The Quiet Picture

Musings on photo editing, part 2

Part 1

My question is, is a photograph a representation of reality, or is it the photographer’s interpretation of what they think reality should be?

When the picture is edited to no longer reflect the reality, I’m not sure if I want to call them photographs anymore… seems like they’ve gone beyond a photograph, in the traditional sense of the word (read: analogue). The dictionary definition of the word “photograph” is pretty all-encompassing though, because the word means “drawing with light”. Photography is a form of art, so a photo must be a work of art, and a heavily edited photo is… not a photo? But a work of art in any case. And such, neither wrong or right. And whatever I personally feel about photo manipulation, I am not going to condemn anyone else for doing it. To each their own! My only problem is when somebody presents a photo to me as a reflection of reality, when in fact the photo is edited to longer represent reality.

The beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re ready to accept a heavily manipulated picture as a photograph, then that’s what is – even if it ends up on Photoshop Disasters. But as all the pictures on the PS Disasters blog witness, a photograph does tell a big fat lie sometimes. The laws of physics are bent and the human anatomy likewise.

Maybe the issue is really about linguistics. Could we have a word for a non-edited image (where no physical elements are changed) and another word for a “photoshopped” image? Both are photographs at the moment, whether you call it an image or a picture it’s all just semantics. But I’m talking about the difference in content!

So this brings me back to the new tools in CS5, which is actually what gave me the spark for these musings in the first place. While the content-aware fill tool is very cool indeed, you can hardly call the result a representation of reality. The ease and extent of removing elements in the photo is almost scary. Don’t like the factory in the background? No probs, remove it. That’s looking at the world through a pink filter: everything you find wrong with it will be fixed.

My challenge lies in finding that rose-tinted reality in the world around me so I can portray it with my camera. The challenge is not about changing the reality to fit my ideal of it.

Same difference I guess.

Musings on photo editing, part 1

Remember when they used to say that a photo never lies?

Well, they may have been a bit too blue-eyed even in the old days of analogue. There was a lot more going in the darkroom than simple film development. But by and large, a photo didn’t lie. Those darkroom wizards aside, the majority of photographers (pros and home snappers alike) settled with reality as it was, warts and all.

Then came computers. Then came digital cameras. And now, Adobe is prepping Photoshop CS5 with some really cool new tools that takes manipulation to whole new heights and it’s not like the photo editing tools have been bad so far either.

Regular readers of this blog (yes, I mean both of you) know that I have a very conservative stance on a photo manipulation. I just simply prefer to make my images in the camera, that’s all – it’s a personal challenge, but it’s not an absolute and I’m prepared to venture out if the occasion calls. Dust spec removal, levels adjustment, saturation etc have always been part of my toolbox and I don’t consider those any more manipulation than choosing the composion, aperture and shutter speed in the camera. Manipulation to me is when you start adding or removing things in the picture – physical things like buildings, radio masts, trees etc.

It seems like I’m getting a bit more relaxed about my attitude towards editing (manipulating) my pictures, so I guess it’s just a matter of giving it time. I try to keep Lightroom as my one-stop shop for photo processing and the clone/heal heal tool has its restrictions. In any case, I’m gradually doing more retouching in my pictures, beyond Lightroom. Nothing drastic, but removing occasional stray branches or grass blades is not the moral dilemma it used to be. White lies… bending the truth a little bit?

* * *

An un-edited version of the above picture is here. And yes, it’s a zoo animal, another thing that requires disclosure. Just take a look at what happened with the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. A stunning picture whether it’s a tame wolf or not, but if it is tame… then I would sure like to know it. The end result doesn’t count if you’re not honest about it!

I left relatively early to catch the morning sun in a panoramic spot I discovered the other day. It was windier than anticipated though, but I took the pictures anyway because the scenery is a little bit unusual – the only place along this road between Funäsdalen and Ljungdalen where you can see the Sylarna mountains. I only know of one other road in this region where they can be seen (and I didn’t actually even realise that until later today when I drove past).

And then to Mittåkläppen. Since I’ve now given up on flower photography because the season is too early for them, I wanted to concentrate on scenery instead. There are a lot of mountain pastures around Mittåkläppen, so I picked a trail which leads past a few of them. It’s important to be there before noon, because the “backside” of the Mittåkläppen mountain becomes shaded around noon and I didn’t want that for my pictures. The only shade I had to worry now was the clouds and at one point I waited for an hour for the clouds to disappear. It really tried my patience… I mean, it was sunny all the way to the freakin’ Helags in the distance, but just not where my camera was aimed!

