S-Log3 Grading Looks for Sony a7S II

October 17, 2015

The Sony a7S II is shipping now from B&H and soon from Amazon. I haven’t gotten my hands on one yet, but Gordon Laing from Cameralabs has, and his ongoing review is off to a great start with some sample stills, and even a couple of S Log3 4K video clips.

The Hue/Saturation and S-Curve tools are all it takes to emulate Sony's S-Log3 to Rec709 LUT.

With Gordon’s permission, I used his footage to test a few S-Log3 presets for Magic Bullet Looks 3.1. I matched these to Sony’s own LUTs, but unlike a LUT, these are completely editable. They come with a 4-Way Color Corrector already poised to make the look your own, and you can even edit the S-Curve and Saturation tools that make the conversion from log to video color.

Get the Free Looks

Read the Review

The Light L16 prototype spills its guts.

Exclusive Details on the Light L16 Camera

October 14, 2015

This is a follow-up to last week’s post on the Light L16 camera, a computational camera that claims unprecedented big-camera performance in a small-camera form. Light launched a pre-order campaign last week, with intent to ship the L16 in late Summer 2016 — and yesterday they announced that the pre-orders have been so successful that any placed after this Friday will ship later, in Fall.

On Monday, I visited Light’s offices in San Francisco. I saw their working prototype, their mock-up of what they intend to ship, and had a delightful and thorough conversation with their co-founder and CTO Rajiv Laroia.

I write this with some circumspection, as I look back with some regret in participating in breathless speculation about previous camera announcements that ultimately fizzled. But Light shared some interesting information with me that hasn’t been available elsewhere, so I felt I’d be doing a disservice not to share it here.

So here’s what we talked about.

These guys are the real deal. That’s maybe the most important takeaway from my visit. I’m impressed with what they’re up to. I still have a few concerns, but these guys are smart, they care about the right things, and from what I can tell, they have a sound plan. Check the About page on their site — they’re being very open about who they are and how much money they’ve raised.

Speaking of “open,” they showed me all the blueprints. Using a 3D-printed model of the insides of the camera, they showed me the five direct-firing 35mm-equivalent cameras, and the 70mm- and 150mm-equivalent cameras that surround them on their sides, shooting through mirrors. You can probably figure out which are which in the photos. There’s a lot of thought to the layout, including accommodations for rolling shutter, and even placing closest to the handgrip the lenses least likely to impact image quality when occluded by a stray finger.

They showed me the mockup, which you saw in their promo video. It’s neither small nor big, and felt good in my hand. They also let me try a detachable oversized handgrip that I hadn’t seen on their site, which helps with balance and is planned to contain a larger battery as well. VP of Marketing Bradley Lautenbach told me that this grip will be included with the pre-ordered cameras.

They showed me the functional prototype — which still requires lots of help to do its work, but is ambitiously similar in size to the mockup.

Rajiv Laroia is an imposingly smart guy (you met him in this video), yet was more than generous with his time, and open about the challenges that face his company. He understands optics, and has no interest in defying the rules thereof — rather, he’s excited about harnessing them in new ways.

All in all, I was impressed.

They don’t need our money. They have $35M in investment and, in a detail absent from their site, are partnered with Foxconn for production of the L16. The $200 pre-order is designed to measure demand, so they can both begin a dialogue with a commited community, and set up their supply chain accordingly.

Speaking of supply chain, Foxconn makes iPhones. The L16 is a camera with high-end photography aspirations that will be built on mobile phone production lines, which is unprecedented. Rajiv stressed that the “why now” of the L16 is that, in the past five years, there has been a revolution of quality for cost in these smartphone camera modules. The quality is so good that the tiny plastic lenses in the L16 prototype are diffraction-limited, meaning they can resolve as much detail as the theoretical limit imposed by their size.

Which is why I was wrong about superresolution. I theorized that the L16’s megapixel claims were a product of interpolated resolution, but Rajiv set me straight on that.

