Underexposed

This image, from a Panasonic paper at the ISSCC computer-chip show, shows a sensor with a better ability to span bright and dark areas in a photo. It works by combining three shots into a single high-dynamic range image using a new Panasonic image sensor.

(Credit: Panasonic)

SAN FRANCISCO-- Panasonic showed technology on Monday that could shift the digital photography trend of high-dynamic range photos off the computer and directly into a camera image sensor.

And it works through a variation of a familiar photographic technique called exposure bracketing. For years, photographers challenged by tough lighting conditions have taken multiple pictures of the same scene at different brightness levels--bracketing--to help ensure one photo has a good balance shadow and highlight details.

More recently, with the advent of computers, these bracketed exposures can be combined into a single high-dynamic range (HDR) image that captures both bright and dark areas--for example both the subtle tones of both a bride's white wedding dress and a groom's tuxedo--that lie beyond the abilities of the camera taking a single shot.

In research shown here at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Tokayoshi Yamada of Matsushita Electric Industrial--better known as Panasonic to most people--showed technology that he said lets an image sensor capture that high-dynamic range information.

With today's sensors, "You can get either highlight or shadow detail, depending on the exposure time. To get much wider dynamic range images, we need to combine these different-exposure images," Yamada said.

Yamada showed a 177x144 pixel image sensor that takes three photos of the same scene in rapid succession. In one example, he said, the first exposure lasts 1.5 microseconds, the second 150 microseconds, and the third 15,000 microseconds (not far from a 1/60 second exposure). Extra circuitry built into the sensor records the data from the multiple exposures and uses an assortment of electronic capacitors to combine it into a single image that spans a greater dynamic range.

The image can span a dynamic range of 140 decibels compared with ordinary sensors with a 60dB range when working at a frame rate of 15 frames per second, the researchers said.

In his presentation, Yamada showed a resulting image taken of a regular incandescent light bulb. With conventional sensor technology, a few of the words printed on the bulb were visible, but most were washed out in a blown-out white patch near the bulb's filament. In the Panasonic sensor's image, not only were most of the words visible, but also the helical coil of the filament was.

Combining multiple exposures has been possible before, but only using technology that recorded the multiple exposures in separate areas called frame memories, Yamada and his Panasonic colleagues said in a paper on the subject.

Despite efforts such as Fujifilm's SuperCCD sensors, camera buffs are often frustrated by the image sensor dynamic range of that's significantly weaker than what the human eye can detect. Although the Panasonic research shows some promise, though, photo nerds should rein in their hopes: the research showed only a black-and-white images so far and is suited "for automotive and security cameras," according to the researchers' paper.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to edit and catalog photos, chiefly the raw images that come from higher-end digital cameras.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Good news for photo enthusiasts who wish they could they could use Photoshop Lightroom for high dynamic range photography and panorama stitching: support is on Adobe Systems' radar screen, if not necessarily its roadmap.

That's the word from Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of professional digital imaging product management and the executive who oversees Lightroom, Photoshop, and the Digital Negative (DNG) format. I spoke with him Wednesday during the Macworld trade show here in San Francisco.

Connor is intimately familiar with these two fast-changing domains in digital photography. High dynamic range (HDR) photography combines multiple exposures of a single subject into a single image that better spans the full range of dark and light tones; a good example is a photo of a cathedral interior that shows both the bright stained-glass windows and the dim stone arches. And the ultrawide views known as panoramas have been around for decades, but the ability to stitch digital photos together--for example with Photoshop's new Photomerge feature--has injected new energy into the area.

It's fair to be optimistic about HDR and panorama support in Lightroom, but don't hold your breath. Both are within the scope of Lightroom, Connor said, but he was careful not to promise whether or when that support might actually arrive.

Of HDR, he said, "It's definitely a natural thing to do. I don't know when. At some point, cameras will be capturing HDR. At some point, Lightroom will have support for that."

And of panorama stitching, Connor said, "An argument can be made for it. It's more about recreating a scene than about creating something that isn't there in the first place."

The Lightroom vision
Those endorsements, however qualified, illustrate Adobe's philosophy with Lightroom. Unlike with traditional Photoshop, Adobe envisions Lightroom as a tool to get the most out of what the camera recorded when a photo was taken.

Certainly Lightroom can alter a photo with some special effects, but, Connor said, "We want to stay true to optimizing what you saw when you shot it."

For that reason, Lightroom is chiefly designed to work with the raw images--the files taken directly from a camera's image sensor without in-camera processing into the more limited but convenient JPEG format. Lightroom's core operation is "developing" many raw images into finished products, but the software also can be used for cataloging and describing photos and for printing them and sharing them as galleries on the Web.

