Jeffrey's Lightroom Geoencoding Plugin

New high end point & shoots and almost all smartphones have Global Positioning System (GPS) built into them. They allow you to incorporate latitude & longitude of the location where the photo taken into the Exchangeable image file format (Exif) header of the photo. But more costly and sophisticated Digital SLR’s lack this simple tool. How will you incorporate this information is subject of my short tutorial. I will make it as simple as possible with bare minimal tools which I have incorporated in my workflow. I hope this information will be useful for all who want to include GPS info into their photos.

I make it a point to display Exchangeable image file format (Exif) on all my photos. I consider it a duty of a every responsible photographer to inform his viewer what parameters he has used while taking the particular photograph. I have seen many discussions on the secrecy of techniques which are not supposed to revealed to anybody.

I come from a Medical profession which also was filled with secrecy. Latin & Greek words doctors were used is mainly to either to confuse or hide facts from the common man . Prescriptions were totally unreadable except to the chemist and the doctor himself. All this has changed now. Internet and information revolution has given most of this hidden information to common man. This has been boon as well as bane to common man. On one hand he is bombarded with good information which is equally mixed with quackery as well marketing. He will be in a dilemma how to differentiate one another. Let us leave medical profession to guide a path through this mess.

Photography also suffered from the same irony, with digital camera everybody has become photographer. The basic knowledge as well as foundation of photography is lacking. I feel openness is the way forward in spreading awareness about photography. When I started this blog I had lot of trouble trying to display EXIF info as well getting that info into the photograph. WordPress engine I am using was not really had any effective tools which could read and display EXIF information in the way I wanted. I had to hack with several plugins to produce satisfactory result. GPS is one tool I relied upon to add location information into the image. Canon as opposed to Nikon has been neglecting the need for a GPS with DSLR’s.

Qstarz BT-Q1000XT GPS Travel Recorder

First you need to get a GPS tool. There are some dedicated GPS taggers which sit on the hot shoe of the camera and add the location information directly onto the photo. Nikon camera has quite a few solution. But since they tie you up with a particular software and hardware combination, I don’t recommend it. Get general GPS logger which log at regular interval GPS info onto a log file. After searching many alternatives I chose Qstarz BT-Q1000XT. It is a GPS Travel Recorder also known as a data logger (or track logger). Q1000XT is capable of recording up to 40 days, which is very reliable and powerful for long trip arrangement. You can log up to 400,000 waypoints as you like. I ordered it from a GPS shop in Delhi called Groovy GPS Store who specialize in selling GPS. On their website only older model (Qstarz BT-Q1000X) is listed. But the Newer model (Qstarz BT-Q1000XT) is what I got from them.

Your GPS position at each point in time (intervals vary e.g. every 5 second or so, as set by the device) is recorded as a track point. Digital cameras also time-stamp your images, so the two time stamps can be compared. Wherever the time stamps match (the clocks in both devices should be synchronized), the associated GPS coordinates can be linked to a particular photo. You can use any GPS logger, even your smartphone, so far as they have logging function and can produce a log in a format called GPX. GPX (the GPS Exchange Format) is a light-weight XML data format for the interchange of GPS data (waypoints, routes, and tracks) between applications and Web services on the Internet.

Here is an example track log of my Pelagic Bird watching Trip in GPX format (opens in a text editor). You can also check the map it renders on Google map below.

Click here for the map

The actual “matching” of track point to photo is done by the software. Before we look at accessing the logs and photo-matching, let’s take a quick look at the alternative, manual method of geo-location. You don’t need to buy a dedicated photo tracker to use the automatic method; you in-car navigation GPS device may suffice (with appropriate software), as could a GPS trekking product. What matters is the ability to record track logs.

Before getting this data logger I was using manual method of adding GPS coordinates. I used to locate my location manually on Google earth using my memory of the area where and when I took photo, and incorporating that into the photograph. It was not very accurate but an approximate way of GPS tagging your photo.

There are plenty of software, some come with the GPS device and few 3rd party GPS tools. I will not go through all of them as I have little experience using them except during early days of evaluating which was good for my purpose. Many of them failed to add GPS info into the Raw files I shoot (not directly into Raw file but xmp side car file). My workflow revolved around Adobe Light room & Photoshop. So I wanted to use a plugin to Adobe Light room which I can use easily on number of photos.

Because the Adobe Lightroom 3 doesn’t support geoencoding natively, you need to use a plugin, Jeffrey’s “GPS-Support” Geoencoding Plugin for Lightroom. It is released as donatioware. using this plugin you can geoencode your photos either using GPX log file from your GPS Logger, or by pinpointing your location on the Google Earth manually. You can also manually enter latitude & Longitude. It can batch process huge number of photos without a sweat.

This has been my workflow incorporating Geoencdng photos. So all you need is this plugin, GPS logger and Adobe Lightroom. When we export photos out of Adobe Lightroom they will be tagged with the GPS info. So next time you want to know location of any of my photo just expand it to the large size and have a look at the Exif info along with location on Google map.

If you want to learn further on geoencoding, check the following links.

• Adobe Lightroom 3 and geotagging: step by step how-to
• Jeffrey Friedl’s GPS Plugin
• GPS Photo GeoTagging I – Two Simple Solutions
• Using GPS Data To Geotag Photos: The Basics
• An ABC of geotagging photos on the Mac

Macro Stitching a Moth - Final Result

This panorama of Oleander Hawk-moth is by using 5 macro photos. In this tutorial I will use Adobe Photoshop CS4 which has greatly improved panorama tools, to produce this macro panorama. This version makes stitching odd photos so much easier than any other program I know of. If you notice these photos are not sequential like the normal pano shots we take. I took this way just to check the capability of Adobe Photoshop CS4 in identifying various segments. You will notice first two shots are of right and left wing, then three shots are of the body from top to bottom. This sort of mixed arrangement stumped most stitching applications out there.

