Just recently I came across an image (can’t find it now) that was adjusted with this plug-in, and I had a “what the heck” kind of moment. I immediately fired up Aperture to re-check out this tool. To get to the plug-in, right click on an image, select Edit With… and pick Dodge and Burn.

This is an image that I recently worked on. When I look at this image, I want the boat to be the focus. I was trying to take a picture of this tender, just peacefully sitting there, but I need to draw the  viewers attention. To do this, I will dodge (lighten) and burn (darken).

The first thing I was going to do is lighten the near side of the boat. Pay attention to the sliders at the top. First select Dodge, and select a tool from Pen, Eraser, and Feather. Lets start with the Pen. Then pick a size. Don’t be afraid to pick a very large size if you are doing a larger area. It make it quicker, and helps reduce uneven lighting. The softness slider is important. All the way to the right, the brush is very soft, and will create very gradual transitions. This is usually the most realistic way to do this. All the way to the left and the edge is a very hard edge. I will often do that with the Eraser. Soft brush to lighten, and if I went past an edge, I will switch to a hard edge to back up a bit. Now select a strength. You can experiment with this. Usually I find you want a lighter touch, and to apply several brush strokes.

So the above image is showing the side of the boat getting burned in a bit. You can see with a soft brush that the light appears pretty nicely. And remember, if you go over where you wanted to paint in with light, you can use the eraser. If you catch what I am saying, while you are in the plug-in, the tool is non-destructive. You can apply and erase light all you want. Sweet. What if you are unsure where you applied the light. Look to the far right drop down. Select “Show Dodge as Overlay”.

You can see that the window goes grey, and the parts of the image that have light applied show up in red. This can be really helpful, especially when you are using the eraser.

Now, lightening isn’t the only way to draw a viewers attention. You can also darken everything else, or just parts to direct attention. For this image, I darkened the dock and the top of the sky. Remember that thing about non-destructive editing when dodging, well you can switch back and forth from any of the the different effects you want to apply. There is more than Dodge and Burn to this tool. You can also do saturation, sharpening, contrast, and others. Experiment with the tool to see what works. I find that selective sharpening is also a great use of the tool.

Because this tool creates a new image, I find it  best to do early on, even first before doing anything else. Then the normal tools will make more sense when you get back to the normal editing environment. Your image will have a little dot within a circle to indicate a image copy was made. This happens with all plug-ins and when sending the image to Photoshop.

Here is the final image after applying some dodging to the boat, burning to the dock and upper sky, and sharpening to the boat edges. In this case the changes are fairly subtle, but that is what I thought was appropriate.

So I have changed my mind. I find this to be a very useful tool now. I still think that it is unfortunate that a new raster image has to be created every time you use this tool, so I would advise trying to avoid going in and out of this tool. Try to get it all corrected and saved once.

I have been working on a gallery with Zen Photo with my Cyberward theme. Still trying to decide what I want to do with it, but I think that I will move to migrate my family photos over to Zen Photo instead of Gallery.

Zen Photo just seems better in my opinion. Gallery (actually Gallery2) seems slow and burdened. Too many things activated and going on by default.¬† Zen Photo has fewer plugins, but that’s ok by me. It seems much easier to hack on too. I guess now I just need to time to do this.

Gavin today called me a “very nice man.”¬† Also that I¬†was a¬†”geeky Canadian”. We Canadian programmers take that to be the highest compliment. ¬†I was quite tickled. It is great when you get to create something that someone really wanted, and doubly when they go out of their way to say thank you.

I am glad that it is what he was looking for. I hope to make some improvements and options for display in the future, but will keep the “title” display¬†that works now.¬†

If you give it a try and have issues or suggestions. Leave a comment on the CwExif plugin page.

This is just the first version. There is much more that I want to do with this plugin, but you have to start somewhere.

Get it here.

The first iteration of the plugin will simple replace the title of the image (displayed on hover) with the some meta data captured by WordPress. This will be things like f-stop and shutter speed. Eventually I would like more data, but I will have to go outside of WordPress to get it. Second, I will need to beef up the display options. Using the title is not what I wanted. I would like to have a hover give a proper note, or a click with a lightbox effect. I will get to those later.

So, the first release of this plugin will be soon. I have it working within the media library, but when you are adding an image, the admin panel uses a pop-up with a different form. I just need to get it working either way.

Here is the exif data when you put this tag in your post: [lameda_exif id=556]

The thing with this, is you still have to go into the post html and find out what the wordpress id of the image is. Still a bit of a pain. I like that it is pulling this from wordpress. Looks like wordpress stores this in the post_metadata table in an entry about the image. Not all data is saved, just some of the more basic ones like those shown. We just need a more automated, and visually appealing way to show it.

