It’s not your camera. It’s not your lens. It’s not the paper, or the printer, or the print lab.
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The One Thing that sets your photos apart, technically
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
Print Shop Review: Adorama Pics
Monday, January 11th, 2010Disclaimer: anything I put into this entry is purely based on my own experience. All content is my personal opinion.
Continuing with online printers: this is the last company that I’ll review, and my favorite. You’ll see why:
Color shifting: Want to avoid it altogether? Download their color profiles (one per paper/print type). Output your images with that color profile, and what you’ll see, you’ll get. Take that back: one time their printers were out of calibration. They re-printed free of charge. Thumbs up, obviously.
Crops: for smaller pics, maybe a pixel. Larger pics (up to 16×20, in my experience): maybe three pixels. As good as it gets.
Paper quality: all quality papers (Kodak, usually), and you get your choice of finish. Includes metallics, glossy, others… More thumbs up.
Sharpness: I’ve generally had it hit or miss with them until the most recent print job. I finally found that they’re considered a “contone print shop”, and you do “contone sharpening”. More about that another day, though.
Overall: AdoramaPix has pretty much earned my loyalty. Some prices might be higher than with competitors, but the quality is there and they cater to the more advanced amateur & pro alike.
Print Shop Review: MPIX
Sunday, January 10th, 2010Disclaimer: anything I put into this entry is purely based on my own experience. All content is my personal opinion.
Another continuation. Yesterday was CostCo, today MPIX. MPIX, in my opinion, has the best Metallic prints of all companies that I’ve used. I’m not sure it’s appropriate for all outputs, but it seems to work pretty well. Sometimes it seems to lack smoothness, though.
So, to jump into it:
Color: So long as you follow instructions, no color shifts. That means uploading images in sRGB. I messed this up once, and the quality was still good – but doing sRGB made it much, much better. Big thumbs up here.
Crops: no discernible cropping to the edges. Maybe a pixel or two, but easily acceptable. Another big thumb up.
Paper quality: decent heft, Kodak endura. Some may prefer something else, but it’s acceptable. Still thumbs up.
Sharpening: Oooh, so close. Big failure here – they flat-out recommend not sharpening the photos. I have a real problem with this – the output needs to be to my spec, not their automated one. Any sharpening at all, in any way, shape, or form seems to give horrible halos
Overall: I’ve used them for the last two years in a row for my personal holiday cards. After this year, where I deliberately kept sharpening to a minimum, I may not do it again. They halos are barely there, but… well, they’re there.
Still, the price is right. And their metallic prints? Gorgeous. By mid-year, I may have changed my mind on these guys!
Print Shop Review: CostCo
Saturday, January 9th, 2010Disclaimer: anything I put into this entry is purely based on my own experience. All content is my personal opinion.
Continuing on from yesterday’s topic, a review of CostCo’s print service. To keep things fair, I’ll use the same criteria: color skewing, sharpness, paper quality, and cropping. And before I go in to trashing the CostCo online printing, let me state: most people that I know like their service & see nothing wrong with it. My problems could conceivably be due to my own behavior (which works fine with other print shops), or it could be the location nearest me.
Color: good God, possibly the worst coloring I’ve ever seen. Take a nice, warm scene with green grass and a smiling, pink baby. Got it in mind? Now turn the grass dull (light) grayish green, the skin tones more yellowish, and remove any character from dirt in the pic. That’s what happened to me. I’d say that it’s like submitting an AdobeRGB photo when they’re expecting sRGB – only I’ve done that, and it’s no worse. And other printers don’t skew it so badly.
The color problem appears to be specific to large prints, BTW. But in this day & age, that’s all I do, so it hurts.
Crops: Again, one heck of a crop that I’ve seen. One year I used their 5×7″ photos for our holiday cards. There was “Happy Holidays” in script towards the bottom, and made sure there was plenty of padding between the edges and the letters.
They still chopped into it.
