Houston Photobloggers

Storage and Backup

Storage isn't much fun to read about (or write about), but I recently upgraded mine and thought it worth a mention.

Drives are so cheap now, everyone should be backing up... at least your photos. 500G drives can now be had for around $100, and 750G for under $200. My strategy is to double the size of my largest drive every few months, and use the "previous largest" for backup (often enough so that I never exceed the capacity of the backup drive).

Another route is one of the new RAID 1 dual-drive "drives"... Maxtor and Western Digital (at least) have these... you get a single external "drive" that actually has two drives in it, which you can put into mirroring mode (RAID 1)... then anything you put on the drive is automatically stored on two drives. If one fails, it can be replaced. These are a bit more money but not outrageous, a 1TB model (i.e. 500G of mirrored space) is $299.

Anyway... this just to encourage you to keep things backed up!

Gradient Overlay Goodness

Vignettes are very popular (and often very cool), and this technique can go along with an actual vignette, or could be used to draw out or intensify part of your image.

First, get your complete image on one layer (either flatten or Cmd-Shift-Option-E on a new layer). You may want to duplicate that layer, and if you're down to one layer only, definitely duplicate it.

Then on the new layer, double-click the blank space in the layers palette next to the layer name (to bring up the layer styles dialog) and select Gradient Overlay, or in the menu, choose Layer -> Layer Style -> Gradient Overlay.

Make your settings look like this for starters:

Then with the layer styles dialog still open, click and drag your mouse around in your image until the center of the brightened spot is where you want it. You can get a better sense of where it is by switching the blend mode to Normal temporarily, but I find it best to work where I can see the actual effect.

Click OK and that's it. There are a bunch of parameters to adjust in that dialog, so tweak to suit your taste or the particular image you're working with. I made this into an action, which makes it very quick to apply. You can always tweak the effect after running the action just by double-clicking the layer style in the layers palette.

Panorama: CS3's Photomerge

I knew Adobe revamped Photomerge in Photoshop CS3, but I hadn't tried it until today... it's really good. This image was created from 9 overlapping vertical frames, leaving Photomerge in "Auto" mode (i.e. the defaults, I didn't do anything). I didn't even take the shots with a tripod, I just handheld and guessed.

So if you have CS3, go take panoramics! The technique is pretty simple, you just shoot 6-10 (or so) frames such that the exposure, perspective, and horizon are essentially the same in each, and such that they overlap enough for Photoshop to be able to merge them. You can probably get away with fewer frames, but I'm not sure why you'd want to. I would think that giving Photoshop more to work with would improve the results.

So in this example, I used manual mode and manual focus (to keep them the same in each shot), steadied my lens with my left hand while shooting with my right, and then rotated a bit for each shot, trying not to disturb the camera much or change where the horizon fell in the frame.

It is also probably important to "normalize" your images using levels so that each image going into the merge is roughly the same brightness, contrast, etc. I ran Aperture's auto-luminosity on each before exporting and merging in Photoshop.

To do the merge, I just ran Photomerge, selected the files on disk, and clicked "Go" (or whatever the button was). Then you'll need to crop the result a little to fill the frame. Very cool!

Optimizing Black and White Conversions

... or, "why do one black and white conversion when you can do two?"

With Photoshop CS3's black and white layer, it is now fairly trivial to convert different parts of an image to black and white differently. For this image, I processed everything above the horizon one way, and everything below it another. Each black and white layer has a mask that is the inverse of the other. Since the whole image is going black and white, you would have to make some pretty extreme adjustments for the dividing line between the two layers to be visible.

This could obviously get even more complicated with more layers or gradient masks, etc., but it's very common for one conversion to work well for sky and clouds and something entirely different to be optimal for ground and trees and so on.

You could even apply different tints that way, though that could yield some hideous results. (This image was tritoned as a whole after the black and white conversions)

Precision Cloning

This is a quick tip but I found it very useful recently. Say you need to clone out parts of an image, e.g. other tourists at a popular spot. Let's also say that the background has fine details that will be obviously wrong if the don't line up just right (e.g. a railing, fence, building, or anything with straight, horizontal edges).

In case you're not familiar, cloning is simply painting from one part of an image onto another part of the same image, using the "clone tool" in Photoshop. It works like a paintbrush, only instead of painting with color, you're painting with the pixels from the "source" part of the image, which you choose.

The tip is to use a guide to place both your source and destination clicks. Drag a guide down from the top ruler to the spot where you want to place your source click. Hold down option (or alt on PC) to get the source crosshairs and line the horizontal line up right over the guide, and click. Then follow the guide to your destination, hold option (alt) again, line it up, and this time let go of option (alt) without moving the mouse at all. Now click, hold, and paint. Your cloned pixels will line up perfectly with the source pixels.

