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3 Dec 2021 - Podcast #771 - (22:36)
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Regardless of your opinion of masks for people, photographers will appreciate the masking improvements Exposure Software has added to version X7. There are other worthwhile updates, too, and I'll start with them.
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Let's start with the fact that Exposure still functions as a plug-in for Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. That's no surprise because the company, then known as Alien Skin, began creating plug-ins for Photoshop in 1993. With the advent of Lightroom, which is now called Lightroom Classic, Adobe began mimicking some of Alien Skin's features. Alien Skin gave Exposure features for organizing photos as a standalone application, but continues the option to run it as a plug-in.
This could be important for someone who has tens of thousands of images in Lightroom Classic even though Exposure X7 can read information from files that have been modified by the Adobe product. Even so, someone who has worked out specific workflows over the years with Adobe applications may prefer to keep those workflows while still using Exposure's features.
Those who choose to run Exposure X7 as the primary photo organization and editing tool will also find an option to send a photo that's open in Exposure to Photoshop for further modification. There is no option to send an image from Exposure to Lightroom Classic, nor should there be.
When Exposure starts for the first time, it examines your computer. If the graphics processing unit (GPU) is adequate, most of the graphics processing can be off-loaded from the CPU for faster overall operation.
Exposure has a lot of panels that hold tools that are designed for specific operations. These are arranged into four workspaces: Defaults (every tool is present), Culling, Editing, and Retouching.
Culling displays the smallest number of tools because during the culling phase, you'll be examining images, comparing them, and deciding which ones you want to work with; but you won't be doing any cropping, color correction, or styling. Then you'll move on to the Editing workspace to make basic changes and then to the specialized Retouching workspace for final modifications. Tools and image displays can be distributed to secondary monitors.
Those who need specialized workspaces with a different selection or arrangement of tools can quickly create and name one.
Exposure doesn't create a catalog. This makes the process of switching between editing mode and image review mode as easy as pressing the Escape key during edits and double-clicking a thumbnail image to open it in edit mode. But it also means that Exposure must create sidecar files with information that is mostly not human readable except for information about the camera and lens used to create the image at the top of the sidecar file and Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) data at the end of the file. All of the information about edits applied to the image is unreadable by humans. Adobe's catalog files are also not human readable, so this isn't a disadvantage, but the sidecar files are saved in an Exposure Software directory below the directory that contains your images. It's important, if you move an image to a new location on the disk drive that the sidecar file is moved, too. Sidecar files have the same name as the image and an ".exposurex7" extension.
Exposure X7 is easy to work with and I'll cover some of the basic editing techniques before getting to the new headliner feature, advanced masking. So I'll start with a photo that I took last winter around dawn. I leaned out of a second floor window to take the photo with a Sony RX100 Mark 6 camera. This camera includes annoyances that shouldn't be present: The sensor is surprisingly noisy, more so even than the sensor in my Android phone, and there's a serious vignetting problem. The noise is virtually impossible to see on the image I've included here, but the vignetting is clearly present.
Exposure X7 has camera and lens definitions for a large number of cameras, so the corrections can be made automatically. For lens and camera combinations that Exposure doesn't know about, the user can make corrections manually. So now the image is square and the vignette is gone, but I'd still like to improve the exposure and color.
It's a near-dawn image, so I don't want to lighten the photo so much that it looks like it was taken in full daylight, but I would like to open the shadows a bit and change the color cast to a more natural slight blue. I also made changes to noise reduction, sharpening, and tone curve settings.
The final image will never win any awards, but it wasn't supposed to. It's just a wintertime snapshot showing everyday life in Ohio.
Exposure's crop and transform interface includes composition guides to help users fit images to specific formats. As with all other modifications, cropping is non-destructive and the user can always go back to the full image as it came from the camera.
Cropping is the oldest method photographers have used to eliminate unwanted objects from a frame. A photograph that includes an unwanted object near the edge can simply be cropped to eliminate that object.
Crops can be free-form or limited to certain ratios such as 8x10 for desk frames, 16x9 to match high-definition TV screens, square, , golden spiral, golden triangle, golden ratio, and diagonal. Golden ratio, for example, is also known as the golden mean or golden section. It's less narrow than 16x9 and more narrow than 8x10. Some artists and architects consider the golden mean to be aesthetically more pleasing than the other ratios. But the proper crop for a given image depends on the content, so the various "standard" ratios are offered only as suggestions.
The spot healing brush is intended to eliminate small objects — a pimple on a subject's face or a beer can floating down a stream — but sometimes it works well for larger imperfections.
