Chapter Sixteen: After the Shutter is Tripped...
In-Camera Post Processing
The EOS 5D Mk III has the ability to perform significant in-camera post-processing of RAW images, saving the result of each as a JPEG image. You can even use the same RAW file multiple times, applying different processing each time, and save a unique JPEG for each of those processing efforts. Note, though, that the camera cannot post-process M-RAW, S-RAW, or existing JPEG images (although a JPEG image can be downsized).
In-camera post-processing is not available if the camera is in a multiple exposure mode or in HDR Mode, or when the camera has a cable plugged into the A/V OUT/DIGITAL port.
To access the post-processing functions, open the PLAY1 menu and select Raw Image Processing. Only the RAW images from all of the folders on the current memory card will be available for display as you scroll through the images. Once you have selected the image for post-processing, press the SET button. This will open a menu of adjustment options. You will need to use the Multi-controller’s joystick to select the adjustment that you want to change, and either rotate the Quick Control Dial to scroll through the values available, or press the SET button to open a dedicated screen for setting the option’s value. If there is a small area in the image that you want to visually evaluate prior to, or after, making adjustments, press the magnify button to see an enlargement of a portion of the image, then use the white-bordered box and the white rectangle as navigation guides while navigating to the relevant portion of the image with the Multi-controller’s joystick.
Though you must click the magnify button to get back to the adjustment options, the position of the image is held, which allows you to quickly get back to the same small area to evaluate the most recent changes.
Before saving the results of this post-processing, select a JPEG Image Quality for the saved file. All of the JPEG Image Quality values are available. At the bottom-right of the two columns of options is an icon showing a bent arrow superimposed on the outline of a sheet of paper; this icon represents the Save option. Select this Save option and press the SET button. Now, select the OK option and press the SET button. Read the Image Saved . . . information to ensure you have the right file in the correct folder. Press the SET button to return to the original RAW image so that you can create a different JPEG file from this same RAW file using different adjustment settings, or to scroll to another RAW file for more post-processing. When you’re through with post-processing, press the MENU button to return to the PLAY1 menu.
To resize JPEG files, open the PLAY2 menu, select the Resize option, and press SET. Only qualified images (no RAW files or JPEG S3 images) are available for selection. Rotate the Quick Control Dial to scroll to the desired image. When you press SET, a menu of available JPEG image sizes is displayed. Again, rotate the Quick Control Dial to select the image size you want, and press SET. Now you should see a query regarding saving a new file. Select OK and press SET.
I think it’s interesting that with today’s super-fast digital processors and massive amounts of cache and memory, we can find a picnic bench in the shade and pretend that we have the ability to process our pictures out there in nature. Nonetheless, I do find that the 24-inch monitor on my computer gives me a huge advantage in trying to determine just how much brightness to set or how much change to make in white balance.
Transferring the Images to a Computer
Memory Card Reader
Essentially all memory card readers, even those built into a personal computer, use the USB data-transfer architecture. A few use the FireWire data-transfer architecture, which is also known as IEEE 1394 and i.LINK. These architectures have evolved over the past few years, during which the original FireWire advantage has been lost to version 3.0 of USB. Few current personal computers come with USB 3.0 ports as a standard component, but a USB 3.0 adapter card can be added to most personal computers at a reasonable price. All current Mac computers come with USB 2.0 ports, and some have FireWire ports as well. Adding an adapter card to a Mac can be a challenge, if at all possible.
FireWire 800, the current version of FireWire, is capable of transferring data at 800 Mb/s (megabits per second), or 100 MB/s (megabytes per second). By comparison, the original version of USB (1.0) offered a data rate of 1.5 Mb/s. Version 1.1 upped that data rate to 12 Mb/s, and version 2.0, attempting to compete with FireWire 400 (at 400 Mb/s), was capable of 480 Mb/s; the specifications for version 3.0 state a data rate of 5,000 Mb/s (that’s 625 MB/s), though no devices are currently capable of exploiting that potential. Lexar is currently selling a USB 3.0 memory card reader, which it claims is capable of up to 500 MB/s. Bear in mind that as of May 2012, the fastest memory cards appear to be 1000X CF memory cards, which are capable of 150 MB/s, so that becomes the point of constraint in a USB 3.0 configuration. With a USB 2.0 (60 MB/s) configuration, or even a FireWire 800 (100 MB/s) configuration, the data-transfer architecture is the constraint for fast memory cards.
