The Quiet Picture

It’s the coldest day of the winter so far, around -20°C. It was  -22°C when got up and the strange thing is that unless my memory totally fails me, it’s colder than it was last winter. Last winter was special in that the cold period lasted such a long time, but up here in Loos the temperatures never plummeted as seriously as it did in the lowlands. It happened a number of times that when I went to work, it was about -20°C in Loos but when I got to work, people were saying they had temperatures all the way down to -30°C. Warm air rises up… It’s not unusual that it’s 5 degrees colder down at the lake than it’s at home.

Anyway, as much as I like skiing and as little as I mind cold weather, I draw a line at -20°C. No point in risking my lungs. So today I will concentrate on indoors activities and I started by playing around in Lightroom. I created a collection of all my unprocessed pictures to see if I could find something worthy of working on and I was shocked to see that I had almost 3000 unprocessed photos… I had no idea it was that bad! I expected they would all be from my pre-Lightroom era but there were hundreds of pictures even from recent years.

In the end I decided to take something really old and see if I could make anything out of my first year of digital shooting (with the 3MP Canon D30). There was this special day in Järvzoo in May 2002, I got to witness the birth of two moose calves. I shot a lot of pictures just to document the event, but obviously it’s difficult to make anything photographically outstanding of such an event (say what you may about giving birth, but it’s really very messy!). After the calves were born, I did my round in the zoo and on the way back I visited the moose enclosure again and found the calves on their feet, nuzzling up against the new mom. Sweet!

May is a good month for other animal babies as well. The ural owls are cute, they leave the nest while they’re all fuzzy and they stood all lined up on the branch. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera ready when all five of them were sitting in a row, but at least I caught three. The light was difficult and I couldn’t fade out the net with the Sigma 170-500mm lens I was using back then so I just simply underexposed the background in Lightroom until I got rid of the net, and concentrated the light on the owls.

Spring is almost around the corner…

I’ve been in a bit of a photographic limbo recently. It would be normal if this was November when there’s hardly anything left to shoot, but it’s July which is traditionally the busiest month of the year for me. I’ve got too many other things in my head and it’s draining my energy so I’m not really even feeling any regret for missing out on stunning sunset light like last night. Missed it by about 20 minutes… had we been driving at Hiviåsen 20 minutes later, it would’ve been a great opportunity. But nix, I was already at home, in front of the computer, downloading the pictures I had taken earlier when I glanced out the window and saw the amazing colour in the sky. But nevermind. I’m happy with the pictures I had. Which I wouldn’t have taken if I didn’t have any photographic company with me because otherwise I don’t think I would’ve bothered to lift up my butt, that’s how bad it is right now.

Anyways, enough of lamenting the current state of things and on with the show. We drove to my favourite brook which I’ve already visited numerous times, but which still keeps inspiring me. It was overcast weather which helped, because during most of my visits it’s actually been sunny, which is the only bad thing I can say about Svansjöbäcken. It doesn’t quite work in sunlight, unless you get there at sunrise in the summer which I’m very unlikely to do. As to why do I always go there when it’s sunny? Because it’s such a great place to be! So now I was taking pictures which I’ve kind of “seen” before but haven’t been able to take because of the light.

One of the first things that caught my eye was all the green grasses. It seems like the colour spectrum consisted only of reds and greens, the only exception being the greys. It’s a lovely combination so my post processing was all about making those colours pop and it took me a while to figure out how to do it in Lightroom. The secret was to use a warm colour temperature to pop the reds, and then cool down the greens using the hue slider. I’ve never actually used the hue slider before but now that I discovered it, it will solve a lot of problems I’ve encountered on previous occasions. I think I need to reprocess some old pictures!

I’ve been working extensively on this lily of the valley pic so I thought I’d post it. Nothing has been removed or added in the content (no cropping either), but I’ve used gradients, exposure adjustments, curves and all of that all over again with the adjustment brush, while trying to be careful not to over-do it. All I wanted was to bring everything to balance and enhance the buds and the droplet. There’s really just one colour in the picture, in different hues, adding to the simplicity. But effective, I hope.

The more I use Lightroom the more I like it. I’m not an expert user but I’m learning, and it seems like my vision is changing in sync with my processing skills. What I thought was perfectly processed a year ago needs re-processing now.

When I was working on Monday’s zoo pictures, LR really proved its worth. I’m totally in love with this tiger at the moment, maybe I’ll grow tired of the picture soon but right now I’m just patting myself at the back for a job well done. I don’t often get to feel like this about my pictures, if I get one such every year I’m happy.

I think what attracts me about the picture is the intensity. At first it’s of course the intense look, but then as I started processing the image to get rid of the grey film that the fence created, I also started to intensify the colours and the tiger’s stripes. Everything has to “pop” – the look in the eye, the colours, and the pattern. All the while trying to minimise the effect of the fence, which is still visible in the background, at least if you know to look for it.

When I was finished with the processing and looked at the before/after comparison, I was impressed that it could all be done in Lightroom with what really amounts to basic adjustments (just quite a few of them). I didn’t even use the clone/heal tool! And like I said, I’m not an advanced user, I haven’t explored the full potential of LR and I don’t know any fancy processing tricks. But I’m learning and maybe a year from now I will come back to this picture and find that it needs to be re-processed because my vision has been re(de)fined along with my LR skills!

Keep It Simple, Stupid! The winter is full of opportunities to simplify your images. In a very basic form, all it takes is a few lines. Or a lot of lines, like the frozen web on the left. It wasn’t just frost, but proper ice crystals that made the threads look like a band of pearls.

The slight dusting of snow we got earlier in the week together with the frost provided me with some nice subjects and I could stop kicking myself about the missed opportunities yesterday. I even found something that was very much like the “Arches” picture that failed miserably as taken with the mobile phone. But already as I was taking pictures of this small bush (or a small birch), I realised that it will be very difficult to bring out the lines when there’s almost no natural contrast at all. So it took a surprising amount of effort to process a simple picture in Lightroom, the trick is to deliberately underexpose a little and then boost the contrast and curves and finally I even used the adjustment brush on the branches to lift them from the background and finished off with a vignette. And it still doesn’t work.

But then I found an easier way to photograph the same subject. The flipside. On the opposite side of the bush (yes, it’s the same bush), the branches were visible so the lines were clearly defined. Processing was easy – deliberate over-exposure for a high-keyish effect with a boost in blacks and clarity and then I just had to clone a small distraction in a corner. And add a slight vignette of course, I’ve taken the habit of routinely add vignettes to almost all my pictures.

Keep it simple. On a wonderful winter’s day as it was today, it was easy. In the immortal words of Frank Drebin in Naked Gun: I love it!

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’ve updated and slightly re-organised the photo galleries at minnak.net. As always, the new pictures are in the “New” gallery and I’ve also tried to re-process some old pictures but it seems like I still have a lot of work to do with them. I’ve recently learned a new way of processing pictures in Lightroom, so the old pictures now look unnecessarily pale… I’ll get to them one day.

Edit 2009-08-30: I updated the Orchids gallery with some new pics and new post-processing.

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!