This works vertically too, of course, with a vertical guide.

Lighting: Distance, Part 2

I did the Lighting 102 exercise I mentioned previously, this image is the result. The exercise is a really powerful illustration of lighting control... the only differences between the four shots above are:

• the only light (one Alien Bees strobe) is half the distance to the subject in each image (beginning at approx. 77 inches in the first shot)
• the aperture is adjusted to compensate for the closer (and thus more intense) light source

Otherwise, the shots are identical. You can see the huge difference in the exposure of the background while the subject stays basically constant. The background is just a bright white foam core poster-board from Office Depot. Here's one cropped to look nicer:

Lighting: Distance Ratios

Distance ratios... sounds like fun! OK, boring title... but if you're interested in lighting, you really need to read this post in the Strobist Lighting 102 online seminar/course/thing. It should make some things click that maybe haven't before... it did for me. In particular, the relationship between the distance of a light to the subject and its distance to the background and the associated difference in intensity.

Digital Workflows Part Two

Jeremey’s post on Digital Workflows was great and spot on identifying the new breed of applications available to digital photographers to help streamline the post-processing phase. The discussion last Saturday also got me thinking about the subject and reminded me of the articles I have read in a number of photo magazines recently about the time spent processing photos. The gist of those articles was along the lines of ‘ In the era of digital photography, photographers are at risk of becoming shackled to their computers’.
In the days of film it was possible to hand over your exposed rolls of film to a lab who would process them for you. Now of course you could have developed your rolls yourself, but for many amateurs and professionals alike, they entrusted professional labs to process the bulk of their work, freeing them up to continue being creative taking photos. Ok, many of you will be thinking this is ridiculous, the digital era offers so much flexibility and speed in being able to shot, review upload and share endlessly, that spending time at the computer is worth it. Don’t get me wrong I would agree with this whole heartedly, but like Jeremey I would strongly support embracing software tools that free up time to get you away from your computer and back to your camera.
Also like Jeremey I am an Aperture user and so I wanted to elaborate on some of the features discussed in the last post that I really like. I won’t go into too much detail as there are a number of useful resources that cover Aperture in great depth (see end of article).

Smart Albums

When I stick in my CF cards Aperture automatically starts up, similar to iPhoto, and I can select the photos I want to add to the library and project. All the images you load can be found in the library but it is typical to create a new project to keep images on a certain theme together. On loading you have a number of predefined formats for batch editing file names and adding captions, keywords or modify IPTC data. As a project grows you may have several 100 images, you can create albums and drag images from the project panel to an album, the images remain visible in the project but if you want to look at that subset, say cars you toggle on the Album. However, a Smart Album allows you to define its contents on the basis of Keywords, date, ratings or any other metadata. The great thing about a smart album is that you can modify its contents if appropriate by redefining the search criteria simply with a few mouse clicks.

Lift and Stamp Tool

You come back from a days shooting, upload your images and starting making adjustments on one of your favorites. When you finishing tweaking saturation, adjusting levels and correcting highlights you notice that many of the images require a similar set of corrections. With the lift tool you click on the image and all of the adjustments made to that image are captured as a list. Lets say that you cropped that image and gave it a ranking of 5 stars and you don’t want to apply that to all the other images, you simply deselect crop and rank from the list of adjustments then shift click all the images you want to adjust and bingo your corrections are applied to all of the images.

Adjustment Settings

I generally like my images with a rich slightly over-saturated look and with quite a lot of contrast in the midtones, once I make a correction to an image I can save those adjustments as presets, they are then available at the click of a button the next time I load a set of new images.

Stacks

It took me a while to become convinced about stacks, however I now live by them. You take an image of church in the Hill Country you upload it and decide that for your photoblog you will post it in color but for Flickr you will make a B&W set. Later you decide that you prefer it in sepia and create a sepia version, once you finish all the adjustments you end up with 5 different versions (remember with Aperture you see 5 versions of the image, but in fact in the database only a master image exists with 5 sets of adjustments stored in an XMP sidecar file). If you do this to a number of images you will end up with many more to scroll through, however if you stack these images, four of the images hide underneath the top one. You can define the top image, or pick, and the remaining order of the images by using the pick, promote or demote icons. When you want to unstack your images you simply shift-K or select unstack. Using stacks you can easily view just your tops picks or all your images in a project or album.

Loupe

The Loupe enables you to zoom in on an image from 100-1600%. Lets say you are viewing thumbnails of your images just after uploading, you have been shooting portraits and you want to see which ones are tack sharp. By using the keyboard shortcut the Loupe will appear on whatever image you have your cursor over and if you move your cursor to another image on the screen and hold down the shortcut key the Loupe will follow. You can rapidly identify your best images and rank them.

