It took me five days to squeeze the last GigaPan image into my schedule. I had classes to teach, meetings to attend, a midterm exam to write, a rehearsal with my choral group, and a meeting of the San Luis Obispo Mac User Group – SLOMUG. I couldn’t find the hours to put the big Mission San Luis Obispo image together until last night.

The abbreviation of San Luis Obispo can often be the source of humorous acronyms and abbreviations. We have a local Internet supplier called SLONET, for example. I have been thinking about calling my exhibition of panoramic images SLOpano, or Take it SLO, or SLOmo Pano, or something trite that includes the SLO moniker.

And I did finally get the Mission SLO pano into the GigaPan Stitch software and on its way to being a very high resolution panoramic image. It is comprised of 798 separate 60 MB images, which according to my calculator is nearly 800 images, which translates into the monstrous file of over 17.74 GB. There is a significant overlap of images when using the GigaPan rig. Though it is adjustable, the default is 30 percent.

This is the finished Mission San Luis Obispo GigaPan photo. Click on the image to go to the GigaPan site to see the ultra-high-resolution version.

When I have taken my other “normal” panoramic images, I usually shoot 12 frames, and the resulting files are a tasty 350 MB finished size. These images have about 25 percent overlap so that my other stitching software (PT GUI Professional) can make them whole without difficulty.

The hard drive companies are going to love me! Oh, yes! Since I (perhaps stubbornly) shoot everything in Camera Raw, I end up not with just one set of 798 images, but two, because I first convert all of the images to full-resolution uncompressed TIFF images for the GigaPan Stitch software to ingest. Camera Raw files from my Canon 1ds Mark III camera are typically 15-25 MB each, and the TIFFs I make from them are really large at over 60 MB each (no compression!). I will probably end up supporting an entire community of workers who will be slaving overtime to make multi-terabyte drives to support my GigaPan obsession.

Oh, yes, it has become an obsession.

The altar, main sanctuary, and side sanctuary of Mission San Luis Obispo. This is a lovely environment, and especially nice for musical performances. This image is a conventional 12-frame panoramic image taken with my own panoramic “backpacker” mount.

As I rode my bicycle to school yesterday morning, I was eyeing the mountains above Cal Poly, a beautiful vista exists up above the Poly “P” on the hill. From there I could get another sweeping view of our beautiful volcanic peaks. And, if I get up there in the next few days there may still be a trace of the lovely springtime green. Spring is short here for color. We get about three weeks of Irish green grass, then it dries quickly to the California gold we enjoy for the rest of the year.

I took this photo during a performance of the Festival Mozaic orchestra performing Bach in Mission San Luis Obispo in 2010. I am the photographer for Festival Mozaic.

I have been thinking about adding some kind of bracket to the back of my old Kelty backpack to attach my horrible and heavy video tripod, making these mountain hikes a little easier on the back and shoulders. And, I have been thinking about other uses to put GigaPan’s software to work. How about flat art? Ultra-high-resolution reproduction of antique images, charts, maps? (I found some on the GigaPan site that were done by others.)

This is the mozaic of 798 images in GigaPan Stitch software. It takes a long time to load, and a long time to stitch, but the resulting images are amazing.

Then I started thinking about a wooden jig with a pin register system for indexing historic Cirkut panoramic photo prints in front of a copy camera or into a scanner. Oh, the possibilities are endless! I am literally losing sleep on this project (it’s 2:53 a.m.), and I am not sure it’s officially a project yet.

This is the finished panorama shown in GigaPan Stitch. I exported it to a Photoshop Raw file 194,256 pixels X 30,452 pixels in size. You can also see the color correction panel at the right. This is a nicely-implemented addition to Stitch. It makes simple and effective color, tint, tonality, saturation and similar corrections to these massive files.

In the online version of the photo, you can zoom in and read the inscriptions on the Mission bells, learn what year they were made (they were recently replaced), and you can see the legless waif walking (floating?) up the stairs of the Mission, the disembodied (or mis-embodied) people all around the Mission Plaza. I’m even in there! Where’s Waldo? I’m sure you can find something interesting in this photo.

There is a rather strange stitching “error” (not sure what to call it) on the steps of the Mission, which marks the beginning and the end of the panorama. Over an hour passed from start to finish, and there was a significant lighting change during that time. The camera continued to shoot at the same exposure, so the variation is understandable, but there also seems to be a positional error that crept into this image. Maybe I bumped the tripod at some point?

A GigaPan Lesson learned here: Don’t split the main subject of a panorama. I will be careful to plan better in the future to pick a start-stop point somewhere in the trees so it doesn’t show if there is a minor exposure difference in the time it takes to make the panoramic image.

A second GigaPan Lesson learned here: A much longer shutter speed would not record as many mis-embodied people. I think that a speed of 1/4 or 1/2 second would do the trick. Then, only people who stand still longer than 1/4 second would be recorded at all. The photo would look as though there was no one around. I used this technique to make people disappear from the plaza in front of Notre Dame de Paris, and it worked well. The only people in the photo are those sitting on benches; everyone else disappeared.

Overall, it’s a fantastic image, delightful to view, and it’s especially interesting to see the effect of time and motion in a busy public place while the camera turned and pitched and clicked. Please enjoy the view!

