5.0 Tiger not working on Vista or Win7?

If you find that the Camera Control 5.0 script is not working at all on Vista or Win7 it probably is because it is trying to properly set the jpg/raw status during camera initialization and that doesn’t always work properly on non-XP systems.

Because this messes up the whole script camera initialization other things stop working as well.  So try this beta version where I have turned off the error checking for that suspect line:

DIYPhotoBits.com Camera Control 5.1 beta

Please let me know in the comments if this helps, and if so I’ll release it in proper packaged format.

DIYPhotobits Camera Control 5.0 – Tiger

Happy Lunar New Year to those of you who celebrate it, and welcome to the Year of the Tiger release of DIYPhotobits Camera Control!

Download 5.0 here

DIYPhotobits Camera Control 5.0 – The Tiger Release – gets a new major version number (from 4 to 5) to reflect several important new enhancements, plus a “.0” to show that this is new stuff and not as well tested as I would have liked.

I’ve actually had this code on my disk for a while now but due to various interruptions I have not had time to complete testing or release it before now.  And to be honest, I’m actually releasing it here without additional testing because I’m seeing plenty of comments from people who have problems that the new version should fix.

Changelog 5.0:

  • Fixed the bug where the preview size doesn’t change during a tethered download preview.  Thanks to Frank.
  • Save the raw vs jpg setting between sessions
  • Save preview size between sessions
  • Save tethered status between sessions
  • Image viewer to view previous shots (jpg only)
  • Flagging/selection of files via file renaming so that sort-by-filename will show flagged files
  • Display latest jpg when downloading jpg+raw
  • Bracketing in manual mode via changing shutter speed
  • Change exposure compensation code so that it should work for negative values in Vista
  • Post processing command either automatically or via viewer
  • Bug fixes to savings settings in registry
  • Add more choices to preview size
  • Added more help links

Well there you go, I’m sure there will be bugs but I hope the new features will be of use to someone.

When I get some more time (haa haa) I’ll try to put together a tutorial video that shows everything working together as I realize the lack of a manual or explanation makes it hard use.

Download 5.0 here

DIYPhotobits.com Camera Control 4.1 – Dog Food

Changes in 4.1 – the “Eat your own dog food” release of DIYPhotobits.com Camera Control.

4.1

– allow fractional bracketing by changing Cint to Cdbl

– don’t crash on line 157 if there is nothing to download

– removed the “download immediately” function and changed things so that the normal tether does this function
– fixed the bug where push external viewer doesn’t work unless you explicitly choose the output folder

Download it here.

Line: 157; char: 2; Error: Index out of range

Update: Sadly this doesn’t work. Ok I really need to fix this bug soon.

Getting this message from DIYPhotobits.com Camera Control when you click the “Shutter Release” button?

It’s a bug, the script is failing to handle the fact that the camera is very slightly slow in delivering the image after taking it.

To avoid this:

Stop using the “Download Immediately” checkbox

Instead, press the “Start Tether” button.

The result is (almost) the same; when you click Shutter Release the images ARE immediately downloaded (because the tether is running), but it’s by a different piece of code that patiently waits for the image to become available rather than demanding it immediately.

Side-effect; this means if you press the shutter release button on the camera then that image also is downloaded.

Sorry I haven’t posted a proper fix for this. What with a new baby in the house (3 months next week and doing fine) we hardly have time to get our jobs done, let alone our hobbies.

Free Mac Nikon Control Beta

Stefan Hafeneger , has built a Nikon specific camera control app for macs which is now beta and freely available.   He is using the Nikon SDK as well so should be able to implement much more Nikon specific controls than I am able to via WIA on Windows in my script.  

Apparently he is able to understand the SDK as well – which means not only can he program better than I but his English/Japanese parsing skill is much higher than mine as well and I salute him!

[via dptnt]

for /f “tokens=*” %x in (‘dir /b *.nef’) do dcraw -e %x

Sorry, being a total geek here.

If you are also a command line geek you will look at the above and go Ahhhh…

Otherwise, it means nothing and you can skip over this post.  🙂

For the rest of you — the above “converts” NEF files into JPG faster than anything you have ever seen before.

And is great for converting 250 NEF files you snapped of something totally unimportant that should have been shot in jpg and not raw.

For example: we visited a couple of flats/apartments this weekend (thinking about moving) and I put a Sigma 10-20mm Best of the Best 4: Without Warning hd on my D300 and walked around shooting absolutely everything.  The idea was that once we got home if we thought “hey, was there an xyz in the whatever room of that second one” or something like that we could jsut refer to the images rather than go back or phone and ask.  So to cover everything, even at super wide, I was shooting like crazy.  Barely aiming, not bothering to focus (and that lens managed fine actually, very well for this purpose).

But I got home and found I had 250+ raw files — or almost 4G of data!  Drat, should have switched to jpg for these snapshots, but now what do I do?  Sure I can batch them through ACR or photoshop, but it’ll take forever.

So luckily I had just been looking at dcraw, the command line raw processor recently, I had the Windows build, and tada.

for /f "tokens=*" %x in ('dir /b *.nef') do dcraw -e %x

An command line that takes all the raw files in the directory and spits out jpg files instead.  After that I just del *.nef and I’m done.

Up side:

  • Fast
  • No settings to worry about
  • Fast
  • Did I mention fast?  We are talking less than a second an image.

Downside:

  • It isn’t really converting the raw fileof course, it is merely extracting the basic Jpeg that is embedded in the raw file.  But that’s “good enough” for what I wanted.

Still a good trick and to save me having to think about the syntax next time I have to do this I’m blogging about it so I can go back and refer to my own blog.  I knew there was a reason I was blogging!

And of course now that I know dcraw can do this I’ll be looking to integrate raw preview into Camera Control using this.  In my copious free time!  Huh!

PS.  There should have been a video today about how to do the paper grid spot, but I totally messed up the recordings and all the files are a disaster so this too will have to wait for another time.