Paper quality: decent. Kodak, pretty good weight. Felt like a waste of quality paper after seeing the color shift.
Sharpness: to their credit, they didn’t add any sharpening. The end results were more or less what I expected.
Overall: I won’t touch their photo service with a ten-foot pole. YMMV.
Print Shop Review: Snapfish
Friday, January 8th, 2010Disclaimer: anything I put into this entry is purely based on my own experience. All content is my personal opinion.
I recently placed an order of photos, and was fantastically pleased with the results. But more on that another day – today I want to place some thoughts into writing about how I got here. Permit me, if you will, to walk through my memories…
In my memory, SnapFish was one of the early entrants to online print shops. They were also the first online company that I used, and for a while my favorite. Having said that, I haven’t touched them for several years now. Looking back, I think it has been about six years since I’ve done anything with them (wow, how time flies!). Five at best.
Why? When I’m looking for a print shop, I’m generally looking for a combination of quality and price. When in question, I usually go for quality. Qualities like: no arbitrary halos around features, no changing of colors, no cropping into the picture, decent quality of paper.
Personally, I only found them to be so-so. It may have been my lesser-experienced eye back then, but the colors seemed to have greens and warm tones amplified. This is a common trick for landscapes and portrait/people shots, respectively – and it just bugs me to no end. On the plus side, it does look pretty good for shots straight out of the camera. On the not-so-good side, if you do your own post processing, then it’s going to look radioactive.
Of course, that was a while ago. They probably have fixed that by now.
Those halos? That’s from oversharpening. I didn’t really see that on prints from them, but I also didn’t really sharpen my own results. I wouldn’t hold it against them, were I to do another run of prints.
Cropping? Oh yes, they definitely do – or did. And not necessarily a small amount, either: I seem to recall losing up to 5 pixels off the end of a smallish 4×6″ print.
Paper? Decent quality, but felt a bit flimsy compared to other papers. Nothing I’d hold against them, but nothing I’d use for photos of any large size.
So to summarize: I’ve found that SnapFish did pretty good work, but I’ll only ever use them for cheap 4×6″ prints. Something for collages or other disposable uses.
Overexposing for Winning End Results
Monday, November 23rd, 2009This is not an original concept, but one espoused by Michael H. Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape. I hinted at it in yesterday’s post, and I think it deserves a better explanation.
Exposing for Digital
First off, the rule of thumb with digital photography is “expose for the highlights, develop for the shadows.” This is because light reactivity on a digital sensor is fairly linear – that is, each nanosecond X amount of light is received on the sensor. Now, the more light that is received, the “whiter” the detail gets. Eventually it can’t get any lighter, and that pixel is flat-white. At this point, we call it “blown out.”
So, with digital you shoot to avoid blown out pixels, which leaves shadows slightly underdeveloped. Then you try to smooth things out after the fact – thus the need for noise reduction software, etc.
Exposing for Film
Now, the rule of thumb with film is “expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights.” This is referring to how emulsions react to light. One might think that emulsion reactivity, like a digital sensor, is linear – for every nanosecond, x amount of crystals react and you get some detail. That isn’t true, however: it’s curved. After a certain amount of exposure to light, the reactivity of the crystals slows down. So, given a highly dynamic range, a film camera might be able to expose for the shadows and not blow out the highlights.
With film it’s all the more important: in digital, you’re virtually guaranteed detail in the shadows. With film, it takes a small amount of time to start the chemical reaction. If there’s not enough light, there’s no reaction – and instead of blown-out highlights, you end up with undeveloped shadows. The same problem as with digital, but on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Shooting Digital with Film’s rules
Now, what Reichmann said was to shoot digital as if it’s film. This won’t work with JPEG output, mind you: once JPEGs blow out a pixel, that’s it – game over.
But with RAW photos it’s different. See, RAW photos actually have a stop or two (in my experience, almost three with Nikon RAW) of flexibility past what you can see on a screen. So, the argument goes: expose for the shadows. You’ll end up with a bright picture, but detail is still all around.