If you need to acquire a new memory card reader, I highly recommend buying a USB 3.0-capable reader that has one slot for CF memory cards and another slot for SD memory cards. USB 3.0 readers are USB 2.0-compatible, so you’ll be able to use your overly capable reader on your current personal computer. When a USB 3.0 port becomes available, either through an adapter card you add to your current computer or—aha!—a new computer, you’ll be able to benefit from the reader’s full speed capability. Just be sure that the next computer you buy provides USB 3.0 support.
Another purchase consideration: Be sure the memory card reader is capable of handling the particular memory card you have, and those you intend to buy. If you currently use something like a 133X CF memory card, most any CF-capable memory card reader will work, but if you plan on adding a new super-fast UDMA 7–capable CF memory card to handle high-resolution video, then your current memory card reader is probably not up to the task. Another thing to remember is that each new “generation” of SD memory cards has required a corresponding new generation of memory card readers, though each subsequent new generation of readers has been able to read the memory cards from the preceding generations.
USB Cable
The EOS 5D Mk III package includes a USB cable (the “interface cable”) that can be used to transfer images from the camera’s memory cards to a personal computer (Canon describes this as “direct image transfer“). There are also some utilities in the Canon software package that allow you to perform minimal customization of certain camera functions, and they rely on the USB cable for computer-to-camera communication.
You may be concerned that the pins in the camera’s CF memory card receiver could get damaged when the CF memory card is reinserted, and be tempted to always keep the memory card in the camera; however, there’s no such potential problem with the SD memory card slot.
There are a few considerations, though, in favor of not using the USB cable for image transfer:
• Unless you’re using the optional (and not too convenient) AC adapter, image transfer is driven by the camera’s battery. Be sure to check the charge level before heading out for the next shoot.
• The transfer rate will be limited by the camera’s internal USB 2.0 chip. Most professional and serious amateur photographers find that they get much faster image transfers by removing the memory card from the camera and using a good memory card reader.
• If you use a card reader, the camera won’t wind up in some precarious position while tethered to the computer.
Wireless Data Transfer
• Canon Wireless File Transmitter WFT-E7A. Canon makes this rather expensive but certainly capable device for the wireless transfer of data. It supports IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n for fast and secure connections over a wireless LAN connection, as well as Gigabit Ethernet for wired connections. Its wireless operating range is up to 100 meters.
• This unit is powered by one Battery Pack LP-E6, the same battery as used in the EOS 5D Mk III itself, and a fully charged battery can wirelessly transfer over 2,000 6 MB images. Be aware that the battery’s charge level must be 20% or higher for wireless data transfer to work.
• Note that this Wireless File Transmitter works only with the EOS 5D Mk III.
• Eye-Fi. This memory card technology is based on the SDHC memory card technology. Eye-Fi cards have the ability to transfer images directly from the camera to your iPhone® or iPad®, many Android devices, or your Wi-Fi-connected personal computer. As the cards are intended to continuously transfer images to your computer when it’s in range, their memory capacities tend to be 8 GB or less. Some variants also provide geotagging capabilities, but because a technology known as Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) is used instead of GPS, precision is usually in yards, not feet. Certainly that’s adequate for confirming an image captured in Boston, or was it Philadelphia?
Storage Considerations
• Short-term
- Thumb drives. The capacity of these little USB devices is often sufficient to store several dozen or even a few hundred images. Though their capacity limits their usefulness for long-term storage, they are a practical and convenient means of storing images for the short term, especially for the transfer of images to another computer, such as at a camera-club show. Be aware that few, if any, of these thumb drives are rated in terms of data-transfer rates, so the actual speed of operation can vary significantly.
- CDs and DVDs. For the short-term (months) storage needs associated with transferring data for archiving, these media work well, and certainly take a significant amount of abuse in USPS or courier handling with no loss of data. I work with a museum that interviews military veterans, using video stored on DVDs. Copies of these DVDs are shipped to the veteran and to the Library of Congress. In the five years I’ve been involved, we haven’t experienced a media problem.
- Internal hard drive. This is the location where we tend to save our images when they’re transferred from the camera, as well as where we save the images we’ve created in post-processing. Today’s internal disk drives are fast enough and have sufficient capacity that most other forms of storage simply can’t compete. In my computers, I have at least two disk drives, one for the bootable operating system and all of the programs I’ve installed, and the other reserved just for data. A 2 TB (terabyte, or thousand GB) hard drive costs roughly $150. So, if you can store 75,000 images on that disk, the storage cost per image is $0.002. That’s about twice the cost of storing them on DVDs, but the hard drive gives you essentially instantaneous access to those images, and it would require about 200 DVDs to contain them.
