Wednesday Photoshop Q&A - Where To Make B&W Images? Lightroom or Photoshop?

Let's dispense with the obvious, if you don't have Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 you can do a Black & White image completely in Adobe Photoshop CS5.  After all, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), which comes with Photoshop, has the same engine as the Develop Module in LR3.  So, bouncing back and forth from LR3 to CS5 and back a few times is more a matter of personal workflow.  Today's image started out as a five image HDR mashup.  It's not an "over the top" HDR, but a pretty subtle form of the technique.  I can go either way with HDR, but tend to be more interested in the photorealistic side.  A buddy of mine (that would be you Lorri) is a great practitioner of the far side of HDR.  Her HDR images are beautiful.  Take a look at her portfolio.  She tends to push to the illustrative side and I'll have to sit down with her one of these days and take a lesson on her technique.  The question today comes from several search queries that brought people to the gallery this past week.  Hopefully I can "focus" a little light on the subject.  (I know, bad pun.)  Today's image is straight out of LR3/CS5.  I played with the two week trial of Nik Software's Silver Effects Pro 2, and thought it was a very interesting piece of software.  I'm old enough to have come from B&W film developing and printing, so I think I might have a bit of an advantage over those who have never done wet printing.  Don't get me wrong, I'm glad those days are gone and I sit in front of a computer to do my "darkroom" work .  To get an idea of how to apply wet darkroom techniques in a dry darkroom, hit the "Read More".

"Back in the old days" you'd develop your film, let it dry and then start "reading" your negatives.  Today you come back from doing a shoot and upload images to the computer.  "Then" you looked at the contrast of the negative  and took a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) at what paper grade you think might be close.  "Now" you go to the camera presets to get a starting point for finishing your image.  "Then" you'd make a test print to see 1. if you were close on the paper grade and 2. to see where you needed to do some work.  "Now", if you have LR3 you can slide your cursor down through the LR3 Presets found in the Develop Module.  If Adobe hasn't given you enough choices you can find hundreds of presets by doing a Google search.  Presets shouldn't be thought of as the end of the development process, but as the beginning of the process.  If you just happen to find one and can say "that's it", that's fine, but, just like in the wet darkroom, you'll probably see some areas that need tweaking.

In the wet darkroom you'd do some selective Dodging and Burning.  You'll do the same thing in a dry darkroom, except you have a lot more tools to play with.  "Then" you might go through several sheets of paper (at a buck and a half back in the 70s).  Expose the image, Dodging in the areas you feel need to be held back.  Either continue the exposure and Burn the areas or restart the exposure for each Burn area.  Meticulous note taking was a must in the wet darkroom.  You'd probably use a red marker to make notes on your test print as remind you where you wanted to do what.  A 16 x 20 print might be filled with ten or fifteen circles of red indicating this or that adjustment.  In the case of Burning a circle might have a cryptic +2 in it.  Meaning I (everyone had their own methods) wanted to Burn that area twice as long (one stop) as the overall exposure.  "Now" you can do test after test and the changes are "sticky".  In the wet darkroom you had to repeat all the adjustments on the next try.  Today when you get one area just the way you like it you leave it alone, go on to the next area needing a tweak.

Life is good in the Dry Darkroom.  No smells, no waste paper basket full of test prints, no needing to get to the finished print before passing out from lack of sleep.  It doesn't matter if you do the entire process in Lightroom, in Photoshop or bounce back and forth using the best parts of each program.  The Dry Darkroom is better.

No Flowers For Fred

We were out on Sunday, walking around with cameras in hand and came across an almost abandoned cemetery.  It appeared that it was semi maintained by a nearby church.  The grass, although mowed, looked like that was the only thing it had going for it.  It was patchy and burnt mostly, with a island of green every once in a while.  The stone in today's image is that of Frederick and Mary Callendar.  It was a little strange.  Mary's "dash" dates were 1865 and 1948.  Fred's were 1873 and a blank.  Now, either Fred is still alive and kicking at the ripe old age of 138, or there must be some sort of story about the blank.  Three quarters into the 19th century families were typically still fairly large.  The first thought that came to mind about Fred was that he may have been the youngest or near youngest child in the family.  He certainly outlived Mary.  He was most likely the one responsible for seeing to the headstone and proper dates of Mary's birth and death.  But what about Fred.  He was 75 when he buried Mary, a reasonable long life for the times.  Perhaps they never had children or might have lost sons in the war.  At 75, Fred might have been the last surviving of his brothers and sisters and had fallen out of contact with any nieces or nephews.  So Fred died with no one to have his rest date put on the stone and no one to put flowers by the grave.  Think of Fred and read the poem "The Dash" by Linda Ellis.

Today image is pretty straight, with no tricks or gimmicks.  It stands on its own, so today the only "read more" is to follow this link and read the poem.

HDR Isn't Always In Your Face

I was at a show the other day and had seven or eight gallery prints of some of the railroad/train images that have been on the blog recently.  One fellow was checking them out, seemed to be interested and decided to comment on a couple.  He picked up the one of the station, train and old car from June 3rd and said "this would have been good if you had done it as HDR".  It's an opinion, so I thanked him for his comments and went along my way.  I didn't bother telling him that HDR was part of the processing of the image.  When I was developing the image I did take a look at going to the dark side of HDR and making it look more like an illustration than a photograph, but didn't like where it was headed.  You can read the story of the image by following this link.  The big deal of the image is that you don't see the processing that was done.  You don't see the hose that was removed.  You don't see the bright yellow paint on the curbing by the car.  You don't see the modern license plate on the car.  You don't see three or four people who added nothing to the scene.  You don't see the handbill taped to the far right window of the building.   You don't see the trappings that give away the fact that the shot was taken two weeks ago rather than fifty years ago.  Beware of people making pronouncements without checking the facts.  I've always run the other way when I hear someone making flat statements.  That's enough of a rant.  To find out how today's image relates to the train image and the misguided statement made by a semi-stranger, hit the "read more".

