Start to Finish Episode 2 Ideas
Rob and I are in the process of developing Episode 2 of the Start to Finish Photoshop and Photography Podcast from the TJM Media Group, and as always we’re looking for your input on what you want to learn and what would be most helpful when it comes to the shoot itself and how to process it for output.
New Points of View Photo Project Image
Ok, since I haven’t gotten any submissions for this week’s Points of View Photo Project as of yet, and I’ve heard that it wasn’t the best source image to use, I’ve decided to offer up an alternate.
Using Textures with Photos
Awhile back I used a photo texture to add a little extra dimension of interest to a series of photos I had been working on and one of my readers asked for a little insight into how to use textures. So, here we go!
TJM Media Group Presents: Start to Finish: Episode 1
The TJM Media Group is pleased to announce the release of the first episode of “Start to Finish” – a series where you, the reader, will help select each month’s photography and graphic design assignment and then watch as your projects are completed, from start to finish. The key to this being a fun, interesting, and informative feature is your interaction. In this first episode, we had to come up with a basic concept on our own.
In this episode, we go on assignment to the grounds of the University of Virginia and photograph Thomas Jefferson’s historic academic village. Photographs are captured to demonstrate basic pano-stitching techniques back in the studio. It was a simple task to get the series up and running.
We have every confidence that you can do much better!
Here’s how we’d like it to work:
Each month we need two basic assignments – a photographic concept and a final presentation.
For example, a suggestion for a photographic concept might be:
Demonstrate the process for capturing the photos needed to render an HDR image of the Lincoln Memorial. The resulting final presentation concept might be: Render the HDR image and present as a fine art print.
(OK, that one seems pretty neat. We might use it… )
Email your suggestions to: start2finish@tjmmediagroup.com
We look forward to working on YOUR assignments.
All the best,
Rob Jones and Jason Moore
Founders, TJM Media Group
Bringing Some Work Home
As some of you may know, by day I am a web designer for a sporting goods company putting together marketing emails, maintaining the look and feel of the website, and keeping an eye on the SEO initiatives we have going.
Coming up later this week we are launching a new sport line. We are mainly a wrestling and volleyball supply retailer, with some running, but we’re jumping into the realm of field sports (lacrosse, field hockey, and soccer) and it has been my job to compile product images, build pages and make sure the whole section is ready to go.
Photoshop Video Contest: Entry #3
This final entry into the So You Think You Can Teach Photoshop contest is one of my personal favorites.
From the first time I saw it I knew I had to figure out how to recreate it for myself. After doing some research, I only found two videos out there that showed how to create the effect. I feel that this is the best entry I have into the contest. I think the production values are good, the content is strong, the effect is unique and interesting, and the process I present is user-friendly and that it all came together quite nicely. (more…)
Photoshop Video Contest: Entry#2
For this next video, I take a look back at a technique I used while developing a marketing campaign at work last spring. It is a concept I borrowed from a car commercial I saw a few years back that added some mystery to the new model that was coming out.
I made a few changes to make it work with what we wanted to do with the volleyball shoe we were selling and I think it has some real potential for uses from product shots to design elements to portrait photography. The possibilities are endless. (more…)
Photoshop Video Contest: Entry #1
As you will notice, I’ve begun making a few changes around here. Most notably with the layout. Every 6-9 months I like to freshen things up a bit and give the site a little face lift and since my last redesign was in March, I felt that it was due. There are still some bugs to work out as I get used to this new system, so please bear with me.
Now that NAPP’s So You Think You Can Teach Photoshop?! contest is closed and the judging is soon to be under way, I thought I would share my entries with you. (more…)
Software Review: Topaz Adjust
I will be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of plug-ins. Maybe I’ve just never used the right ones, maybe I’ve never played around with them enough, maybe I just haven’t been too impressed with the results. So, I’m going into this one a little skeptical from the start.
With all of that said, I must say that when I sat down to try out Topaz Adjust, from Topaz Labs, I found myself actually enjoying the process. Now, I’m not a purist at all; I think if you have the tools at hand and the ability to utilize them to achieve your vision, by all means. But I feel, and I’ve said this before, that sometimes people can go overboard and turn a potentially good photo into something kind of “alien”, surreal, and even cartoonish which distracts from more than enhances the viewing experience. Not that it isn’t ok to do that sometimes, but it should be done sparingly, in my opinion.
When I opened up my source image from a photowalk I did in Boston over the summer, I was presented with a dark, flat, and uninteresting photo – isn’t that how most of them start out?
Sometimes, when presented with a shot like this I may even just pass right by it without giving it another thought thinking that it was a nice idea but the light wasn’t right or I didn’t take enough time to do this or that the way I wanted to. Then I thought, what better way to really put this Photoshop plug-in to the test than with an image I’m not excited about in the first place? And so the fun began.
When I first opened the plug-in dialog I felt that the interface was very intuitive with a diverse set of presets and their respective previews running down the left, a decent-sized window for your full-sized image (complete with the option to zoom in and out of your photo), and a collection of sliders along the bottom for any fine-tuning you may want to do.
I started off by clicking through each of the presets to see how they would each affect my shot, thinking as I went that a number of them just didn’t give me what I was looking for. At the same time, though, I found myself thinking how I could see where those effects might come in handy with other types of images. I finally landed on the “Dramatic” preset which really caught my attention. I felt as though it really balanced out the tones in the image by lightening up the shadow areas without blowing out the highlights. It also brought out a great deal of details and made the sky, well, dramatic. All adding interest and depth to the photo.
In a way it created an HDR-like effect without the downsides I mentioned above. I then hit the sliders to refine the image even further and really get the results I was hoping for. I brought back a little detail in the highlights and shadows, supressed the noise a tad, and made sure that I wasn’t getting that awful halo effect that a lot of HDR photos employ. In the end, I was pretty pleased with the final image. And considering I was about to dismiss the photo altogether, I’d say that using Topaz Adjust saved it from the recycle bin. Here’s my final image (only process with Topaz Adjust):
Pros:
- Simple, straightforward, and intuitive interface.
- Variety of presets available, with previews
- Large preview window with zoom
- Ability to adjust each setting to fine-tune the image
- Hovering over a slider does more than show you the tool’s name, it pops up a description of what that tool is actually doing
- Works well Smart Objects so you can always go back – gotta love that it’s non-destructive!
- Priced at only $49.99 puts it within reach of everyone.
Cons:
- I could tell that the presets were on the left, but I think the section could’ve been set apart or labeled a little more clearly to make it more self-evident.
- I think some of the names for the sliders could be improved to help the user have a better idea of what’s going on (ie – “Highlights” should be called something more like “Highlight Protection”).
- I think the interface could be rearranged a little bit for a cleaner look – but I might just be nitpicking at this point.
In the end, I would say that I am very glad to have been introduced to this plug-in and it has helped change the way I feel about plugins as a whole. I would definitely recommend adding Topaz Adjust to your Photoshop toolkit!
Workflow Friday
For this edition of my Photoshop Workflow series, I thought I would walk you through the steps to add a nice shadow/reflection to a product shot. It’s something that I’ve done a number of times at work for both our website graphics and marketing email campaigns. Because of time, I’ll only have the final image but hopefully the description will sufice.
- Isolate your product from its background and place it in a new document. If you’ve placed it in the new document it should be a Smart Object already, if you just dragged it over, convert it to a smart object for the added flexibility and preservation of the image. In this instance, we’re looking at a new Nfinity Volleyball Shoe that we’re selling so I had both the standard shot as well as the shot of the outsole to work with, which will make the reflection more believeable later on.
- If you are going to use the same image of the product as the reflection, duplicate the layer using Cmd/Ctrl+J. Select the version that is lower in the layer stack and go to Free Transform (Cmd/Ctr+T) and flip it vertically and align shift it down so that it lines up below the primary “right-side-up” version of the image.
- Lower the opacity of the upside-down image to around 40%. Add a layer mask to this same layer and with your linear gradient set to “Black to White” grag from the bottom edge of the product to where it meets the right-side-up version. If you like, you can also add a slight Gaussian Blur to it as well.
- To see the effect, using the Rectangle Tool, create a black box below both layers so that the top edge of the box falls part of the way up the original version of the product – be sure to make it far enough up so it looks like the object is sitting on a surface but not too high that the edge is not above the object.
- At this stage we’re going to add a little more flair to it to really make it stand out. On a new layer above the reflection and below the object, use the Eliptical Marquee Tool – or the Elipse Tool – to create an oval around the base of the product and fill it with white. Convert it to a Smart Object and blur it quite a bit to make it look like a spotlight is shining on the product. And reduce the opacity of this layer to about 80% or so – to your taste.
- Duplicate the layer you just created and reduce the size a little, while holding down Option/Alt+Shift to create a hot spot in the middle of the spotlight.
- Duplicate the product shot one more time and select the copy that is directly above the spotlight layers. Add a black Color Overlay Layer Effect to this layer.
- Go into Free Transform and grab the middle handle on the top of the product shot and drag down so it shows up beneath the object – you may need to do some warping/skewing/etc. to get it to fall properly and look right.
- Add about a 4px Gaussian Blur to the shadow layer.
- Add a Layer Mask to the shadow layer and using the edge of a fairly large, soft-edged brush paint with black a couple of times along the edges of the shadow so it will appear that the shadow falls off a little, in a more realistic way.
