Archives for November 2020

iPhone 12 Pro Max Support Added to Artist’s Viewfinder and Technical Camera

November 29, 2020 by

Updates to fully support iPhone 12 Pro Max cameras in Mark II Artist’s Viewfinder and Technical Camera are now available on the App Store. This includes both lab-measured angle of views as well as Wide Mode support for the ultra wide camera.

But since the telephoto camera is longer than all other iPhone telephoto cameras were (2.5x vs 2x), the user interface of both apps had to be adapted to the new situation.

Changes in Artist’s Viewfinder to accommodate the 2.5x camera of the 12 Pro Max

The changes are consistent across both apps. First, the 2x icon on the Quick Control Screen in Artists Viewfinder and on Camera Options in Technical Camera changes to 2.5 in case your device sports the longer telephoto camera.

Second, the Smart Function Key formerly known as Switch Wide/Tele Cameras is now named Toggle Telephoto Camera, and the associated key label has been changed from 2x to T to be angle of view neutral. Well, the name change was long overdue since the old one was rather ambiguous on triple camera devices…

The Viewfinder Handbook has also been updated to reflect these changes.

And that’s it for now. Mark II Artist’s Viewfinder 6.8 and Technical Camera 1.9 are free updates for existing users.

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

Kuuvik Capture 5.4 Released

November 26, 2020 by

The latest update to my Canon EOS tethering app, Kuuvik Capture, is now available for both Mac and iPad.

With this release, we’re starting to roll out a new focus bracketing engine. Building on new features of the DIGIC 8 and DIGIC X processors, Kuuvik Capture can now execute focus brackets with the mirror locked up during the entire bracket (on DSLR cameras), saving time and reducing mirror wear. The new engine is initially available for the EOS-1D X Mark III and 250D/Rebel SL3/Kiss X10/200D Mark II. Of course we’re planning to bring it to other cameras as well in the future.

The new engine also drives focus bracketing for the EOS R5, much faster than the old one did. Electronic shutter is supported for focus brackets with both the 1D X Mark III and the R5, resulting in minimal shutter and mirror wear, and rather quick operation.

Firmware for DIGIC X-based cameras unfortunately still full of bugs hindering proper tethering operation. A newly discovered one is that once depth of field preview is engaged, you won’t be able to move around the point of operation (that is, can’t move around in live view when zoomed in, or can’t jump to a marker). This is a rather serious oversight from Canon.

We’re mitigating this issue by automatically turning off DoF preview when it would break the operation you are going to perform. For example, one typically uses DoF preview with the jump to marker feature to be able to assess depth of field with the current focus placement. We faced a choice here, either a) jumping to a marker would silently fail when DoF preview is on; or b) turn off DoF preview and do what you asked for. B is a clearly better solution here, and we consistently do the same in case of all other operations where the bug would cause a problem.

On the 1D X III this bug also causes issues with multi-point live view, so we completely disable DoF preview during multi-point live view.

The update is free for existing Kuuvik Capture 5 users. We also offer an upgrade from 2.x-4.x to version 5.

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

Big Sur Display ICC Profile Handling Bug

November 14, 2020 by

Before updating our production machines I always test a new macOS release (even point releases) on a dedicated test MacBook. Software-wise this notebook is a close match to productions ones.

After the upgrade to Big Sur 11.0.1 finished, I was greeted with this (don’t read the image’s title if you don’t like spoilers):

Spoiler: macOS Big Sur fails to properly use table-based v4 ICC profiles…

It was suspicious even during the upgrade that something wrong is going on: there was no difference between checked and unchecked states of the presented check boxes.

Now, I have installed Big Sur betas and even the final release on the very same MacBook on an external disk countless times, with no such issue.

It turned out pretty quickly that the cause is the custom ICC display profile. I do profile each display on production machines, as we’re doing color-critical work on them. And I also think that all monitors are color-important, so they have to be properly calibrated and profiled.

Interestingly, some older profiles exhibited this issue, others showed the regular Catalina “blue cursor” issue, while a few were OK. After an afternoon’s worth of debugging and work, here’s what I found.

  • With matrix-based profiles (v2 or v4) Big Sur fails to color-manage the cursor (mouse pointer, etc), which looks odd blue (D50 and 5300K are our standard color temperatures, so a 7000-8000K cursor stands out like a sore thumb). This is the exact same bug that plagued Catalina.
  • Big Sur is unable to handle v4 LUT-based profiles properly. The dock, the background, and most window manager stuff is totally washed out, as you can see on the screen grab. Interestingly, content in apps (like Safari) is OK, so I guess that this is just a Dock/window manager bug.
  • v2 LUT-based profiles work as expected! And this is the solution for now: use v2 profiles… In i1Profiler LUT-based profiles are called table-based.

Speaking of i1Profiler, I’m still using an oldish i1Pro v1 spectrophotometer, and the latest version of i1Profiler that supports this instrument is 3.1.1. I have found no issues with this version for display profiling on Big Sur (just don’t install the HASP drivers).

And the important takeaway: re-profile your monitor to create a v2 profile before upgrading, otherwise you won’t see your checkbox choices during the upgrade!

More to come on solving other issues to make Big Sur livable…

Filed Under: Operating Systems Tagged With: , , ,

Kuuvik Capture 5.3 : JPG Only Download Option

November 12, 2020 by

The latest update to my Kuuvik Capture tethering app is now available for both the Mac and iPad.

This is the first Canon remote control solution that offers native Apple Silicon support, and is also optimized for macOS Big Sur.

Regarding new functionality, we’ve added an option to allow downloading just the JPG from a RAW+JPG pair. This ensures a much faster image display in cases where the download is slow – for example when using the camera’s built-in Wi-Fi transmitter.

Download options when shooting RAW+JPG

Of course the camera will store both the RAW and the JPG to the memory card, so you can process RAW files later.

With the release of iPadOS 14.2, Apple fixed the USB tethering bug that rear up its ugly head with iPadOS 14.0. So this very convenient and fast connection option is back in business. But they also took care of another bug report of mine, which makes a pretty neat little feature possible.

iPadOS 13 immediately suspended all USB camera communication when you put the app into the background, for example to write a note, or check a message. With iPadOS 14.2 and Kuuvik Capture 5.3, the connection will stay alive for 30 seconds. Your sequence, or download will continue to run in the background. After 15 seconds you’ll get a notification, that the communication will be suspended soon, but you have plenty of time to return to the app – the easiest way being to tap the notification. This is the same behavior you get when using Wi-Fi/Ethernet connections.

The update is free for existing users. New users can buy the app in the respective App Store. Don’t forget that the Mac and iPad versions are sold together – buy any of them and you’ll get the other for free!

Enjoy!

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