Today's image is a three shot HDR, again done to be subtle rather than overt.  In the size seen here on the splash page of the blog it looks like a "normal" shot.  If you click on the image you'll see a larger version.  Even at the higher image size you'd probably say "hmmmm", is it or isn't it.  You can see some blue tint in the steering wheel but much less in the gauges and dials.  A B&W Adjustment Layer was applied and only the gauges turned to B&W.  The Opacity was brought down to give just enough tint to show the glass and chrome.

The fact that you can see down to the floor by the pedals should be an indication that there's HDR involved.  It's subtle.  Rather than the hyper-realism of some HDR images it looks like a well lit shot.  If you were to put it next to the same image that was done to the far side of HDR people would take a look at the out there version and marvel at the "work" done to the image.  They'd pick up the version that's today's image and, basically say ho-hum and think very little work was done to the image.  The oppose would be true.  Pushing a button and moving a couple of sliders doesn't mean lots of work.  Today's image is another one, like the train image, where what's was taken away is as important as what's added.  One of the things that happened when the HDR portion of the image was opened was that the restoration of the car was seen as not being as flawless as it look in life, in the original shots or in the finished image.  Lots of scratches, dings, smudges, dirt and rust had to be touched up to make it appear in the image as good as it looked to me in person.

The take away would be not to second guess what the finisher had to do to create the image.  Just enjoy the image or keep your mouth shut and keep walking.

Making The Mundane Interesting

If someone were to ask you to shoot a shot of a blanket, how would you make it interesting?  The red in today's image is "just a blanket", thrown on a chair.  It's even a solid color, so there's not a lot of detail to focus (bad pun) in on.  To give it a little life it was shot through a large Mylar backdrop.  The backdrop was hung across a backdrop stand and the end touching the floor allowed to bob and weave in whatever manner it fell.  That gave the reflective surface a lot of undulations and made the blanket sort of breathe with a sensual feeling.  The chair is actually purple, but the colors started adding up and it was changed very simply in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.  We'll get into that after the "read more".  The setup for the shot was a light, aimed at the chair and blanket as though it was to be a straight shot.  A white board was use to fill in the shadows rather than allowing them to get too dark.  The whole intent was to make a plain old blanket interesting.  The end use the client had in mind was cover art and room had to be left near the top and bottom for descriptive text.  The upright of the arm of the chair serves as a divider between two sets of texts.  So, three areas needed to be formed and the arm of the chair accomplished the purpose.  Not every shot can be a beautiful landscape or model.  A "piece of art" can help get a photographer's name out in higher circles maybe a little quicker than putting things in to your local county fair, but it seldom pays the rent.  A, now retired pro once told me he takes pictures of invisible things.  I told him it must be pretty easy to convince the art buyer that you gave him/her a good image.  He said I was missing the point.  Most of what he shot on a day to day basis was everyday items.  A hinge, the screws for the hinge, a piece of metal he had no idea what it was for, and maybe a lockset.  Most of what he did was catalog work.  Not the runway models at a fashion show, but the things that show up in a workman's hands to find the right piece for a job.  It's not even thought of as a photograph, it's a pictorial description of what he/she is going to buy.  No glamour, no jostling for a better angle for a shot, just very methodical shooting, trying to make something abstract interesting.  How the chair's color was changed after the "read more".

The change in color on the arm rest would be an easy Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer in Adobe Photoshop. It's just about as easy in Lightroom. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 doesn't have Layers, but everything done in LR3 is nondestructive. You can think of LR3 making a spreadsheet of every step you make on an image. It would look something like:

What do ya wanna do?
Change a color?
How much? 50% toward green

Lightroom just keeps track of what you do to the image. If you were to follow the steps you might find a sequence like: crop the image, scratch that, crop differently, nope - scratch that too, make it a vertical, make it a pano, change the aspect ratio and on and on. Going back a step is counted as making a step. If you were to spend an hour working an image you'd end up with a sheet with hundreds, if not thousands of steps.

At the end, you can step back, survey what you've done, say "nope, I don't like it", hit the reset button and be back exactly where you started. That's the beauty of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Do You See What You're Looking At?

Take a look at today's image.  What do you see?  Is it just a random splash of black ink on a white page, or are there cows standing in a group?  Have you ever gone out shooting with friends and then chimped each other's shots over a beer?  Whenever I do, invariably an image pops up and everyone other than the person who took the shot says "where'd you shot that?".  Each of us typically swears that the shot wasn't anywhere that we were shooting at.  None of us saw that view, angle, entire scene, or colors or something.  Of course, the rest of us were almost shoulder to shoulder, in lockstep with the cameras all aimed in the same direction.  Someone (or ones) were the creative folks and looked in a different direction.  It could be up, down, sideways or back from whence we came, but there's something unique about a few of the images out of the entirety of the shoot.  The more we get together, the more I can identify the individuals who'll come up with the shots the rest of us pass by.  Out of a group of twenty or so, it's the same couple of people who see things in a way that escapes the rest of us.  There are things that are visible about these folks.  If it's a winter shoot, everybody else is wearing a parka, mukluks, mittens, a ski cap and obviously thirty seven layers of clothes.  The ones who get the most unique shots wear a cape, that's it.  We're out to battle the elements, they're out to experience the day.  They think different.  They're "wired" unlike any of the rest of us.  They're creative.  To find the answer to what today's image is all about, hit the "read more".

It's cows. Specifically, three cows. It pays homage to Otto Litzal. He had a book published back in 1967 titled "Darkroom Magic". It was back in the dark ages of photography when people actually used film in their cameras. Otto did some of the same "creative" things you see today. The big difference is that today it means pushing a button. In Otto's time it meant understanding what was going on between the click of the shutter and the final print. It meant using the right media and the correct chemicals to get an end result. Otto's creativity came from knowledge, not from pushing buttons. Not that pushing buttons is a bad thing. I do it all the time. The trick is not to be surprised at the outcome.

Try taking a Curves Adjustment Layer and make it look like an up pointing arrow. Use the "pen" found on a Curves Adjustment Layer and click on the lower left corner. Holding the Shift key down, click at the midpoint at the upper center point. Keep the Shift key down and click on the lower right corner. You just solarized your image. If you have someone only familiar with a digital darkroom they'll probably suggest that you didn't matchup the images to eliminate the fringing. The thing is, that "fringed" look is necessary for a true solarized effect. The "fringe" is called "Mackie Lines" and they're supposed to be there. It's what makes the solarization effect.

