Listen to the Podcast
06 Oct 2019 - Podcast #663 - (19:35)
It's Like NPR on the Web
If you find the information TechByter Worldwide provides useful or interesting, please consider a contribution.
If you find the information TechByter Worldwide provides useful or interesting, please consider a contribution.
Tasks that once were limited to professional photographers and serious amateurs are now commonplace and available to everyone. You can stick with basics such as cropping or you can go much further. Nearly every photo needs to be edited when it comes out of the camera.
Nearly all digital cameras come with an application by the manufacturer so that the user can make basic edits. For those who want more control, Adobe's various Photoshop applications are a good choice and many of the developers who once made plug-ins for Adobe's applications are now making photo manipulation programs that can be used as plug-ins or as standalone applications.
It's the rare photo that needs no additional work. So rare, that I don't recall ever seeing one. Maybe the image needs to be cropped or straightened, perhaps the color is not quite what you want it to be, or maybe the lens introduced some distortion that you'd like to eliminate. There are applications for these tasks. The simple fact is that whatever comes out of the camera can be improved.
This isn't something that's a result of digital photo editing. It's just a lot more democratic now because in the old days photographers needed darkrooms and they had to spend years developing techniques that allowed them to improve the image on the film negative. Most of them spent more time manipulating images than they did creating images with their cameras. Some even wrote entire books about their processes. Now anybody can improve the photos that come out of the camera.
These programs provide, at the very least, a full range of capabilities that darkroom photographers had with film and many of them go far beyond anything that any film photographer would ever have been capable of.
The Adobe products — Lightroom, Lighroom Classic, Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Bridge — are popular because they pack a lot of processing power and capabilities into a package that costs $10 per month.
Standalone applications such as OnOne Photo Raw, Affinity Photo, Aurora HDR, Exposure, and others offer their own unique capabilities, philosophies, and procedures. The question that often asked is "Which one is best?" and there's no good answer just as there is no good answer to "Which one is best?" when applied to cameras, automobiles, or vacation destinations.
They're all the right choice for somebody at some time. So as much as I'd like to say one specific application is the best, I can't. What I can say is that if you want to create the best photos possible, you need a photo editing application.
Here's an example. I was in Bellefontaine where the Logan County courthouse reopened this year after several years of repairs and remodeling. A storm with 80 mph winds severely damaged the 142-year-old building in 2012. Instead of tearing the building down, a decision was made to repair it. For the next 7 years, the building was closed.
Now it's open again and I took several pictures of the renovated building, inside and out. The image on the left has several problems. It's not straight, shadowed areas are muddy, and the image has an overall blue cast. As a snapshot, it's fine; but it's not something that I would want to share with anyone.
Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.
Nearly any photo editing application could be used to make the changes shown in the image on the right. The image was first rotated and cropped. Then, using the clock face
to identify white for color balance, the application corrected the color. The overall exposure was increased slightly, highlights were darkened a bit, and shadows were boosted. I also increased the intensity of the sky a bit.
The cropping cut off part of the flag on top of the flagpole and, had I been planning for this, I would have allowed more room. Even so, the modified image is substantially better than the original and it clearly illustrates how just a few modifications can turn a substandard image into something useful.
Regardless of which application you use, take a little extra time with your photos and improve them. Sometimes just a few moments' work can turn an average image into something spectacular.
This week's main article is all about why you should take time to improve your photographs but you might be wondering how to do that. I have the advantage of having had a darkroom when I was in high school, being the operator of a photo studio for a decade, knowing enough about software to figure out how applications work. If you don't have those advantages, there's a shortcut.
Lynda.com is now part of LinkedIn and LinkedIn would like me to refer to it as LinkedIn Learning. Anyone who wants to improve their photography skills should take a look, but the problem is that it costs $30 per month (or $18 per month if you sign up for a year). In addition to some excellent photography instructors, Lynda.com (I still like the old name) has hundreds of courses in dozens of other topic areas. But is it worth $30 per month? Maybe. What if somebody offered free access?
Your local library might make it possible for you to view the entire Lynda.com catalog for free and if your local library doesn't offer access, it's possible that a library in your state does and that it will issue you a library card. My local library offers access and so does the Columbus Metropolitan Library, the Cleveland Public Library, and the Cincicnnati Library. All of these libraries make their services available to all Ohio residents. It's likely that a library system in your state also does this.
Have I mentioned recently how important libraries are?
Richard Harrington, Chris Orwig, Ben Long, Derrick Story, Tim Grey, Justin Reznick, Seán Duggan, Jan Kabili, Deke McClelland, Julieanne Kost, Robbie Carman, Taz Tally, Chris Meyer, Trish Meyer, Aaron F. Ross, Lee Lanier, Rob Garrott, Bert Monroy, Garrick Chow, Bryan O'Neil Hughes, David Hobby, Steve Simon, and Steve Wright all have a dozen or more lessons on photography — some with far more than a dozen.
You can watch these programs online, download practice files (depending on what your library has licensed), and learn how to become a better photographer. Chris Orwig is a college instructor, Ben Long is a San Francisco photographer, Jan Kabili is a writer, Deke McClelland is an author and designer, and Julieanne Kost is a specialist in Adobe products.