• Long-term
A major concern regarding long-term storage is the durability of the storage medium.
- Floppy disks. The 3.5-inch floppy disks that most of us once used on our personal computers were able to store 1.44 MB of data. A large, high-quality JPEG image from the EOS 5D Mk III requires 7 MB (5 diskettes) and a large RAW image requires 27.1 MB (19 diskettes), so diskettes are simply not a viable medium for storing today’s images.
- CDs. Recordable Compact Discs (CD-Rs) will hold as much as 700 MB of data, which is not that much in a world of 25 MB images. But the worst part is that these discs are designed to be written with the low-powered lasers in our personal computers, so their real life expectancy ranges from about one and a half years to a dozen years, with the average being about seven years. I find it difficult to recommend this media type, and encourage you to consider moving any images already stored on CD-R media to some other form of backup.
- DVDs. Here, again, longevity—the period of time for which you should expect to be able to read a previously written disc—becomes a concern. DVD-R and DVD+R discs, the two types used for storing data written by the DVD drive in a personal computer, currently offer a useful life expectancy of two to 15 years. That’s still not a very impressive number. Again, if you have DVDs with valuable images stored on them, you may want to consider another backup format.
- External hard drives. All of the factors stated about internal hard drives also apply to external hard drives. The significant additional factor is the type of cabling by which the external drive is attached to the personal computer. The most popular connection types used today are USB and FireWire. In fact, some external hard drive enclosures offer both, typically USB 2.0 and FireWire 800. Be aware that neither will provide a data transfer rate close to what is available with an internal hard drive.
• There are some external hard drive enclosures designed to attach to your local network router, which then makes the external drive available to anyone on the local network. I suggest you consider this option only if your computer is connected to the router by cable. A cable connection is capable of 100 Mb/s or 1000 Mb/s, depending on the network adapter in your computer (anything in the last three or four years is likely to be 1000 Mb/s), whereas a wireless connection will be 54 Mb/s, at best.
• The newest connection technology, and the fastest, is an external enclosure that connects to your computer via an external Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (eSATA) cable. As with USB 3.0, you may need to add an adapter card to your computer to provide the eSATA port, though a few newer personal computers are now including one, typically on the back panel.
• Some of the newest Macs provide the new Thunderbold data transfer technology. Thunderbolt-compatible hard drives currently are capable of a 125 MB/s data transfer rate. As a comparison, drives attached by USB 2.0 can transfer data at a rate of 60 MB/s, FireWire 800 at a rate of 100 MB/s, a wireless local network at 7 MB/s, and a wired local network at up to 125 MB/s. The current eSATA data transfer rate is 375 MB/s. Only USB 3.0 has the ability to provide a faster data transfer rate, with some new-to-market external hard drives claiming 625 MB/s.
- Cloud storage and other “real-time but off-site” facilities. Personally, I don’t use any of these facilities. I don’t feel comfortable letting some profit-motivated organization assume control over my years-long collection of images. They would work fine as a backup to my backup, though. The major advantage they offer is that the images are stored off-site. Most of us feel comfortable having our images backed up on a DVD, hard drive, or whatever we tend to have on our desk, but that backup becomes useless if the office or house suffers catastrophic damage due to a tornado, hurricane, flood, fire, theft, riot, or break-in.
• There have been some noteworthy examples of companies suddenly shutting down, with all customer-stored data lost. People are checking to ensure their images on Kodak’s Gallery make a successful transition to Shutterfly. For display and sharing of images, some of the sites are worth looking at, but study the “fine print” closely to see what—if anything—you’re surrendering by using their services. As an example, this is part of the terms for the now-defunct Kodak Gallery (the emphasis is mine):
To maintain free storage, you need to meet the following minimum purchase requirement within 90 days of first uploading images, and then every 12 months thereafter . . . If you do not purchase the required amount as set forth above from us for a period of 12 months, we may delete the images stored in your account.
• As Yahoo! was consolidating its Yahoo! Photos site with the newly acquired Flickr site, the company told Yahoo! Photos users:
If users don’t tell Yahoo! what to do with the photos before the site closes, their photos will be deleted and will no longer be accessible.” Now, if you were in the upper reaches of the Amazon River for six months . . .
On-Computer Post-Processing
There are a number of good image-editing programs available, and many including library management as well. Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software that arrives on CD along with the camera is certainly good, and doesn’t require spending even more money in order to acquire it.
