Use Adobe Photoshop CS5 HDR Toning For Realism

You’ve undoubtedly seen the wild end of HDR.  Even some images here at the gallery.  Every once in a while I feel the need to go crazy and play with the fringe of HDR.  I think some come out interesting and other make it look like I’m on an acid trip (have never done that).  That “tip of the iceberg” of HDR is a fun place to play, but can’t be thought of as the serious side of HDR’s use.  Today’s image resides on the calmer side of the method.  It comes from one of the all time best places to get river/stream photography.  Kelley Stand Road in Vermont.  It’s in southern Vermont, only about 25 north of the Massachusetts border on Route 7 in Arlington.  I’d love to try getting some winter shots but the road is closed to vehicles during the cold months.  If you take a trip along the Kelley Stand when it’s open you’ll know why.  I may have to find a snowmobile and some hand warmers.  It’s something to think about.  Hmmm.  I started playing with today’s image with the thought of going to the dark side of HDR, but I’ve already gone nuts on another shot of KSR.  Plus it was coming out really bad.  The alternate was to try for a realistic image I couldn’t get with my “normal” processing techniques.  It was a bit of a fight, with green gremlins creeping in.  To find out how the gremlins were kept at bay, hit the “read more”.

By green gremlins I mean really green, almost neon green, areas that needed to “be there” but not the glaring, eye catching, area of the image. The easiest way to describe where the greenies lived is to reference the good old “Rule of Thirds”. Right at the top of the image, just where the left vertical line would exit the image was a bright mossy rock. Enhancing the image using a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer made it pop to neon. The easy fix was to use Dodging and Burning to bring down the brightness. Dodging and Burning in CS5 is not your father’s D&B. It’s been reworked in CS5 and is actually usable. It has a button to turn on “Protect Tones”. I can’t imagine why it’s optional. I haven’t found any case where turning it off resulted in a better fix. Green gremlins gone.

The HDR Toning, in this case, wound up very touchy. Moving the sliders by ten points often made wild differences in what was happening in the image. Changing Exposure wacked out the Detail, which altered the amount of Shadow or Highlight strength that was needed. It was a balancing act and back and forth with the sliders to tame the image. The result is a pretty fair representation of what we saw on one of the best photo op spot in the northeast.

Raw Images Suck, Until They're Developed

If you routinely shoot in Raw, no matter what camera you use, the file, straight out of the camera looks terrible. Flat, soft, kind of lifeless would be good terms to describe a typical RAW image. If you’re new to shooting Raw, or just exploring the Raw versus JPG debate you might go running for the hills the first time you download a camera full of RAW images. If they’re so bad, what’s all the fuss about. Well, the fuss is due to the fact that they have more information in the file, they have a wider tonal range and they don’t have the camera manufacturer’s bias put on them. This can be directly related back to the film days. With film you got a basic image. Hopefully each lab you used to have your film developed did it using standard practices. Those set up by the film manufacturer. So, you “should have” gotten back a baseline negative (or positive) image. It was up to you to put you “signature” on the finished print. That’s what’s needed with a RAW image. It needs your “signature”. I could have given a copy of today’s RAW image to a half dozen photographers (or finishers) and I would have ended up with a half dozen interpretations of the same scene. Today’s image was shot almost a year ago (October 2009). I took a couple of the better shots from the trip to Maine and they’ve been featured here at the gallery. This one was pasted over several times since the initial selection process, but I couldn’t bring myself to chuck it altogether. There was “something” there. I just had to let it marinate for a while until the inspiration struck me. Well, today was the day. A couple of features of Adobe Photoshop CS4 and CS5 made it possible to “develop” the image. To find out what features were used in today’s image, hit the “read more”.
The first thing to say is that today’s image is basically full frame. I doubt if we lost more than a couple hundred pixels due to straightening. It doesn’t look like any digital camera format that I’ve ever seen, so how can it be full frame? Here’s where a feature, introduced in CS4, comes in. The big rage today is the Content Aware Fill feature in CS5. Well, in CS4 adobe put in Content Aware Scaling. It’s one of the least used features you’ll find. The big reason is that it’s a little confusing to use. Here’s the way it was used in today’s image. The Quick Selection Tool (W) was used, and anything other than the sky was quickly selected. Right clicking on the selection brought up a dialog box and about half way (loosely) down the options “Save Selection” was clicked. Save Selection produces a new Alpha Channel (look in the Channels panel) that I named “shore”. The selection was then deselected (CRTL D) and the entire image selected (CTRL A). Under the Edit Menu we find “Content Aware Scaling”. Once that’s picked you’ll see a dropdown in the options bar titled “Protect”. Clicking the dropdown shows the option to Protect the “shore” selection. You’ve, pretty much, put yourself into the Free Transform Tool. Grab the center top handle and drag downward. This compresses the sky area with changing anything from the horizon down. Compressing the sky area produced some additional drama in the sky.

