A follow up radio interview from last weeks episode where I was invited by David Peach to discuss photography and digital asset management along with fellow photographer Eden Connell. Below is the recording from the second episode.
Episode Two [44:28]: This week we discuss specific programs including Phase One Media Pro, Adobe Lightroom and Extensis Portfolio.
Automated transcript:
I’m really struggling this morning, Spot the tech guy!
So this question of digital asset management, as we talked about last week, it’s an exploding world. People have got lots and lots of stuff to manage, and you guys obviously specialise in images. Robert, you’ve got a whole website and a whole methodology around this, so are you going to talk to us about that this morning and some of the software? I’m going to name a few products, because there are a lot of products, like there are a lot of apps out there.
Right. There are a lot of questions we got towards the end of the show last week, and I might take it head on if that’s all right. Hang on, where is it? What programme would your photographers recommend to be able to search for a photo? Entering data about that photo so you can search for the photo later. What are the advantages and disadvantages of Mac versus PC, Picasa, Lightroom, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think that kind of goes to the core of everything, doesn’t it?
Pretty much, yes. There is no one programme that will do everything for everyone, just like the iPhone doesn’t suit absolutely everyone, or an Android phone. I just don’t understand that. But photographers in particular, or creatives in general, want just a panacea that’s going to fix every problem that they’ve got, and because they drive the market, that’s pretty much where it follows. I will mention a few programmes, and it depends upon how deep you want to get into it, from a very large company to just an individual.
My primary focus with this show is business owners, so let’s take the case of somebody who isn’t a professional photography studio, but they amass a lot of images in the course of their work. Maybe they have imagery for their online store, they’ve got cataloging info, events, all those sorts of things. I’m sure there are people around who have this problem who aren’t photographers. Not every programme. All creatives. All creatives, so that can be graphic designers, it could be website designers, it could be anyone that’s got multimedia content, I suppose.
The programme, if you want just one programme, it’s currently called Phase One Media Pro. I believe we mentioned that last week. If you go to Phase One, P-H-A-S-E One, not Won, which is, sorry, I should spell it, O-N-E. Number One? Not Number One, but I’m sure they probably have a redirect if their marketing team’s on to it, or just Google Phase One. It’s not F, it’s P-H at the beginning. This is a programme they’ve purchased, acquired from Microsoft a few years ago, who Microsoft purchased off a small English company. It is a true multimedia, so it can catalogue images, raw images, JPEG images, movies, anything your iPhone or Android phone puts out, as well as the stuff, in fact, it can catalogue any programme, so it can catalogue websites, it can catalogue animated GIFs, PNGs.
By catalogue them, what does that mean for an amateur like me, does that mean it goes and reads the website and works out what the images are, names them, gets any information? When you look at the thumbnail, it shows you a thumbnail of the website, now whether that’s been kept up to date, because the web moves very quickly with what are standards, so it’s typically a HTML file, but if you’ve got a website you like the style of, and maybe you’ve got to show that to a client, you just want to make a note of it, that’s probably not its primary function as a cataloguing programme.
A number of clients of mine are just a mess, as I’m sure you’ve seen clients who’ve got content everywhere, so I say, look, what we’ll do is we’ll just lift the hard drive and drop it onto the icon and we’ll come back in a few hours, and it catalogues everything in your computer. I went into a client site this week, it’s a brand new client, I met them for the first time, they took me into their computer room, without a word of exaggeration, there must have been 200 hard drives in there, and I said, what’s on that, and he said, content, and I said, do you know how to find any of this stuff?
Drive 182 in the corner. He didn’t even have that, he had a spreadsheet, and on it was the very, you know, manually kept up-to-date list of what he thought was on that drive. Not down to the image level, just, you know, I did this shoot on that day, you know, as a video photographer, and holy cow, what a nightmare. Did she take a selfie of your expression then? Robert, have you compared the Phase One software to Lightroom at all? Lightroom is, it’s great, but it doesn’t catalogue every multimedia format, so it won’t catalogue PNG files, or Flash files, or anything like that, ironically Adobe own Flash now.
