Buidling a Photoshop Workstation

At the end of last year, I began to grow tired of out of memory messages while trying to do anything in Photoshop CS5. Content Aware Fill, multiple layers, Photomerge, etc are all memory-intensive commands that can consume every last byte of memory and still scream for more. Photoshop began to remind me of this little guy:

© Artisoft LANtastic™ 1989

I began my odyssey by googling for system recommendations for Photoshop-specific configurations. After a short time reading about others' computers, looking at advertisements and perusing forums - my head was spinning. Perhaps the hardest thing was weeding out the good information from the bad.

I had decided to avoid the Apple platform, purely on a cost/benefit. Apple makes fine systems, but they were just too expensive and not necessarily better for what I needed, so they were off the table. Similarly, I dismissed a Xeon based system. I did come across this useful link to Adobe's recommendations for hardware and system configuration - http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404439.html

The common theme was that the graphics adapter was less important and that overall Photoshop performance was tied to hard drive I/O speed, multiple scratch disks RAM and CPU cache size and clock speed. The current version of Photoshop does utilize dual core CPUs in some operations, but in the interest of "future proofing" I opted for a quad core.  Hyperthreading, an Intel technology, will make a noticeable improvement, which ruled out using AMD CPUs (their CPUs do not offer hyperthreading). So, I put together a theoretical system that had the following features:

• Windows 7 64bit OS.
• Intel quad core CPU - 3.3 ghz cpu speed that supports hyperthreading
• Support for 16 gb or more RAM
• Solid State Drive (SSD), SATA3 (currently the fastest drive interface that is widely available)
• RAID capability - for redundancy and performance, support for RAID 5
• Nvidia Graphics adapter with at least 1gb DDR5 memory and dual display support
• At least 4 SATA3 device support (boot drive and others)
• A big case with lots of ventilation
• And a power supply big enough to run all of this

First I looked for already built systems at the usual suspects - Dell, HP, Newegg, TigerDirect, Amazon, Buy and Nerds - and found that in order to get what I wanted I would either have to spend close to $2,000  and would still be short on certain specs - usually an anemic power supply or graphics card. Or I could build one.


I ended up selecting the following components based on a best-bang-for-the-buck criteria:

• Intel i5 2500K (the K designates a cpu whose clock is "unlocked" allowing overclocking, or running faster than the rated frequency for the cpu, presumably with additional cpu cooling)
• 16 gb of RAM from Corsair -Vengeance DDR3 1600
• Palit NVidia GeForce GTS 450 with 1024mb GDDR5 memory (intended for entry level gaming, but super duper performance for Photoshop)
• OCZ Vertex 3 - 60gb SATA3  solid state drive -
• Western Digital Caviar Black 1Tb SATA 3 hard drive with 64 mb cache
• OCZ Mod Stream Pro- 600 w power supply with one 25amp 12v rail each for motherboard, cooling and graphics card.
• ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 Motherboard with support for all of the above, and 8 drive device ports - 4 SATA3 and 4 SATA2 and RAID support (SATA2) and overclocking capability
• Diablotek EVO Mid Tower Case - with 4-120mm fans.

My total cost for all of this was under $1000 after rebates. Purchased at my local MicroCenter.
Next I would like to share some of my decision processing. I have never been an advocate of acquriing cutting edge (more like bleeding edge) technology. It is important to know where the state of the art is, and what the sweet spot is for compromise between benefit and cost. This is why I decided in favor of an Intel i5 2500k cpu. I could save almost 1/2 the cost of the i7, and still have 90% of the performance. And for my purposes, if I really needed more performance, I could always purchase a higher capacity cpu fan and overclock the cpu a bit to gain another 25% or more in performance without sacrificing system reliablity.