Photoshop, in contrast, permits not just photo editing but all kinds of original creation, from compositing multiple images to digital painting and sketching to elaborate visual effects on text. Also different: Photoshop presents myriad editing options at any moment, but Lightroom's interface is designed to march along with a photographer's import, edit, and export "workflow."

One of the key features in Lightroom--and another major difference from Photoshop--is nondestructive editing. Not only is every adjustment in Lightroom reversible, but the software keeps track of those changes and stores them as metadata associated with the file. That means an underlying raw image is preserved but can be accompanied by instructions such as how to crop it, adjust its tones, and sharpen its edges.

The SDK challenge
That nondestructive philosophy poses a big challenge for Adobe: how to design a software development kit for Lightroom. SDKs can let others extend a product with new features, and indeed Photoshop's rich array of third-party plug-ins illustrates the value of the approach.

Adobe has released a beta SDK with a very limited scope, but Adobe plans to expand it, Connor said. One tough balancing act the company faces now is deciding how much developer attention to focus on building the SDK and how much on building new features in Lightroom.

A Lightroom SDK is thornier than one for Photoshop because the latter can accept a filter that permanently changes an image, Connor said. Image-processing plug-ins are "trickier in Lightroom because it's nondestructive," and filters must be applied and reapplied in real time as new adjustments are made.

In addition, because adjustments are stored as metadata, there's a risk that an image edited with a plug-in on one machine will look different on another machine lacking that plug-in, if it can be opened at all, Connor said.

Adobe began developing Lightroom, code-named Shadowland, between the release of Photoshop 7 in 2002 and Photoshop CS in 2003, Connor said. But the company that brought the first such product to market was actually Apple, with its Aperture software.

Aperture fueled Adobe's competitive flames for Lightroom, Connor said. "It did raise the urgency. We didn't want people to think we were ignoring (that market) or that Lightroom was just a response," he said.

But Aperture also did Adobe a favor. Adobe's biggest hurdle with Lightroom was defining what the product was for, and Apple actually ended up doing a lot of that work, Connor said.

Adobe took a very work-in-progress approach to Lightroom, releasing multiple open beta versions, then 1.0, then 1.1, then 1.2, and most recently, 1.3. Significant new features were added with each update, leading me to suggest that version 1.3 might be best thought of as the real 1.0.

Indeed, things look a bit more settled now, and Connor suggested Adobe's attention is now turned toward a more substantial update. (He wouldn't even commit to a version 2.0, much less say when one might arrive, but you can bet it's in the works.)

"I can't rule out" a version 1.5 update," Connor said, "but I think we've done the bulk of what we wanted with the updates."

In a Guardian column earlier this year, Andrew Brown lamented the hard times that have befallen professional photographers. What caused the "death of an honorable profession," he argues, is an army of mostly mediocre shooters posting millions of shots at Flickr and selling to advertising agencies via "microstock" sites. Few make a living at the latter, but their gravy is "bread taken from the mouths of professionals," Brown said.

I think he has a point. But I think he misses another, less gloom-and-doom aspect of the digital photography revolution: the innumerable amateurs who are discovering, rediscovering or reinventing photography.

Sure, a pro photographer may be unhappy that the businesspeople-gathered-around-a-laptop photo she used to license for $300 now can be had for $3. But on the flip side, any number of folks with some talent and spare time now have a side business selling photos on microstock sites such as Fotolia, iStockphoto and SnapVillage. It sure beats stuffing envelopes.

Although the Internet has made microstocks feasible, it's also meant that pros can reach much broader markets on their own. That probably helps landscape photographers whose work has broader appeal than, say, a news or portrait photographer who relies on a local market, but it's a silver lining that shouldn't be overlooked.

But what I find most intriguing about the digital revolution is how it's helped amateur photography. One friend of mine is delighted to have rediscovered in digital photography the artistic opportunities of the darkroom that he'd largely abandoned after college. Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, Apple's Aperture, and a raft of high-performance but affordable digital SLRs are powerful tools. Sites such as Flickr provide shooters with communities to like-minded folks interested in everything from throwing cameras in the air to black-and-white pictures taken with a Holga camera. Technology also is opening new frontiers in panoramas, high dynamic range imagery, and "geotagging" photos with location data.

Granted, a lot of this is in the fine-art or hobbyist arena rather than photojournalism. But I strongly suspect that in the long run, creating an army of active, interested amateurs will ultimately help the photography profession more than it will hurt it.

(Via Photoshop Senior Product Manager John Nack.)