SPNCH 2013 - Image Archiving Principles and Practice at The New York Botanical Garden

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METRO - Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Workshop

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NYBG Herbarium Image Editing Workflow

Click below to view the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium Image Editing Guidelines - documentation of our post-capture image processing workflow using Adobe Lightroom.

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The preview in Google Docs is low resolution. Once in Google Docs, click the Download Original button to save a more legible copy.

Adobe Lightroom - Corrupt Thumbnails

I just got a new Dell Optiplex 990 computer with an Intel Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40 GHz with 8.00 GB of RAM and 64-bit Windows 7 OS for image processing. It's fast.

I just processed 2 processed 2,297 .DNG files and exported them as Jpegs. Unfortunately, when I look at the thumbnails in Windows, this is how they look:

Click images to enlarge

I thought the files were corrupt and tried exporting them again - same result. When I opened the images the files seemed fine, but I didn't want to run the risk of corrupt thumbnails. Fortunately a post on SevenForums described the same phenomenon. Here is the solution:

Open Disk Cleanup (I just click on the Start Menu and type Disk Cleanup in the Search box).

Select the drive where you keep your thumbnails and press the OK button.

Check Thumbnails on the list of stuff to clean up (you may want to un-check all the other options) and press the OK button. This will delete all your thumbnails. When you reopen the folder your thumbnails will be fixed (they were never broken, but in the interest of speed, they were never drawn right in the first place).

"Fixed"

I hope this helps.

Adobe Lightroom 2.7 Error - Unable to Export

I am in the final stages of the first phase of restructuring the Herbarium's digital image archive. Of course, this is when I hit a snag. I am sorting through a 2 terabyte mirror of the first archive structure, built who knows when. It contains TIFFs, NEFs, CRWs, and Kodak DCS 660 TIFF RAWs. There were 161,658 files hidden in a very opaque folder structure consisting of 6,201 folders.

Using Adobe Lightroom, I sorted the files into collections according to type: TIFF, RAW, and KodakRAW (the Kodak TIFF RAWs were tricky, because they show up as TIFF files, so I segregated these from the RAW files).

Out of the 60,396 TIFF files, I made a collection of 21,142 TIFFs for which there were no corresponding RAW files and exported them to an external hard drive. These will be returned to the archive, along with the RAW files. The remaining 45,564 TIFF files will be backed up on to tape and deleted from our servers.

I successfully converted the Kodak TIFF RAW files into DNG.

Now, I just have to move the RAW files. I could do this using a Windows search and just moving them on the sevrer, but I want to unify the file formats, so I figured I would export them from Lightroom as DNG. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, I encountered the following error:

Unable to Export

An internal error occurred: XMP parse threw an unknown exception

Now what?

METRO - Intro Photoshop Class

Thank you to everyone who attended the Intro Photoshop and Digital Imaging workshop. Here are links to the presentation in .pdf form and the sample images we used in class. The presentation is all fuzzy when viewed in Google Docs, so make sure to download it to see it clearly.

Metro Intro Photoshop Class

Workshop images

Here is a link to the NARA Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access that I reference in the presentation. It is an excellent source of information for digitization projects.

Thank you to everyone at the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Lightroom How-to: Batch Color Balance Using Munsell Color Checker

One of the great things about Adobe Lightroom is the ability to batch color balance photos. We include a Munsell (Macbeth) Color Checker in every shot. Here's how I color balance using the eyedropper tool.

 Open a representative image

Our photographers shoot hundreds of pictures in a day. The camera settings and lighting is always the same which makes color balancing batches of images easy. The color checker is always in the same location.

Zoom in to 100% magnification (press the 1:1 over the navigation)

Select the eyedropper tool

Position the eyedropper and click

You'll want to find a neutral tone. For some reason I find the second lightest square to work best for me. Make sure you are only selecting the grey area. And click. That's it! It's color balanced.

Return the color picker

I kind of wish that once you make a selection by clicking that the eyedropper tool would return to it's original place. It doesn't. Make sure to put it back. If you don't navigation can get a little confusing.

To batch process, select all the pictures (CTRL A) and use the SYNC command.

Select-all thumbnails (they'll be highlighted when selected)

Sync brings up the synchronize menu - I sync all the global adjustments

Confirm

Once the adjustments are synchronized, you'll see the little +/- symbol in the corner of the thumbnails. This means the picture was edited.

Double check

It's a good idea to double check some of the images - just to make sure they look okay.

Night Photography - Nikon

I used to enjoy night photography with film, because you never quite knew what you would get. Now with digital photography, I probably enjoy night photography even more precisely because of the instant feedback.

Eiffel Tower at night as seen through a Nikon D50

If you want to try night photography, you will be dealing with very long exposure time since there is not a lot of light at night as far as the camera is concerned. This means, you should have a tripod to get the best results. I don't like lugging a tripod around, so I just place my camera on the ground, or in the case of the picture above, the hand rail on a bridge.

In this picture, my camera was set to ISO 400 and aperture priority. I wanted a long exposure time to burn in the tower and the street lights and I wanted a broad depth of field, so I set the aperture at f16. This resulted in an 8 second exposure. To avoid camera shake from pressing the shutter release, I set the timer and waited.

This is the result:

What the camera recorded

I used Adobe Lightroom to get to the final version. How I did that will have to wait for another post.