The motherboard choice comes from having a series of positive experiences over the past 20 years with ASUS, and not so positive with the competition. It offered an easy to manage mouse driven BIOS interface, and a simple overclocking scenario, with all of the bells and whistles if I needed to really tweak it. Plus it supported the drives and devices I wanted to connect to it. One of the nicer features was support for the use of a SSD (solid state drive) to cache the boot drive. With this arrangement I can use my 60 gb drive to augment the performance of my 1 tb boot drive, with both devices on a 500mb/sec SATA3 interface. That's pretty darn fast - almost as fast as running a SSD as a boot drive. As I was intended to migrate my 1.5tb RAID5 array from my old computer to the new one, I selected this motherboard since it had built in RAID support.. Photoshop will readily utilize as many hard drives as possible as scratch disks to improve performance, and this motherboard can accept a total of 8 devices, with 4 of them being the faster SATA3 interface.

A brief piece of wisdom I collected along the way on hard drives. There are many many options out there. It is not unusual for a company to offer a 2 TB hard drive a 1 TB hard drive and a 500 TB hard drive - and they will be priced similarly.Aside from performance, the big differnce among them is the duty cycle, orin layman's terms, how hard you can beat on them before they fail. In general the drives with the highest price per gb tend to be oriented towards read/write intensive environments such as file servers and engineering or 3D graphics workstations were there will be tons of reading and writing to the drive. The drives in this category are more robust and can tolerate such use much better than the consumer oriented products. Plus these drives tend to have longer warranties. The Western Digital Caviar Black series of drives are targeted at the advanced computer user, falling just short of what is known as "enterprise class" hardware. They come with an excellent 5 year warranty. Another good choice is the Samsung F3 1 TB drive which utilizes a 2 platter design compared to everyone elses 3 platter systems - the result is less wear and tear and faster throughput. Highly recommended for their reliabilty and performance, particularly in intensive read/write applications.

Graphics adapter was simple - I just looked for an Nvidia card that had the monitor connections I wanted, at least 1GB of DDR5 memory, and modest power supply requirements. The Palit GTS 450 fit the bill nicely. It is powerful enough to do video editing, but reasonable in cost. Certainly more than I need for Photoshop, but all in all a very nice, fast display adapter.

The power supply is a big deal. While many offer 600 plus watts of power, very few can do this under load. A motherboard will easily consume 25 amps @12 v when fully populated and running fan managenment, and a discrete graphics card will have similar power requirements. The power supply is the one place you do not want to skimp. An underpowered system is likely to fail due to voltage drops which result in higher current demand and heat generation. Better and safer to go overboard on the power supply.

Memory - select the fastest, motherboard-approved memory modules you can afford. Get them as a matched set. With Photoshop as the principal application, Putting in 16 gb of "overclockable" ram that cost only $100 was a no-brainer. The motherboard has four memory slots, and is designed to take up to 4 - 8 gb modules for a total of 32 gb, but currently they are prohibitive in price. In keeping with the bang for the buck theme, it made no sense to spend upwards of $350 for 32 gb of ram when 16 was more than sufficient.

The Diablotek is one of the best kept secrets in the industry - it is a roomy, airy case with cable management (most of the cabling is routed under the motherboard platform) with tons of airflow where it counts - around the CPU and the hard drives. It boasts a total of 4 120mm constant velocity fans, and can handle another 2 large fans.

On to the system build. Things went together quite easily - I would say that in less than 2 hours everything was completely assembled and ready to accept the operating system. There was a bit of confusion with the software and firmware listed on the ASUS website for this version of the motherboard, and some issues with Windows' deep sleep mode in the current version, but once I got the kinks worked out the system has certainly exceeded my expectations.

This is how it all came together:

One thing that I found to be indispensable was to create an image of the Windows 7 DVD and install it on a USB flash drive. Microsoft describes the process at http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_programs/burning-an-iso-image-onto-a-usb/3f656c95-ba75-4b85-8fca-68a12cf7f8a9

This will save you hours - you will be able to install Windows, start to finish in about 10 minutes.

So how does this thing perform you might ask? Well, once the power on self test is complete, it boots into Windows in about 12 seconds. Microsoft Excel, Word, Outlook pop up in under a sccond. Photoshop CS5 64 bit takes about a second to load the first time, and less if it is cached. Right clicking on a jpg image and selecting open with Photoshop will take less than 2 seconds. The Intel Smart Response SSD hard drive cacheing provides near-SSD peformance on a 1 TB drive without the expense.  Gone are the dreaded "out of memory" messages in Photoshop, thanks to the 16 gb of RAM. And this is running at the stock CPU frequency of 3.3ghz. This CPU can safely clock up to 4.5ghz with the addition of a modest third party cooler like the ever popular CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus cooler which has a street price of $30.