The other thing that made today’s image possible was CS5’s Content Aware Fill. One of the big gotchas in today’s image was several poles sticking up from the bottom of the image. Because of the limit on what was shot, they came out of random spots and had no anchor points on the pier or shore. They just looked dumb. I figured I give CAF a shot. I outlined the first pole using the Lasso Tool (L). Hit Shift F5 to bring up the Fill dialog box, selected Content Aware and hit Enter. The computer did it’s magic on Adobe’s algorithm and in popped a completely clean fill. I didn’t have to do a thing to it. I was stunned. The next pole went right through the numbers found on the boat at the bottom center of the image. Bam, another good fill, including adding in a sequence of numbers. The number were a copy of the numbers that were already there, but they were on the right angle and fully formed. Wow! A third went through the lifeboat on the same boat. No problem.

With the tools we have available today anyone can change the content of an image. What used to be a skill had by an expensive few is now a simple click. Pretty amazing.

A Riff On Rockwell's "Main Street" in Adobe Photoshop CS5

In the post of March 22th I told about visiting the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge Massachusetts with some friends. One of the things I mentioned in the post was that I wanted to try doing some “recreations” of Rockwell’s paintings in photography. I thought (still think) it would be interesting to come full circle, since Rockwell used photography to help with his visualization process, to attempt to “update” his paintings as digital images. Rockwell was not a photographer and employed the services of various professionals for his needs. He oversaw the staging , angles, posture, costuming, and any other aspect or what went on during a shoot. He just didn’t click the shutter. Once he had the reference photos he’d take liberties (artistic license I guess you’d say) and make adjustments or enhancements where needed. On one hand he was more than willing to alter “reality” and on the other he’d do things like giving a female townsperson money to go out and buy a yellow dress to pose in. The irony was that his reference photos were in Black & White. With his painting “Main Street” he took the liberty of putting in some of the nearby Berkshire Hills into the background behind the stores on Main Street. The Berkshires are lovely, but cannot be seen from the center of Stockbridge. I took the same “artistic license” in today’s image. The big difference is the hills in the background are from a drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway, a pretty “fer piece” south of anywhere in New England. To find out about the machinations I had to jump through to make today’s image, hit the “read more”.

Rockwell’s painting is a straight on shot of the street. It’s actually an impossibility in that he shows no perspective. Each building is front on with no sides showing. It’s as though he stood in front of the library and painted it. Then he walked down the street fifty feet, set up his easel again and painted Theeler and Taylor’s Real Estate. Step and repeat for the Art Shop, the Stockbridge General Store, and on and on down to the Red Lion Inn. I tried doing the same thing. I took a shot in front of the library, walked down the street (tried to maintain the same camera height and focal length), shot the Art Shop, walked a little more and shot the General Store, etc. You can see, when the series of three shots were manually stitched together there was still perspective.


First thing I tried was using Adobe Photoshop CS5s Photomerge feature to have it do it’s typically great job of making a panorama. No such luck. Because of the shoot and walk, shoot and walk style of gathering the images the Photomerge went crazy and threw up its hands. So, everything was stitched “old school”. Each piece went through its own Free Transform to nudge it into place. The Opacity of the overlapping image was lowered to be able to get the right alignment with the underlying image. It was pretty painstaking and took longer than I would have liked.

Once everything was lined up I had to go through my own Blending of the images (something Photomerge does so well) by using clipped Brightness/Contrast Adjustment Layers. With a big, soft Brush I feathered the seams using the Masks that come with Adjustment Layers. At that point I had a mangled car sitting in front of the General Store. I cloned the car right next to the wreck overtop using the Clone Stamp Toll (S).

Next trick was to create a Mask to get rid of anything behind Main Street in preparation for inserting the foothills. I started off with the Calculations dialog box (Images/Calculations) to get a baseline Mask. I figured CS5s Refine Mask would do a great job cleaning up any problems. What a rude awakening. I sat there going back and forth and the Edge Detection kept making things worse rather than better. Thought “this has to be ‘user error’”. It was. I was applying the Mask to the wrong Layer. Duh! Once I figured that out (after about a half hour of futzing around) the Refine Mask worked great. It’s always “user error”, but determining what the “error” is isn’t always easy.

Next step was to use CS5s HDR Toning to give a little painterly look to the image, which screwed up the sky. That meant a new Mask for the sky and a Gradient Layer (darker Blue to lighter Blue) with an Overlay Blend Mode to maintain some definition and I was pretty close.

All this was coupled with the normal workflow of saturating each color, using High Pass Sharpening and putting a vignette around to finish. What started as a goof at about nine in the evening ended up as today’s image at one in the morning. Boy, I hope you like it.

