A Cold Day in Ballard

Daily Photos, Greenlake: Kids, Benches, Film Grain

A few snaps from Greenlake yesterday.

Kids, and trees,

and a monster costume.

The Benches…

I tried out Lightroom 3’s new grain effect on the B&W shot, and also on this color shot. We watched an old color Hitchcock film this weekend, Torn Curtain, and Iwas trying to go for the same 60s vintage sharp/grainy look the film has.

Sheba-Bats - Half Dog Half Bat

Two Sheba Inu dogs dressed up with bat’s wings for the Haloween holiday—saw these guys at the bakery this morning when we stopped for coffee.

I had several more shots, but I messed up the exposure for half of them (hadn’t had my coffee yet)..

More Global Trashing - Garbage Gyre Photos by Chris Jordan

Just saw a link to jaw-dropping and thought-provoking photos by photographer Chris Jordan. The shots show dead albatross chicks, fed on trash from the North Pacific garbage gyre. Click here for the gallery.

Don’t know about you, but I’m not buying or opening anything with a plastic bottle cap today.

I found this on the A Photo Editor Blog.

Why Use an AIR App In a Lightroom Export Action?

In my post How to Use an AIR App as a Lightroom Export Action I showed how a list of exported files passes from Lightroom to your app. This begs the question, why the hell would you want to do that in the first place? Here are a few reasons why. The next post in this series will show how I did it.

For all its features there are a few things I wanted to do during image export that Lightroom doesn’t do.

Even using the Lightroom SDK, Lightroom exports output one file per image. If you want to export the same image at multiple sizes, you have to initiate several export operations. To prepare files for pixel-and-ink.com, I want to create an image “pyramid” composed of four JPEG files at 80, 400, 800 and 1600 pixels on the longest side.

Lightroom also does not let you specify output folders using variables or rules to determine the name of the folder. You can specify one output folder and a sub-folder. I wanted a unique folder per image, with the pyramid of JPEGs inside. For example when exporting 20091027DEF_D700_2336.dng, I want folder 20091027DEF_D700_2336, containing the four JPEGs. And I want to export batches of DNGs, so for each image in the batch, I need a different sub-folder at my export location.

I was also not happy with Lightroom’s watermarking feature. It worked well in some cases, but not all. Watermarking is way better in the Lightroom 3 beta, but because of these other issues, it’s not yet practical for my workflow.

Another thing I wanted to do was output a couple extra files with the JPEGs, an XML file with metadata about the photograph and about the sizes of JPEG available, and a PHP script that would render an HTML page for the photo. Various pages at on pixel-and-ink.com use the XML to display the photograph in galleries, for example the gallery pages read the list of JPEG sizes available and automatically pick the best size for the browser window size. Check out a portfolio gallery like Seattle and notice how if you make your browser window bigger and bigger, the page will start loading a larger JPEG. Click on one of the photo’s more info links, and you’ll see the metadata.

Do do all these things, I needed to write some code. To do the job I probably could have used any one of several scripting languages—or even written a native Mac app in C/C++ or Coca, but I settled on ActionScript running in an AIR app. With AIR and ActionScript the application framework does a lot of the heavy lifting for me. For example, it’s got easy-to-use cross-platform APIs for accessing the file system (making folders, moving and renaming files).

Most important I knew that my AIR app could use a technology from the Adobe Labs website, SwitchBoard, to send automation instructions from my AIR app to Photoshop. All the image processing I want to do (making JPEGs of various sizes, adding watermarks) is done in Photoshop—a great tool for the job. SwitchBoard lets your AIR app send JavaScript to Creative Suite apps, and with JavaScript you can make Photoshop do just about anything you want.

Gotta go carve a pumpkin. The next post in this series will have the code it takes to make it all happen.

Please Be Seated

Redesign!

Today I updated the front page at pixel-and-ink with my new site design and galleries. All my latest favorite photos will appear on the front page and will be hosted here and no longer on Flickr. The front page also features the headlines and links for my five most recent blogs posts.

I’m building a new portfolio of photo galleries. The portfolio has four new galleries including my favorite photos from 2009. I will add additional galleries from my archives over the next several months.

The portfolio galleries and front page have a new dark-gray design with a main photo and a strip of thumbnails beneath. At gallery pages the main photo expands to fill your browser window. To see the photo bigger, maximize the window. The size of the front-page’s main photo is fixed. Thumbnails are partially hidden and transparent. They will pop-up and become opaque as you move your mouse over the strip.

Find the gallery name in the upper left hand corner of the window. The current photo’s title and position in the gallery appear here as well. Click the “more info” link to view the photo alone with additional info, like the camera, location and description. This page’s URL is the static address for the photograph.

Please subscribe the the blog for updates about new galleries and photos on pixel-and-ink.com.