This other program is a multimedia cataloguing program, it was created by an employee at BBC to make those old-fashioned things called interactive CDs, so he had to catalogue everything, he was the guy that started programming for it, this became more successful, so he quit his day job, the good old tech story, this is in the 80s, but what it will do, once you’ve thrown your hard drive or 200 hard drives on top of the icon, it will then make it much easier, because you’ll have it down a panel, you’ll see all the different file types, you’ll see the dates they were created, you’ll see which hard drive that is on, and it’s a visual database, that’s a good thing, I’ve seen similar circumstances that you just described, David, and it’s on disk 001, or my disk, my disk, my disk, because that’s, they’ve just taken the default burn, this will at least point them to something like the serial number, the unique ID number, but being a visual, all you’ve got to think of, and this is how I describe searching for anything in any database, you don’t have to know the keyword, because you might not have keyworded it.
Most don’t, so you just have to think, what am I looking for, is it an image or a movie, and that will then filter it down, do I remember roughly what year, great, or what month, correct, that will keep narrowing it down, and when you’ve narrowed it down to even just a few hundred images, then you just scroll through the thumbnails, and you can find it quickly, it might be some other thing that tweaks, it might be the camera you used to record it, and again, you can just filter it down by that, but until then, you’re just looking at a room with 200 hard drives.
That would be a photographer’s view of the world, what camera did I use, my camera? But not only that, the lenses you used as well to shoot it, you can search by that with some software, which is great. So that stuff gets recorded in the metadata on the image anyway, doesn’t it? I think most people kind of know that, I think, because if you’re using iPhone or something on your Mac, at least, it does pop up with that information if you look behind the image, but you’ve got to know to go and look for it.
Yes, and it is recorded, so metadata. There are two types of metadata that are important to photographers. There are some standards for that. There’s the EXIF data—don’t ask me what that EXIF stands for—but all camera manufacturers, including Apple and everyone else, agree that this is where you store the field, such as camera shutter speed. And it’s not a silly thing to catalogue because if I know that I shot that on my iPhone, I’m not going to go and look through all the various cameras I’ve owned during my life. I can remember this was roughly that date, so as Eden said, you can actually look for the lens or any way that helps you find your image.
I guess we should also explain what metadata is.
Metadata is data about the image. It’s not the image itself, but it describes the image.
Incredibly geeky.
So it’s data about data.
Yes.
It doesn’t get much geekier than that, does it?
So there’s EXIF data, and other data that we catalogue is IPTC, which I do know stands for International Press Trade Council. And you hold up your hand if I’m getting too geeky here, David.
No, no, no.
So EXIF is automatic.
Geek out.
Geek out, yeah.
If you’ve got your iPhone, or a compact camera, or very few DSLRs—in fact, no DSLRs really do it, but some can connect a GPS device—it will record where it’s taken.
So again, you might not—it’s just a way of filtering it down. I remember I was in Perth when I took that photo, so you can filter it. Even iPhones do that because you can geolocate your images in iPhoto, or was it, is it iPhoto?
Yeah, in iPhoto. And Lightroom, that Eden mentioned, can do it, and this program, Phase 1 Media Pro, you can actually go back afterwards and geocode it and push that data back in.
That’s EXIF data—so it’s automatic stuff that your camera records about when and where you took it.
The IPTC data is an agreed set of fields created by the newspapers in the ’70s, which is appropriate for the music today, because back in the old days, they’d process their film in the hotel room back in Iraq, version 1. Then they’d have to scan it on a really bad scanner and send it over an old-fashioned telephone line to get to the newspapers around the world.
So they had to have a field that went into that.
Incredibly analogue.
Oh, absolutely, but this would be going around the world. Now, who took the photo? What was it of?
So they agreed, the newspapers agreed on standards, and we still use those standards today.
They’d also probably want to do that to be able to protect their copyright in the image as well.
So, typically, who took the photo—the credit was very important. But we’ve used those fields now, so we can put our contact information in there, the keywords, which is very important with laws changing around the world. And I’ll try not to get my photographer’s hat on too much.
But people, very soon, potentially, in Australia, anyone can take your photos and use them professionally. So it could be the next advertisement—I won’t name brands—for X brand soft drink, and they can use your photo if they don’t know that you took it, David, without paying you.
Really?
Yeah.
And naturally, photographers are fighting.
That’s happened in London. The UK’s latest ones—it’s called Orphan Works—which means that if people do a fair and reasonable search for your image and can’t find you, which means they might have just looked on Google, “I don’t know who took this photo,” I’m allowed to use it.
Yeah, what qualifies as fair and reasonable in that?
