Chris_Malcolm
Editing DSLR photos with an Android tablet (Nexus 7 original) on holiday
This is me on holiday (in Sicily) using my tiny Nexus 7 tablet and 3rd party Bluetooth keyboard to do emails etc.. In fact this was written with it. Of course I can do that using the screen keyboard, but writing and editing are faster & easier with a physical keyboard. This one snaps on the front of the Nexus 7 to be a protective cover, has a slot for holding the screen up like a laptop screen, and being wireless can be be used detached from the screen. It's small, to fit the Nexus 7 exactly, and can't support the high speed key rattling input beloved of actors playing geeks on TV, but is small enough that you can hold it with two hands and do thumb typing. Small size, light weight, high portability for working on the hoof and on holidays were what I was after. What's more, it was very cheap -- the same price as an overpriced simple tablet protecting plastic wallet on sale in High Street shops. And charges off the same USB plug as the Nexus. A charge lasts for ages, possibly long enough to write a book.
So as many have discovered a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard is good enough for doing general computer desk work on the hoof, including the simple editing and exporting to social media and blogs of images from its camera or a smartphone. But what about big images from big cameras? What about more serious editing? RAW files even? Noise reduction? Lens geometry correction? Perspective adjustment?
(A small image import problem with the Nexus 7 solved. You can't plug in memory cards, read files from USB stick or external camera etc.. The USB connector only works as a connector to a host computer with the tablet as slave. But you can get a USB cable switcher which makes the tablet USB a host, and a variety of free apps such as Nexus Media Importer let you read and write USB to USB sticks, cameras, card adapters, etc.. I use a USB card adapter to read my camera's card. So no problem getting images in.)
I already knew that the Nexus 7 could import and display the large 24MP jpegs from my camera (Sony A77). It has good enough colour and resolution to be a portable portfolio, and can zoom right down to pixel level. But how much serious editing on really big images could it support? And were there any good free or inexpensive apps that worked well enough on my Nexus 7 to do that kind of stuff? Big images need some serious image chewing power. For example when I upgraded to 24MP from 14MP my PC started choking and I had to upgrade it. 'Choking' means I could only run one big image editing program at a time, and certain operations changed dramatically from having taken several seconds to taking minutes. Well, it was a very old PC :-)
(This by the way is not a comparative review, just a record of what I found that worked well enough.)
The built in Android Gallery app displays nicely, and I often use it to check what I've got where. It's editing is limited to choosing from prepackaged effects, but it links nicely to image editors that are kind enough to introduce themselves to it.
I first tried Pixlr Express. It was restricted to jpegs, and annoyingly didn't copy all the EXIF data through, especially annoying being losing the GPS location information the camera supplies. It would handle full size 24MP images, but had no options for resizing the image or adjusting the level of jpeg compression. That meant using more memory than needed, and annoyingly slow exporting of batches of images up to the web. The crunch came when I had a folder of nearly 1GB of images. It started slowing down image rendering, sometimes being unable to clarify when zooming in to a high level of resolution. I guessed that had something to do with the nearly 1GB of images, because when I deleted a pile of them it went back to its old speed and detail resolution. The Nexus wasn't running out of memory -- it had over 20MB free at the time.
A quick rummage in the app store turned up nothing more promising looking that was free. At the cheap end of priced apps was Photo Mate, one of the few RAW editors, well reviewed, and offered stuff like curves. I gave it a try, and found that it does image resizing, jpeg quality adjustment, and seems to put through all the EXIF data, including the GPS location my Sony A77 can supply. That's *extremely* useful when in unfamiliar places.
It's a bit fiddly adjusting Photo Mate's sliders with fingers on a touch screen. There's (as yet) no editing of the corresponding numbers. I must try using a screen stylus. Photo Mate sometimes loses the plot and displays an absurdly garish image if you do too much or too extreme fiddling too quickly. No harm done, picks up perfectly if you kill and restart the program. In some places the interface is a bit clunky and being able to leave more standard defaults set up would be handy. These are minor niggles considering the price. So I'm happily using Photo Mate for now.