The crazy resolution comes from tiling, which means those little mirrors actually move. When you shoot at the 35mm equivalent zoom, the five 35mm cameras fire, as do the five 70mm cameras. The 70mm cameras are oriented by their mirrors to tile the FOV of the 35mm cameras — one for each corner, and a fifth in the center.

The result is fused (not tiled) into a combined, simulated exposure.

An L16 photo at 35mm is made up of five 35mm (equivalent) images, plus five 70mm image tiles, all taken from slightly different perspectives.

What happens when you shoot at 150mm?

The mirrors angle the fields of view of the 150mm cameras to overlap completely, and the 70mm cameras fire too.

The details about the individual cameras that make up the Light L16 have been right there on their own web site since launch.

Video is a matter of bandwidth, storage, and heat. And processing time. The L16 will generate about 50 megabytes of losslessly-compressed material per exposure. Light could aspire to do that 24 times per second, but the camera would have to look a lot different to accomodate the requisite processing power and storage. Light is not setting their sights there just yet. For now, 4K video comes from a single camera — but which camera is determined by your zoom choice, so you should expect 4K at any focal length from 35mm to 150mm.

They really want to work well with Lightroom, which is great. Light’s software (which does not exist yet as shown in the video) is promised to output DNG files, but they know that closer integration would be better.

You do focus the L16. All the lenses focus together. Your range of refocusing in post centers around the focus point you selected when shooting.

Close focus distance depends on zoom, just like in reality. Expect about 10cm minimum focus at 35mm, 40cm at 70mm, and 1m at 150mm. Let’s not hold them to these numbers, but it’s nice to know.

The cameras use electronic shutters. Which means the L16 will be prone to rolling shutter artifacts, just like your phone. In other words, it’s probably not something to worry about. Long shutter durations are created by accumulating multiple readouts of the sensors.

Light needs light. The L16 is a light-gathering device. Thats why it’s as big as it is — just like my Canon 50mm. There is an ISO, but no control of aperture. They may promise great low-light performance, but you’ll make better photos with more photons.

There’s a depth map, and you can have it. The L16 outputs a depth map of the scene, and Light expects folks to use this to great effect in post processing. A high-quality depth map makes it easy to cut out foreground objects, or insert imagery into a photo.

The sample images on their site are not representative of the final quality they intend to ship. They know their gallery needs work. They realize the images are biased toward showing off sharpness, punch, and resolution, rather than meaningful refocusing and DOF-simulation. They know their low-light example isn’t great, and they know they’re not yet impressing anyone with the dynamic range.

As one might imagine, they scrambled to get these images shot with the prototype in time for their launch. Many features are not implemented yet in the prototype, most notably varying the exposure from camera to camera for single-shot HDR capture. This should improve dynamic range dramatically.

They know they need some soft-focus, non-blown-out sample shots, and they plan to shoot some.

But I’m still worried about their ability to make super sexy shallow DOF photos. I brought my Canon 5D Mark III with 50mm F1.2L lens along, hoping maybe I could do the Pepsi challenge between it and their prototype. That didn’t happen, but we looked at some ƒ/1.2 photos I’d shot recently and spent a good deal of time talking about that shot from Nocturne. We talked about what makes for pleasing boke, and what kinds of creative possibilities emerge when boke is simulated. Rajiv confidently assured me that they could do everything a real lens could — but he also repeatedly referred to my ƒ/1.2 photos as “corner cases,” which is engineer-speak for “not the problem we’re solving for” — and that concerned me greatly.

Light claims the L16 (mockup shown here on the right) will do everything the full-frame Canon 50mm F1.2 rig on the left does, and more.

I pushed back and told him what he already knew — that when I buy a lens that says “F1.2” on it, I’m not spending $1,500 to shoot at ƒ/4.0. Photography is all about corner cases. We buy full-frame cameras and fast glass so we can push them to their extremes. The cake I want to have-and-eat-too with the L16 is the shallow DOF of my Canon, with the promise that I’ll never miss a shot due to focus.

