Digital Photo Blog

Have “experienced” George DeWolfe’s “Digital Photography Fine Print Workshop” book.

Didn’t say read, because Mr. DeWolfe is a talented photographer but annoyingly and extremely full of himself.

It’s this latter part that made the book so hard to read. He spends a huge amount of time telling the reader how great he is, and how fortunate they are that he is sharing his wisdom.

Very tiresome.

And, of course, there are the parts where he’s wrong.

Such as in his basic workflow, where he places noise reduction as the last thing done to the photo, prior to sharpening and printing, because “Noise…is the exact opposite of sharpening.” Huh? “Blur” is the exact opposite of sharpening.

This is a computer, folks, not a sentient being. Computers run programs that are looking, in this case, for a very specific condition: CCD noise and color noise, so it can effectively remove them.

It is NOT looking for contrast enhanced, color corrected, noise. It will never find that… because that’s not what it’s looking for.

You want your noise removal done as _early_ in the workflow as possible, not as late as possible.

As to the book as a whole, I’d give these comments:

It’s a very basic beginner’s book. If you want Fine Art Print information, get “Fine Art Printing for Photographers” by Steinmueller and Gulbins.

DeWolfe’s artistic advice is much better than his technical advice. If you want a good book on photos in Photoshop, get Martin Evening’s “Adobe Photoshop CS3 for PHotographers.”

The “Shutterbug” editor, and apparently a number of readers, don’t understand the nature of digital. (originally posted 2/13/05.)

I’m in a unique position vis-a-vis digital photography, as I’ve been a photographer (with darkroom experience) for 46+ years, and have some nearly 30 years of detailed computer experience (I was a programmer) as well. I jumped on the digital photography bandwagon with the very first digital camera, and have long since abandoned film.

It is from this perspective that I’m making the following comments, and taking to task George Schaub, editiorial director of “Shutterbug” magazine.

George has been on a rant for the past two issues, complaining about the unknown longevity of digital media. “What ever will happen to our precious photos with this media?” he wonders. He seeks “… a viable medium the will not be lost to us later in our own lives, and to generations ahead.”

“…one of the main detriments folks see to digital is just that – that we have yet to be convinced that it’s a reliable keeper of memories. Digital memories, stored as bits and bytes are not, like a well-stored print or properly processed piece of film, hard -wired; they are virtual and sit on a medium that more often than not seems transitory.”

To his credit, George goes on to point out that, in fact, film and prints are -known- to fade over time, and to shift colors. “It took years for the photographic industry to first own up to, and then do something about creating more stable color images.”

“Perhaps it will take just as much time for the digital industry to own up to and do something about the reliability of the bits and bytes on which many of the memories we create today reside.”

This strikes me as not only silly, but a bit misinformed.

Current film and print technology (non-digital) is not permanent; in fact, it begins to change color and chemistry the instant it is removed from the bath… although it may take 20 years for the effect to be noticed by the human eye.

Yet he takes to task the digital industry because he “feels” insecure and things “seem” unreliable. He calls “bits and bytes” (they are the same thing: a byte is just 8 bits) “virtual” while lauding a print as “hard-wired.”

Well, I’m not sure what that means, if anything at all. Prints and film are molecules and grains of silver – molecues and grains are not photos. They change constantly and deteriorate. What is any more “virtual” about a bit? Once burned to a CD, that area of difference is just as “real” as a burned grain on a photo.

I suspect that it’s just ignorance at work here. It’s fear of the new. Photographers are not generally computer gurus and what they don’t understand, they fear. They may think it’s “virtual” because they can’t see it, but I assure you it’s as real as any negative.

And in terms of longevity, the irony of his recent editorial is underscored by an advertisement in the back of the same magazine for a CD with an expected life of 300 years! That’s 15 generations; twice as long as the current history of photography as a medium!