"Seeing" what you're looking at is a developed habit. Good photographers look through the viewfinder and see the entire scene. The difference between a good photographer and someone new to shooting is what's in the background of the image.

Sharing The View With A Painter, So Why Not Bend Some Pixels

As we go running around shooting the falls colors and trying to get the definitive image of the season, it occurs to me that we don’t run into too many others trying to do the same thing.  Unless we specifically go out with a group, we seem to have the run of whatever place we’re in to shoot ‘til our hearts content.  It seems a little bizarre.  We go to the prime places.  We go at the right times and dates.  We wait until the perfect clouds roll by or the shadows get to the ideal lengths, but still we shoot alone.  Just the two of us.  Any other type of thing we decide worthy of checking out and we’re always in the middle of throngs of people.  We hear about a performer doing something in some out of the way venue and it’s packed.  We read about some minor event happening at a park or alleyway or field and it’s jammed.  Is it just because someone didn’t put a notice in the paper or an announcement on the radio that photographers don’t show up at very public, very scenic, very photogenic spots on the ideal day at the ideal time?  All we have to do is look out the door and we get an idea if the day is going to be one of those special days when photographic magic happens, yet we don’t see masses of people jostling to get their tripod set into the worn Kodak picture moment holes.  The fellow in today’s image knows what I’m talking about.  We spotted him sitting by the side of a tarn at the top of a small mountain (east coast mountain, not a real mountain) and he was even just fifteen feet off the road.  A road with wide shoulders to accommodate plenty of cars whose drivers had looked over the scene and thought “I have to stop to take in this beautiful view”.   Yet, he sat in solitude.  At least until we showed up.  I asked if I could take a couple of pictures and he didn’t have a problem unless I was going to show his face.  No sweat, I was interested in the scene more than in the person.  To find out what’s become of this scene (photographically), hit the “read more”.

After bumping the color saturation up to a good level, I went to Adobe Labs’ Pixel Bender Beta plugin for Adobe Photoshop CS5. They have a preset called Oil Painting. With the right image it seems to do a pretty good job of making a quasi painting. “Quasi” being a term meaning “close, but no cigar”. Every image I’ve tried using Pixel Bender on has taught me something. Usually it’s that not every image gets “enhanced” by tossed Pixel Bender at it. I’ve pushed the sliders left and right and nine times out of ten have turned a reasonable image into garbage. Thank goodness there’s a Cancel button. The other thing I’ve found is that, like many things in Photoshop, a deft touch is needed to make things appear reasoned rather the cartoonish. In Pixel Bender, more than many other plugins, using the Shift Key to move the slider values gets you into range, but marching the slider up or back by single increments is often needed to hone in on the sharpest point.

One thing that was needed in today’s image was a very custom vignette. An overall Vignette was too much in three of the four corners and yet not enough in the fourth. Going up a full step was, again, too much in a couple corners. Using Layer Masks on the Vignette Layers and using grays rather than blacks to touch the corners made the Vignette a significant portion of the time spent on the image.

The image was also hit with some Dodging and Burning to bring out the folds of the painter’s shirt. Such is the life of the “artist”. Oh well.

This Weekend Is The Max For Autumn Color Around Here

The calendar says it, the weather forecasters proclaim it as though it was the first day, the nip is in the air and the photographers are ready.  Today’s image comes from last week’s ride to northwestern Connecticut and Kent Falls State Park.  Today’s image is of a single tree along the walk up to the base of the falls.  As I crossed the covered foot bridge and started up the path, this tree wasn’t even on the radar.  Half way to the falls it emerged out of the early morning mist.  I didn’t have a choice, I had to stop and shoot the tree before the gathering light ruined the mood.  I plunked down the tripod and shot a couple dozen frames.  In order to get the optimum exposure I bracketed the exposure at one stop steps, two stops in either direction of what the camera thought was correct.  This also gives me the potential to do some Adobe Photoshop CS5 HDR Pro magic if the spirit strikes me.  Today’s image is one exposure, but it did benefit from a slight bump from CS5’s HDR Toning.  The dark area surrounding the tree is actually the mountainside (a Connecticut level “mountain”, not a real mountain) behind.  A daylight shot, with the fog burned off, would have revealed the hillside with no problem.  As it was, the F Stop really didn’t matter.  F 22 wouldn’t have provided more detail in the background.  Everything was sucked up by the mist.  If you’d like to know the surprising details of the finishing of today’s image, hit the “read more”.

The one thing I didn’t want was to increase any blue tones in the shot. I’m always harping on saturating each of the colors (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta) found in the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers. This time things went all over the scale. Red was increased slightly. Yellow: just a touch. Green was actually desaturated to bring down the grass in front of the tree. Cyan, Blue and Magenta weren’t even tried. A Vibrance Adjustment Layer was used to, again, bring up the colors in the middle ranges just a wee bit.

I wanted to take a look at what would happen would some HDR Toning (Image/Adjustments/HDR Toning). One more time, the sliders were barely nudged to get the desired effect. I did get to use an option for the first time going through this step. When I went to the HDR Toning, a dialog box popped up and said the file would have to be flattened to apply the HDR Toning. Since it was only a “look see” I wanted to preserve the Layers. I decided to Duplicate the file (Image/Duplicate) to have one with all the Layers and one to play with the HDR Toning. In the HDR Toning the Detail was brought up considerably and the Radius and Strength slide almost to zero. The reason for the high amount of Detail is that the Detail, Radius and Strength work hand in hand. Bringing the Radius and Strength down caused the Detail to need a big bump to show any effect.

Typical High Pass sharpening was applied and then a Vignette. The Vignette did absolutely nothing to the upper third of the image. I guess darkening white just makes more white.

