Reggie Thomson’s Diary

I wrote a rather long comment on digital-photography-school.com about the photo processing software that I use.

I start with Breezebrowser, which I use to relabel all my images and videos to a common format. Some of the images get label sequentially and separated into another folder, which is very easily done by Breezebrowser.

Then I select my favourite photos by giving them star ratings using Adobe bridge.

I currently use Adobe Photoshop CS2 and ACR to process the raw images, though I will probably upgrade to CS3 sometime soon.

Within CS2, I reduce noise with NoiseNinja and correct for lens/vertical distortion using PTLens. There are then minor adjustments to curves and any touching-up or removal of blemishes.

I also have Lightbox, but haven’t used it much. It might be more useful when I upgrade to CS3. I would like to use it for adding IPTC info to photos in batches.

I may move to using Bibble Pro for raw conversions, as it builds in the NoiseNinja.

Though I have RoboGeo and always use a GPS to take tracks of my locations, I don’t use RoboGeo to add location info to my photos. I would ideally use a program (not yet written, to my knowledge) that automatically suggested IPTC and description info based on an Internet database of well-labelled photos in the vicinity. Maybe Google could be persuaded to take on such a project.

I’ve just sent a message to Tom Niemann of ePaperPress.com, the author of an excellent Adobe Photoshop plug-in called PTLens.

Hi Tom,

I use your PTLens plug-in regularly for fixing my photos - thanks.

Many of my photos are of buildings taken from a low vantage point. When taking the photo, I usually try to ensure that my central vertical is actually vertical. In PTLens, it would be great to have a slightly different colour of red for the central vertical in a photo. This would help me to get the correct rotation for each photo.

Furthermore, I find I am guessing about the vertical perspective. However, most of the time I can accurately place the horizon. If I could put a horizon line on the photo, I believe it would be possible to calculate the required vertical perspective correction from the focal length and the position of the horizon. Alternatively, and perhaps much easier to implement, when adjusting the vertical perspective, a horizon bar (e.g. a lighter red line) moves down (or up) the image.

Finally, I follow my PTLens adjustment with a crop. Are there any plans to put a crop (with optional retain image width/height ratio and optional resize to original image width/height) on PTLens? This isn’t essential - it would be a nicety.

Thanks again.

Wooh. I’ve just read the bit at the top. I hope you have a great time in Antartica.

Cheers, Reggie