It’s very grey areas, so…
Even with families and children and things like that?
Anything. But of course, then they get silly because there are things with model releases. Whereas if you start using this stuff, which I’ve been advocating, this has been down the pipeline for over 10 years. This is before the Australian government now—it could happen. So protect your images as professionally or amateur.
If you put that metadata in there, when it comes up, they’ll be able to find you, and these are not hidden fields—just looking at file info in-app.
So is that something you would set by default in your camera?
When I download, and you can do it in Lightroom or Phase One, Media Pro, or Picasa.
You set all that stuff, and it just appends to each image as it imports?
That’s right.
You do, Eden, as well?
Yeah, I do, I do.
Yeah.
My metadata basically says my name, my website, so anyone can contact me, it’s easy.
And can anybody clear that data out of the image afterwards?
Yes, which is illegal.
It’s against the DCMA, the Digital Copyright Millennium Act. The problem is proving that they did it.
Yeah, absolutely.
But it is illegal.
But on the same foot, it’s illegal to use an image at today, unless you can contact the owner.
If this works, comes through, then that changes.
The idea behind it is that there are a whole lot of images out there we can’t use because we don’t know who owns it.
So the idea behind it is—the notion’s nice, but the practicalities of it’s not.
So if I go to Google Images and I stumble across one of your images there, how do I reasonably check that it’s you?
I mean, is it as simple as right-click on it and get info, or something like that?
Google is actually pretty good.
Picasa, you’ve mentioned, that’s pretty good, too. It honours it.
Websites—social media is very popular, I don’t have to mention it. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter—they all strip the metadata when you upload your images.
And that’s only recently with Facebook as well.
It’s a shame.
They strip it.
They actively strip it.
Take it out.
So there are lobbies of various organisations to stop that.
But I mean, there are other issues, too. You upload it to Instagram, you give them unlimited usage anyway.
And if there is someone in it that doesn’t want to be photographed or have their work used commercially, when you’ve signed up to Instagram, you’ve accepted that you’ll take responsibility.
Right.
So if you put an image up and it’s got a face in the background that you haven’t sort of pixelated out, somebody sees themselves turn up on Instagram—you, as the photographer, have that issue, not Instagram, even though they strip out the metadata.
Well, it turns up on Instagram promoting, or on Facebook, as an advertisement.
Commercial.
You’re in trouble.
And that happened. A practical case is that Vodafone, the local Vodafone, the German one, did an advertisement where they went to Flickr and just pulled off a whole lot of images and put them on bus shelters around Australia.
And the person in the photo from Singapore didn’t like the fact that she was being used to advertise Vodafone.
So sued Vodafone.
Wow.
Because she didn’t give permission.
So does this fall under copyright or asset management?
Well, digital asset management protects your moral and copyright.
So it is very important.
As you said, I don’t do this, I don’t sit through and do all my photos. It automatically imports, adds all my copyright information.
And then whenever I make a duplicate or a version of it, it puts that into the new version.
Gets carried across.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it’s out there. I think it’s important for anyone, professional or otherwise, any business. That’s your intellectual property.
So if you said you were putting out your software, you know that you’ve got intellectual property. You’d put the usage rights with the…
Okay.
So for a photographer who is professionally producing this stuff, it makes total sense.
For maybe an amateur photographer or somebody maybe who aspires to a professional career but they don’t yet have the revenue base to go and buy these more expensive programs.
Is there a…
Does iPhoto do that? Does it allow you to… Does it append that sort of information to it as you bring it in?
Yes.
I mean, I use iPhoto just as an example.
I use… What is it? On Windows. Windows Picture Manager or something like that.
They all allow you, and they all read that metadata.
Right. But does it allow you to set a copyright notice in there as well?
Yes.
For a cross-platform solution, look at Picasa.
Yes.
Yeah.
Picasa’s just …
They’ve lifted their image allowance to a terabyte per user or something?
I think that was Flickr.
Flickr.
Yes.
Yeah.
It was Flickr.
You’re right.
Sorry.
I’m a huge advocate of Lightroom. I would recommend if you’re an amateur photographer and you’re getting into it more and more, jump into Lightroom and it’s very easy.
Does Lightroom come with the Creative Suite as part of it?
It’s … Or is it a separate product again?
It’s a separate product.
Right.