Original: DSC05062-EditPhM
Editing DSLR photos with an Android tablet (Nexus 7 original) on holiday
This is me on holiday (in Sicily) using my tiny Nexus 7 tablet and 3rd party Bluetooth keyboard to do emails etc.. In fact this was written with it. Of course I can do that using the screen keyboard, but writing and editing are faster & easier with a physical keyboard. This one snaps on the front of the Nexus 7 to be a protective cover, has a slot for holding the screen up like a laptop screen, and being wireless can be be used detached from the screen. It's small, to fit the Nexus 7 exactly, and can't support the high speed key rattling input beloved of actors playing geeks on TV, but is small enough that you can hold it with two hands and do thumb typing. Small size, light weight, high portability for working on the hoof and on holidays were what I was after. What's more, it was very cheap -- the same price as an overpriced simple tablet protecting plastic wallet on sale in High Street shops. And charges off the same USB plug as the Nexus. A charge lasts for ages, possibly long enough to write a book.
So as many have discovered a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard is good enough for doing general computer desk work on the hoof, including the simple editing and exporting to social media and blogs of images from its camera or a smartphone. But what about big images from big cameras? What about more serious editing? RAW files even? Noise reduction? Lens geometry correction? Perspective adjustment?
(A small image import problem with the Nexus 7 solved. You can't plug in memory cards, read files from USB stick or external camera etc.. The USB connector only works as a connector to a host computer with the tablet as slave. But you can get a USB cable switcher which makes the tablet USB a host, and a variety of free apps such as Nexus Media Importer let you read and write USB to USB sticks, cameras, card adapters, etc.. I use a USB card adapter to read my camera's card. So no problem getting images in.)
I already knew that the Nexus 7 could import and display the large 24MP jpegs from my camera (Sony A77). It has good enough colour and resolution to be a portable portfolio, and can zoom right down to pixel level. But how much serious editing on really big images could it support? And were there any good free or inexpensive apps that worked well enough on my Nexus 7 to do that kind of stuff? Big images need some serious image chewing power. For example when I upgraded to 24MP from 14MP my PC started choking and I had to upgrade it. 'Choking' means I could only run one big image editing program at a time, and certain operations changed dramatically from having taken several seconds to taking minutes. Well, it was a very old PC :-)
(This by the way is not a comparative review, just a record of what I found that worked well enough.)
The built in Android Gallery app displays nicely, and I often use it to check what I've got where. It's editing is limited to choosing from prepackaged effects, but it links nicely to image editors that are kind enough to introduce themselves to it.
I first tried Pixlr Express. It was restricted to jpegs, and annoyingly didn't copy all the EXIF data through, especially annoying being losing the GPS location information the camera supplies. It would handle full size 24MP images, but had no options for resizing the image or adjusting the level of jpeg compression. That meant using more memory than needed, and annoyingly slow exporting of batches of images up to the web. The crunch came when I had a folder of nearly 1GB of images. It started slowing down image rendering, sometimes being unable to clarify when zooming in to a high level of resolution. I guessed that had something to do with the nearly 1GB of images, because when I deleted a pile of them it went back to its old speed and detail resolution. The Nexus wasn't running out of memory -- it had over 20MB free at the time.
A quick rummage in the app store turned up nothing more promising looking that was free. At the cheap end of priced apps was Photo Mate, one of the few RAW editors, well reviewed, and offered stuff like curves. I gave it a try, and found that it does image resizing, jpeg quality adjustment, and seems to put through all the EXIF data, including the GPS location my Sony A77 can supply. That's *extremely* useful when in unfamiliar places.
It's a bit fiddly adjusting Photo Mate's sliders with fingers on a touch screen. There's (as yet) no editing of the corresponding numbers. I must try using a screen stylus. Photo Mate sometimes loses the plot and displays an absurdly garish image if you do too much or too extreme fiddling too quickly. No harm done, picks up perfectly if you kill and restart the program. In some places the interface is a bit clunky and being able to leave more standard defaults set up would be handy. These are minor niggles considering the price. So I'm happily using Photo Mate for now.
Original: DSC05062-EditPhM