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2013 Carpinteria Christmas
Photos from 12/25, posted 12/28/2013

2013 Carpinteria Truax Xmas Photo Notes

Pam had rented an economy car while her Honda was in the shop and they upgraded her to a convertible Mustang muscle car.  The red color was appropriate for Christmas day.  The air temperature climbed into the low 80s, so the convertible made for a fun family outing with the scooters in the trunk.  Pam wanted some photos before she returned to car, so we found a spot in the QAD parking lot on a bluff overlooking the coast.

The photo files posted are only marginally suitable for printing or zooming.

The photos files were shrunk to a maximum dimension of 1920 pixels wide or 1080 pixels tall, which is the size of the previous generation HD TVs, so you can't zoom in from a large monitor, but you will be able to zoom some from a small monitor. The files were also given medium JPG compression, so there may some loss of fidelity.

Construction files were saved for some of the photos, but not posted due to their large size. If you want to print or zoom any of the photos, send a request to Tom and he will either post the construction files so you can make alterations, or he will supply files suitable for printing or zooming base on your intended use.

For the technically inclined, a typical workflow path is:

All photos are recorded on the camera card in both RAW and JPG file formats. If there weren't significant lighting issues, the RAW files were discarded and JPG files we're opened directly in Photoshop. Files taken in bright sunlight typically have lighting issues. Photos with lighting issues enter the workflow as RAW images for adjustments, then are exported to Photoshop. Cropping, rotating, and touchup are done in Photoshop. Skewing is sometimes done in Camera RAW, but not always.

A "keeper" photo may be output to JPG with several different crops depending on desired aspect ratio (frame size) or artistic objective. Various crops are saved in the Photoshop file at full resolution, preferably non-destructively. There are several methods to save crops. I typically save a crop selection as either a path or a channel. Photoshop adjustments are typically done on layers so they can be turned on and off. It is preferable to print directly from the Photoshop file for maximum fidelity.

If markup or artwork is added, that step is typically done in Adobe Illustrator because Illustrator's drawing tools are better than Photoshop's. The Photoshop file is placed as a locked layer in Illustrator, then the Illustrator markup layer is placed back into Photoshop for a lossless transit.

The RAW files are only used if there are lighting issues for several reasons. A RAW image file contains much more luminance data to correct lighting issues compared to "developed" file formats, but the additional editing adds significant time to the workflow, and there is usually some degradation to the photos when going from RAW to a developed file format (JPG, Tiff, PSD...). The camera seems to do a better job of rendering directly to JPG output compared to working on a RAW file and then rendering. No sure why. Perhaps it is because Adobe's Camera RAW editor outputs files as either 8 bits or 16 bits for each R, G, or B channel, but the camera typically records each color channel utilizing 10 to 14 bits of luminance, so maybe something is skewed in the conversion? Despite the slight but noticeable graininess introduced by running the workflow through RAW editing, the ability to correct a wider range of luminance issues with RAW editing outweighs the increased graininess with some but not all photos.

8 bits equates to 256 levels of luminance. 10 bits is 2 to the 10 power or 1024, and 14 bits is 16K levels of lumens per channel. Your computer monitor will display 24 bit color which equates to three 8 bit channels (R, G, & B). 24 bit RGB color can display 16 million unique color variations.