I’ll have to put my disclaimer. I’m an Adobe Creative Professional, which means I don’t get paid for it, but I’m acknowledged by Adobe so that they help me if I put on workshops.
So they’ve now got Creative Cloud, which I’m sure you’ve spoken about.
Yeah.
I just put a client on it last week, actually, and she’s just thrilled to bits, $50 a week and she’s got …
Monthly. $50 a month for us.
Yeah.
If you’re on the old system of licensing where you get the box or download the software, then Lightroom’s not included, but in Creative Cloud, it’s all you can eat for $30 or $50. So it includes Lightroom.
So Lightroom is included in Creative Cloud?
Lightroom is included.
Yes.
All their software titles.
It’s great.
I use the cloud. Love it.
So you’ve gone to Creative Cloud as well?
Yeah, yeah.
I love it. It’s great.
Okay.
Yeah.
So more and more of these platforms are moving to software as a utility and you just rent what you need.
We’re talking digital asset management with my two photographers, Eden Connell and Robert Edward.
Is it Edward or Edwards?
Edwards.
Edwards.
I’ll get that right. Sorry.
And you have a website at damnsimple.com and www.photographer.com.au, is that right?
Hang on. It’d be good if I turn your mics on here. Really struggling with the mics this morning. There we go.
Photographer.com.au is the best place to go and then there’s a blog as well as a link for workshops.
That is an awesome URL. I don’t know how you got that but I want to hear the story. How did you get it?
Do you want the truth or …
No.
The good story is it was just dumb luck in that when URLs became available I had to go on the internet and I was sick of having the ISP’s name and advertising that in every email. I thought, I’ll just register. How do people find me in the yellow pages? They look up photographer. So I’ll look. Yes, this is available. This is quite a long time ago of course.
Wow. That really had to be just dumb luck.
But before that you weren’t allowed, you probably remember David, you weren’t allowed to register real names or occupations. And so I actually registered and still have photographer.net.au and then they decided to release it.
I can’t remember.
I can.
I can.
Then the one in Australia, they said, yes, we’ll bring a lot of money, we’ll release all the names. So they put them up for auction and I had to bid for www.photographer.com.au and it kept going up and up and up. So I paid a reasonable amount of money and that’s to protect my name, photographer.net.au.
That’s extraordinary. I mean, I won’t ask the amount of money, but it’s not often that you hear people actually have to go into bidding wars to get a domain.
And these days, one of the first things when people are naming their business is they check all the namespaces, make sure it’s available as a handle on Twitter and Facebook and all these other places where they might want to be known, as well as the URL for it.
I had to change my business name to get the URL as well, so it’s the same sort of thing.
But I wasn’t quick enough on Facebook, I can’t remember.
If you’re starting a business, the business name is probably decided by the social handles as much.
Yes.
Yeah.
My word.
And Eden, yours is a good one. Zoom in with Eden. I bet you weren’t getting too much competition.
No, no. I didn’t get any competition, but just for my business, it was for a blog that I had overseas and that’s where it all came from. It was great.
Right. So did you name the business as a result of the blog? You had the URL first and then the business just grew out of that, right?
And then it was simple. It was just called Zoom in with Eden, my business.
Right.
So, yeah.
So it was just natural.
And you recently ran an online voting competition for the tagline.
Oh, God. I had some funny taglines.
What did you get? The final one.
I can’t tell you.
I know one of them was expose yourself with Eden or something like that. We had some shocking ones come through.
I had a good friend that had a joke and he sent through about 20 taglines. I’m not going to reveal them all because your listeners will turn off the radio, but the final one was Zoom in with Eden photography. We focus on you. So I’m happy with that.
So we’ve got a new site and that’s been live this week.
Oh, you’ve got a new website too?
It’s live. It’s out there.
How’s it look?
Yeah, fantastic.
Happy?
Yeah, I’m happy. Extremely happy.
Getting good feedback for it?
Yeah. We had to get it live. It’s just when you’re doing websites, it takes so long to do and getting all the … It’s very hard to go through your images and pick the right and the best ones.
Is it hard as a photographer to differentiate yourself online?
Very much so. Without giving away all your intellectual property, but putting your images out there.
You’ve got to put some stuff in that makes people want to click through and find out more, but you don’t want to give away your best stuff, do you?
If it’s online, then people can steal it like anything that’s on the internet, but you’ve still got to put your best stuff out there.