"But I am not handy with tools" you might be thinking. Putting together a computer these days is neither difficult nor time consuming. If you can turn a screwdriver you can assemble a computer. Everything is color coded, and set up so that it is difficult to make a mistake. Besides, if you purchase from a store like MicroCenter, they are pretty good about helping you configure a system and responding to your questions when they come up - and they have an almost "no questions asked" guarantee. They don't hassle you if you need to return something, they only ask why you are returning it for tracking purposes.

I couldn't be happier with the system - it met my criteria for a sub-$1000 system, it is more than fast enough, can be upgraded with inexpensive components to improve performance, and I can say "I built it myself." What more can you ask for?

Correcting a Color Cast in Photoshop

There are many ways to correct a color cast in Photoshop. Generally speaking they fall into three broad categories - automatic/preset, subjective and analytical. I will be describing some of the more popular methods and where they may be used to maximum benefit in this and future posts, .

The first and the easiest is Automatic method. In Photoshop there are several places you can peform an automatic color adjustment. From the top menu you can select Image-Auto Color to make a reasonable guess at what a neutral color balance looks like. In general, this works pretty well in many, but not all, circumstances.

You can always go to auto settings in either the Image-Adjustment-Curves or Levels. Each has an Auto button which will adjust color, contrast, black and white levels, and brightness - all at the same time. The results are often quite good in many situations, and if you are in a hurry this often works well enough.

The next method is a bit more accurate, and is one of my favorites. It starts by making a duplicate of the image by selecting Image-Duplicate from the menu.

This will create a duplicate of your background image, and both are "pinned" to the desktop area in Photoshop. In order to carry out the next step, you will have to unpin the copy you just made. With the copy selected, left click in the top information area for the copy and drag the image away from its "pinning,"

This will create a floating window for the copied image. With the copy still selected, apply Filter-Blur-Average.

The copy becomes an image that averages all of the color values in your image.

If the blurred image is anything but neutral gray, as in the frame above, you have a color cast in your original image. You have just created the reference layer that you will use in the next step.

Select the ORIGINAL image and create a duplicate Background Layer by right clicking on the Background Layer in the Layer palette, and selecting Duplicate Layer. With the Duplicate Layer selected use the menu to select Image-Adjustments-Levels. (you can also use Curves if you prefer). Click on the middle eyedropper, and use it to sample the BLURRED image.

 The minute you click in the copied image the color balance in the original will automatically remove the cast.

At this point the blurred reference image is no longer needed and can be deleted.  By making the adjustment on a copy of the Background Copy, you can vary the opacity of that layer to adjust the amount of correction. In this case, the original image had a warm cast. So adjusting the opacity slider of the Background Copy layer to reveal more of the underlying image and its color cast. To my eye, the neutral balance was a bit cold, so I adjusted the opacity to 62% to produce a slightly warmer image. This is an important benefit of working on a copied layer- the correction is non-destructive and easy to adjust and/or undo.

You can turn off layer visibility of the Background copy layer by clicking in the "eye" icon to the left of the layer's thumbnail in the Layers palette to compare to the original.

If all is good, you can right click on the Background layer and select Flatten to finish.

This seems like a lot of steps to follow, but in practice you can complete this correction about 90 seconds or less. I will be detailing other color correction methods in upcoming posts, so be sure to stop by.

Buying Used Gear

Buying used equipment is not for the faint of heart, especially when the stakes are high. My most recent foray in to the used market unfolded over the past 10 days. It began innocently enough, when I spotted an Ebay listing for this baby.

The price was awesome, and there was a little bit of wiggle room as it was listed with a buy-it-now or best offer. I took the opportunity to bypass the best offer feature and contact the seller directly, making my offer personally. I also took the precaution to ask if the lens had any obvious defects, and he responded that it didn't. He accepted my offer, took the listing down, and we scheduled a mutually agreeable time when he would relist with the agreed price as a buy it now. Deal was done, I used Paypal's Bill-Me-Later payment option which was running a 6 month no payment/no interest promotion.