And the finall shot will look something like this (with a few added touches):
Give it a try and if you come up with anything cool, send it along and I’ll post it here on the blog!
Workflow Friday: Michael Palmer
For this week’s Photoshop Workflow Friday post we get a look inside a recent HDR project from DC-area photographer, Mike Palmer.
(click to enlarge)
I shot all images RAW with a D200 w/ 24-120 VR Nikkor , I shot Aperture priority, bracketed, 3 shots, hand held at f3.5. I overlapped the pano 20 percent for each shot.
Imported the .NEF’s into Lightroom. I selected the series (3 x how many in the pano) I was going to batch processes in Photomatix, created a new folder in LR and put the images in the folder. Started photomatx, did a batch of that folder at 3 images, and walked away. So how do I get the look? These are the setting I used. If you use Photmatix, you know they a a bit over the top, but I went to a HDR seminar by Chris Alvanas at CDIA and he is the one who turned me on to this. He was also the guy that was in Nikon World Magazine for HDR and the cover for Shutterbug.
After they batch processed in Photomatix Pro ,the tonemapped .Jpegs would be plaed in a new folder, I synced the folder in LR, and the tonemapped .Jpegs would import into LR. Select (Ctrl-click) the .Jpegs and right click, Merge to Pano in Photoshop. Ctrl-Shift-E to merge layers, Crop, Curve, Sharpen (unsharp mask Amt 185, Radius 1, Threshold 5-10), add letterbox effect in canvas (Alt-Ctrl-C). Save and export for the blog at 2000 wide 72dpi.
Bottom Line, Its FUN, I do not carry a tripod everywhere, and I think the water came out really cool in the process, very angry. Try it yourself and have some fun… If I was not clear (not the first time) or you have a question, feel free to email me Michael@mpalmerphotography.com.
Check out some Mike’s other HDR shots from this series:
Thanks Mike!
Workflow Friday: Marcus Taylor
This week we welcome photographer Marcus Taylor of the blog Invisible Green Photography. This is a really cool series of HDR photos that have a really nice balance between the true-to-life tonal range that HDR provides and the surreal, almost dreamlike nature of some of the artistic applications of HDR without being over-the-top like so many others seem to do.
Take it away, Marcus!
Urban Exploring in HDR
Shooting
For our December meetup, my photography group planned an urban exploring outing in Atlanta. Having never been before I had no idea what to expect, so I set out without much of a plan. Once we got there, and I saw what we would be shooting I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try some HDR shots. Nearly everything I shot that day was a sequence of bracketed shots from three stops below to three stops above what my camera was metering.
Of the shotss I got on the trip, this composition would turn out to be my favorite shot of the day. I might have missed it too, because I was pretty much done shooting when I found it. The rest of the group was standing around talking while a couple of guys were still shooting. I stood around for a minute, but then kept walking around, looking for something else. I had already shot just the hook
and just the tag on the background wall,
but while I was walking around I realized the similar shapes would make for an interesting shot. So I setup my tripod, lined up the hook with the tag and fired my bracketed sequence.
When shooting HDR, or any photography for that matter, the most important steps in the workflow are what I’ve desciribed above. You have to find something interesting to shoot and then shoot it in a way that conveys what it was that pulled you to it. For me, this shot was just about the rhythms of the shapes, colors, and textures. The correctly exposed version of the shot is interesting on it’s own without the HDR processing. As was recently said by David Duchemin, HDR is not an “unsuck filter”, if you don’t have a very good image to start with, then no amount of post processing is going to make it good.
Photomatix
Here’s how I post processed this image, or rather these images. First I imported the files to my computer. When shooting for HDR I generally only use the jpegs straight out of camera, so I don’t bother with the RAW files. I haven’t found any noticeable improvement in image quality from using the RAW vs JPG when tone mapping, and it saves a lot of time over processing each RAW file.
I use an image viewer to find the correct sequence of shots and make a note of each number in the sequence. Then I open Photomatix Pro, go to HDR > Generate.
On the HDR dialog press Browse
and select all of the images you want to use for your image.
Click open, then ok. And you will see the Generate HDR dialog.
Use “Align Source Images” to make sure slight movements between composition don’t cause problems for the image. Use “Attempt to Reduce Ghosting Artifacts” if there was something moving through your images, people or a breeze, etc. And “Take tone curve of color profile”. Then click ok. Depending on how many images you’ve used, or how large they are, this could take several minutes.
When that’s done, you will see an image that doesn’t look very good at all.
In order to get a presentable image, you’ll need to Tone Map it. Go to HDR > Tonemapping.
You’ll get a new window with a much better looking image, and a dialog box with many options.
For this image, and most HDR images, I used “Details Enhancer” because it allows a lot finer control of the details than the “Tone Compressor” method. I can’t tell you exactly what settings I used for this shot, but my practice with working these settings in Photomatix is the same for most any photo editing program. That is is I push them to an extreme value, then back them down to a point that looks more like what I was going for. The settings in the screen shot are a rough approximation of what I used to tone map this one. It’s rare that I keep the strength at 100% but in this case I think it was warranted. I also use the Micro Tab and bumped the micro contrast to 4 and Micro-smoothing to 5.
After fine tuning the settings to your liking, click “Apply” to apply the tonemapping, then save the image as a tiff.
Photoshop
The final step in the process is to open the image in Photoshop for a little bit of enhancing. When I shot this, I thought the empty beer bottle was an interesting detail. Once I generated the HDR I found the bottle distracting so, I cloned it out.
After cleaning everything up, I used high pass sharpening, to bring out a little bit more of the texture. To do this you’ll need to create a composite of all the layers, the easiest way to do this is press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E. Then, with the new stamped layer selected, Go to Filter > Other > High Pass.
In the dialog that comes up slide the radius slider to the right until you just start to see color in the preview.
Click ok, then change the blending mode of the layer to Overlay.
My final step before publishing to my website was to resize, flatten, and save as JPG.
And here’s the end result.
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Workflow Friday
So, I guess it’s my turn. I decided to pull one of my videos out of the moth balls to share with you a fun little technique for turning your 2D images into a 3D-like magazine or book. Enjoy!
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Workflow Friday: Jason Anderson
For this edition of our Photoshop Workflow series, we welcome the Canon Blogger himself, Jason Anderson. Jason will be taking us away from the processing side of things and delving deeper into the terribly important, yet oft overlooked best practices of digital asset management.
Without further ado… Heeeeere’s Jason!
First off, I would like to thank Jason for sharing his blog with such a wide range of both skilled and professional photographers as well as those of us who are, let’s just say, a little lower on the learning curve of this great field of photography. It is quite an honor to be here today.
For my contribution, I would like to share something that is not often talked about, and that is digital asset management. As I begin, I would like to say, for the record, that I am certainly not a professional photographer, so my images aren’t nearly important to me as those digital negatives are to pros like wedding photographers, graphic artists, and the like. Having said that, as a self-professed geek, and an IT nerd, it is equally important for me to state that my file integrity is pretty darned important to me.
Notice how I started off by stating that my file integrity is important to me. That is because a photograph stored on a computer is just that – a file; nothing more, and nothing less. It literally is just a bunch of ones and zeros to the computer, and a computer (or more accurately the hard drive within your computer) doesn’t care whether the file contains information about a possible photograph (something that creates a picture when printed) or a possible text file (something that creates a document when printed). As a result, all the files on your computer are treated with equal care by the computer itself.
On a larger scale, it is important to understand that the concepts demonstrated here relate to more than just your photograph-type files. These principles and concepts apply to everything. I am talking about everything – your photos, your music, your videos, even those silly email forwards you’ve downloaded to save about something pithy that you just don’t want to delete, but will likely never read again! These are all your digital assets. However, since we are admittedly talking within the parameters of a photography blog, I’ll limit the specifics to that file format most relevant – the digital negative. Keep in mind though, there are more assets out there than our negatives, and we must make plans to care for those assets as well. However, I’ll cut to the chase for the purposes of this post.
Your answer on how to create a BEST PRACTICES FOR DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM lies in reading, understanding, and adopting the practices of The DAM Book – Digital Asset Management for Photographers, by Peter Krogh. Although this was written in the ancient days of CS2, the principles still apply.
Now it’s time for another revelation – I don’t follow the DAM book to the letter. It’s my weakness. I always strive for the best of intentions, but am never able to completely conquer a task to the degree that I would wish. Whether restricted by time, finances or other ends, it’s something that I admit I will never get a complete handle on. So, what’s a guy (or gal) like me to do? The best that you can! And here is my method for doing just that – the best that I can given my limited resources both in the way of time and assets.
First off, after I am finished shooting (most of the time), I will take the CF card out of the camera, insert into a card reader, and connect to my computer. My computer houses only one onboard hard drive – for my operating system and program files. I don’t care whether you are running Windows or Mac, a desktop or laptop, this should apply for everyone! The OS drive should never contain your important documents, because that is the one most likely to fail and unable to “boot”. My other “drive”, is a USB connected SAN drive – a Western Digital 1TB drive, consisting of 2 500GB drives. Instead of leaving it as a single unit, I broke the drive up and made it the 2 500GB drives. Here’s why – backups!
Yes, I am going to lecture on backing up for just a moment – primarily because of the way I have this set up. Guess how often I back up my data? Never! I don’t do a darned thing! Once, just once, I set up a script file that does a backup of the 1st 500 GB drive to the second. The script is scheduled to run nightly. So, for me it’s been a set-and-forget process. That way I know anything that goes on that SAN is backed up.
