Saturday, January 11, 2014

To ae or not to ae, that is the question?

I’m talking about google+’s auto AwesomE feature, its something that you get for free, but already I’m underwhelmed by the snowing effect. I’m also not so sure about the auto enhance, which frequently transforms my carefully processed photos into less that complimentary ways. However enough of the complaining, I will have to admit there have been a few nice surprises.
IMGP9345-HDR IMGP7800-HDR
IMGP9417-HDR IMGP8959-HDR
HDR when you least expect it and more importantly done with some constraint. Actually they are predicatable because they are only done with bracketted sequences with suitable exposure steps, taken with HDR in mind.
IMGP8760-PANO
IMG_6769-PANO
The PANOramas have been a slightly more hit and miss affair, I always take a number of shots of ant location in a roughly overlapping fashion. So I have gotten a fair number of very average results with exposure banding as the camera light meter adjusted the exposure. I’m also a bit puzzled because a number of image sets I would have expected to make a great panorama have been made into MOTION auto awesome’s .GIFS format that pan across the scene!
standard sizeSo the question remains should I turn off Auto Awesome  and miss out on these goodies. Well As long as you only upload photos in standard size (which in google+ terms means 2048 pixels or less on the longest dimension) any auto awesome photos will not count against your disk storage limit. You can find where this is set under the settings tab on the AutoBackup Application on your computer (or in your mobile app). So any Auto Awesomes are created automatically and for free. As +Ananda Sim pointed out in the comment to my Auto Imposition post the auto awesome is a copy and there is no penalty to you letting them be created. The other issues is do you want to disable these and/or the auto enhance feature, These settings can be found on-line in your google+ profile, under the setting item at the bottom of the pull down list on the right hand side of the screen. Then look about half way down, just under the storage details. At least for the time being I will be leaving both on.
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