Is RED One Really a 4K Camera?

Anyone interested in the RED One camera should read this comparative review/diary of the Sigma SD14 and the Canon 5D (the latter of which I am a delighted owner).

Both are SLRs, both are a few years old. But the 5D has a 12.7 megapixel, full-frame chip, where the Sigma produces a mere 4.6 megapixels. Why bother even comparing them?

The reason is that the Sigma has a Foveon sensor rather than a CCD or CMOS. This sensor can capture distinct R, G and B light information at every pixel. The 5D's CMOS chip can record luminance at every pixel, and uses the common Bayer pattern of color filters at the photosites to capture RGB color, intermingling color fidelity and spatial resolution in a way that must be decoded by software using some math, some compromises, and some guesswork.

One way of looking at this is that the 5D spends three of its 12.7 million pixels to accomplish what the Sigma achieves in only one. If the 5D records 12.7 million tiny little light records per image, then the Sigma records 13.8 million (4.6 x the unique R, G and B records per pixel).

But that's not entirely fair. Our eyes tend to perceive detail more in luminance than in color, and the 5D is recording much more luminance information that the Sigma. For black and white photography, the 5D truly is a 12.7 megapixel camera and the SD14 truly is a 4.6 megapixel shooter.

So the truth lies somewhere in between—the SD14 is neither the 5D's equal in resolution nor is it possessed of one third the pixel count.

In one very real way the RED One is a 4K camera. It creates 4K images that look damn good.

And in another equally real way, the RED One is not a "true" 4K camera, as each of the 4K's worth of pixels it creates for each frame is interpolated (from compressed Bayer data at that).

And that's probably just fine—a topic for another day.

What's Wrong With Digital Photography?

A while ago I posted this on the Adobe Lightroom beta forums. I recently re-read it and thought I'd post it here verbatim, since it describes a gaping hole in digital photography workflow. Everyone who has a digital camera is either struggling in solitude with this issue, or will be soon.

Hello, my name is Stu Maschwitz. I'm an active PS and AE user, and the Adobites on those teams know me well, but here I am just another photographer with needs that straddle both professional and personal realms.

As a filmmaker, I shoot and maintain a library of stills that I use as reference for my motion picture work. I currently use iView Media Pro for this task, and am not 100% satisfied with it. But one thing it does well is allow me to keep a catalog file on my PowerBook that I can use to search my library (using keywords, dates, locations, metadata, etc.—the list of search terms is truly staggering). I can browse the thumbnails, and then iView will tell me what hard drive or backup CD I need to dig up to find the originals.

This is cool, but the process is very manual. If I want to de-archive stills from several sources, iView does nothing to help me with this. It also didn't do anything to help me take the media offline in the first place.

I should pause here and mention that Lightroom is simply phenomenal, and with the workflow, UI, and ACR technology, you guys had me at "Hello." But you knew that already. It's the less sexy stuff, the archiving and organizational stuff, that will make it my new best friend.

Did I mention that this library of mine has something like 60,000 photos in it? From about six different cameras?

So, with that introduction, here are some workflows that I'd like LR to support. I prefer to tell you guys what I want to do, rather than request specific features.

I take a bunch of photos. I pop in my card and ingest them. Lightroom handles this for me and asks me at the time of ingest if there's any keywords or other additional metadata that I'd like to associate with all of these images. Place, project, Copyright, author, subject, etc.

Now I have, let's just say, 2 gigs of new media on my PowerBook. Let me just get an important aspect of a photographer's workflow out of the way right off the bat: this is not a tenable situation. Because I'll shoot 2 gigs tomorrow, and the next day, and the next and the next, and at some point I need to move it, and then things get scary. Because I want to both "nearline" my media and also back it up in some way. I want it safe and nearby, and yet I want to browse thumbnails of it remotely.

Not a single product that I know of deals well with this simple and universal fact of digital photography!

So back to my workflow. I have 2 gigs of images, a few of which I want to work with right away. I'll work with them and output them. Lightroom already has that stuff well handled and is only getting better. Now I want two things. I want the 2 gigs freed up on my hard drive, and I want to know that my images are available to me quickly if I need them again.

What I'd like to do is define for LR my primary and secondary archiving devices. Let's just say that my primary is a big old firewire drive and my secondary is a DVD burner. I tell LR that it's time to "nearline" this project. Oh, did I mention that this whole workflow I describe is encompassed by the idea of a "project"? No? Well, I meant to.

So I tell LR that it's time to nearline project "Footprints." LR asks for my primary device, and I plug in my FW drive. Progress bar. LR asks for my secondary device. I pop in a DVD. Progress bar, and now LR asks if it can go ahead and delete the originals, and I say "OK."

One of the reasons that I say "OK" is that I know that I've told LR how paranoid I am about my archives. I've actually told it that I fear that my hard drive could go bad once every year, and that my DVDs could rot once every four years. If LR hasn't seen my FW drive in a while, it will ask me to plug it in, just to confirm the sanctity of my archive. Four years from now, LR will ask me to dig up those DVDs and re-burn them. Or maybe at that time I've decided that I want my secondary device to be another hard drive, in which case LR will suggest that I should move that secondary archive to the new device.

The thrust here is that LR is helping me confirm that I always have redundant backups of my stuff.