Using Adobe Photoshop CS5 HDR Pro To Add Drama

Today is the first anniversary of The Kayview Gallery Blog. I’d like to thank all those who have been faithful readers and have helped make readership grow. It’s very humbling to see the steady increase in popularity and to hear from readers around the world. I hope you all continue to enjoy the stories and techniques found here on the blog. Thank you.

I’m not positive, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s thought of it, but using Adobe Photoshop CS5’s HDR Pro to add another “dimension” to an image looks like it might be one of CS5’s hidden “golden nuggets”. The “star” of today’s image is the parachute. Giving it a greater place of importance in the shot has a double meaning. A couple CS5 features were used to “make” this image. The angle of the sky diver was pretty flat. He/she was coming in on a final approach and was lined up with the canopy directly overhead. A fairly boring composition if you ask me. First thing to do was to put her/him into a turn by spinning the image slightly. That made the shot a little more dramatic and left me with a corner that was chopped off. CS5’s Content Aware Fill was used to complete the rectangle. That was a little overkill because the sky was a flat blue at that point. If you think about it just a smidge you can probably figure out that sky diving with the clouds depicted in the image probably isn’t the best of ideas. Heck, even small planes avoid flying through clouds formations any time the pilot can help it. The buffeting is just too strong. So, chances are the jumpers would have been sitting around on the ground waiting for the weather to pass, rather than jumping through clouds. Therefore, another “dramatic element” was the addition of the cloudy sky. To find out more about what makes the parachute pop (bad pun), hit the “read more”.

Today’s image builds on the last post. Using HDR Pro like “spot color” to emphasize an element appears to be something that requires further exploration. The parachute and jumper were the shot when the shutter was snapped. It was an okay shot, but nothing that distanced it from the hundred other clicks of the shutter that day. There were more colorful chutes and jumpsuits, but this one had an extra meaning with the red, white and blue. The same technique that was used in the last post of using two copies of the same image for the HDR Pro and the “straight” segment (the jumper) was employed again. The biggest caveat I can give when trying this technique is not to overdo the HDR. It the “over the top” processing were used, it would be easy to spot it. It has to be a middle of the road solution that makes the viewer kind of cock their eye and wonder.

As usual, a Layer Mask is employed to combine the straight with the HDR. The CS5 Refine Edge does a remarkable job with a subject as easily masked as the parachute. If more than thirty seconds was used to complete the mask it was putting too much effort into making the mask. A Quick Selection (W) and a quick swipe around the edge was all that was required. All in all, the image comes across as reasonably realistic. Enough so as to be accepted by the viewer.  Let me know what you think.

I'm No Artist, But Adobe Photoshop CS5 Helps

If you were to flip back a couple of month’s worth of posts you’d see an image that looks remarkably similar to today’s image. The big difference is the fact that I’ve tried another of Adobe Photoshop CS5’s new features. The Mixer brush. It took a couple minutes of playing to get an idea of how it works. I’ll freely admit that I’m a photographer, not a paint and brushes type of artist. Therefore, I was starting from ground zero as far as how to produce some sort of “painting” from a photograph. I’m sure several people I know could start from scratch and come up with a better representation of a sunflower than what I’ve done. I certainly wouldn’t go entering today’s image in any sort of “art fair” as a digital painting, but I do see the potential of one of Photoshop CS5’s new features. In the past, if you grabbed a brush tool you did have several options, but they all involved either single colors or previous states of your image. With the Mixer Brush (B) it’s possible to select multiple colors and have them interact with each other. Again, if I were an “artist” in the traditional sense, I’m sure I could “build” an image. Being feeble of mind when it comes to size and proportion, that ain’t happening. On the other hand, John Nack, of Adobe, has an example and video of painting in CS5 as a function of modifying a photo of an apple versus painting an apple from start to finish. In the example, both come out looking like an apple. (Here’s the link) According to the video it takes approximately the same time either way. I really don’t care how much time you give me, I wouldn’t come up with something, from scratch, that would look like an apple. It’s not in my DNA. To find out how today’s image “evolved” using the Photoshop CS5’s new Mixer Brush, hit the “read more”.
First thing I tried was “painting” directly on the background image. (Hey, it was an experiment.) That didn’t work. Couldn’t get anything to happen. Next was creating a blank new layer and painting on that. Since there was nothing to get the information from, again nothing happened. I just looked and there is an option for “Sample All Layers”. Had I looked for that before It probably would have picked up the information and be able to paint on the blank layer. Duh!!! It’s always the little things.

So, the way I did it was paint directly on a copy of the background layer. I separated out the major components, the flower, the stem and leaves, the center and the background. Each of those on a separate layer gave me greater control. Thinking about it, I should have treated each as a individual painting and combined the pieces to create the total.

Photoshop CS5 will be another learning curve. Between the Content Aware Fill, the Mixer Brush, the Puppet Warp, and more than forty new features it’ll be hitting the books all over again.