What Are Color Profiles and Why Do You Want Them?

Or - How to Make My Photos Look Like Whats On My Computer Screen


Have you ever wondered why the photos you get printed never seem to look like what’s on your computer screen?  In some cases you might have spent hours meticulously editing the photos to look just right and then you get them printed and they look horrible.  Well there is a fix for that and it’s really not that hard!

Colors, in the digital world are represented by a number.   Computer monitors, scanners, and printers all use some number to represent a color and basically what happens is that they all see the colors slightly differently.  So what is a navy blue on your screen might be interpreted as a dark blue - almost black - to your printer.  Now your next question is "how do I fix this?"  Well the answer can be really simple or it can be pretty complicated.  There are these .icc files that are called "color profiles" that are specific to each printer/paper combination and basically what they do is act as a translator and make corrections to the files when you print so that what you see on your screen is what gets printed. 

Now why I say this can be simple or complex depends on if you want to invest in some hardware and what printer or print house you want to use.  The first step is to calibrate your monitor.  There are some devices out there that will do this for you automatically and can be pretty reasonably priced.  The Pantone Huey Pro is one that I have used and I have had great luck with it.  You can get it from Amazon HERE and it will run you about $75.  There are also more professional ones that can run a few hundred dollars but I will leave the research up to you.

The next step is to find the color profiles for the printer that you are going to use.  If you are printing at home your best bet is to go to the printer manufacturer such as Epson, Canon or HP.  However, their profiles are typically only good when using their paper (not surprisingly), but Canon has shocked me and offered a number of profiles for third party papers.  See links to their websites below.  Red River is a third party paper manufacturer and has some profiles HERE.  If you are dead set on using some unique paper/printer combination you may have to make your own profile but that is a bit more involved and beyond the scope of this post.

EPSON
CANON (they also provide color profiles in their software, but also have them for 3rd party papers with Canon printers)

A lot of people, myself included, don't make a lot of prnts so they don't own a fancy printer and would rather get them printed at a print-house.  In this case you can see if they have their color profiles available online.  I often use Adoramapix because they do make their .icc files easily available online HERE.  Costco is also known for having color profiles for most if not all their stores.  Go HERE and use the index on the left to select your state and you can find a number of different places that have their icc files available for download.

For Adorama, when you go to their site click here on the color profiles section shown below:

Then you will see this and select the types of papers you will be using. I typically use glossy, but I also downloaded the matte one just in case.

 

From here on out I am going to be focusing on Lightroom since its what I know.  Photoshop will be somewhat similar.  If you are using a different photo editing software you can probably go into the help section and type "color management" or "color profiles" to get you on the right path.

 

Now to load the profiles into Lightroom you have to copy the files to a specific location.  You can visit the Lightroom help HERE but I took a screenshot the directions that you can see below. 

Here the directions diverge depending if you are printing at your house or getting them printed somewhere else.

Print at a Store

After you are done editing the files you will need to export them and when doing so embed the color profiles directly into the file. In Lightroom you export as you normally would except under FILE SETTINGS, COLOR SPACE, you drop down and select OTHER.  See below. 

The screen below will pop up.  I highlighted the Adoramapix color profiles just so they stand out.  Select the one appropriate for the paper finish you want to use and hit OK. 

Now when you go back to your Export Screen you will see this below - highlighted yellow. 

Just a side note - when I export files that have a specific color profile imbedded into them, I usually put them in their own special folder like "Photos - Adorama" or some such so that know not to use these somewhere else because they may not print right.  Next is to then upload them to Adoramapix or Costco or put them on a thumb drive and take them to the print shop. 

One last important step - if you upload the prints there is a step or setting that you have to make sure you find.  On the Adoramapix site it looks like this:

Make sure you check the "NO. Thanks, Don't Touch My Images."  This tells them you already corrected the prints.  Costco has a similar setting but since I don't have a Costco membership I can't show you that.  But you should be able to figure it out.

Assuming you have a calibrated monitor your prints will be pretty much spot on. Even if you monitor isn't calibrated it probably gets you a bit closer than you were.