External Editors and Plugins

I also find myself using photoshop for some things, including Noise Ninja, and Alien Skin plugins for Photoshop and as the last post mentioned it is not a problem. I mention Alien Skin Exposure Plugin because if you don’t have Aperture or Lightroom you can use AS Exposure to make adjustments to your images using pre-defined settings that mimic film. You can also edit any of those predefined setting to create your own unique color and grain profiles to apply unique custom styles to your images that can be applied time and time again at the click of a button.
A great feature on the Mac is Automator, Automator is a user friendly interface that allows you to take ready made script elements and attach them together to automate repetitive tasks. One of the simplest is just applying a batch name change to all your images on import followed by an automatic copy / duplicate and image resize (very handy for web uploads). If your nervous of bolting these actions together and you use Photoshop CS2 or CS3 you can download Photoshop Automator Actions v3.5 from Ben Long and Rick LePage at completedigitalphotography. This amazing pack has 86 scripts including useful actions like adding watermarks, assigning color profiles, image resizing etc. With this powerful set of actions you have the potential to perform useful batch functions on your images, and save a heap of time.
Of course, if using Aperture wasn’t efficient enough, Automator also contains actions for Aperture allowing you to search albums and perform batch exports as well as other useful stuff.

On Camera Settings

There is of course another approach to consider and that is performing adjustments to your images in camera. From reading bulletin boards I have noticed a number of pro-photographers who use Picture Style (Canon DSLR) to save them time. For example a wedding photographer could use a color portrait setting with richer / warmer color tone for people shots then perhaps switch to a toning effect like sepia for Church and abstracts, shooting in JPEG to reduce post-processing time and increase turn around time. Or for amateurs taking part in the emerging activity of photomarathons, you don’t really have time to process your images so why not ahead of time define a series of settings you like. It is really no different from film, different brands of film had different tonal ranges and saturations. If you like the warmness of Kodak Ektachrome or the vividness of Fuji Velvia when shooting a certain subject you would pop that brand of film in your camera. Well, with on camera settings you can recreate the same way of shooting. Of course we could easily slip from the subject of workflows to the topic of ‘getting the photo’ right when you take it discussion, but lets leave that for another day.
The downside in the case of Canon’s Picture Style is that unless you shoot JPEG you have to use Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software. If you use RAW the adjustment settings are not carried into Aperture or Lightroom. However, that brings us back full circle to the subject of predefined settings in Aperture and Plugins like AlienSkin.


Hopeful this adds to the last post and may convince some of you to test drive Aperture, or experiment with other forms of batch / automated image processing.


Remember if you want to test out Aperture or Lightroom you can download a 30 day trial for free.

Useful Links

Ubermind

Automator

Apertureplugins

Automator Photoshop Plugins

Aperture vs Lightroom

O'Reilly Digital Media

Test Drive Aperture

Test Drive Lightroom

Alien Skin

Noise Ninja

Digital Workflow

At the meetup / photo walk on Saturday we had some discussion about Photoshop vs. Photoshop Elements and so on, so I thought I'd write a little about workflow because that really seems to be the hard problem in digital photography. The term "workflow" covers the whole process of handling digital images, from importing files from camera or memory card, through editing and developing, to output, be it print or web or whatever.

BTW, I use "editing" here to mean the traditional process of selecting the best images, and "developing" to mean the process of taking the image produced by the camera and transforming it into a finished image. Also, apologies for the length of this... even as long as it is, I'm only scratching the surface of this topic.

There are new tools now, particularly Aperture (by Apple) and Lightroom (err, Photoshop Lightroom, officially, by Adobe), which remove much of the complexity of managing files, different versions, backups, and so on. All of the editing and the vast majority of the developing that I do now I do in Aperture. I no longer have files littering my drives, multiple copies for each version, etc.

Continued...

CS3 Goodies

Speaking of CS3... since it was released just last Monday, and as I'm a Photoshop addict, I thought I'd highlight a couple things that are new that I use alot (I'd been using the beta).

The first is the black and white adjustment layer. I love black and white, especially when converting from color, because I have so much control over tone. CS3's B&W adjustment layer takes that to another level, with separate sliders for reds, yellows, greens, cyans, blues, and magentas. Instead of a direct control over channels like we had in the channel mixer, you now have much more useful tonal control with more granularity. You can also apply a tint in the same dialog, which I'm using to apply sepia toning or even just a slight warm cast. If you've been using Lightroom, the B&W adjustment will look very familiar.

The second feature is non-destructive filters (aka smart filters). Normally a filter (such as a blur or unsharp mask) would alter your actual pixels, but you can now apply it as a smart filter instead, and it becomes similar to a layer or layer style, which you can turn on and off, re-order, etc. Your original pixels are untouched.