The Quiet Picture

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?

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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!

It was such a great weekend, you’d almost be fooled into thinking it’s summer (if it weren’t for the fact that the temperature stayed in the ‘teens). Perfect for motorbiking, in other words!

Despite the bike, I’m not really a motor enthusiast. Actually, I’m not even a motorbike enthusiast – I just have my Tricker and that’s perfectly enough for me. But this old tractor, it was just begging to be photographed so I parked my bike and obliged.

And then afterwards, I fiddled with just about every slider in Lightroom to edit the life out of it!

The bog star, or grass of parnassus (Parnassia palustris) is a flower that definitely deserves a closer look. It’s not hard to find if you are in an area where it grows (bogs, as hinted by the name) because it’s just about the only flower that is still in bloom this late in the season. The first time I remember I ever saw it, was in September a few years back. Now in early August, they have just started blooming and I could still see plenty of buds today.

The bog star is exquisitely beautiful, an absolute delight to see through the macro lens. The pattern in the petals is unrivalled and you’ll find to your surprise that this white flower is much more colourful than you’d expect at first look. Even the leaves are beautiful, as reflected in the Swedish name “hjärtblad” (heart leaf) as this flower is sometimes called here.

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The image is completely (well, almost completely) processed in Lightroom for web release, meaning that LR is increasingly becoming my one-stop-shop for all image processing. I tried the option to add a copyright watermark via the LR export dialog, but it’s not possible to change the font and I found the default style horrible. After some searching I found a plug-in that can insert a graphical watermark during the export process so I can now use my old copyright text, straight from Lightroom. The only thing I’m not happy with is that LR doesn’t seem to compress the jpg’s the same way as e.g. Photoshop does, so the file size is bigger than it should be. If I take down the quality, then the image just gets pixelated. So the “almost completely” I mentioned is that I export the image to Irfanview and just simply save it with a quality setting that gives me the right size without completely messing up the image. A couple of quick clicks and it’s done – and I’m waiting for better compression in Lightroom 3, maybe?