Studio Workshop Wanderings
Green Valley Photographic Information
-- A new cover for Al Crawford's Website of Photography
Resources. This will include links to Al's handouts as well as
other information that is included in this newsletter. You may
get there directly by clicking on the link that begins this paragraph
or by clicking on the Photography Resources link on the Green Valley
Camera Club front page.
At the end of April Al Crawford will discontinue his Thursday workshops
for the summer. The Friday B&W workshop will likely continue
with the fine leadership that has developed during this spring.
During the summer Al will be sending newsletters to those who would
like to receive them. They will contain some helpful tips on
photography and Photoshop as well as descriptions to websites on
photography. If you would like to be included on his mailing list
drop him an e-mail to Newsletter@CrawfordEnterprise.com
Workshops for this week
All workshops are
in the Camera Club Studio Classroom and do not require a sign-up.
Intermediate Digital Photography Workshop
Thursday, March 29, 9:30 to
11:00
"Non-destructive Techniques"
presented by Al Crawford
Principle: Do not
changing any pixels in your image until you absolutely have to
Techniques will be presented by Al that will allow you to dodge and
burn without altering pixels in the original image. And, if you
make a mistake, you can easily correct your mistake since the original
is still unchanged. Furthermore, you can use the clone tool and
the brush tool in a similar manner. A basic understanding of
dodge & burn and the clone tool is all that is necessary to
understand this lesson. This is a repeat of a January session.
Time will be given at the end of
the session for questions and answers.
Advanced Digital Photography Workshop
Thursday, March 29, 1:30 to 3:00
"Three Tutorials" presented by Al Crawford
"Making Selections Beyond the Marquee and Magic Wand"
by Machelle Perkins. This tutorial is in the latest issue of
Rangefinder magazine. It covers the Magic Lasso, Select Color
Range, Quick Masks, selection modification, Grow, and Similar.
This tutorial will increase your ability to select portions of
your image.
"Is It a Painting or a Photograph"
by Jim DiVitale. From the latest issue of Photoshop User
magazine. Get some realistic painting effects without using
additional software or plug-ins.
"Extreme Contrast" by
Scott Kelby from the DVD "the best of Photoshop User magazine".
Scott presents a way of adding stylized contrast to an image and in the
process presents some interesting concepts that we can use.
Black & White Study Group
Friday, March 30, 9:30 to 11:00
"Kitchens and Garages" a continued discussion lead by Nancy Spear
This week we look at photographing things from the kitchen or
the garage. Turn ordinary things into great photos. As you photograph this week, think about the
ordinary. Bring
your successes and past failures to class for us all to talk
about.
Featured Website of the Week
Each week or so a website will be featured here.
Shutterbug
-- This website has something for everybody. A very large number
of tutorials in the form of "techniques". Forums, reviews,
galleries, many contests, and links to other sites are but a few of the
features of this website. Currently the website contains a short
review of Adobe Lightroom, a review of the new Nikon D40, as well as
many other reviews. The techniques (tutorials) include
"Beyond Layer Basics: They're Not Just for Composites",
"Digital Color to B&W: Five Top Ways to Convert to Gray", and
"Shoot File And Scan". In the area of Outdoor and Travel you will find
"Exploring Arches National Park",
"The Accidental Tourist", and
"The Yosemite Firefall".
And these articles just touch the beginning of this site. Explore
-- There is something for all levels of photography.
File Sizes Under Different File Formats
Should
you use camera raw, psd, tiff, jpeg, or even a new image format HD
Photo to store your images? I did a little experiment with each
of these formats to determine the size of file that each one produced.
I saved the image on the right under all of the formats. Where
applicable I saved 16 bit images as well as 8 bit images. Also
where applicable I saved the images using different compression
levels. The original image was from a Canon 30D which produces an
8.2 megapixel image. The resulting file sizes are given in the
table below.
