Archives for October 2019

Celebrating 140,000 Wonderful ShutterCount Customers

October 28, 2019 by

I’m proud to announce that ShutterCount just passed the 140,000 customer mark. People in more than 120 countries rely on this app to measure the number of shutter actuations on Canon, Nikon and Pentax cameras. Thank you for helping to make ShutterCount the gold standard!

Launched almost exactly six years ago in October 2013, ShutterCount was the first shutter count reader for Macs. It supported Canon cameras only at that time. But we didn’t sit on our laurels, and in April 2016 launched the first (and to my knowledge the still only) shutter count reader for iPhone and iPad: ShutterCount Mobile. Canon has changed the way its cameras work, and we were the first on the world to support this new way in ShutterCount 3, available since June 2017. This release also brought Nikon and Pentax support, and the ability – again as a first – to count and graphically display live view actuations separately. Mirrorless cameras from Canon introduced a new counting mechanism, and ShutterCount was the first app to include support in October 2018.

With an app having such a widespread user base, it is inevitable that some people will have problems. During the last six years we had helped several hundreds people. From pre-purchase questions to actual problem solving. They helped to shape the various resources we offer today to get the most out of the app: the Getting Started Guide, my step-by-step pairing guide, as well as a handful of instruction videos. Thank you!

Unfortunately there are a few people who doesn’t allow us to help: doesn’t read/watch the instructions, and doesn’t contact us for help. And usually end up leaving a bad review based on their beliefs how the app should work. It’s really hard to shepherd them back to the correct way, but we take it as a challenge and continuously improve both in app-messages and our guides.

Again, thank you all for this wonderful journey!

Filed Under: My Apps, Photo Software Tagged With: , , , , ,

iPhone 11 UWA Camera : Disturbing Discoveries

October 18, 2019 by

After just spending a day’s worth with the iPhone 11 Pro ultra wide angle camera, I’ve discovered a few things everyone should be aware of. I’m rather tired of Apple’s half-assed approach to everything photography related. This is not a whining of a 20-something reviewer. This is from someone who wasted months of his life to transform Apple’s incomplete, amateurish APIs to something suitable for professional photo apps, and wrote exposure calculation, image encoding/decoding/display and color space transformation code along the way.

To anyone reading this at Apple: I’m open to provide you with consultancy to help get your act together and make a truly pro-level camera device / API.

No RAW

Take a look on any JPG file from the ultra wide camera. You’ll see heavy smearing and exaggerated chromatic aberration as you approach the corners. These are telltale signs of distortion correction going on (I have quite a lot of experience in this since I wrote the world’s first wide angle converter real-time distortion correction code on iOS for the Mark II Artist’s Viewfinder six years ago).

Which means that the laws of physics still apply, and supports my suspicion that the ultra wide angle camera in fact has a pretty awful tiny lens, with huge amount of distortion. And Apple doesn’t want to advertise this, so rather turned RAW capture completely off for this camera. Why? Leica, Nikon, Panasonic all do software distortion correction for expensive lenses, and the photographer at least have the freedom to correct it or leave the distortion in place for artistic purposes. (That I would never buy a 5 grand lens that require distortion correction is a tale for another day.)

The professional approach would be to provide RAW capture, and include distortion correction data inside the DNG so that RAW converters could pick it up (with the WarpRectilinear opcode).

2-3 Stop Vignetting

iPhone 11 Pro Max ultra wide camera vignetting

Now seriously. When one does distortion correction, why vignetting correction isn’t in place is beyond me. The above shot is just a wall shot under daylight, and not something suitable for exact measurements. I might do it later on, but currently this is enough to illustrate how much vignetting the image suffers from.

Again, the professional approach would be to correct this in JPG images and live video stream (or even better, provide an API to be able to control the correction), and include the necessary correction data inside the DNG files (FixVignetteRadial opcode).

No Focusing

This camera has a fixed focus lens. Read: no focusing of any kind. With such an ultra wide lens, the lack of focusing ability is mostly disguised by huge depth of field. But don’t expect to use it for ultra wide closeups.

Conclusion

Anyone touting this camera as a professional grade, DSLR (or even medium format) contender must live in a reality distortion field, powered by a huge marketing budget. Over-processed Apple JPGs suck. They always sucked. Not having proper RAW capture on the ultra wide camera is a huge drawback of the iPhone 11 series, hindering their usability for professional image capture.

  ☕ ☕ ☕

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Filed Under: Photo Equipment, Photo Technique Tagged With: , , , ,

Viewfinder iPhone 11 Support Coming

October 18, 2019 by

The release of the iPhone 11 series marks the end of an era for me. Six years ago we’ve released the Mark II Artist’s Viewfinder, a new incarnation of our successful Viewfinder Pro app. The Mark II brought first class wide angle conversion lens support, complete with real-time distortion correction. A world’s first tech at that time, and still unmatched.

This opened up a whole new world for landscape and architecture photographers, allowing them to simulate ultra wide shots and stitched panoramas.

But the converter lenses were bulky, expensive, and sourcing them early was a huge problem. We have a big box of lenses for every imaginable phone that are nothing but worthless junk now. So I don’t feel sorry that this is history and that some converter lens manufacturers will go out of business. With the exception of ALPA, they were all a pain to deal with.

We’ve received our 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max two days ago (more than a month after placing the order – sadly Apple doesn’t provide an equal playing field for developers in some European countries). And now I’m happy to report that ultra wide angle camera support is almost complete. Yes, I wrote most of the code in advance.

A screen shot showing the ultra wide camera in action

During the last month we had been asked frequently whether the new ultra wide camera will be able to simulate a Rodenstock HR Digaron-S 23mm f/5.6 on a 40×56 mm sensor, such as the Phase One IQ4 150. Although precise bench measurements still have to be done, based on iOS provided angle of view information the answer is a resounding yes. Just take a look at the screen shot above. For 35mm cameras, this is roughly 15mm equivalent. Sides of a 14mm are slightly clipped, so the 13mm in Apple’s materials seems to be marketing exaggeration. But we’ll see after the measurements.

The ultra wide camera is treated as a permanently present wide converter. That is, activating Wide Mode will switch to the ultra wide camera. There’s nothing else to configure. And there are no workflow changes. The updated app will also provide a separate Frame Size Adjustment slider for the ultra wide camera.

We still have about a week’s worth of work ahead, and thus I expect the updated version to be available by the end of October. The update will be free for existing Mark II users.

Filed Under: My Apps, Photo Software Tagged With: , , , ,

90D Support in ShutterCount and Kuuvik Capture

October 15, 2019 by

ShutterCount 4.2 and Kuuvik Capture 4.4 with Canon EOS 90D support are now available on the App Store.

ShutterCount also adds support for the Nikon Z50.

In these releases we had improved a few error messages. First and foremost, in case of any interference on a Mac, we remind you to quit Dropbox. Yes, they didn’t fix this bug despite we had reported it months ago, leaving no other choice for us but to explicitly point in their direction. Dropbox was the culprit in 100% of the connectivity-related support cases we resolved during the last 6 months or so.

We had also revised the Wi-Fi pairing instructions in ShutterCount’s Getting Started Guide, and updated the Wrong Connection Mode message’s description to mention the key points. I’m amazed that some people think this message is a joke and continue to bark up the wrong tree – in one occasion we had received a problem report showing that this message was displayed no less than 50 times. I can’t stress it enough: you must follow the instructions.

Filed Under: My Apps, Photo Software Tagged With: , , , , ,
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