Yesterday I took one in Mission Plaza, in front of the historic Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, located in the center of my town. Built in 1772, the Mission is a favorite tourist spot and an active Catholic church, where three or four masses are held daily. I took a series of over 800 photos of the Mission from the middle of the plaza, and I was using the telephoto lens for this.

At the beginning of the hour-long gigapan photo session there was a fair for expectant mothers. As the camera slowly worked its way around the image (a full 360 degree pan), the fair had ended, and many of the tents were disassembled and removed from the scene. Tourists, clusters of visiting students wearing FFA jackets, and a delightful seek-and-find competition was being held simultaneously. The sun also went lower in the sky, changing my exposure by one full stop in the time it took the machine to make its rounds.

I haven’t started stitching that photo yet. It will be Monday night’s stitching event. I am sure it will be an interesting photo with all that activity.

I’m stitching the Eagle Point panorama now (late Sunday night) from a set of 888 images taken on the Canon 1ds Mark III which was nestled into the Gigapan while attached to my 100-400 mm Canon telephoto lens set at 300 mm focal length. Stitching can take hours with the Gigapan, and this one has already taken a couple of trips around the clock. This one is going to be breathtaking, and it will be really large, over 15 GB final size.

I’m treating these images both as lovely panoramic photos and as historic documents. I would like to think that 100 years from now someone will carry the Terapan (Petapan?) device up the same mountain with a sturdy tripod and record how the City of San Luis Obispo has changed since way back in 2012.

My panorama from Black Hill in Morro Bay, California. It’s a huge image, delightfully detailed, and capable of being printed over 60 feet in length on my Epson ink-jet printer. The 19:1 aspect ratio is a bit much to take-in, but it will be a fascinating printed piece. Click on the image to view it in the Gigapan web site.

My Morro Bay pano, shown here, is about 9 GB in size, and I have uploaded that to the Gigapan web site so that the world can view it. My print version of that panoramic image will print at almost 70 feet in length when I am ready for its presentation. The curious thing about the Morro Bay panoramic image is the aspect ratio. My preferred ratio of length to height for panoramic images is about 5:1. Morro Bay is more than three times that wide at 19:1, which makes it freakishly long. It’s more interesting when you zoom in, and zoom in, and zoom in.

As I type this blog entry, I’m preparing to print a 44-inch wide version of my Terrace Hill pano (posted in my blog yesterday). That print will have to be printed vertically, because – this is the first time I have ever encountered this – Photoshop will not print a file of that resolution in landscape mode; it must be rotated and printed the other way.

I have been running into little barriers like this all day, a result of pushing the limits of photographic imaging in the common and uncommon applications that I am using to make these ultra-high-resolution panoramas. The idea of assembling 888 individual photos into a single image is thrilling to me, but the process is tedious. I have to sort, rename, convert formats (Camera Raw to TIFF), and then stitch. And wait for hours while these things are happening.

This is the Gigapan Stitch 2.0 software at work on the Terrace Hill photo from Saturday. It went very quickly – about one hour – through the process.

Gigapan Stitch working on my Eagle Point panorama: This one has 888 component images, and is obviously more detailed. I don’t know how many hours it took to stitch (perhaps five?) because I was asleep while it worked. Click on the image above to go to the Gigapan site. It’s an amazing photo!

In yesterday’s two gigapan sessions, I shot about 1,700 photos. I used up all the memory cards I had in my camera case, with just part of one to spare. When I got home, I had to transfer all of these files to my hard drive, and even that took hours. Organizing takes longer, and sometimes you forget where you are. It would be easy to miss a photo in the middle of a gigapan session because you can run out of card space so easily. I was careful though; I did not run out of space on any card, but it required diligence.

Even opening a multi-gigabyte photo into Photoshop takes a long time, so I find myself being very patient as I do this stuff. Even making the reduced resolution images that I am posting here has taken hours of work in Adobe Photoshop. Reducing the 8.69 GB Morro Bay photo to a tiny JPEG of just 72 KB in size took over ten minutes of calculation time.

At some point I plan to print these panoramic images into huge ink-jet reproductions that will be mounted on a gallery wall. The Morro Bay panorama will probably be printed about 30 feet long, and my Eagle Point panorama will probably be printed at about 60 feet in length. I own an Epson 9600 wide-format printer, and I am thinking about a panoramic image printed on that company’s gorgeous Luster paper that uses more than half a roll of material (it comes in 100-foot lengths).

The Eagle Point photo finished stitching in the middle of the night (it’s 4:51 a.m. now) and I’m saving it as a Photoshop Raw file (Gigapan suggests that a TIFF file that large may pose problems for some software). It is over 200,000 pixels on the horizontal and 12,000 on the vertical. That’s exactly what I was looking for in this image – a large enough file that I can zoom in on the second floor windows of my home, which is about one mile from the camera position in the image.

Looks good!

As for the Gigapan rig itself, I will be shipping it back to the rental house today. My week-plus with that gadget is over for now. My overall impression of the Gigapan device is that it is an empowering technology. A couple of stepper motors, an internal control computer – it’s not much, really, but it makes these fabulous panoramas possible. I think it’s a great tool, and I look forward to using it again.

There will be a sequel, I promise.

