Ask Brooks

Music Royalty Issues

I am planning on adding music to my Photo PDFs, but I don't want to infringe on any copyrights of either the artists or the producers of the music. How does one obtain the rights to reproduce music? Also, are there any "public domain" music sites that will allow reproduction of the music.  I'd like to use Classical, light Classical, and/or Blues and light rhythm.

— Doug

I have to confess, that we sort of cheat — not by breaking any laws or violating any copyrights, but rather by coming at this from a different angle.

There is a sizable corner of the music world known as "loops." These are short segments of musical phrases that can be strung together to write your own music. By combining any number of loops and repeating patterns into a multi-track audio software, you can easily create music riffs for your projects that are royalty free and unique to you — because you are the creator! Another way to express your creative impulses in a project. There are thousands — check that, more like millions — of loops available via download representing every musical instrument, style, key, beat, and rhythm you could possibly want. Most are free; some of the better ones have a nominal cost. Do a Google search for loops or free loops.

Here are a couple of longer experiments where I was just playing with the segments to see what I could do. The first one is from 2001 titled Dharma Greb's. It uses 27 different loops.

Dharma Greb's

Loop Fun Blues

They are certainly not great tunes, but I did have fun with the concept and learned enough to make audio for our products.

Here are a few of the individual loops used in the first composition.

120_arpeg_a_1

120_arpeg_a_7

PW-Flute1a-Short-FadeIn-96bpm-C

PW-Strings3a-96bpm-C-Cascade1

And finally, here are a couple of very simple loop compositions that I made in about 10 minutes of playing around that may sound familiar to LensWork fans.

Marimba - Long Version

LXT intro tabla loop

I first discovered this world with a program called Acid Loops, now Acid Pro 7 from Sony. I now use Adobe Audition to create them. Here's an online software that I've seen mentioned a few times, but I have no experience with it.

Before I discovered loops, I tried — unsuccessfully — to find and buy canned, royalty free music created by professional musicians. They all sounded like business success meeting themes that the corporate world would probably love. I spent countless hours previewing sample cuts on the web and even purchased a couple of CDs of royalty free music. They were all pretty awful — at least for my uses. Who knows, however, they might be a lot better now than when I was looking for something 10 years ago.

I can tell you this: it's a lot more fun to create your own music with loops and a rainy afternoon!

Acrobat Pro or Extended?

Your move to Acrobat 9 for LensWork Extended has finally motivated me to upgrade my Acrobat 8 (Standard). Wondering if you would recommend Acrobat 9 Standard, Pro, or Pro Extended. I'm largely interested in PDF publishing as a way to distribute my images, possibly with an overlay of audio. I have no interest in integration of video. My best estimate from a study of Adobe's website is to go with Pro but would appreciate any insights you might be able to provide.

— Frank

From my point of view as a publisher, the only functional difference between Pro and Extended has to do with video. So, short answer, as long as you are only interested in audio, might as well go with Pro and save the money.

When importing a video into a PDF using the Flash import option, the Extended version of Acrobat has the advantage that it includes video converters. It therefore can take your MP4, MOV, WMV, or a bunch of other formats and convert it to FLV format on the fly. This is handy, but not the only way to get there. For example, we just export FLV files directly out of Camtasia or Premiere Pro. By doing so, we don't need the Extended version of Acrobat for the video format conversion process. On the rare occasion that we do need to convert a video to the FLV format, we use dedicated converters like the Adobe Media Encoder.

Fortunately for you, Frank, the Acrobat Pro audio import function will accept MP3 audio files as well as others directly and use them with the built-in Flash player. This is our normal workflow for audio, too.

You could consider a totally free option, of course, and just keep your Acrobat 8 for publishing non-Flash media and install the Adobe Reader version 9 for viewing LensWork Extended. If you want to publish using Flash, then upgrading to Acrobat Pro 9 would probably be the best choice.

The Original

Brooks,

First of all, I would like you to know how much I enjoy your Editor's Comments, including your most recent, Paper as Medium [LensWork #87]. Having said that, there is one point that I feel that is important that you did not touch on: The print is the only way that a photographer can show their image in exactly the way that he or she wants it to be seen. With the computer monitor there is always the issue of the calibration and even then how would one be assured that they are seeing the image just as the photographer wanted. Even with the quality of the reproductions found in LensWork or in the four tone process used by Little, Brown and Company for Ansel Adams' book, there is still nothing like looking at a print to see the depth and breadth of the photographer's vision. I know that looking at a print there is no compromise between what the photographer meant for you to see and how it is being presented. I am interested in your thoughts.

— Rick

I agree with everything you've said. However, way off in the corner of my peripheral vision there is a fly heading straight for the ointment.

More and more photographers are starting to rethink this idea of "the original." What is it? In the days of the darkroom, the original was indisputably the print made by the hand of the artist. Sort of. I never did feel entirely comfortable with the fact that famous photographers like Ansel Adams had assistants who did so much of the work for them. When Don Worth or Ted Orland or John Sexton (et al) did all that work for Ansel in helping him with his printing, at what point exactly does it become their work rather than Ansel's? If Ansel focuses the enlarger is it still his work? If Ansel does the dodging and burning motions, then is it still his work? Does he need to soup the print in the developer for it to still be his work? Is it still his if someone else ran it though the fixer, did the mounting, spotted the image? If an assistant does it all and Ansel only signs it, is it an original Ansel Adams because he approved it as matching his creative vision? What about photographers who do not do their own printing at all, e.g., Duane Michals? What precisely is the darkroom photographer required to do for it to be an original? Fuzz abounds.

