Photo phun

I’m strictly an amateur when it comes to photography, though I still like to take my share of snapshots. Sometimes I’m lucky. As a holiday break I decided to play around with a hodge-podge of images – some from holiday times or winter locations and others not.

These were processed through Lightroom and Photoshop as well as the photo plug-in versions of Tiffen Dfx and Magic Bullet Looks. On some of these I was going for rich images, some for effects and others a pseudo painterly look. Although these were all still photos, the same looks and processes are applicable to video color grading and stylizing effects.

Click on any image to see an enlarged view and to scroll through a filmstrip view of all. After the New Year I’ll be back with more standard film and video fare.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Cool Tools for Spring

Time to catch up on a few items that will improve your editing and make your daily tasks easier.

(Click on the images below for an enlarged view.)

DiscCatalogMaker

Editors are increasingly using inexpensive hard drives as a method of archiving. But how do you keep track of where your files are? As I started to look around, I realized I already owned a very functional utility, simply because I had Roxio’s Toast. One of the extra applications installed and in the folder is DiscCatalogMaker RE. It automatically catalogs all of the discs you’ve ever burned, but it can also be used to index hard drives. Simply start a new catalog and have it scan a target drive. This file can be saved and printed. It’s also searchable, so you can easily find files without mounting the drive. Once you add/delete/change files on the drive, just rescan it and re-save the updated file.

Red Giant Software Magic Bullet PhotoLooks

If you like Magic Bullet Looks and you do a lot of work with stills, then check out PhotoLooks. I touched on this in my Stocking Stuffers post, but it’s worth another mention. Like Looks for video applications, PhotoLooks runs in an external LooksBuilderPL application that is optimized for stills. PhotoLooks works as a plug-in for Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom and uses the same chain of tools as the video version. As you can see in this Alamo photo, it’s quite easy to create very stylized still photos in post.

Digital Film Tools PhotoCopy

At first glance, PhotoCopy might seem like it’s doing the same functions as Magic Bullet Looks, but that would be wrong. Like Looks, the plug-in launches a separate, customized interface, but that’s where the similarities end.  DFT PhotoCopy uses representative samples from movies, paintings, photographs, etc. to apply color correction and texture to your target photo or video clips.

These can work like color grading presets – or in the case of paintings – apply brush strokes and texture to the image. This isn’t just a simple overlay. PhotoCopy does an analysis of the target image, in order to intelligently apply the right effect or colors to the appropriate positions within the shot. These can be further adjusted by slider controls in the interface. PhotoCopy runs in Final Cut Pro, Media Composer, After Effects, Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom; however, different licenses must be purchased for the motion and the still photo versions of the tool.

Nick Shaw ALEXA Look-Up Tables (LUTs)

As editors start to wrap their heads around post workflows for the ARRI ALEXA camera, the biggest issue seems to be the best method of converting the Log-C profile recorded by the camera into nice-looking Rec. 709 images for the client. Log-C images are viewable, but appear flat and washed out prior to grading. UK-based post consultant Nick Shaw has developed a set of FCP plug-ins designed to convert Log-C images into Rec. 709. They include a few extra features, like saturation boost and timecode/text burn-in fields. For now, these are considered to be “preview” quality, since the LUTs truncate the bit-depth to an 8-bit scale. The current paid version supports the camera’s 3.0 firmware.

Luca Visual FX

I’ve covered the Luca Visual FX tools a few times in my color grading posts. Their plug-ins are offered as part of the FxFactory product line. In addition to plug-ins, Luca Visual FX also offers a set of Film FX and Light Transitions. They have recently released the Film FX 2.0 package. Unlike the plug-ins, these tools are a set of QuickTime movie files using the Animation codec with an alpha channel. As such, they can be used with nearly any NLE or motion graphics application and aren’t dependent on a specific plug-in architecture. In the case of Final Cut or Media Composer, simply place a clip on an upper track and the rest is done. In the previous post, I covered some ways in which these can be used with different fills or by combining several clips for a custom effect. The Film FX 2.0 package adds more grunge to the options in Film FX 1.0 for new and dynamic effects.

Noise Industries FxFactory Manifesto

A better Final Cut Pro title tool and it’s free. What’s not to like? Noise Industries launched Manifesto – a lightweight, yet powerful title generator – as part of the FxFactory toolset. It installs as two generator plug-ins – one for static titles and another for rolls and crawls. Text composition is very easy and the plug-in draws on many of the built-in frameworks of Mac OSX, such as fonts, colors and spell-checking. You can also import existing RTF files and Manifesto will use the formatting of that file.

Focusrite Scarlett

Another tool I touched on in the Stocking Stuffers post was the Focusrite Scarlett software filters suite. This set of four audio plug-ins (EQ, compressor, gate, reverb) installs in VST/AU and RTAS formats. On a Mac, they’ll work in most DAWs, as well as Media Composer (5, 5.5) and Final Cut Pro (sliders only – no custom GUI). These filters are designed to look and sound like their classic hardware brethren. In general, they run best in Avid Pro Tools, Adobe Audition and Apple Soundtrack Pro and provide a reasonably-priced filter package for those who want to go beyond the healthy set of options already included with these applications. Focusrite also sells other software plug-in products, including Midnight, Forte, Guitar FX and more.

Noise Industries FxFactory Photo Montage

Noise Industries just introduced a great new tool for assembling photographic montage sequences, called simply Photo Montage. There are several of these on the market, but the Noise Industries version is easy to use and offers plenty of presets, as well as many ways to customize the style, moves, transitions and other attributes. Like most of their plug-ins, Photo Montage is GPU-accelerated and works in Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, Motion and After Effects. It supports most common image formats including JPEG, PNG and PSD, so getting started is as easy as applying one of the generator effects, choosing the source image folder and applying a preset. From there, you can re-order the stills, alter the animation parameters and so on.