I extended the rental period of the Gigapan unit to give myself a couple more days with the device. It was also overcast for two days this week, and not particularly photogenic (and then there was the trip to San Jose and back to pick up a Linotype Machine), and then there was class, and office hours, and advising, and heck it has been busy outside!

So, enough excuses! I went out again yesterday afternoon to re-shoot a Gigapan I had made the previous week from Terrace Hill in San Luis Obispo.

This time I got it right!

Last week I used my 16-35 mm wide angle zoom lens, and I captured a stunningly unstunning panorama from the crest of that hill. This time I used my 100-400 Canon telephoto zoom, and set it at 150 mm. The Gigapan made a series of 105 images with that lens, and I stitched them this morning into a Mercator (for print) image. I am also uploading that image to Gigapan’s site. I think this one will be very impressive.

This combination did the trick! My Canon 1ds Mark III and my Canon 100-400 mm zoom lens. I had the lens set to 150mm, and Gigapan Stitch did the rest. The result is an image of about 2GB that is very successful.

After stitching, the image came out at just over 2.0 GB. It had a lot of unnecessary grass along the edges, so I have cropped it for print to just over 1GB. That’s a very large photo, and the detail in it is extraordinary. The sky was a bit hazy, and it was ferociously windy on Terrace Hill yesterday, but the resulting image is very nice. It is what I had hoped the Gigapan would do for me. It just took me a week to figure out how to do it successfully.

Now I feel I have the control over the Gigapan process that I didn’t have last week. It has been a good experience. Despite a couple of missteps, now I know how.

This is a reduced-resolution version of my Gigapan image. This shows the general view, looking northwest from Terrace Hill across San Luis Obispo. In the background are two of our “signature” mountains, Cerro San Luis Obispo (1292 ft.), and Bishop Peak (1546 ft.). Click on the image to visit the Gigapan version online.

Gigapan Stitch 2.0, the software that makes these images into Gigapans, is much faster today than it was during the week. I think it must be easier to stitch telephoto images than wide angles images, or perhaps the software prefers the Saturday morning shift to the Thursday evening shift. In any event, the stitching process took only minutes – maybe 30 – to generate a 2GB photograph.

I’m going to hike back up to Eagle Point to re-shoot my major San Luis Obispo panorama. It’s the one I have been dying to get in extremely high resolution. I’ll post a link to that here when I am finished.

Yes, it was a Linotype keyboard! attached to the rest of a complete Linotype machine, rushing down the freeway. And, yes, it was in my own truck!

This is the “new” Linotype machine in the warehouse in San Jose. We machinery movers had a relatively simple job of mounting it and loading it into a truck this morning.

I picked the machine up this morning at History San Jose, a public museum in the city of San Jose, California. That organization is placing the machine on indefinite loan to the Shakespeare Press Museum at Cal Poly.

The 3,000 lb. Model 31 is moved from the warehouse to the back of my waiting pick-up truck by Ken Middlebrook of History San Jose.

The machine is an operational Model 31, originally manufactured by Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn, NY, in 1931. It is fitted with a Star Quadder and four magazines of matrices. It has an electric pot and a 110V motor. The last time it was running was about five years ago.

This will be our second Linotype machine, the other being a Model 4 that is not capable of setting type, or even cycling through the process. That is a “teaching machine” with many of its key parts removed for access to the internal workings of the machine. I remember using that one as a student at Cal Poly in the early 1970s.

Tom Goglio, a retired Cal Poly lecturer, guides the Linotype machine into the back of the waiting F350 truck. The lift gate ended up getting in the way, but we managed to lift the machine over it and into the back without incident.

Cal Poly has a wonderful working printing museum on the ground floor of the Graphic Arts Building, a museum that has been open and operated by student curators since 1969. We have 18 working printing presses, numerous binding machines, and a collection of over 600 fonts of metal and wood type.

And now we have two Linotype machines that we can point to, and explain to visitors.

Celebrating our success, from left to right: Jim Gard, Tom Goglio, Ken Middlebrook and Brian Lawler. The ETAOIN SHRDLU Express did a great job of delivering the machine to Cal Poly for the Shakespeare Press Museum.

This new machine will be added to the collection tomorrow morning, and will become an example of the second-most-important machine in the history of printing (in my opinion). It will take its place in the museum, replacing an Intergraph machine that will be sent to another museum on loan.

It took several years to acquire this machine, a result of some light negotiations, some fear of “scrapping” the machine, and the efforts of my good friend (and retired Cal Poly lecturer) Tom Goglio. Ultimately, the decision to loan this machine to Cal Poly was made by Jim Gard, a driving force at History San Jose, and Ken Middlebrook, the organization’s technical guy and manager.

And, once the decision was made to lend the machine to our museum, things happened quickly. It was just a few weeks between the call, and the pick-up.

I drove up to San Jose in the dark of morn today, and we loaded it up. For the journey, I borrowed my friend Jim Eckford’s heavy duty Ford F350 dual-rear-wheel truck. This truck, according to its manual, can handle a load of just over 6,200 lbs. in the center of its bed. The Linotype machine weighs about half that. It felt heavier on the road.

