We all know about color temperature. From the orange-y glow from a candle, the warm light of incandescent bulbs, the cool of fluorescents, the brilliant white of sunshine, to the steel-blue light in open shade under a blue sky outside. Us humans have no trouble at all recognizing a white sheet of paper as such under any of these lighting conditions. Modern cameras are clever enough  to automatically adjust to do the same – and they do a good job of it.

There are occasions when a camera might not get the automatic adjustment right on. I was photographing food items last week under warm incandescent lights. I wanted to make sure that the “white balance” was good – that the white plates were indeed white in the photos, so I used the manual setting. Most cameras have a group of manual settings in addition to a number of automatic modes. The manual settings are typically labeled M, A, S, P, for completely Manual, Shutter speed selected, Aperture selected, and a manually definable Program mode (shown in yellow in my illustration).

In the manual modes on most cameras a variety of settings can be specified, like white balance, and the camera will remember those settings. I had done this, as I mentioned, for my “food shoot”. So now to my afternoon walk.

With my camera either on AUTO, , or “close up”, , I can take photos without much fuss. The camera takes care of the work – including setting for color temperature. On this walk there were several scenes where I wanted more depth of field so I switched to “A”, aperture preferred, and set the lens to f/11. I did not notice that on the manual setting the camera remembered the white balance setting for “incandescent”. For that setting, since there is a lack of blue light coming from lamp bulbs, the camera multiplies the amount of the blue signal many times (and also the green to a lesser extent) in order to render white objects as white in the photo. Under daylight now, with plenty of blue light, resulting photos, were, let’s say, worthy of being called “cyanotypes”. Since the camera was still compensating the exposure there was precious little information in the reds.

This much color temperature error was way more than most editors can handle. Lesser error are easily compensated for in Photo Gallery.

Picasa has a neat eyedropper control that lets you pick an item in the photo that is supposed to be white, gray, or black, and and corrects the color temperature with a single click.

As for my beyond-correction photos – why, I just turned them into “art”!

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Photosynth provides a three dimensional simulation, and Zoom.it a flat presentation that can be zoomed. Here is a demonstration of a vertical panorama in both services.

Click the images to see the expanded photo in Photosynth and Zoom.it.

Now for a quick review on how to generate a panorama for sharing in Photosynth.

There are two was of creating a Photosynth. For a smooth, three-dimensional appearing version the image is first prepared in ICE – Microsoft Image Composite Editor.

Overlapping images of the scene are loaded into ICE. The photos should overlap about a quarter or more, they can be made hand-held, ICE is pretty smart at stitching them together.   The photos must be taken from the same position in a rotating motion.

ICE assembles them and offers two “export” options. For Photosynth select “Publish to Web…” This will call the Photosynth program which then takes over and completes the task.

The second method produces a “classic” Photosynth and the overlapping photos are sent directly to the Photosynth program.

Both the Photosynth and the ICE program can be called directly from Photo Gallery. Just select the thumbnails, click the Create tab, click More Tools… and select the program. Oh, yeah, of course, you have to have these programs installed on your PC. They are free and easy to get – from the same menu in Photo Gallery, see the illustration here.

For the Zoom.it version the image is exported from ICE to the PC by selecting “Export to disk…” Note the cropping outline in ICE. The image can be cropped before exporting to the PC. That is what I have done for the demonstration image here.

Zoom.it needs an online image to work with, so just upload the large panorama to you SkyDrive and get the image URL from there for use in Zoom.it. Make sure that the upload resizing option is not set to resize the photo.

Once you have the image URL (from the address bar when View original is selected), go to zoom.it and load the URL into the entry field there.

Click the image to see the “classic” Photosynth way of showing overlapping photos.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

The SkyDrive Desktop App makes the SkyDrive look pretty much like any other folder on the computer. Updating a SkyDrive album is just a matter of dragging the photo or pictures to the folder. That can be done just as easily using SkyDrive in the browser, but with the Desktop folder not just files but folders – albums – can be copied to SkyDrive.

Of course, any subfolder can be the destination, just like copying or moving stuff around on your computer.

Like other files on a computer, the order of files inside a folder cannot be customized when using the SkyDrive desktop folder. However, using the SkyDrive in a browser provides the Rearrange option – a drag-and-drop feature.

You can arrange your SkyDrive photo gallery just the way you want, with the individual photos in just the order you like. As a “front end” or “lobby” to your gallery you need another site. I like using a photo blog for this. You can build some nice pages and have a blog post page showing the latest additions and any stories you would like to tell.

