Farrar Focus Digital Darkroom 6   $90 Buy it Now

Miscellaneous / Blog

2007/12/18 - Feature Freeze

As can probably be guessed from the website, FFDD 6 is almost finished, and all in-progress stuff is being saved for FFDD 7.

2007/10/11 - Woo Hoo !!!!

Three months later ... been too busy with the summer art shows to work on FFDD6. Also had been unable to find a solution (until an hour ago) to my primary goal of FFDD6 : batch blending of DNG files without needing to load the DNG files in ACR. With a huge number of new unprocessed bracketed and bracketed+stitched images to process from our Mono Lake trip (just flew back this morning), I needed to find a workaround! Well, a work around has been found, thanks to the Script Listener (which enabled me to find ways to script things undocumented by Adobe)!

So I'm into the rabbit hole, and when I come back out, I'm going to have a new batch blending script which is a one stop batch solution for going from bracketed DNG files to blended negatives --- automatic adjustment of chromatic aberration based on camera/lens/mm/f-stop/focus, automatic sync of color temp, and more.

2007/07/12 - Update

It has been a while, over 8 months, filled with FFDD testing and development in combination with being busy with other projects and my own photography sales. Now I am back to polishing up the documentation so I can get release 6 out the door. I want to thank all those beta testing some of the new FFDD6 features, especially Vincent Mounier who has been producing stunning images with FFDD and has posted a really nice tutorial on his blog.

2006/11/04 - Release 6 Progress Update

Another primary focus of FFDD6 is providing tools for an efficient HDR stitching workflow. The above unfinished shot is the result of stitching 7 vertical blended digital negatives into a pano format, then developing the resulting 40+ mega pixel file. The Hugin program was used to do the stitching. When properly cleaned up, croped, and finished, this image will make a really sharp 72"x24" print with no visible noise.

To make this possible, there are a bunch of new tools and features in the works for FFDD6. There is a new Adobe Bridge plugin script to make file renaming for the bracket script easy. I am looking at making a script which completely automates the process of setting all the Camera Raw conversion options. There are two new scripts for creating a low resolution copy of an image for development, and then later appling the development done to the low resolution image to the orgional full resolution image—this makes developing huge stitched images fast and easy. And the bracket script is getting a complete rewrite with the following new features and bug fixes.

  1. Huge speed improvements when choosing the flatten before save option.
  2. Automatic correction for images with too much dynamic range (ie a series shot into the sun).
  3. For non-stitched shots, now maximizes dynamic range of the blended negative (expands darkest frame to full exposure range before blending).
  4. For stitched shots, maximizes the dynamic range, keeping the exposure correct for each group of images used later for stitching.
  5. The script is now smart and will automatically figure out if you want to blend DNG or TIF files.
  6. The script is now safe to rerun a second time, it will not re-blend images that have been previously blended.
  7. Ability to set defaults for all options so the script never prompts for any options.
  8. The script now makes sure all the prompts are with the proper range and re-prompts when they are not.
  9. Skips files that fail to blend properly and continues with the rest of the files.
  10. And logs errors.

2006/10/17 - Release 6 Progress

I just finalized the new development tools for FFDD6 (used to process the image above from our Utah trip). The new method is much easier to use than the previous "brightness and contrast with layer masks" approach to development, and is color correct in that it does not distort colors under extreme adjustments. The new method uses a graduated exposure adjustment (instead of the old brightness adjustments) to accurately simulate any graduated neutral density filter, followed by a non-graduated contrast adjustment.

2006/09/26 - Skipping Exposures During Bracketing

2006/09/22 - Better Long Exposure Noise Reduction

2006/09/21 - LCD Monitor Calibration Tip

2006/09/14 - LCD Monitor Calibration Article

2006/09/08 - Release 5 Development Comments

As what is now becoming a FFDD tradition, this release pushes the boundries of what can be done in Photoshop. Weeks of research and development has pushed the release date far beyond what I would have liked. However I am sure the new features are well worth it. The new sharp, double, and denoise actions are stunning. Photographs processed with these new tools print twice as clear and sharp as those from FFDD4. As time is always the limiting factor, there are other things which didn't make the cut for release 5. These ideas are usually not fully tested or simply not documented well, and can now be found in the experimental page.

2006/08/24 - Interesting Method to Adjust Chroma

Doug Dolde informed me of this interesting method to adjust color, Joseph Holmes Profiles.

2006/08/20 - The Blog

A new CMS (content management system) tool that I am building has now enabled me to easily make changes on this site, and thus this blog is born to replace the previous future page and to make note of other interesting things...

Misc

  1. Pro Photo Home : Shaded facades in architectural photography
  2. DPReview : Digital Blending Message
  3. Digital Monochrome Forum : HDR with no halos
  4. Fredmiranda : Landscape Photographer - Sunset and Exposure Bracketing
  5. Wikipedia's Page on HDR
  6. Canon Digital Photography Forums : Your opinion of HDR photography
  7. Nature Photographers : Digital Imaging Forum - FFDD Extended Dynamic Range Blending
  8. Fredmiranda : Post-processing & Printing Forum - Best/easiest HDR software
  9. Luminous Landscape : Landscape & Nature Photography - Grad ND vs. blending in PS?
  10. Canon Digital Photography Forums : What noise removal do you use, and why.
  11. Fredmiranda : Software beyond CS2 recommendations
  12. Fredmiranda : Bracketing For HDR Question
  13. Canon Digital Photography Forums : How much post processing do you do?
  14. Plugs N Pixels has a write up on FFDD, however the examples are from FFDD4.
  15. Dan Heimsoth created an interesting Interactive Panorama making use of the blend script.
  16. Pegtop Delphi article on the mathematics of Photoshop blending modes.

Ideas For Future Releases

  1. Add the brightness and contrast actions to all supported colorspaces.
  2. Make the actions more batch process friendly.
  3. Redo desplotch with new denoise like method.
  4. Action for correcting chroma problems around bright edges.
  5. Document and finish the Soft Light Blur script.
  6. Blending script for night photography.
  7. Try dark frame subtraction method for night photography denoise.
  8. Focus bracketing script script.
  9. Set of actions to adjust color temp and saturation.
  10. Black and white conversion action with expose-to-the-right highlight recovery.
  11. Script that produces full dynamic range black and white image from one exposure taken with a colored filter.
  12. A script which takes the development of one image and applies it to another image (usefull for batch processing a sequence of images for pano stitching).
Farrar Focus Digital Darkroom copyright © 2005-2008 Farrar Focus LLP. All rights reserved.