Having done my hike, I rewarded myself with a waffle at Djupdalsvallen. It’s their first day of the season, but the waffle was as good as ever! Walking around the place, I saw these marsh marigold in full bloom and the scene was just begging to be photographed. I waited until late afternoon and in order to pull off the composition, I needed something wider than the 24mm on my zoom lens (plus crop factor, of course). So I tried stitching, I wasn’t sure if it would work because I was so close to the flowers, but ICE didn’t have any problems with it!

I also did some scouting. Found a nice place, or rather, I finally stopped at this nice place I’ve driven past countless times… a small tarn with a great view towards to Skarsfjället. But it was too windy to make use of it today, in fact, it was too windy to make use of any of the ideas I had, because all of them had water in them! And then there was also a bank of clouds coming up from the west, which means that all the views towards Mittåkläppen were washed out. I decided that I’ve done enough for the day, with these clouds coming up the evening light won’t happen either.

Going home tomorrow, the butterfly orchids will be open by now… and then back to the mountains later in the week again.

I wanted to get back to my semi-high key wood anemones from Sunday. I liked the composition in this one with the foreground flower asymmetrically mirrored in the oof flower on the right (if it’s possible to “asymmetrically mirror” anything?), plus the open white space above. In Lightroom, I muted the colour in the leaves by increasing brightness (I didn’t want to desaturate because it just adds grey and it didn’t work in my eye), and then used a brush to selectively increase and decrease clarity. Some cloning and healing was also involved in the process because there were some stray petals sticking into the frame which I thought distracted too much, and the whole thing was finished off with a white vignette. A whole lot more post-processing than I normally do, but I guess it’s the joy of the flower season that inspired me!

I must say that I’m happy with the result, with reservation for the degree of whiteness in the background, because strictly speaking, it’s not white – it’s light grey, with perhaps a dose of yellow in the form of oof flowers. However, if I were to make it white then the main flower would be totally lost, so keeping the grey helps to lift the topmost petals. It really comes down to presentation; this picture should never be shown against a white background, nor should be it mounted with a white frame, LOL! I hope that the Lightbox plugin works for you so the picture opens in the dark frame… the default white browser window rarely does any favours to any picture, for that matter.

I can handle sunlight and I can handle overcast, but when it’s blue skies above and sunlight heavily filtered through a persistent cloud bank in the horizon, I came completely undone. I just couldn’t make any sense out of it, it was light but it also wasn’t? I was totally uninspired to take any pictures despite the delightfully frosty trees. But out of principle, I took a few frames and when I came home, I found that I wasn’t the only one with problems. Lightroom was none the wiser about the light and no matter how I tried to adjust the WB I got nowhere fast. Everything looked unnatural so in the end the only way to go with the picture was to go over the top.

Would you believe that the colour temperature is 5000K? Almost a daylight WB and so blue, without any adjustment to any colour channel. Add a generous over-exposure and vignetting and the result is… uhh, the jury is still out. But at least I tried.

LR/Enfuse is a HDR plug-in for Lightroom for merging your HDR pictures without leaving LR. You just select the images and tell Enfuse to merge them and import the result back to LR. Couldn’t be simpler! I wish I’d known about this plug-in a few months ago when I was doing comparative tests with HDR software. This little snippet of programming can do the job much better than Photomatix, so I’ve re-done many of the Photomatix HDR’s that I wasn’t happy with and LR/Enfuse came up with a winner every time.

LR/Enfuse doesn’t have as many settings as Photomatix does and the HDRs lack much of the “pop” that Photomatix creates so at first look it may seem like Enfuse isn’t that good. However, what really matters is how the dynamic range is handled and this is where Enfuse shines and you create that pop yourself, it’s no different than any post-processing you with your images. I’ll much rather have a perfect “raw HDR” that needs post-processing than a half-baked HDR with generous contrast and saturation. LR/Enfuse even succeeded with the reflection images that Photomatix completely messed up.

The first image above is Njupeskär, a 4-image HDR. Compare it to the Photomatix HDR, where the sky looks like it belongs to a different image. The second image comprises of 3 exposures, where the Photomatix HDR left a nasty grad filter effect in the birch. Both of these new HDRs are done with the default settings in LR/Enfuse and required post-processing in LR, but nothing extravagant – saturation and curves for the most, and a grad filter in the second image to add some more drama in the clouds.

