[3:02am EDIT: fixed. WordPress might have a similar hole. need to check.]

I never have enough of that one.

Ok, so you get back from your photo shoot… and all your pictures look orange.

WTF?

In the old days, you bought film and made choices.  You would choose film speed (ASA/ISO, and perhaps DIN if you were a Nazi or are collecting Social Security), film size (35mm, 120, etc.) negative or slide, color or black and white.  If you chose color you had another choice – what type of light would you be shooting under?

Our brain makes things we know to be white look white under a range of lighting situations.  Film doesn’t have a brain. See, if you were outdoors, there was a film to make a pure white subject look white when lit by (midday) sunlight (5600K); if you were indoors, you could choose film balanced for Tungsten B lights (3200K) and even, and rarely, Tungsten A (3400K).  In an ideal world, our indoor lighting would be at the same color temperature-

-wait. I’m not going to get into the physics here, but you do need to know something about “color temperature” – and this is all you need to know, at least to start.  Those numbers above are in Kelvin (absolute temp= Celsius + 273.15). What heat has to do with any of this is not important.  You just need to remember the following five things:

1. Sun = 5600K
2. Cheap, powerful inefficient lights (Photofloods) = 3200K
3. Expensive, powerful efficient lights (HMI) = 5600K
4. The lower the number (temperature), the redder, and yes, confusingly, “warmer” the color
5. The higher the number (temperature), the bluer, and yes, “cooler” the color

Now digital is awesome, because the sensor doesn’t actually see color, so we can make it up as we go along.  We can tell the sensor what to consider white, and then it figures out the rest of the palette from there.  Not only do we not have to worry about having the wrong, uncool film (pun mildly intended) in the camera, but we actually can balance for any temperature light source – not just the three options from the film days (and don’t ask about multiple light sources with different temps in the same shot.  That’s for later.)

But.

This is all well and good – important stuff to know – but your model still looks like a tangerine.  In all your shots.  And she’s already gone home or out to party with the band and do blow.  There is no reshoot.  You accidentally set the camera to shoot for something like daylight, but you were using cheap continuous bulbs from the hardware store and don’t even know what color temperature they are.
You are fucked.

Maybe not.

Now, the following steps will work with JPEG and RAW images, but it is far better to do this with RAW images.  There is no quality loss, and if you have to fix the exposure (because of human vision relating certain colors to luminosity) there is much more latitude and shadow detail to bring back.  For our workflow, we’re going to be using Adobe Lightroom (version 2.7 here), because we want to fix an entire photo shoot’s worth of images.  Photoshop is better suited for in depth correction of a single picture.  We’re going to fix all the shots perfectly – no estimation or guessing – in about one minute – assuming we took one simple precaution.

We’ll get to that.

Let’s have a look at our orange model.

Pretty, ain’t she?  But even she would agree that while warming filters are flattering, she is plenty orange enough without the help.  In fact, not only was this shot screwed, so was this:

Hell, the prima donna  won’t even look at us until we have this taken care of.

So, let’s fix this.  See, we were careful and using a color balancing card in one test shot.  A 18% gray card would be fine, and another method could use a white card.  (Yes, I was going to do both as you might notice from the Lightroom screenshots, but it’s 3am now [edit: 4:50am])  Gray cards are traditionally used for establishing a exposure level for a section of the image with a reflective (often a spot) meter, however, as they are color neutral and fairly standardized (there are other mixes of gray, but 18% is the traditional choice),  you can use them as the basis for color balancing.

In Lightroom, this is very easy.  Below is a color calibration card set; there is also a pure gray only card, but this is fine – the colors are printed on a 18% gray background.  That’s all we’ll need.  This is a fancy card with at least four ways to do color balance.  Forget that.  This method will work on a $2.49 card.  (In other words, you need this and cost is no excuse.)

Ok, great you took this shot.  So you can fix this picture because you have a neutral tone that you know. “Wonderful,” you say, “but I need to fix all the shots.  Even the ones with different exposures, lighting angles, and with no pretty calibration card sitting the frame.  What now?” Well, here’s the thing.  Your camera was set to 5400K (warm daylight type fluorescent bulbs).  There was only one source of light in the room – an incandescent light of unknown color temperature.

Since there is only one type of light source, the difference between what your camera expected and what was there is exactly the same in every shot lit by the lamp.  If you needed to drop the color balance by 2,550K (which you will in this example), then all the shots need the same correction, regardless of how much light actually was reflected in the scene and regardless of the color of what reflected it (sorta, but again, that’s for later).

So to clarify – if your camera thinks the white is cool (a high number) and it’s warm (a low number), we’re going to be subtracting.  How did I know that I was subtracting 2,550?  And isn’t this is taking way longer than a minute to explain?