Here you might wonder why I am calling this USB connected drive a SAN. The reason is because this drive is shared out across my internal network. I have a network of anywhere from 3 to 6 computers running, and since all computers (except one) get their internet address from the router, each computer can see one another. My Macbook Pro has the iTunes and iPhoto libraries housed on the network drive. My Windows computer has its My Documents folder pointing to a shared location on the network drive. All my important file are on this network drive. I have it labeled “Y”.
Sure, I could build a RAID array, but that takes time and money. I could even buy a Drobo, but that takes money. The idea of this SAN came about as a cost effective and time efficient way to maximize safety and minimize risk. I am somewhat safe here, but nevertheless, I am at risk. The reason is because there is no system (in my mind) that is 100% risk free. Drives will fail, and when that day comes, it will be a matter of minimizing your losses and maximizing your recovery.
Enough about backups though – the bottom line is to come up with a backup system and do it – regularly. Script it, schedule it, or whatever, but you just have to DO IT! Okay, now on to my method for digital asset management…
Rather than just explain it, let me help with a visual. Look at image #1 – here you can see my desktop folders on the Windows computer. It has a Y drive – this is the SAN drive.
Now, look at image #2 – here you see the wide array of file types I have on the SAN – probably more stuff than I need on there, and it is always due for maintenance and cleaning, but I digress. A root level folder I have there is called images. Guess what’s housed in here?
Now, look at image #3 – I have all my images categorized by subject matter. This tells me what the folder contains, and is a good starting point for finding something I am looking for. Are there times where I haven’t found what I was looking for (calling U2…)? Sure – but only because I had deviated from my own system! When I adhere to my system, it works.
So, what about edits of files? Workups? Printed versions? Web Versions? Well, thanks for asking! Let’s take a look at a sample folder. Look at image #4. Here I have the original raw files. Now also notice the sub folders within that category. At this point it’s just a matter of remembering to save your output to the right location. If you do that, all your images will be easily found. Notice that I don’t change my filenames to match a description or anything, like the DAM book suggests. For me that’s just personal preference. If I need a file named that way for web submission (like to Popular Photography or some other venue, I’ll make my first save to the Y drive, then copy to the desktop for emailing and rename as they request. That file then gets deleted off my desktop.
So, why do I only have 250GB of image files and it’s less than that, remember the other assets?)? Chimping! I chimp in-camera. If my flash didn’t fire, a shot is under exposed or over exposed, I just delete it. I will even delete if a quick glance on the composition looks bad…if it looks bad on a 3” screen how will a 22” screen make it look better? I delete! I have other methods too – and here I side with Dave Cross, because I love Adobe Bridge!
When I get the files into the unsorted folder I am brutal on myself. I delete anything that doesn’t make me go “oooh, that has possibilities!”. If I see any two shots that look pretty darn close, I’ll increase the thumbnails to see if I had a blinker – if not, I delete one. If I see 4-5 shots that are all close to one another I actually keep those because 4-5 in succession tells me I am bracketing exposures. Here I can winnow out another third of my shooting efforts in the field. Once I have deleted all the files I don’t want, I then move the remaining images at that moment to a new folder via the “Move” command (who’d have thunk that?) right there in Bridge. If I have a pre-existing folder, that’s where the images go (Maggie is a good one – I take lots of shots of my dog). If I don’t have a pre-existing folder – I make one, right there. It takes 5 seconds, and it also forces me to get a few tags ready for the images mentally. Because once the images are moved, I start tagging.
Here is where I agree and adhere to the DAM book. I add the tag info for all shots on import into Bridge! Here I also go through even more methodically and star the images, 1-4. This helps the winnowing process. My rule of thumb: Ones are deleted if I don’t see any modifications after 6 months – it means the shot has not stayed with me, so why should it stay for anyone else? Twos are maintained because there could be just minor flaws or things that I just would like to retain for documentary reasons. Threes and fours are my gallery quality work. Threes are the ones that have potential with a few tweaks in either PS or even just ACR. Fours, I don’t even edit – they are great in camera and I just leave intact for cropping, outputting to print or whatever!
You’d think that’s it but there’s one more caveat to all of this. Remember those raw files you see at the root of each subject folder? I also burn a copy of these to DVD after import. Sometimes it takes more than one DVD. Sometimes, it even takes 3 or 4. But I do this to maintain a second copy of all negatives. I know, they don’t have permanence like a hard drive or other possible storage – but I figure with the mirrored hard drive creating a backup, and then a DVD copy stored elsewhere (this little bugger sits in the trunk of my car in the middle of the spare tire…check out image #5 below). That pretty much mitigates my risk. Is it gone? Nope, my computer could fail, the SAN could crash, the backup skipped for that day, and the DVD could be scratched beyond readability – but what are the odds of that? It’s a matter of tilting the odds in your favor, and here I think I’ve accomplished that. It may not be as fancy as all the Drobos people are talking about – but I just can’t justify the $500 for each unit and then the cost of all the drives. This is a triple backup solution, and I do it for $200.
The last caveat in all of this is understanding that your asset management needs will change as your library expands. I know this system won’t last me forever, and eventually, a Drobo or RAID solution might be called for. But with my photography, I can certainly keep things in check by just being honest with myself about the “keepers” versus “throw-aways”. Think about it – how many images are you keeping that you really could throw away? Sure, storage is cheap, but does that mean we shouldn’t be critical of our work? Hopefuly, that’s some food for thought. I know, the subject is not always a fun one to think about – but if we do take the time to think about how we manage our assets, we can hopefully become better photographers in the process, by virtue of training our eyes to see through the chaffe and help reduce the need for deleting photos. Imagine if all your shots were keepers! My God, think of the storage needs!
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Workflow Friday: Shawn Duffy
For this week’s edition of our Photoshop Workflow series, we welcome DC area photographer, Shawn Duffy of SDuffy Photography. Shawn leads photowalks around DC, does some amazing journalistic shots in Palestine, and has created quite an iconic image from the 2008 election. He’s a hell of a photographer and a really nice guy and I’m sure you will learn a lot about the whole process from capture to HDR.
Take it away, Shawn!
Every time I am in Pittsburgh, I love going up to Mount Washington and taking photos of my hometown. This time, though, I wanted to do a multi-shot panorama in HDR. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do but had never done it before. Here, I’ll walk you through the steps for turning your multi-shot panoramas into awesome high dynamic range panoramas!
This tutorial assumes you have the following:
- A camera with Automatic Exposure Bracketing capability
- A tripod
- Adobe Photoshop
- Photomatix Pro
- Basic knowledge on creating HDR photos… For a great, basic HDR tutorial see Stuck in Customs.
First, I’ll show you the finished product. The full-size original image is comprised of twelve photographs and is about 750MB and 23 megapixels in size:
Click the photo below for a larger version…
Taking the Shots
First and foremost, you’ll need to actually shoot the images you want. This is, of course, the most important step.
Set your tripod and point your camera at the most important part of your panorama. For this example, I used the large group of buildings on the right hand side. I chose these because they are a natural subject for a city panorama and also because they are the most detailed and complex parts of the finished product.
After the camera is pointing at your subject, begin setting up your camera:
ISO
Use the lowest ISO setting possible. For most cameras, this is ISO100. My 5D does go down to ISO50, but 100 is what I used for this shot. HDR photos, depending on your final settings can have a fair amount of grain or noise in them. Increasing the ISO also will introduce noise into the final images. Multiply that by three and add on the potential grain from an HDR and you’ll see what I mean.
Manual Mode
This is extremely important. If the camera’s aperture, light metering, or shutter speed differ from shot to shot, you’re going to end up with a panorama where each section is different in tone, exposure, and focus. I’m only a Photoshop newbie, but I can imagine how difficult this would be to fix. For a landscape shot, particularly a panoramic landscape shot, I use a smaller aperture to increase my depth of field. In this particular case, it may not matter much since the city is so far away from me, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind. Once you set your aperture (I used f/7.1 in these photos), adjust your shutter speed so that the main part of your panorama is properly exposed. I used the default average metering for this shot, which will likely work fine unless your dealing with drastic differences in lighting. Based on an aperture of f/7.1, the camera’s light meter told me that 10 seconds would give me proper exposure.
Manual Focus
Turn off your lens’ AutoFocus feature. If you use AutoFocus, the lens is going to refocus every time you move the camera to take a new set of shots. For a small aperture and distant subject, you may not notice the difference in the final shot, but, then again, you might. Using Manual Focus is the only way to go. So, again, adjust your focus so that the main part of your panorama is sharp.
Automatic Exposure Bracketing
After setting up the camera’s ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, you’ll want to enable Automatic Exposure Bracketing, or AEB. Most, if not all, SLR cameras have this feature. This will allow you to take three shots at configurable exposure compensation settings. For most of my HDRs, I set AEB to +/-2. This means that the next three shots will be at 0ev (proper exposure), -2ev (2 steps underexposed), and +2ev (2 steps overexposed).
Swinging Through
Now that your camera is all set up to take the photo, look through your viewfinder and slowly swing through the entire range of the panorama and make sure your zoom is set so that you can get the entire landscape in without having to adjust. Without doing this, you may find that your subject is lined up right but when you go to move to the next segment of your shot, something is running outside the frame.