We bolted the Linotype machine to a fresh pair of skids, then Ken Middlebrook lifted it with the organization’s fork lift, and we gently squeezed it onto the back of the truck. It cleared by about an eighth of an inch.

Nothing like this is ever easy.

Loading took about an hour, and soon the machine was resting in the back of the truck. I strapped it to the bed with those clicky nylon straps that give you confidence that your load will not shift on a truck. But, in my heart of hearts I knew that these straps would snap like dental floss if the Linotype decided to shift in the bed. There is nothing worse than 3500 lbs. of angry cast iron!

I drove carefully and (relatively) slowly, and returned to San Luis Obispo. The trip, which normally takes about three hours, took me more than four. But, the load arrived safely and we will be unloading the machine in the morning.

I had only one person notice the machine on the road, a fellow passed me and gave me a big thumbs-up sign. Grinning, I responded in kind.

In the coming months I will be working with several other old coots like me who know a little about Linotype machines. We’ll polish this one up, and we’ll rewire it, and we’ll see if we can make it run again.

The ETAOIN SHRDLU Express delivered her cargo safely today!

I’ve been schlepping my big video tripod (25 lbs.) up and down mountains this weekend, carrying the Gigapan Epic Pro mount (about 5 lbs.), and also carrying my camera bag (13 lbs.) which has my camera and lenses and an old banana peel in it.

My position in Pirate’s Cove, near Avila Beach, California. This beautiful spot was ideal for making a panoramic image. While the camera was making 504 images, I picked up two bags of litter from the rocks – fishing tackle, beer cans, cigarette butts, broken glass. When I climbed back up the hill I looked like a photographer-Bedouin.

It’s tough getting old.

And, this equipment is getting on my nerves. It’s an awful lot of weight to carry for the purposes of shooting a panoramic image. My normal rig is a carbon-fiber tripod with a Really Right Stuff head on it (about 4 lbs.) and my wooden panoramic head (.75 lbs.). I still have to carry the camera and lens, but the whole thing doesn’t cut into my shoulder blades like the big tripod does. I noticed in the mirror this morning that I have bruises on my shoulders.

GigapanMoves

Click above to see a short movie of the Gigapan device as it moves my camera around a panorama. It takes a few minutes to download to your computer, so please be patient.

On Sunday I took a photo at a local beach area called Pirate’s Cove. This is a beautiful, quiet beach with several McMansions above it on the bluff. I was clambering down a hill to get to the rocky side of the cove when I realized that I was breaking through shoulder-high poison oak bushes. That, I thought, would complicate my project, but I forged ahead, making it safely to a rocky section of the cove where I made a Gigapan image of 504 images (63 rows of 8 columns). Two days later I have had no outbreak of Poison Oak, so I passed that test.

This is one version of my panoramic image at Pirate’s Cove. This one was made by the Gigapan motorized head, but then stitched in PTGUI Pro. I made 37 horizontal images on the Gigapan in one row, then put it together in PTGUI. The scallops on the end indicate that I should have taken a few more images into the hillside, and then cropped the ends square.

My folders of hundreds of images are brimming with files. I shot everything in Camera Raw, which allows me to convert these images into other formats for stitching: Gigapan software requires JPEG, PTGUI prefers TIFF. I feel safer with Raw images because I can adjust exposure, change shadow depth, and more. The size of all of this is mind-boggling. I continue to move, duplicate and duplicate again folders measured in the gigabytes. But, that is a small price to pay for the ultimate high-resolution panorama. I would hate to go out and make a huge collection of component images, and then not be able to use them because they were slightly overexposed.

The Gigapan stitching software is amazingly slow. To stitch my first image took about half a day. I had to tell my Macintosh not to sleep so that the stitching software wouldn’t pause in its multi-hour process. When it was finished, I uploaded the image to the Gigapan web site as a “private” photo, meaning that I’m not sharing it with the world – yet. The panoramic projection created by Gigapan is spherical, and I always have a problem with images like that. I don’t really want to look up into the blue sky. I want this to be a long horizontal panoramic of stunning resolution.

Obviously I need to learn more about the Gigapan process, being one method to get bigger, higher resolution panoramic images.

My experimentation continues…

A stitched panoramic photo involves taking a series of images with a special camera mount, then stitching those images into a whole, using software to correct for the overlaps in images, and to un-distort the resulting file.

This was my first stitched panoramic image, made with the then-new Kodak DC20 digital camera and Apple’s QuickTime VR Authoring Studio software. I think it is comprised of 16 separate images. This was my home office at the time, featuring a working antique candy store neon sign. Since then I have moved into a smaller home that cannot accommodate such luxuries.

I’ve been making panoramic images for decades, stitched panoramas since 1996. My first work with the stitched variety involved Apple’s QuickTime VR Authoring Studio software, which made gorgeous panoramic images from properly photographed originals. It had no user interface, instead using the Terminal as its control mechanism. Getting images made involved typing a command into the Terminal, listing the source images, and then letting the software work for a fairly long time. It worked well, but it was very geeky software.

This is the Taj Mahal, Agra, India, taken with a point-and-shoot camera and no tripod. United Airlines lost my tripod on this journey, and I was left to make my panoramic images on a stone bench using my Boy Scout compass for the rotational settings. It worked fine.

Eventually Apple added a user interface, making the process easier. And, as with other things from that company, they discontinued the product once it reached success.