The trial version has a size limit which I think is way to small (500 pixels) for any reliable evaluation, for example, it’s impossible to say how the alignment works. So after some hesitation I paid to get the full version and now that I know how well it works, I only wish I could get my money back from HDRsoft so I could give them to Timothy Armes instead. If you’re a Lightroom user and looking for HDR software, I can warmly recommend LR/Enfuse!

Since there’s been some talk about me being a photo purist who doesn’t like manipulate pictures, I thought I should confess to some photo fixing every once in a while. The real issue I’ve been preaching about is disclosure – manipulate all you want, but I think it’s only fair that the manipulation is disclosed. Except, if you’ve done the manipulation before you took the picture, so I’m letting some double standards show through. And let’s not forget one very important thing – sometimes in nature photography it really is better to do the manipulating on the computer than in the wild because you should never try to bend nature to your will… well, except gardening out some grass straws. I mean, we mow lawns, right? Oh well, anyway, I’ll try to get to the point now.

When I took this picture of the bear cub, I knew that it was going to be a close call to fit it in the frame. The 40D viewfinder doesn’t have 100% coverage so I hoped that although the paw was clipped in the viewfinder it would be whole in the actual picture and indeed it was – except that the claws just touched the bottom edge. This is no good, but I didn’t want to throw the image away because I didn’t have any good bear cub images in my catalogue and this one was otherwise the best frame I got in the session. Then I noticed that I had another image where there’s more rock visible at the bottom, so I just simply took a slice of the rock and added it to problem image and then with some careful cloning and erasing made it fit seamlessly. Then I cropped the image to 5:7, added vignetting, adjusted curves, selectively saturated and de-saturated and used a gradient…

So what you see is not what I got, but thanks to Photoshop I got a keeper of a bear cub anyway!

With that said, I do strive to create the image in the camera. But if I fail, I can cheat!

I like maps. They’re good for a lot of things, including a source of inspiration when I’m planning my weekend photo excursions. Even when you know (or think you know) the area you live in, a close inspection of a map can reveal something you haven’t seen before. Say for example, a murder scene. I’m not kidding, the Murder Scene Marsh (Mordplatsmyran) is marked on every map, provided the scale allows it because it’s a really small patch of bog. If you don’t believe me, take a look yourself.

I made some enquiries and found out that apparently back when someone had killed someone over some money and so the bog became known as Mordplatsmyran. I’ve driven past it many times, but never paid any attention to the place. Now that I saw the name, I just had to go and take a closer look. I found out two things. Firstly, there are a lot of dead trees in this bog which was appropiate enough for the name. Secondly, when you’re standing on the road and look to the bog and then behind it, it actually has a lot of potential – a few weeks earlier when there still was colour in the trees, and in a better light than today, it would’ve made a really nice landscape picture. And honestly, I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever that I’ve ever reacted to this place when I’ve driven past.

* * *

The coal tits are giving me a hard time. I’m still trying to get a good keeper, this is today’s effort.

I always make an effort to photograph the full moon every time the moonrise or moonset coincides with sunset or sunrise. I’m more of a landscape photographer than moonscape ditto, so I leave the moon closeups to the astronomy buffs and try to create landscape pictures with the moon in them instead, which requires some light on the landscape. Today’s moonrise was well before sunset though so I had hedged my bets on photographing the sunset, but when I got to my location (I didn’t have much choice with that since I was coming from work), I saw that the moon didn’t actually appear too high in sky from that point along the road. So I was torn between the sun and the moon, but it became quickly obvious that the sunset wouldn’t be nearly as nice as yesterday’s red clouds (as seen through the bus window), so I hurried up to find a place for framing the moon.