In post-processing you can subjectively reduce your exposure, until you get something you like. Your shadows will be well-defined, noise will be reduced, and you can control parts of the exposure, just like in the old days in the darkroom.
Yesterday’s final pic is a great example of this in action. The exposure was fine on the foreground, but the sky was blown out. Subjective exposure tweaks brought it all back together.
Rescuing Overexposed Shots
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009Take the following two pictures:
 Unprocessed Image |
 Processed |
The thing that should jump out at you in the “before” picture is that the clouds have virtually no definition and the sky is washed out. They are drastically overexposed due to the dark foreground. Now, some of this may be due to the altitude – I was about 8,000 feet above sea level, something I’m not too used to. So my mental focus wasn’t that sharp, and I didn’t review the histogram on-site for blown-out highlights. Click to continue »
Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity
Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
Mountains over Seward
Almost a year ago, I went to the NAPP Photoshop World in Las Vegas. I’m dying to go again this year, but I’m afraid I’m out of time. Maybe next year – especially if they would add more about using Photoshop in the medical field… but I digress.
One of the main concepts I came away with was courtesy of Jean Paul Caponigro. He said: color is merely a blend of hue, saturation, and luminosity. He lamented that a photoshop filter (similar to the channel mixer or the contrast/brightness applet) had been removed, but then pointed out that it was back in Adobe Raw, and pointed out a couple of ways to fake it in Photoshop.
Well, that’s kind of the point of the photo to the right. It was a poorly processed HDR image, which just couldn’t be brought close to color properly in Photomatix – not easily, at least. The original was far too grey, in fact. But with H/S/L, we can bring back the colors to how they should be. The steps I took here, and why:
- Tweaked hue for yellows and greens – moved them more to the green side of the scale, but very slightly. Yellows, about 11, Greens about 18. This moved the muted greens over to a more pure green, without adding saturation or brightness.
- Tweaked green luminosity – added no more than 10. This brightens the greens, which means we lose saturation. A side benefit: we lose some of the greys.
- Removed about 8 in luminosity from yellows – after the tweaks, they were almost too saturated.
- Slighty bumped green & yellow in saturation – this gets rid of the last of those greys and makes the hills feel “alive.”
Rescuing Ice Pics
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
A Calving Glacier
Here’s a situation that happened to me last week, on the 6th full day of a South-East Alaska cruise: we’re sailing through fog, right up to the Hubbard Glacier. When we get up to it, everything is spectacular – calving at regular intervals (that’s the breaking off of ice into the ocean), deep blues… how to show this?
Well, even with proper exposure, you’ll end up with a fairly flat, even grey pic. The problem is that everything is a dingy white, and the sensor will try to dirty it down. You can alter your exposure, but it won’t really matter – you’ll still end up with a flat image, short on the color that you actually see.
In the case of this picture, here are the steps to resurrecting it:
- Tweak around the general exposure & some of the contrast in Adobe Raw. Don’t overdo it.
- Open in Photoshop, and duplicate (<cmd/ctrl>-J) the bottom layer.
- Open levels (<cmd/ctrl>-L), and bring in the high & low markers to fringe the actual histogram (to the very edges of where it starts).
- Open Viveza and drop points across the sky. Desaturate slightly and darken.
- Drop points across the ice, too. Increase saturation (very slightly) and contrast.
- Resize, sharpen and save.
In this case, I took it a little overboard on the glacier. This was deliberate – otherwise the splash from falling ice gets completely lost.
Salvaging poor pics, ctd.
Saturday, July 25th, 2009Continuing on with yesterday’s thoughts, I noticed a post on DPS, where the author uses Photomatix to create a worthwhile photo. The short version: he uses two differently-rentered (but the same) photos and blends them in Photoshop.
I’ve used a similar technique before, but haven’t gone this heavy into the HDR feel when doing it (BTW, I think he did an excellent job of not overdoing it). Looks like something new to try…