Let’s look at longevity of digital media. Unlike analog media (film) digital is simple: it’s either on or off. No gray areas: the bit is either there, or it isn’t. The CD is either burned or it’s not. This simplicity leads to reliability, as opposed to the infinite shades of gray in the analog world.

It further leads to 100% -perfect- duplication. Once you shoot on film, you cannot duplicate that negative or slide with 100% fidelity… but a digital photo you can, a thousand times over… and each one IS the original! Worried about storage? Why, with the ability to make an infinite number of perfect originals? Further, after storing that original for 20 years, if you’re worried about the medium itself beginning to deteriorate, just make a 100% perfect copy on a new CD, and you’re good to go for another 20 (or 300) years.

Try that with film.

The recording media industry doesn’t need to “own up” to anything. The details of what is known and what is not known are discussed ad-infinitum within the computer world. Maybe not the photo world, but the discussion is there, to be read by anyone who is interested.

The National Bureau of Standards has run longevity tests on CDs and is running them on DVDs now. That data is public knowledge: your tax-dollars at work.

Manufacturers are working diligently to make ever more durable and long-lasting media, just as they did with the quality of film and paper, evolving over the years.

There is no “dirty little secret” in the closet; nothing “the industry needs to acknowledge” nor anything it is hiding.

Media as it is now, properly stored, is perfectly stable: bits don’t change by themselves, like magic. They are not “virtual” (whatever that means) nor subject to alteration on a mysterious whim.

Can a digital media file be destroyed? Sure. So can a negative or a print… it’s just different things that destroy them.

Look: digital is not a panacea – it is just another medium. And as another medium, it is subject to the constraints of that medium, which are different from the constraints of film and chemicals.

So, if what George is complaining about is permanence, all I can say is “What? 300 years isn’t enough? What do you want? Isn’t that at least 250 years better than what you have now?”

Outside of the fact that you cannot hold them up to the light to see an image, I cannot think of a single way in which digital storage of files isn’t superior to film.

What is at work here is not media problems, but ignorance. It’s a case of “the devil you know, versus the devil you don’t.”

Ignorance isn’t bad: it’s simply the state before becoming informed. I’m immensly ignorant of thousands of subjects.

Here it is in a nutshell: take a photo in the analog world, and you are 100% guaranteed that it will eventually deteriorate and fade from human history. Store it as a digital file, and with a bit of human help copying it every 20-300 years, there’s no reason that original image, exactly as it came out of the camera, won’t be here at the time the universe ends.

You decide which one is “virtual.”

Once again, it’s necessary to correct photographers about computers. Here’s why digital photos are NOT “codes.”

Oh good grief: words have MEANING!

In a recent (July 2006) Editor’s Notes in Shutterbug, George Schaud says “… digital images are composed of codes, either/or binary ‘addresses’ that can be swapped for others without much regard for the original codes set when the image is recorded and processed.”

Leaving out the adjectives, that becomes “codes are address” and thus, “digital images are composed of addresses.”

Well… no; they are not. Digital image files are composed of numbers, from zero to something, intended to be grouped in threes, one each for red, green, and blue.

(Yes, a number is represented by “bits” – binary switches that are either on or off, but I have not twiddled with bits since the early days of assembly language programming, and trying to get a photographer to make the mental jump from binary numbers to, er… “codes” borders on intentional obfuscation, if not the self-agrandizement of “jargon speak.”)

There is nothing mysterious about this, and calling them ‘codes’ is merely confusing. They are just numbers representing the intensity of light hitting that particular sensor.

And they are not even remotely ‘addresses.’

Look: an address is an address. Think of your mailbox. That’s an address. There is nothing in it… it’s just a container. You can put a magazine in it, or you can put a letter in it.

The magazine in the mail box can be swapped out for a letter… but the address on your mailbox does not change, as George seems to think (…”addresses” that can be swapped…”)

When one of those numbers, representing a level of light is loaded into a computer’s memory, it has to reside somewhere… and -where- it resides is it’s address. Each time you load that particular file, the address where a given pixel resides is free to change, just as you can put the same magazine into many different mailboxes, and each mailbox can hold various things.