Luckily the seller was local, so we arranged a time to make the exchange, giving me an opportunity to assess the purchase in person. I met the seller and picked up my lens. I did a quick assessment of the condition of the lens. I looked for "brassing" or areas where the finish had worn off, typical of a heavily used lens. Presence of brassing is not a reason to reject unless you are looking for cosmetic as well as mechanical perfection, and are willing to pay for it. It was of little consequence to me.

Next I worked the buttons, checked the glass for marks, fungus, internal dust or haze, checked the diaphragm for oil seepage, the screws for any obvious signs that the lens had been opened by a DIYer. I loosened the tripod collar just enough to turn it with a little resistance - to see if there was any binding which would indicate that the lens barrel had sustained an impact. So far so good.

Even though this is an automatic focus lens, manual focus is important since it is common to fine tune the focus for some subjects. I turned the focusing ring. Uh-oh. It seemed a bit sloppy, and if I turned it too quickly, a chatter. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but an area of concern that required a little research. I mentioned it to the seller, and his response was that he only used the lens in auto-focus mode. To me it seemed that it had not been  properly maintained by it's previous owner in quite some time - not a good sign.

I made the decision to roll the dice and take it anyway. The seller seemed genuine and honest - a judgement call on my part - so I figured if there was a significant cost in servicing the lens, I was certain it could be worked out. I loaded the beast - its case it weighs 26 lbs - into my car and drove home.

First thing I did when I got home was to check the operation of the lens with my camera body. It focused perfectly and it was damned sharp. So I started making phone calls to various lens repair shops that had experience with this lens, and this is what I found out:

Nikon has a policy to manufacture parts for their lenses for only 10 years after they are discontinued, after which they either destroy or give away these parts to their authorized service network members. The stopped production on this lens around 11 years ago. Not happy. The repair, if no major parts were needed, was fairly involved - it had to be completely dismantled, which would cost $500.This was referred to as "standard maintenance" which included replacing minor parts, clean/lube, realigning and calibration. Less happy. It was becoming more and more evident that there could be other internal issues associated with the focus ring problems, and of particular concern was the serviceability of internal motor. The cost to replace this item would be $1200 - thus putting this out of the range of "we can work it out."

I contacted the seller, explained the situation, and gave him the option to work with me on its repair, or issue a refund. I was leaning towards the refund, and was happy when he took that option. He promptly issued the refund. I returned the lens to the seller this morning and all is good.

There are a few lessons to be learned here.

1. It pays to become intimately familiar with what you are buying. Scour the Internet forums for reviews and user experiences.

2. Get a sense of pricing. Avoid pricing that seems too good to be true, especially if it is on Craigslist - it could be stolen. Avoid pricing that is too high - the seller is having buyer's remorse or is clueless as to the market value of his offering and is trying to recover as much money on his equipment as possible.

3. Make sure you have some recourse in the event of a problem. I cannot stress this enough. No one wants to have an expensive paperweight - in this case, a $5,500 one - sitting on their desk, or add $1800 to the price of their good deal. Ebay is a wonderful marketplace, even though the prices you pay might be a little higher, you still have an ally and a mediator when a problem arises. With Craiglist and other classified sites, you are on your own. Some forums like fredmiranda.com, naturephotographers.net, nikonians.org have classified listings - again, there is some risk, but since these are a members-only classified listings, there is a bit more accountability.

4. Its good to have a network of repair people that you can rely upon to steer you in the right direction with clear and crisp advice.

5. Give preference to the seller that takes the time and care to post lots of pictures of the actual piece being offered. Avoid those that use stock photos. Give preference to offerings that include the box, original receipt, instruction manual, accessories, and a comprehensive description of the item - including its flaws, etc - this reveals that the seller was fastidious and cared for the gear. Unless properly reflected in the price, avoid listings that are missing parts. While looking for this lens I came across another that was missing a lens hood. A little research resulted in finding a $500 price tag for the hood. It's good to know something like this before you settle on a price.