Zoom
If you have a “wide-angle” lens, don’t use it. It may seem like a good idea but it isn’t. Wide-angle zoom lenses sometimes introduce distortion at the edges of the photo. This happened a lot when I had the Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens. I loved that lens but, at 10mm, the objects at the edges of the photos would lean inward. This will totally screw up your efforts to merge your panoramas later. For this example, I zoomed in to 43mm.
Taking the First Shot
For HDR images, it is vital that your camera move as little as possible for the multiple shots you’re taking. This is especially true at night and even more so for night panoramic images. If you have one, use a remote shutter release. Or, if you don’t have a remote shutter release, use your camera’s timer. This will allow you to take the long exposure shots without risking your hand moving the camera when you press the button. As an extra bonus for those of you that use the timer, your camera may take all three shots in a row when AEB is set. My 5D does this and, even though I have a remote shutter release, I still tend to use the timer. All I need to do is enable AEB, use the timer, and hit the button once. After the timer expires (10 seconds), the camera fires off all three shots.
You can shoot in any direction (left-to-right or right-to-left), but I prefer to shoot from left-to-right. It simply seems more natural to me. So, after I set up my camera while looking at the city, I swung it around and began taking photos on the left side of the image.
Taking the Next Shot
When you’re doing panoramas, you’ll want to make sure that each segment overlaps the previous one significantly. I believe I’ve heard they should overlap as much as 30%. That’s fine. The more the better, in my opinion. That will give your photomerging software more to work with when it has to merge them later. So, after you take your first set of photos, make a mental note of some landmark on the edge toward where you’ll be swinging the camera next. When you slowly swing the camera to the next position, make sure that landmark is easily visible and not too close to the edge. Now you’re ready to take the next few shots.
Another word on framing… Photoshop, in my limited experience, does a pretty good job of stitching images together. That being said, try not to have major overlaps right in the middle of your subject or right in the middle of a particular complex area. You want as much of your subject in one frame as possible. That way, if Photoshop doesn’t stitch them together perfectly, it won’t be in a critical part of the photo and may be easier to fix.
The Shots
Here you can see the shots I ended up with after taking after setting up my camera as described above. At each spot, I had the camera take three photos via AEB:
Each segment’s photos are as follows: 0ev, -2ev, +2ev
Segment 1:
Segment 2:
Segment 3:
Segment 4:
Export The Shots
Now, we will export the photos to a folder on our hard drive. Make sure to export all the photos at the same exposure level into the same folder. We’ll be merging the photos into three big panoramas before we do any HDR work. I export the photos into folders with descriptive names such as “Pan-OverExposure”, “Pan-UnderExposure”, and “Pan-ProperExposure”.
For example, the following four photos will be in the folder “Pan-ProperExposure”:
Repeat for the under-exposed and over-exposed versions.
Merging The Shots in Photoshop
Open up Photoshop and select File -> Automate -> Photomerge:
Next, you will see the following dialog, where I’ve already added the first set of four photos from “Pan-ProperExposure”. You’ll also notice I selected ‘Cylindrical’ for the Layout, though you’re free to experiment with the others for different effects:
Click for larger version…
Click OK.
Now, Photoshop will churn away a bit, depending on the speed and memory in your computer and what you’ll end up with (hopefully) will look like a complete panorama that’s a little rough around the edges.
Repeat this for the other two exposure sets and you should end up with a desktop that looks something like this:
Click for larger version…
On the right-hand side, you should notice that all three layers of each panorama are selected. If the panoramas look acceptable to you, merge those layers into a single image. If the panoramas look “off” you may need to retouch them with Photoshop or reshoot while following the directions at the beginning of this article. Merge them by right-clicking (Ctrl-Click) on the selected layers and select “Merge Layers…” as shown to the right. (Click on image for larger version…)
Repeat this for all three panoramas. After you’ve merged them all, consider naming the single layer something descriptive. Double-Click on the Layer Name and replace it with something like “Pan-Over”. This tells me that this is the overexposed panorama. This will come in handy later. See below:
And, when you’re done, consider saving them as Photoshop documents in case you need to go back.
Uniformly Resizing and Cropping
Now that we have three panoramas at different exposures, we need to crop them to make sure that they’re all the same size. Photomatix won’t be able to merge them if they’re not. To do this, make sure all three panoramas are open and select the Move Tool as shown to the left.
Next, we’re going to pick one of the images where we’ll drag the other two. The other two images will be added as layers on top of the image you pick. In my case, I dragged the low and proper exposure images to the over-exposed image. Once you have done this, you’ll see one image with a few edges sticking out around the side and three layers corresponding to each of the images. See why we named them?
Click image for larger version…
Now, with your mouse, make sure all three layers are highlighted, then go to “Edit -> Auto-Align Layers…” and select “Auto” Projection as shown in the images below…
Click OK.
Once your computer stops churning, all three layers should be perfectly aligned with each other. Now, we need to apply a crop that will resize all three layers (soon to be separate images again). Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool as shown on the right. With this, select the biggest region of the photo that you can without getting too close to the edges. See my example below:
Click image for larger version…
Next, select “Image -> Crop”:
Your result should now be a three-layer image that’s nice and trim.
Separating the Layers
Photomatix requires multiple photos at different exposure levels. So now that we have three layers that are all identical sizes, we need to use that to create three individual files. Select all three layers in the layers box on the lower right-hand side of the screen and then select “File -> Scripts -> Export Layers to Files…”:
Click on the image for a larger version…
Now you have three identical images at different exposures that you can easily turn into an awesome HDR photo! For help on creating an HDR with these three photos, see this awesome tutorial from Stuck in Customs.
Again, here we have our finished product:
Click on each image for a larger version…
And, one more, with a little more color and different post-processing:
Have any panorama or HDR tips? Leave them in the comments below!
Workflow Fridays are sponsored in part by Competico.com. Competico offers the world’s leading online photography competitions. Head on over and sign up for your free account, enter your own photos and vote for your favorites today!
If you would like to sponsor this or one of our other regular series, or if you would like to support this site through a general site sponsorship or banner ad, please visit our sponsor page to learn how!
Workflow Friday: Scotty Graham
This week’s Workflow Friday comes from the other side of the world from my humble home here in the states. Scotty Graham lives in Indonesia and takes some tremendous shots from all over the world, both above and below the water. Today’s workflow contribution gets us beneath the surface of Scotty’s process and will surely offer some info and inspiration as you approach your own work.
Scotty, they’re all yours!
From Dive To Print
I am honored to be Jason’s guest blogger today on Workflow Friday. My name is Scotty Graham, and I am a professional photographer. Although a professional, I do not make my living taking photos, thankfully. I am a teacher, and my hope is that you can learn something new today.
I enjoy all forms of photography. However, my passion for the past 25 years has been underwater photography. My workflow is different with my underwater photography than it is for my work above ground. In fact, my workflow for my “land” photography is not much different than the other professionals that have shared their workflow on this blog. Today, let’s change the pace just a bit, and let me describe my typical workflow for an underwater photograph. Let me warn you, this is a lengthy post, but in reality, it only takes me a few minutes to actually edit my photographs. Learning short cuts in Photoshop, and using pre-recorded actions helps save heaps of time.
Before I start, I must thank Scott Kelby and his incredible staff at NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals). Virtually everything I know about Photoshop and Lightroom was learned from these incredible educators. If you are not a member of NAPP, sign up NOW….it will be the best 99 bucks you ever spent.
Ok, onto my workflow…using Scott Kelby’s style, I will go step by step…
Step 1: The first actual step is the preparation before the dive. Underwater, you cannot change lenses, and some camera functions cannot be changed either (depending on your housing). So, before I jump on the boat, I must decide if I am going to shoot wide-angle or macro or super macro. Each requires a different set-up with my equipment…ie, which ports to use, which strobes to use, which strobe arms to use, and which lens to install. My decision is really based on the amount of ambient light available at the time of my dive, the visibility, the tide, current, and the time of day. If it is a bright sunny day, I prefer to take wide-angle shots as there will be lots of ambient light that my camera can capture beyond the scope of my strobes. For the shot I am going to describe, I decided to go wide angle. It was early morning, the sky was blue with a bright sun, visibility was good, and we were going to a nice reef with many schooling fish with strong current. Strong current usually means lots of fish, but more challenging for the photographer.
Step 2: Set up your equipment, and check to be sure all camera settings are set beforehand, and that your camera and strobes are working. Check all dive equipment to be sure all is in good working order, and that your tank is full of air. Again, once underwater, if something is not working, you are stuck. Your SCUBA equipment should be in good working order, and your dive skills (especially buoyancy skills) should be top rate. Don’t take photographs underwater until you are an experienced diver or an accident is ready to happen.
My equipment for this shot: Nikon D300, Nexus housing, two Nikonos SB-105 strobes, Nexus dome port and Nikon 10.5 mm DX lens.
Step 3: Plan your dive with your buddy. Make sure he/she knows your plan for what you are going to shoot, and to be prepared to hang around while you take many shots of the same subject from many different angles. Diving with another photographer is usually better as other photographers understand that sometimes an entire dive is spent around one small area of the reef.
Step 4: Dive your plan. When I entered the water, I looked down and saw a gorgeous reef and schooling Yellowstriped Snappers. I instantly knew what I wanted. I wanted a photo of the Snappers swimming across the reef with a blue water background.
Step 5: Get the shot. This is the tough part. Fish are not cooperative models. They rarely swim where you want them, they are always moving, and they are shy and don’t like to get close to your camera. There is also current, surge, and other environmental hurdles trying to prevent your from taking a photo. The key is to stay relaxed, to be patient, and to be a “quiet” diver.
