Photos from the Ecuador/Peru trip finally available

by philg

Photos from the April/May 2004 trip to Ecuador/Peru are finally available in JPEG format at http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200404-ecuador-peru/ . I am going to make a further selection of my favorites soon but for those with plenty of patience the index files might be of interest.  http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200404-ecuador-peru/200405-machu-picchu/photographing-llama-3.tcl is my personal favorite photo so far.


[It took all of this time because the photos were in Olympus RAW format from an Olympus E1 camera and I needed to script Adobe Photoshop to add black borders, copyright info, convert to JPEG, save in four different sizes, etc.  Plus I needed a Perl script to make the index files (thanks, Jin!) and some AOLserver Tcl code to deliver the larger images after someone clicks on a thumbnail.  Then I had to do at least a first pass editing the 1500 photos.]

8 thoughts on “Photos from the Ecuador/Peru trip finally available”

  1. As far as your kick wih photographing photographers goes, I much prefer the one of the sandal wearing freak with the 300mm f/2.8 and the hot babe in the bikini on the beach. But that llama has a killer smile and knows how to pose really well for the camera!

  2. As nice as automation is, I still prefer doing it by hand in C1DSLR. It takes a while, but simply setting shadow/highlight points properly for the three channels makes such a big difference.

    My resizing work is automated using ImageMagick and some Tcl scripts, obviously. But I can’t be bothered with borders and copyright messages.

    I remember you borrowed that E-1, do you still use it? I love it, especialy the lenses; smaller, lighter, cheaper and every bit as good as the Canon L zooms. The 16×12″ print I just had made shows the 5MP is more than adequate for my needs too.

  3. I was surprised to read that you are using Photoshop to do the image scripts when ImageMagick and the command line program convert can do all of these for you. Information on scripting the resizing and adding a copyright blurb can be found here:

    http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-graf/?ca=dnt-428

    Scripting the addition of adding borders can be found here:

    http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-graf2/?ca=dgr-lnxw15GraphicsLine

    When you are scripting photoshop can you run the resulting scripts from the command line or do they have to be initiated from within photoshop? Also, Phillip, your photos seem to be nicely reduced JPEGs. That is the quality of the image is good but you have obviously taken steps to reduce the image size. Can you give some tips here on what settings you use for these JPEGs?

  4. ImageMagick wouldn’t be able do the Olympus (or any) RAW conversion from the camera, so that’s a major showstopper right there. You could export to TIFF using other software and then do the rest in ImageMagick, but it’s best to keep everything in one place. (I do use the two program method, but because I don’t script the processing, just the resizing, that doesn’t matter)

    As for the JPEGs: if it goes in like shit, it comes out like shit. Because these were straight from RAW, with no doubt a bit of sharpening after the resize, they turn out very nice and you can use a pretty low quality setting for a small file and they still look good. What you are looking at here are first generation JPEGs. If you shoot JPEG and then edit and resize them, quality goes down hill real fast and file size goes up.

    Philip, did you try scripting in “auto color”? In PS 7 it’s actualy pretty good and probably better in CS. Not as good as doing it manualy, but it should make most of them look much better. (and absolutely kill a few where it gets it horribly wrong, obviously)

    Maybe you could publish your script and a how-to, I know the question on how to do this comes up quite often on photo.net…

  5. To answer various questions…

    I returned the E1 to Olympus after the Ecuador/Peru trip. I think the overall system is a great idea but I own about 20 Canon EOS lenses so the cheap Canon digital SLRs make more sense for me.

    Photoshop has a built-in JavaScript interpreter. You have to launch the app and then use mouse commands to invoke the script. The JPEGs are saved at quality settings 5 or 6 (for thumbnails) or 8 or 9 (the bigger ones). I think this is on a scale from 1-12 or 1-10.

    I have not tried autocolor. I probably should. I will be giving away the scripts and some tutorial material as soon as I have the time.

  6. I bought myself an E-1 a few weeks ago…. now I just have to get myself to the Galapagos 🙂

    Great photos, but I’d prefer a tighter selection with some commentary or at least captions.

  7. When you run a script for converting digital camera Jpegs to thumbnails, you should strip off the EXIF headers to reduce the file size (currently 20KB+).

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