6. f you are participating in an auction, don't get caught in a bidding war. Know what your top price is and stick to it.

7. Trust your instincts. If you have even the slightest sense that something isn't quite right - either with the product or the seller - bail. Your instincts are probably right on the money and can save you a headache.

Following these simple suggestions should help to save you lots of money in the future. Thanks for visiting!

Shooting in Winter

Pine Brook Trail, Harriman Park, NY 11/30/11, Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20nn at 10mm, ISO200, 1/1250, F10

Boy, do I Love taking pictures in Winter!

Winter blues? Not me. Head south for warmer climes? No way! I live for Winter. But getting good pictures at this time of the year can be a bit of a challenge, unless you understand and approach it sensibly and prepare accordingly.

I will divide this post into three topics – personal prep, gear prep and actual shooting.

Being out in the cold for many hours taking pictures is quite different from just conducting your normal activities. As that mercury dips (as the cliché goes, but I think mercury thermometers for consumer use are all but gone) it becomes harder and harder to stay warm. Add to that a little precipitation and/or wind, and you have your first challenge - avoiding frostbite and hypothermia.

When preparing for a day out in the cold, the usual cautions apply. Minimize exposed flesh, dress in layers, avoid wearing cotton, use a polypropylene wicking layer next to the skin, use a windproof outer layer, and to help avoid cold hands and feet – wear a hat and neck gaiter or scarf. If it is really cold and you anticipate lots of time just standing around, then chemical hand and toe warmers will be your best friend. Your goal is to stay dry and warm, and if you plan on hiking where you will generate perspiration, that poly layer will help minimize that clammy feeling.

If you are going hiking into areas with fresh snow cover, you might want to consider a pair of snowshoes and ski poles. Otherwise, a set of MicroSpikes from Kahtoola http://www.kahtoola.com/microspikes.php are the order of the day. These traction devices are made of that really tough gummy elastomer and hardened steel, and are like four wheel drive on the trails. They are easy to slip on and off your shoes and are small enough to slip into your pocket.

Stores that cater to outdoor winter activities will probably be your best bet for finding the right gear and advice for your planned activities.

Bring a thermal bottle filled with a hot drink. When I go out on hiking trails, I usually bring a bottle full of tasty soup - it really does warm you up, and provides a bit of extra energy.

Camera gear. Generally your gear does not need any special preparation, other than the usual precautions to keep the gear dry while shooting. A weather cover, or in a pinch, a plastic garbage bag can help keep the snow off your gear. Cold does make batteries much less efficient, so it makes sense to bring an extra battery or two for each device.

One of the things that you should look out for is condensation. Bringing in a camera from the cold into a warm and moist environment is always a peril to be avoided. I will remove my memory cards in the car, then leave my camera and lenses zipped up in the bag so that it warms gradually, resulting in little to no condensation forming on glass or in the moisture-sensitive electronics.  In fact, it’s a good practice to keep your camera cold. Avoid putting a camera under your jacket – it will just become wet with condensation when you remove it. Also, avoid breathing on the viewfinder or LCD – it will become glazed over with a layer of ice, rendering it useless.

Taking the picture. This can be very challenging, since the low angle of the sun will give you extremely bright areas and deep shadows. The wide brightness range is often beyond the capability of a modern digital camera to capture in a single exposure. This will force you to decide what is more important to you – the highlights or the shadows, and make the necessary compensation. Another complication are the broad areas of white or near white, which will totally confuse even the most sophisticated metering systems, resulting in somewhat underexposed images. With large expanses of deep blue sky, everything taken in open skylight will take on a cold, steely blue hue, so white balance needs to be monitored or custom adjusted if your camera has that capability.

This is my strategy when shooting snowy scenes. I shoot raw (see my 1/17/12 post). If your camera can shoot uncompressed raw, use it. I set my ISO to its lowest setting, providing me the widest dynamic range. I use exposure compensation to +.7 or +1. This will take the camera’s reading and add a bit of extra light, bringing the areas of snow out of a dingy grey tone and more towards white. I typically do not set a custom white balance, preferring to make that adjustment in post-processing. My camera has a blinking “Highlight Warning” mode in its display settings which I always keep set to on, so I can quickly see much overexposure, if any, my images will have.