Digital Heaven Final Print 2.0

Many of Digital Heaven’s tools are designed around improving the editor’s efficiency and taking some of the drudgery out of non-editorial tasks. Often editors have to supply reports to clients, marker list print outs and more. A helpful application is Final Print, which has just been updated to version 2.0. You can start with XML files or directly load projects from FCP7. Final Print 2.0 will not only display various marker lists (which can be filtered by color), but also sequence lists complete with thumbnails and timecode. If you need to generate various reports out of Final Cut Pro – such as the director’s notes from marker text – Final Print 2 provides one of the best and most attractive ways to do that.

©2011 Oliver Peters

Adobe Lightroom for video editors

Video editors and producers frequently have to deal with photos. This is especially true of many documentaries where a large portion of the story consists of still images. No motion film or video was available to preserve that given event. This requires a large collection of possible shots to be organized and prepared for the edit. The latter task often involves color correction, painting out defects (tears, dirt, scratches, etc.) and scaling/cropping to match the video format of the NLE.

There are plenty of tools to do these tasks and more often than not Adobe Photoshop is used. I’ve written before about Apple Aperture as a solution for this, but recently I’ve been turning more to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. Both Aperture and Lightroom are great tools to use. For me, there’s no clear winner is this debate, but you can find plenty of passionate posts around the web by photographers and photo enthusiasts who extol the pros and cons of each application. Regardless, both offer powerful tools for a video editor who has to deal with stills. Apple just released Aperture 3 and Adobe currently has Lightroom 3 in public beta. Although these add new features, the general requirements that I will discuss are fine in either app’s 2.0 version.

Comparison

Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture both work in the same general manner. You can view stills in a library or catalog, which is used as a form of asset management. You may choose to have the application handle all control of your stills and the locations where they are stored. Or, you may choose to do that organizing yourself at the finder level and then import these folders and files into the library. The application lets you work with high-res proxy files that link back to the unaltered original photos.

Changes made to these proxies are previewed by showing you a “live” update of the original at full resolution. Any alterations are only applied when a file is exported. This exported file is a copy with the adjustments “baked in”, so the original photo is always left unaltered. Obviously one key difference between the two applications is that Lightroom is a cross-platform solution, while Aperture is Mac-only. If you are on the Mac, then the choice of which to use is largely subjective for our purposes.

There are three things at the moment that appeal to me more in Lightroom than Aperture. First, I like that Adobe uses a terminology that’s consistent with the files and folders of the computer. I organize my images in folders on my hard drive. These can easily be imported into Lightroom as a folder and shown in a manner that maintains that order. Although Aperture allows essentially the same method, Apple prefers to hide the fact that you are looking at a folder on the hard drive, by organizing the photo folders according to “projects” and “albums”. Not a problem, but I just think that’s a way of dumbing things down, as well as, unnecessarily mixing metaphors for the user. The second and third items for me are that Lightroom feels like there is better dual monitor support for the way I like to work and it is already a 64-bit application.

Lightroom layout

The Lightroom user interface is divided into five basic sections, which can be accessed via tabs in the upper right. These are Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. Library is where you see your catalog of assets. You can view the layout in several ways – grid, single image and others. Locations are on tabs down the left side, images in the middle and metadata on the right for the selected image. If you have two displays, then the selected image will be full-screen on the left monitor.

Develop is where you’d adjust, correct or alter the image. Pick an image from the filmstrip below and it loads into the center pane of the right monitor at one of the various, selectable proxy sizes. The same image is full-screen on the left monitor in either a “fit to screen” or a “1:1 pixel” display. The left portion of the right screen (your main working display), includes a navigator panel, presets and history. The image adjustment tools are on tabs down the right-hand side. I won’t go into any detail, since you can find plenty of in-depth tutorials around the web that discuss how these tools work. Suffice it to say that you have a powerful toolset for primary and secondary color-correction, stylistic effects, cropping, scaling and adjustment layer masking.

Slideshow offers you tools to control playback of a selected set of images on your desktop, complete with a presentation title. Print controls layouts for printing. Web does the same for displaying image collections on the web. Web choices include Flash, HTML gallery and Adobe Airtight display engines.

For the video producer

The toolset is great for fixing or giving a “look” to images, but the video producer is going to be most interested in how this makes life easier. That’s centered in three areas: cropping, metadata and export. Develop includes a cropping tool which can be restricted to certain ratios. If you want an image to fit neatly into the 16×9 of HD or 4×3 of SD, then set the constraints and the crop you draw will maintain this ratio. The same tool also allows freeform rotation – handy if you just need to move the image a few degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise to make the horizon level or correct for a badly angled tripod.

Photo organization is achieved through Smart Collections. Images can be tagged with addition metadata, such as key words and/or ratings. Smart Collection folders can be set up accordingly, so any images with the appropriate tag will automatically be filtered and pop up in the appropriate Smart Collection. A producer trying to cull 100 selected options from 1,000 possible images can easily tag the desired shots and automatically create a Smart Collection of the selects.

Once the images have been selected, then simply export one or more images for use in your NLE. Images can be exported from Library or Develop by right-clicking the image and choosing Export. Select a range of image to get more than one. This opens the export dialogue where you can select a preset or set new parameters for target export location, file format, size and color profile. You may also rename the exported file. So, exporting a batch of JPEGs – resized to 1920×1080 and labeled by project name and sequential number – is a simple one-step process. When the images are exported, any color correction, stylistic effects and cropping will be applied to the exported images.

©2010 Oliver Peters