site- Boy of Blue

unbelievable. just. unbelievable.

Wayne Martin Belger's site here.

and thank you isa.

unbelievable.

"The creation of a camera comes from my desire to relate to a subject. ...All to witness and be a tool of the horrors of creation and the beauty of decay presented by the author light and time."

friday diversion: revolution

More about PSD formats...

This, via Nate, via Xee. Any questions?

NSArray *layers=nil;
BOOL hasalpha=NO;

uint32 layerlen=[fh readUInt32BE];
off_t maskoffs=[fh offsetInFile]+layerlen;

if(layerlen>0) layers=[XeePhotoshopLayerParser parseLayersFromHandle:fh parentImage:self alphaFlag:&hasalpha];

[fh seekToFileOffset:maskoffs];
uint32 masklen=[fh readUInt32BE];
[fh skipBytes:masklen];

while([fh offsetInFile]+12<=imageoffs)
{
uint32 sign=[fh readUInt32BE];
uint32 marker=[fh readUInt32BE];
uint32 chunklen=[fh readUInt32BE];
off_t nextchunk=[fh offsetInFile]+((chunklen+3)&~3);
// At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
// PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
// insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
// worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
// that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
// If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different
// places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those
// too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide
// that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement
// should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned,
// or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.
// Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD,
// of course, uses all three, and more.
// Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
// your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
// birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but
// at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people
// responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
// Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this,
// I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending
// me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or
// other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so
// difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I
// was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done
// so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.
// Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
// them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
//
// PSD is not my favourite file format.

if(sign!='8BIM') break; // sanity check

switch(marker)
{
case 'Lr16':
layers=[XeePhotoshopLayerParser parseLayersFromHandle:fh parentImage:self alphaFlag:NULL];
break;

case 'Mt16':
hasalpha=YES;

How the pixels really work. No, really.

See, they always describe pixels as being like buckets, that collect light. That ain't it at all. They are photoelectric diodes, or a type of light controlled transistor, really. Nothing but an itsy-bitsy relay, actually.

What the heck is that you ask? A relay is a switch that takes a little tiny bit of current, like, maybe 12v battery power, and lets you switch a huge amount of current, like big floodlights or something. A transistor is a semi-conductor that does the same thing. Really just a valve. Now a pixel, being as it's a photoelectric diode, controls the voltage going through the switch, (or valve, really), depending on how much light is hitting it. Lots of light? Lots of volts going through.

If the pixel was just gathering light and making it into volts, like in the bucket analogy, you wouldn't get a lot out of it. No sensitivity, like ISO 1 or something. Using a photoelectric diode, you can pump current through it, and are only limited by the leakage. Think garden hoses here. Big valve, (pixel), gets big hose, lots of water, no leaks. Little KMart valve is gonna leak, so you're limited in what you're gonna get out of it.

Here's my dumb illustration. Kara wouldn't let me put it in the book. Whatever. (It's copyrighted, so make your own.)

Facebook- FAN me!

The Pipeline Series Facebook page here!

site- TED- did it again.

I'm starting to get addicted to this site...

The New Baryta Papers

Bartya papers, harkening back to some of the glorious silver papers of the darkroom days, have very recently joined the inkjet printing arsenal. It’s big news.

Baryta is really simply another type of mordant (a substance that binds a dye or pigment to a a fabric or fiber material), it’s a barium-sulfate compound, again, much like a clay, bonded to a fibre-based paper substrate. It gives you a very high reflectance, thus a very bright white, without introducing optical whiteners. It’s a particularly helpful trick when it’s used on a flat, matte surface, either on a cellulose (standard wood-chip based), or on a 100% rag (generally referred to as acid-free, archival) paper, to enhance the contrast and dMax of the more absorbent paper bases. (The gloss papers have less of a problem with that, since the coating and even sometimes the base, often a plastic, performs much of the same function as the mordanting.)