I rely heavily on the camera's histogram tool during critical shots. It will instantly reveal loss of information in the shadows and the highlights, and can help you make appropriate adjustments.

here is an example of an underexposed image in Photoshop, with its histogram

See how the tonal values in the histogram are all bunched up to the left, and there is a significant amount of data is actually touching the left border, indicating a loss of detail in the shadows. Any time the histogram values touch a border - clipping - you begin to lose information. If it touches on the left you have pure black, and on the right you have pure white. Notice there is very little tonal information on the right, and the image has no pure white. In many (but not all) photographs the goal is to have some black and some white, and lots of middle tones.

This image is overexposed. Histogram shows significant detail loss on the right (highlight) side of the graph.

And finally this image shows better balance. The histogram barely touches left and right indicating no loss of detail due to clipping in either the highlights or the shadows.

And here is the final image, with some manipulation of the blue level, shadow recovery and sharpening adjustments applied.

Croton Reservoir Dam Spillway, 1/29/11, Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm, ISO 200, 1/320 F11

Most cameras can tolerate a bit of underexposure and shadow recovery, but overexposed highlight recovery is typically only minimally possible at best. When in doubt, use exposure bracketing, or better yet, take those multiple exposures and combine them as an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image (this technique will be explained in detail in a future post). I included this HDR shot for comparison. I took a series of 5 exposures, bracketed to -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, then combined these in Photomatix Pro, a popular HDR processing software tool.

The HDR image has greater saturation, balance and detail, particularly in the shadow areas. The sky and its depth of color is just amazing!

Hopefully some of this advice will help you to take better pictures this winter! As always, your comments and questions are welcomed!

Why Shoot Raw?

Short answer - because the quality of the resulting image is noticeably better than what the camera can produce with its limited preset values for sharpening, saturation, contrast, color temperature and noise reduction.

Longer answer. In order to produce a standard jpg image, the camera's sensor receives the image, then electronically applies adjustments according to the settings you have made in the camera. These are image manipulations that, while they produce pleasing images, remove data from the file. For ultimate image quality you don't want to remove data as a first step. Ever.

A raw file contains all the information captured by the sensor, with no adjustments. The camera's firmware allows for 2-3 levels of coarse adjustment in each category, while computer-based software, known as raw conversion software, generally has infinitely variable adjustments. In addition, raw conversion software typically provides all sorts of adjustments that are not possible in-camera. Exposure correction, hue saturation and luminance, highlight and shadow recovery, brightness, exposure, color temperature and tint, and local contrast. Some of the more powerful converters also enable to correct for lens deficiencies such as distortion, vignetting, perspective, chromatic aberrations and color fringing.

Here is an example of an image that has been just converted and not processed, essentially showing what the camera saw. Notice the curve of the lower step, graininess and lack of overall image "snap."

Taken 12/19/11 with Fuji Finepix F600EXR, ISO 400, 1/17 sec, F3.5 4.4mm (equivalent to 23.7mm), uncropped (click on images to see larger versions)

And this is what resulted from a quick pass through Adobe Raw Converter and Photoshop:

In Adobe Camera Raw I applied a Fuji-specific lens profile to handle the distortion and light drop-off in the corners. Next I used the sliders to adjust highlight recovery, reduce exposure raise black levels a bit, and added some vibrance. I then opened the image in Photoshop CS5, applied fairly aggressive noise reduction using Topaz DeNoise, did a local contrast adjustment using unsharp mask (55 pixels, 45%) followed by a sharpening 1.5 pixels and 60%. to come up with the second image. The most striking features are the straightening out of the steps, the highlight recovery revealing the words in the lights set into the step risers, and an overall "punchier" image as a result of the unsharp mask local contrast adjustment.

So where do you start? First you'll need a camera that is capable of shooting raw. Websites such as http://www.dpreview.com/ and http://www.steves-digicams.com/ have fairly up-to-date reviews and listings of digital cameras and include file format specs.

