Returning to a previous post, which has been rather well visited. I thought is useful to describe how to use Lightroom and the LR/ Mogrify plug in from Tim Armes to prepare images for Alamy.

Any well exposed image taken in RAW from a 6MP camera or greater can meet Alamy’s standards as long as the ISO is low. I would suggest that anything over 200 on P&S’s is going to be tough. But Canon DSLR’s such as the 10 series can be pushed to 400 without difficulties. 1 series and the 5 D can go up to 800 ISO and the new mark 111 1 series cameras (an perhaps the 5D mk II) even higher. Nikon I am not sure about.

This is assuming that the lens is a good one, so basically L series zooms and quite a few of the non L series primes. Non L series zooms may be more of a problem.

The LR standard input sharpening for RAW images should be left alone and no output sharpening applied. If your image requires sharpening to look good don’t upload it to Alamy.

Out put using LR/Mogrify. The original version for LR 1 works best for this as the one for LR2 doesn’t convert the file format. Tim Armes seems to think the old version doesn’t work with LR 2 (and it didn’t work with the Beta) but it works fine.

Here are the settings I use from a screen grab

Make sure that the path to mogrify is set correct or none of this will work!

The file settings should be TIFF, 16 bit, no compression and a colour space of sRGB (you can send Adobe RGB but I prefer not to risk it.

In Mogrify image processing options set resize to fit “total number of pixels” and then set this at 16.1 MPixels (which gives a file size of 3 X 16.1MB or 48.3 MB obviously) this meets fully with Alamy’s requirements for sizes. Obviously if you have a 22 MP camera then you don’t need to do this!

Then set the Mogrify format options to cahnge the format of the output file to JPEG with a quality of 95%. This will give you a file size of anywhere from 2 - 5 MB dependent upon the image. 95% compression will not usually show up any artefacts (unless you started with them in the image by underexposure or sharpening)

Now upload to Alamy.

Simple really.

• By Chris Orwig
• Jul 29, 2008
• Article is provided courtesy of Peachpit Press

The pricing is interesting. In the past ADOBE just charged the USD $ price in GBP

This is a set of images that go together to make my book.

svgallery=incomers_book

Here is the details of how they were made.
All the photographs were taken on my last two visits to Eigg. The were taken on a Canon 1D mk II camera using either a 28-70mm f2.8 or a 70 - 200mm f2.8 lens. Occasional use of a 580 Canon Speedlight was made as appropriate. A polarizing filter was also occasionally used.
The shots were taken in RAW. Initial processing, selection, key wording etc. was carried out in Lightroom. One image (the woods) was an HDR image created from 3 exposures in Photoshop due to the large dynamic range of light present. The images were made into B&W and all final processing carried out in Lightzone.
All images were exported as 16 bit tiffs, resized as appropriate using LR/Mogrify and then placed on the page in In Design. Text was also added in In Design.
The pages were exported as sRGB 8 bit JPEGS and placed in the Blurb software to make a final book. This was exported for printing.
Prints of images were prepared using Qimage and printed by Peak imaging on Fuji Crystal Archival paper.
The prints for college display were mounted on polar white, museum grade board and framed in black 50cm X 50cm frames by myself. The prints for display on Eigg were mounted on foamboard by myself.

Resolution micro-conference, originally uploaded by sharl.

31st December, 2007

Sounds an interesting conference, strange that Sharl should be talking about the future, when the college he works for hasn’t arrived at the present! But Sharl seems to be different to most of the lecturers, in that he is aware of a world outside the so called “fine art” stuff.

