As Promised...Kinda

A while ago, I did a post on an image I made while on vacation near Port Renfrew, BC. I promised that I'd do a video explaining more of the editing process, but never really got around to it.

I thought about doing one tonight, but instead I did a video on the editing process of another, very similar photo. This one was actually more challenging to edit, so I think it does a better job of explaining the process than the other photo would have.

Starting from the beginning, my family and I were hiking in the Avatar Grove near Port Renfrew. Apparently, it's home to the gnarliest tree in Canada, along with some of the oldest and largest. Everyone was excited to go out and hike in such amazing scenery, even though it was foggy and raining out.

The trail was one of the coolest I've been on. It was just a collection of deep, gnarled, beautiful roots climbing up a the steep slope. The giant trees and ferns were all round in the typical north west fashion, it is pretty much a rain forest. The vegetation up there is just amazing, so dense and green all around, with rich browns and black dirts.

Sadly, with the conditions as they were, I doubted that I'd be able to get any good photos. The light was really flat, and all the moisture just made it impossible to see much detail at a distance. Being me, however, I brought my gear along in hopes that something would turn up and be worth shooting.

I'm glad I had faith, because about half way through the walk the sun broke out! Just as we reached a small stream in a gully, sun beams streamed through the canopy down to the forest floor. Within seconds my camera was out and I was looking for good compositions along the stream.

My first shot was a broad shot of the stream. I was not looking directly into the sun, I mostly focused on the vegetation and the stream. I really liked this shot as it captured the whole of the forest, getting all the elements in. The tall trees were there, the moss, the stream, and the rich soil. However, I was very interested in the way the stream wove it's way through the dense undergrowth, so I moved in for the kill.

It was a bit tricky to get a vantage point at first. The bank I wanted to stand on was of course covered with bushes, so it took a second to work my tripod in a spot that left my lens unobstructed. There was still one bush on the left side, but I didn't want to rip it out. My composition had the stream running from the bottom right to the middle, then snaking it's way out about the middle of the frame. In hind sight, it would have been nice to frame slightly more right to have the stream farther left, but I was doing a panorama, and didn't realize what the end result was really going to be like :( Something to keep in mind for the future though. I like the current composition, but I could have been better.

I bracketed three shots in a vertical panorama. The settings where f/11, ISO100, .25-.6-1.6s. This is about 1.2 stops of difference I think between exposures. Any more than that and it becomes very difficult to composite later. The mid highlights in the dark image become actually darker than the midtones of the light image, which is a big problem. You get weird ghosting and muddy highlights when you add back the shadows on the dark exposure, which sometimes can't be recovered very well. In the video I go through how I solved that problem, and also explain it with visuals so hopefully it'll make more sense that way.

Keep in mind, the idea behind bracketing is to capture the full range of tones in an image. One exposure usually can not hold all the information, and even if it does somehow, extracting it with Lr or another RAW processor induces a lot of noise and degrades image quality. I talk more about this idea in this post.

To begin the editing process, I first had to make the three panoramas that would then be merged into the HDR image. The three panoramas need to be exactly the same, so that they basically become three bracketed images themselves. Normally, I would do the opposite, making three HDR images out of the bracketed sequences, then composite those into a panorama. However, with manual blending, you need to make the panoramas first, and the HDR second. The reason for this is that manual HDR blending doesn't follow any recipe that can be repeated. For each part of the image, a different technique is used, and it would be impossible to edit each bracketed sequence the same way and have them merge together cohesively. With HDR programs like Photomatix, the same adjustments can be applied to each image. However, that in it's self is a problem because I just said that different part of the image require different editing! An HDR program can't really define what areas need what like a human can, so most of the time the results are less than satisfactory. Yes, the results can be cool sometimes, but right now I'm not into that style.