So a couple of years later I'm working on a new project that involves footprints. I am in Istanbul. I pop open my laptop, still unwilling to call it anything other than a PowerBook even though it's a MacBook Pro or whatever, and I open LR. I type in "footprints" and up come the thumbnails of my good old Footprints project. I ask LR to online Footprints, along with a few other images from other projects that had the keyword "footprints." LR asks for my FW drive, and I say "Dude, I'm in Istanbul, remind me again in two days." Two days layer, LR chimes in with a reminder, and this time I'm at home. I plug in my FW drive and guess what. it's hosed. LR says "Dude, don't panic. I foresaw this. Get thyself to Fry's and buyest thou a cheap new drive and in the meantime feed me the following DVDs. Not just the footprints ones, but all the DVDs for all the stuff that was on the FW drive that died." LR won't leave me alone until it has seen to it that I once again have redundant backups. I come back with a new drive and LR asks if that should be my new primary archive device and I say "Hell, yeah." LR asks for DVDs and I keep handing them to it until I can't find one. Then me and LR have a problem. Both archives failed. Nobody could have prevented this. We weep. LR asks me: seriously, like, in all seriousness, do you have some other copy of these files? I say, "Dude, seriously, no." LR then asks if it should remove the entries from the catalog, or keep them but flag them as unavailable.

Years later I find that DVD behind the stove. I run in slow motion across the wheat field towards LR, waving the disk. LR restores the files and immediately demands that I help it help me to get my redundant archives current.

Am I crazy? I mean, aside from my slow decent into annoying colloquialisms? Does no one else have a ton of photos, processed and originals, that are in various states of backup, mostly "not?"

Lightroom is obviously the dope dizzles when it comes to creative image manipulation, but feel strongly that its emphasis on workflow needs to extend into the unsexy, but critical issues that every photographer faces.

Linear Color Workflow in AE7, Part 6

Extracting Linear HDR (AKA scene-referred values) From Camera RAW files. Wee!

Much is made of the overexposure latitude contained within RAW images created by higher-end digital cameras such as DSLRs. The truth is, there can be extra data up there, but it may be hard to artfully extract. For the same reason we put the magenta filter on the Viper, the over-range values in a RAW file may be monochromatic and otherwise discontinuous from those in the sweet spot of the chip's sensitivity.

However, Adobe Camera RAW does a mighty fine job of milking every last bit of usable picture data out of a RAW file, and it is now included with After Effects 7.0. If you underexpose your RAW shots enough so that the highlights aren't clipping, you can effectively create single-exposure HDR images for use in your 32bpc projects.*

First, set up your project for a linear floating point workflow. This means switching the bit depth to 32bpc and selecting a linear (gamma 1.0) profile as your Project Working Space.

Then import your RAW file. Here's what one .NEF from my Nikon D70 looks like in the Camera RAW window:

Notice that the clouds are almost clipping, but Camera RAW is rounding into the clip nicely. That's lovely for photography, but for visual effects I'd like to get a more accurate representation of the actual light values present in the scene. I need to remove all the artful tweakings of the tone curve that Camera RAW has suggested.

To do this, set Shadows, Brightness, Contrast and Saturation all to zero. Then go into the Curve tab and select the Linear preset for the curve.

Feel free to adjust other settings to taste, such as those found in the Detail and Lens tabs. Remember, there is always subjective processing involved when making a viewable image from a RAW file, so don't shy away from these controls. You should also select a White Balance setting that makes your image look the most neutral (if you want it to have a color cast, better to do that later in float).

Your final step is to adjust the Exposure slider until no highlights are clipping. Use the histogram and the Highlights checkbox in the upper right to guide you. Find a setting just below the point at which you begin to clip.

Here's what my image looks like after following these steps:

Now hit OK (twice) and you are returned to After Effects. Select the footage item in the Project pane and you'll see that the profile it is importing via appears next to the thumbnail. Since our Project Working Space doesn't match any of the four export profiles supported by Camera RAW, our image defaults to the sRGB space. Which means that once we add it to a comp, it requires the same conversion to our project's working profile as any sRGB image would — the same one we went over in Part 1:

Now that we've got a comp that contains our linear and underexposed scene-referred pixels, we can simply add an exposure effect and boost it up until our image "looks right." In doing so, we'll push the brighter pixels into the overbright range, effectively creating an HDR image. Here's my image exposed up by a stop:

Photographers may be distressed by the clipped clouds in this image. Speaking for myself, when I shoot stills, I'm trying to artfully compress the broad dynamic range of the world into a viewable range. In other words, I'm trying to take a High Dynamic Range world and squeeze it onto a Low Dynamic Range print. But what we just did is the opposite — we took a LDR image and made it HDR. Why do such a thing? Images that visual effects artists shoot are often used not as standalone works of art but as ingredients in a final composite. Our HDR sky, blown out as it may appear, will react very realistically to subsequent compositing. If we blur it or composite transparent things in front of it, we will see the detail in those clouds come back in a photographic way.

Or we can play with other ways besides just tone curves to create a more pleasing final image. For example, we could take an image like this:

...and multiply it over our shot, for this result:

Happy RAW shooting!

* In other words, it's more your RAW format's ability to handle underexposure than overexposure that allows it to capture HDR imagery!