A good summary of Lynda.com's past and present is available on Wikipedia: LinkedIn Learning was founded as Lynda.com in 1995 in Ojai, California, as online support for the books and classes of Lynda Weinman, a special effects animator and multimedia professor who founded a digital arts school with her husband, artist Bruce Heavin. In 2002, the company began offering courses online. By 2004, there were 100 courses, and in 2008, the company began producing and publishing documentaries on creative leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs. In 2015, LinkedIn announced its intention to buy Lynda.com in a deal valued at $1.5 billion. Then in 2016, Microsoft announced that it would acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. In 2017, Lynda.com was renamed LinkedIn Learning and now users who have no LinkedIn account are being told to migrate to a LinkedIn account in order to use the service.
LinkedIn's Premium membership costs $30 per month, but a free option is also available. Before being acquired by LinkedIn, Lynda.com had two subscription levels, $25 and $35 per month. The higher priced option allowed users to download practice files. Some libraries license what is constructively the lower-priced option and users don't have access to the practice files. These are less important for people who are attempting to master a photographic technique than for someone who is trying to learn C++ programming. LinkedIn free memberships provide no access to the training programs, but $30 per month for a Premium LinkedIn membership includes the programs without additional charge.
Presumably, when a LinkedIn membership is required for library access to the training programs, the free account will be sufficient. At $30 per month, subscribers have access to thousands of training programs, but it's an even better value for those who log in for free from home through their local library.
Google's MVNO cellular telephone service might be exactly what you're looking for and, depending on how much data you use, it can be one of the best values available. MVNO stands for "mobile virtual network operator" and I'll explain that in a moment.
Google Fi began in 2015, but only for Nexus 6 smartphones. As a virtual network operator, Google purchased services from Sprint and T-Mobile, then added US Cellular in 2016. Although the service requires special phones that can use each of the three systems, more that a dozen additional phones are certified for Google Fi and several others may work.
Becuase the service buys voice and data packages in bulk from Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular, the phones are designed to select the network with the best signal in any given location.
The pricing is attractive. A single user pays $20 per month for unlimited talk and texting and $10 per gigabyte of data used. You have to sign up for one gigabyte, but if you don't use all the data, the monthly data charge is pro-rated. Because I'm almost always near a Wi-Fi hotspot, my monthly bill is usually around $25. Add another user to your account for $15 per month and you share the $10 worth of data.
For heavy data users, Google Fi caps the data charge at $60 (6GB), so you have a defacto "unlimited" plan. Note that if you exceed 15GB of data per month, the speed is reduced to 256Kbps or you can choose to pay for higher speed access. Also, the "unlimited" plan kicks in at 10GB when more than one user is on the account.
On Pixel 3 phones (and later) there's no need for a SIM card, but you can add one if you ever need to use the phone on some other network.
The Pixel 3 has been available for about a year. You'll find a larger screen, a better camera, and Google's Titan Security in these phones. In May of this year, the Pixel 3a and 3a XL models were released. Those with the XL designation have larger screens and usually more memory. Artificial intelligence attempts to block spam calls and an option to screen calls is a welcome addition to the current Android operating system. The Call Screen feature transcribes the caller's response to a challence so the user can decide whether to answer the call or mark the number as one to be rejected.
Google Fi uses Wi-Fi when possible. The phone's "Wi-Fi assistant" is constantly on the lookout for open Wi-Fi networks and will automatically connect to ones that are in Google's database of networks that are known to be reliable. The connections automatically use a virtual private network and data sent or received via Wi-Fi doesn't count against the system's monthly data limit.
Those who travel a lot will see another benefit from phones that work with Google's virtual network: You can use the service in nearly 200 countries around without additional cost for data use or texting. Phone calls are charged at a flat rate of 20¢ per minute or use Wi-Fi to place calls back to the US for virtually no cost. Data used outside the United States is priced exacly the same as in the US.
Google recently began to allow any unlocked phone to be added to Google-Fi, but the best results will still come from a Pixel device. Starting with the Pixel 3, the phones use SIM circuitry instead of a SIM card. Other "designed for Fi" phones still need a SIM, but they offer all the benefits of a Pixel phone. If you choose to use an unlocked phone that's not designed for Google Fi, you'll lose some features. Unlocked phones can't switch from one network to another, but Google Fi now supports IPhones.
I added my wife to the Google Fi account a few months ago and arranged to port our home landline number to her mobile phone. That turned out to be needlessly complex. Google Fi has an online form to start the porting process, but it asks for a personal identification number (PIN). Landlines don't have PINs. I spent more than 90 minutes on several calls and online chat sessions trying to work that out. These days most people probably port numbers from other cellular services, not from landlines, and it seemed that the customer service representatives and their supervisors (and the supervisors' supervisors) had never dealt with anyone who wanted to port an AT&T landline to Google Fi.
The solution turned out to be quite simple, which made it all the more annoying: I could write anything in the text box that requested the PIN because Google Fi would know that the landline has no PIN. Why nobody told the support staff that small but important bit of information is a mystery. This information should have been included on the form used to start the port process, but wasn't. So a process that should have taken no more than 5 minutes consumed nearly two hours over several days.
Once the process is underway, porting a number from another cellular service will take less than an hour. Porting from a landline provider will be complete in a few days and you'll briefly be able to make outbound calls on both the mobile phone and the landline.
Google Fi isn't the only mobile virtual network operator, but it may be the largest. Wikipedia has what appears to be a comprehensive list of MVNOs including many that you've probably never heard of and some that you have. For example: Consumer Cellular, Credo Mobile, NetZero, Straight Talk, Tracfone, Walmart, Xfinity, and Zing.
If you're thinking about ditching your current mobile service for another, Google Fi is worth checking out.