Archive for the Category ◊ Photoshop ◊

22 Apr 2009 So You have a new DSLR: Step three
Author: Photoburner |  Category: DIY gear, Photoshop, general, getting started, legal, lenses  | Tags: , , , , , ,  | One Comment
Greek Shrine

Greek Shrine

Step three: learning to edit.

OK you have been taking lots of photos, you’ve been using jpeg + raw as your file formats. And you have been using the jpeg files to upload and do any printing. You are now ready to move up to some editing on the files. You can start with edits on your jpegs but in some ways that can be more difficult than editing raw files. Jpegs can take light editing, some sharpening and maybe some tonal adjustment. But any serious editing will cause the images to develop very ugly artifacts like banding and posterization. We will get into that when we talk about raw files in another post. Right now lets list some of the available free editing software on the web. So far as I know these editors will only work on non-raw file formats. Jpeg and .tif formats mainly. Some of the best known are:

And Mac users have a freebie that is included on their system, iPhoto or some such. Your camera also may have come with free editing software of modest capability. Canon cameras come with DPP and Nikon users can get the pretty good Nikon editor but it isn’t free.

Paint.net is an open source project and it has developed a large community of developers who are supplying a good variety of plugins which have greatly extended the capability of the basic product. This is a good choice for a basic editor.

Adobe Photoshop Express comes with 2 GB of free gallery space, and a free photoshop.com address, and it connects directly with Flickr, Photobucket and some other online galleries. The tools allow you to do basic editing like sharpening, cropping, resizing and other simple tasks. These are implemented with a wizard type interface which is simple and easy to use. If you select one of the tools you will see a string of thumbnails at the bottom of the image showing how different levels of the tool will affect the image. You click on the thumbnail to apply that level of the adjustment.

Editors with raw support.

Sooner or later you will want to move to real editor. And the three best supported editors are:

Why Adobe products?

Why do I limit the list above to Adobe products? The primary reason, in my mind, is the fact that there is a vast online support community for these products. You will find literally thousands of online websites, tutorials, podcasts, and video tutorials on these editors. If you participate in online lists almost all the users will be using one or another of these products and you will easily get help when you get stuck. I have never failed to find a number of online tutorials or other help when I use Google to search for a way to do something in one of these apps.

Besides online user help Adobe itself provides a very comprehensive online support capability including forums and user groups and there are literally hundreds of published books available on each of these editors. Amazon shows 183 books for Photoshop CS4 and 202 books available for Photoshop Elements 7. Corel Photo Paint X3 by contrast has 3 books available. GIMP 2.6 has 14 books. Apple Aperture 2 has 26 books.

Elements

PSE 7 is the current version of Photoshop Elements and it will allow you to do raw file conversions and just about all basic editing on your images. PSE has a lot of wizard type interfaces to guide new users. And it comes with a pretty good photo organizer. I think this is the best choice for new users who need raw support or who want better editing capability. If you work at developing your editing skills you will eventually start wanting to do things that cannot be done in PSE and that is the time when you should start thinking about moving up to Photoshop. A good online community for PSE is found at this PSE group.

Some good introductory books:

Lightroom

Some people find Lightroom to be a middle ground between PSE and Photoshop. But it seems like every Lightroom user I have heard from also owns Photoshop and uses that for the more intense editing procedures. Lightroom is aimed at production photographers, people who need to batch process large numbers of photographs. Perhaps someone who is shooting senior portraits by the hundreds. You can easily apply the same corrections to an entire batch of shots. This is possible in PS but not as easy and I’m not sure how well it would work on large batches. LR also has a very powerful photo archiving ability, it makes it easy to find your photos whether they are on your hard drive or have been moved to an external storage device. LR has the same raw converter as Photoshop: Adobe Camera Raw. Lightroom lacks the ability to select certain parts of the image and apply effects just to the selected area. That is when LR users move over to PS. Glenn Michell has some thoughts on the two.

