanted it to be more highly functional," Block said.

Windows Live Photo Gallery shouldn't be thought of as what Vista's photo management ought to have been, Block argued. "It's adding new features. Don't think of it as a patch," he said.

During the photo import process, on either the standard and augmented Vista, people can tag their images with labels such as photo locations and subject names. Adding such "metadata" is a crucial part to enabling software and therefore computer users to search for particular photos.

Vista simplifies some of the divergent standards for photo metadata, said InfoTrends analyst Ed Lee. There are still problems, however.

For example, image-editing powerhouse Adobe Systems also offers software that lets people tag photos and rate them on a scale of one to five stars. Adobe and Microsoft software can read the primary photo tags the other company's software has written. But the companies take an incompatible approach for subtags that provide more elaborate detail. A "flower" primary tag could be expanded by adding a "rose" subtag, for example.

"There's no agreed upon industry standard," Block said. "Both implementations are good; they're just not compatible."

He didn't have a projection for when the companies might work out their subtagging differences.

The Windows Live beta software can be downloaded from Microsoft. It's available for Windows XP and Vista, but it requires the installation of other components for search and color management for XP, and of SQL 2005 Compact Edition for both operating systems.

SnapVillage, the brand-new microstock from late entrant Corbis, has just fired up a revamped Web site, and it features some notable changes for photographers--chiefly, the ability to upload images with IPTC metadata such as captions and keywords. But the more interesting information from the company is in the future: the potential for raw-image support at SnapVillage, which I just wrote about at CNET News.com.

SnapVillage has revamped its beta microstock site for selling photos.

(Credit: SnapVillage)

SnapVillage has added support for Adobe Systems' XMP, which can record raw-file settings as well as other metadata. Part of the reason for the move was that it would make it easier to handle raw images.

Raw images are more flexible than JPEGs, but they need to be processed before they can be used in brochures, ads, Web sites or other common microstock markets. It's rare for microstocks to support raw images, which are typically in proprietary file formats that vary from one camera maker and model to the next.

Also coming up is a new Java-based upload tool that can handle 150-200MB worth of images and international sales. SnapVillage expects that will help bump the current library of images from about 60,000 today to hundreds of thousands by the end of the year.