A portrait I made at 50mm, F1.2 on Saturday. This is the kind of image I'd like to see on Light's L16 gallery page.

The biggest complaint I’ve seen about Light’s marketing is that they talk about ƒ/1.2, but don’t show it. Ironically, their own site is full of shallow-DOF photography with sexy boke — but it’s all the shots of the camera, not made by it.

The biggest risk I see facing Light with the L16 is that they’ll be able to produce perfectly acceptable photos with it.

We can already do that with our telephones. The challenge is clear: They need to bring the sexy.

There are so many more possibilities to come. The potential of cameras like this is mind-boggling. The depth map could well be so accurate that you could usefully measure objects in a photo. You could accurately place 3D objects into an L16 photo, with automatic occlusion. It’s an ideal tool for lightweight 3D scanning too — extracting a decent 3D model from a depth map and corresponding RGB data is trivial, and technology exists to merge a few such samples into one very nice textured 3D model.

But back to photography: When it comes to simply processing your photos, much more than simple selectable focus is possible. You could design your own boke pattern. Create a plateau of focus in an otherwise shallow-focus shot. Tilt or even bend the plane of focus to hold two sharp eyes at ƒ/1.2, or simulate a tilt-shift lens. Because you can center the synthetic aperture anywhere on the virtual imaging plane (just like Lytro), you can do parallax tricks, or render a stereo pair of images from a single shot.

The L16 may or may not be able to make photos as appealing as those I routinely make with my bulky, expensive Canon rig — but it may not have to either. It might carve out an important niche for itself as a camera that is much more than just a camera.

But I hope it does more than that.

Last point: We’re not done. They’ve invited me back for another visit. This time, we’re going to take some pictures.

The Light L16 Camera and Computational Photography

October 09, 2015

Photographers and cinematographers love lenses. We romanticize this part of our kit more than any other, going on about “the Cooke look” or the unique character of a vintage Canon with spherical elements. But the time may come when our big, heavy chunks of polished glass are replaced with arrays of small, unremarkable image gathering sensors that not only boast improved image quality over their traditional ancestors, but can be tuned to emulate any of their qualities.

What if you could choose any lens characteristic you desired, including focal length and even depth of field — without ever changing lenses? What if you could make these decisions after the photo was shot?

What if you could not only specify how much (or little) depth of field your photos had during post processing, but you could also change which part of the image was in focus?

What if you could simulate any lens, from an NASA Zeiss F0.7 50mm that Stanley Kubrick used on Barry Lyndon, to a tilt-shift, to a razor-sharp telephoto at ƒ/22? All with a single camera the thickness of a point-and-shoot?

This potential future of photography has a new player with a very fancy web site and a pre-order form. Meet the (website for the) Light L16 Camera.

When the Photo is Built, Not Taken

The Light L16 is based on a concept known as computational photography. What that means is that the final photo that it generates is not a 1:1 record of light intensities captured on a photosensitive surface, but rather a reconstruction, based on multiple imaging sources.

Remember the Lytro camera? It was the first commercially-available computational camera. Known as a "plenoptic," or "light field" camera, the Lytro features an array of microlenses directly on its sensor. A traditional lens focuses the scene onto this micro-lens array, and the sensor records many small images of the scene — one per micro-lens.

They key is that each micro-lens sees a slightly different perspective on the scene, just as a grid of cameras aimed at the same subject would. Software can use these multiple perspectives to build a depth map of the scene, and reconstruct a photo at a higher resolution than any one of the capture sites. This reconstructed image can have any depth-of field you like (up to the limits related to the full sensor size) and can even be re-imaged from the perspective of any of the micro-lenses, giving you the ability to create a paralax effect in post-processing.

It’s a bit like a police sketch artist creating a crisp likeness based on multiple blurry photographs. With enough of them to work with, the drawing can look nearly perfect.

You can see live examples of this madness at Lytro’s gallery. Hover your mouse over the images to see the parallax effect, and click to refocus the photo wherever in the image you like.