One might well wonder why there is such a broad difference in file
sizes. At least a portion of the answer to that question is the
concept of lossy vs. lossless compression. All of these formats
are compressed somewhat. But some such as Camera Raw, PSD, TIFF,
and HD Photo use a lossless compression method. What this means
is that when files using these formats are brought back into the
computer each pixel is just like it was when the file was saved.
Not one pixel was lost -- hence the format is lossless. What this
means to the user is that the file can be save then reopened as many
times as you wish without losing any of the quality of the image.
But it also means that the resulting size of the image file is larger
than with lossy methods.
On the other hand, JPEG and some settings on HD Photo uses a lossy
compression method that allows a greater degree of compression by
combining pixels that are "almost" the same. And each of these
two methods allows for different quality settings. The higher
quality settings have a tighter definition of what "almost" is and
results in fewer pixels being combined. And also results in
larger files. Under any quality, but especially the lower quality
settings, repeated saving and reloading a file will result in a
significant lowering of the quality of an image. But low quality
settings are very good for displaying an image on a computer
screen. For example, the image above was saved using a low
quality setting for jpeg. But for printing and for storing you
will want a higher quality setting.
Another major factor that goes into the file size is the number of bits
per pixel. For every camera, even point-and-shoots, the image is
a 12 bit image. And since the camera raw format is actually a
monochrome format, this is 12 bits (1.5 bytes) per pixel. Without
compression this would be a little over 12 megabytes for my Canon 30D
camera. Compression gets it down to less than 8 megabytes.
But for an 8 bit color image that is actually 8 bits for each of the
three colors (red, green, and blue) that becomes 24 bits (3 bytes) per
pixel. So my 8.2 megapixel image becomes 24.6 megabytes.
And the PSD format is very close to that. But to get even more
quality many people move up to 16 bit color. And this is 16 bits
per color or 48 bits (6 bytes) per pixel. And my 8.2 mp
image becomes a 49.2 megabyte file which, again, is about what it is in
the PSD format.
But if you notice by the chart you can get very good quality JPEG 8 bit
images for about 4.5 megabytes in a file, about 20% of the uncompressed
file. And 10% of the uncompressed 16 bit file. And that is
pretty much what your printer will print.
On the new HD Photo format:
Microsoft has announced a new compression format called HD Photo that
is claimed to be of higher quality than other formats. Ron Stein
sent me the following link where you can get more information about
this new format. Click here for more information.
I downloaded the plugin for photoshop and tried it. The filesizes
are listed in the table below. It is not at this time ready for
prime time. I started to wonder when the lowest quality got me a
file size of one third the size of the best jpeg. But I found out
why. The colors on the resulting file were wildly off. The
sky turned green and purple in places. And it also would not save
the Photoshop layers. But it probably will be better when the
real thing comes out. It currently is out only in a beta version.
Al
File Format
|
16 bit images
|
8 bit images
|
Camera Raw (12 bit image)
|
7,866 KB
|
n.a.
|
PSD, no layers
|
47, 195 KB
|
23, 799 KB
|
PSD, layers
|
87, 140 KB
|
48, 099 KB
|
TIFF, no compression
|
55,980 KB
|
32,000 KB
|
TIFF, LZW
|
66,199 KB
|
23,980 KB
|
TIFF, ZIP
|
50,469 KB
|
20,408 KB
|
TIFF, ZIP, Layers
|
136,929 KB
|
56,483 KB
|
JPEG, High quality (10)
|
n.a.
|
4,470 KB
|
JPEG, Medium quality (5)
|
n.a.
|
1,350 KB
|
JPEG, Low quality (3)
|
n.a.
|
954 KB
|
JPEG, Very low quality (1)
|
n.a.
|
681 KB
|
HD Photo, lossless
|
36,842 KB
|
13,539 KB
|
HD Photo, High quality
|
26,469 KB
|
5,877 KB
|
HD, Photo, Medium quality
|
12,743 KB
|
1,395 KB
|
HD, Photo, Low quality
|
2,691 KB
|
203 KB
|