Now if you are using your own printer the process is a little different.  Again, this is for Lightroom - go to the Print tab and in the menu on the right scroll down to the bottom.  You will see the image below (minus the red circles :-)) In the color management, profile, select the printer profile that you need to use.  Highlighted in yellow and circled in red there is a warning that you need to turn off the color management in the printer settings too - otherwise this will all be for not.  I can't help you with the printer settings since they can vary but buried in there is something that tells the printer not to mess with your files.

Anyways - hope this helps and if you have any questions please post them in the comment section below.  I would also appreciate it if you followed me on this blog.

Organizing Your Photos -

Strategies and Tips

Organizing photos has always been a problem even in the age of film though the volume of photos people can generate has magnified significantly with digital.  There are a number of strategies for organizing photos and I will go into some detail what I do and perhaps you can take use this my process or develop your own to help you keep your images sorted.  The key is to figure out your system and then make sure to follow it as you unload photos from your camera onto your computer because once you get behind it can be hard to find the time and/or the motivation to clean up the files.  Then you run the risk of losing photos you treasure either because you accidentally delete them thinking they are stored somewhere else or your computer dies and you don’t get them backed up properly.

Really the only way to organize digital images is to figure out some sort of file structure that you can place your photos into.  It seems that people typically decide to organize by date (ie 2-15-2015), or event name (ie “Christmas at Grandma’s”).  Now there are advantages and disadvantages to both. For instance, you may not remember what date something happened on so you will find yourself spending a decent amount of time searching through folders trying to find the photos you are looking for.  Also, if you don’t use the right date format you will find that your folders won’t be in the order you expect.  For instance, if you use the format 1-7-2015, then all your January dates will be grouped together, then February, etc.  On the other hand, if you list it by event name and you don’t remember what you called the event – for instance you remember is was at Grandma’s house, but you forgot you called it “Christmas at Grandma’s” you will have to read each folder name until you find it.  What I have found that works the best is a combination of the two. 

Here is an example of how I organize my photos.

My top level folder I call “Photography”.  Under that I have a folder for different years 2007, 2008, 2009… etc.  Within each
year I have folders for events “Renaissance Fair”, “4^th of July”, and the like.  Since I started I have gotten into Milky Way time lapse which has become quote a large portfolio.  Each shoot yields hundreds of photos and since I didn't want to have to dig through my general photography images to find these I created a new broad category labelled “Time Lapse.”  In this folder I use a slightly different strategy to organize my files since I seem to shoot in the same locations regularly and the date is irrelevant to me, under the main folder I have a folder for different locations.  Those folders are then sub divided into more folders with descriptive names like “Silos with clouds” – which means something to me but probably not anyone else.  I have also created large broad categories to organize photos of local bands I shoot, Infrared photography and one folder dedicated to my daughter.  

This shows how Lightroom is organized .

As you broaden your photography interests you might make other broad categories  as well – such as Weddings or Real Estate or what have you. This works well not only for general file organization, but also works well in Lightroom.  Now each broad category can become its own Lightroom catalog.  The only issue I have had is if you want to transfer images from one catalog to another it can be a little cumbersome – but perhaps this was solved since v2.7( yeah I am a little behind the times…)

Maybe you are just taking pictures of your family and some landscapes or whatnot you could still separate the images into broad categories such as “Kids” or “Dogs.”  My mother-in-law takes pictures of trees.  She could have one folder labelled “Trees”, a folder for “Family” and then “General.”  Really, you can adapt this to you own personal needs.

One note that I would like to stress, if you do choose to label folders by date, is not to use the standard American date format (ie month-day-year).  The folders, which are usually sorted by name, will have all the months grouped together and your folders will be out of chronological sequence.  So, for example, all your January folders will be together, then all your February and so on and so on.  See example below.  The 1/1/2001 then the 1/1/2002 are next to each other.  

Naming Files with month first will group months together as opposed to grouping years together.

My suggestion is to label them year first, then month and day - always using 4 digits for year, 2 digits for month and 2 digits for day.  See below. This standardizes the titles of the folders and makes it easier to find a particular date. 

Name them with year first and they will be in chronological order. 