The Last Step With Adobe Photoshop CS5

It was a pretty good weekend, photographically.  With the fall colors at just about peak we had to maximize what we had, so I shot Saturday, early Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon.  One of the reasons for the urgency was the high winds for the entire weekend.  For anyone who doesn’t live in a place with the wonderful change of seasons we get in Connecticut, let me tell you how it goes.  The leaves turn and just hang on the trees.  Without a fairly heavy rain storm or some wind they’ll sit there for a couple weeks.  It’s the times when the weather is calm that you get the spectacular colors you see in magazines and on calendars.  Once the wind comes, it’s done.  One day the trees are a riot of color and the next they’re bare.  It’s as quick as that.  It’s a metaphor for life.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  So, every fall there’s a mutiny by those couch potatoes who’d rather sit and watch a game on the weekend and the roads near any vantage point become as thick as molasses with car after car slowing to get a few seconds of autumn’s glory.  There’s an adage about those not learning from history being doomed to repeat it, and we’re no different.  Seems like every five years or so we get an irresistible urge to take a ride along the Mohawk Trail through western Massachusetts.  It’s actually Route 2 and follows the hills and ridgelines of the Berkshire Hills.  Every time we get suckered in.  Thinking, as we start out along the trail, that “this isn’t too bad” and wandering along for the first thirty miles unencumbered.  We scoff at those traveling in the opposite direction because we see the traffic jam at the exit point, stretching for miles.  Because we’re there to capture the wonder of one of nature’s greatest displays we tarry and end up at the terminus (it really doesn’t matter which end) after dark, sitting in a ten mile long chain of headlights.  I’m sure from the air it must look lovely.  From ground level, not so much.  Today’s image comes from a different, equally evocative, tourist spot at a completely different time.  To find out where and what “makes” today’s image, hit the “read more”.

Today’s image is not as far away as the Mohawk Trail. It’s Kent Falls State Park, in Kent Connecticut. At least I didn’t have to travel out of state to get the shot. In the past couple months I’ve mentioned the town of Kent several times along with, at least, four images in posts. The falls are just north of town and a magnet for people wanting to see the 270’ falls. The parking lot is full throughout three of the four seasons, but not at 6:00 AM in any season. I had the entire park to myself. I could have shouted, generally run amok and had my way with the flora and fauna of the park. I didn’t. I was just there to shoot the falls. The falls are a series of cascades of anywhere from 6’ to 20’, so there are plenty of drops to keep a photographer busy. We haven’t been to the falls in a lot of years. Enough years have passed that I was shocked to see a flagstone patio at the base. It’s very nicely done and makes the base of the falls wheelchair accessible. It’s worth the trip.

The thing that “makes” today’s image for me is the very last step in the finishing process. I had worked through the “normal process” and the best I could say was “okay”. It was an average shot at best. The last stop in my workflow is to put a vignette on the image. I typically try to be pretty subtle and not let the viewer say “oh, look. He put a vignette on the image.”. The way I apply a vignette is simple. I make a composite of everything done to the image (CTRL/ALT/Shift/E) and then make a copy of that Layer (CTRL J). The composite is used for sharpening and the copy for the vignette. There are two things that grab the eye when looking at an image. Lightness and sharpness. Making a copy of the composite before sharpening insures the center of the image being sharper than the edges. On the copy, I’ll use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) with a high degree of feathering applied to create a Selection around the Center of Interest. With the copy Layer selected I hit the Delete Key to knock a hole in the image. The Blend Mode is then changed to Multiply. This darkens the outside rim of the image. Typically by too much. The Opacity is then reduced in 10% increments by holding down the Shift Key while either tapping the Down Arrow Key or rolling the Scroll Wheel on your Mouse. An average amount of vignetting is around 40%. Today’s image has the vignette set to 100%. Something I think I’ve only done one other time. It’s different.

It's Almost Time For A Field Trip

Every year in the September/October time frame we take a couple of days to go out shooting. For the past four or five years we’ve headed to the Maine coast. Bar Harbor, Boothbay Harbor and almost every spit of land twenty miles down at the end of each peninsula jutting out into the sea have been targets for our wondering. This year we’ve decided to put the car in reverse (so to speak) and head in the other direction. I took a look at the distance up to Bar Harbor (about 440 miles) and spun the compass around the opposite way. It came up to western Pennsylvania and the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. We did the western PA thing a few years ago to check out largest Elk herd east of the Mississippi. Basically you need a longer lens than we had at the time or trample through people’s yards. If you ask the “officials”, they’ll tell you there’s a “viewing area” where you’re sure to see herds of elk. Sure enough, they said to be there about a half hour before sunset and there had to be a couple hundred elk in the field. Only problem was that the field was about a half mile away. There is the official viewing area, but some of the elks didn’t get the memo. You’re just as likely to see one, two or three elk standing on the side of the road or in someone’s back yard. On our way back from the viewing area we stopped along the side of the road and were within six feet of a couple of elks. We tried to get a couple shots, but the light had faded enough that they all came out blurry. Oh well. This year we’re heading to the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. A couple places we’re hoping to hit are the Dolly Sod area and Blackwater State Park. We’ll be spending one night at the Blackwater Lodge, on the Canyon side. We have two “guide books” we’re using to plot an itinerary. One is “Scenic Driving in West Virginia” and the other is “Waterfalls of Virginia and West Virginia, A Hiking and Photography Guide”. Both have been very informative. But, today’s image isn’t in West Virginia. To find out where it is, hot the “read more”.



Today’s image is from Bailey’s Island, Maine. It’s along route 24 about 16 miles south of route 24’s junction with route 1. We found out about the lobster shack in today’s image from Dave Middleton’s excellent book “A photographer’s Guide To The Maine Coast”. We were a little surprised when we got to the point for shooting the shack. Middleton’s shot showed the entire shack painted the same red as you see on the door. Dave had, obviously, gotten there just after the shack was painted. Several years of weathering late and we arrived. It certainly wasn’t the same shot David had gotten. On the spur of the moment we continued down to the bottom of the peninsula just to see what we would see. Reminds me of an old song. “I joined the Navy to see the world, but what did I see? I saw the sea”.


I’m hoping our drive to West Virginia results in as good shooting as has been the coast of Maine.