Several other software companies picked up where Apple dropped the core. Most of these products were written by software publishers who used a body of code created by a German programmer named Helmut Dersch. His work was available gratis, and was (is) well-documented, well-commented, and it worked very well. Anyone with an interest in improving the state of the art in stitching software, or blending software, or some variation of the components of a panoramic stitching application contributed to the effort.

Over the years two products have emerged as the best in the business, one is called Autopano, the other is called PTGUI Professional. They both use Dersch’s code for the complex process of integrating and blending images, and they do it really well. I am a user of PTGUI, which has gotten better and better over the years. The Professional version now supports multiple processors, numerous methods for stitching and blending, and it has gotten so smart that you don’t even have to put your source images into the program in order; PTGUI will figure out which images go together and just makes them work. It’s almost magical.

Since my first stitched panorama experiments in 1996 I have used a variety of panoramic camera mounts, some I purchased, some I made myself. My favorite is the Backpacker’s Pano Mount, my current model, which is made almost entirely of lightweight woods. I make these mounts one at a time, and then use them until I improve on the design, then I make a new one. Though I enjoy using mounts that are made of machined aluminum, and I appreciate their accuracy and finish, I can’t stand carrying them because they weigh too much. And, almost all the mounts I have used have things that can, and do fall off, making a simple panoramic outing into a frustrating experience when you discover that the brass framis adapto-snake fell off somewhere between Glacier Point and Nevada Falls.

My mount weighs less than one pound, and it holds the unpleasantly heavy Canon 1ds Mark III camera that I use, combined with the unpleasantly heavy Canon 16-35 mm f2.8 lens that I attach to the camera. The camera and lens are a brilliant combination, providing me with extraordinary images of high resolution and exceptional sharpness. This is quite a camera for making panoramic images.

My stitched images are made from twelve or fewer individual photos, each of which is 60.2 MB in size when open. I shoot everything in Camera Raw, then convert to full size uncompressed TIFF images before stitching in PTGUI. I never use JPEG, fearful of the harm it does to images (I can see it). When I make a standard 360-degree panoramic image with my usual settings, I get a file that is about 300 MB in size. And, the size is impressive: I can make a print about six feet in length, and about 17 inches tall on my Epson ink-jet printer with these files. The results are excellent.

A couple of years ago, I read about a new panoramic mount called the Gigapan, which is a motorized stepping mount that will hold a variety of cameras. The mount is capable of making hundreds or thousands of separate images to construct images that are single-cylinder panoramas or fully spherical panoramas. It comes with its own stitching software (perhaps it has the Helmut Dersch code inside?) that can take hundreds or thousands of component images, and make them into a multi-gigabyte panoramic image.

The idea of using a Gigapan mount has gotten my attention a few times, but I postponed getting one until the right moment, a combination of nice scenery, good weather, a bit of spare time and a renewed interest in making panoramic images. We had about two inches of spring rain in the past ten days in San Luis Obispo County, and the grass is on its extended green behavior for a short while as a result. Very soon this verdant color will transform into California Gold, a dry-straw color that lasts until late November when we get our next rainfall.

Here is Gigapan, working on my afternoon panoramic image. It took 504 separate images to make the image I did today. Once I get the image stitched in the Gigapan Stitch software, I will post a link to it here.

I rented the Gigapan Epic Pro mount this week from my friends at BorrowLenses.com. The package arrived on Friday, and I jumped in with both feet. This big Gigapan unit retails for $895, but I’m renting it because I don’t know if it’s something I need to own.

The unit is a motorized cradle that can accommodate a camera and lens of up to ten pounds. Its controls allow me to select a 360-degree panorama, or a partial panorama, and then it calculates how many frames to shoot, and it moves the camera up-down, left-right until it captures the complete set of photos needed. The controls are simple, and the operation is foolproof.

One must be prepared for the Gigapan, however. Knowing the position, or calculating the position of the optical center of your lens is helpful, and understanding how to expose for panoramic images is critical. And, one must also buy every available memory card in your county before venturing out to use the Gigapan. Shooting Camera Raw images for the three photos I took today took five 8GB memory cards, and I’m still transferring the photos to my hard drive. (Gigapan recommends JPEG, which I might try tomorrow when I make my next image. With JPEG I will worry less about card capacity.)

I took my second 360-degree panorama this afternoon, and had to pay careful attention to the number of available photos on each of my cards. I watched carefully, and paused the Gigapan twice to change cards for one photo of 504 component parts.

The Gigapan is a nice unit, and its ability to automate the process of stepped panoramic shooting is delightful. So far, I like it (except for carrying it and the heavy tripod I am using).

Tonight I jump into the Gigapan Stitch software, and I will report back tomorrow on how that process works. I’m about to make my first multi-gigabyte panoramic image.

Mr. Curmudgeon is grumpy – always. I had to replace my Nikon Scan software yesterday, and that’s OK, but it brings up a problem that happens occasionally in our “industry.”

The problem is the obsolescence of perfectly good products. I own two Nikon CoolScan scanners, a device I consider to be the best film scanner ever made. I speak with some experience here because I have owned and operated various scanners including a Crosfield 646IM system, which occupied two air-conditioned rooms at my company, and various tabletop, desktop, and portable scanners.