To make the three panoramas that are exactly the same pixel for pixel, I use PTGui. This is an amazing program, it has a pro feature of HDR panoramas but you can export the three blend planes instead of the blended image! Essentially, this is exporting the three bracketed panoramas that I need to create my manual HDR in Photoshop. I go through this step in more detail in the video.

In Photoshop, I first make my luminance selections based on the EV0 exposure. This exposure has the greatest range of tones, and thus more information to make the selections off of. Again, explained more in the video.

For blending, I only use the darkest and lightest exposures. All the tones in the middle image are somewhere in the the other two exposures, and since I blending them at definite opacities, I'll get the tones between the two. First, I paint in my shadows and midtowns that are lost in the darker exposure. This is a pretty simple process. However, doing this creates the problem with the highlights that I explained earlier. It looks like this.

Look at the moss in the middle and on the bottom right. The highlights, are muddy and very flat, theres is just no contrast there at all!

To fix this, I selected the highlights, and then started to gently paint them in from the bright layer. Emphasis on gently, the highlights from the bright layer are very overexposed, so all I want to do is add some of that to the image, but not all. To add all would be to overexpose, I just want to bright them up. I go over this in more detail in the video.

One thing I didn't get to show in the video was recovering highlights and shadows in the trees. There was one spot that was very flat because the light layer had been blown out with a light leaking thing.To correct this, I painted out the light layer complete from that area, then just painted in the highlights again. However, this was still too flat, so I selected the midtones, and painted those out of the trees about 50%. This left some bright areas in, some of the midtones, and the dark shadows of the dark layer.

Next, I set my black point in a curve layer, which helped correct color balance. The image was a bit warm in the shadows for my taste, and setting the black point helped to neutralize that. However, I did want some warmth in the highlights, so I grabbed a selection of the highlights and added a warming filter to them.

I think that's about it! A little cropping, and a bit of sharpening in Lr was all that was left. Enjoy the video and finally the picture!

See you soon!

Hello, World

It's been a while, well, only a few weeks, but it feels like it was a long time ago that I finished up my digital annum. Never fear though, I have still been shooting, and there's lots of new photos to write about! I'm going to be doing posts less frequently than before, but I'll still post from time to time. There's four or five photos I'd like to go through on the blog over the next week or so, so expect some post coming up!

Tonight, let's talk about sunset shots. They can be very hard to get when you're shooting directly into the sun, as the shadows get very underexposed. In order to expose the sun correctly, you have to underexpose everything else. Sometimes, the silhouettes that are made are actually pretty wonderful, but a lot of the time you just get a super contrasty, rather saddening image.

On the other hand, you can over expose the sun and sky to get detail into the ground and shadows. However, the obvious problem with that is over exposing the sky and sun....

For the last couple years, the solution for that has been HDR programs like Photomatix Pro and even Photoshop. These work really well to do fast HDR images (although Ps makes 32bit HDR images that are great for editing later), but the results can be less than satisfactory. Ghosting and bad blending almost always occurs, and most of the time the images are way, way over done. This has given HDR a bad name, which is quite sad.

I used to be a big fan of slightly over processed HDRs, I'll admit. Half of the fun is just getting super crazy results! With a couple clicks, all this magic happens and your bracketed images suddenly merge into one super awesome....thing. It was fun for a while, but over time I found myself going away from that over processed look towards something more real.

I first discovered luminosity mask blending from the Patel's last spring. They marketed the process as iHDR, a process they created. Yes, they had their own work flow. But no, they didn't create luminosity masks and they weren't the only ones using it. There wasn't much information out there yet, and I wasn't at a point where I was ready to experiment with it. With the blog in full swing, I didn't have time to really figure out luminosity masks, so I kept putting it off for a few months.

The most common method of blending I was using before luminosity masks, was just layer masks. It's quick and easy to do, just paint where you want the image to show. With a little skilled a precise brush work, images can be blended quite well actually. It's not a bad method sometimes, but with areas like horizons and skies, it really doesn't work well. The transition zones become this weird gradient, and it's obvious that layers were blended.