Backing Up Files:

On a side note, once you have a pretty well established file system, backing up files becomes that much easier.  I am not going to get into to much detail here since this is a whole other topic in itself but I mention it now since you should develop a backup routine because no hard drive or computer is going to last forever.  There are a couple different things you can do now to help protect your files.  One is to back them up onto an external drive on a regular basis.  They have become much more affordable and you can find a 1TB external hard drive for about $60 online.  Another option is to use a "Cloud" backup.  Meaning you upload your images/files to some online service.  This is a great option since internet servers (where your files will be stored ) have a very regimented and robust backup process and its highly unlikely that the data will be lost.  There are a couple disadvantages to this however, one being there is likely a monthly/yearly cost if you want to store more than 5GB of data, and secondly, uploading a lot of large files may take a long time or be impractical if you don't have access to high speed internet.  

Arduino Time-Lapse Dolly Project Part 3

Arduino Time-Lapse Dolly Project Part 3

Stepper Into Motion

Now that I have tried the relay hooked up to the camera, got a button to fire it, and now its time to test the stepper motor.

First I should briefly explain what a stepper motor is and why I choose to use one.  They are called stepper motors because they move in small incremental steps which is generally measured in degrees.  So a 1.8 degree motor will take 400 little steps per revolution.  Because the motor can move in these small increments, it can (depending on the quality of the motor) make some very precise movements.  That is why I chose such motor for my application since I need the camera to move in consistent, accurate movements between shots.

I am using the Adafruit motor shield.  After I bought it, and started to figure out more about these crazy motor shields they can only handle so much power which means the motors can't draw to much power itself.  The Adafruit ones can handle 1.2A and I found it difficult to find a motor that was less than that. I eventually got one that draws .4A but I am not sure it will be powerful enough to move the camera... we will see!  Regardless it was only $15 so it if doesn't work I can at least use it to test everything out.

The Adafruit website is actually pretty handy and they have a lot of tutorials which is super awesome (see this link here) - though the one for this motor shield was slightly wrong at points, it was right enough that you can figure it out.  First thing first was to download the motor shield library. For instance, the tutorial said once the library is installed it should be accessible through the File/Examples/AFMotor, but that never happened for me.  It does show up under Sketch/Import Library/AFMotor and when you select it you get a "#include " added to the code - I assume always to the top but I haven't done it when there was code present.  Don't let this bother you, keep following the Adafruit tutorial and it has a lot of useful information and some example programming.  I used that example to help with my code below.  

Next step was wiring the sucker up.  For a test, and test only, I used a 9v battery to power the motor.  In real life the battery probably doesn't have enough juice to fully power the stepper motor I am using nor will it have the longevity that I need - 600+ cycles.  I bought a 9v battery hookup and wired it to the board at the Ext. PWR block.  Next to that, there is a jumper. Per the Adafruit tutorial if you want to use an external power supply to run the motor that is separate from the Arduino board, then you remove the jumper.  If you Arduino power supply (ie USB cable) is going to power both then leave the jumper in place.  As a side note, my experience is that even with the jumper removed, when I plugged the Arduino in to the USB to update the program it moved the motor.

Blur block next to the EXT PWR is where you can hook up the power.  The red circle on the right is where the jumper is located.  In this photo, I have already removed the jumper. 

I got a Primopal motor because it was cheap (~$15 shipped), and it was nice that Primopal had data sheets available for all their motors.  Without some sort of tech sheet you will have to figure out how to wire the motor to the board.  Now I am not expert on stepper motors but some are uni-polar and some are bi-polar.  Uni-polar motors have 5 wires and bi-polar have 4.  Either one will work, the shield allowed for both to be hooked up.  There are online resources that will show you how to wire the motor if it doesn't have a data sheet.

To test the motor I used Adafruit's tutorial code with some simple changes.  The motor I have is 1.8 degrees per step, and Adafruit is using a 7.5 degrees per step.  So I changed the steps from 100 to 400 (see red text below).  I also changed the rpm from 10 to 60 just because.