Well.  Now that you know the problem and you have taken the one precaution YOU WILL ALWAYS TAKE IN EVERY SHOOT, that is, YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE A SHOT WITH THE MODEL HOLDING (AT LEAST) A GRAY CARD WITH EVERY LIGHTING COLOR CHANGE, the rest is very quick.

We’ve imported our shots into Lightroom and from the Library, we see the problem in all it’s ginger glory:

Ok, so we see we have the important shot right there – a card with our preferred neutral color, 18% gray.  We click on it, and then go to Develop in the top right corner.  This will open up that image alone and give us more and finer tools to use.  When the mouse hovers over the image, it turns into a magnifying glass. We click on the part of the picture with the card to zoom in.  Now, on the right, you’ll see the Basic (very top) panel is open, set to Color (default), and there is a circle with an eyedropper.

Click on the eyedropper.

Now, that the mouse has turned into an eyedropper, we can move around and see the effects of picking various tones as the white balance point in the preview in the top left corner. We just want things “normal.” So, find the most even sample of the gray in the card that you can:

And just click… and:

Now, that looks right.  But I said we would fix all of them in a minute, and even if you went slow, I should have 30 seconds left. More than I need.

While still in the Develop section on the picture we just fixed, right click on the picture (either the big one you just worked on or the small one in the filmstrip), and find Develop Settings/Copy Settings and click…

Now we are going to take the important development change we made here (the white balance) and copy it.  Hit Check None at the bottom and then check the White Balance box (not suprisingly, the very first option, from an English reader’s perspective).  Click Copy.

Now that we have the change that we want, the rest is pretty obvious.  Go back to the Library View (top right corner) and select all the pictures that were from the late night photo shoot.  Don’t worry if you have the “fixed” picture in the selection.  We are going to paste a calibration number, not just “subtract” a number from all of the images (but that is the practical effect).

Now we just do what we did to copy, but instead choose paste –  right click on any of the selected images and find Develop Settings/Paste Settings and click…

And just like that-

Our model has her fluffy white hair back in every photograph… and is now ready for you to mess with her colors, but as you choose.

Addendum:  This is the most basic and simple method to get a decent working white balance after the fact.  There is always a gray card around, but it might not be perfectly neutral (though this is more common with the rise of digital cameras).  Color panels and white/gray/black card sets exist for a reason.  I use one of these. I have that with me at all times.  If I know I’m going to really be doing complicated color work with time to set up, this bigger and more versatile card is a lot more flexible (and my colormeter might come along).

These SMC routers were ordered in bulk with a custom firmware, with some “features” that were put in place to (presumably) assist in over the phone tech support.  The firmware enables WEP encryption with a preset key on the network and uses Javascript to disable more advanced features, including choosing WPA.  If that wasn’t problematic enough, the WEP key is derivable from the MAC address.  Let me repeat that point as clearly as I can.

The preset WEP key is derivable from the MAC address that is broadcast in the clear.

That last part is trivial, and I’m not going to give out (what I hesitate to call) the algorithm.

But wait, there’s more.  One of the advanced features disabled by the Javascript hack is the ability to change the WEP key.  I was not vulnerable to this (I use a different service with my own hardware), but a friend was -which allowed me to do a bit of work on these routers and their deployment.  We were told (July 2008) by a customer service rep that changing the WEP key was not supported for the end user – even after I asked my friend to claim that she thought someone had her “network password” (which was technically true).

Ironically, the vulnerability mentioned in the Slashdot article is the means to secure the router: by using various techniques (disabling Javascript, Greasemonkey, etc.)  you can restore these functions: changing the mode of encryption, the key, and the administrative values.

SMC is not the only company to have sold these gelded all-in-one routers to bulk telecom customers; nor is Time Warner the only customer to deploy them.  In a private discussion sharing these findings with some westcoasters at Defcon in Aug 2008, I was told there was an L.A. telecom doing exactly the same things – mass deployed routers with predictable keys and a broken firmware that prevented a fix.

The oddity is that you can find that you were famous months after the fact.

Back in February, when Facebook was considering some controversial TOS changes, I was (apparently) early in joining one of the the Facebook protest groups.  Now admittedly, I did care about the TOS issue: I posted items and used my status message to try and raise awareness.  I made one or two wall posts in said protest group.  Mostly, I wanted to clarify that the TOS wasn’t seizing copyright ownership, but the distribution license had onerous consequences.  I then said that in response, I deleted my uploaded photographs, save a profile picture or two.

