Kuuvik Capture 2.2 Released with Wi-Fi Support

February 25, 2016 by

The latest update to my Kuuvik Capture camera remote control app went online earlier today. Although it looks like a small update on the surface, there’s a huge change under the hood. This version contains the 3rd generation of my digital camera library – with full Wi-Fi and Ethernet connection support.

You may remember that we had dropped the network camera option during the beta, because Apple’s PTP-IP (the protocol used to talk to the camera over Wi-Fi and Ethernet) implementation turned out to be unreliable under heavy load. Not to mention the side effect that Image Capture started every time we connected a camera.

So I took the challenge and developed a completely new PTP-IP transport component, debuting in Kuuvik Capture 2.2. If you think that it’ll appear in other apps in the future, then you’re on the right track… But let’s concentrate on Kuuvik Capture now.

Connecting your camera via Wi-Fi (or Ethernet)

First of all, you’ll need either a Wi-Fi equipped camera (6D, 70D), a built-in Ethernet socket (1D X, 1D C) or a separate Wireless File Transmitter (5D Mark III, 5DS, 5DS R, 7D Mark II, 1D X, 1D C) for this to work. Only Canon’s transmitters are supported, third party Wi-Fi remote control boxes will not work. Please check the tech specs for the full list of compatible equipment.

Canon cameras provide connectivity in several ways. The most complete is the EOS Utility connection mode. For this mode a camera needs to be paired to a given app on a given computer. Using two apps on the same computer? You need to pair the camera to them separately, and only one can be active at a time.

The computer side of this pairing process is dramatically simplified in Kuuvik Capture 2 compared to both version 1 and Canon’s EOS Utility.

Kuuvik Capture now needs to be “pairing mode” to accept a pairing request coming from the camera. This mode is accessible through a new menu item (or by pressing F2).

networkPairing

Pairing can be initiated from the menu.

Kuuvik Capture displays the pairing window (shown below) while in pairing mode. This window also shows your computer’s name, which will appear on the camera’s LCD during the last pairing step, so you can double-check that you are pairing to the computer you were intended to.

networkPairingWindow

The pairing window. Kuuvik Capture is ready to accept pairing request only when this window is displayed.

And that’s all you need to do on the Mac.

Once in discoverable state, you can start the configuration process on your camera. The process consists of three large steps:

  1. Choose a connection mode.
  2. Configure your network.
  3. Do the actual pairing.

They are documented in your camera’s or wireless transmitter’s user manual, but there are a few important points to consider.

First, please don’t start any Canon app that may be mentioned in the manual. You are now pairing to Kuuvik Capture, and not to Canon’s apps.

For step 1, you must use the Connection Wizard on cameras where it’s available (e.g. 5-series, 7-series with the external brick), otherwise you won’t be able to complete step 3. On the 6D and 70D choose the Remote Control (EOS Utility) mode. On other cameras choose EOS Utility mode in the Connection Wizard.

In step 2, the camera will ask for network specific parameters (whether it’s wired or wireless, plus various options and a password specific to your network). This is the most complicated part of the entire process, but Wi-Fi setup is such a thing… I’d recommend to study the camera/transmitter manual beforehand.

Out in the field with no network to connect to? My previous post shows you how to create a fast and secure Wi-Fi network on your Mac!

The last step is the actual pairing. As the LCD indicates, this is your last chance to put Kuuvik Capture into pairing mode. It may take up to 1.5 minutes for the camera and your Mac to find each other.

camerapairing1

This is how the camera’s LCD will look like as soon as they found each other:

camerapairing2

Pairing should be done once (unless in the meantime you paired your camera to another app, another computer, or used another network). To deal with these different scenarios, the very last screen in the process (after clicking that OK button) lets you save up to 5 (3 for 6D/70D) setups into your camera’s memory. But if nothing has changed, Kuuvik Capture will find your camera automatically the next time you turn it on and connect to the network, so the pairing is not necessary every time you want to use a Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection.

When pairing has successfully completed, the camera’s LCD will turn black, the pairing window will disappear, and the camera’s name will show up in Kuuvik Capture’s camera selector.