Back to my comments on "the original." There are many photographers today for whom the book is the only physical form of their work. There are no prints. The book is "the original." There are photographers working in multimedia for which the PDF or the Flash presentation is the original. There are photographers whose work is an interactive installation piece. What is "the original" for their work?

For most people, the line between original work and not original work lies somewhere between the artist's vision and the physical artifact created to make that vision manifest. Somewhere, but precisely where can be difficult to nail down.

In my case, I do extensive creative work on my digital files, but I have an assistant do the printing. I consider my digital files as "the originals" (where the creative work happens) and the prints as reproductions. The prints never look precisely like my originals nor precisely like the vision in my head.

And this doesn't address at all the conditions under which the so-called original is seen. Paul Strand looked at is work under a very strong light — a bare incandescent bulb just inches away from the print — which is not at all how we today look at his prints in the museum exhibition. Under what lighting conditions does the photographer intend their work to be seen? From what distance? With whose eyes? (We all see color slightly differently, for example.)

So, when you touch on the idea that the original is the only way a photographer can show their work exactly as they intended it to be seen, we can quickly find ourselves peering through a glass darkly. An argument could be convincingly mounted that the only people who ever see work exactly as the art maker wishes are the art makers themselves. The rest of us always see some form of compromise. The only question is how much is the compromise and how much are we then missing?

DPI for submissions

I am preparing a submission to LensWork. The portfolio submission guidelines indicate a pixel width or height size. I did not see a dpi size. Do you prefer 72dpi, 240 dpi, or 300 dpi?

— Michael

This is a common question and needs some clarification.

First, the term dpi is "dots per inch. " This is a hold-over term from offset printing days which refers to the dot density in a half-tone images, like in the newspaper. Lay down a ruler and count the number of dots in an inch; no more sophisticated than that. In recent years, this has fallen out of favor for computer images for a more up-to-date term, PPI which is an acronym for "pixels per inch."

Both of them are meaningless in some regards.

The PPI is not really a measurement of the resolution of an image, but rather the density of pixels when spread over a given linear space. Output devices require a sufficient density of pixels for their needs. Greater density is discarded to no advantage; lesser density will result in a compromise in image quality — often called "pixelization," a blockiness to the edges and smooth tones.

Inkjet printers typically require a pixel density of around 300 pixels-per-inch, give or take a little. Most people use somewhere between 240ppi and 360ppi; there is some debate about the optimum.

The resolution of most monitors is 96ppi, older ones as low as 72ppi.

We produce two different publications with the images that are accepted for publication.

• LensWork (our print edition) is printed on an offset printer that requires 400ppi for the best reproductions. Because of the page size, the largest images can be as wide as 5.5" or as tall as 7". A little math will show that a landscape orientation image must have at least 2200 pixels horizontally or we won't be able to provide the necessary pixel density. Portrait orientation images must have at least 2800 pixels vertically. Hence our submissions guidelines specify these as the minimum dimensions — 2200 pixels wide or 2800 pixels tall, depending on the orientation of the image. More than 2200 pixels in width or more than 2800 pixels in height is not a problem, but not needed for our use. Fewer pixels in either dimension mean we run the risk of compromising image quality on the press.
• LensWork Extended (our multimedia edition on computer disc) requires 96ppi for display purposes, but we produce it at 200ppi so readers can zoom in on the details of an image without pixelization. This also accommodates large monitors and HDTV presentations. Based on the size of the InDesign layouts we use to create LensWork Extended, we need images that are at least 2222 pixels wide or at last 1666 pixels tall. This is within the parameters of the print dimensions we need for LensWork, so the 2200x2800 pixel images in LensWork will reproduce beautifully in LensWork Extended, too. In essence, we simply resample the images to the required pixel density — PPI — as needed for each publication.

So, it makes no difference to us whether you provide 10 PPI or 10,000 PPI images as long as they are at least 2200 pixels wide or not less than 2800 pixels tall. We'll arrange the pixel density as needed for each use.

For your own use, the PPI can make a difference in this regard: Placing images into some other software application, e.g., InDesign, will cause the receiving application to size the image base on the PPI specifications in the image file. Drop a 2200x2800 image set to 72 PPI into InDesign and the image will be huge. Change the image (in Photoshop, for example) to be a 2200x2800 image at 5000 PPI and the image place in InDesign will be tiny. Both images will be 2200x2800 pixels, they'll just render in your layout at different sizes based on the PPI specification. You can, of course, resize either of these images inside InDesign and as long as the final pixel density meets your output requirements there is no functional difference between the 72ppi and the 5000ppi image in the output from InDesign. The only thing that counts is the final output pixel density — which is a function of the available total number of pixels in the originating file and the output size in the InDesign layout.

Whew! Make sense?