The photo blog is, of course, managed using Windows Live Writer. There is no better blogging tool. The Insert > Photo album feature can place nice link arrangements on a blog page or post. Just take a look at Silver Canvas – Gallery EXP 2. But even a single photo with a hyperlink to your album will be a fine “front end”. Let me explain that a bit more.

I use an album called Gallery EXP as one of my SkyDrive prime galleries. Inside this album are albums, folders for various topics. When a visitor gets to this album the tiles for the sub-folders show little slide shows of the contents. I think this is pretty neat. Here is a still photo of my gallery. Click the image to go to the live one.

Getting the link for the albums and photos is just a little bit complicated. For the prime gallery, sign in to your SkyDrive using the browser version. Navigate to your “prime gallery” folder. Click the little “details” icon to open the information pane on the right side. Click Sharing then click Share folder. In the next dialog click Get a link. Then click Make public. You will now see a somewhat long URL in the address box. Copy this URL and file it so you can use it in the future to provide links to your gallery. You can click the Shorten link to get a short URL. You can see my short URL for Gallery EXP when you move the pointer over the image above. You can similarly obtain URLs for any folders in your gallery.

To inform my visitors of new photos in the gallery, I like to include the picture in an update post in the blog portion of my photo blog – my “landing page” for visitors. Here is how to go about that:

Navigate to the newly added photo in SkyDrive (not in the desktop folder, this requires the browser version).

Click View original in the top taskbar. This gets you a view of the photo on a separate page. The address in the browser address field is the URL for this photo. It is rather long. Copy it and file it away. When you insert a photo in Live Writer – Insert > Picture > From the web…  this URL will allow you to source your actual photo and show it in your post.

Here is what such a post looks like:

Of course, you can see it better by clicking the image to go to that post. Be sure to click Latest in the menu bar to see the most recent posts. And don’t be shy about clicking the Gallery EXP link, it gets you to my gallery.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Thank you, dear readers, for visiting Cafe Ludwig throughout 2012.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 7,400 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 12 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

For preparing posts and pages in a fast and easy WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) manner, nothing beats using Windows Live Writer. Live Writer also offers neat gallery access via SkyDrive photo albums.

So can both be used together?

Yes, indeed – sort-of.

Unfortunately, Writer doesn’t know about WordPress slideshows or galleries and has some editing quirks. The WordPress editor doesn’t understand the intricacies of the Live Writer “Photo Album” and tries to “optimize” the code. So between the two of them it is a delicate operation to get them to play together.

You can see that WordPress slideshows and galleries can be combined with Live Writer photo albums on my Gallery EXP page at Silver Canvas.

True, in the kitchen you should never use all the spices at once, and this is probably true in building a photo gallery blog as well. But my page is an exception, of course, as I am testing the gallery features of both WordPress and Live Writer.

The pitfalls and problems

Live Writer will not find a page created in the WordPress dashboard (most of the time), so to use Live Writer with a page, the page should be started in Live Writer. Besides that, Live Writer makes a mess of the gallery code generated by the WordPress editor. Example: The WordPress code for a gallery might be:

Live Writer will replace the quote marks and the “corrected” code will be like this:

You can imagine that when WordPress again gets a hold of this, the gallery won’t look the same.

		Flowers VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Now the WordPress editor also attempts to correct and optimize code. When it gets a hold of the large set that defines the images and links of a Live Writer “Photo Album” insertion sometimes strange, and not necessarily beautiful things happen.

Especially insertions with individual thumbnails and links, like the one here, get mangled pretty badly. They get progressively more damaged on repeated use of the WordPress editor.

The strategy for getting an acceptable page or post is this: Plan ahead, minimize the use of the WordPress editor, and don’t make revisions.

Strategy and procedure

To get a post or page that combines Live Writer “Photo albums” with WordPress galleries proceed as follows:

1)  Plan ahead – Sketch out your post or page, note what photo albums and galleries you wish to include. Organize the photos for the albums and galleries.

2) Upload your SkyDrive albums – Set up the SkyDrive photo albums that you wish to include in the root of your SkyDrive. Live Writer cannot find sub-folders.

3)  Start in Live Writer – Start the page or post in Live Writer. Include all elements and text, and any simple insertions. Insert the SkyDrive photo albums and pick the album styles and other features.

Live Writer provides a nice selection of thumbnail layouts, “Album styles”.

4)  Publish to blog – If you are working on a page go ahead and publish it. Since it is new it will not be included in a customized menu. If you are working on a post, select “Post draft to blog” so it will not be published immediately.