#include


AF_Stepper motor(48, 2);


void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);           // set up Serial library at 9600 bps
  Serial.println("Stepper test!");

  motor.setSpeed(10);  // 10 rpm

  motor.step(100, FORWARD, SINGLE);
  motor.release();
  delay(1000);
}

void loop() {
  motor.step(400, FORWARD, SINGLE);
  motor.step(400, BACKWARD, SINGLE);

  motor.step(400, FORWARD, DOUBLE);
  motor.step(400, BACKWARD, DOUBLE);

  motor.step(400, FORWARD, INTERLEAVE);
  motor.step(400, BACKWARD, INTERLEAVE);

  motor.step(400, FORWARD, MICROSTEP);
  motor.step(400, BACKWARD, MICROSTEP);
}



Now - to tie my camera shutter, and stepper motor together I wrote this code.  A button sets the whole thing in motion.  It will take 20 photos and advance the camera on the track 20 times (see the yellow highlighted section of the code in which this number is set). Keep in mind I have a MEGA board and not the regular Uno board, so I have more pins.  The button and relay are hooked to ports 52 and 53.


#include

AF_Stepper motor(200, 2);  //number of steps per revolution and indicates which port the motor is wired to.

const int buttonpin = 53;  //number of the pin the button is connected too
const int camerapin = 52; //number of the pin the relay to trigger the camera is connected too

int buttonstate = 0;

void setup() {

 pinMode(camerapin, OUTPUT);
 pinMode(buttonpin, INPUT);

 // Setting up the stepper motor
 Serial.begin(9600);           // set up Serial library at 9600 bps
  Serial.println("Stepper test!");  //probably not a necessary line....

  motor.setSpeed(60);  // 60 rpm
 }

void loop(){
  buttonstate = digitalRead(buttonpin);

  if (buttonstate == HIGH){
 
    for (int i=0; i<20 span="">; i++) //this will be the stepper motor camera trigger loop, i dictates the number of times the camera shoots
  {
    digitalWrite(camerapin, HIGH);
    delay(3000);
    digitalWrite(camerapin, LOW);
    delay(500);
    motor.step(400, FORWARD, SINGLE);
    delay(1000);
  } //ends the FOR statement
 }  //end IF statement
} //ends LOOP



Next Steps - make a track and dolly for the camera!

Arduino Time-Lapse Dolly Project Part 2

Arduino Time-Lapse Dolly Project Part 2

Buttons make it go!


For those who have not had much experience with the Arduino, basically what happens is once the board if plugged into a power source the program starts to run - so in this case the relay will start clicking away until you unplug it or upload another program.  So its kind of nice to update the program so that the relay, and therefore the camera will only fire once a button is pressed.

Now I add a button that will trigger the relay and therefore the camera.  The basic button wiring can be found on the Arduino site but I have one here as well:

So I ran a wire from the Arduino +5v pin to the bread board.  Hooked one side to the switch, on the other side of the switch is connected to a digital pin on the Arduino (Pin X), plus a 10K Ohm resistor connected in parallel to ground.

Here is my set up:

Button is the little back square on the white bread board.  The purple wires connect to the relay.  The red, yellow and black wires on the left side go to the camera.  

One thing to consider is that buttons aren't perfect and may "bounce" - meaning they don't make smooth contact and may chatter a bit.  I added a simple debounce code - very simple, maybe even laughably so - but I am a simple guy and I didn't understand the debounce code available online.

Here is my code:

const int buttonpin = 53;  //number of the pin the button is connected too
const int camerapin = 52; //number of the pin the relay to trigger the camera is connected too

int buttonstate = 0;

void setup() {

 pinMode(camerapin, OUTPUT);  //sets pin 52 to output mode
 pinMode(buttonpin, INPUT);  //sets pin 52 to input mode
}

void loop(){
  buttonstate = digitalRead(buttonpin);

  if (buttonstate == HIGH){
    digitalWrite(camerapin, HIGH);  // since I am not sure how much time the relay needs to be on for the camera to register it will keep the relay "on" for .1 seconds. 
    delay(100);
    digitalWrite(camerapin, LOW);
    delay(500); //to help prevent the button from triggering the relay multiple times by accident, this delay prevents the button from being pushed again for .5s
  }
  else{
    digitalWrite(camerapin, LOW);  //in hindsight, I probably don't need an "ELSE" statement
  }
}


Next: Stepper it up!