Online support: Yahoo Lightroom group

Some good introductory books:

Photoshop

Photoshop is simply the best editor available. Over the years many competitors have attempted to catch up with PS but they never succeed. I think the reason that they fail is this: they usually come up with a fairly good basic product. Maybe something in the PSE range plus a few more features. But to catch up with the vast capabilities of Photoshop they need a large group of programmers and time to write and debug all that code. So they need to sell copies of their first effort to finance the further development and they always seem to run out of money before that happens. Now PS is the best, but it also has a huge user community who has been using it for a decade or more. As new features are added many of those users are used to the arcane and difficult user interface and vociferously resist the least change in the way things work in PS. That means that new features are grafted on to the current user interface making it that much harder to learn. Old features never go away. John Nack has commented on this built in resistance to change from the user community.

Adobe of course has the large developer force, time and money to make sure that they stay far ahead of any competition. They have been steadily adding more power and capability to each new version. And I have yet to feel like a version upgrade is worthless from them. New versions are on a three year schedule lately. So Photoshop is difficult to learn, partly because of all the baggage it is carrying around from the past. It is also darned expensive, about $650 US for a new purchaser. Upgrades are running around $200 every two years.

Also Photoshop has a schizophrenic nature, it is both a graphics editor for graphical artists and it is a photo editor. Photographer may well never use many of the tools in PS since they are targeted at graphic artists. But it can do things that no other editor can do, and it can usually do those things in many different ways. But that will come at a cost to you.

Lynda.com has many online tutorials for PS (as well as many other applications) and they have 30 plus hours of video tutorials just on learning how to use the selection tools in PS. 30 hours for one feature. I watched them and worked thru the examples but still don’t think I understand everything about the tools. So this is why I urge people not to spend that $650 unless you are sure that you are ready to tackle this difficult editor.

A major online community for PS can be found at: listmoms

Good books for CS4
Editing webpages

There are some excellent websites that cover editing technique. Like mostsites they are specific to Photoshop but if you know your editor you can probably adapt the techniques to your editor.

Cambridge in Color which is Sean McHugh’s site is one of the best that I know of. It has a slightly technical reading level but has very good coverage of a most basic Photoshop techniques. Be sure to look at Sean’s photo galleries while you are there.

The Light’s Right the site owned by Glenn E Mitchell has a great set of tutorials that probably a bit more advanced than Cambridge. He has a 300 page ebook on sharpening for example. There are also a number of video tutorials. The essential read on this site is the ‘pop’ series of articles but you will want to read more than those. Mitch also has a blog and some excellent photo galleries.

The Luminous-Landscape is owned by Micheal Reichmann and a lot of other writers often contribute including Jeff Schewe. He has a set of video Magazines that can be downloaded (not free) that have some intensive looks at various aspects of photography. He also has the best intoduction to Printing and Color management that I have seen. It’s a 6.5 hour video which he sells on site. This is call From Camera to Print, and it is on the advanced side and probably of little value unless you have Photoshop and a serious printer.

There are many guides and tutorials on this site but they are not as well organized. You have to look for the gems. The trip is well worth the effort. Try the Understanding series.

Commercial Tutorials

Lastly let’s look at the two major commercial tutorial sites.

The first is Lynda.com. They offer a wide variety of video tutorials covering most Adobe and many other software packages. The instructors are excellent on the whole and the price is reasonable: $25/month for full access.  Lynda is mostly limited to software training tho they have a few more general photography sets. You can get a free month of Lynda as a gift when you register CS4. The courses range from the basic to the advanced and can get very advanced.

KelbyTraining is Scott Kelby’s site and I have only used it when they were offering a free look when they started up. At that time I thought it was very limted and Nikon centric, but I hear that they have added many new instructors and have photographic technique as well as software training courses. Cost is $20/month. I’ll give it another whirl sometime soon. Kelby is the author of many very popular photography books and his books often live at the #1 position on Amazon.

And that wraps this post up.