I think you’ve just got to show it and get it out there.
My best stuff’s on my website, but to pick all those images, I’ve actually recently gone through six years of images, and to pick the best of the best is an extremely hard job.
Do you get very critical of your own work?
You do, and you hold onto images as well.
I’m attached to so many of my different images, and sometimes you’ve got to go, no, that one’s out.
Emotionally, because of what they meant at the time?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because what they meant to you may not necessarily transfer to somebody looking at your website looking for a wedding photographer or something like that.
Totally.
Do you do wedding stuff?
Loads of weddings, yeah.
Yeah?
Yeah.
But yeah, my clients, when they look at the images, say you go on my website today and have a look, you probably won’t have the feeling that I had at a wedding where the grandfather cried or the grandmother cried, and I took that photo, and that means so much to me.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I think putting a grandfather crying at a wedding would be a very touching photograph, would make me want to click through and find out, well, who took that?
Yeah.
So yeah, anyway, we digress. Let’s get back to digital asset management.
So we talked about Lightroom, and I think that’s an Adobe product.
It is.
It’s an Apple product that came out around about the same time.
There are a few products out there that I’d say look at. So if you are a photographer, Lightroom is really the dominant player out there.
The gold standard?
It is, and that’s whether you’re, I suppose, an amateur. I wouldn’t say just a keen iPhoto photographer. You could certainly use it for your smartphone photography, or an advanced professional. It is a great program, but it is definitely single-user, so you can’t share it amongst a workgroup. It catalogues raw files if your camera can produce raw files.
Sorry, hang on. Just back up there a little bit. Lightroom is a single-user product.
It is a single.
So you can’t share the library on a network or something?
No. And I wish you could. That’s a downfall for me.
Wow.
With using the software.
I would have thought that was like, for a creative studio, like a base minimum requirement.
That’s why I mentioned it. It is dominant for single users. I’m an alpha tester for Adobe. Alpha test is just people Adobe go to, but don’t pay, and say, what’s the pain points?
Break it for me.
Basically, yes. I mean, there’s a great side story there. One of the versions for Lightroom, they sent 20 photographers from around the world with the Adobe Lightroom team to Tasmania. I was fortunate enough to be invited on that, so we went down there, spent two weeks really pushing the product. It was also for beta testing for the public, photographing amazing areas around Tasmania, processing images.
Who does the radio show in the US, Leo Laporte?
He was on it, yes.
He was on that trip as well.
I remember listening to his podcast. I was in the car while he was doing a podcast, I was in the front seat, he was in the back seat doing it. He had a lot of things to say about Australia, beautiful stuff, but not too impressed by our technology as in the telcos.
He’s very, very vocal on that, on his show as well.
Not a fan of Telstra.
He’s such a, I mean, yeah, he’s a lovely bloke.
He’s such a funny bloke.
Is he?
Yes, absolutely. He is exactly how he appears on his show, that’s him.
It’s a great single-user program and there’s no way at this stage that they’ll, I mean, who knows what companies are doing, but there’s no way to share it. People have—geeks out there have tried to come up with ways. There’s another program I use that uploads your images to another website and you can download it and look at it so it looks like a virtual version of Lightroom, but it doesn’t interact.
For a single user, it’s only photographing with photos and videos that DSLR cameras can record. It really is the benchmark.
And Eden, that’s what you’re using as well, right?
Love it.
Yeah.
But as soon as you, if you then took on a bunch of employees who needed access to that, does that mean you then need to move up, does, you know, or use another product name? And I stress, none of these people are advertisers or sponsors of the station, but it’s hard in this program to have a technical discussion and not mention third-party products. It’s just the nature of the beast. And I felt that’s what people want. They want you to name a few products and then they can see what’s best for them.
So does that mean, like, does Phase One do?
It’s a bit kludgy. It does. It can share it. In fact, Lightroom doesn’t even let you put it on an external drive or server, the catalog. It has to reside on the internal hard drive of the computer. So they’re forcing you to do that. There are ways of sharing it and I’ll keep you in tune if anything turns up.
Phase One locks the catalogs. Only one person can read/write, the rest can read it. And that’s okay for a few users, but it becomes—you can share it with clients so you can actually email or Dropbox or whatever the catalog and they get like an Acrobat Reader version of it. It’s read-only and they can give you feedback. Find the images they like, give feedback, and then they email a small file to you.