I was able to find a nice sandy spot on the bottom behind a reef that blocked the current. I set my aperture to f-11 (I had decent ambient light for a mid-range f-stop), and my strobes to maximum power. For wide angle underwater, you need to be within inches of your subject to be sure your subject is well lit, and doesn’t appear too small. I waited for the fish to circle the reef, and then slowly approached the reef trying not to disturb the fish. I also wanted the sun in the photo. While viewing my composition in the small viewfinder of my housing, I drift as close to the fish as I can, and fire. Of course, as soon as my strobes fire, the fish scatter…I go back to my spot in the sand, check my photo in my small screen for correct exposure, composition and focus.
Usually, something is off, so I keep repeating the above with different settings and perhaps from a different angle until I get a shot I am happy with. This is the beauty of digital photography. In the old days, I would shoot an entire roll of film on one spot bracketing every shot in hopes of getting one keeper. Digital saves heaps of time as I can just delete underwater if I missed the shot, and I don’t have to wait a week after my dive trip to see if I got the shot or not. What a great time to be an underwater photographer.
Step 6: After the dive, I remove my CF card and download my photos to my EPSON P-5000 (one of the best things I have ever bought). I soak my camera in fresh water (with the housing, of course), go to the nearest hammock, turn on my ipod, and check out the photos I just took looking for keepers. I never delete photos in the EPSON P-5000 unless they are total crap…sometimes a photo that looks like crap turns out to be a good photograph, so I usually keep everything until I see them on my big screen at home (I have a 24-inch iMac).
Step 7: The dive trip is over, and I am home. I hook my EPSON P-5000 to my computer, and download all the photos to a folder on my hard drive named after the dive trip and date…example, RajaAmpat_March2009. I then burn a back-up copy of the photos onto a DVD.
Step 8: I import the photos from this folder into Lightroom, assign key words to all the photos, and keep them in the original folder.
Step 9: I have two monitors, so I have set up Lightroom so that I can view each of my photos in my Apple 23-inch cinema display, and the rest of Lightroom on my 24-inch monitor of my i-Mac. My 23-inch monitor is profiled and calibrated using Spyder3 software (and hardware) for my EPSON 9880 printer, so any adjustments to my photo should be viewed on my calibrated monitor so that accurate prints can be made later.
I then browse through my images and flag the shots I like and delete the totally awful shots (believe me, there are tons of the latter).
Step 10: I then go to the shots that I have flagged as possible keepers, and start the editing process. I chose this photo to edit. All my photos are taken in RAW, and this particular shot is the best I got of the Snappers swimming over the reef. My settings are f-11 at 1/60 sec at ISO 200…10.5mm lens.
Step 11: Move to the develop module in Lightroom. This is where my workflow differs somewhat from my land shots. Color underwater is a mess. You lose color very quickly underwater. The color is lost in order of the spectrum of light…remember ROY G BIV? First, you lose your reds, oranges and yellows, then greens, then Blues, Indigo and violets. Get to a depth of just 10 meters and everything looks grey until you artificially add light, and then the color comes bursting at you. This is why it is imperative you shoot with strobes underwater. Even with strobes, my photo above looks washed out and drab. My goal in Lightroom is to bring back the color and make my image “pop”.
Step 12: I first look at the histogram and check for proper exposure. In this case, the photo is a bit underexposed but with some “spikes” on the extreme right. So, the first thing I do is slide the exposure slider to the right slightly, and then slide the recovery slider to the right to bring down those spikes and to gain back any detail lost from over-exposed parts of my photo (mainly the fish bellies in the top left)
Here is my original histogram…
Here is my new histogram…
Now my photo looks like this…not too different…
Step 13: Crop. I don’t like the light from my strobes showing in the top left of the photo and the right side of the photo. I will crop those areas out of the photo.
Step 14: Now for the color. This is the most difficult part of the process. Above ground, I usually make my photos warmer. Underwater, if you move the temp slider to a warmer temp, you will lose the nice blues in the water. On the other hand, if you cool the photo down to bring out the blue water, you lose the nice yellows in the fish. Since reds are the first colors that are lost underwater, I almost always need to move the tint slider to the right for more magenta. The trick is finding the right balance between the two sliders…and I usually do this by eye. I know what the scene is supposed to look like, so I just mess with the sliders until I get close to what I want. I also will use the eye-dropper and click on a neutral gray, and see what Lightroom gives me, and then tweak from there…I settled on these settings…
Step 15: Now go to the color palette and the Tone Curve. I go through each color and move the sliders to bring out each individual color, and then move to the Tone Curve to darken or lighten the highlights, lights, darks and shadows. The most important color to play with is the blue. Here I darkened the blues and added more saturation.
Step 16: Now I go to the other fun sliders…fill light, blacks, contrast, clarity and vibrance. I rarely touch the saturation slider…I just play with these to add contrast and to give the photo some punch. Here are my settings…
Step 17: The last thing I do in Lightroom is to darken the edges with a Lightroom preset that I got from Matt Kloskowski’s website…called Edge Darkening. After darkening the edges, I sometimes have to increase the exposure or fill light to balance.
Step 18: Time to move into Photoshop. Press Cmd + E, and my photo opens in Photoshop with the changes I made in Lightroom.
Step 19: I have some actions that I created that does some magic with colors…in this particular action, I have done the following with one click of the mouse…
A curves adjustment layer to brighten the scene…
A levels adjustment layer to intensify the contrast…
And a Hue and Saturation adjustment layer to boost the colors…
Here is my layers palette…I group all of these adjustments, and then lower the opacity of the group so that it is not over done…
Step 20: Now for some dodging and burning. I want to lighten some of the coral in the foreground, and the school of fish, and darken some of the coral in the background. I do this by creating two new curves adjustment layers with a mask. Once again, I have actions that create these two layers and masks with a single click of the mouse. One brightens the exposure, and the other darkens the exposure. I then paint in both masks where I want the photo brighter and where I want the photo darker. Here is my layers palette. Notice the white parts of my two masks….where I have painted white is where light has been painted or where darkness is painted…
Notice in the photo how the foreground is now brighter, and there is more depth to the school of fish making it appear almost 3-D. The image really pops now as well…
Step 21: My final step in Photoshop is sharpening. I have many sharpening techniques. One of my favorites is a third party filter called Lucis Art. It is like sharpening on steroids. I use the sculpture filter, and sometimes the wyeth filter. The wyeth filter has a tendency to make your photos have an HDR look to them… sometimes good, and sometimes not good. For underwater, I don’t really care for the HDR look, so I usually just use the sculpture filter from Lucis Art. Of course, Photoshop’s unsharp mask works really well too if you don’t have Lucis Art. Anyway, I flatten my image, then duplicate the layer (cmd+J on a mac), and apply the filter, and then reduce the opacity if the effect is too strong.
Step 22: I am finished editing, and am now ready to print or save to the web for my website. I save my changes in Photoshop, which then saves the changes to the copy of the photo in Lightroom. I then print from Lightroom to my EPSON 9880. Printing is an entirely different tutorial…but Lightroom does make it easy, and the nice thing about printing from Lightroom is that it has built-in output sharpening developed by Jeff Schewe and Bruce Fraser who are legends in fine art printing.
Here is the before image…
Here is the final image…
If you are interested in seeing more of Scotty’s work, check out his photo blog at
http://www.scottygraham.blogspot.com or his website http://www.scottygraham.com
Workflow Fridays are sponsored in part by Competico.com. Competico offers the world’s leading online photography competitions. Head on over and sign up for your free account, enter your own photos and vote for your favorites today!
If you would like to sponsor this or one of our other regular series, or if you would like to support this site through a general site sponsorship or banner ad, please visit our sponsor page to learn how!
Workflow Friday: Andy Biggs
This week’s Workflow Friday comes from an exceptional photographer who leads African photo safaris, has his own line of camera gear bags, and whose images can be seen in your local Banana Republic retail store. Andy Biggs of the blog The Global Photographer inspires equal parts creativity and jealousy as he shares his photographic adventures in Africa and elsewhere around the world. Like many of those featured here, reviewing his work makes me want to be a better photographer.
So, without further ado, take it away Andy!
Thank you for the opportunity to share some of my processing steps! I will walk through how I processed an image for my Timeless Africa Collection portfolio, which is an image of a leopard in a tree that was photographed right after the sun went down. We had a wonderful day out on the Serengeti plains, in the east African country of Tanzania. I was out on safari with some friends of mine, and I had not put my camera away yet. I am very thankful, because we saw this beautiful female leopard as we were passing by a tree right next to our path. I had only a few seconds to grab as many frames as I could, but I was only able to nail 1 or 2 frames before she scuttled off into the bush. I had my camera set to ISO 1600, and I was using a Canon 1DsMkII camera with a 500mm f/4 lens on a beanbag.
Here are my steps on how I processed the image.
Step 1) I processed the raw file in Adobe Camera Raw, and outputted the image as a color image in 16-bit mode, full resolution. Saved as a .psd file.
Step 2) After opening the resulting file in Photoshop, I created a new layer and converted the image to black and white. I use the Channel Mixer for all of my black and white conversions in Photoshop, and on this day I chose a +80, +20, 0 (R, G, B) mixture.