19 Mar 2009 Stacking for Star Trails
Author: Photoburner |  Category: Night Photography, Photoshop  | Tags: , , , , ,  | Leave a Comment

Lake Eaton star trails

Lake Eaton star trails

How to make star trails

There are a couple of different ways to photograph the night sky with stars. If you shoot a reasonably short exposure then you get stars that are pin points. The exposures have to be fairly short because of the earth’s rotation. More than 30 seconds or so will start to draw the stars out into ‘trails’. You can get a longer exposure but you will have to mount the camera on some sort of drive that will rotate the camera in sync with the sky’s movement. You can make a mount to do this called the barn door mount out of a couple of boards, a hinge and a screw.

Google “barn door star photo”

and you will find many references and instructions for making one of these.

You can make stunning photos with that technique. Look at this one by John Moran

But our subject for this post is making star trails not avoiding them. To make the shot above I took 6 shots, each with 180 second exposures. And combine them using a technique called stacking.

A comment about that shot. I do not claim it is one of my best shots but it is the only successful star trail shot I have so far, so there it is. The red in the sky was from the urban lights from the City of Ocala about 15 or 20 miles away. The red comes from all the forest fires in the area, from the smoke not the flames which were 7 miles behind me. That area across the lake did catch on fire the next afternoon however, causing us to beat a quick retreat before they closed the highway out. Click on the shot for a larger version.

I could have made a single 18 minute exposure rather than 6–3 minute exposures. But the bane of night shooting is sensor noise and the longer the sensor is run the hotter it gets. By dividing the shot up into shorter intervals you can reduce the heating problem.

Now this shot was taken to the north but not quite far enough, the pole star is just off frame to the right. But getting a shot due north will give you concentric trails like this by Harold Davis. You can tell he has had a lot more practice than I have. Unless you live down near Key West or Brownville Texas in the US you won’t get the same effect by shooting south since the southern axis is below the horizon.

The stuttered dotted effect of the shot above was because I let a minute of so go by in between shots to demonstrate the effect of stacking. If you shoot them closer together you will get a continuous trail.

How I did the Stacking

I have Photoshop CS4 extended which includes stacking modes. Standard CS4 does not, CS3 extended does. The version Adobe sells as the educational/academic version is the extended version. So that being said I suspect that most of you will not be able to follow this method, but there are other ways. So I:

  • Shot the images and loaded them into Adobe Bridge.
  • In Bridge I compiled them into a stack by selecting them all and right clicking and selecting group as stack.
  • You can then open tools–>photoshop–>open in photoshop layers
  • Or you can download Russell Brown’s scripts which will add a Dr Brown’s Services menu item under tools and one of those services is Dr Brown’s Stack-o-matic. He seems to be having a problem with the scripts but they will show up on this page. He has CS3 and CS4 versions. He has a lot of good Photoshop material on that page too and the scripts do more than stacking. Select maximum mode from his script.
  • Anyway, without Dr Brown’s help, go into CS4(or 3) and select all the layers then go to Edit->Auto blend  layers. You may need to auto align the layers first but do not unless you have to do so.
  • Then Layers–>smart objects–> convert to smart objects
  • Finally the Stack Modes menu item will be visible on the layers menu, select maximum mode there. There are a lot of modes and you can play with them.
  • If you have a lot of layers in the stack be prepared for long waits as photoshop does the work.

You don’t have PS Extended.

In that case load the shots into layers in Photoshop as above then try to combine them using blend modes and opacity. Screen or lighten mode are likely to work the best and the opacities should probably be 30  percent or so. But you will have to experiment yourself or hit Google.

Other Stacking Software

There are a lot of non-photoshop ways of doing the stacking:

You are on you’re own with these since I haven’t used them. If you have a favorite let me know and I’ll add it to the list. I don’t know of any other photo editing software that does stacking but some may do so.

I’m probably going to step away from night shots for awhile and do some posts for new camera users.