Raw conversion software comes in a wide varietly of flavors. The simplest are those which are bundled with the camera such as SilkyPix, Canon Digital Photo Professional, and software that should be bundled but is not from Nikon - Capture NX. These are usually pretty clunky and slow to use, but are free with the exception of Capture NX, so they make a good starting place.

The next category of Raw capable software are a bit more mainstream in nature - Adobe Camera Raw, Bibble Pro, Raw Shooter, etc. These are generally very powerful for single image editing, and in the case of Adobe's Camera Raw, somewhat integrated with an image editing program - in this case, Photoshop. Other packages include fully integrated image editors such as Picture Window Pro and DXO Optics Pro.

Finally there are the industry workhorses, also known as workflow software - Lightroom, Aperture, Capture One - which provide excellent raw conversion some image editing capability, and asset management capabilities. The primary value of these is the ease with which one can apply image adjustments to multiple images, making it possible to edit huge numbers of files in short order.

Here is a little trick in the event you already have a camera that does not shoot raw, or forgot to set the camera to raw format. Photoshop has a command in the file menu - Open As - that allows you to specify the file format you would like to open the file as. In the drop down list you can find "camera raw" which allows you to open a jpg file as a raw file in Adobe Camera Raw. This opens the file in the ACR editor, with nearly all the adjustments available to raw files. I once shot an entire set of outdoor images in jpg with the white balance set to tungsten. Under normal circumstances this would have resulted in a lost set of images. Since the lighting was consistent for all images in the set, I opened them all as raw, applied a white balance adjustment to one image, highlighted the entire set and used ACR's synchronize feature to apply the adjustment to all the highlighted images. Such is the power raw. The workflow packages offer similar capability.

I hope this helps to demystify the process of raw image processing for you. In 2007 I purchased my first raw-capable camera, a Nikon D200, and started shooting raw almost immediately. The only times I shoot jpg is either by accident or if I am a second shooter on an event where the primary does not shoot raw. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Hudson River Eagles



Mature eagle at Verplanck, NY. 1/29/11
Nikon D300, Sigma 50-500 @ 500mm.  ISO 800, F8, 1/1000, cropped  59%

In just a few weeks, as the bodies of water up north freeze over for the winter, this scene will repeat itself over and over again on the Hudson River. Every year the arrival of flocks of common merganser, goldeneye and canvasback in November signals the start of the eagle migration. Unable to find open water to fish from, these waterfowl head south, stopping by any body of water that has food in it. Many come and just hang around the Hudson, enjoying the bounty made available by the river's tidal action.

Well, it should come as no surprise that aside from fish, these waterfowl are among the eagles favorite live snack. I make the distinction because Eagles are basically lazy, opportunistic feeders. They will eat anything, including food stolen from other critters. Sitting on an ice floe is a form of easy, energy-saving transportation, providing an up-close vantage point from which a hungry eagle can scout for their next meal.

So where can you see this in the New York Metro area? I have personally witnessed eagles in flight over the West Side Highway as far south as 96th St, where an adult flew about 20 ft over the hood of my car in the morning rush hour traffic one day. I received a picture, taken with a phone cam, of an eagle perched on a branch enjoying a fish. The shooter was sitting in an office at the cemetery at 155th St. and Riverside Drive. When there is a lot of ice, typical after an extended period of sub-30 degree weather, I have seen them floating by from Inwood Hill and Fort Tryon Parks in Manhattan.

For the most reliable locations for seeing/photographing these majestic birds I typically head north, generally starting at the Croton Reservoir, a favorite nighttime roosting area, and Croton Point Park and Train Station. On a good day it is not uncommon to see 5-10 eagles within an hour. Other favorite locations can be found along the east bank of the river all the way up to Peekskill. Montrose Point is another well-used roosting area, where one late February afternoon I counted 29 birds while standing next to the cove at George's Island.

Eagle watching season is short around these parts. They are all but gone by the end of February, save for a few that chose to start and raise a family and remain over the summer.

This is my first blog post and I hope you found it interesting. I will be adding content that will range from how tos to what happened when, links to photographic technique webpages, and my own pictures and website. Thank you for visiting!