Nikon Scan is dead. Long live Nikon Scan!

Nikon Scan, the software that was developed to run the CoolScan products, was a lovely piece of engineering. It was the first scanner software/hardware to include the Applied Science Fiction (later Kodak) ICE system that removes dust and scratches, the first to incorporate ROC – the Restoration of Color features added a couple of years later, and ultimately GEM – the Grain Enhancement and Management tools that make the Nikon scanner so amazing.

It’s been a couple of years, but Nikon dropped the CoolScan scanners from its product line, and then dropped software support for the thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of existing customers who own these fine devices. They refused to rewrite or recompile the Nikon Scan software for the newest versions of Windows and Mac operating systems. The software still runs on Windows, apparently, but it won’t run on the most recent Snow Leopard upgrade, and it will absolutely not work on Mac OS Lion.

So I bought a copy of Vuescan software that runs the Nikon scanner. I should be able to survive on that for a long time. The new software cost US$80, and it appears to control all of the features of the CoolScan. So, I will survive.

What I don’t understand about Nikon (and Heidelberg a couple of years earlier) is that they had the command of a market, then just abandoned it. They dropped it like dirty laundry, leaving many people in possession of an excellent piece of hardware and no software to make it go. This isn’t good marketing, and it left me and a lot of other people awfully angry.

I know it’s moderately expensive to do so, but couldn’t they get Steve Fuchs (the chief software engineer of Nikon Scan) to recompile the Nikon Scan software for the new Intel processors and operating systems? Couldn’t they spend the time and money to keep us happy into the next generation of film conversions? Would that not make us love Nikon again, instead of being infuriated by them?

I understand that the market for high end scanners has collapsed, and that continuing to manufacture them is folly, but come on, don’t injure us and also insult us! Let us continue to use the machines we have come to love as long as possible.

And, since I am being a curmudgeon, can I give Quicken a piece of my mind? What a bunch of dopes!

I have been paying my bills with Quicken since 1987, and have become so reliant on their application that I just don’t know what I would do without it. Last June, Intuit, Quicken’s parent firm, sent us Macintosh users a Dear John letter telling us to use their useless online Quicken Essentials, or abandon ship. Sorry, you’re a Mac user. We have no plans to support you. Ever. Good bye. Go to Hell.

Or buy a Windows machine.

Then, last month, they announced that they had rewritten the software, oddly called Quicken 2007 for Macintosh Lion. It’s the same ol’ software. I bought it. It works.

But, it’s brain-dead. They somehow “forgot” how to remember the size and position of windows on the screen. So, now every time I open Quicken, I have to open, and position all of the windows where I want them to be. How do you spell “enervating?”

Why do we put up with crap software like this?

Because there is no competition? Because Quicken is the only program that both keeps track of my money, and allows me to pay bills online? Because they are the only show in town, and I can’t go anywhere else?

I get the picture. They get my animosity.

But I continue to use their brain-dead software because it works. Maybe Vuescan can write a replacement for Quicken for Macintosh.

While visiting the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian last fall, I was impressed by a photo montage in one of the galleries.

This is a section of the wall in the museum where hundreds of lovely portraits are presented. These are all processed by a method we used to call “fake duotone.” There is nothing fake about how nice it looks.

The montage uses a photo technique we used to called “fake duotone” printing. It’s also known as a “tinted photo” technique. The word “fake” causes on to think that there is something unprofessional about the process. Why fake?

In the days when we did this – and the last time I did anything like this was about 1973 – it was fake. We printed a black and white photo on one press unit, and then we printed a rectangle of color that superimposed the photo on another unit (or perhaps we did it in the reverse order). When I first did this we had only a two-unit press, so the process of making “tinted” photos was pretty impressive stuff.

Though perhaps a bit brash in this color, this example of my friend and former student Lindsey Hahn shows the basic technique.

I suppose that it was also done because we were not experts at making duotones, so the tinting did the trick. It inserted a spot color into an otherwise monochromatic job, and it made the photos look impressive and “colorful.” Too bad we didn’t have a color scanner and a four-color press to play for keeps in this game.

Sometimes Multiply doesn’t work. In this set I have used four of Photoshop’s Mode settings for the overlay of blue: A. Line Burn, B. Multiply, C. Color Burn, D. Color. Obviously, Color works best for this portrait of my friend Rosie Bubb.

In the Museum in Washington, the wall display is done using a modern version of the same technique, and the images are lovely. I wondered, as I looked at the array of handsome portraits, if this was done easily in Adobe Photoshop, or if this required some skill or knowledge that I did not possess. I waited until after dinner that evening to try it, and I was pleased that I could quite easily reproduce a similar looking image.

But, as is often the case with such things, it’s no simple task to get an image to look nice using just one technique. I figured out several ways to accomplish the same, or approximately the same kind of image, but my technique didn’t work equally well on every image I tested.

To get these images, one needs a grayscale photo as the base image. To make useful grayscale images from color, I use the Black and White Adjustment Layer in Photoshop, as its sliders allow me to control the conversion of colors to monochrome with exceptional accuracy and translation quality.

