Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5

I use Adobe Lightroom as my main image management software. Right from transfer of images from the card reader to the final point of printing over 90% of the workflow involves Adobe Lightroom. Now I hardly need to move to any other image manipulation tool including Photoshop or my latest favorite GIMP. These programs are needed only if the image in question requires a large amount of cloning, layers or other stuff which does not exist in Lightroom. So when Adobe announced its Lightroom 5 Public Beta I was really excited. Here are the features in that beta version. For a beta version it was pretty stable and had very few problems. Three days back Adobe announced that Lightroom 5 has just been released in the final form. Here’s the download link you’ll need. As with previous versions, it is available as a perpetual license from Adobe and other resellers (full price $149, upgrade $79), as well as being included in the new Creative Cloud.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5

So what’s new? Most of the new features were same as that of LR 5.0 beta. If you haven’t tried the beta, here’s my 5.0 beta blog post with a detailed list of the changes. There have been around 400 bug fixes in this Final version, including a fix for Upright which wasn’t straightening horizons properly. Feathering on the Radial Filter has been doubled.

Important for Lightroom 5 enhancements include:

• Additional Smart Collection Criteria – Size, Bit Depth, Number of Color Channels, Color Profile, Smart Preview status & PNG file type
• Advanced Healing Brush – You can now paint in spot removal.
• Aspect Slide – in Lens Corrections – You can now compensate for lens corrections changing the shape of things – or slim people!
• Book enhancements – Improved Text, Page Numbers and User Pages
• Direction – You can add a direction to EXIF data (North, South, East, West, North – West, South – West, North – East and South East)
• DNG Validation – You can now validate Adobe generated DNG files (but not camera generated ones)
• Full Screen Mode – Shortcut ‘F’ now gives a true full screen mode. Old mode is accessed via ‘Shift F’
• HiDPI support – Windows support for 150% and 200% resolution screens
• Import Focus – You can now choose to have Lightroom stay where you are, rather than jumping to Current/Previous Import during an Import.
• LAB Color Readout – Right click on the Histogram and choose ‘Show LAB Color Values’
• Lock Zoom Position – You can now have Lightroom remember the last part of a photo you zoomed into (View menu).
• New Grid Overlays – You can now add overlays and customize the grid size and opacity
• PNG Support – Manage PNG files. Transparency is shown in white and not as checkerboard. Files can be edited as PSD or TIFF in Photoshop
• Process Version warning change – The Warning to indicate an older Process Version has moved to the Histogram and changed to a lightening bolt.
• Radial Filter – A radial version of the graduated filter. More control for Vignettes, etc
• Saved Location improvements – photos can be dragged to Saved Locations and vice versa in Map
• Set as Target Collection added to the New Collection dialog box
• Shift Q to toggle between Clone and Heal in Spot Removal
• Slideshow with videos – Videos can be added to a slideshow
• Smart Previews – Lightweight files that allow offline files to be developed
• Soft Proof Before/After – Before After now shows the current photo and the soft proofed version
• Upright – A new automatic lens perspective and straightening tool
• Visualize Spots – A photo inverting features that makes it easier to see spots.

As with all Lightroom updates, there are many camera and lens profile additions including the Hasselblad H5D-60, Olympus PEN E-P5, Olympus PEN E-PL6, Panasonic LUMIX DMC-G6, Panasonic LUMIX DMC-LF1, Ricoh GR, and preliminary support for the Phase One IQ260. DNG Converter 8.1 & Adobe Camera Raw 8.1 is also now available for Photoshop CS6, and although it doesn’t have a UI for the new features, it does render them correctly when you use Edit in Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5

So with all these goodies in LR5 what is the catch and why am I calling it a hot potato? Adobe recently announced that they will no longer be selling perpetual license for the Creative Suite. That’s now been rebranded as Creative Cloud, and will be available by subscription only. Technology, and life in general, are moving faster and faster, and 18-24 month upgrade cycles just don’t work that well anymore. Adobe wants to focus on providing changing technology as fast as they can was Adobe’s argument for such a model. Nevertheless Lightroom will continue to ship as a standalone product by electronic download or as a boxed copy, as well as being available in the Creative Cloud. I do not have a Creative cloud subscription. I had purchased a box license for Lightroom 4 and I do not want to get into a monthly subscription model of creative cloud. For me boxed subscription suits better. Even though Final version released by Adobe has over 400 bugs squashed from LR5 beta, it still has few major bugs. Having a creative cloud like setup allows Adobe to release a considerably buggy software as a final release and as the day progresses it can squash these bugs and upload latest version on creative cloud. I feel that laxity is the one which made Adobe to release what should have been Lightroom 5 Beta 2 version itself as a final release.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5