Step 3) I created a new adjustment layer to increase the overall contrast of the image. I don’t mind losing shadow detail when I increase the contrast of a scene, as I believe that people respond favorably to contrast. I am definitely not obsessed with the trend of opening up as much shadow detail as possible. Give me a deep black in a scene and I am a happy man. When I look at images that have too much detail in the lower values, the images typically look washed out. When using a tool such as the Shadows and Highlights adjustment in Photoshop, one must pay attention to mid tone contrast when opening up shadows and bringing down the highlights. The reason is that more values are now being moved to the middle of the tonal range, and there is a lack of mid tone contrast as a result.
Step 4) Selective sharpening adjustment layer. I sharpened the leopard’s face with Photokit Sharpener. This sharpening tool does a fantastic job with all things related sharpening. Capture sharpening, creative (selective) sharpening and output sharpening.
Step 5) I then needed to burn down the background a bit, as the bright background was distracting. I created a new blank adjustment layer and used a black brush at 5% opacity for burning.
Step 6) I created a vignette around the edges, using the same technique in Step #5. The key is to use a large enough brush off of the side of the canvas so that the effect is slowly built up. It is helpful to click the ‘F’ key before painting with the brush, which allows you to work outside of the canvas on the image. Minimize the size of the image in relation to the screen, so you have some of the gray area to the side.
Step 7) On a new curves adjustment layer, I created a slight upward curve to brighten up the leopard’s face and body. I had to create a mask so that the adjustment only affected the leopard, and not the entire image.
Step 8 ) I then toned the image using Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro. I have created a custom tone for my wildlife images, and this tone is both brown and red in the shadows and midtones, yet neutral with the highlights.
That’s it! I know enough in Photoshop to get the jobs done for my own images, but I am by no means a huge Photoshop guru or expert. I consider myself a field photographer first and a digital darkroom guy after that. If you have any questions at all, please post them on this blog post and I will try to remember to check back to answer them.
Workflow Fridays are sponsored in part by Competico.com. Competico offers the world’s leading online photography competitions. Head on over and sign up for your free account, enter your own photos and vote for your favorites today!
If you would like to sponsor this or one of our other regular series, or if you would like to support this site through a general site sponsorship or banner ad, please visit our sponsor page to learn how!
Workflow Friday: Roger Madsen
This week we welcome another exceptional photographer to our Workflow Fridays series, Roger Madsen. I don’t recall where I first encountered Roger and his work but I’ve always thought there was something really compelling about it. I always appreciate it when there is more to a photo than the technical – framing, composition, color, tone, texture, etc. – and it actually tells a story, captures more than the moment, and draws you in and transports you to another place entirely. Much of Roger’s work makes me want to be there, and inspires me to be better, myself.
Thanks for sharing with us today, Roger!
One thing I often do when I arrive to a place that I want to photograph is to walk into a tourist shop and look at postcards. Not to just copy and get the same images myself but to be inspired and get ideas. The angle in which this image is shot is pretty common on postcards in Paris although on every postcard I saw it was shot at night when the tower is lit and with a completely black sky. I wanted to shoot a similar picture but at sunset with a more interesting sky and in HDR converted to black and white. Getting a more interesting sky is of course not something that you can just choose to get whenever you want to but as
you can see I was pretty lucky that day.
I will just describe what HDR is very briefly here if you’re not familiar with it. HDR stands for high dynamic range. Sometimes the dynamic range in the camera is not enough. You either get blown out highlights or completely black areas in your image. This is when HDR can be a solution. You shoot a couple of images with different exposure, some that have details in the shadows and some that have details in the highlights and then combine them to one high dynamic range image.
Here’s my step by step guide to how I post processed the image of the Eiffel Tower.
Step 1.
First step is to combine my different exposures in Photomatix. Photomatix is pretty much the standard software to use for HDR today but there is a new software out called HDR MAX that might be interesting to check out too. I haven’t tried it myself yet though. You can actually do HDR’s in Photoshop too but I don’t recommend even trying that. You will for sure get a headache.
I shot this image with seven different exposures but I only used three in Photomatix. That’s usually the way I do it. I set my camera to bracket 7 or sometimes even 9 shots and then I pick three different exposures from those that I think will work best. It also depends on the subject I’m photographing, how much dynamic range I actually need. Sometimes I use four or five images. It’s better to shoot to many exposures and end up using just a few than to shoot too few exposures and not having enough dynamic range. Here’s the three exposures I used for this image.
I don’t do any adjustments at all on my RAW images before I open them in Photomatix. I just open them just as I shot them straight from the hard drive on my computer. If I need to do any cropping on my image, which I didn’t in this case I also do that after I have combined my exposures in Photomatix.
Step 2.
I have now opened my three different exposures in Photomatix by hitting the generate HDR button and then choosing my three images. Now I have some settings to deal with before I can generate my HDR.
I shot this with a tripod so I will not check the align source images check-box because I know all my images are perfectly aligned to begin with. The number one rule when shooting HDR is to use a tripod so I never check this box.
The other check box, attempt to reduce ghosting artifacts is a bit more tricky. It should help you get a better result if you have something in your images that has moved during the exposures like trees that are moving because of the wind. If there is something that could have been moving between my exposures then I usually try different settings here to see which one works best. I probably did have some very small movements in the clouds in this image and I have tried all the different settings but I didn’t see any difference. So for the final image I choose to not have this box checked.
For this image that will be in black and white I don’t really care about the white balance and just choose as shot.
Now I hit ok and let Photomatix do its magic.
Step 3.
The tone mapping step. This is the hardest part. At least the hardest part to explain. There are so many settings here and I wonder if there is anyone that knows what every single one of them do. I just drag different sliders around until I have something that I’m satisfied with. One thing to be careful with though is the light smoothing setting. This is where it can go very wrong. I usually have this set to high or very high. Many people seem to like to have it set to low (at least if you search for HDR on Flickr) and that will give you some really creepy looking pictures with halos and all kinds of stuff. To get a pretty natural looking image set this to high or very high.
I always set the black and white point slider to zero. I feel more comfortable doing this with a levels adjustment in Photoshop after I’m done in Photomatix. Here are the settings I used for this image.
When I’m done with my settings I hit process and then I save the resulting image as a 16 bit TIFF. Now it’s time to play around in Photoshop!
Step 4.
This is the output image from Photomatix. I think the colors looks a bit strange but as I said before I knew from the beginning that I wanted it in black and white so I don’t put any effort into correcting that.
The first thing I did in Photoshop was to add a levels adjustment layer to lighten up the image a bit and also set the black and white point. To add a adjustment layer go into the Layers menu and then New adjustment layer. Here you will find all the different adjustment layers. The rest of this tutorial is all about adding different adjustment layers so I will just describe how to do that once here.
Step 5.
Then I converted the image to black & white by adding a black and white adjustment layer. I pretty much always use the black and white adjustment layer for conversions and I also 90% of the time use one of the standard preset (Red filter, yellow filter and so on). In this image I used the red filter preset. I at least start by going through the presets to get a good starting point and then if I think it’s needed, which I usually don’t, I will tweak it a little.
Step 6.
The levels and black and white adjustments has already added some contrast to the image but I wanted more so I added a curves adjustment layer with a s-curve.
Step 7.
To get a more metallic feel to the Eiffel Tower I added just a touch of split toning effect to the whole image with a color balance adjustment layer. Giving the highlights a warm tone and the shadows a cold tone.
That’s it! Any questions? I will keep an eye on the comments here for a while if you have any questions or just send me an email to the address you can find on my web page and I will be happy to answer your questions.
Thanks Roger! Check out more from Roger by visiting his blog today!
If you enjoyed this edition of Workflow Fridays, please help keep this and our other great Photoshop & Photography series going by becoming a sponsor today! You can sponsor an individual series or support the blog as a whole with a banner in the sidebar or leaderboard. Find out how!
Workflow Friday: Rob Jones
This week we welcome another exceptional photographer to our Workflow Fridays series, Rob Jones. Rob and his wife Rose run Towner Jones Photography based in Gainesville, VA.
Thanks for sharing with us today, Rob!
First let me say, I feel quite humbled to be in the company of the talented folks that have contributed to this great blog. I also want to say “thanks” to Jason for allowing me to participate and thanks to all of you for sharing your time with me today.
When I first started preparing for my edition of “Workflow Fridays,” I was quite excited. I had, on my schedule, a perfect photo shoot lined up which I thought would provide some excellent shots to put through my workflow. The plan was to hike into Shenandoah National Park, here in Virginia, and capture images of the waterfalls in Whiteoak Canyon. However, when I got up the morning of the shoot, there was no hot water in the house. I did get to see a waterfall that day – unfortunately it was coming from the hot water heater in the basement. Oh the life of a great adventurer…
Why am I sharing this story with you, you might ask? I’m sharing it because, I did manage to find a “waterfall” picture in my collection to work over for you, but it’s a tad smaller than the eighty-six footer I had planned on shooting.
Just imagine the splendor of what could have been in your mind’s eye, and we’ll get started.
So here’s our “waterfall” shot. It was taken early in the morning, also in Shenandoah National Park, back in October. For those of you that are interested in the image specs, it was taken with my Nikon D90 using Nikon’s 18-200mm lens. The exposure is 6 seconds, at f/20 (ISO 100). (On a side note, the D90 has become a beloved addition to my gear for situations when carrying the D3 with its big, heavy glass just won’t do)
Now for all intents and purposes, I think this is a pretty decent shot – though a little underexposed. My goal, however, is to bring back the color, vibrance, and “pop” that the early morning sun cast on this little corner of the park.