Some current examples of Baryta papers are Epson Exhibition Fiber, Ilford Galerie Gold Fiber Silk, Hahnemüle Fine Art Glossy, and Harman Glossy Fiber Base AL, released in 2007. Although that’s quite a while, now, in digital years (very similar to dog years- one digital year equals about 5 years of normal technological development) the papers have been getting great reviews, and gaining a slow, but steady acceptance. Back to Mr. Jensen, the subject of the post where he mentions violins is precisely that- with the release of these new papers, he feel confident that he can produce a print of acceptably high standards, (his), using these new papers.

I have little doubt that you’ll see, within a fairly short time, a much deeper selection of Baryta papers available from many more vendors, including the printer manufacturers as well.

Harman Papers, by the way, is one of the places that Ilford put it's resources after they shut down their traditional darkroom papers line.

site- The Wayback Machine

Henry, this is for you...

Every time I try to remember this site, I ask Henry. I finally decided to post it here so I could find it. Truth be told, That's why I started this blog in the first place, so somebody else (blogger) could keep track of all my miscellaneous ramblings.

Anyway, the Internet Archive is a pretty amazing tool. I first used it just as a curiosity- checking my old sites, and I found some pretty funny reminders of why you should hire a website designer... but I also found some photos that I had up, a long time ago, that I'd completely forgotten. Just in case you think you own the life of your images...

A journalist friend of mine has used it for years to check backgrounds and uncover scams. That, certainly, is where it gets interesting. I was checking into a site that, the more I looked at it, the fishier it seemed. Checked them out on the Wayback Machine, and what do you know... in 1997 the site was just about the cheesiest porn site you'd care to see, if that's what you like to see. (Does the name "Awesome 3-D" ring any bells?) Pretty much shot this guy's creds full of holes, from where I sit...

Anyway, take a look, and have some fun. The Internets has spawned, among a lot of other things, a wave of the biggest sleazeballs the world has to offer, but it's nice to know they still leave their own characteristic sleazy trail...

Oh, and by the way, there's also whois.net. Want to know who owns a site? Put the domain name into whois.com and you'll see all the public information available. If you have a domain name registered and having your address out there for all to see bothers you, you need to request, and generally pay for, a Privacy feature.

The Wayback Machine, here, and WhoIs.net, here.

Book Updates: Black and White Pipeline available for preorder on Amazon!

...check it here!

blog: THE ZEN OF FILM vs. DIGITAL GRATIFICATION

Zen, art and pixels.

Oh, to those people who complain about the LCD being like crack, and screwing up your creative process? I have one word for you. Menu>Image Review>OFF.

OK, four words.

(you KNOW i love your punk ass, doug, right?)

Outback

This post, (referenced in Black and White Pipeline), is just about the most intense pixel-peeping I've come across, thanks to Giorgio Trucco. He's talking about the Epson 3800 but a great discussion of Epson Advanced B/W, RIPs, profiling for B/W, and stuff I don't even know what he's talking about.

Via Outback Photo.

I'm going back to bed.

Apple Store- MOM I'm on the TEEVEE

yeah, old news, but I just found it again.

site- Lou Lesko, "Knowing when to flush..."

Back atcha baby!

Lou Lesko and a GREAT post about being an artist and getting rejected, HERE.

Contact Sheets in Bridge CS4

Making Contact Sheets in CS4 has moved from the Photoshop "Automate" menu to the "Output" menu in Bridge. When you select "PDF" you get the usual Contact Sheet decisions- rows, columns, file names, etc, along with new stuff like headers and footers. Refresh the Preview to see the results.



When you have it nice, go to the very bottom. There, hidden in the "Watermark" section is the Save button. Snap. Done.

site- LensWork Special Editions

I mentioned this briefly before, but I think it deserves some more explanation.

In this post, Brooks Jensen mentions a wonderful description of the importance of paper in the final print:

"I once interviewed Oliver Gagliani and we talked about the intangible nature of paper qualities. He compared the selection of photo paper to the judgment of a fine violin. The way to determine which violin is best is not based on reputation, not based on price, not based on materials, but based on the instrument’s ability to carry over distance.

