Wednesday, January 21, 2015

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!

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