For a little background, I’m a Lightroom convert. I used to post-process all of my images in Photoshop. Since Lightroom hit the scene, I’d estimate less than 10% actually make the trip out of Lightroom over to Adobe’s flagship application. For me, the decision is all about efficiency, and that’s the name of the game in Lightroom. The steps I’m about to outline, took me a little less than a minute from start to finish. The order of these steps sometimes varies, but these are the “basics” I do to almost all of my “keepers”.
Step 1: Correct White Balance
I’ve read a great deal of discussion regarding “correct” vs. “incorrect” white balance. For those of you that read my blog, you’ve heard me say that I believe “correct” is always in the eyes of the photographer. For me, finding the right color temperature involves using the WB tool in Lightroom to sample a number of target grays and finding the one that, I feel, reflects the mood that I’m trying to convey in the photograph. In this particular picture, I wanted a little more warmth than what the camera captured, which I found in the gray at the center of the rock in the upper left corner.
Step 2: Exposure Adjustment
As I mentioned earlier, I felt that this image was a little underexposed from what I remembered, so I bumped up the overall exposure about three-quarters of a stop.
Step 3: Tone Curve – Contrast Adjustment
In Lightroom, the Tone Curve sliders give quick and easy access to adjusting ranges of tones. At this point, I wanted to bring the water from the waterfall and the rock on the bottom of the stream up a little relative to the shadows and mossy undersides of the rocks, so I bumped up the “Highlights” and “Lights” a bit. I didn’t, however, want to dramatically change the overall relative contrast too much, so I brought the low-to-mid range “Darks” up a hair as well.
Step 4: More Exposure “Tweaking”
I often do a little dance back and forth between steps 3 and 4 to get the proper balance of exposure and contrast. Here in step four, using Lightroom’s “Fill Light” and “Blacks” sliders bring out a little more of the detail (particularly in the moss) that I didn’t achieve using the Tone Curve adjustments.
Step 5: Adding Pop
Consider this step optional, and let me take a slight mental detour. Lightroom offers three “Presence” sliders, which we all know and love… Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation. These guys have the power to dramatically affect a photos representation of “reality” – and I, for one, am NOT ashamed to use them. In this step, I’ve added some “pop” to the image by bumping up Clarity and Vibrance. Generally speaking, I use these two to add a little flavor, and Saturation to mellow things down if I go overboard.
Step 6: Fine Tuning Color
Some of my favorite tools in Lightroom are the Detailed Color Adjustment sliders. Here I’ve continued to “tweak” the image to achieve the vibrancy of colors I remembered from that morning. My other favorite use for these sliders is eliminating color cast that I’ve introduced by pushing other adjustments in Lightroom.
Step 7: Finishing Touches
The finishing touches most common for all of my work are Sharpening and Vignetting. Zooming in on the moss, I applied an appropriate boost of sharpening to bring out edge detail while minimizing edge artifacts. When it comes to vignetting, I want to personally thank the folks at Adobe that added “Post-Crop” vignetting in Lightroom 2. I’ve used a slight post-crop vignette to bring the viewers focus in on the waterfall at the center of the scene.
And last but not least… the final shot.
I’ll note that I’ve left off a number of the other cool things (Adjustment Brush, Graduated Filters, etc.) that Lightroom makes available. Though I love them, I’ve personally found that the amount of time I spend “messing with” my photos goes up exponentially if I’m not careful to use them sparingly. As a result, I follow the basic process I’ve outlined here for most of my pictures, and save the more advanced tools for the shots I want to give some extra attention.
One closing thought about developing your own workflow. Make sure that the end of your workflow involves sharing your photos with others. It doesn’t matter if you’re a novice or a pro, sharing your photos with others will provide healthy criticism and (if you choose your audience well) positive affirmation – both of which will help you continue to grow as a photographer. And with that, thank you, sincerely, for the opportunity to share my work with you.
All the best, Rob
Thanks Rob! Check out more from Rob by visiting his blog today!
If you enjoyed this edition of Workflow Fridays, please help keep this and our other great Photoshop & Photography series going by becoming a sponsor today! You can sponsor an individual series or support the blog as a whole with a banner in the sidebar or leaderboard. Find out how!
Workflow Friday: Joey L
This week we welcome an amazing photographer to join our series, Joey Lawrence, who might be better known to many of you as Joey L. I first met Joey back in the spring of 2007 and was immediate taken by the quality of his photography, the spirit with which he approached life, and his perspective on the world around him at even such a young age.
Joey just returned from an awesome trip to Africa and today he is going to walk us through how he processed one of his shots from that experience, “Vicious Dog.” If you would like to learn more about Joey L, the subject of this photo, or his adventure, you can find more information in his P&P Blogger Profile, his guest post from this week on Friend-of-the-Blog Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider, and on Joey L’s blog.
But for now let’s sit back, relax, and enjoy some great photography, some insight, and inspiration from an exceptional young man!
To me, Photoshop is simply a tool that should be fully molded to suit the users taste in editing. No matter what kind of image you are editing or how much work you are going to put into it, you’ll find there are several ways to do the exact same thing. I like to work as simply as possible and treat the image as if it were real right in front of me, and CS3 is made up of just raw tools around me… If one adjustment is done, it can bring one look, but one area must be compensated with another adjustment… Which must be compensated with another, and so on. It’s like a doctor proscribing a patient many medicines to eventually balance each other out. To overcome these many steps, the most important thing to learn is not Photoshop instructions, anyone can learn those… The most important thing is to develop an insight into foreseeing how your image should be, this way you see past the individual steps and vision the final outcome of the image.
I’ve been questioned many times on my methods in my own tutorials for sale, which some say are destructive to an image. Although I have learned some new techniques to protect the pixels in the image and apply them in my workflow now, (and agree this is crucial when printing a file), my answer is the same… Who cares! Yes, it is very important to understand the principles of Photoshop and know it’s limits in an image, but this knowledge should be set at the back of your head as instinct so creative thoughts are not completely dissolved in book knowledge. I admit, I first learned Photoshop just by clicking around and experimenting. This did lead to many mistakes that I know now not to do, but it did raise some interesting patterns in the way I edit. My first training was not formal, and a lot of the things I do today are based on those first years I was playing around. Just look at an image as it is, an image. The technicalities are important and should be engraved into your skull, but they are not the image and the end result.
Here is a simple technique that was not in my editing DVD that I do a lot lately to much of my newer work.
Step 1
Always edit in the wee hours in the morning. There’s nobody there to bother you.
I am converting the RAW file in Phase One’s capture software. The image itself was taken with a P45+ back and a prime 80 mm lens.
I know a lot of people pump out their RAW files first with a very flattened exposure and adjust it with more precision in photoshop… But usually I know exactly where I want an image to end up, and don’t mind just boosting the contrast and turning down the saturation a bit right in the RAW converter.
Step 2
Properly sharpening RAW files before output is very important. If you plan to do it later, you are missing out on manipulating the root of the file… And the results will be very poor. I find a point in the photo where the depth of field trails off, and focus on the sharpest point near it. It takes a lot of practice to figure out the right degree of sharpness for a print. Usually the rule of thumb I use is to just feel it out by eye, and make the image a little bit too sharp for your monitor. This way on the page, the fine details are preserved. Make sure to avoid sharpening halos.
Step 3
I now have my image converted from RAW and in Photoshop CS3. To me, the tonal range on my subject seems too flat. It is not really a matter of contrast that I didn’t add in the converter, but a lack in the tonal values themselves. I want a harsher, grittier tonal range.
Step 4
How I get this is to first duplicate the background layer, then select Channel Mixer. Within the channel mixer, I can make a black and white image that looks much different than just simply using the command “desaturate.” I can mix all the channels of blue, green and red to come up with something. Usually, the pure “blue filter” preset works great, and I have used it on this particular image.
Step 5
Doing this kind of black and white conversion has now enabled me to have some thick tones, the only problem is now the image is not color. To move on, I slide down the opacity slider until it looks good. Usually I like slightly muted, muddy tones. A opacity of 32% has seemed to work.
Step 6
Just to show you the difference of the channels, check out what happens when I use purely the red channel instead of the blue channel. I get very even and soft tones versus the harsh and contrasted.
Step 7
I had to convert to black and white for the technique to work, but now I’ve lost some of the coloring that was initially in the image. I want to gain this back, but also add a contrast boost. I do this by duplicating the colored background layer again, and dragging it on top of the image. Then I set it’s blending mode to “Soft light” and drag the opacity around until it looks good. 28% seemed to work.
Step 8
Now I have noticed because of my last manipulation, I have lost a lot of detail in the shadows. I correct this by doing a simple Shadow/Highlights adjustment.
Step 9
I tweak the colors in selective color to fine tune everything in the image and achieve the perfect skin tone.
Step 10
Turn off your embarrassing music and go to bed.
Thanks Joey! Check out more from Joey L. by visiting http://tutorial.joeyL.com.
If you enjoyed this edition of Workflow Fridays, please help keep this and our other great Photoshop & Photography series going by becoming a sponsor today! You can sponsor an individual series or support the blog as a whole with a banner in the sidebar or leaderboard. Find out how!
Workflow Friday: Jeff Revell
This week we welcome photographer, photowalker, and all around great guy, Jeff Revell of PhotoWalkPro. You can find out more about Jeff by visiting his blog or by reading his P&P Blogger Profile. Thanks for sharing with us this week Jeff!
