Where are we going?

The issue of whether people should pay for forums or not came up on dpreview. With the current economy, I expect how to pay the bills will be a growing question for many web services.

The problem is with forums there is perfect competition. Anyone can setup a forum and run it for next to nothing. If one forum decides to charge a fee, the users can flee to another forum. The only reason they might stay is because of the audience. For example, photographers pay for to host their photographs on Flickr primarily because it provides a rich audience of people who love to look at still photographs. Flickr is the Life and Look magazine of our time, it is the revival of the great picture magazines, not because of its technology (that helped orient the site in the right direction to succeed, just look at the abject failure of Picasa to be social---too little too late). Flickr just happened to be where most people who like to look at pictures gathered, mostly because of its blog-like streams of every changing pictures and social tools. It is easier to pay a small fee to use Flickr (perhaps even to "read" it) than it would be to overcome the "capital" costs of changing sites. Flickr users have a lot invested in Flickr and it might just cost less to stay and pay than to move elsewhere. Besides, there is no where else to move. The closest thing I could see to Flickr would be for every photographer to put up their own photo blog software and then join photoblogs.org, which would become the "magazine" and "social hub." This is a distributed vision of photo sharing online. I used to wonder which would be successful. But it really was simple, Flickr did it all for you, some for free, a little more for pay, well worth it to promote your photography.

Despite the somewhat juvenile and absurd environment of Flickr with regard to art photography (you know, the dozens of people giving out "Great Photograph" awards to pedestrian, derivative and mediocre images mostly to promote themselves or because they are too young to know what a derivative image is), it is useful to professional photographers and art photographers because Flickr is where the eyeballs are. It attracts people who still love still photography, which in this age of video, is a bit of a miracle that anyone takes an interest in photography. However, photographs can make the world sit still long enough for people to pay attention, and that is a very similar experience to poetry, which at least in part, is there to draw attention to things. I've heard from professional photographers they get an order of magnitude more requests or work through Flickr than through one of the professional portfolio sites.

One reason, perhaps the principal one, Henri Cartier Bresson and other great photographers became well known, was through their images being published in the great picture magazines. When television came along, the picture magazines went into decline. Photojournalism began its long decline at this time, for the simple reason people could learn about their world visually through television, a more attention grabbing (the barrier to entry for television was lower, you didn't have to be intelligent to watch it, a good example where low barrier of entry is destructive to society) and free medium. Without the picture magazines it was no longer possible for a photographer of acknowledged artistic merit to become known and their images have significance in society. The audience was gone. Flickr reestablishes this audience.

So the question still stands. Will people in the future pay for their online content. Pay to create it. Pay to consume it. What is happening now? People are already paying to create content. They pay for a Flickr account with better tools. They pay for services to create graphics, three dee art, property in virtual communities. A few sites charge for reading content, but not many. But given human history and the recent past, when most content was paid for, in newspapers, books and magazines (except for tv), it seems reasonable to assume the free ride will be over someday.

There may be a tipping point when a non-pay site is no longer competitive. When most good content has gone to pay sites and the community of interest for that content willing to pay is consuming all they can (this is what happens with books and magazines today), the other sources will be driven out in a kind of perfect competition. The free sites will be filled with garbage and what passes for content on local cable access.

The network is not the old traditional world of libraries and publishers. It will be different. Project Gutenberg. Open source projects. The collections of enthusiasts sick and tired of the crap shoveled out by the traditional content and software businesses have taken it on their own to produce quality products where the marketplace would not or could not. This is an order of magnitude different than the pre-networked world, where people could not work together, providing little bits of effort or expertise to collaboratively create a cultural artifact. This is entirely new and we don't know where its going.

As an aside, the idea of tipping or donation comes up. Frustrated with no way to fund my original website, I considered taking a modern high tech variation on the PBS approach. I considered (in the 1990s) creating a content management system where each article would have a countdown timer displayed like a reverse donation thermometer. If you didn't contribute something to the article, it would count down, when it reached zero, the page would be pulled from the site. Of course, the ability to cache networked content presents a threat to such schemes, the wayback machine can regurgitate considerable missing content and so can the Google search cache. What about caching? If the Wikipedia were to dry up funding and blow away today, would its content still remain available in a myriad of niches around the network? On people's computers, disks, servers here and there, in caches? Would it evolve another life in a peer to peer environment? Will all information become distributed over billions of cell phones and have no location at all?

Blown Highlights and Blown Highlights

There is a lot of talk about "blown highlights" in digital photography forums, especially with respect to my camera of choice, the Olympus E-510. I think it needs to be clear what we are talking about. There are two kinds of blown highlights. The first is where highlights are blown in the captured image. These are lost forever to the photographer, even if storing the raw file data from the image capture. The second kind is where highlights are blown in the image developed from the captured image.

The first kind comes from incorrect exposure or dynamic range limitations in the sensor, which the photographer cannot do anything about after the exposure is made. The second kind the photographer has more control over (other than getting the exposure right) through the JPEG engine adjustments. Blown highlights in the developed image can be the result of these adjustments, not a limitation of the camera or exposure.