Maxing Out Adobe Photoshop CS5's One Image HDR Toning

I knew exactly what image I wanted to use for today’s post. I haven’t taken it yet, so that presented a small problem. It was supposed to be a beautiful weekend around here so I thought the time was right. It’s starting to get dark earlier, the evening temperature was going to be tolerable (compared to trying the same shot in January or February) and the sky was forecasted to be clear. So, off we went on Saturday late afternoon. The route goes past one of our favorite restaurants (The Cook House in New Milford, CT), so leaving earlier left time for dinner before setting up. The goal for the evening was “star trails”, so darkness, without light pollution was a must. Arriving at the restaurant and surveying the skies didn’t exactly give us a warm, fuzzy feeling about the prospects for success. A recheck as we left the restaurant was a little more encouraging, as the clouds were breaking up a bit. Heading up Route 7 into the darkness of northwestern Connecticut, with an eye on the sky, teased us onward hinting of clearing. We got to one of the targets at late dusk. Enough clouds persisted to dash out hopes of shooting any stars. Sunday we had the gear packed in the car as we left for a family picnic. The picnic was still going as darkness closed in. At one point my brother-in-law and said “what are you looking at”? I replied “stars” and we were off chasing the night. Again, headed north to escape the light pollution, we arrived at the place we’d scouted on Saturday. Everything was set, the time was now, stars were sparkling, the night cool and clear and we at the right spot. Told my wife I that before we got out the tripods I was just going to do a couple of hand held shots just to check for exposure. I said they would, undoubtedly be blurry, but they’d only be a quick test. That’s when the sad fact that I’d left the camera on for a week and completely drained the batteries became apparent. That’s when Doris said "let’s was pack it up and go home. I’ll get my shots the same night you do”. Very nice of her. So, that’s the tale of how today’s image was selected. If you’d like to learn about what was done to it, hit the “read more”.

I just felt like playing this morning, so I found an image that could be played with. It’s a ride at a local carnival taken last month, during the day. I liked the bright red seats with the somewhat faded piping and seat backs. This one wound up being fun because it involved a Mask for the pavement below the ride, the background behind the ride and a combination of the two. It was taken into Adobe Photoshop CS5’s HDR Toning and a little side trip to a Shadow/Highlight Adjustment.


The first thing was to take the blah gray pavement below the ride to a good, rich black tar. The Quick Selection Tool (W) was used to pick up the areas of pavement. Right clicking on the selection brought up a dialog box and Save Selection chosen. This produced an Alpha Channel that could be activated at will. Next was another Mask for the areas between the padded pipes. Same thing, the Quick Selection Tool (W) with a little clean up with your favorite selection tool. Now we have two Alpha Chanel Masks. Each had something to on their own, but there were also times to use both together. Holding down the CTRL key while Clicking on the Alpha Channel icon reselects your original collection (either the “pavement” or the “background”. To marry the two Masks, drag either one down to the New Alpha Channel icon at the bottom of the panel. Select it, right click to get the dialog box and select Add to Selection.

After that, it was just fun and games, playing with HDR Toning (Image/Adjustments/HDR Toning), jacking up the individual colors using individual Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers and sliding sliders in Shadow/Highlight (Image/adjustments/Shadow-Highlight).

So, although we got skunked trying to get some start trails, today’s image was a fun one to play with.

Dog Sitting Mr. Personality

He looks like a tough guy, doesn’t he? We were dog sitting our granddaughter’s English Bulldog over the weekend, so I had to get a couple of shots of him. Let me tell you a little about him. He was taken to obedience class as a pup. He flunked the obedience portion, but he did get the congeniality award. He thought he was there to entertain and play with all the other dogs. He was the runt of the litter and is still pretty small for a bulldog. (About half the weight of some of his siblings.) If you look at his forehead you’ll see, what looks like a poorly done swipe with the Brush Tool (B). It’s not. That’s his natural marking. This shot doesn’t show it, but most of the time he has this “snaggle tooth” sticking up over his upper lip on the right side. Every time we go over to our son’s house, as soon as he sees me, he races around to find his newest favorite toy and brings it over to show me. He’s done that since he was a pup. Right now he’s over on the couch, fast asleep, snoring softly. Trying to get a shot of him was more of a challenge than I thought it was going to be. Turns out the camera scared him. All of a sudden something was blocking my face and was being aimed right at him. If that wasn’t enough, there were flashes of light happening and freaking him out a bit. So the shoot when something like this: Position the light, get the dog into the lit area, snap a shot, reposition the lights, wrangle him back into the lit area, snap a shot and so on. To find out more about this particular shot, hit the “read more”.



The setup was two Nikon SB600 Speedlites set behind and above his head. The light on his face comes from skimming off the sides of the lights. Both flashes have Stofen diffusers on them to generalize the light. Lighting in this manner gave his wrinkles better shadows and made the folds of skin more accentuated. He does have about enough skin for two dogs his size, so it was important highlight any tucks and creases to give him character.


Focus was kept directly on his eyes and the Depth of Field was just enough for his nose to be in focus also. Luckily his nose and his eyes are almost on the same plane. English Bulldogs are noted for their flat faces.

There is surprisingly little post processing on this image, proving again that a well lit face doesn’t need much basic processing. Processing of human models to produce the illusion of perfection requires processing well beyond what could be termed “basic”.

Sharpening was done with our normal High Pass Filter (Filter/Other/High Pass) technique, but the interesting thing was the vignette. A uniform vignette darkened his left ear much too much. Once a normal vignette was applied using a Layer Mask, a large, soft, black Brush (B) was used to push the edges of the vignette out to give his ears a little separation from the background.