Adobe Lightroom 5 final version has too many bugs to my liking. Known Issues So far in Adobe Lightroom 5 are

• Fullscreen Mode does not show the next image in your selection. This occurs only when you have selected a series of images before entering Fullscreen mode.
• Video playback is not currently supported in Fullscreen mode.
• There is no error message informing that offline photos and videos are not exported to slideshows.
• The slide after a video clip is often not shown. This only occurs when using the Manual Slideshow feature.
• Custom slideshow templates will default to 480×270 on export. This only impacts custom slideshow templates created in previous versions of Lightroom.
• The slideshow appears as a black screen occasionally. This only occurs when a video file is chosen as the first slide.
• Star ratings cannot be applied while previewing or viewing a Slideshow.
• Deleting a book in the Book Module may occasionally cause another book to disappear.
• XMP metadata changes are not automatically written to file when the original file is offline.
• Canon cameras are not detected when using Tethered Capture in Windows 8. This only occurs on Windows 8.
• Offline photos go missing from Lightroom when moving folder of images to a different volume.
• GPS metadata on videos created on an Apple iPhone is not imported.
• Basic metadata is not imported with video files. This only occurs when imported directly from the camera. As a workaround, please copy the files from camera to your harddrive and then import into Lightroom.
• When utilizing the “Merge to HDR” feature with Photoshop, the resulting HDR image contains metadata from the last selected photo.
• Photos adjusted using Process Version 2003 incorrectly display a “Post Crop Vignette: Paint Overlay” History step. Selecting a subsequent History State can reset existing settings that follow that state in the History panel. This reset cannot be undone, effectively deleting any settings that have been applied after the selected History State. This only occurs with images adjusted in PV2003.
• Images exported at less than 1/3 of their original size may not retain Output Sharpening and Noise Reduction settings.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5

So what is my verdict. Every software has bugs, and it’s a balance among many things what gets addressed and when is more important. These bugs may or may not be showstoppers for many. The new features introduced in Lightroom 5 (improved spot removal/radial filters/automated perspective correction) are highly indispensable for many and may makes it difficult for them to go back to Lightroom 4.4. Still I find production level stability is difficult with Lightroom 5.0 in its present form. I will wait for Lightroom 5.1 to fully embrace Lightroom 5. AS of now I am maintaining 2 catalogs one for my Lightroom 4.4 and other for my 5.0 as both versions of Lightroom work simultaneously on same machine. If you like to learn about Lightroom 5.0 here is a nice compilation of resources available on the net –
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2013/06/lr5-resources.html

Dundubia species Cicada

As soon as I saw an exuvia of cicada on one of the tree trunks in our garden, I knew we were in for an ear splitting noise of cicadas. Peak of the summer every year I get a lots of these cicadas in our garden. Exuviae is the remains of an exoskeleton that are left after insect, crustacean or arachnid have moulted. Within a week my surrounding was buzzing with cicada sounds. The cicada I had seen that day belongs to the Dundubia species. Its name is derived from Sanskrit word Dundubi which means drum. The first two photographs here are results of stacking several closeup photos taken using Canon EOS 5D Mark III and Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM to get increased depth of field without flash. I wanted to use natural light and get slow shutter speed photos using tripod and then stack them together. Even with f/11 the depth of field I had obtained in an individual picture was very shallow. This is the result of being so close to the subject. I have used Zerene Stacker program to stack them. Other three pictures are normal closeups.

Perfect Camouflage

Cicadas are insects in the order Hemiptera, suborder Auchenorrhyncha.Their eyes are prominent, though not especially large, and set wide apart on the anterior lateral corners of the frons. The wings are well-developed, with conspicuous veins; in some species the wing membranes are wholly transparent, whereas in many others the proximal parts of the wings are clouded or opaque and some have no significantly clear areas on their wings at all. About 2,500 species of cicada have been described, and many remain to be described. Cicadas live in temperate-to-tropical climates where they are among the most-widely recognized of all insects, mainly due to their large size and unique sound. Cicadas are related to leafhoppers and spittlebugs. Cicadas differ from related groups in having three ocelli (simple eyes) located between the two large compound eyes. Other auchenorrhynchous Hemiptera have only two ocelli.

