Increasing Your Productivity with Photoshop CS
The featured speaker for the final segment of the Members Only Meeting was Julieanne Kost, Adobe Systems’ Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist, who described how to get the most value from the new file browser in Photoshop CS. The file browser lets you group your photos in various ways and then apply various operations (rotate, rename, insert metadata, run scripts) to all the items in a group. You build groups in two ways:
Light box. In addition to several standard sorting methods, Photoshop now lets you define a custom sort by dragging the images around in the browser window, arranging them just as you might move slides on a light table. (Note that you have to enable this with the popup control for sort order.)
Folders. Photoshop can create a new folder (subdirectory) in your computer’s file system and let you drag images into it. If you are going to sort images into folders, this is the best way, because Photoshop will preserve all your metadata and will make sure to move any sidecar files at the same time.
Interestingly, Photoshop will not let you delete a folder — even one you created in Photoshop. This is not an accidental omission, but a way of preventing accidents. The reason is that the file browser normally shows only the Photoshop-readable files, which might lead you to think a folder is empty (hence, OK to delete) when it’s not.
Some of the actions you might apply to an image, such as adding metadata, cause an immediate update to the file’s contents. Others do not. An example is the 90-degree rotation function, which changes only the image’s display attribute in Photoshop’s private database. Here, too, the reason is to protect you: Rotating a JPEG requires re-compressing the data, which can cause loss of image quality. If you do want the rotation to update the image file, there’s a separate menu command.
Incidentally, if you don’t realize that Photoshop has a database, you can lose some metadata when you move images out to CDs or backup disks. The rule is, export the cache (via the browser window’s own little File menu) before you archive.
One common action is to export a group of images as a PDF presentation. As with other presentation systems, you can choose from a variety of transition effects and time delays. However, warned Kost, you probably should avoid the Dissolve effect, which is truly ugly.
Kost also showed a very complex action, called Custom B&W Conversion, that you can download from the Adobe Evangelists web site. From one RGB file, it constructs 42 different grayscale views. It illustrates the wide range of conversion options that are possible. Even better, it writes the settings for each variation into a separate layer so that, if you see one that you like, you can figure out how it was done.
The Workflow for Metadata
In a typical digital-camera workflow, said Kost, you might download the day’s shots and arrange them using Photoshop’s file browser. You might then want to run the batch-renaming function, which lets you define a series of names. (You do this by combining up to six fields that can hold literal text or various formats for date, original file name and dot-extension.) After that, you would populate the standard metadata fields of the batch, using either a script (Applescript, VBscript, Javascript) or an XMP template. A number of sample scripts can be downloaded from Adobe’s user area.
The XMP templating facility in Photoshop is a bit rudimentary; it requires you to hand-edit the XML Schema data in a configuration file. Fortunately, there’s an easier way: Install the free MetaLab plugin from Pound Hill Software. It lets you place up to 10 items on a custom panel in the CS File Info box. Two of the 10 items can be popups and two others can be checkboxes. If you need more, you can move up to MetaLab’s high-end brother, the Catalyst XMP development tool.
A Pitch for DNG
Kost then described Adobe’s Digital Negative specification, which was published just a few weeks ago. (Adobe prefers not to call it a “standard” because it has not been, and probably will not be, submitted to a public standards body. We suspect, however, that it will soon become a de facto standard like TIFF or PDF.) DNG was created to address several problems that digital camera raw files present.
Foremost is the fact that raw files, which are growing in popularity, use proprietary formats that are different for each camera maker — often, for each camera model. At this writing (October 2004), there are said to be more than 100 formats in use; Adobe supports about 65 of them in its Camera Raw plug-in for Photoshop CS. As new cameras come on the market, this number will grow.
It’s a problem for Adobe, which has to write new code each time a camera is introduced. It’s a problem for the photographer, who won’t have Photoshop support for his new camera until Adobe gets the code tested and distributed. And so it’s a problem for the camera maker, because a lack of Photoshop support can mean slow sales.
That’s not the end of the problem list. The camera manufacturer has the ongoing expense of supporting its proprietary data formats in the years ahead, as computers and operating systems come and go. Or perhaps the manufacturer will quietly decide to stop supporting an old camera, especially if it wasn’t a best-seller. The owners of that camera model may or may not be willing to upgrade to a newer design, but when their conversion software stops working, they will be exceedingly unhappy to discover that their old images are no longer accessible.
The cure, says Adobe, is to have a single, public, highly flexible file format that all camera makers can support. That’s where the Digital Negative specification comes in. Because most of the proprietary file formats are loosely based on the TIFF-EP format (of which Adobe is the custodian), Adobe has based DNG on TIFF-EP. Like TIFF, DNG is extensible; if a new kind of data is invented, it can easily be supported by defining a new data tag. (This also maintains backward compatibility, as TIFF readers simply ignore any tags they don’t understand.) The most important tags are public — rules for their interpretation are openly published — but the file can also have private tags that support a vendor’s “special sauce” or proprietary processing algorithms.
Like TIFF (now at version 6) and PDF (version 1.5 is current), DNG is made even more future-proof by a version-level identifier. If a radical change in imaging technology ever requires a major overhaul of the DNG file layout, reader software will still be able to recognize and interpret today’s files. This means that DNG should be safe to use as an archival format; by storing your images in DNG, you can survive the changes that are surely coming to both the digital camera market and the general computer business.
Adobe now provides a free utility program that converts proprietary raw files to DNG. It has one serious flaw: Its output contains only the information that it understands. If a camera maker keeps secret information in the raw file (and hasn’t told Adobe how to work with it), that information will get left behind. Therefore, Adobe currently advises everyone to keep the original raw data as an ultimate backup. Hopefully, the next generation of cameras will use DNG as their native format, so that no conversion process will be necessary.
More Workflow Tools
Kost also suggested that photographers may want to investigate the Russell Brown Tips and Techniques page, where you can download Dr. Brown’s Image Processor. (It’s also available from the Adobe web site.) This Javascript utility for Photoshop CS lets you batch-process a group of images without setting up an Action. In particular, it can automatically convert a sequence of raw files to any of the formats that Photoshop supports.
Just before leaving the podium, Kost mentioned one further resource: her QuickTime demo on how to use “variables” to automate text replacements in Photoshop and ImageReady. It’s available as a stream from the demo page of the Software Cinema web site.
Digital slide mount. Peter Krogh then gave us a brief demo of the forthcoming “Dr. Brown’s Meta Framer.” This nifty utility creates a frame around your image and embeds your copyright and other metadata as rasterized text. The point, of course, is that your customer won’t have to use a special tool to see your licensing information; it’s printed right below the image.
The Meta Framer has two options: “captioned print,” which places three short phrases at left, center and right bottom; and “professional image delivery,” which writes seven metadata fields and optional free text as a long, punctuated string below the picture.
The software is free, but as of October 2004, it’s still in beta; to join the test program, send mail to peter@peterkrogh.com. When it’s finished, we’d expect to find it on any of the sites where other Dr Brown scripts are available.