Anybody With A Point N Shoot Could Take This Shoot - Not

I guess I’m still smarting from a comment made by another professional, who I’ve known for thirty plus years. He was a judge at a juried show I enter a couple of pieces in a couple of months back. One of the shots was of a barn I discussed on the gallery back in April. The foreground colors were popped with a subtle HDR effect and the sky replaced with a good looking sky. I grabbed the judge after the juried portion of the show finished and asked why he had killed my print. His response was that it was a shot anyone could take, on a good day, with a point n shoot camera. Now, this guy is a retired professional, commercial photographer. He travels pretty extensively now, carrying his little Nikon point n shoot and does get some incredible images. So, I’ll give him the fact that anyone with his training and eye could get some pretty darn good images, but not any that are half HDR and half straight, combined to make a homogenous image. Cameras are getting pretty slick, with added features such as Extended Dynamic Range and a host of other “effects” built in, but… They just can’t make the creative decisions a person can. Oh well. Today’s image isn’t about sore grapes or anything like that, it’s about shoots that look like they could be made “with a point n shoot on a good day”. Anyone who’s been reading posts here at the gallery probably knows there’s “something” about today’s image that separates it from a straight shot. The flag, displayed on the porch, is actually across the street from the restaurant with the decorative window. The problem is that fact that there is a tree on the green in the middle of the street between the two images. It’s also about fifty yards between the buildings. That makes for a very tricky reflection. To find out more about today’s image, hit the “read more”.
About the window and the wall? The trim on the window isn’t as bright as seen in the image. The colors have been pushed up quite a bit. The wall isn’t as dirty as it appears on the left hand side. The darkness is a result of the vignette put around the image to hold the viewer into the shot. Little things are often the difference between a snapshot and a creative image.

The big deal is the reflection itself. A mask was applied to knock out what the actual reflection in the window. The porch scene was slid in below the window Layer and a nice, crisp shot of the porch/flag could be seen. To make the reflection a little less crisp and Ripple filter and a slight Blur were applied.

If you look you can see some reasonably uniform “highlights” on the cross members of the window. If you look closer, on the lower left you can make out the hood and window of the car that was the actual reflection in the window. It would have been an easy task to remove the “highlights, but I thought they added some interest, so I left them. Let me know which way you think would work better. As is, or with the highlights removed. Thanks

More Drama Using Adobe Photoshop CS5

I don’t know, maybe I’m becoming fascinated by the possibilities of combining a piece of an image done in Adobe Photoshop CS5’s HDR Pro and the rest as a straight image. The sky in today’s image is as it was when we were there and is an accurate recording of that part of the scene. The lighthouse, grounds and any foreground elements have been hit with HDR Pro. Just to make one thing very clear, I do have HDRSoft’s Photomatix software and have used it in the past. I’ve used it as a plugin and had a good time working a few images. It’s just that Photoshop CS5’s HDR Pro is just so much more convenient and simpler to use. I find I don’t fuss around with the sliders as much, with HDR Pro, as I did with Photomatix. In the “read more” I’ll go through which sliders I use and in what order. Literarily, what used to be fifteen minutes of playing in Photomatic is now two minutes in HDR Pro. Let’s not let this be the start of a fight. Photomatix is a good program and served the purpose of popularizing HDR for legends of fans. I sort of liken it to what goes on in the hardware side of computing. We can turn the wayback machine to the year 1993, when I first started with Intel. The big deal then was the introduction of CD ROM drives on computers. The earlier computers had a separate card that was used to provide a hardware assist to be able to read the CD. That didn’t last long. With the introduction of the Intel Pentium Processor, computers finally had enough power to read the CDs using software only. The same goes for several other steps in the evolution of computers on the hardware side. The same thing goes on with software. Before MicroSoft integrated Internet Explorer into the OS you had to get a web browser application. All the fuss the ensued, in my opinion, was dumb. New things are integrated into all sorts of technology all the time. Put anyone under about thirty five into a typical 1950’s era car and they wouldn’t be able to open the windows. They’d be confused by the crank and not having a push button to open windows. Think of today’s cars. Not only do we have keyless entry, but keyless ignitions. Keep your keys in your pocket and the car “knows” it’s you and lets you start and drive the car. Technology marches on. Adding a useable HDR feature is just another step in the line of march. To find out what sliders I use in HDR Pro, hit the “read more”.

The key to Photoshop CS5’s HDR Pro is the Detail slider. It seems to be the engine the makes it go. First thing I do is crank it up all the way to the right. Then, just like I do using the individual Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers, I highlight the value and start walking the sliders back down, holding the Shift Key while tapping the Down Arrow on the keyboard. It drops the value down in ten point increments. When I see the amount of detail I’m looking for I look at the halos around the major elements of the image.


The next slider is the Strength to see if I want more or less of the HDR effect. Then the Radius slider come into play to reduce/remove the halos. That’s just about it. I take care of color saturation in Photoshop, using the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers (one (at least) layer per color. I use a High Pass Filter to do my sharpening, the Marquee Tool to apply a vignette, and all the little detail type things normally needed in an image.

Like I said, it’s about a two minute process to go through HDR Pro the way I use it. All I can say is “mileage may vary”.

Combining Single Image HDR With A Straight Shot in Adobe Photoshop CS5

As the title says, today’s image is a combination of a single image HDR shot using Adobe Photoshop CS5’s HDR Pro and a straight shot. The “trick” is that they started out as the same image. Through the “magic” of Layer Masks the two were recombined to make one final image. The “original” image does fairly well on its own. The reds, yellows and green can be fully saturated and make an interesting image. This same farm has been featured in a couple of posting here at the gallery. This one combines a truck from a little town in Maine with the farm, located in Connecticut. Another use of the farm can be found in our tribute to the USA celebrating the 4th of July last year. This farm gets around. It’s been used three times and none of them are a straight shot of the barns as they sit on the ground. It goes to show that some scenes are iconic and can be the basis for many “story telling” images. It also shows the benefit of “working” a scene. This is the first of the three images where you can see the fences. Seeing as the farm is private property and we were just driving by searching for something to shoot, all shots (so far) have been from the road. It’s not unusual to get images that can be used in a variety of ways if you know where the good scenes are. Yesterday we went out shooting. We didn’t have a defined place to shoot, but had an idea of what we wanted to look for. Barns! People for other parts of the country or world don’t typically think of Connecticut as being rural, but we natives know the pastoral areas of the state. We took a ride to Bridgewater, Roxbury, Woodbury, Southbury and Newtown. (You can plot it out and pretty much figure out our route.) We didn’t even take the cameras out of the bags. One place I aimed for was a beautiful, big horse farm with snowy white fences flowing up the side of a hill. I remember being really impressed by it as a possible scene. But, that was then and this is now. The horse farm looks like a construction site now and soon there’ll be shiny new McMansions dotting the hill. Another spot, already a hodgepodge of million dollar homes is on an aptly named road called Poverty Hollow. Talk about irony. To find out about today’s image and how it was “combined”, hit the “read more”.

As a “straight” HRD rendering I really didn’t like the sky. It just looked too fakey, even of the far side of HDR. So, having become some sort of mask maven, I used the good old Calculations (Image/Calculations) dialog box and make an accurate mask separating the sky from the land. I then went to apply HDR Pro to a copied layer and got stuck. First thing that popped up was a warning box saying the image would have to be flattened in order to apply the single image HDR (Image/Adjustments/HDR Toning). Oops! Sort of defeats the purpose of what I was trying to do. Well, I already had the Alpha Channel of the mask. So all I had to do was to have two copies of the original image. No big problem, the original image was still sitting of the computer, so flatten away. Then apply the HDR Toning to get the effect on the barns.

I opened a second copy of the unaltered image and dragged it over onto the HDR image. Now I had a Layer that was HDR Toned, a straight Layer, and an Alpha Channel with the mask. I lit up the Alpha Channel as a selection (CTRL Click on the Alpha Channel) and clicked on the Create New Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel. That was it. HDR barns and a straight sky from the same image. It is easier than you think. Give it a shot, or let me know and I’ll walk you through it.

What's Important In An Image?

What’s the important “story telling” portion of this image? Obviously, the most imposing piece is the lighthouse, but that’s not the story of the shot. The “story” is the couple sitting on the bench. It’s easy to create a story around them. You can see that they are looking at each other. Both turned toward each other, knees touching, familiar over the years. It appears that the woman has white hair and the man may have thinning or close cropped hair. It gives the impression of age. Is that why they stopped to sit on the bench? Have they been here before, at a younger age? Are they sharing something as strong and enduring as the sentinel behind them? Is the lighthouse a metaphor for their life together? Obviously there’s “something” bigger than the two of them in this image. What it is is best left to the person observing. The time of day depicted is another notable aspect of the image. It’s late in the day/life of the subject. The light, low on the horizon, has dipped low and illuminated the underside of the clouds, the couple and the symbol. The “story” can go on for the entire length of the page or be the opening image of something like “The Notebook” by Nicholas Sparks. The individuality of the story each of us see in the image is strictly a personal one. We each “see” what we want to see in this small, but powerful piece of today’s image. If you’re interested more in the how of the image rather than the illusion it contains, hit the “read more”.

It’s a composite. That should be pretty clear to whoever’s looking at the image. At least as important as what was added to the shot is what was removed. In the original, we have a couple of light posts, some sort of framework behind the lighthouse and a single person walking in the foreground. They “added” nothing to the story being told, so they were removed.

We have a fairly large set of cloud shots, taken in all sorts of weather conditions, at all times of the day here at the gallery. Any time we’re out and see some great cloud formations we pile out of the car, point the cameras skyward and shoot. The set in today’s image were taken at a rest stop along the highway, on the way home, after a day’s exploration. If I remember correctly, the cloud shots were the highlight of what we got for the day.

The mask for the composite wound up much easier than I thought it would. Taking the Blue Channel into the Calculations Dialog box (Image – Calculations) and changing the Blend Mode to Hard Mix resulted in a mask that was 90% complete. A couple of tweaks with a hard edged black Brush (B) to clean up the lit surface of the lighthouse and some random specks in the rocks was all it took. The Alpha Channel was applied as a mask and the rest was just the normal workflow.

You Can Fool Some Of The People All Of The Time...

A few years ago I put today's image into a competition. It had a theme of "reflections". I attended the show to see how the print would do. When it came up in the lightbox a couple of the judges got up, walked up to the print and obviously spent some looking at the wine glass. Apparently they were "looking" for the reflection. I don't know what they were thinking, but all I could do is remember the old adage "can't see the forest for the trees". There is a reflection in the wine glass, but the fact that the entire image is a reflection seemed to escape them. While they were studying the glass they missed the writing on the bottle being backwards. Also, on the subject of the glass, the shape itself should have been some kind of hint. Maybe the biggest clue was the fact that the surface of the wine in the glass is on about a thirty degree slant. Whatever it was, they miss read the image by a mile. I had to smile (or maybe smirk) when they returned to their seats and scored the image. I find it sort of amazing that some people try to find something hard, where the observable is easy. I've seen this same type of thing in areas other than photography. People get to the point where they have, what they feel, is the answer they were looking for and stop. They don't ask the follow up question. The one that's critical to the success of operation at hand. I used to work for a company that would come out with the most amazing products, because they "could". I don't think they ever asked themselves if they "should". I was listening to the radio in the car on the way to a gig several years back. The show was a technology call-in talk show, specializing in computers. They just read about a new technology and were howling about what a dumb idea it was. No one would ever get into this, they said. They went on and on about how useless the "add-on" to a common devise was. Because of the position I had at a cutting edge (and I mean bleeding edge) company I knew the piece would gain wide acceptance fairly quickly. I haven't run into the hosts in several years. I had "appeared" on their show shortly before this episode. I am willing to bet that both hosts now own the common device with the add-on. Mainly because it's hard to find a cell phone without a camera in it today. Another example of not being able to "see the forest". Today's image is pretty easy to do. If you'd like to check out the technique, hit the "read more".

Today's image is not a shot of a glass of wine and the bottle. It's a shot of the reflection of the glass and bottle. Mylar was hung from a background stand and the still-life was setup the opposite way around. The only remaining question was how to light it. As it would up, the flash was shot into the Mylar. It lit up the scene nicely. The gold background was my wife holding up a gold colored blanket while I shot it from an angle.


Remember, sometimes the answer is easy. Don't make things any more difficult than it has to be.

History Has No Buttons

One of the things I've done as a result of thirty plus years of interest in photography is judge a lot of photo competitions. Something that's sure to garner a photographer a lower than possible score is obviously punching buttons without knowing a little of the history of what the effect is. In Photoshop there's a filter called Solarize. People will click on it, see an interesting effect and say they created an artistic image. Some think solarization, or more accurately the "Sabattier Effect", is something out of the minds at Adobe. The reality is that it's an effect that's been around for about 180 years. Some of the legends of photography are names associated with early experimentation with image manipulation. Have you ever seen, or heard of, a "Daguerreotype"? Louis Deguerre mentioned the effect in some of his notes. He didn't have a name for it, but through experimentation he described it. One of the attributes of solarization of an image is the development of Mackie Lines. Lines of contrast around the most prominent edges of elements in the image. Alexander Mackie is credited with being the first to describe the lines found in the effect. Today's image is obviously not a solarization of the scene, but is another old, wet darkroom effect. To find out what the effect is and how it has become a "button" to push in Photoshop, hit the "read more".



The effect used on today's image had its roots (for me) in high school. It didn't have anything to do with photography, but something I became pretty good at. It was a design class and the first time I had ever made a "blueprint". The smell of ammonia from that class and classes all the way through college defined my early career. I was fairly good on a drafting board throughout school and only discovered that doing it for eight hours a day got to be pretty boring, pretty quick after I got my first job as a detail draftsman. Sorry, but "yuk".


Today's image has an effect called "cyanotype" applied to it. A cyanotype is a "blueprint". Very closely related to the job I found so boring. In Photoshop, it's simply an effect that can be found as a preset in a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer. That doesn't mean it's "cheating" to use it, just that it has become a button to be pushed without any knowledge of the history behind it. It's another process that has it's roots back close to 160 years ago.

There still seems to be a debate about what is called "Photoshopping" an image. What most of the most passionate, ardent, strident anti-adulteration of an image folks don't know is that just about everything that can be done in Photoshop comes out of work in the wet darkroom.

So, today's image was made by punching a button in Photoshop. The trick is having the knowledge of where the effect comes from. The use of the heavy vignetting is something that was often found in images of this type. It's paying homage to the past, and knowing that it comes from long, long ago in a far off wet darkroom.

Photo Restoration?

Some photo finishers might try to take a "snap" from 1944 and lovingly take the creases and folds out of the image and restore it to pristine condition. Some may even apply a faux hand tint to it to make it look like someone did something special to it 66 years ago. I sort of went the other way on today's image. I took a shot from a reenactment demonstration last summer and tried to make it look like it had several decades of being carried around and then had been tossed into a drawer to be forgotten. I probably need to do a little more work (probably start over with the original) to get it looking aged. The "cracks" need some work. They need to be rougher and have the emulsion look like it's separated. The edges of the "print" need to be more distressed and the overall image of the image needs to be discolored. I print isn't going to sit in some GIs wallet throughout the war and then survive in a drawer without getting pretty well damaged. It's not bad for a first attempt, but if you're interested in how I'll address the next round, hit the "read more".

The first thing I notice is that the conversion to B&W has to be better. The image of the print is pretty muddy. Of course, since this is supposed to be a "drug store" print, it probably shouldn't be a really snappy print with good contrast. Maybe muddy is more authentic, I'll have to think about that for a while.


Step two will, most likely, be the cracks. Any discoloration would come after the cracking because the bare paper that would show up in the cracks would be discolored too. The plan for the cracks would be that the photo had been folded to fit into the GIs wallet, so most of the cracking would be in the center. A stray crack might run counter to the majority, but only one or two lines will do it. The big deal with the cracks will be giving them some dimension. It has to look like you'd "feel" them if you ran your finger across the surface.

For the discoloration there's a couple of ways to go. The first thing would be to choose colors for the effect. Maybe a foreground of a coffee color and a background of a Campbell's Manhattan Clam Chowder broth hue. The using Photoshop's Render Clouds filter and stretch and blur the clouds until they look like blobs would be a way to go. Changing the blending mode and lowering the Opacity could be the way to make it believable. Stealing a trick from Bert Monroy to add some dirt would close that portion of the project.

That's a short snapshot (bad pun) of the work that needs to be done. Sounds to me like a good project for a snowy day.

The Season's Over

We've come to the turn of a season again. The leaves, for the most part, are off the trees in New England and we're headed into the cold, "sticks as trees" period of the year. That means the "vista" shots are winding down as we await the snow to put a fresh face on the landscape. That doesn't mean we hang up the camera and wait. There's a height adjustable table and some props, along with enough flash units to light up a cave is around the room wanting to be useful. They'll get their chance in the days to come. Lately we've taken a run up to Maine and went to specific "events" to shoot anything from lighthouses to commissioned assignments. We'll be headed to the Caribbean in a few weeks, bringing along enough camera gear so people will think there's a third person along with us. We've gone to the islands every year for the past fifteen years and I can honestly say we have some tourist pictures to show for it. The intent of the trips is vacation, not getting the next calendar shot or six shot travel article with a double truck opener. Lately the trips have been by boat, sailing out of New York City. The nice thing about going that way is the two days plus of sailing before you get anywhere. It's a great time to unwind before getting into the hustle of being in the islands. It used to be that we'd leave NYC at 4:00 PM and be in St. Thomas or San Juan at 9:00 AM a couple days later. Then it got to getting in at 1:00 PM and now it's 3:00 PM. Sounds like the cruise line is trying to find the optimum "gas mileage" speed. Oh well, guess they do have to maximize the use of every dollar they take in. What's this rambling got to do with today's image? Not much, but if you want to find out about the shot, hit the "read more".

We were just plain driving on our way back from Tennessee a couple of years ago and saw this scene. The horses were out in the field having a grand old time. They'd gather and nudge each other and then take off in a sprint to another area of the meadow. They'd stop, form up a little and repeat the process, This went on for the entire time we stayed. It was like they knew the end of the season was coming and had to get in some "horsing around" before it started getting cold.

The shot is uncropped. That is the scene, as seen in the viewfinder with a 200 mm lens. The horses legs and lowered heads remind me of athletes walking toward the sidelines of a sport. Fatigue starting to set in after playing hard, either winning or losing, it doesn't really matter, fatigue is fatigue. The trees, with a little selective blur could be the people in the stands, decked out in the team colors. The "island" of trees the couches and various personnel standing along the sideline or on the bench. I think of this image as the athletes and their adoring fans. Guess you could think of it as a fantasy shot.