5) Edit in WordPress dashboard – Once the page or post has been uploaded the next step is to add the WordPress features – slideshows and galleries – that are not available in Live Writer.

The WordPress Media Library is one huge shoebox with all your images. The new features that make it much more user friendly really do not yet go far enough. Selecting the photos for a gallery or slide show is easy in principle, but messy in practice. Here is why:

When you click “Add Media” you are taken to a beautiful page like this:

Pretty nice. Click a thumbnail to select it. Only problem is the identification of the thumbnails. You can’t tell which image you are dealing with until you click it. The pane on the right gives the details. Since the Media Library will be filled with many thumbnails and full images, the selection process is a bit cumbersome and time-consuming.

The procedure to get a gallery onto the page requires Create Gallery > Update Gallery > Update (page). The options for the type of gallery, Default, Tiles, Square Tiles, Circles, Slideshow, is a bit temperamental, and the interaction between columns and type – it it exists at all – is not obvious.

Re-arranging the pictures within a gallery is a quick drag-and-drop.

Still, WordPress galleries are nice. The slideshow works but the window size is not adjustable. The neatest gallery arrangement is “Tiles”. There is no control over the arrangement, but it is always pleasant.

For all galleries (but not Slideshow), clicking leads to a black-framed large image. A good way to view the pictures.

Updating the Mixed Gallery

Updating the mixed gallery can get tricky. If Live Writer is used the WordPress Galleries are messed up. If the WordPress editor is used the photo albums inserted by Live Writer may get spoiled.

Editing in WordPress editor

The WordPress galleries can be easily maintained and modified in the WordPress editor.

Clicking the Edit Gallery link in the gallery placeholder opens the Edit Gallery page which allows re-arranging, deleting or adding to the gallery, as well as changing gallery parameters. “Add to Gallery” can be done from the Media Library or by uploading. Uploading would be the preferred method – it is also a drag-and-drop process and avoids the confusion posed by the Media Library.

The only downside is that Live Writer Photo Albums might get mangled.

Updating Live Writer Photo Albums

Maintenance on the Live Writer Photo Albums is a matter of updating the corresponding SkyDrive album. That is a snap, especially when using the SkyDrive Desktop App. Just manage the folder like any other folder on the PC and let the app do the updating. Even relocating the album will not affect the operation of the blog post or page – it will continue to work just fine.

If you don’t mind the occasional update headache, combining the features offered in Windows Live Writer and the WordPress online editor can lead to some gorgeous looking photo galleries.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Relax and read about your favorite pastime, you do need to bring your own cup of coffee.

Right now a lot of sprucing up is going on. You may have noticed the updated layout and a more readable font. Other changes are coming, so please excuse the dust.

Here is a link to “Ludwig’s Gallery”

Ludwig’s Gallery

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

There was a time when panoramic pictures were laboriously assembled with straightedges and knives and sticky tape. Then came photo editing software did not do much more than help you align the edges. But all that was long ago, it is amazing what today’s tools can do. The one I reach for first is Photo Gallery. It is impressive to see how well it works.

There is a favorite barn that I like photographing under various light and in different seasons. Walking by recently, I thought I would see how wide a picture I can get with my smartphone. The 24mm equivalent wide angle was not wide enough. So I also took a shot toward each end. Before I show you my originals, here is the uncropped result from Photo Gallery.

Photo Gallery warps the images, matches and blends them together. For those who are interested in the math and science, here is some if the metadata Photo Gallery writes into the resulting image file.

What is not at all obvious from the picture above, is that the individual photos did not match in exposure. Take a look.

No corrections were made to the images before submitting them to the panorama tool in Photo Gallery. The left shot was more than a stop underexposed compared to the others. That was no problem for Photo Gallery.

In all fairness I must admit to being a big fan of Windows Photo Gallery. Enough so that I have written my second book about it.

You just might like to take a look.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

C/net has a nice overview article about what is happening:

How camera makers are getting their design groove on. 

Pop Photo has a gallery of innovations at:

Photokina 2012: The Best New Gear

Enjoy the articles and start saving your pennies!

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Smartphone Photos

Smartphones are certainly more capable than desktop computers when it comes to photos. There is a built in camera and apps for sharing via email or “in the cloud”. Enhancing and editing can be done right in the phone. The whole thing fits into a pocket and is unobtrusive in use.

Here are some thoughts on using a Windows Phone, in my case a Nokia Lumia 900.