*****
My Photoshop workflow changed substantially when I started using Lightroom as part of my process. Writing a photography blog means that I am working with images on an almost daily basis, constantly making small changes and then preparing them for upload. Here is how my process goes.
Since I download most of my images using Lightroom, they are ready to browse using the Library panel. I try and keyword my images as I import them so that I can quickly get to the group of images that suit my need and then narrow down to the specific image I am looking for.
Once found, it’s time for some fine-tuning in the Develop panel. I try not to get to heavy into my processing so I generally start by adjusting the Color Balance, Exposure, and Black levels and maybe a bit of Fill Light.
From there, I boost the clarity a bit (my favorite slider) and then check the image to see if it can’t benefit from a little bit of Vibrance.
From there I move on to the Tone Curve pallet to do some contrast adjustments as well as improving the shadows and highlights just a bit.
It’s at this point that I usually decide if the image needs some localized adjustments using the Adjustment Brush. I tend to go way overboard to start with because it makes it easy to see all of the areas that I am affecting and then pull back on the sliders until it looks just right.
Finally I hit the Detail panel to add some sharpness. I almost always shoot RAW and that means that every image is going to require some level of sharpening.
My final step is to export the image to my Blog folder so that it is ready to upload. I have created a custom export setting that has been created to specifically handle blog images. The image is set to go to a specific folder. I have a custom naming convention set up to apply the letters “sm” to the end of each file name so I know it is a smaller version. I export in JPG at 80% quality with the color space set to sRGB for good web viewing. I resize to 800×800 pixels so that it will proportionally shrink my images. Finally, it set to open the folder when the export is done so I can check the finished product.
The real key for me is to have things set up to move quickly so that I can spend more time writing and less time having to actually work in Photoshop. I still love Photoshop for my unique processing requirements but for the daily grind, Lightroom is my application of choice.
*****
Thanks Jeff!
If you would like to share your workflow with us, please use the “Contact Me” link above to send me an email. Also, if you would like to support this or any of the other regular series here at Jason D. Moore Photography, please visit the “Become a Sponsor” page to learn how!
Thursday News Quickie – Prints, Prizes, Projects & Posts
Just a quick post to hit on some reminders from yesterday’s P&P Weekly that might’ve gotten lost in the shuffle and to announce our guest blogger for tomorrow.
- New photos are being added to my print store all the time. Just last night I added a new gallery of my “Paris in Black & White” images which I am particularly proud of. Remember, if you enter the code 15OFFJAN09 during checkout, you will receive 15% Off any orders between now and the end of January. So act now!
- The January Photo Contest is almost up! There are currently 26 entries into the contest and only a few days left in the month to enter! So head on over to the monthly photo contest information post to get the rundown of the contest and to learn how to enter for a chance to win a cool prize package!
- The first installment of the “On the 4th” photo project will be posted soon! If you took a shot on January 4th, please send it in to be a part of this exciting new photo project!
- Finally, be sure to check back in tomorrow for our guest for Workflow Fridays, photowalker extraordinaire Jeff Revell!
Workflow Friday: Marshall Garlington
In our inaugural post in the Workflow Fridays series we welcome blogroll member, and inspiration for the project, Marshall Garlington of f/11. More information can be found on his blog or by reading his P&P Blogger Profile. Thank you, Marshall, for your willingness to share your process with us!
Without further ado, here’s Marshall’s workflow:
Hello everyone! Many thanks to Jason for giving me the opportunity to share the process I used to create my Roosevelt Hotel image. Hopefully some of this information will be useful in creating your own images.
A little background information first. I took this image out in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Blvd. I shot it with my trusty pocket camera, the Canon G9. The specs were f/5, iso 200, 1/1000 at 29.2mm. I processed the RAW file in Apple’s Aperture.
Here is my original image.
I took the image knowing that I would do a fair amount of post processing on it. One of my main thoughts behind taking this image was to try a technique where I could “turn the neon sign on” and make it seem natural. You can see that the day was really overcast and that left things very flat and without any kind of mood. To begin working on this image I started where I start almost all my post processing, levels. Here’s the histogram, and you can see that the blacks seem good, but the whites could stand to come up. I brought the slider in until I was just on the verge of clipping.
The next thing I did was give the saturation a little boost just to add a little punch. I find that with most of my images a little saturation bump can round things out nicely.
For the next few steps I knew I would need to do work with layers and masking so I exported the adjusted image to Photoshop CS3. I am a huge fan of Nik Software’s suite of plug-ins and I used a number of them on this image. I’ll try to show how you can also get very similar results with filters and adjustments present in Photoshop.
This first thing I wanted to address was mood. I started by applying a Nik filter called Midnight.
This filter darkens the image, increases the contrast and adds a slight Sepia tint. I liked the effect but it was still a bit cold for me so I warmed it up with a bi-color filter of brown and yellow. This is a split filter with a brown tone on top and a yellow tone on bottom.
A similar effect could be achieved by having a brown photo filter on one layer and a yellow filter on another layer and blending them. I was happy with the overall mood of the image so I moved on to address the sign.
To get the pinkish red for my neon I used a Nik plug-in called Viveza but the same could be done by duplicating the background layer and applying a red photo filter.
I then applied a black mask to this layer and began revealing just the letters. This is certainly the most tedious part of the process, but your time is well spent here to achieve a polished final image.
When I was done with the letters the effect was a bit strong, so I reduced the opacity of that layer to about 60%.
This reduced the brightness of the red and also let more of the underlying texture of the letters through.
I was almost done with the image, but the brightness of the sky and some of the building bothered me. I took care of this by adding a vignette that toned those areas down but still left a brighter spot on the building as if some light was breaking through the clouds. With that done I was happy with the result, so I flattened the image and saved it as a TIFF. Here is the final image.
I hope you enjoyed this little walkthrough and that you can use some of these ideas to create a unique image all your own. Thanks again to Jason for letting me share my thoughts and process.
P&P Weekly: #105
Welcome to week #105 of The Photoshop & Photography Blogroll’s P&P Weekly!
I’d like to start off today’s edition with a Welcome! to any new visitors that may have made their way here from Friends-of-the-Blog Jeff Revell of PhotoWalkPro, Jason Anderson of CanonBlogger (who got there from Friend-of-the-Blog Scott Kelby of Photoshop Insider). Thanks Jeff and Jason for your kind words and continued support! I couldn’t have gotten here without your support. I hope that you will take a look around and soon become regulars here!
You’ve come at a really exciting time here at Jason D. Moore Photography. We’ve recently announced a few new series that I think will prove to be informative, inspirational, challenging, and fun!
Read on for more information!
Monthly Photo Contests
Our new monthly photo contest for January continues to be open for entries. Full details can be found on our Monthly Photo Contest post and you can submit your shot(s) to our Monthly Photo Contest Flickr Group. Prizes for January’s contest include:
(Embroidered “Ps” logo on a dark blue shirt with navy collar and sleeves)
(Blue, with black ink)
(1″x1″)
I hope you’ll throw your images into the ring!
Starting this Friday and continuing every other Friday, we will welcome a new guest blogger that will share their personal workflow with all of us. They will take one of their own photos and walk us through the how’s and why’s of their post-processing techniques so that we might learn and expand our own workflows.
If you would like to participate in this new series, please email me via the link above, or leave a comment!
This friday we will have our first guest post from blogroll member Marshall Garlington of f/11.
As announced yesterday one of our newer and more exciting series, for me at least, is Photoshop Interviews. Once a month I will sit down with a member of the Photoshop community and talk about the software, the creative community, and how they influence each other.
Be sure to stop by on Monday for our first interview with Photoshop Hall of Fame inductee and Principal Project Manager for Adobe Photoshop and Bridge (and Friend-of-the-Blog) John Nack!
Our next new series, which has already begun, is the “On the 4th” Photo Project. On the 4th of each month throughout the year I invite you to take a photo and send it in. Join me and other photographers from around the world in documenting a day in the life, of sorts. For full details, take a look at our introductory post.
Geographic Composition
The Geographic Composition series is now open to anyone who would like to contribute. A special welcome to our newest participants! And I hope some of you are inspired to join us next time. Our upcoming themes – and their posting dates – are:
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Week #45 – January 16: “Green”
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Week #46 – January 30: “Shadows”
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Week #47 – Frbruary 13: “Round”
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Week #48 – February 27: “Contasts”
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Week #49 – March 13: “Wood”
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Week #50 - March 27: Contributor’s Favorites
More details about Geographic Composition.
Starting in January I am offering special desktop wallpaper calendars. These desktop calendars will feature my personal photography as well as a listing of holidays and important dates. I offer these wallpaper calendars in a variety of sizes to accommodate a number of screen resolutions. The January Desktop Calendars are up now and February’s will be posted towards the end of the month.
Get Your Monthly Desktop Calendar Today!
In the meantime…
Click here to become a member of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. A great resource for training, tips, and connecting with other creatives.
And as always, take a moment to grab one of the chicklet links to show your support for this blog and, for blogroll members, be sure to pick up your P&P Blogroll Member badge link.
My apologies for those of you hoping for the weekly round-up of the top half of the blogroll. Due to time constraints, I had to forego that portion of “The Weekly” this time around but I will do what I can to get back to a more regular schedule starting next week.
Thanks for stopping by! And be sure to come back tomorrow for more!