My Digital Pinhole Camera

I have never seriously pursued pinhole photography, but idea of it, and the soft dreamy scenes have always appealed to me. One day I got this wild idea to make a pinhole lens for my D300. So, without consulting the all mighty internet for ideas, I set about making this lens. Whatever the outcome, I wanted a lens that was professional looking, and not something like a cardboard tube with aluminum foil taped over the front or something like that. To me, this dictated that the lens had to mount to the camera on the Nikon F mount. The only items that I could think of that could mount to the body of the camera were a lens or extension tubes used for macro photography. If I wanted to use a lens, I would have to strip it of its glass, or remove the mount from the lens and somehow attach the pinhole to the mount. I looked at my small inventory of lenses, and though I had some real cheap lenses, they all worked, and I couldn't make myself disassemble one. That left me, in my mind, two options. Try and find a broken or very cheap lens (I was thinking $5-15 is my budget for this project) or find really cheap extension tubes. For some reason, I thought a set of extension tubes would run me $50+, so I didn't bother to look at what was available. Instead, I search craigslist, and ebay for broken lenses. No luck. On a whim, I search ebay for extension tubes and found a ton that were only $10 (that included shipping). So I bought a set. Of course it was coming all the way from China, and I didn't expedite the shipment so it took about 2 weeks to get the extension tube set in the mail. My expectations for this product was fairly low, and I pretty much expected them to be made out of plastic, but they are aluminum. Even still, I am very careful not to cross thread them or try and tighten the various extension tubes to much since I am sure the threads will just get torn apart.

With extension tubes in hand, how do I turn them into a pinhole lens? I am lucky and work for a medium to large machine shop and a friend of mine who is a machinist offered to make me something if I drew up a print. So, 2 minutes to draw something up for him, and a day for him to machine it for me I had a part that looked like a lens cap that as threaded and could be screwed onto the entension tubes. Below are some pictures.

Here is the extension tube set with the aluminum pinhole adapter.




For those not aware of how extension tubes work, the tubes are a set of 5 parts, first part has the nikon body mount on one side and threaded on the other. Three parts ar basically just spacers that thread onto the first part. The last part threads on the end and the lens mounts onto it. So the pinhole adapeter is threaded to screw onto any one of the spacers.

Here is another image with the extension tubes and adapter.


Here is a picture with the adapter screwed onto the end of the extension tube.



So now I need to make a pinhole in something. My first attempt was using aluminum foil like most pinhole cameras are made with. The results were less than desirable. At first I thought this project was all for not. I was not naive to think that I was the first one to come up with this hair brained idea, and given my poor results, I decided to look on the internet and see how other people's pinhole cameras turned out. I found one guy who punctured a hole in a can and seemed to have the image quality that I wanted mint to have.

Here is a sample image using the aluminum foil.


So I took a coke can and cut it up, sanded it on both sides and used a thumb tack to make a hole. The idea, when making the hole, was to make the smallest possible hole. So I tried to stick it in just enough to start penetrating the aluminum. Since the pressure of the pin dents the aluminum, I sanded the front and back one more time.

Here are some of the tools I used.


Here is a macro shot of the hole (using the extension tubes as intended!).


Now I need to affix this to my pinhole adapter. This image has a close up of the hole along to the top since its difficult to see.


Now for a picture of the whole rig on my N80 film camera.


Pretty sexy for a pinhole camera... well I think so anyways, but I am a bit of a photo geek.

So how does this new hole compare to the terrible picture above? Check it out!

Yeah, its soft, but much better than the other, in my opinion. I even refined the hole a bit, and made one a touch smaller and got an image that was a little better. These small images may make it difficult to see the difference but here is a comparison anyways.

When using the aluminum foil, my hypothesis is that the pin creates a ridge of displaced material on one side of the pinhole. This ridge interferes with the image quality, but when using an aluminum can, the ridge can be sanded away, and the image quality is much improved.

Now I need to take it into the field and really play around!

Until next time...

Matthew Eddy
Photographer
http://www.oil-rigs.net/