Do they still call it Acrobat Reader or is it just Adobe Reader?
It’s Acrobat.
And what about the Apple equivalent?
So Apple were first—anyone in Ringo’s an Apple fan, wouldn’t they?
Well, that’s what I was going to say. If you’re a one-eyed Apple diehard, there is Aperture, which came before Lightroom. I mean, they both have their costs and benefits. Lightroom is more future-proof. How it handles your images, it’s non-destructive, as is Aperture.
In the old days, you opened a JPEG in Photoshop or Microsoft anything, it would have to throw pixels away when you changed it. This new cataloging program, only changes are made in the catalog. So that’s a big difference. Aperture is the same, iPhoto is the same.
The beauty of Aperture and iPhoto, which are Mac-only, is they actually talk to each other. So if you’re feeling in a really basic mode or you want the family to share photos or someone in your company who’s not really advanced at imaging, they can use iPhoto, and then when you open that same catalog in Aperture, it’ll see their corrections.
So you can park a catalog or a library file on a shared drive somewhere. It’s just one catalog and they can all play with it, but you don’t want them to give access to all of the features in Aperture.
So iPhoto is like Aperture Light, is that a good way to describe it?
Yeah, yeah. Apple will probably be happy with that as well.
You can also share it over the web, there’s a third-party open—I’ll have to grab the name for you, sorry I only just found out about it—there’s a way of actually sharing it over the web as well. You can make changes and it will appear across the other side.
These are all just basically SQLite databases.
So forgive my ignorance in this because I’m not a user of Adobe products on a regular basis. Where does Bridge fit into all this because I always thought Bridge—and maybe Bridge is just an antique product, I don’t know—is that?
It’s connected with Photoshop itself, but Lightroom’s come out so a lot of people are using Lightroom.
Right, so they’ve dropped Bridge and moved on.
No, no, they’ve still got it, I’ll let Robert jump in because I’m sure he’ll be a bit more technical in that aspect.
Bridge is definitely still there, if you download any of the Creative Suite, it’s like an adjunct to it. It was invented with Photoshop, but it’s an image browser as opposed to a catalog.
So with a catalog program like any of the ones we’ve mentioned, it will show you what’s supposed to be there. If you disconnect the hard drive, it will still show you what’s there.
So for our audience who perhaps don’t know the difference then between an image browser and a catalog, can we put some simple language around that and differentiate the two?
Absolutely.
Private cloud, you could do it that way. You can do that to many people, keyword, because you might not know everything that was in that image, for example. Now, Eden, you were talking in the break, then, about something that you do with generating JPEGs or smart JPEGs.
Yeah, Lightroom has brought out functionality now. So before, you’d have your hard drive on the side of the computer in your USB port. What would happen is the catalogue would be connected to the hard drive to view the images. What Lightroom has now done is it’s brought out a thing called Smart Previews, and what that can do is if you don’t have the hard drive connected, so I get out of Sydney for the weekend and I take my laptop away, I can still edit the catalogue images, and then as soon as I come back to Sydney and connect that hard drive, it’ll sync then, and it’s a great functionality.
It’s also really good as well if I’m sending images offshore, so I had a terabyte of data to send of the images, it’s basically 14% of the data in Smart Previews. So it’s a lot less data to send, and then I can send the catalogue over to be edited, and then that can be sent back, and it’s easy. So I’m not sending that much data, so it’s saving me time.
Right. So it would make sense that something like that will, within the not-too-distant future, would be able to sync across the net as well.
Totally.
Yeah. At the moment, it still syncs physically when the drive’s reattached, yeah?
Well, catalogues aren’t that big, predominantly, as such, the images they create… So they’re just the database files?
Yeah, because you’ve got your raw files, and then once you import it, then it creates JPEGs. So the JPEGs are probably the biggest component of the catalogues, but really, I think it’d be great having Lightroom as a multi-user platform where the catalogue is instantly updated. So I could be in my studio, and I could work from the first image, and I could have my assistant working from the last image, and we could edit a whole shoot and meet in the middle.
Cool.
Yeah. That’s what I’d love to do, or be able to do.
Yeah. It’s probably not that far off. Somebody’s got to be working on that.
Yeah. Also, with cloud computing, my dream is to be able to go to Robert’s studio one day, or even go to your house, or friends’ places, and just log in to their computer, log in to your computer, and instead of me bringing my laptop over and all my stuff, have everything in the cloud.