Male cicadas have loud noisemakers called “tymbals” on the sides of the abdominal base. Their “singing” is not the stridulation (where one structure is rubbed against another) of many other familiar sound-producing insects like crickets: the tymbals are regions of the exoskeleton that are modified to form a complex membrane with thin, membranous portions and thickened “ribs”. Contracting the internal tymbal muscles produces a clicking sound as the tymbals buckle inwards. As these muscles relax, the tymbals return to their original position producing another click. The interior of the male abdomen is substantially hollow to amplify the resonance of the sound. A cicada rapidly vibrates these membranes, and enlarged chambers derived from the tracheae make its body serve as a resonance chamber, greatly amplifying the sound. The cicada modulates the sound by positioning its abdomen toward or away from the substrate. Additionally, each species has its own distinctive “song”.

Closeup of head

Although only males produce the cicadas’ distinctive sound, both sexes have tympana, which are membranous structures used to detect sounds and thus the cicadas’ equivalent of ears. Males can disable their own tympana while calling. Some cicadas produce sounds up to 120 dB among the loudest of all insect-produced sounds. It is technically loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in humans, should the cicada sing just outside the listener’s ear. Conversely, some small species have songs so high in pitch that the noise is inaudible to humans. Species have different mating songs to ensure they attract the appropriate mate. It can be difficult to determine from which direction(s) a cicada song is coming, because the low pitch carries well and because it may, in fact, be coming from many directions at once, as cicadas in various trees may make noise in unison. In addition to the mating song, many species also have a distinct distress call, usually a somewhat broken and erratic sound emitted when an individual is seized. A number of species also have a courtship song, which is often a quieter call and is produced after a female has been drawn by the calling song.

Cicada exuviae

Cicada nymphs differ from the immatures of other Auchenorrhyncha in having fossorial forelegs (modified for digging). Female cicadas generally deposit their eggs in twigs or branches of woody host plants, or on grasses. Soon after hatching, nymphs drop to the ground and burrow into the soil where they feed on roots. Like froghoppers, cicadas feed mostly on plant xylem. The subterranean nymphs develop relatively slowly, taking from a few years to as long as 13 or 17 years in the periodical cicadas of North America (genus Magicicada). South Asian species are not that periodical and are seen almost once a year. Mature nymphs emerge from the ground and molt to adults, often leaving their nymphal exuviae on tree trunks. Cicadas are benign to humans under normal circumstances and do not bite or sting in a true sense, but may mistake a person’s arm or other part of their body for a tree or plant limb and attempt to feed. Cicadas have a long proboscis, under their head, which they insert into plant stems in order to feed on sap. You can notice that proboscis in my photos it feeds this Indian Almond Tree. It can be painful if they attempt to pierce a person’s skin with it, but it is unlikely to cause other harm. It is unlikely to be a defensive reaction and is a rare occurrence. It usually only happens when they are allowed to rest on a person’s body for an extended amount of time. Cicadas can cause damage to several cultivated crops, shrubs, and trees, mainly in the form of scarring left on tree branches while the females lay their eggs deep in branches.

The adult insect, known as an imago, is 2 to 5 centimeters in total length in most species, although the largest, Pomponia (Megapomponia) imperatoria, has a head-body length of about 7 centimeters and its wingspan is 18 to 20 centimeters. Cicadas have prominent eyes set wide apart on the sides of the head, short antennae protruding between or in front of the eyes, and membranous front wings. Some species of desert cicadas such as Diceroprocta apache are unusual among insects in that they have been shown to cool themselves by evaporative cooling, analogous to sweating in mammals. When their temperature rises above about 39°C they suck excess sap from the food plants and extrude the excess water through pores in the tergum, at a modest cost in energy. Such a rapid loss of water can only be sustained by feeding on water rich xylem sap.

Dutch angle on cicada

Most cicadas go through a life cycle that lasts from two to five years. Some species have much longer life cycles, such as the North American genus, Magicicada, which has a number of distinct “broods” that go through either a 17-year or, in some parts of the world, a 13-year life cycle. These long life cycles perhaps developed as a response to predators, such as the cicada killer wasp and praying mantis. A predator with a shorter life cycle of at least two years could not reliably prey upon the cicadas. Cicadas are commonly eaten by birds, and sometimes by squirrels, but Massospora cicadina a fungal disease is the biggest enemy of cicadas. Another known predator is the cicada killer wasp. Cicada killer wasp (Exeirus lateritius), which stings and stuns cicadas high in the trees, making them drop to the ground where the cicada-hunter mounts and carries them, pushing with its hind legs, sometimes over a distance of a hundred meters, until they can be shoved down into its burrow, where the numb cicada is placed onto one of many shelves in a ‘catacomb’, to form the food-stock for the wasp grub that grows out of the egg deposited there.In eastern Australia, the native freshwater fish Australian bass are keen predators of cicadas that crash-land on the surface of streams. Some species of cicada also have an unusual defense mechanism to protect themselves from predation, known as predator satiation: because so many emerge at once, the number of cicadas in any given area exceeds the amount predators can eat; all available predators are thus satiated, and the remaining cicadas can breed in peace.