How Many Cameras Does it Take

Last year the HTC released the One M8, a smart phone with a second rear camera devoted entirely to recording depth information. Its built-in software allows adjusting the appearance of shallow DOF. Some examples I found were convincing, some not so much.

This two-camera approach was an improvement over previous attempts at this kind of thing in mobile phone photography, where multiple photos taken at slightly difffernt times could be combined to offer post-processing focus options.

If the multiple-imagers to make one picture thing is not exactly new, what’s special about what the Light L16 promises?

Choose Your Fetish

The Light L16 has 16 separate cameras at various focal lengths. Many are quite a bit larger than what you'd find in a smartphone, packed in sideways and firing through mirrors. The resultant arrangement of apertures looks almost insect-like. Depending on the zoom level you choose at capture time, ten of the 16 cameras are fired to gather material to merge into a final image.

What does this buy you?

Megapixels

I recently wrote about 3,000 words about how you might not want the overhead of the Sony a7R II’s 42.4 megapixels. The Light L16 promises stills of up to 52 megapixels. This is presumably possible because of a technique known as superresolution, where multiple samples are combined to create an image of higher resolution than any one of its sources. If you want to play with this technique today, try the Cortex Camera app for iPhone.

35–150mm zoom

This isn’t truly an “optical” zoom, because the images are synthesized, but since some of the cameras on the L16 are genuinely longer in focal length, you should expect high (super)resolution results at any virtual focal length in that range.

A long zoom is hard thing to find in a pocket camera, and when you do see it, it’s always at the expense of my fetish:

Shallow Depth of Field

The L16 promises to be able to emulate a ƒ/1.2 aperture in its post processing. But don’t worry, you can decide just how shallow your DOF should be in post — as you see happening in Light’s lavishly-produced demo video:

Of course, shallow focus is just one option. MIT Technology Review’s Rachel Metz’s wrote about her visit to Light’s offices:

Light didn’t show me any working camera arrays, though I did see an image of one of the company’s engineers that was shot with a test array of four eight-megapixel sensors and combined with software. In a close-up of her face, her hair and the background were quite sharp.

That sounds terrible to me — but here’s one pocketable camera that promises Rachel her infinite DOF and me my crazy shallow focus. And I’m sure there are occasions where each of us want the opposite.

Focus Later

Because light field cameras offer the ability to select what’s in focus after the shot is captured, not only can you choose focus manually, but the camera’s decisions about what should be in focus could be made after the shutter is depressed rather than before, eliminating some delay.

And then in post processing, you grab a slider and make that final tweak to sharp-up the eye rather than the eyelash.

Low Light

The L16 video shows how multiple exposures are combined to create low-noise images even in low-light situations. I’m curious as to why Light doesn’t play up the HDR possibilities here more, but low light performance is definitely nice, and also something that traditionally would come at the expense of the other features listed here.

Perfect focus every time. A 35–150mm equivalent zoom at ƒ/1.2. Great low-light performance and more resolution than a $27,000 medium-format Hasselblad. It’s easy to see why folks are excited — this camera seems to have it all.

Of course, it doesn’t exist yet.

The Light Plan

Light plans to ship the L16 in “Late Summer” of 2016 at a cost of $1699. You can pre-order now, and your $199 (refundable) down payment earns you a $400 discount on the list price.

Should You Order One?

A lot can happen between now and Spring. Light seems to have moved from a business plan of building camera modules for mobile phone manufacturers to include in handsets, to a selling directly to consumers. But their Plan A is, very likely, everyone’s Plan A. My estimate is that within two to four years, technology like this will be commonplace in mobile phones.

I’ve been hoping that would be true for a while now, so I might be overly optimistic. Apple can barely squeeze their single tiny camera into their current iPhone. Digital imaging maestro and former Apple employee Ron Brinkmann wrote about the possibilities of a bug-eyed camera array in an iPhone back in 2011 when the Lytro was announced.