Yeah, that’s, I guess, what I’m expecting it to be. I mean, it’s funny. We talk about cloud computing as like this sort of rainbows and unicorns, it all happens in the cloud. No one really knows what’s going on. At the bottom of it, there’s computers, and cables, and operating systems. Nothing much has changed there, it’s just we’re finding new ways to use them.
It’d be like having a, like on my Windows computer, having a log in where I’m—
We don’t talk of Windows.
I know, I know.
Windows Studio.
Windows 8, hey? When I put in my password, boom, up comes my stuff, so say I use your computer, I logged in, boom, it’s got everything that I’ve got. That would be nice.
Okay, well, I think we’ve pretty much covered digital asset management, I think we’ve managed it to death, I think, by now. I’ve got a question which we’ll deal with after the next music track, and it’s specifically around stuff that you guys would know about, so can you hang around, and it’s one of the questions I got you in a week, and I think you guys will have some interesting input into it.
So we’ve got to the last part of the show already, and it’s the part where I do questions and answers, and one of the questions I got this week was around the issue of colour calibration of a monitor, and the specific question was, how come the colours on the monitor look different when I print them?
And the short answer there is that there are two completely different types of technologies generating that colour, and a screen or a monitor is a transmissive technology, it generates light from LEDs, and depending on how many bits are used in the LEDs, you get a different colour saturation and whatnot, whereas when you print something, not only have you got the vagaries of ink and the ink mixes and things like that, it’s actually a reflective technology, it generates colour by reflecting light differently.
Robert, you’re a bit of a colour specialist I think, but it’s a thing that crops up all the time.
This is the first time I’ve ever been asked it. Somebody said, well, why is it different? I said, well, two different ways of generating that for a start, and either one of those variables could be out. So the trick would be to start with a monitor that is calibrated correctly, is that right?
It is, so we were talking about that during Brian Ferry, and like, as Eden was saying, as any professional, or even someone who cares about their images, you have to make sure your screen is at least calibrated, you can also calibrate your printer, and the old days before colour management, we used to do it by numbers, so you’d look at the numbers on the info palette and know that this grey or this blue had to be this certain amount of numbers.
Is that RGB?
That’s right, or CMYK for print.
The beauty, and it really was a weight lifted off my shoulders when colour management was created because it meant I could actually judge it like a human would, look at the colour on the screen knowing that it was accurate.
Sorry, we just used a couple of acronyms, RGB is red, green, blue, and there’s a value between zero and 255 associated with each one of those, and the mix of those three numbers generates the colour.
That’s right.
Is that in a nutshell?
Yes.
Correct.
So if you’ve got a black screen, you need to turn it on, and yeah, 255, 255, 255, minute’s too bright, it’s a bit white.
Right.
And anything in between, and generally they have kind of a slider control of some sort, and that.
And then you’ve got every colour that we can see and the colours we can’t see as well.
Calibrate, it really lifts the burden from you, you know that your screen, I strongly, strongly recommend that you use a calibration device, don’t rely on your eye, Apple devices by nature, whether it’s an iPhone or a Mac, come out of the factories very, very close to proper calibration.
But I’d say…
The only thing is manufacturing tolerance, surely there’d be room for improvement?
Oh, yes.
So, yeah.
You can actually, if we’re allowed to mention a couple of products, you did mention one that looks like an insect sort of, an arachnid.
Yeah, as I keep saying, you know, we have to mention products in this product because, in this broadcast, because the very nature of the thing is we’re talking about this sort of stuff, and you can’t describe something and not name it.
So, the one that I am familiar with is a thing called a Spyder, and I think it was a Spyder 4?
Yeah.
Is that what you’re using, Adrian?
I use a Spyder 3.
Right.
So, you’ve been superseded.
Yeah.
I have, but I know my calibration’s great.
With my lab that I print through, everything comes back how I see it on screen, when I’m editing images. I’m not editing in a bright studio. It’s dark in there. Everything looks good, but when you calibrate laptops, big screens or whatever, what you’ll notice is everyone’s brightness has turned up to 100, and this is, it’s amazing because you’re losing all the shadows, you’re losing lots of details of the images.