The de facto standard appears to be Adobe Photoshop, though many are finding that Lightroom is adequate for their needs (if you need pixel-level editing or use multiple layers for editing, then stick with Photoshop). Adobe attempts to provide support for the RAW files from camera manufacturers shortly after delivery of a new camera model. It provides support for EOS 5D Mk III RAW files to Photoshop CS5 users through Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) version 6.7, and to Photoshop CS6 users through ACR versions 7.1 and higher. Without a compatible version of ACR, Adobe products cannot process a camera’s RAW files. Of course, you can always open your RAW files in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software, make whatever edits you wish to perform in DPP, save the file as a high-quality TIFF file, then open that TIFF file in just about any version of Photoshop to continue with your image editing.
Printing
Some folks are satisfied to have their photos available as an attachment to an e-mail message, an upload to a website, or part of a web-based newsletter. Many place excellent images in the hands of stock-photo brokers. But most of us, especially the great number of professional photographers, want to see our images committed to paper. There are certainly photographers who choose to deal with professional printers, giving themselves more time to spend behind the camera or in the post-processing of their images. The majority of us do our own printing, though, whether out of a distorted sense of cost, or simply because we see putting tiny dots of color on paper as a part of the “creative process.”
For “on-site” printing, there are two major categories to consider:
1. Some photographers simply want to dump the contents of the memory card onto paper, saving the time and hassle of dealing with a big-box store’s printing service. Several printer manufacturers build small printers specifically for that kind of job. Stand-alone printers such as Epson’s PictureMate models can run without any connection to a personal computer. Some stand-alone models can run on a rechargeable battery, allowing you to generate prints just about anywhere. Such printers allow the user to simply plug a memory card directly into the printer, select the images to be printed, and sit back and have a cool one while the prints slide out of the printer. The images are sharp and colorful, and some manufacturers claim their paper/ink combos are capable of lasting 100 years without fading in a glass-covered frame displayed out of direct sunlight, or as long as 200 years in an album. But some printers are slow and moderately expensive, the print sizes are limited (often 4” x 6” is the only size option), and the paper and ink are rather specific, so you won’t be finding many discounts or sales.
2. The majority of photographers who do their own printing purchase personal computer–connected printers. These vary from the $100 black-cartridge-plus-color-cartridge printers that will handle letter-size photo paper to sophisticated, multi-foot-wide-roll-paper printers that are capable of selecting from any of a dozen or more ink cartridges. At the high end, they can cost thousands of dollars. Fine-art photographers love those advanced printers. The most common photo printers, though, range from capable $200 all-purpose printers to the photo-specific $700–$800 printers. The $200 class of printers provides separate cartridges for black, yellow, cyan, and magenta inks. Models in this class are capable of handling letter-size photo paper, and often have memory card readers built into the printer, allowing you to print directly from your camera without going through your personal computer. The $700–$800 class of printers is generally capable of handling tabloid (11” x 17”) or Super B (13” x 19”) paper in a variety of different weights and surface finishes. These printers typically come with at least two different black inks and five colors, allowing for much-improved color accuracy in the final prints.
Lastly, let’s take a look at PictBridge. PictBridge is a standard for sending images directly from the camera to a printer that was created by the Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA) in 2003. It’s not an open-source standard, but several camera and/or printer manufacturers, including Canon, have acquired authorization to implement it in their products.
In the simplest of terms, to use PictBridge, you must have both a camera (the EOS 5D Mk III is one) and a printer that conform to the PictBridge standard. A USB cable is plugged into a Type-A USB port on the front of the printer (not the little USB port that is typically on the back of the printer and used to connect the printer to a computer) and into the USB Mini-B A/V OUT/DIGITAL port on the camera. A USB ‘“interface cable“ is supplied with the camera for this type of connection. Once the cable is connected, you power on the printer and camera, then press the camera’s playback button to access the images currently on the memory card. You use the Quick Control Dial to scroll through those images and find the image to be printed. To confirm that the camera and printer are properly connected and communicating with each other, look in the upper-left corner of the image and make sure you see the PictBridge logo with the word SET attached. Then press SET to open the setup screen. On this screen, I find using the Multi-controller joystick and button to be the fastest way to select an option, open the option, and set a value. The three options under the small display of the image are accessed by scrolling to the Paper Settings option, pressing the Multi-controller button, then navigating across a panel for each option. When your setup is complete, select the Print option and press SET.
Remember, though, where the power is coming from to drive the image to the printer! Be sure you have sufficient charge on the battery, or use the Canon ACK-E6 AC adapter kit.