A batch photoshop action for fixing white backgrounds
Please test first.
Mark
Case Study
200 Guests at a University Annual Ball
Manchester
Location
Palace Hotel
Equipment Used
Canon 40D
Wft-e3 wireless transmitter
Wrist Grip
Infrared light trigger
Lighting
Lastolite 6”x7” Hilte with train
2x 400W Elinchrom (one in Hilite, one as main light with softbox)
4x 150W Interfit (one as fill light with 1m brolly, one in Hilte, to burn out floor either side)
PC Equipment
Main PC
1 x Acer Dual Core 1.66 GHz 3GB ram (acting as server)
Viewing Stations
3 x Dell 1.2GHZ 512k ram
Network hardware
1 x Belkin 4 port wired router with cat 5 cables
1 x Belkin Wireless access point
Printer
Copal 6”x9” dye sub
Software on Acer (server)
Windows XP
Filezilla (for wireless images transfer)
Filezillas setting:
Create your folder structure
In (with 8 sub folders 1-8 or however many you need)
Out (where the output is saved by Jalbum)
Orders (where your orders are saved)
Set up a user account in Filezilla and then go to shared folders, add the folder 1-8 (browse) and mark folder 1 as home directory. (Images will be saved here) in Jalbum point your input folder at the IN folder and exclude all folders except 1. Image are then transferred by Filezilla and saved to folder 1 and the automatically process by Jalbum when in server mode. When folder 1 gets to about 200 images, in Filezilla set home dir as folder 2 and include in Jalbum.
Jalbum (image processing)
Photoshop
Ultimate View (server control, displaying images on viewing station and order control)
Software on Viewing Stations
Windows XP
Firefox in F11 mode (Full Screen)
The Job
An extremely busy night, all where very eager to have pictures taken and to buy them, £1435 taken on night on 167 actual prints bought (we done a few deals for big orders) Our typical price is £10 for a 6”x9” print with buy two get one free (no mounts). We done a lot of groups as well and we done a few deal 8 for £50 all of the same image.
On-Site Problems
All went extremely well, had a bit of an issue when I went over img_9999.jpg and the camera then reverted to img_0001.jpg and the order of the images was then wrong in the folder, quickly fixed in Jalbum by ordering images by camera date rather than name. The recent Jalbum upgrade also works very well and quickly amended the structure. Also I think there is an issue with the 40D recent firmware update that it resets the file name when auto power off. (Not sure on this one will need to investigate further)
Loading the images on-line
Already had a few orders in, will update in a month with figures. Every order gets a business card. I have also started making a copy of all images and converting them to Black & White, so the client can see a colour and black & white image on line. On my last four jobs offering both B&W and colour orders have increased by 17%. Use Irfanview to copy image, convert to B&W and append file name with BW so you know that a B&W has been ordered.
The workflow to get images on line
Transfer all images to external drive
Resize (750pxlsx750pxls) and save to new location. Use Irfanview, advanced function, save images by keeping file structure.
Delete shockers, and quickly PS the low res images if needed, especially the floor. As they are now just low res, you can open a 100 at a time in PS, set up Function keys with actions for quick tweak. If you spend more than 5 seconds per image for a full length shot then you need to look at your lighting settings.
Use Irfanview, advanced function, convert to greyscale, append file name with BW and save images by keeping file structure to a new location.
Rename folder 1_Black_&_White etc…
Copy folder to input folder
The online gallery can be seen here.
http://www.gotyou.co.uk/gallery/palace/index.html
Mark
Hi,
ULTIMATE Deluxe 1.8.6 launched.
Abilty to select Swiss Francs as the currency in ULTIMATE with intergration into Payal for selling your photographs in Swiss Francs, Just for our increasing number of Swiss Photographers.
Minor bug fix. When the client pays by cheque and return to the gallery the basket is now cleared.
Thanks
Mark
Last week an Ultimate Deluxe user reported that he was recently not getting the order email generated by Ultimate, but he was getting the payment confirmation from PayPal.
After further investigation we found that the email was being sent from the oneFshop server, but was being identified as spam and blocked. This is being done on the ISP's not your own aniti spam software. The email that is sent from oneFshop has inevitabley a number of characteristics of spam (although off course it is not) the emails are all very similar to one another, it is automatically generated and it adds the clients email address as the sender although it comes from the oneFshop server.
THE SOLUTION.
1. Contact your ISP and inform them that emails from oneFshop are not SPAM. This is not however a quick fix as an email can go through multiple servers and aniti spam filters to reach you.
2. Set up a GMAIL account (orders@yourdomain.com) and redirect your email through to your normal inbox. Gmail is different from a normal email system as you are in complete control of what is spam and not. This has proved worked fine. You can use GMAIL as your regular server for your normall emails that is becoming very popolar due to the very efficent spam filters and the control it gives you. If you decide to route all your emails through GMail (I have) then you do not need to change any of your settings in your albums.
If you have changed your email address then you will need however to change the email address in your past albums to go to your new GMAIL account. You do not need to re generate your album again. IN your FTP software open the album>RES>DATA>CONFIG and change the email address.
I am sure you appreciate that this is out of our control, with the ever increasing problem of spam and the fight back it is inventible by the aniti spam software and that legitimate email are being blocked. But the GMAIL account does solve it.
The fight back against spam will increase over time, and we do not want to rely on anyone else systems in the long run, not even Gmail. We are thererfore investgating in adding the abilty for you to log in to your oneFshop account to see all your past order emails. Hope to release soon.
Mark
Hi,
Just downloaded Goggles' new browser "Chrome" and tested galleries created by ULTIMATE. And it is very fast. We have recently made a lot of effort in ULTIMATE for speed in the regular browers, Firefox, IE and Safari, and it works well. But using Chrome it is really fast.
This could be a very useful for ULTIMATE View with on-site viewing stations, as the speed is very very fast. and uses far less memory than Firefox. Cant see how you can run it in full screen mode but iam sure an addon will be developed.
The thumbnail appear almost instantly and the drag & drop is even smoother. Google has designed this from the ground up with an emphasis on web applications such as javascript, which ULTIMATE uses a lot.
I am sure IE and Firefox will follow a similar path, which will be good news for ULTIMATE users and there clients when you want to sell your photographs on-line.
Well worth a look
Mark