Notes on Wi-Fi speed

It seems that Canon implements one of the lowest speed classes for each of their Wi-Fi implementations. This is 150mbps for the external 802.11n bricks (using only one spatial stream), and a shockingly low 60mbps for the 6D and 70D (despite they advertise it as 150). So don’t expect miracles and be prepared for 12-15 second downloads on these slower cameras. On the other hand, the external bricks are fast enough to be perfectly usable when the network signal is good.

Well, speaking of bad, flaky networks. While I absolutely hate to add new configuration options (one more thing for you to deal with), this time it was a must.

Wi-Fi networks can become unbeliveably slow (think longer distances and/or interference), causing the camera to disappear from Kuuvik Capture. A longer network timeout (a longer time allowance for intermittent network errors to clear) may solve this, but at the expense of delaying the detection of actual issues (such as when the battery dies). So the Preferences window now has an option to control this.

ntoPreference

The default is 10 seconds, which we found to be suitable for most Wi-Fi networks. You can go as low as 5 seconds or as high as 30 seconds. My personal preference is to go with the lowest number, and raise it in the presence of connectivity issues.

Other new features

There are two of them. Customers have asked for more, longer time options for mirror lock-up auto-release. So we’ve added 8s, 10s and 15s to the palette. Also the new white priority white balance mode introduced with the 5DS/R is now available on the white balance control.

Availability

The update is free for existing Kuuvik Capture 2 customers. New users can download Kuuvik Capture 2 from the Mac App Store.

For more information about the app, please visit it’s microsite, or check out my posts.

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

Creating a Wi-Fi Access Point on OS X

February 14, 2016 by

With Kuuvik Capture 2.2 around the corner, I’m going to post a few short tutorials on wireless “tethering” setups. Yes, the wireless connection option will make a return in version 2.2!

So let’s start with a solution to one of the most aching issues.

Imagine the following situation: you are out in the field, photographing an old castle. You want to place the camera on a crane to photograph from a high vantage point. The crane is higher than your longest USB cable can reach, so wireless connection would be the most appropriate solution.

First obstacle: all Canon Wireless File Transmitters (both built-in ones and external bricks) require an existing network to connect to in EOS Utility mode. Yes, it’s utterly stupid, since in other modes they can operate as an access point and create their own network. But other modes simply suck in terms of remote control features.

Back to our example: there’s no phone coverage (for the Personal Hotspot trick), there are no nearby networks of any kind to connect to. You could create an ad-hoc wireless network on your Mac, but setup is complicated and error prone (needs manual TCP/IP configuration on both the computer an on the camera), and in the last few versions of OS X there’s no way to create a secure Wi-Fi network (another utter stupidity). The lack of security is a total showstopper, so this isn’t the appropriate way to make the connection work.

There’s a neat trick, however. OS X has a built-in Internet Sharing feature that practically creates a Wi-Fi access point to share an existing network connection. The next obstacle is that you need the network you want to share to be in the “connected” state (think cable plugged in both to the computer and into a router). Unfortunately the built-in loopback interface (which is always connected and provides access to the local computer only) is not accessible from the Network preference pane in System Preferences (one more stupidity).

The key to the trick is to make the loopback interface appear in the Network pane. Actually, it’s pretty straightforward: launch the Terminal app and copy & paste the following two commands (working on both Yosemite and El Capitan):

sudo networksetup -createnetworkservice Loopback lo0
sudo networksetup -setmanual Loopback 172.20.42.42 255.255.255.255

Enter your password to allow these modifications if OS X asks for it.

Now your Network preference pane should list the brand new Loopback service:

network-loopback

It’s still listed as “not connected”, but don’t worry, that’s just a bug.

Side note: if you use multiple “network locations”, you need to repeat the above commands for each location. If you just use the Automatic location, then you can move to the next step.

Go to the Sharing preference pane, and on the list of services click Internet Sharing. If the service is already on, turn it off. Choose the Loopback service as the one you want to share your connection from. And share to computers using Wi-Fi.

sharing-1

You can set up the shared Wi-Fi network (the network we’ll connect the camera to) by clicking the Wi-Fi Options button. Here is the Wi-Fi Options screen:

sharing-2

The network name is your computer’s name by default, but I’d recommend to enter a simple alphanumeric name (containing no special characters), as Canon cameras have issues with displaying characters outside of the simple letters and numbers range.