It seems inevitable that the future of mobile phone photography is multi-capture computational, but it’s not clear exactly when that future will be. Light is promising to put it in your hands early next year. But I’d guess they’re also working on making their technology available to others at the same time.

What I Like

Lytro seemed positively obsessed with the idea that their cameras made a new thing called “Live Photos,” meaning the focus and parallax hijinks should be exposed to the viewer, rather than provided to the photographer as editing tools with the goal of producing a superior traditional photographic result. It’s fun to play with in their gallery, but it’s not photography. When I make a photo, I frame it. I decide what you see, and that includes focus. Focus is framing in depth. When you ask the viewer to chose it for you, it’s like beginning to tell them a joke, and then asking them to provide the punchline. It’s dissatisfying to them, and an abdication of your responsibilities as a photographer.

I like that Light seems to be dispensing with this technological showcasing and focusing on giving photographers tools to make the best pictures possible.

I also really like that whole thing about perfect focus every time, a 35-150mm zoom at ƒ/1.2, great low-light performance and more resolution than a Hasselblad.

It simply seems miraculous, and I want it all.

These Are Our Concerns

I am always suspicious of miracles in photography. At best, they may result images that appear to have had miracles worked on them.

We romanticize lenses in part because lenses are weird. Strange things happen with them. Have you ever noticed a background distorting along the edge of an out-of-focus foreground? Or how heat ripples refocus light? How spectacular (and hard to fake) anamorphic lens flares are? Or how sharp silhouettes appear in big circles of boke? Look at this shot from Nocturne:

Notice how clearly your eye can resolve the silhouette of the approaching skateboard wheels, sharply outlined within the boke of the distant headlights. Those of us who fake reality for a living know how hard it is to generate this kind of organic, optical reality. This shot is a light sculpture, a freak of nature. It’s weird, and wonderful, and it’s actually communicating a lot of information in those blobs of light. I’m not sure you could make anything like it by reconstructing multiple images.

Not that the L16 would claim to — it’s important to note that the L16 is promising 4K video from a single-sensor only, so none of the fancy DOF or refocusing will be available in motion. Maybe light-field video will be next year’s pre-order.

One big issue I have looking at Light’s sample gallery is that there are very few examples of shallow focus. The few comparisons they present are very conservative — more so than what they show in the video. If the L16 can really emulate ƒ/1.2, we've yet to see it.

The sample gallery seems tuned to Rachel Metz's tastes, not mine. There's a lot of pop and contrast, and little indication of broad dynamic range, or sultry shallow focus. Light would do well to get some moodier, sexier samples into that gallery.

If you want to get people excited about your breakthrough camera, show gorgeous examples. Period.
— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) October 9, 2015

It’s worth thinking about about how a camera like this would integrate with your daily photography habit, which, for me, revolves around Lightroom. These photos obviously require Light’s own proprietary software for all the fun tricks, but I want it all — Lightroom’s color and organizational control, without giving up my ever-re-editable DOF and focus sliders.

I have one last concern, and it’s a big one. Next summer is soon. This camera doesn’t exist yet. Let’s have a little Shyamalan flashback to that MIT Technology Review quote: “Light didn’t show me any working camera arrays.” That was in April of this year.

An anonymous friend (and Lytro owner) shared his skepticism with me:

Acording to that same article, Light has partenered with Foxconn to finance and manufacture the L16. Still, my sense is that we'd all be wise to treat this pre-order situation like any crowdfunding campaign from Kickstarter or the like — with the proviso that Light promises to refund your down payment if you ask in time.

Pre-Ordering the Future

Today we get to decide if we want to pay now to potentially play with the far future in the near future, or just wait for the future to arrive on its own. Sometimes the future is amazing. Sometimes, when it arrives too early, it winds up sitting on a shelf — like my friend’s Lytro.

Even with the $400 discount, $1,300 is a lot to spend on an experimantal camera that doesn't integrate into your existing workflow. On the other hand, what the L16 promises cannot be had at any price today. What would you expect to pay for a F1.2 35–150 zoom lens?