[exzo url="" title=""]dsc_0021[/exzo]

That will get you this image on my site:

Most of the styling and which exif data that shows up is all customizeable. But I have a couple of issues. First, there seems to be an issue in the plugin where is doesn’t reference the zoom.css file. I had to modify exzo.php to point to it correctly. Second, the included lightbox effect isn’t so hot. The biggest issue is that the image pops up full size. Other versions I have seen try to scale the image for the viewport.

It does look like you could opt to just show the exif data though, like this :

[exif="dsc_0021.jpg"]

What would be really neat is if instead of the formatting of the picture, and the need to use this tag, is if via javascript, it could just attach itself to the image and display on a hover, or a click or something. Hmmm… that would be interesting…

First, having someone document a shoot is pretty cool, I think. The fact that this one wasn’t going well just makes it even better. Shows that we all have to keep our heads on straight, and can still pull something out of the ashes.

Second, Scott shows us an effect plugin which he decides not to recommend. This is great. I like to see what people are using and how it is used. I don’t buy plugins (yet). They just seem soooooo expensive, and that is part of the reason that Scott does not recommend it.

Third, the comments are crazy entertaining. The plugin, by Lucis Art is what is driving all the comments. It is a mostly one trick pony that creates a rather striking effect. Scott posted about a older version of this a while back, and how to create it without a plugin. The comments concentrate on two things. One, they don’t like the Dave Hill look (I think he has some great photo’s), and those that think that the effect is overused. First, Dave doesn’t use the plugin. He invented this “look”. He certainly has the right to do to his photo’s what he likes. Why wouldn’t anyone else? I am amazed at the self richousness of photographers. Raw vs jpeg, crop vs no crop, in camera light balance vs post, “natural” vs post. The list is endless. I wish people would just take pictures. If you don’t enjoy someones work, just move on. I haven’t seen others using this effect, but then I don’t actively look for them. I did notice a couple of flickr groups, but I hadn’t seen them before today. I have yet to see in in print. Hardly overused. But who cares anyway.

One interresting thing is that a commenter talked about a plugin I had not heard of before from Topaz Labs . They have a plugin that comes close to this for a lot less money. I don’t know how close, because I haven’t tried it yet, but it does have a free trial. They also have other plugins for noise, sharpening, and others. I would love to know how good the noise one is. I could use a good noise filter.

While playing with this plugin I discovered a bug. I couldn’t update/save the attributes for a file. I was trying to assign a custom icon, and the display name, but nothing would stick. Hunting this down I found out why php debugging, especially ajax calls really sucks. Anyway, I finally discovered what the issue was; a variable that was not initialized. It must be the particular combination of WordPress (2.7), PHP(4.5), and MySql(5.0) that I was playing with, because I can’t belive that this doesn’t work for everyone that uses this plugin.

Turns out that the developer has a tracker, so I created a bug with my solution. I am going to be moving to this from the Download Manager plugin I was using.

It got me thinking though about how I might integrate it with WordPress. After seeing the tantan Flickr plugin, and how well it works, I figured that there must be a plugin for zenphoto. Well, no. Not really. There are a couple that will let you show pictures in the sidebar. And Trung’s presszen looked promising, but it didn’t seem to work. I started taking a look at the code for the tantan Flicker plugin, and saw how he was able to take control of a URI to insert his own code in with the current wordpress theme. I stripped out the relevant stuff, and got it to work. This is the code.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33

function parse_query(&$query) {
	$query->is_404 = false;
	$query->did_permalink = false;
}
function request($query_vars) {
    $query_vars['error'] = false;
    return $query_vars;
}
 
function cww_template() {
	get_header();
	echo '
<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
<h2>Zen Integration</h2>
</div>
';
	get_footer();
	exit;
}
 
define("CWW_ZEN_BASEURL", "/blog/test");
if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], CWW_ZEN_BASEURL) === 0) {
    status_header(200);
    remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
    add_filter('request', 'request');
    add_action('parse_query', 'parse_query');
    add_action('parse_request', 'parse_query');
    add_action('template_redirect', 'cww_template');
} elseif (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].'/', CWW_ZEN_BASEURL) === 0) {
    header('location: http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].'/');
    exit;
}
?>

I think that I may take a go at pulling in the zenphoto albums in a plugin, and see how it goes. I like how you create plugins in WordPress, and it is kind of fun poking around. It was frustrating for the longest time when I was trying to get it going, and I was getting the body of the blog showing up at the bottom. I finally realized that I needed to ‘exit’ the script to prevent the loop from happening. You would think you could override a WordPress function to prevent that instead.