Sunset at 300mm Focal Length

Here is a sunset I witnessed near the Software Technology Park, Derebail Mangalore. Sun was setting over the Mangalore landscape of coconut grooves, evening haze along with smoke. You can see quite a few black kites flying in the sky. I wanted to show you how the same sunset looks when shot using three different lenses of various focal lengths. I used my Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L II IS USM, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM and Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM Lens on Canon EOS 5D Mark III body to take these photos. The purpose of my shooting was to show how the change of focal lengths affect the way we see the photos. I was creating a series of pictures for my upcoming workshop on Fundamentals of Photography. As you can see each focal length produces interesting as well as different look for the same sunset.

Sunset at 300mm Focal Length

Understanding camera lenses can help add more creative control to digital photography. Choosing the right lens for the task can become a complex trade-off between cost, size, weight, lens speed and image quality. The focal length of a lens determines its angle of view, and thus also how much the subject will be magnified for a given photographic position. Wide angle lenses have short focal lengths, while telephoto lenses have longer corresponding focal lengths. Many will say that focal length also determines the perspective of an image, but strictly speaking, perspective only changes with one’s location relative to their subject. If one tries to fill the frame with the same subjects using both a wide angle and telephoto lens, then perspective does indeed change, because one is forced to move closer or further from their subject. For these scenarios only, the wide angle lens exaggerates or stretches perspective, whereas the telephoto lens compresses or flattens perspective. In this test I was stationary and took the photograph from the same position using 3 different lenses, so this perspective difference is not visible.

Sunset at 100mm Focal Length

Other factors may also be influenced by lens focal length. Telephoto lenses are more susceptible to camera shake since small hand movements become magnified, similar to the shakiness experience while trying to look through binoculars. Wide angle lenses are generally more resistant to flare, in part because the designers assume that the sun is more likely to be within the frame. A final consideration is that medium and telephoto lenses generally yield better optical quality for similar price ranges. A wide angle lens can be a powerful tool for exaggerating depth and relative size in a photo. However, it’s also one of the most difficult types of lenses to learn how to use.

A common hurdle with wide angle lenses is strong variation in the intensity of light across an image. Using an ordinary exposure, uneven light can make some parts of the image over-exposed, while also leaving other parts underexposed — even though our eye would have adjusted to this changing brightness as we looked in different directions. One therefore needs to take extra care when determining the desired exposure. Telephoto lenses enlarge distant subjects. They are also a powerful tool for affecting the look of your subject. They can normalize the size and distance difference between near and far objects, and can make the depth of field appear more shallow.

Sunset at 100mm Focal Length

When you shoot a Sunset shot one of the important thing to remember is to not to over expose the sky. If you follow the camera’s meter reading it will over expose, as the bright sun inside the frame, will fool the meter. Under-exposure, will allow you to get vivid colors of the setting sun. I usually use spot metering mode and select a location about 30 degrees off the sun and take meter reading. You can also set your camera for negative EV compensation of 1 to 2 stops, depending on the situation, if you don’t want to try spot metering and will be able to get great results.

Sunset at 35mm Focal Length

The most interesting sunsets are those where light clouds and haze are in the sky. The haze will make a very dramatic sky. The sunlight coming through the clouds will create deep reds and purples, which will help you create a strong scene. Silhouettes are created when we back light the subject, thus creating strong under exposure.

Sunsets are ideal place to experiment with silhouettes. Turn the auto focus off and shift to manual focus as the sensor will not be able to focus properly on the sky which lacks contrast. Else you will end up with a blurred picture. If you have a foreground object in your photo, focus on that than focusing infinity. Do not belive the infinity marking on the lens. It is variable for different temperature conditions.

Sunset at 35mm Focal Length

Do not leave as soon as the sun sets as most people do. After the sun sets, and the light is low, the long exposure can give you lots of interesting opportunities. Setting long exposure, when the sea is in the frame, will create a smooth/misty surface, depending on the amount of waves. Sometimes, when the sun has just set, the light is still too strong, you can use an ND filter to reduce the light brightness.

Best composition will be to place the sun at one of the sides of the frame, rather than at the center, this will help you to create more interest in the frame. Also, try and place some other interesting objects in the frame, other than the sun. Finally an important warning – Do not look directly at the sun, no matter what! Not with your bare eyes, and not through the eyepiece, it can cause irreversible damage to your eyes.