This is a good starting point, and when I like the grayscale image, I flatten it – leaving the image in RGB color. From there, creating the tinted image is relatively simple. I create a new Layer, and fill it with a bright color from the Swatches palette. The new Layer begins as an opaque overlay on top of the grayscale image (so you see nothing but color).

Here is another image of Rosie with the highlight on her left cheek left as the photo was taken (perfectly exposed, but bright).

…and here is the same image with its highlight dampened a bit, bringing its tonality to a more flat appearance. I did this before applying the color overlay, and it’s more in keeping with the look of the images in the museum in Washington. Color Mode was used the same in both images.

By changing the Mode of the new layer to Multiply, the color of that layer darkens the grayscale image below it, and the Opacity slider allows me to control the degree to which the overlay color shows through. I slide that control left and right until it’s a pleasing image.

On some images this doesn’t produce as nice an image as I want, so I try the Color Mode instead. This works well on people with dark hair, or against a dark background.

These tinted images is that they are intolerant of bright highlights, and I have found that I must tone-down the image to redice the brightest highlights before I convert to grayscale, and then, after I my tint overlay, they look much better because they don’t have too bright a color tint in the highlights. To do that, I return to the original camera raw image, an reduce the Exposure, or increase the Fill Light to make a considerably flatter original. Then I apply the color tint, and the results are much better.

I also tried the technique on an inanimate object, the local History Center (and former Carnegie Library) in San Luis Obispo. Here again, the Color Mode works best to keep the tones brightwhile maintaining nice blacks.

I am presuming here that I would print these on an ink-jet printer, which has an amazing gamut of colors and which can print pretty much anything I want. If instead I want to print these images as true tinted photos of a multi-color printing press, using spot color inks, then it would have to be done completely differently. For that I will write another blog, and we will dig into duotones – real duotones – and “real” fake duotones – tinted photos printed with spot colors.

Keep an eye open for that blog.

Addition to my blog on tinted photos:

Today the 100 Most Influential People in the World edition of Time Magazine arrived in my mailbox. Admire the cover images!

© Time, Inc. 2012

I’m writing a new book about printing processes and prepress. Click on the link below to give me your e-mail address, and I will let you know when the book is published (target date is Summer, 2012).

I have found the Holy Grail of portrait and commercial photography!

Yes, I have done it, and it’s working and I am thrilled. The Holy Grail is a combination of tools, specifically an Apple iPad, an EyeFi Pro X2 SD card, and my Canon pro digital camera.

The simple-looking EyeFi card has both 8GB of camera memory, and a microscopically small WiFi network transmitter on board. The card writes photos to its own memory, and simultaneously transmits them to software on the iPad.

When I shoot the occasional group photo, or the occasional bankers-in-a-row photo, I usually have an Art Director with me, and we are often stumbling over each other trying to see the little LCD viewfinder on the back of my camera. In a shot last year in a bank in Santa Barbara, I was up on the ladder while the art director was “directing” from the ground, moving 19 people around in a crowded lobby so that everyone looked good.

I took a photo, then passed the camera down to the AD, then she would hand it back up to me, and I would shoot another one, and so on. It seemed to me that this could be done better.

I bought an app for my iPhone from OnOne Software that allows the control of my camera, and an on-screen image from the camera on the phone each time I shoot a photo. Though I like this software a lot, the problem is that I have to connect the camera to a MacBook Pro with a FireWire cable, then transmit the photo from the MacBook Pro to the iPhone. Awkward, but workable.

The Art Director confers with the subject of our portrait photo session using the iPad and EyeFi software.

Then I learned about the EyeFi card. It’s an SD-size memory card (8GB is the largest currently available) with a built-in WiFi transmitter. At about $90 I had nothing to lose, so I bought one. I watched a video on YouTube that explained how to do this with the EyeFi card and an intermediate “ad hoc” WiFi transceiver (a strange little gadget that I might carry in my camera bag). The transceiver receives photos from the EyeFi card in the camera, and then passes them to an awaiting device – in my case the iPad 2 – over a short-distance WiFi network it creates.

That was a flop. I never got the WiFi transceiver to work; it had settings that didn’t seem to correspond with the instructions, so I let it go (I may take it up again soon, as it might be able to extend the distance between the camera and the iPad considerably.

Making it work: before the iPad can receive images, it must be “paired” with the iPad. This is done in the EyeFi software, and it takes just a minute to do. Once the two are paired, the images from the camera begin to show up on the iPad.

EyeFi cards are made by a Mountain View, California company. They have made a name for themselves making the first camera memory card that includes a tiny WiFi 802.11 transceiver. It’s absolutely amazing that they figured out how to fit that transceiver into a card that is already packed with 8GB of memory. More amazing, it works!

So, I figured if I could get the EyeFi card to work on my pro camera, my Art Director could observe the photo shoot while holding the iPad, and give direction from a few feet (at least) away from my position.

This is the view from the iPad, with thumbnail images at the bottom of the screen. The photo is of Liz Summer, Relationship Manager for Heritage Oaks Bank in Paso Robles, California (used by permission).

The iPad’s gorgeous display would be much nicer for showing a client a portrait in progress.

I don’t know why it took me so long to get it working, but I tried, and failed, and tried again, and failed, and kept putting it off.