15 Mar 2009 Quick Post Processing example
Author: Photoburner |  Category: Night Photography, Photoshop  | Tags: , , , , , , , ,  | 4 Comments
Lake Eaton at Night-from the camera

Lake Eaton at Night-from the camera

A quick look at editing

Let’s take a quick look at editing. I say quick because I haven’t figured out a way to squeeze this into a reasonable length post if I go into great detail and add screen captures to show the steps in Photoshop. If there is any interest in that I’ll give it a try.

Look at the image above, it was taken at Lake Eaton in the Ocala National Forest this last Friday. I took my son there on a scout camp-out. The light on the horizon is the urban area to the west.  You can see some stars in the sky but it is basically black. As is the foreground. The whole image is dull and low contrast.

After ten minutes in CS4 we get this below:

After some work in CS4

After some work in CS4

This is still no great image and it does look a lot better in larger sizes. But now we can see that there are a lot of stars. The sky is midnight blue. The lake water now pops out in a reflection of the orange sky and clouds. There was a large forest fire to the east of this area and that was imparting the smoky orange tones. There is now a boat visible in the right foreground. Let me note that this shot was a 3 minute exposure but the histogram was mostly to the left since I actually shot 6 of these images and intend to stack them. But that is for another post.

How did I get from the first image to the second image?

Edits

In ACR5

  • Increased fill light to +67
  • Added contrast and just a little more exposure
  • Added clarity and vibrance
  • Decreased the color temperature to 3050
  • Use 5 adjustment brushes
  • Reduced noise

In CS4

  • added a layer copy
  • used noise ninja on the whole layer

Starting with the ACR (Adobe Camera Raw 5) work. The histogram was pushed to the left (Histogram 1 below), so I pushed the fill light slider far to the right from almost zero to +67. That moved the histogram a little to the right (Histogram 2) and brightened the stars and foreground. This revealed the boat.

Histogram 1

Histogram 1

Histogram 2

Histogram 2

The only reason I can do this is that this shot was captured as a raw file. That gives you 1.5 to 2 stops of leeway at both ends of the histogram. You can recover both shadow detail, as I did above or recover blown highlights on the right side of the histogram. In a jpeg file this is not possible.

I then add just a little more exposure and some contrast which makes the stars pop out a bit more. I reduced the color temp from 3150 to 3050 to make the sky more blue but this makes everything else bluer too.

Why dod I pick the various adjustments? It is just from my experience working in ACR. I make adjustment until I like the effect. You can always go back on these adjustments if you think you went too far.

All of this can be done in CS3 and ACR4. But in CS4, Adobe added adjustment brushes to ACR5 and you can use these brushes to add local changes in exposure, contrast, clarity and several other adjustments to the image by brushing them in. I used this feature five times to brush in more contrast and less exposure to the sky. More orange and adjusted the exposure on the lake with another brush. And used a third brush to do similar adjustments to the skyline and clouds just over the trees. A last couple of adjustment brushes dimmed the foreground weeds and lightened the boat.

All of this added a lot of noise so I used the noise reduction feature in ACR to reduce this. And then moved to CS4.

All I did in CS4 was do a single run with Noise Ninja to reduce the noise further. And I added a copyright watermark.

Why work in ACR?

Everything I did in ACR could be done a different way in CS4 or CS3 (and probably earlier versions of Photoshop). The adjustment brushes could be duplicated by selecting the area and creating a mask. You could then use dodge/burn, curves and saturation to recreate the effects. But by working in ACR you are working in the raw linear data and changes are easily reversible and do not introduce as much image damage.

You could also duplicate this in other editing software. The ability to use layers and masks would make that easier.

So I wanted to give people a brief look at what I do in editing. I probably could have picked a better sample image to work on. I have no hesitation to do any sort of editing that I think improves the image.I never claim that my work is a representation of the scene as it naturally appeared.  The sky was black, the only star really visible was Venus and the boat was dimly visible to my eyes. But it is a representation of my ‘artistic’ vision of what I want to create.