I had a photo from a park near where I live. The image showed people standing on a dock and walking or biking on a trail, but there were also two people with chairs and a dog near the edge of the water. They tended to be the focal point of the image, and that's not what I wanted. Cropping would have eliminated more of the background than I wanted to lose, so I tried the spot healing brush, expecting utter failure.
Surprise! It's not perfect and additional cloning would be essential to get the result I was looking for, but the modification was far better than I expected it to be. So the lesson here is this: Even if you think something won't work, it might be worth giving it a try.
Other photo editing applications have attempted to replicate Exposure's film looks, but Exposure has been developing and perfecting these looks for 15 years, so there's little question that Exposure is the leader. I played a little game with a photograph I made with a film camera in 1975 when my wife and I visited the Yankee Peddler Festival in northern Ohio. That was the festival's third year and it's still running annually in Canal Fulton.
Starting in January, I've scanned approximately 4000 old film negatives. Several images from the Yankee Peddler Festival depicted costumed Revolutionary War soldiers firing their muskets. Photography didn't exist until the 1800s, but I wondered what it might have looked like if cameras had existed in the 1700s. I used a lot of Exposure's tools.
I started by cropping closer because there was an unwanted object near the left edge. Then adjusted the black point, overall exposure, highlights, and whites. When the color image was as good as I could make it, I switched to black and white mode and then applied film looks. I didn't care for cyanotype. Calotype looked better and calotype-sepia was better still. Then I added vignetting to darken the corners and — DONE!
When I posted the image to Facebook, I described it this way: "I don't suppose you'd believe that my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather took this picture of Revolutionary War soldiers. It could be true, except that photography hadn't yet been invented."
Perhaps it's needless to say, but the image generated some amusing comments
Maybe you wondered when I'd get back to the biggest new feature in Exposure X7. Well, here it is: Improved masking. Exposure allows multiple layers and multiple masks. The combination is quite powerful, but that's not what's new. What's new is improved ways to create masks. Masks make it possible to apply modifications to specific areas of images. Most photo editing programs offer circular (or radial) masks, linear masks, paint-on masks, and some form of automatic masking that's based on a combination of color and brightness — and sometimes artificial intelligence is involved.
A new polygon selection tool accelerates masking by allowing photo editors to draw a rough border around the object. The software then detects the edges and creates its best-guess mask, which is surprising accurate. The selection can be fine-tuned using any combination of other masking tools.
The additional masking tools include markers to add or subtract from polygon masks. Markers are point selectors that have circular boundaries. Besides being used to modify polygon selections, markers can be used by themselves to create masks by clicking or drawing. Clicks create specific mask components and drawing generates a mask with a series of overlapping points. Sometimes a linear or radial mask gives the best starting point.
Of course, there's more.
Whether used as a plug-in or standalone, Exposure X7 has a lot going for itExposure is no longer just about film looks, and hasn't been for a long time. Whether used as a standalone application or as part of a Lightroom Classic and Photoshop workflow, Exposure X7 is a winner. A fully-functional 30-day trial is available from the Exposure website. New users will pay $129 and owners of previous versions can upgrade for $89. If you purchased Exposure X6 on or after 15 July 2021, the update is free.
The cat rating scale ranges from 0 cats (worst) to
5 cats (best).
I use one of my favorite applications many times every day even though I hardly ever open it. Macro Express by Insight Software allows me to perform repetitive, and sometimes complex actions, with just a few keystrokes.
Macro Express is one of four programs from Insight Software and most of my needs could be served currently by the least expensive one, ShortKeys, which replaces characters the user types with up to 3000 other characters. At its most basic, Macro Express replaces one set of keystrokes with another -- but it can do far more.
The functions I use the most are date and time related. I put date stamps on many documents and I want the date and time to be right, formatted properly, and without misspelling. So I've created a series of macros that retrieve the system date and time and then type it for me. I preface the trigger codes with an indicator that tells Macro Express to translate the next set of keys:
All of the time information uses a 24-hour clock.
Numerous characters can be created by using Alt and the numeric keypad on a Windows computer, but I have trouble remembering that the degree symbol, for example, is Alt-0176. Instead of having to look it up every time I need it, I defined a macro that's triggered when Macro Express notices that I've typed two periods (..) followed by the letters "deg". The dual periods are the prefix. So typing 65° is easy. I've also created macros for cents (¢), copyright (©), cubed (³), division (÷), squared (²), subscript 2 (₂), trademark (™), and registered trademark (®).
In an earlier time, Macro Expressed served well to automate complex computer management tasks that required numerous steps with a variety of applications and utilities. Because of that, Macro Express has been on every Windows computer I've used since sometime in the late 1990s.
Although I don't use it very much any more, I once wrote a macro that was triggered by the word "greets". After being triggered, the macro determined what day it is (Monday through Friday) and whether the time is before noon or after noon. It was limited to weekdays and work hours because I used it at the office.