Oliver explained it this way: If you take a number of violins outdoors into a field and have someone play them while you listen from a distance, some violins just sound better. Up close they might look the same, and from a close range they might even sound the same. But the better violins have the ability to “carry” so much farther.

Oliver simply applied this thinking to photographic papers, too. Sure, he would measure densities, he would look at all the other characteristics of a paper, but his true test was to look at papers from a distance and see which one “carried” the farthest. He was absolutely right. Some papers, seen from across the room, simply look better even though they may have exactly the same densities, similar paper base, the same shade of white, comparable surface textures, etc.

There is a kind of ethereal presence that some papers have that is discernable if you really look and look carefully, which of course, we photographers do."

...he's discussing this in the context of his testing of a new generation of inkjet papers: Epson Exhibition Fiber, Ilford Galerie Gold Fiber Silk, Hahnemüle Fine Art Glossy, and Harman Glossy Fiber Base AL.

See the whole post here.

astoundingly stupid statements

The forums- great stuff:

"Bottom line on the digital cameras…..the sensors are made to get the best results in a variety of lighting situations. The goal is to have a camera that will give “good” results, even if the operator hasn’t got a clue. Harsh mid-day sun? No problem?

Don’t know what you are doing? No problem either. One thing that we can learn from fine art photographers is that they are moving as far away from digital as possible…."

Digital Silver printing

Eric Luden, at Digital Silver Imaging, uses a Durst Theta to print digital files to silver paper. It's really as simple as that. Big laser, shooting file to light-sensitive paper, processed in chemicals... traditional black and white chemicals. Just like a Durst Lambda, but just B/W.

Full details on the available papers and sizes are at his site, and if you just like silver, then I'd encourage you to pay him a visit, but if you want to see what the difference is between a silver print and an inkjet print, read on.

I sent Eric a pretty normal file and simply asked him to print it fairly "straight". He did no adjustment, and applied no sharpening, and printed it at 8"x10". I then took the same file and printed it on the Epson R2400, on the Ultra-Premium gloss paper, using Advanced Black and White at 1440. To take a closer look at them, I just slapped them into a really crappy little Epson scanner, and scanned at the hardware maximum of 600 "dpi".

Here's what I saw, at just 200%.

The inkjet print-



The silver print-



The Epson print, at just a 600 dpi scan and 200% shows significant banding, and dots of ink. I can even, in the original TIFF, see color fringing in the scan... effectively, noise, generated by the inevitable introduction of color to the inks, to neutralize the tones. The print appears sharper, but in reality it's simply the result of the dot-pitch giving the appearance of edges. (Remember how Tri-X makes a slightly blurry shot look OK, because of the grain? Same thing...)

The silver print is, fundamentally, a continuous tone print. End of story, and you can see it very clearly in these samples.



This got me going... the highlight transitions are one place where you can clearly see a break- a distinct line where you get ink dots and not, even with the eye at normal viewing distances. Above is a pretty startling comparison (silver on left, inkjet on right). The silver print has a smooth transition, the inkjet a clear line. (You can even see the color aliasing in this one.)

Does this matter? Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself. I've seen some comparisons done, notably Tyler Boley's work, here, doing ultra-high resolution scans of similar prints, and as thorough as to print several samples, using RIPS and quad-tone inks... My doubts were that such a high-resolution, detailed look, "pixel-peeping" to the extreme, probably were, well, too extreme. If you can't actually see a difference, then it's academic.

The point of my exercise here was to keep well within the bounds of reason. Can you see the difference with the naked eye? Do the prints feel different?

My conclusion? Silver rules.

Thanks Eric!

testing TwitterFeed

...posts to twitter from here. Embracing the inner TWIT.

TwitterFeed here.

...becoming a twit

my twittering here. puh.