Tools that I Use

It’s been a little while since I’ve written about some of the tools and techniques that I use when editing photos.  Part of this has been that I’ve been working on changing how I approach editing workflow, to make it more enjoyable for myself.  I find that the more that I learn about photography, the more I want to continue expanding my (in my opinion) novice skill set when it comes to editing and retouching my images into a final product.  The goal that I aspire towards is to be a well balanced and consistent visual artist.

As some of you know, my day job takes me out of town for extended periods of time and I live in an environment where I cannot bring my camera.  What I do bring with me is my laptop, and as much of my photographic collection as possible.  It is during these times I work on images and do most of my blogging.  

The image below was taken during my last shoot with my friend Graham, that was the subject of my last journal post.  To be a bit more specific, the image below is actually a HDR composite of five images ranging from -2 EV to +2 EV in one stop increments.  After exporting the images from Lightroom 3 beta to Photomatix Pro to do the blending and tone mapping, I discovered  the good and bad about the image.  The good was that I love the golden sunlight that was brought out; and the bad was that it was very obvious how windy that day was, especially with the trees in the foreground.

At first I thought that the image was a lost cause, but then decided to work at it using some of the other tools that I employ from time to time.  I opened the image in Photoshop CS4 and first went to the Phototools plugin by onOne Software.  With it I did a very basic adjustment to adjust the orange/yellow saturation slightly across the image.  I followed this with opening Focal Point 2, also by onOne Software, and proceeded to create the blurring, and vignette on the image.  After this I brought the image back into LR3b where i adjusted the sharpness slightly.  The thing to note about the onOne Software plugins is that they use Photoshop’s resources to provide the edits.  Yes, you could do all of the same edits by just using Photoshop, but onOne’s plugins are very intuitive and natural feeling to use.  

In any event, here is the final product that I came up with.  As always, thanks for reading!

Looking across the Edmonton river valley to the U of A Campus

Glad to get out and shoot

As some of you may know, I haven’t been feeling too good lately, and have ended up working from home for about the past week or so.  That in itself has been good, because it’s always nice to recoup at home instead of toughing it out in a tiny camp room.  Well, it turned out to be a pretty nice day today and my friend Graham, suggested we go out and for me to do some photography while he did some videography.  It was great to get out of the house, get some fresh air and step away from the tech and editing projects I was working on this weekend.  Here are a few photos that I got during the outing.

Sunset

Benches

South Side of the River

LRT in Action

Attempting Good HDR

It started with a fairly simple conversation with my friend Graham that went something like this:  

Graham:  Hi, I’m back for another round of pain at the UofA; have you done any HDR photography since I left four months ago?

Jared:  It’s great to see you back; no I haven’t.

Graham:  Did you bring your camera?  Let’s go right now!

Jared:  Errr, no I didn’t and I don’t think our wives would appreciate us ditching them.

Graham:  It’s on next weekend then… NO EXCUSES!

So yesterday was the day we got together and killed a solid ten hours of shooting and marathon editing.  Of course there were a few breaks along the way for driving between locations, food and coffee.  Was it successful?  Very!  Did I/we learn anything?  Yes  Will I/we be doing this again?  Definitely!

I would consider this to be our first serious attempt at “Good HDR” from a photographic standpoint.  Here is the general workflow that I prefer to use when I approach HDR.

1. Find a subject with contrasting lighting conditions.
2. Take multiple exposures of the subject bracketing between underexposing and overexposing.  I prefer to use 5 or more images and generally spread the range between EV -2 and +2.  This is just a general guide because the subject may require a greater range.  
3. Select the files and combine using Photomatix Pro.
4. Use Photomatix Pro for Tone Mapping.
5. Continue editing the combined/tone mapped file in Lightroom/Photoshop.

Further Explanation:

• You and your camera:  Manual Mode
  • This is a great exercise to become familiar with your camera’s manual mode.  Shooting manual allows you to have maximum control over the image.  In this case you do not want your aperture to change, and will only be changing the shutter speed.  Your camera’s meter will display how much you are under/over exposing the shot.
  • Yes, you can use Aperture Priority mode for this as well, as well as Auto Exposure Bracketing.
  • Lock your focus:  Different camera makes and models handle this differently.  My preferred method is to use auto-focus to initially focus, and then switch it over to manual to ensure that it will not try to refocus or focus differently between the shots.
  • Tripod, Tripod, Tripod
• You and your computer:  Resources Required
  • The thing to note is that these types of files can become massive and the overall process can really chew into your computer’s resources.  This where having that extra GB of RAM can make a difference.  
  • Just combining the files for this project in Photomatix Pro returned an average of 80 - 100MB 16bit Tiff files.  Expect that number to increase or decrease depending on the number of exposures that you are combining.

Conclusion:

After seeing the results, both Graham and I were blown away.  Even before editing, on average the combined/tone mapped file was very superior to any of the images that had been taken to create it.  One of the really interesting things for me was seeing the differences between each of our final images.  Even though we were using the same identical files, the editing process is where the artistic personality of each person comes out; and I’ve enjoyed looking at his images as much as looking at mine.

More will be coming in the future, so stay tuned!