Once I got this working, I figured out a way to mount the iPad so that the portrait subject can see it during the photo shoot. This is a MonkeyPod flexible tripod hanging on a SuperClamp on one of the light stands.

While I was floundering and forestalling, the EyeFi Company made their product better, adding the ability for the card to speak directly to the iPad, and thus not requiring the “ad hoc” network device (which I could never get to work). That turned out to be the trick, and suddenly the system worked just fine.

This week I tried it again, and it’s better than I ever thought it would be. On Thursday I had a professional portrait assignment for a local bank. I invited the subject to sit for the portrait at my home. I set up for the photo, put the lighting in position, and then added the iPad, first taking the couple of minutes it takes to “pair” the EyeFi card and the iPad. Within a few seconds, the card was passing images to the iPad, and they were showing up there on the full-screen.

This is a view of the thumbnail images on the iPad screen. With these, the subject can get a sense of how things are working, while in the middle of the shoot.

My camera allows me to put both an SD card and a CF card in the camera simultaneously. They can be mirrored, chained, or written exclusively. For this EyeFi experiment to work, I put the SD card in, and set it to mirror the images I take. The CF card is set to record in Camera Raw; the EyeFi card is set to record in JPEG. This speeds the process, as my Raw files are between 15 and 30 MB each, and it would take too long for these to be copied over WiFi to the iPad. The JPEG images are modestly sized, and get there in a few seconds.

(I have not tried to use the EyeFi card by itself in a camera shooting Raw, but I will soon, and I will write about it then.)

The photo shoot went delightfully well. My Art Director worked with the subject, posing, and showing her the images as they showed up on the iPad. I shot the photos, and paid attention to the camera. The images are nice, the customer is happy, and the system now works.

I will be carrying the iPad from now on, using it as a wireless proofing viewer on my professional photo shoots.

I have found the Holy Grail of photography tools.

I have tried a variety of “natural” drawing apps on my iPad since I bought it about a year ago. Some I like, some I don’t. In the end, I find myself not using any of them. I resort instead to drawing on paper with a felt pen. My favorite sketching medium is a paper napkin with a bamboo-tip felt pen. I scribble, and doodle, and I come up with some nice sketches from which I make my illustrations (later in Adobe Illustrator).

Last week a friend showed me a new app for the iPad called Paper, from a developer named 53. Yep, 53.

I drew this alphabet with my finger on the iPad, using the Paper app from 53. Look how nicely the app smooths the letters, making them look more “professional” than my finger would normally allow.

This is the first drawing app on the iPad that I have found to be so pleasant that I want to draw with it.

Paper is – basically – free. When you get the free version, you are limited to just one brush, a pen tool that responds to pressure and speed on the screen. It’s the nicest of the five tools available for Paper, and it is enough for many people. But for $8.00 I bought the other four tools – a colored pencil, a felt pen, a sharp pencil, and a Sumi-e brush.

Here is my Peach Street artwork, drawn with my finger, and a Griffin stylus on the iPad using Paper. Notice the six tools along the bottom: eraser, pen, colored pencil, felt pen, sharp pencil and Sumi-e brush. The nine colors in its entire palette are at right. That’s all you get for (only) $8.00.

I am really taken by this app, and what I find most appealing is the feel of the brushes, and the “natural” way the app responds to my gestures. It’s not clunky or rough like other apps. The scripty lettering I do when I brush with my finger on the screen is nicely smoothed by Paper into lovely lines that make me feel like I am an awfully good lettering artist (it improves my scratches immensely).

I have tried sketching, lettering, drawing and “lecture-drawing” which is what I practice when I work on of a chalkboard at the university. I might even try this in front of my students next week, iPad in-hand, connected to the projector cable. That might help me to create some nice hand-out quality illustrations that have more than the transitive value of scribblings on a chalkboard.

I drew this while watching people bid on my eBay auction this evening. My lens didn’t sell any faster, but it was fun to draw the image using Paper.

The Paper app has a few drawbacks: it has a palette of only nine colors. You can’t get more. It has some sort of “undo” function, but I can’t find it often enough to enjoy it, and there are just the five tools mentioned. You can’t change brush size or intensity; you can’t change much of anything. But, I still like it a lot.

I have been working on an illustration of a peach for my Peach Street weather station “badge” that I might use on my web site. I have been sketching a lens that I have for sale this weekend on eBay. And, I have been doodling with script alphabets. I might take some of these sketches into FontLab and create a new handwriting font – who knows?

I find it interesting that numerous people have complained on the iTunes Music Store that $8.00 is an awful lot to pay for an app. Well, folks, have you priced Adobe Photoshop recently? To quote one of my students who saw Paper, “I spent half that much on a cup of coffee this morning.”

Maybe I can nominate this lettering for one of the coming Presidential campaigns. I am very happy with the quality of the word “Yes.” I could easily use this as a template in Illustrator to create a vector illustration.

Paper lets you build sketchbooks with multiple pages, each of which represents a single horizontal page folded into a book. Once you have drawn something, it allows your images to be passed to the iPad’s Camera Roll, and it allows for your sketches to be sent to various social media sites.

This app is very nice, and I think that anyone who has even rudimentary drawing skills can benefit from its clever tools.

Remember – it costs about twice the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and you can use it over and over again.