Anyway, I got a new phone (galaxy s5) so I thought I'd test out the new camera on it! Yesterday was the STP ride, so I was doing that all day. But before I left, and when I got done, I took some pictures.
The night before the ride, I was at my aunts house in Seattle. She and her husband are growing some lotus plants, and they have the coolest buds ever. Victor and I took about an hour just snapping photos of the things and comparing how our phones looked. The S5 definitely has a great camera. As for the software though....not so much. The UI is pretty terrible. Hate to say it, but Apple really knows what they're doing as far as that goes.
I edited the photo of the lotus in Snapseed, freshly downloaded that very evening. That's were the S5 really shinned. I did my usual basic edit, save, and then re edit that saved photo with different effects. The S5 kept up perfectly, saving and opening photos in an instant.
Speaking of editing, I did the following (if my memory serves me correctly.) Vignette with blur, increase shadows, ambience, and structure. Contrast and sat up a hair, with a local brightness adjust in the middle of the photo for the blossom. I did an extra edit too with a b/w high contrast/raised shadows so that I could make a luminosity mask easily for the shadows later on in Ps.
Good segway to Ps I suppose. I opened all my edits, three with Retrolux filters, one base edit, and one b/w. Then I went through and figured out which parts of each edit I liked, and used layer masks to softly select those parts. By softly, I mean use a soft brush. I also used the lighten blending mode on those layers to combine them. With the b/w layer, I made my luminosity mask and I had planned, and turned that into a layer mask for a curves adjustment. I then inverted the mask to select the shadows, and also increased the black point on the mask to filter out the highlights. With the curves adjustment. I upped the contrast and raised the shadows. This gave me more definition in the shadows while preserving the white and black point. Basically HDR.
For the second photo, I took a picture (obviously) of the curtains in the hotel we stayed at. The light coming in was beautiful on them, and I couldn't pass it up. I did pretty much the same adjustments for the basic edit as I did on the lotus picture, except that I raised the contrast a bit, and cropped the image. The rest of the process was the same, including making a high contrast b/w version.
For editing, I used the same layer mask/lighten blend mode blending techniques. However, with the b/w high contrast layer, I simply used a layer mask to paint in the highlight area I wanted. This area was on the curtains, and I wanted it to very blown out and dramatic.
Both of these photos are very "instagramy/iPhone/#whatevercomesafterpostmodernism" They are completely and utter over processed to the point of absurdity. But that's what I love about them! Photography is all about doing completely unnecessary and absurd things!
Now...for tonights photo!
I went out to Lime Kiln where there's a sweet light house. I haven't done any little planet effects with building in it, so a light house sounded like a perfect first try. I set up the same as I have in the past, very level tripod and the 10mm fisheye. I shot vertically to get the most, well, vertical coverage I could. I shot maybe 10 times in the panoramic, using bracketing at +-2EV at f7.1, ISO100, and 1/6.
I used Photomatix Pro to make the HDR by way of batching and using fusion/natural blending. PTGui made the actual panoramic with little trouble, although I did have to try a few times to get the stitching right. Back in Lr, I raised the clarity, highlights, and shadows. Also the vibrance.
Moving over to Ps, I filled in the center whole using the stamp tool. Back over to Lr, where I darkened the sky and make it more blue with a adjustment brush. And that's it!
See you tomorrow!
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