How to upsize an image for Alamy and other stock photo librariesWe are often asked how to resize images for the Alamy picture library. Here is a quick explanation and howto guide.Alamy ask for files that are 48 Mbytes in size, RGB, 8-bits per pixel, and jpeg compressed using quality 10 or above in Photoshop. This needs some translation.The 48 Mbyte file size is for an uncompressed photo. The image has to be RGB (rather than say, CMYK which has a reduced colour space).Remember that 8-bits is one byte. Each pixel has one byte for the Red, one byte for the Green, and one byte for the Blue colour channels. So, we have 3 bytes per pixel.A typical 8 Mpixel camera will give an uncompressed file size of 8 x 3 = 24 Mbytes. Alamy require 48 Mbytes, or equivalently 48/3 = 16 Mpixels.The source of possible confusion with Alamy is that they ask for a 48 Mbyte file as a jpeg image.Jpeg is a wonderful technology if used right, it reduces file sizes by throwing out information that is the least easily perceived in a photo (it is a lossy compression technique). You can control the amount of information that is lost, but you can very easily overdo it by throwing out information that you can see, leaving behind ugly artifacts. Sample photo increased in size by 130%Figure 1: Canon G7 image enlarged to 48 Mbytes / 16 MpixelThe file size for a jpeg image is highly dependent on the image content. File sizes can be reduced without artifacts or any loss in perceived image quality if the compression setting is not too severe

So, why do we need LightZone again? What is it? Why do you want something like that?

The thing is that I really don’t like is, well, yes, Photoshop. Actually not Photoshop in itself but Photoshop as a tool for Digital Photography. And it is not just Photoshop really, but all the software that we generally use to edit Digital Photos.

What is wrong is that presently all software applications (except for, of course, LightZone treat an image as a bucket of numbers, three numbers for every pixel, which are only correlated to the image we see on the screen through a very obscure relationship.

Then what the user is asked for is to change the numbers in some other obscure ways, using Levels or Curves tools, and getting feedback from a Histogram.

Aside from the fact that many Photographers might not be too interested in the mathematical aspects of image processing, even for people well versed in Photoshop mechanics image editing seems to remain cumbersome and unpredictable. A fair amount of trial and error is always involved and every image seems to require a new effort.

My conjecture is that the difficulty lies in the distance between the object being manipulated and the resulting image on the screen. The distance is too large and the brain doesn’t bridge the gap.

The photographer looses a very important tool: the capacity of pre-visualizing the changes to the image at every step. Maybe the photographer knows fairly well what he or she wants to get out of an image, but how do you get there from the initial image, what are the steps to follow? I think that Photoshop (and all other imaging software of the kind) makes the task of the photographer very difficult because it is very hard to predict what happens at every step of the corrections. It is a sequence of trial and errors that is usually frustrating and misleading.

What I think is needed is something that allows a more direct manipulation of the image, something analog to what the brain already uses to represent the image.

I think that to modify an image it takes another image.

Photography is some 150 years old now, people have been working with images in the darkroom for a long time and the tool that photographers seem to have universally choosen is some incarnation of the Zone System.

The Zone System, as popularized by Ansel Adams and others in the 40’s, divides an image in various zones of different luminosity and provides methods for altering the relationship between them.

Zones can be translated up and down on the brightness scale and ranges of zones can be compressed or expanded.

The Zone System provides to the photographer a great degree of precision, allowing to exactly calculate how the different elements of the image have to be transformed, allowing for great predictability in the results obtained in the darkroom.

Many think that predictability as the reason why photographers use the Zone System. I don’t agree.

I believe that the Zone System is actually a way of thinking about images, a framework where the relationship between the graphical elements of an image can be analyzed and thought about even before thinking about what to change.

The reason why this framework is successful is that it can be interiorized by the photographer and it allows the mind to play what if scenarios with the image, the changes can be pre-visualized before being performed.

Good photographers can do the visualization work at the moment they capture the image itself, they choose the exposure, make trade tradeoffs with what the camera and the film can capture in view of what they want to obtain out of the picture they’re exposing. Many people do this consciously, others in a more instinctive fashion, but all good photographers do it.

With LightZone I wanted to build a software implementation of the Zone System, a tool that would allow a direct manipulation of an image in terms of zones and light values and thus re-enable the visualization capacity of the human eye and brain.

If you made it this far and you are still interested, then please go download LightZone at http://www.lightcrafts.com and tell me what you think of it.

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