Now, mind you, I have no precise idea what I said : after Facebook abandoned the proposed terms, I quit the group.  With many such Facebook groups having been formed, and hundreds of thousands of users joining them, and in turn, generating thousands of posts and threads, my original is sufficiently misplaced.

None of this would be of any interest to me – or to any right thinking individual – but for the curious addendum.  A couple of weeks ago, I googled variants of my name to see where this site was showing up.  Lo and behold, by page three, nearly all the links were in Spanish.  This was of particular curiosity to me, as my Spanish aptitude never progressed beyond some Fs and Ds in high school classes.  (Immersion methods do not work well with me, unfortunately, it took me years to figure this out and learn what does.  Another story for another time.)  Apparently, some tech writer for the EFE news service needed a quote for his piece on the TOS changes – and the user response – and quoted me.  In turn, this article was reposted and quoted by aggregators and blogs across the Latinternet.  This happens, nothing special.  However, since the original quoting was translated into a language I don’t speak or read, I had no idea until May, despite the EFE being the fourth largest news agency in the world.

Now, I cannot be certain why the original author quoted me (and I should point out, that while I don’t recall the precise wording, the translation entirely correlates with  my recollection of what I wrote) but I suspect it is because:

• I wrote with a reserved, educated tone.
• I separated my understanding of the situation from my response.
• I sounded like I knew what I was talking about.
• I am from New York.

To invoke a bit of Cialdini, the first two strike me as social liking through identification.  The first point results in a tone similar to modern journalism, and not only garners the sympathy of a writer accustomed to the style, but in using a similar style, it fits smoothly into a newspaper piece.  Similarly, the second is akin to an editorial response or, more liberally, the conclusions of a reporter.

Coupled with the a writing style, (I’m glad the reporter kept the “permissive and perpetual” bit in Spanish – I liked it enough to remember) simply sounding like I had read the new TOS and was capable of calmly correcting others probably secured me a air of authority.  Finally simply being from New York (my primary Facebook network), which the reporter did specify in the quote attribution, is both identifiable and desirable from a global perspective.  This is certainly liking and authority at play – a well spoken, informed, urbane “expert” from an international city says… – but also maintains a smooth flow for the reader who already has some idea where New York is, as opposed to stopping to wonder what or where Buffalo is.

Still, this story is just a an anecdote, a curiosity of a google search, and the subsequent analysis somewhat facile and obvious.  The lesson is not:  if you choose to write with a certain style, you will “speak” louder than others in a written medium.  Make sure that you want those words repeated: if you write well-formed drivel or masterful and erroneous prose, you may find the echo much louder than expected and the ringing criticism deafening.

This is the burden of educated speech, whether educated in fact or in tone: if you write with care, have a care with what you write.

Let’s get this out of the way: it is great and geek lust worthy; I have spent the better part of today not buying this kit.  That said, it has issues.  I suppose it is a consequence of the size (which is wonderfully tiny), but the work area is too small and it could use at least one more axis (i.e. object rotation).  If the base were extensible (hinged foldover or a notched edge with a lay in extension)  with the rails thread tapped for extension rails, this would be much more valuable.  Additionally, It would be nice to not need the PC as a controller:  take an Arduino and slip it a SD card with G-Code on it, and there is no reason to need to have the computer next to it.  Or even networked: HTTP POST via Ethernet, anyone?

(As an aside, how does the title of this post only result in six Google hits as of this writing?   So obvious.)

I’ve been looking at editors geared to little distraction for a while and considered the obvious – the obvious to me – such as lyx and vim but neither seemed to turn my Ubuntu running EeePC 701 into the full screen editor / typewriter emulator I was looking for.  I remembered a recent Slashdot thread – recent being almost a year ago(!) – inspired by a New York Times article discussing this very problem.  Amongst the recommendations was a program called Writeroom, a stripped down full screen editor presented in green on black glory. Writeroom, however, is an OS/X program, which meant I was still without a solution.

Apparently, in the time between that story and my latest bout of scrivenery inclinations, an enterprising and kind soul released an open source Python based clone: PyRoom.  Even better, he maintains Fedora and Ubuntu repositories, sparing me from the annoying maintenance involved with tarballed binaries.  I’m just putting the program through its paces, but it looks to be precisely what I was looking for – a simple full screen keyboard oriented writing implement designed to minimize  distractions and maximize writing.

If you have been looking for a solution to the same problem, it is worth the few minutes it takes to add the repo and install.

As a cautionary tale, it got even better – expanding on the chaotic complexity of interacting state machines:

Single Web Hit Led to UAL Glitch, Tribune Says – WSJ.com

When I redid my VPN this month, it took me an hour to track this down. Somehow I doubt it will be patched, either.

Simple fix, tho.

Only one way to find out…