I had used Google's translate function to create messages in several languages and the macro had ten possible responses, from Monday morning through Friday afternoon. Because I was typing this text on 10 November 2021 at 14:23:35, the computer's response to "greets" would be "Happy Wednesday afternoon! Beatus diei Mercurii! Laimingas Treciadienio popiete! Maligayang Miyerkules ng hapon! Pozik asteazken arratsaldean!"
That's an absurd way to use a program, but co-workers who didn't find the process annoying seemed to be amused. Macro Express Pro can work with the Windows clipboard, minimize and restore windows, create dialog boxes for responses from users, open folders in the file explorer, read and write files, use file transfer protocol to place or get files, type text, change the status of keyboard keys, perform relatively complex programmatic logic, manipulate the mouse, play audio or video files, manipulate the Registry, perform system functions such as restarting the computer, make branching decisions based on factors such as the value of variables or the passage of time, select an application based on several factors, modify the size or position of windows, and a lot more.
Insight Software offers ShortKeys, Keyboard Express, Macro Express, and Macro Express Pro at prices ranging from $35 to $70.
If you'd like to try one of the programs, download a 30-day trial version. I'm a big believer in automating anything that I need to repeat regularly. Macros standardize and goof-proof these activities. You'll find additional details on the Insight Software website.
Vivaldi was one of the best known composers of the Baroque era, but there's also a web browser named Vivaldi. I've been using it for a few months, and I'm frequently surprised by its ability to be configured so the browser works exactly the way I want it to.
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Take tabs for example. Most browsers put tabs along the top edge. Vivaldi does that, but they can also be placed on the left or right side of the screen or at the bottom. I like having tabs on the left because that provides more space for displaying the name. But Vivaldi's developers have also added Accordion tabs that can be used to group related tabs under a single tab location.
Previously Vivaldi had added a translation tool, email client, calendar, and RSS feed reader. Version 4.1 added command chains, which is essentially an included macro function within the browser. Users can chain together any of Vivaldi's more than 200 browser commands and execute them in a sequence using a single shortcut. Some actions are already defined including "Open Link in Current Tab" and "Open Link in New Window", but users can create their own by clicking the plus button and selecting actions from drop-down menus. Once the command chain has been saved, the user can run it by pressing F2 and typing the name of the command.
Read more about the updates on Vivaldi's blog.
The plan was for a new company called Lordstown Motors to manufacture electric trucks in a plant that GM shuttered several years ago. That's not going to happen, but there's still hope for the plant.
Lordstown Motors has sold the 6.2-million-square-foot factory to Foxconn. Foxconn is a Taiwan-based manufacturer that makes IPhones for Apple. The $230 million transaction should be complete in the first quarter of 2022. Foxconn says it will Lordstown Motors as part of a joint venture to design and build commercial trucks for three years. Lordstown will retain its electric motor production and batter module lines.
Having been accused of illegal business practices, Lordstown Motors is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice.
Adobe grows by building new applications and also by acquiring businesses that have developed tools that the company feels will be beneficial to its product line. The most recent acquisition, announced formally at last month's Max conference, is Frame.io.
Frame.io is a cloud-based video collaboration platform that fits well with Adobe's video editing applications — Premiere Pro, After Effects, and even Photoshop. The goal is to accelerate the process of creating and delivering video presentations. The company already has more than one million users on its cloud-based video production systems. Adding Frame.io allows Adobe to expand beyond computer-based video editing.
Adobe notes the "skyrocketing demand for video" as a primary reason for the acquisition, and says today's video review and approval processes are "disjointed across multiple channels, leading to inefficient, time-intensive workflows." Adding cloud-first tools to enhance collaboration is seen as a way to allow "every stakeholder to effectively contribute to the creative process with the appropriate controls, feedback mechanisms, and security."
Apple introduced the IPod in late October, 2001, and started selling them in November. The slogan for the first version was "1000 songs in your pocket". Today's smart phones can hold considerably more selections, along with a library of books and thousands of photos.
So 1000 selections doesn't seem like much these days, but by 2001 standards, it was huge. Apple sold more than 400 million IPods and the device fundamentally changed the way we listen to music. Instead of buying albums, we now buy individual selections. Instead of investing in high-end audio gear, we play lossy MP3 files and listen on computer speakers. It's a question of convenience over quality.
But with larger storage devices, we can store music in lossless or near-lossless formats like Apple's AAC and the open-source FLAC format. Oh, and Apple is still selling IPods — just one model now, the IPod Touch that looks a lot like a smart phone and includes a camera. Prices range from $200 for a 32GB device to $400 for a 256GB IPod.