All other options are the usual Wi-Fi setup options. A few notes though. Channels 1-11 use the 2.4 GHz band, while 36-48 use the 5 GHz band. Transmitters in the 70D and 6D only operate on the 2.4 GHz band, while the external WFT-E7 brick operates on both. The 5 GHz band is faster and generally has less interference from other networks and appliances operating in the crowded 2.4 GHz band. For security, choose WPA2 Personal (the other option is None, which is unacceptable).

Once the Wi-Fi options are entered, you can start the sharing service. To do it, click the check box in front of its name in the list. OS X may ask to turn on your Wi-Fi radio if it was off, and will ask your confirmation to start the sharing service. After the service has been successfully started you’ll see a screen similar to the one below:

sharing-3

IMPORTANT: due to an OS X bug, your selection in the share from list may change to another (random) network service. So you must check whether it still shows the Loopback service after each start!

The Wi-Fi icon on the menu bar will change to the sharing icon once the sharing service is ready to accept connections.

sharing-on

And that’s it! Your personal access point is now ready. The steps to configure your camera will be discusses in an upcoming post.

  ☕ ☕ ☕

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

Kuuvik Capture 2.1 Released

September 21, 2015 by

Version 2.1 of Kuuvik Capture is now available on the Mac App Store. This update brings a handful of new features and a few fixes. Let’s start with the new features.

kc21prefsFirst, a new preference is added to control whether the camera’s LCD is turned on when you start live view from within Kuuvik Capture.

If you turn this preference off, the camera’s LCD will remain turned off to conserve battery. But you can turn the LCD on any time with the live view button on the camera.

When you start live view directly on the camera, it’s LCD will turn on regardless of this preference (chances are that you engaged live view on the camera because you want to look at the LCD).

Upon user request, the number of focus bracketing steps had been increased from 30 to 100. And I’ve added hot keys to the Purge Unrated (Cmd-P) and Purge Unrated and Decrease Rating (Shift-Cmd-P) culling commands.

The bug fixes are the following:

  • Live view is now automatically stopped when changing lenses or when the camera is disconnected.
  • Live view navigator zoom labels now display “6x” and “16x” for the EOS 5DS and 5DS R. The navigator frame’s size is also corrected to reflect these zoom levels.
  • ISO 16000 now can be set from Kuuvik Capture on the EOS 7D Mark II, even if using full stop ISOs is set on the camera. This is in line with the camera’s behavior.

Version 2.1 is a free update for existing Kuuvik Capture 2 owners.

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Photographing Grebes with the 5DS R

September 20, 2015 by

The 5DS R became my main camera the instant I got my hands on it. Honestly, I thought that it will somehow augment either the 7D Mark II or the 5D Mark III as a high-res landscape camera, while one of those will remain my wildlife camera. I was wrong.

The 5DS R has so many seductive qualities that I tend to forget all its shortcomings and difficulties (more on those later).

Colors are bold and thanks to the anti-aliasing cancellation filter it can produce lovely crisp images. Such as the following one.

aaa

A moment before diving

It was taken in early morning light with the Canon 500/4 IS II lens and the 1.4x III teleconverter. It’s a moderate crop of about 26 megapixels – still enough for a 40×60 cm print. Yes, you can crop the hell out of these files, and still retain a huge amount of details due to the lack of AA filtering.

Some of my former grebe images are 6-8 megapixels from the 1D Mark II… So its a huge increase in usage flexibility.

Of course those huge files have a few consequences you have to live with. First, the 5DS R feels like a medium format camera. From the sound of the mirror to the time it needs to display an image on the LCD. It feels like you travel a decade back in time… Press the play button and wait… Also I haven’t experienced buffer full issues since the 1D Mark II – but run into that quite a lot even using 1066x Lexar CF cards.