To clear up any confusion in my mind over the effects of camera adjustments I developed images representing the extremes of the 510's development adjustments. The intention was to show the widest range of contrast possible using the in camera adjustments on a difficult subject.

Noise reduction and sharpness also influence highlights in the result, but their effects are minimal compared to contrast and saturation. I left the sharpness at minimum, as if I intended to bring the image into my image editor before applying sufficient sharpening for printing. Noise reduction, by blurring pixels, can affect the measurement of dynamic range, so it was turned off (the E-510 allows noise reduction to be turned off completely).

Muted



This scene was shot with the E-510 and developed in Master 2.04 using the following settings:

Picture Mode: Muted
Contrast: -2
Saturation: -2
Sharpness: -2
Noise Filter: OFF

(The Master 2 raw developer honors the E-510 camera settings, giving the same results from developing an image at the computer as in the camera).


Vivid



This scene was shot with the E-510 and developed in Master 2.04 using the following camera settings:

Picture Mode: Vivid
Contrast: +2
Saturation: +2
Sharpness: -2
Noise Filter: OFF

The difference is best seen by examining the venetian blinds in the window on the corner of the first floor nearest to the viewer. Although it is difficult to see in the photographs resized for the web, the window shows nicely how the contrast and saturation (including Picture Mode) adjustments influence the highlights of the developed image, so I have provided a detail:



In the Vivid image, the highlights on the blinds appear completely blown. In the Muted image more of the venetian blinds are visible. The lower contrast rendering shows more detail than the higher contrast one. What appears as a "blown highlight" shows detail as the contrast and saturation are reduced, proving the detail was there in the original capture. This is not an example of highlight recovery, it shows how the raw image contains detail that gets obliterated by the contrast curve.

(If you would like to read more about how contrast curves influence perception and testing of "dynamic range" read How to Magically Improve You Camera's Dynamic Range).

True Blown Highlights

In fact, this photograph does contain highlights blown at capture, the yellow sidewalk curb is blown along the front length and the far sky toward the horizon is blown a bit (when recovery of highlights is attempted, this part of the sky posterizes). The detail in these areas is completely lost, even in the captured image.

What does not count as a blown highlight is a specular reflection or element in the scene that is naturally so bright it does not contain any detail. Such reflections should be rendered in the captured image and final print as completely white without any texture. The reflection from a wave top, chrome on an automobile, and the like. In the example picture, the yellow curb is painted with a material designed to reflect light to give it greater visibility, which is partly why it exhibits blown highlights.

Local Contrast Enhancement

There is a way to increase the perceived contrast of an image without blowing the details in highlights. One is called "local contrast enhancement" and is a technique for increasing what is called "micro contrast." Micro contrast is the amount of contrast at the edges of objects. Increasing micro contrast makes an image appear sharper, clearer and increases perceived acuity, which is why photographers seek lenses with better "contrast" by which they mean the ability to provide greater contrast between edges and in details. It is the contrast of fine detail, not the overall contrast of the scene.

Basic LCE is simple. Just set apply unsharp mask with a very wide radius and a small amount. You will see the "fog" lift immediately from your picture. Local contrast can be pushed beyond small amounts without blowing highlights by using a "gray mask" (This is a mask inverted to protect highlights from changes) in LAB space.

Using LightZone, one can protect highlights from changes by adding a sharpen tool to the stack and then selecting only the highlights from the tonal range, and inverting the the mask, which automatically creates a mask excluding effects of sharpening from highlights. Another LightZone trick is softening blown highlights to make the less distracting and more acceptable to the eye, by adding a blur tool to the stack and selecting only the highlight tones, so the blurring only applies to the lightest highlights. Some adjustment of the selection range is necessary to smoothly integrate the blurring at the edges and soften highlights into gray tones. This is very similar to the technique of blurring the image slightly in "glamor shots" to give the image an ethereal look.

Thanks to dpreview.com forum members (Nik121 and gollywop) for their comments.

My attempt at defining some unfamiliar terms.

Blown Highlight. A highlight without detail or tonality, which equals or exceeds the white level of the capture. People find highlights with detail or gradient more attractive and less distracting. A "hot" highlight is one that appears blown or is distracting, but not actually blown.

Specular Reflection. A point source of light or bright reflection, such as the crest of a wave, which does not contain any detail. These highlights will always be "blown" as they should be, represented by white in the image. A point source may not be a reflection, but for all practical purposes it falls under this category in photography.

Highlight Recovery. This is where extra information the camera captured in the exposure is used to reconstruct highlights. Ordinarily, this can only be taken so far, and anywhere detail was not captured in the original raw image, the highlight will be replaced by gray.

Captured Image. This is the raw image data, which cannot be viewed as an image without development.

Developing. The raw image data is converted into a viewable form through development, which either happens at the computer or in the camera through a JPEG engine.

JPEG Engine. The hardware and software the camera uses to develop the captured image in the form of raw data into a usable image in the JPEG format.