My earlier favorite was PTGUI. When I tried it with these photos it failed miserably to recognize control points. The resulting panorama was a horrible mess. Adobe Photoshop CS4 excels in the aspect of recognition of various segments in the photos.

I was trying to photograph without tripod that day. My Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro was not able to get the full moth at 1:1 magnification. I used 20mm Kenko extension tube along with 100 mm and photographed the moth in 5 pieces with the intention of stitching together later.

I had to make sure that background was as clutter less as possible. This was easy as it was quite dark outside and I was using my Canon MT-24EX macro twin light flash so that background would be dark.

Next thing I wanted to make sure that there will be at least 20% overlap of parts in each photo, otherwise Photoshop will find it difficult to stitch them together.

Macro Stiching a Moth - Select Files

Once I imported the photos to Adobe Lightroom I selected these 5 shots and chose Edit in Photoshop as panorama.

Macro Stitching a Moth - Send to Photoshop

After churning out a bit, Photoshop CS4 produced this beautiful image of the Oleander moth all stitched together.

Macro Stitching a Moth - Panorama on Photoshop

I flattened all the layers and filled the transparent area with black around the moth. I also cropped and rotated to get this final result in Photoshop. So what we have at the end is around 100 mega pixel image of moth which is perfectly stitched and exposure blended. You can see this image at the beginning of this post.

If only I had tripod handy that day, I would have used macro focusing rail and could have taken several shots using canon MP-E 65mm 1x-5x macro and produced 1000 mega pixel monster photo ha ha, I was just joking

Anyway it was fun to try this panorama like stitching using macro that too with shots which were hand held. Photoshop CS4 has really improved its method of Photomerge and produces seamless stitching with excellent results. I hope this small tutorial helps many macro shooters out there who find their subject too big to fit in one frame

The other day, I found a Long horned beetle clinging to the siding of my house. I grabbed my trusty Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro lens and my Feisol tripod. As I could not get all the parts of this beetle in focus I remembered the auto-align and auto-blend trick I had seen in the new Adobe Photoshop CS4. Previously I had tried focus stacking using freeware combinez5 which produced fantastic results. On the web I could get quite a few video tutorials like this and this, explaining their technique but there was dearth of written tutorials with pictures. Probably it is easier nowadays to create a video tutorial and post. So here is my humble effort to show you how I did this. I recommend that you download the latest update of Adobe Photoshop CS4 11.0.1 which updates and improves the quality of the results of Auto-Blend Layers.

I shot this beetle which was sitting on a white dining mat. As the depth field at 1:1 macro setting was too shallow. I took 10 sequential shots maintaining same exposure settings on a tripod but just altering the point of focus little by little. I usually start from the nearest point which I try to be in sharp focus then try little further until I reach the last shot which has the farthest point in focus. Best method to do this is fix the focus on the lens and move the camera little by little forward and keep taking pictures of different focus points. This avoids the geometric distortion all together. Make sure while doing so you make sure that the exposure, speed as well as focus all are locked. This needs a real steady hand or a focusing rail connected to the tripod head.

If you don’t have them then you can try getting the shots by fixing the camera on the tripod and altering focus of the lens by adjusting manual focus ring. Auto focus is a big NO for this technique. Now with Adobe Photoshop CS4 you can easily correct the geometric distortion introduced by adjusting manual focus.

Export from Lightroom to Layers in Photoshop

My work flow involves Adobe Lightroom 2.3 which manages all my files on my hard disk. Once you import the files from your card, select all the files which need to be blended and choose the option of edit in > Open as Layers in Photoshop. The step is same if you are using Bridge instead of Lightroom. Now Lightroom exports all the files to Photoshop into a single Photoshop document with multiple layers. Each layer consists of a single image. Here I have 10 images of this beetle consisting of various areas of  sharp focus resulting in 10 layers in the Photoshop document.

Select All Layers in Photoshop

In Photoshop choose Select > All Layers.

Choose Auto-Align Layers

Then choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers. The Auto-Align Layers dialog box opens.

Auto-Align Layer Dialog Box

Note: The Auto-Align Layers dialog box has a default Lens Correction setting of Geometric Distortion. This setting gives you the option of compensating for geometric distortion. In addition, the default Projection setting is Auto. When Auto is selected, Photoshop finds and compensates for certain kinds of lenses based on meta data information.

After Auto-Aligning Layers

Now click OK to view the Auto-Aligned composition. Now all the images are perfectly aligned. You might notice the edges of the picture seems warped this is because Adobe Photoshop has now corrected the geometric distortion.

Auto-Blend Layers

With all Layers still selected choose Edit > Auto-Blend Layers.

Auto-Blend Layers Dialog Box

Select Stack Images from the Auto-Blend dialog box. Leave Seamless Tones And Colors selected.
Click OK.

If we had not done auto-align before doing the auto-blend then the geometric distortion would be there in these images. And that gives a strange halo effect near the edge of the beetle. So it is always advisable to run auto-align before auto-blend.

Auto-Blend Layers Progress

When you turn on the layers, you can see that the images now contain deep focus with all the points in focus.

Cropping in Photoshop

Now its time to crop the edge so that main image looks clean. It also gets rid of the warped edges. Now its time to save the image and get back to Adobe Lightroom to further process if necessary. I found many a times the resulting image needs some exposure correction which can be easily done in Adobe Lightroom. Now here is the final image as exported from Adobe Lightroom.

Hope this tutorial was helpful, please ask me any steps if you have found difficult to follow. Please enter your valuable comments so that I can improve on my tutorial.