You also need more time to cull a shoot. Fortunately I have an app for that: with Kuuvik Capture 2 I can sift the daily crop of 1500-2000 images pretty quickly. An old friend of mine was sitting besides me last morning and was surprised how fast the app deals with 50 MP files (and this was on a 1.4GHz 11″ MacBook Air I use as a field computer).

The next one is cropped from the sides for the rectangular composition. Same lens and converter combo. I stop down to f/6.3 with this combination, which is a bit below the f/6.7 diffraction limit of the camera. So unlike landscapes, one doesn’t have to deal with the depth of field versus diffraction issues here.

bbb

Curious visitor

Surprisingly, I found ISO 800 images a bit sharper than ISO 400 ones, so all of these were made on 800. I’ll have to investigate this further before I can draw serious conclusions. But until then, ISO 800 seems to be perfectly usable with no need for extra noise reduction.

The images in this post are the tranquil ones (the action shots are saved for another post). The 5 fps maximum speed turned out to be usable with a little anticipation of what’s going to happen (which also helps your photographs and in the understanding of the behavior of the species you are photographing). But for fast paced action I still reach for the 7D Mark II.

I tend to like to include a bit of the bird’s habitat in my images (maybe I should call them birdscapes), for which the full frame sensor is a real boon. And I can crop the surroundings away if a tight composition is what I’m after.

ccc

Breakfast for the nestlings

AF is superb. The best I’ve ever found on a Canon camera (excluding the 1D X, because of it’s faster focus driving speed). The only thing I miss is the AF mode selection lever of the 7D Mark II. I find myself reaching for the lever and cursing who’s responsible for this omission quite often.

A hot topic is the dynamic range of current Canon sensors. Well, while sometimes I would need more (maybe a handful of times during the last 12 years), what the 5DS R offers usually pretty much enough. Especially that I print my images where I have just 6 or 7 stops, and usually expose my images properly with no need to recover from the shadows. Also I like to utilize clipped highlights and shadows as artistic tools… So I’m not complaining on this front.

ddd

Good night!

As you may already think, I really like the 5DS R. It’s not the absolute fastest and the most suitable camera for bird photography, but those limitations are igniting my creativity and are not in the way of image making. It’s an exceptional tool for making the kind of photographs I have in mind.

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

Kuuvik Capture 2 Available on the Mac App Store

August 6, 2015 by

kc2icon@2xI’m proud to announce that Kuuvik Capture 2 is now available on the Mac App Store!

I’ve added a few features since the Beta 2 (see my previous post about the Beta 2 feature list):

  • Open in Application command to directly open the CR2 files in your favorite RAW converter.
  • Ratings in the CR2 files (set in the camera) are now honored.
  • Added clipping display control menu items to the image area’s context menu.
  • Added ability to work with Canon EOS 5DS and 5DS R images on computers that lack the GPU resources needed to display these images. Images are now downsized to 24 megapixels for display in this case (RAW files remain in their full resolution).
  • Added support for Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, EOS 750D / Rebel T6i / Kiss X8i, EOS 760D / Rebel T6s / 8000D and EOS 1200D / Rebel T5 / Kiss X70 cameras.

You can download Kuuvik Capture 2 from the Mac App Store for a discounted price until the end of August. This discount serves as an upgrade price for existing users as well as an introductory price.

For the complete list of compatible cameras and computers please visit the tech specs page.

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Kuuvik Capture 2 Beta 2 Released

July 19, 2015 by

We’ve come a long way since the Beta 1, with some significant departures from how Kuuvik Capture worked in the past. I bet you’ll spot the single most important new feature on the screen shot below.

kc2b2-with-ib

Graphical Image Browser

Session management has been completely rewritten for this beta. It became way simpler, as sessions are now just simple folders. And Kuuvik Capture now lets you quickly browse the contents of the session folder with the help of the Image Browser. You can rate the images with 1 to 5 stars, color label them, and sort according to your preference. Industry-standard XMP metadata files provide workflow integration with XMP-aware RAW converter apps, such as Adobe Lightroom and Capture One. (Well, in theory it should work with Capture One, but my fellow colleagues at Phase One screwed up their XMP parser and 99% of the time can’t load a well-formed XMP. Either ours or Lightroom’s. Even worse, if you enable Full Sync in Capture One, it would corrupt the XMP file… So Capture One is declared incompatible until they fix this.)

