Follow-up: The thing’s I’ve learned

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Old Photo Critique, Photo Processing

I wanted to do my retouching on the photos I posted a couple days ago as quickly as possible.  The temptation is to spend a lot of time on post processing, especially when you are “trying to prove a point” so I had to time myself.  I decided to not take more than 5 minutes on either picture.

There’s not a lot one can do to correct the first image.  These are the things I did:

1. Red eye removal
2. Crop tight
3. Remove  clutter from background with content aware fill.
4. Clear a few spots from face.
5. Warming filter.

Cropping in tight helps to get you more engaged in the image, but since this was a 4MP image in the first place, the cropped images is only really of a reasonable size to display on the Internet.  I can’t make a decent print larger than a 4×6.

The second image I spent every moment of the 5 minute time limit and did:

1. Brighten eyes
2. Increased iris saturation
3. Saturated pink shirt.
4. Light skin smoothing (to reduce noise mainly.)
5. Darken background using a curve adjustment.
6. Add a warming filter.

So what do you think?  Is spending 5 minutes on an old image worth the time?

Read More

Go back and fix the past

Posted by Philip in Old Photo Critique, Photo Processing

From time to time you need to go back to some of your old photos and see what a couple minutes with the new tools can do for them.  Nine years ago I got married and honeymooned at Disney World.  Since tomorrow is our anniversary, I took the first reasonable photo from the trip taken with an Olympus Point and shoot camera to see what it looked like.

Taking a close look at the image the color looks a little flat.  It’s likely because it was an over cast day, and there was some noise in the image.  So taking the editing capabilities of Camera Raw, I knocked out the noise, warmed the scene and added a bit more blue to the sky with a touch of negative clarity.  All-in-all a much better image.  If I knew then what I know now, I could have taken several shots from the same location and easily cloned out the people, so it would look like we had the place to ourselves.

What else can/should I do?

Read More

The Photography Tip of the Week #078

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Podcast

Ho Hum to Hmmm

078 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Is every photo a masterpiece?  Can any photo become a great work of art?  Is beauty in the eye of the beholder and if so what do they behold?  I see similar questions to these on various photography forums from time to time.  They are basically asking if they should keep every photo and if they do, what should they do to make them worth keeping.  So for this tip I’m going to give you a basic process to bring out the best in any photo.  This isn’t going to make every photo a masterpiece, but you may find a few treasures you didn’t think you had.

Before I begin I must warn you that this will require some post processing techniques that I feel photographers should have, but many probably don’t.  It’ll also require the use of some software that’s more than what you get with the camera, but programs like Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop Elements and even free image manipulation software can handle these steps. Here they are: Crop, Correct, Concentrate.

I recently entered some photos in a local contest and one of the categories was insects.  I generally don’t do a lot of macro photography and I don’t have a gallery of insect photos.  But I did remember that I did photograph a butterfly recently.  When I looked at the photos they were all “Ho Hum.”  So how do you make a Ho Hum photo into one that makes you go Hmmm.

Step 1, Crop.  This is pretty straightforward and I’ve had tips on how to crop before.  Simply get rid of the background cruft and make your subject large.  That’s one of the beauties of having lot’s of megapixels, you can often crop more than 50% of the photo away and still have plenty of information to make a great image.

Step 2, Correct.  You want to do a color correction based on your subject.  This color correction can include extra saturation and contrast to make your subject pop. Don’t worry too much about the surrounding information, we’ll handle that in a moment.

Step 3, Concentrate.  Finally you want to concentrate the viewer’s focus on the subject by making the surrounding information less colorful, visible or sharp. This is an artistic decision, but I’ve found that you don’t have to be extreme.  Even subtle changes can make the subject stand out.

So these are my 3 steps to convolve a ho hum photo into a more interesting photo that makes you go hmmm.

Read More

The Photography Tip of the Week #077

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Podcast

Same Time Color Correct

077 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

When post processing your photos one of the most common tasks is color correction.  If you are using a pro photo product that does the color correction for you, then this tip does not apply to you.  However, if you are manually correcting the color of a photo, then you need to pick a time of the day that you perform your color corrections.  The goal is to improve your consistency, so it’s important to have not only the same environmental conditions, but for you to be physically in a similar state as well. I like to do my portrait color corrections about a half hour after I get up in the morning for these reasons:

1. I’m well rested, especially my eyes are well rested.
2. My office is on the west side of the house so I don’t have the morning sun streaming in through the windows.
3. I don’t have a lot on my mind yet, so it’s a more relaxing time of the day.

I wanted to put this to the test  so I performed color correction to the same image at different times of the day over the period of a couple of days just to see what the difference would look like.  The point of this exercise was not to make a value judgement as to which is the better image, but to see what the difference is between the images from different times of the day.  I had to do them several days apart so I wouldn’t accidentally remember what settings I used previously.

As you can see there’s a big difference.  Even though I did attempt to make the environmental conditions the same. I wanted the same amount of ambient light and made sure I calibrated the monitor before performing each color correction. There’s a pretty sizable difference.  In my case the morning version prints much better on my printers than the afternoon version.

I know you don’t always have the option of picking when you post process all of your images.  But if you can create a habit or build it into your schedule to do this work at the same time of the day under similar conditions, you will achieve more consistent output.

Read More

Lens Correction and Manhattan Skyline

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Processing

Since I got the request to do my same lens correction test for a panorama, but with a cityscape, I asked Mark Schaffer of Knowsphotos if he had a few RAW files I could process.  He’s a far more traveled and accomplished landscape photographer.  You should check out his site, he posts images rather regularly.  The only thing is he uses a Nikon, but I won’t hold that against him.   ;-)   Just to be clear the original RAW files are his, and I processed them (including color correction) the same way I would have for any panorama.  So this is about as close to an equal comparison as the skyline pano I performed the same test on last week.

Yes, I know I didn’t crop the image.  I just want you to see what comes out of the pano stitching.

From this size you cant really see much difference.  And even putting the photos on top of each other at 100% shows that they are very close even along the edges.  Below is a small section of the pano at 100% where the images are in a difference mode so you can see the… differences.

As you can see there is not a lot of difference between the two images.  So one can conclude that with this lens, lens correction will not make a large difference when stitching panoramas.  I would hazard to guess that this would be true of 99% of  you panoramas, because the way the panoramas are stitched, the least distorted area of your lens is used for the bulk of the stitched image.  If you have any distortion, it’s generally along the edges of the picture, and you normally crop that out anyway.

So now you know and can spend some time at Knowsphotos to see some of Marks Landscape and Architectural photography.

Read More

Lens Correction and Panos?

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

After looking into what lens correction added (or didn’t add) to my portraits, I wondered if the lens correction being applied to each individual image before stitching the panorama would help.  One would think that the lens correction would straighten out the individual images and then the final panorama won’t have that bent bowtie effect.  So I decided to do a test with the following panorama.

After applying the lens correction and restitching I came out with the following panorama.

It’s kind of hard to tell, but it appears that the center horizontal of the panorama is a bit straighter.  But the sky appears to have even more bend to it.  So I decided to overlay the images to see how different they were.

There’s a pretty big difference and I think that applying the lens correction to the individual images before stitching does help the final image.  What do you think?  Is it a positive difference?

Read More