So, for somebody who has no idea what we’re talking about, these things basically attach to the front of the screen, and they see what you see, but they see it through a very objective lens that says, this is the colour mix that’s coming out of the screen, and you can adjust it based on…
It’s even better. It adjusts it for you.
So, what you do, you plug it in the USB. It’s wizard-driven. It’s a spectrometer or something, I think. It’s a photospectrometer, but for a user, it means you plug it in, you watch the pretty colours flash in front of you, and at the end, it says, save, calibrate it, and you can see before and after how bad your monitor was.
Are these things expensive? Like anything, it’s all relative. Under $100, we’ll get you an okay one, but I don’t know if it’s any better than what comes native.
But is it the sort of thing you’d use once and then put in the cupboard? You recalibrate just to make sure no one’s coming and sabotage your monitor or your settings, so recommendation, and it can nag you if you want, I turn it off every month. It depends how much you use your computer, but with the new technology, you mentioned LEDs, a lot more stable than the CRT.
Yeah, I mean, it’s something I used to see a lot more, and the reason I say I haven’t been asked recently is because just about everyone’s using LCD monitors these days. No one, I can’t remember the last time I saw a CRT in the workplace. Probably in those 70s film clips, I saw the songs. They’re gone. They’re gone. They’re on the side of the streets at clean-up days.
Yeah. Unfortunately, they go into landfill, and there’s a lot of lead in those screens, but that’s another story. But yes, get a calibration device, a good one, if you want to know, under $200 will buy you a very good one.
Can you buy them? It’s against the software agreement. What you can do is hire a calibration person to come and calibrate your screen, and they’ve got the license agreement to do that.
So once your monitor’s calibrated, then if your printer doesn’t get that right, then it’s a problem with the printer. I mean, the printer’s $150 for an inkjet printer. What do you expect? It’s going to do its best job of trying to mix inks.
You can actually calibrate your printer as well, then it’s a different … You can actually buy an all-in-one calibration device, then you’re looking at probably double. So it’s $300 to $400. It prints out pretty colours, and then you scan it with your calibration device, and it will build a profile for that paper and that ink.
Yes. Or a lot of the labs we use now are basically just output devices. They’ll have colour profiles they’ll give you, so it doesn’t cost you any money. If you use a good lab, and even if it’s a mini-lab, the better mini-labs even have colour profiles.
So Eden, you’re using a Spyder. Love it. Do you use the same device? I use an X-Rite. I’ve used all of them, but I just like the device. That’s all.
Eden shoots Canon. I shoot Nikon. Right. I’m an Apple guy. He’s a PC guy. Yes. That’s the way it is.
Do you drink coffee? I do. It works for you. But there is an answer, and it fixes the problem. That way, you should do it if you’re creating any visual content.
So if you’re writing a book, it’s probably not important. If you’re creating a design or a web design, you need to make sure what you’re putting up there is to a standard. The problem is…
Right. So colours important, too. Even if you are taking… Even black and white. Yeah.
If you’re taking an image and sending it to the web for… And what gets rendered on a website is usually a fairly low-res, lightweight version of the original file. But you still want the colours to be right.
Well, my goal is to go out and calibrate the planet of every computer, because, of course, we calibrate all our screens, but when you go out there, you can’t…
Really? That’s your goal? No. The problem is, of course, everyone’s got a different screen, so we can… I’ve got somebody who’s geekier than I am.
I’ve had it before with a client that rang me once and said, oh, I’m looking at the images, the skin tones are not correct and all this, and I said, no, no, come into my studio, I can bring a laptop to you and show you.
So because we’re editing images, you don’t wanna edit images on a screen that’s not calibrated because they’re not gonna be edited correctly.
Yeah, unless you’re controlling one end of the variable, and then when it gets to his screen, if it’s not rendering properly, then…
That’s what I was hinting at. Yeah, it’s not your fault. It’s the fault of the output from the world wide… Everyone…
So people might be looking at our websites now saying, gee, they’re very dark photos. Yeah. There must have been something wrong that day. Bit moody.
All right. So there are tools around? There are tools. And they’re not wildly expensive, or you can get somebody to come and do it once.
Yes. So your local friendly camera store will have them, and the people there can talk to you about it.
Okay. I say spend the money, buy a calibrating unit, and because you upgrade screens, you’ll get new laptops, you’ll use it for its lifetime.
Even Spyder can actually calibrate an iPhone as well. Wow. I didn’t know that.