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
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.”
Shooting red on a blue background
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
Red strobed flowers
Taking a picture with strobes can be somewhat challenging with the setup that you have to the right. What we have here are two primary colors, red and blue, with slightly different tones that need to come out well saturated. I’m doing this indoors, so I don’t want the light to be quite as harsh as I did last time, so I’ll use a softbox. How am I going to set this up so that the background recedes and the flowers are well saturated?
A few things. First, I need to keep the lighting on the flowers delicate. They’re already pretty bright, so they don’t need a lot of light. Too much, and the colors bleach out. I also need them to be brighter than the background – the background is actually a mid-to-light blue color (my daughter’s lunchbox, in fact).
So I start by exposing f/stop wise where I think I’ll need it for the light. f/11 or so. Then I adjust shutter speed while exposing for the background, aiming to hit -1EV for that guy. Flash with softbox is perched to camera left, set on manual (14 mm spread) at 1/32nd power. Blinds it out on the petals. Move it down in third stops until it stops bleaching out: 1/64 even is the flash. Try slightly smaller and larger f/stops, find f/11 is still the best.
That’s all there was to this. These petals are from the www.moosestooth.net parking lot (my daughter snagged them). I did the full setup, shooting and teardown in 20 minutes – her bath.
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
Friday, July 24th, 2009
Some sorta flower my daughter named 'em "giggle flowers."
I’ve been thinking lately about the quality of my pictures. The quality is sure going up, and that’s a good thing – I hate spending time on post production. On the other hand, there are always decent photos that are just missing a little something – maybe flat, or the background doesn’t stand apart, or not fully sharp.
Take the photo to the right: in the original (not shown here), the photo is pretty dull. Low contrast, not terribly interesting, and fairly dull colors. The greens were good, but nothing really stood out. Minor tweaks in Adobe RAW helped (as usual), but didn’t really solve the entire problem.
In the end, I had to pull the entire thing into photoshop and use NIK’s Viveza to breath life into it. Look at the pic in the large view & you’ll see.
Post production, an example
Monday, July 20th, 2009
Eklutna Lake at Dawn
Take the photo to the right. In its original form, it’s pretty good. Flat lighting, but that’s due to the haze and fog. For full rendering, however, it really needed to have a few things brought out. The mountain in the background was barely visible, for example. There was a yellow haze over the mountain, and due to exposing for that large amount of white, the grasses in the foreground had lost a lot of their saturation. To make things worse, I had a large smudge over part of the mountain (I later found a fingerprint on the back piece of glass on my lens – dunno how that got there!).
So, for editing: I smoothed out the histogram in Adobe Raw, using minor tweaks to contrast, clarity, and exposure until I had a good base image. Then, to Photoshop:
- Bring in the mountains: I used the dodge and burn tools (something I rarely do) to bring in the peak in the background. There wasn’t much detail there, but it wasn’t really needed. In this case, it’s the idea of a mountain that’s important.
- Remove yellows from the smudge: Burning in colors included burning in yellows. I swapped over to the sponge tool (set to desaturate), and lightly went over the burned-in haze. This left in the smudge, but it’s no longer a blob of smog.
- Remove the smudge altogether: the smudge covered part of the peak, so I couldn’t get away with the easier tools (healing brush, patch tool). This requires heavy-duty work. Fortunately contours were visible. I built back in the sky around the mountains using a light touch on the clone tool (set to lighten). Then I smoothed out the smudge in the mountain, using the same settings. This was tricky, needing to find a similar structure to not blow anything out. Finally, minor spot touch up with the healing brush.
- Bring back light to the grasses: this was a natural job for NIK’s Viveza tool, and that’s what I used. Four control points spread along the grass, set very slightly up for brightness (+6%) and contrast (+8%), and saturation (+8%).
- Brighten the water: still in Viveza, with four more control points. In this case, contrast was moved up to 12%, brightness to 8%. That was enough.
- Remove noise: This was a handheld image, so I had a faster ISO going when I took it. To get around that, my next-to-final step was to run NIK Dfine 2. Defaults were fine.
After that, it was just a matter of resizing, sharpening, and saving.
This is possibly my favorite shot from that camping trip – very “Lord of the Rings” – or so it seems to me…
Post processing for effect
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
Clover in a sand pit
The photo to the right was originally a fairly decent picture, but nothing spectacular. By that I mean that it had decent placement, a good symmetry to the petals, and something to look at in regards to sharpness. It looks much better after processing, though.
In this case, it didn’t take much. First, I started in Adobe RAW. Steps were roughly:
- Moved it to +1.3EV;
- Slid contrast to the right until there was decent contrast (whites are blown out);
- Moved recovery slider over to recover highlights;
- Reduced EV back to +.4;
- Moved up Clarity slightly, until petals jumped out again;
Then in to Photoshop:
- Open the NIK Viveza tool;
- Lower brightness on background areas with control points (4 points, large);
- Slightly increase saturation on rosy areas of clover with another control point, click OK;
- Merge layers on a new layer;
- Sharpen (with a luminosity layer, at 60% opacity);
- Add copyright, etc.;
Total time: 3 minutes. Which is why I was willing to pay for NIK’s software – it saves that much time.
NAPP Photoshop world
Saturday, June 27th, 2009Twice a year, the National Association for Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) hosts Photoshop World. One of these takes place on the east coast, the other in Las Vegas. Last year I went, and… it was a blast! Not so much that it was a non-stop party (frankly, their party-like stuff was kinda lame), but there was soooo much to learn!
I’m debating on whether to go again this year. Last year I learned a lot, but this year it’s even more focused on photography than in prior years, and most of it appears somewhat basic. But even basic classes last year were mighty useful.
If I had a gripe, I would say that the classes were too short – in & out in an hour – that’s barely enough to get a taste of each instructor. I think I’ll hold on to that perspective this year – looking at it as a chance to evaluate instructors for what else I might learn from them afterward.
My only hesitation in going: I’m completely self funded on these operations. Tickets from Alaska to… anywhere are ridiculous (seriously, I think we subsidize cheap flights in the lower 48). And I’ll have to cover room, flight, conference fees…
http://www.photoshopuser.com/
Frame within a frame
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
HDR of clouds and trees
I read a lot on photography. One of the more common themes a year or two ago were about finding the “fram within a frame.” That is to say, find a new composition an existing photo. For example, take a look to the right. An HDR from last weekend, which has some incredible light in the clouds, but sorta loses the feel in the trees. This was hand-held, mind you, so that might have contributed to the trees being off, but it was also slightly windy.
Nonetheless, the light in the clouds was great! Wanting to capture this, I dinked around for a few minutes in photoshop, until I came out with the photo below.
There I go again with abstracts…
HDR Clouds, from cropping in the previous pic