I bracketed with hopes of putting together an HDR in Photomatix. It turned out that Photomatix is hopeless with this subject matter, for one thing it doesn’t understand the concept of “reflection” but insists on making the reflection lighter than original and that’s a big no-no, and secondly it kept overexposing the moon no matter how I tried to adjust the sliders. Photoshop to the rescue, and this is how I did it:

Out of the dark, middle and light exposures, the dark exposure had the moon and its reflection, the middle one had the sky and the light one had the foreground. I copied the middle exposure on top of the light one and then selected the moon and its reflection from the dark exposure, copied them to the base and carefully erased around the moon until it fit seamlessly to the sky (you have to make sure to get rid of all the dark sky around the moon, and careful not to erase too much which will leave you with a bright ring instead). Then I started erasing the middle layer by using a large soft brush with low opacity to reveal the lighter background below. Again, important not to overdo it or the halos around the treetops would ruin the effect, also have to watch out for the reverse where the treetops are too dark in relation to the rest of the tree. The result is darker than my original RAWs would allow (it probably looks too dark on some screens, but is reasonably ok on my LCD), but it’s miles better than the Photomatix mess. I wasted an hour with Photomatix trying to fix it, and when I finally gave up it took only 10 minutes in Photoshop. A bit of a rush job, granted, so there’s room for improvement. Anyway, whether it’s done in Photomatix or Photoshop or wherever, you need some trick up your sleeve to put together a landscape photo without an overexposed full moon. Now you know my secret!

I’ve mentioned quite a few times that I don’t like wideangle lenses because they are a compositional nightmare for me. I do however like wide views – panoramas. A stitched panorama shows so much more than a panorama crop of a picture taken with an extreme wideangle lens.

The biggest problem with creating panoramas is to create a seamless join between the frames. The left edge of the first frame is never a 100% match of the right edge of the second frame, so if you’re creating your panorama manually, it becomes very time consuming to manipulate the pictures in order to hide the seam. I’ve tried a few panorama programs in the past but nothing worked to my satisfaction (or the program was so complicated to use that I gave up) so I’ve been doing my stitching the hard way, which is not only tedious but also very time consuming.

So I decided to take some measures to improve the situation. Firstly, I ordered the Acratech Leveling Base which will enable me to level the ballhead, because a perfectly level platform is the foundation of a good panorama (I just got the thing so hopefully I can say something about it after this weekend). And then I also wanted to give stitching software another chance, especially after I heard that Photoshop CS3 is very good at it so I felt that I was just making things too hard for myself by stitching manually. Unfortunately, PS is not an investment I can justify in any way, so I looked for specialist stitching software instead and I started with Canon PhotoStitch which came with the camera. I gave up after the first panorama – total crap. PhotoStitch is best used uninstalled. I browsed some photo forums to find out what software other photogs used, and saw someone recommend Microsoft’s ICE (Image Composite Editor) which apparently is just as good as Photoshop. And the price is right – it’s free.

I loaded up my panorama frames and waited for ICE to do its thing. I was amazed – I couldn’t tell where the seams were, even when I knew where they were! I have now been throwing panoramas at it for two nights in a row (I had lots of unstitched images in my catalogue), everything from 2 to 13 frames, and it seems to deliver perfect results most of the time. There are two things which seem to be an issue sometimes, one of them makes sense but the other one is a bit of a mystery.

Firstly, although all the detail in the image is seamlessly joined, ICE doesn’t always seem to be able to compensate for uneven light from one frame to another. By this I mean that if one side of the frame is slightly darker than the other (it is so slight that you don’t even know about it until you start stitching), then in stitching you will notice this when the lightness of the picture changes at the seam. ICE allows you to export the panorama in e.g. Photoshop format with layers, so for critical work, you can use adjustment layers to fix the issue. You can see an example of this problem in the panorama below – there’s a sharp change in levels a little bit right from the middle, and then about 2/5 from the right there’s a wide strip with some lighter levels. It’s good enough for me because I won’t use this image for anything other than keeping in my catalogue (and using it as an example here), but if were to e.g. print it then I would take some time in an editor to sort out the levels.

Secondly, sometimes ICE leaves out a frame in the stitch for no apparent reason at all. Initially I thought it’s doing it because there wasn’t enough overlap between the frames, but then it happened again when there was definitely enough overlap. I re-loaded the frames but it did the same thing again. The really strange thing is that ICE knew exactly what size of slice was missing in the panorama, so it left a gap which was a perfect fit to fill in Photoshop without moving any of the layers done by ICE. Weird. This happened e.g. with the above panorama.

Other than these bugs, it really doesn’t get any easier. Launch the software, select the pictures, read some news while you wait (it doesn’t take very long anyway), select the crop and how you want to save it and that’s it. I never thought I’d say this but… well done Microsoft!

The only problem I have now is what will I do when I go over to Macs next year like I’m planning to? I somehow doubt that Microsoft will make a Mac-compatible ICE!