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

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 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.

Color balanced lighting

Urban and Industrial Night Photography

Shooting in Urban and Industrial sites poses it’s own set of problems.

• Safety issues
• Color Balance
• Access

Safety

The safety issues were discussed in the first post of this series for urban areas. If you are shooting in industrial areas, like the one above or abandoned sites, then those have their own sets of problems. Industrial areas will have high temperatures, steam, electrical dangers, fall hazards, moving equipment and traffic problems. You should never be in these areas unless you are familiar with the dangers, have permission to be there or are escorted.

Shooting at abandoned sites is popular but the dangers there can be real. These sites are not maintained and there can be uncovered pits, fall hazards and the possibility of a wall collapsing and falling on you. There can be enraged security guards and maybe guard dogs to deal with too. You don’t want to end your shooting adventure in a hospital or jail. I would be sure to have someone along with you for backup in case there is a problem.

You can also run into urban outdoorsmen living on these sites who may not welcome the intrusion.

Equipment and Exposures

The equipment you’ll need for this type of shooting is less than for dark environment shots.

• Tripod
• Remote release
• Flashlight with gels
• Lens Cloth

The equipment is discussed in this post

Exposure durations will most of the time be less than dark areas with the possible exception of abandoned sites. They can be very dark. Just take a guess and watch your histogram. Adjust exposures up or down based on the histogram peak. Too far to the left, add shutter time and if too far to the right then reduce shutter time. ISO should be low, 100 or 200 and try a mid range f/stop like 5.6 or 6.3 to start.

Color Balance Problems

Take a look at the shot above. This site shows at least 5 different types of industrial lighting. Starting at the tower on the left I see blue, orange, green, yellow and white lights. Probably several different types of sodium lights, HID and mercury lamps are present.

I just don’t worry too much about color balance unless it is obnoxious. There is no way you could ever correct that shot above. But I actually like the effect in that shot.

But sometimes, if one light type predominates on the scene, you can tweak the color temperature or use curves to correct the color in post processing.  And sometimes with yellow or orange lighting you will want to do some correction. I don’t try to guess the color temperature and set it on the camera either. I just use automatic white balance and shoot in raw. I do my adjustments in Photoshop and ACR.

Light Painting

This type of shooting is natural for light painting, you can put a gel over the lens of your flashlight and add light and color to the scene.  The traditional way to get gels is to get a sample kit from one of the manufacturers like Rosco. However the manufacturers are not giving out the sample kits like the once did. You can try to request one but it might take some creative form-filling-out skills to succeed.

You can buy gels from B&H and others but you’ll end up with a huge sheet which will be a 100 year supply of that one color. So there is no great solution. Too bad these people don’t sell the sample kits. It would be worth $20 to get a sample kit.

–update– I have a comment that say that B&H does sell the Rosco sample kits for less than $10. I just spent 10 minutes trying to find the sample kit but could not; but Rosco has thousands of different items on sale at B&H so I may have used the wrong search terms.

Finally

Like other night shoots these images will also require a lot of post production. But you can produce wonderful images. So get out and give it a try.