Most built-in smartphone cameras are quite powerful and comparable in features and performance to many point-and-shoot digital cameras. Once you have taken a photo, you have a number of options for managing and sharing the picture.

In the case of the Windows Phone, the camera stores the photos in a folder in the phone called camera roll. A tile on the phone, Pictures, gets you to the photos stored on the phone as well as to the pictures on your SkyDrive. The SkyDrive pictures can be found under albums.

You can keep and enjoy your photos on your phone, of course, but you may want to share them or move them to your computer and manage and enhance them there.

As with all things electronic these days, there are several ways to accomplish any task. Moving, copying, or sharing Windows Phone photos is no exception.

Share to SkyDrive

The option to share on SkyDrive can even be set up to work automatically for every photo. The image is copied to a SkyDrive folder named Mobile uploads. If you don’t have a folder by that name, it will be created. Pictures copied to SkyDrive with this command are scaled to 718 by 518 pixels. That is less than 0.4 Mpx, less than 5% of the 8 Mpx my camera records. Bummer? Not really.

There is a reason for the reduced resolution photos being uploaded to SkyDrive. If you are not in Wi-Fi range the upload goes over the cell phone network. This tends to be costly and slow. It does get it up there right away, so if your Mobile uploads folder is shared with friends, they can see your photos right away. Note: By default the Mobile uploads folder is not shared, so if you want your friends to see that album, you must share it with them first.

Share in Email

Attaching photos to emails is the way photos have been shared by all of us for a long time. This is also pretty straightforward with the Windows Phone. Here again the pictures are scaled to a lower resolution. This has been the custom for email sharing for a long time. My Windows Phone reduces the images to 1632 by 1224 pixels, that is about 2 Mpx, about a quarter of what my camera produces. Not bad, but still not the full glory of my Nokia phone camera images.

Using the SkyDrive app

If you want to copy your photos in their full, original resolution, the SkyDrive app (a free download) is the way to go.

Without the SkyDrive app you can see your SkyDrive albums on your Windows Phone, but with the app you have full control, just like you have from your computer. Touch SkyDrive and touch an album, or a folder, and it opens and shows the contents. The circled-plus symbol opens the “add file” window and you can select a photo from any phone folder or even another SkyDrive folder.

The actual upload to your SkyDrive will take place when you are connecting with Wi-Fi. If you are not connected, the upload will be delayed. This saves you cellphone network usage, at the price of possibly having to wait until you have connection with a hotspot.

You can select only one photo at a time, and the maximum number of photos set to upload to SkyDrive is five at any one time. As soon as one or more is uploaded you add another.

Gotcha Warning!

In none of these procedures do you have the opportunity to specify a file name. It is all done for you. The SkyDrive app assigns file names in this format: WP_yyyymmdd n, the “WP_” part is always the same, the “yyyy” is the current year, the “mm” the month and “dd” the day. There is a space which is followed by a sequential number (shown in the format here by the “n”) if more than one image is uploaded in a day. This is the upload date, not the date the photo was taken. If the images are removed from the folder the phone just starts over with the numbers at the next upload. This can cause duplicate file names. Also, if you upload to more than one folder, this numbering can lead to duplicated file names. Be very careful so that you don’t loose images because of file name duplication!

Direct connection – phone to computer

You can, of course, connect you phone directly to you computer. Windows Phone requires the Zune program to be installed to handle the communication with the phone. The sync option creates a folder called “From phone name” in your My Pictures folder. This is the default location, the folder name will contain the phone name that you have set up after the “From ”. Zune creates subfolders in this folder for each folder on your phone. These are named the same as on the phone, so there will be a folder named Camera roll and all the photos in the camera roll folder on the phone will be copied to this folder.

The images in the Camera roll folder will be full resolution copies. The naming convention here is WP_00nnnn.jpg with a six-digit, zero-padded sequential number starting with 000000.

While this file naming scheme is the same as photos uploaded to SkyDrive with the Share on SkyDrive option, the file names are not the same in the two locations! A specific photo will most likely have two different names! This can be more than confusing. My advice is to move your photos to conventional folders and rename the images in a more consistent manner.

Once you have your cell phone photos on your computer you can manage them just like other photos.

Simulcast

In the days of yore, the term “Simulcast” was used to indicate that a program was being broadcast simultaneously on different media like a television channel and a radio station. Here I just want to indicate that this article is posted on two blogs, This ‘n That and Café Ludwig. This “multipost” is part of an experiment which I will report on upon completion.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck