This last weekend I got to visit my folks and attend an unusual reunion.  All the classes from 1970-1979 gathered in OK, for a big party.   Because I took my “real” camera, I wound up as the photographer for many of the events.  It was a blast.  One of the things which really distinguished McAlester during this period was an incredible choir, music and theater program—No I did not sing.  The organizers arranged for the choir director to come back and for volunteers to perform at one of the many large churches on Sunday morning.   For some reason, churches really object to shooting with big booming flash units, so I knew I needed to plan for shooting, hand held with a long lens in low light.  So, today we are going to talk about strategies and tools to help, both in shooting and in post processing.

First, let’s talk about your ability to adjust your ISO settings.  ISO is how the camera’s sensitivity to light is measured.  All camera’s have optimal settings where the sensor has the lowest noise profile.  For my D300®, that is at ISO 200.  It is the same thing as the film speed.  A lower number meant that you needed more light, but that the pictures were sharper.  With a digital camera you can change the sensitivity on the fly.  Many camera’s have auto-ISO settings.  I prefer to adjust mine manually.  When shooting indoors, my camera is good up to around ISO 800.  The noise there is visible, but manageable.  Above ISO 1000, it looks very grainy.  The newest Nikon cameras have really broken through with new sensors and they can be used at settings of ISO 3200 or greater.  How much greater? All the way up to ISO 102,400, this is almost like shooting at midnight.

So what is the impact on your pictures?  Less light means your shutter has to stay open longer at a given fstop.  If you are shooting things that don’t move and are on a tripod, that might be ok, but trying to shoot people moving, well it means that they will be fuzzy at best and uselessly blurry at worst.   Fast glass, i.e., f2.8 and better really helps, but that kind of lens get pricey quickly.  Even at ISO 800, I the picture was shot at 1/10 of a second, really too slow to handhold. 

Lightroom 3.x has dramatically improved our ability to get cleaner images.  Nothing yet, although there are algorithms in development, can correct an out of focus picture.   There are still plug-ins available that do this as well, but in the new release of LR, they added a new Noise Reduction module just below the sharpening module.  It has two different sets of sliders, one for Luminance noise—random flecks and the second for Color noise—the banding which can appear around objects. 

From the Adobe Community Lightroom Help Pages at   http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/3.0/Using/WS67a9e0c3a11b149632d4213d12864349b1a-7fff.html

Luminance

Reduces luminance noise.

Detail

Controls the luminance noise threshold. Useful for very noisy photos. Higher values preserve more detail but may produce noisier results. Lower values produce cleaner results but may also remove some detail.

Contrast

Controls luminance contrast. Useful for very noisy photos. Higher values preserve contrast but may produce noisy blotches or mottling. Lower values produce smoother results but may also have less contrast.

Color 

Reduces color noise.

Detail

Controls the color noise threshold. Higher values protect thin, detailed color edges but may result in color speckling. Lower values remove color speckles but may result in color bleeding.

There are no right answers to the settings, play with them with the image at 100% until it looks right. It makes a difference as can be seen from these two segments of the image above.  The first has no noise reduction applied:

The same image with NR cranked up to 89 (Yes it goes past 11).  Edges are much crisper. 

To apply this feature, you just need to be in the Develop module and work your way down the menu until you get to “LensCorrection”.    

Just select the check box for “Enable Profile Corrections” and if it has a model for that lens, it will apply the correction. They keep adding new profiles and release them with the updates.

The model for each lens from each manufacturer has to be built separately.    Here is a link to the current list of supported lenses http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/846/cpsid_84666.html . 

The Nikon lens list includes the most popular models. 

” The beauty of Adobe’s tool is that you need no fancy equipment whatsoever. In fact the only requirements are that you can mount the chart flat (can be as small as 8 1/2″x11″) and that you can provide constant illumination (doesn’t have to be superhomogenous just constant between shots). Larger charts can be print out for little money using labs like costco’s for almost nothing ($9 for a 20×30 nowadays!). Then shoot a minimum of 9 shots of the chart at several focal lengths for a zoom lens at a single aperture (11) in manual mode which you can do handheld without a loss of quality of the profile, it really doesn’t matter. Then load those shots into the lens profile creator app and let it crank away. I’ve done this for a few of my unlisted lenses and the profiles work excellent. I’ve also submitted these profiles to Adobe, but unfortunately, the Lightroom engineers did not yet build in the feature you have access to in the lens correction filter in Photoshop CS5 where you can download the user submitted profiles for a lot of lenses from Adobe. This should be fixed in an upcoming update to Lightroom. For now, you either have to use CS5 to download profiles or profile the lenses yourself, which is easy. Adobe really did a great job on this tool to make it usable for folks without any special equipment. “  http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobe_lightroom/discuss/72157624239647554/

Although it exists in Photoshop CS5, there is not yet a way to share or retrieve profiles others have created online.  It is coming, at least according to Adobe.

Last week, I used Content Aware Fill to clean up some telephone lines in an entry primarily about the impact HDR Toning can have on a flat image.  Today, I want to show a few more examples of this new feature in Photoshop CS5.  You can save loads of time in post-processing with this new tool and more easily edit things that would be extremely difficult without it.

Let’s start with something simple. The other night, we were at a nice vineyard, the Oak Barrel Winery, shooting in early evening light.  Sunset was still about an hour off.  I really liked the shadows from the vines and thought the workers added some interest to the image.  That golf cart, however, was ruining my shot.  This kind of work was no big deal with the last version of Photoshop.  Using a mixture of the Clone Stamp and some Healing Brush, I’ve removed this type of obstacle many times.  It probably wouldn’t take me more than five minutes.  With the new Content Aware Fill, it might have taken me two.  You simply put a selection around the offending object and hit Shift-Backspace.  A dialogue box will appear, and you select the content aware option.  The program will sample the surrounding area and fill in the selection with similar pixels.  It doesn’t always work perfectly; you may need to do some touch up.  Here is my photo with the golf cart gone.  Ahhh, much better!

In this second image, I have a much bigger obstacles to get rid of.  There is the tree top creeping in from the bottom of the frame and a shed in the field.  I took care of it quickly, but still wasn’t happy.

The horse was too far from the house, and I wanted another one out there.  There was another horse out there when I pulled up, but I guess it was camera-shy and ran off.  I cropped in tighter and dropped in another horse, while repositioning the original horse.  I added a little Vibrance in Lightroom.  Yeah, I know, I did more than Content Aware Fill, but it needed to be done.

My last example is a much more challenging job.  It began innocently enough: I got up early after a couple days of rain to shoot the mushrooms that always show up.  They’re only there for the day because the hot sun shrivels them in a few hours.  I grabbed the macro and began low-crawling through the grass, just like they taught me in the Army.  I snuck up on the ‘shrooms and clicked away.

The most interesting part of the mushroom is the gills under the cap, so I tried to bend it over gently to get that shot.  Ooops, I was in my Grunt mode and broke the stem.  I took this shot, but, obviously, this is useless.

I decided this would be a good test for Content Aware Fill.  Could I remove the stem and still keep the gills looking “real”?  You can see the results below.  I don’t think I could have done this with just the old Clone Stamp.  Again, I selected the stem, but the first pass didn’t create the final image.  I needed to select different parts in a triangular pattern, towards the center.  It took several selections to get this result.  I’m not sure that this image has any value, other than allowing me a good practice session, but that was good enough for me.  I did a retrograde operation, back to headquarters and processed the images.  Hooah!

Why all the Army talk?  Well, today is the US Army’s birthday.  Happy Birthday to all soldiers, past and present.  I’m proud I was one of you.

Cape Henry, Va Beach, Va

Over the weekend, I was reviewing some old photos and came across a double lighthouse picture that was flat and lifeless.  It was a cloudy morning in Virginia Beach, and the sky was a mush of gray.  I remembered what I saw that morning, but I hadn’t captured it very well.  This happens to photographers every now and then.  When it does, you can delete it or put it into post-processing.  I took it into Photoshop.

I cropped it, and got rid of the telephone pole on the left side.  That still left another pole and the lines across the sky.  I’ve used the Clone Tool and Healing Brush to successfully get rid of similar obstructions in the past – it isn’t a hard fix.  However, it can be a tedious job with constant adjustments to the “fix” to get it right.  This time when I used the Healing Brush, I made sure the Content Aware box was checked and had it knocked out in less than two minutes.  When you’re working on images all the time, that kind of time savings is huge.  I made one or two minor tweaks, and that was it.  I’ll do a blog on this feature later; today, we’re concentrating on HDR Toning.

With everything cleaned up, I jumped into HDR Toning to put a little more life into the shot and put more definition into the clouds. In a “normal” HDR image, you’ll use 3-5 (sometimes more) photos, merged to achieve the wider dynamic range.  In CS5, you do that with a new tool, called HDR Pro.  If you just have one image and you want to get a similar look and feel, you use HDR Toning.  The menu location is: Image, Adjustments, HDR Toning.

The first time you enter this tool, you’ll notice that the default settings give you a highly saturated and highly vibrant image.  Too much for me; I backed them down.  I increased the Detail setting and made some minor adjustments to the Highlights and Shadows.  You should be careful with these sliders because a small movement can have a big effect.  I try to stay away from the over-the-top look of some HDR images, but this is obviously closer to that side.  Everyone won’t like it, but it is better than the original.  You can find some video tutorials on HDR Toning all over the web.  Here are two links to give you a sample: Adobe and Tip Squirrel.

You can do this with portraits, too.  People and their skin do not react nicely to some of the HDR Toning  processes.  So, unless you are looking for those kinds of changes, proceed carefully.  I’m just beginning to get my settings down for that.  As I figure it out, I’ll create custom presets to make things move even more quickly.  Here is a sample.  (And, yes, Content Aware Fill was used to delete the other kids – in under a minute!)  You can used the supplied presets, in addition to your own, to make your work more consistent.  This new version of Photoshop is loads of fun! 

Macro photography is close-up photography. A macro lens reduces the minimum focus distance to a very short distance and allows you to fill the frame with small objects.  At this distance, the depth of field can be measured in millimeters.  Focus is absolutely critical since any change in the camera to subject distance will cause a change in the area of focus.  You should use a tripod to help you maintain the focus exactly where you want it.  A remote trigger or cable release also helps prevent any camera movement.

In order to create a greater depth of field, I frame the object carefully, and manually focus on different planes, taking several photographs.  In Photoshop, I create a stack of these photos and blend the photographs together, masking out the out of focus portion of each photo and leaving the sharp elements.  The remaining composite reveals a sharp macro photograph that cannot be recreated with the camera and lens alone.

The steps are easy.  Place all the photos into one image file, with each photo in its own layer.  Select all layers.  In the Edit menu, choose Auto-Align Layers, and let the program ensure all layers are exactly aligned.  Back in the Edit menu, choose Auto-Blend Layers, and Photoshop creates the masks for each layer.  You may need to crop slightly to compensate for the any ragged edges created in the alignment step.  Nothing to it. 

Just in case you didn’t know, Photoshop CS5 is now shipping.  Both of us have our copies.  I believe the upgrade is worth every penny.  We’ll probably throw in a few blogs in the near future about some of the new features.   Lightroom 3 should be out soon, as they are now in their second public beta.  Another worthwhile upgrade in my opinion.  Lots of fun new toys for the upcoming summer!