With the down falls of only using layer masks, I shied away from shooting contrasty scenes. Forests in mid day light, or sunsets on beaches were mostly edited in Lightroom. It wasn't the worst way to edit, but it does induce noise and artifact by manipulating only one raw file.

Finally, with my final project last fall, I started using luminosity masks and install fell in love. The advantages are HUGE. In Lr, when you raise the shadows, you raise the shadows everywhere. Even in you use a local adjustment, you can't be very precise. But with luminosity masks, you can very, very precisely paint in layer masks. You can select only the shadows of one image, then paint in that selection from another image. In other words, you can select the totally crushed blacks from the underexposed sunset shot, and then paint in that area from your over exposed sky shot. By doing this, you're taking the best of both your images and combining them into one. There's no weird blending marks or gradients, it looks like it came from one image. Even better, you're not manipulating the original raw file, so image quality is not lost. The only down fall is that you have to have perfectly aligned images.

So back to the sunset shot I'm writing this post about....

I went out to South Beach when I was home over break, specifically to shoot sunsets and test out luminosity masks. I didn't have a very wide lens on me, so I was limited in what I could shoot. The shot I really wanted to make required a wider field of view than I had, so I had to look around a little more to find something I could shooting with the lens I had.

Note: Later I figure out how to make a panoramic HDR with luminosity mask to simulate a wider lens. That's coming up in a later post.

Eventually, I found this really awesome log that was getting hit my surf. When a big wave came, it crashes around the long, which I thought would look awesome with a long exposure to blur the water. Another reason I chose to shoot that log was the composition of it. By putting the camera lower down and shooting into the sun, the log made a line leading to some rocks, which then led to the sun, which then led to the clouds, then the water, then the log, etc. It just made a nice zig zag over the image. Wonderful. It was also a great way to test out luminosity masks.

I stopped down all the way to get a slow shutter speed to blur the water. Preferably, I would use an ND filter and shoot at f/11 or so, but I don't have an ND filter so f/22 would have to do. With that aperture and ISO100, my shutter speed for EV-0 was 1/4s. This overall gave good exposure, and would have been the exposure I could use just with Lr sliders to create an HDR image. But I wasn't doing that. I did a bracketed sequence of +/-1EV, so 1/8s and 1/2s. This got the sky exposed properly as well as the ground.

I made sure my setting were okay by looking at the histogram. With the -1EV, I wanted the information to be all the way right, but not clipped at the whites. This would give me the most information in the highlights. With the +1EV, I wanted the information as far left as possible, but not clipped on the blacks. This would give me the most information in the shadows. Granted, I could have done a greater range than +/-1EV and gotten more information in the highlights and shadows, but I've found 1 stop actually does a pretty darn good job at capture the full range of tones in a sunset.  It's not as contrasty as full sunlight, so one stop works really well. And yes, Lr could easily pull out the information from one RAW file, but as the cost of image quality. With a full frame camera like the 5D mrkIII or the D810, maybe one file would do it, but maybe not with the 7D. Plus, I was experimenting with a new technique!

And, I actually just remembered this, with three exposure right after each other, I have three stages of waves to blend into the final image. You'll see in the final image how I blend all the waves together.

Another thing I forgot I did...Before I edited in Ps, I tried to compress the tonal range of the RAW files in Lr by lowering the highlights and raising the shadows of each. Yes, this goes against what I just said about not editing in Lr because it degrades the image....but, little adjustments don't have too much of an effect. It's more when you do major changes that things go bad. With doing the adjustments, blending goes much more smoothly.

Here are the three shots, originals then edited:

Starting in Photoshop, I make my luminosity channels off the dark layer. I use Jimmy McIntyre's action for creating the channels for the selections, which become the masks. He has an awesome action provided for free, so why not take advantage of it? He's also a great resource for learning advanced blending, I think one of the better pro's out there. 

