Post Processing

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Rescuing Ice Pics

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
A Calving Glacier

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.

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Salvaging poor pics, ctd.

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Continuing 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…

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Salvaging poor pics

Friday, July 24th, 2009
Some sort of flower

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.

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Post production, an example

Monday, July 20th, 2009
Eklutna Lake at Dawn

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…

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Post processing for effect

Sunday, July 12th, 2009
Clover in a sand pit

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.

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Shooting through glass

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
Sea Lion at the Sea Life Park

Sea Lion at the Sea Life Park

Some things you just don’t want to do with a point and shoot camera. Like the photo to the right – this was taken with an SLR, through several inches of Plexiglas. Ideally, you want to take this picture with a circular polarizer.

In my case, well… I’ve outgrown my camera case.  I just don’t have the space to carry a camera, several lenses, remote cables and my filters.   So I made do without.

In this case, we had about 20 minutes before the sea lions were going to be fed.  being without my tripod (probably wouldn’t carry it into a place like that, anyway), I wedged myself up agains a railing, mashed the camera into my shoulder, and took a couple.  The fun thing about this is the walking – you have to meander a bit to find a good angle that will reduce the glare.  This was the best angle available.

Another fun part of shooting through colored (lightly tinted) glass? You end up with a color cast as well as a low-contrast photo.  In the original, the sea lion blends in with the background.

Post processing to the rescue!

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Finding Motivation

Saturday, June 13th, 2009
Young ferns, fighting through the recently-cut grass in our backyard

Young ferns, fighting through the recently-cut grass in our backyard

Sometimes it’s hard to be motivated. For me, this usually means that I’m too busy – working long hours, not enough time away from the computer, and not sleeping enough. When I get to that point, I go numb. The world is flat and uninteresting.

I can usually snap out of that by doing something new and interesting – going to someplace new, or finding a new perspective.  Witness the rooftop pic I took recently – that was inspiring.

Today?  Not so much.  It’s drizzling, but not heavily.  The mosquitoes are out, and I’m itchy.  It’s not warm, kinda dank and grey.  I’ve fought my way to the end of a tough week, but I haven’t had my normal opportunities to exercise.  I’m tired and somewhat cranky.

So I’m fairly unmotivated.  How to get around that?  Shift perspectives!  Yesterday I decided to find something that would come out decently in black & white.  Witness the ferns to the right (click for a larger pic – the larger one is much better!).

Details on this: completely manually focused.  In the flat, grey light it’s pretty uninteresting, but by boosting contrast in photoshop, the fronds begin to stand out.  Shift to black & white with NIK Silver EFex, work in some grain & add to contrast & you have this.

Not bad for 5 minutes of work.

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Frame within a frame

Sunday, May 31st, 2009
HDR of clouds and trees

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

HDR Clouds, from cropping in the previous pic

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One final B&W

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Well, for now.  The same day that I took the photo of the mountains across Turnagain arm also yielded the photo below.  This one didn’t come out as well as I would have liked, but it does have something of that light, old-timey feel.  I like that.

In post-processing, I did actually do a bit of burning to the shadows of the trunk, and dodged the details back in to some of the branches. When working in black & white, I usually stick to that – I feel it’s closer to the original techniques in the darkroom.

Bird Creek Tree in B&W

Bird Creek Tree in B&W

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Revisiting RAW vs. JPG

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

It seems that recently I’ve started moving back to using JPG formats for my images. Two months into this blog, and I’ve realized that (for the web, at least), I never start post-processing from the RAW image. That’s partly because the JPG conversion on the sd500 is excellent – it usually takes me much more work in Adobe RAW & Photoshop to get to the same point (which usually means tweaking the black point, adding some fill light, adjusting contrast, and adding sharpness).

RAW is still the far superior format and I should use it exclusively. I’m just finding that my actual use doesn’t require it.

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