As a side effect, Kuuvik Capture can now be used to quickly cull a large number of images. Actually, this was one of the motivations to create the Image Browser. I want Kuuvik Capture to fully and seamlessly support my workflow.

I usually have a mix of images taken with Kuuvik Capture and my cameras alone, so I needed the ability to work on them together. When I’m birding, it’s now uncommon that I return with 2000 images from a single afternoon shoot – 90% of which goes to the trash. But culling with full-featured RAW converters was slow and painful. Now I can sweep through those 2000 images in roughly 1.5 hours – with all the help of the usual Kuuvik Capture tools like sharpening and focus peaking!

Positive Selection Culling

Contrary to the usual “throw out the bad ones one-by-one”, Kuuvik Capture sports a “mark the best & ditch the rest” concept of image culling. During the years, I found the negative approach (throwing out the bad ones) impact my creative process in a very bad way: I’ve been concentrating on the bad images, instead of the standouts. It was a kind of mental torture for me (not surprisingly, I had a huge pile of un-culled or partly culled shoots).

With Kuuvik Capture, I just give stars to the best images, to those that I really like (and those whose technical properties are also good). Then ask the app to trash the others. You also have the option to decrease star rating of remaining images (and start the process all over again). It’s simple, intuitive, and fosters positive thinking about the good images.

Multi-Touch Gestures

This beta also introduces a host of multi-touch gestures. Besides the usual, standard zooming and panning of images, we now support 90 degree image rotation with the flick-rotate gesture (it’s like trying to quickly rotate the image, and Kuuvik Capture detects the direction and rotates the image by 90 degrees).

In live view you can also flick-zoom (both in and out).

Built for the Canon EOS 5DS and 5DS R

The app has been designed and optimized to work with the huge images from the new 50-megapixel bodies. While it’s fast working with them, it became lightning fast on smaller (22 or less megapixel) images. The long delay between beta 1 and beta 2 is partly attributable to this process, as I had to replace a few slow, leaking and generally problematic frameworks with my own implementations. So the complete display engine is new, including the sharpening and peaking filters that now work properly on Retina displays.

Other New Features from the Beta 1

  • Streamlined user interface to give more screen space to your images and to support the new MacBook.
  • New raw decoding engine which is up to 5x faster than the open source library used previously. And consumes way less memory in the process.
  • Improved image display quality.
  • Improved focus peaking visibility in some situations.
  • Exposure information for the currently displayed image below the histogram.
  • RAW label to show when the histogram is generated from raw data (instead of white balanced ‘jpeg’ data).
  • Session information can be overlaid on the displayed image.
  • 11 new guide templates, including golden ratio, a dense 30×20 grid and several aspect ratio lines, such as 1:1, 5:4, 16:9.
  • Selectable guideline color.
  • Color pickers for both peaking and guides allow you to set the opacity.
  • A new menu item and hot key to cycle peaking color presets (yellow, white, green, magenta). Cycling also include your chosen custom peaking color if there’s one.
  • All panels (not just the Navigator) can be quickly revealed.
  • Event Log to notify you about problems that may influence your shoot (such as inability to write to the download folder or interference with other concurrently running remote control apps).

What’s Not In There?

Due to the sheer amount of change in the most basic parts of the app (camera communication, display, sessions), we had to drop two features from version 2.0. First, testing revealed that OS X’s PTP-IP implementation (that was used to drive the cameras through WiFi and Ethernet after dropping Canon’s SDK) tends to corrupt data under heavy load. So I removed network camera support until I roll out my own PTP-IP code.

Second, support for the 1Ds Mark III has been removed as it needs to be operated completely different from modern cameras. We will re-add support as we can put our hands on a 1Ds Mark III for a few days, and only if there’s demand for it (given the limited feature set that camera supports). The 1Ds Mark III is supported in the final release.

Availability

Beta 2 will be released to registered beta testers during the next day. This beta represents the final feature set for version 2.0, and if everything goes as planned, it will be released in the Mac App Store as soon as Apple approves it.

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