The reason computers are useful at all, is that you can change the numbers inside the address, say from 200 to 220, making the computer interpret that pixel as brighter than recorded.

I think George has a vague idea of that, or perhaps even a firm grasp, but he does a terrible job of explaining it, using words that have a specific meaning in the wonderful world of computers, without properly understanding them.

“Code” is a programming instruction, telling the computer to do something, like “add 20 to the number that is in address 34567.” (“Code” does NOT mean “number.”)

“Address” is a memory location that can contain a number.

“Binary” is base-2 numbering; II = 3; IOI = 5; IIIIIIII = 255. Computers use binary numbering because computer memory is just a bunch of on/off switches. 255 is 8 switches in a row all turned on.

The rest of George’s note is pretty much accurate. But I do wish he’d either do a better job of explaining, or a better job of understanding.

In either case, his failure to do so results only in confusion, as when the reader later hears the words “code” “address” and so on, used properly, s/he will be forced to decide which version was the proper meaning.

I can’t imagine him calling developing fluid “water” and there is no excuse for using the wrong words in the digital domain either.

The next entry, called “A Bit of a Nibble…” actually explains, in simple and clear terms and analogies, how computers work, and is aimed at anyone interested in what’s really going on in digital photography.

While Scott Kelby may be the world’s leading computer author, that doesn’t make him right… Correcting misinformation for digital photographers. (Originally posted 2/12/05.)
Scott Kelby is, according to Amazon.com, the world’s leading computer book author. His fame rests in his works about Photoshop, and I’d be the first to admit that he’s made great contributions in that realm. On the other hand, I started working with computers when he was about four years old; Photoshop at version 1 and digital cameras when they first came out.

So, I’ve assigned myself the task of correcting the misinformation in his books, and misinformation about digital photography and computers in general. I’ll not limit this to Kelby, but will begin with him.

In his book “The Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers” (New Riders, 2003) he states on page 149 that “…16-bit offers 65,536 possible levels in each channel.” This bit of misinformation is promulgated throughout third-party literature on Photoshop.

One can be slightly forgiven for assuming that 65K worth of levels are used, since 2^16 = 65,536, but then one would equally assume that 16-bit raw files have 65K levels too, and for the exact same reason, both are incorrect.

In fact, Photoshop allows 32,768 levels, because it uses only 15 of the 16 bits. This can be verified by simply putting the info palette into 16-bit mode, and clicking on “display 16-bit values.”

On the same page, he states “To get the benefits of editing in 16-bit, you need to shoot Raw (sic) 16-bit photos…” Well, sort of. Most raw files are in fact 12 bits of data, with 4 bits padded with zeros (bringing the total bits to 16.) In short, the camera is recording 4096 levels of information (0-4095), so that even loading in a raw image does not result in a 16-bit range of data, nor even a 15-bit range (neither 65,536 levels or 32,768) but in fact 4096 levels per channel.

While this is truly counting the angels on the head of a pin, as 4096 levels per channel is still a stunning amount of information, I merely hope to set the record straight. 256 levels per channel yield 16.7 million possible colors (although not all would be distinguishable to the human eye) 4096 yields a staggering 68 billion color possibilities.

And just FYI, the difference between a million and a billion is about the same as the difference between two weeks and 32 years.

Next, another oft-repeated bit of misinformation about Photoshop is recycled on page 145 of the same book: “…press option-delete to … fill with black…”

In fact, option-delete fills with the foreground color, whatever it may be. (Command-delete likewise fills with the background color – again, whatever color that happens to be.)

(To use the keyboard to fill with black, one has to first press d to reset the default colors of black in the foreground and white in the background. Only then can one be assured that option-delete will fill with black.)

Next up: one photography magazine editor and his failure to understand digital technology…

… stay tuned.