For now, Light has $200 of my money. And I have an invitation to visit them and learn more in person. So this won’t be the last you read about the L16 here.

Update 2015-10-14

I visted them.

Introducing Prolost EDC for After Effects

October 08, 2015

Over my many years using After Effects, I’ve always kept with me a set of simple, homemade utility presets. Most are just shortcuts to effect settings I use all the time, or easy ways of applying common expressions. Lately, a few of them have gotten a little more complex too.

Prolost Spanner 2D makes it easy to set aim one 2D layer at another.

These are my go-everywhere-with-me After Effects mini-tools, which reminded me of the concept of an “Everyday Carry,” or EDC. There’s a bit of a fetish out there, which I admit I share, for compact, efficient tools that one never leaves home without — in fact, there’s a whole site dedicated to it, where just about every day you can find the last watch, wallet, or pocketknife you’ll ever need. And then find a new one tomorrow.

So today I’m releasing Prolost EDC for After Effects. It’s a fun experiment in a couple of ways:

Pay What You Like

You decide what Prolost EDC is worth to you. You can pay anything you like, even nothing at all.

Free Updates Forever

Prolost EDC is a subscription. I can’t promise how often, but I’ll add to the set over time, and release free updates. You’ll be notified by email whenever this happens.

Prolost EDC is available now. You can see the complete list of presets here.

Get Prolost EDC

More Lightroom, More Dehazing, More Free Presets

October 05, 2015

Today at Adobe MAX, the entire Lightroom lineup was updated, from Lightroom Web to Lightroom Mobile for iOS and Android. Lightroom itself is now at 6.2 (perpetual) and 2015.2 (Creative Cloud), and guess what? It comes with more Dehazing-related features that are only available to Creative Cloud subscribers.

You may recall that, with Lightroom 6.1/2015.1, Adobe introduced a new control for removing haze from photos — but only for subscribers. I wrote about that here, and offered some free presets to enable the functionality even for non-CC users.

Today's update adds Dehaze to the list of local adjustments, meaning CC users can brush it in, or use it on a Graduated or Radial Filter.

Now before you get out your jumbo Sakura marker and make a protest sign that says “How dare Adobe provide new functionality on a continual basis exclusively to people who pay on a continual basis?”, take a deep breath and download Prolost Dehaze v1.2, which gives Lightroom 6 owners (limited) access to these new features, even without a Creative Cloud subscription.

Get Prolost Dehaze 1.2

Prolost Dehaze 1.2 includes:

Dehaze — the same global Dehaze from 1.0, but with finer increments.
Gradient Dehaze
Radial Dehaze

The workflow is a little funky, so you’ll want to read the User’s Guide. In a nutshell, you can move and edit the Graduated or Radial Filter created by the preset, and even edit it with the Brush tool, but you won't reliably be able to adjust the intensity of the Dehazing effect after applying. Please really do RTFM on this one, because there are big limitations and a right and wrong way to work with these presets.

Prolost Dehaze v1.2 is free, just like last time, and I’ve made the download process a lot easier since then.

Prolost Dehaze is a part of the Prolost Graduated Presets, which I've updated as well to include the new Dehaze presets.

What else is new with Lightroom?

The headlining feature in Lightroom 6.2/2015.2 is a simplified import experience. Lightroom Mobile for iOS has been upped to 2.0, with the addition of an improved Collections View, a built-in camera, and oh, boy, the Dehaze control. Lightroom Mobile is now free to use locally (device photos only) without a Creative Cloud subscription. And Lightroom Web now allows you to edit your photos for some reason. Read all about it at the official Lightroom blog.

Update 2015-10-09

This release of Lightroom has been controversial for both the features removed in the name of streamlining the import process, and for some crashing/performance issues on Mac, possibly having to do with El Capitan. Today, Adobe released 6.2.1 to address the crashing and performance issues. Find it under Help → Updates.

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