Anyway, once I had my mask, I selected the dark areas of the image, and then used that selection to paint in the light areas. It takes a bit of tweaking and I used a couple different selections for different areas, but it's a fairly straight forward process. I explain it more in the video below. 

Then, after my images were blended, I working on my tones. With a couple of curves adjustments that altered different parts of the image, I got a much more dramatic image. Again, I got through that in more detail in the video. 

Finally, I worked on colors, added vibrance in to different parts of the image at different levels. Just simple layer masks used there. 

This video has a more detailed description of how I edited. Seeing is probably a little easier to grasp than me writing a bunch of tech jargon! 

And finally, the image! As I said in the video, this image was shot and edited not based on a recipe, but on problem solving. HDR sticking software makes all the decisions for you, and the image suffers from that lack of creative input. It takes longer to do it yourself, but the results are so much better! Here's a comparison with one made in Photomatix and one with Lr. 

Photomatix:

  Lightroom:

Photoshop:

See you...sometime in the near future!

Fire and Ice

So....last post. It's been a year tomorrow since I started the blog. This is the last one.

That aside, Victor and I wanted to do something epic for the last photo. Something we'd remember and we hadn't done before. Something that tied together a lot of what we'd learned over the last year.

Fire has been a common theme that we've been very interested in all year, so we packed up a couple of new trick and set out for the quarries. It's still freezing out, and the water was somewhat frozen. Wasn't exactly the most pleasant experience being outside for hours.

At first, we tried the creamer cannon. We mostly succeed in lighting Victor and the ground on fire, so that was abandoned pretty quickly.

Next, we moved on to the steel wool. That stuff just never, ever gets old. At the north end of the quarries, there's a big rock cliff that overlooks the water. We both thought it'd be a great spot to do some raining fire.

Last night, we also did some fire pictures. After doing some tests, and based on prior shots, we came up with the ideal exposure for fire of f/11 and ISO100 and around 30s. The time doesn't matter as much, because at night there's so little light that the background doesn't really show up. The settings only capture the fire, which is really perfect for applications.

However, tonight I wanted to get the background exposed too. With all the fire we're doing, there needed to be some context.

But I couldn't get the background in on the same exposure with the fire, as it would take maybe 16 minutes to get a decent shot. That's not practical.

To fix this problem, I did a base exposure of the background at f/3.5, 30s, and ISO1600. These are also idea exposure settings for my camera and lens set up that I discovered the other day while shooting the light house. With the moon out, there was a lot of detail in the landscape, as well as good stars. It was perfect shooting conditions.

We shot a big panoramic, with 4 framings. By framings I mean 4 shots to complete the panoramic. Each framing was framed in a way so that the most fire would be captured. We mostly did the cable and whisk method of making fire, but we also attached a shorter cable to a screw gun to get the same effect. It's pretty obvious from the photo were the locations we picked for fire, but mostly they were spots where there would be lots of area for the fire to spread. We also tried one new thing, a ball of wire with the wool inside. It got thrown off the top of cliff :)

Basically, the procedure went like this. I'd take the base exposure, then we'd do as much fire in that location as we could. Then repeat! Ice makes a great surface to bounce off of btw...


Editing took a little thought, but was pretty easy. I first corrected the lens distortion in Lr, then moved over to Ps. I made four groups, each with the photos from the framing in them. This way, I could align the images based on the base exposures, but the fire pictures would be aligned too since I'm moving the whole group. I only had the base exposures turned on in each group. I started with the bottom, and worked up. The alignment only had to be rough, since the final image would have a very dark background only for context.

Once everything was aligned, I turned on all the fire pictures, and set them to lighten. However, the base layers were too bright, so I took them and put them in their own group. This way, I could put them on the bottom, and then added a levels adjustment layer above them. I darkened it quite a bit, so that mostly only the highlights were visible.

I moved over to Lr next, were all I did was some selective clarity adjustment on the fire and stars.

And that's it. All done. The last photo.