Tutorials

Gone – 1 year anniversary

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Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 24-105mm, ISO 400, 24mm, f/16, 1/100 sec

One year and 1 day ago I got my first high-end DSLR – a Canon 5D Mark III. And one year ago today, exactly, I took this photo – the first one I have found good enough to be published. This version of the image is actually the second version I published. The first one I wasn’t quite satisfied with and I returned when my post-processing skills improved.

The photo is a single exposure that I have processed as a pseudo HDR. I did that by creating two virtual copies in Lightroom, and then setting the exposure compensation to -2 and +2 respectively. That gave me a -2, 0 and +2 version of the image. However, the dynamic range of the Canon 5D Mark III is really not very impressive (you might want to read about it in my review of Canon 5D Mark III and Nikon D800 and D600). Because of that, there was heavy noise in the darker regions of the +2 image, because the shadows had been raised so much. So what I did was to do some heavy duty noise reduction on the +2 version of the image.

I then did my tone mapping with Photomatix Pro (see my tutorial on using Photomatix) and got a good result that improved the photo immensely. I did a few other things, that I don’t remember in detail, but what I got was this image:

As you can see, the lower part of the image is more or less the same, but the upper part has changed a lot.

What sometimes happens, when you make HDR photos, I have realized, is that they get way too gray’ish. That is a side effect of making HDR photos and it is your job, as a photographer to handle that that in some way. In this particular case, the sky was complete wrong and it was way too grey and I wanted to fix that. Some time later I found the original photo and started working the sliders in Lightroom, and focused only on the sky. Below you first see the original image, and then you see the sky I got, by working the sliders. What I did was take my Photomatix version of the photo, and exchanged the sky, with this new one from Lightroom, and that really made the image.

Original photo without any adjustments:

And a Lightroom version, in which I focused on the sky only:

I then replaced this sky, with the sky in my tone mapped image, and that really did a change to the photo.

Roskilde Cathedral by Night – Change your vantage point

Nikon D800, Nikkor 14-24mm, ISO 200, 23mm, f/4.5, 1.6 sec (zero exposure)

Roskilde Cathedral is almost a thousand years old. The Church is on the list of UNESCO’s world inheritage and is absolutely worth a visit, if you ever come by Roskilde or Denmark. The Church is fairly big (not in the Sct. Peters Cathedral in the Vatican size, but it’s no small cathedral).

Shooting the photo

I had a lot of trouble getting a close shot of the church, if I wanted all of the church included. The square infront of the church is fairly big, but not compared the the size of the church. In the end I needed a 14mm full frame lens to be able to capture all of it. The first time I tried with a 17mm, and was able to include all of it, but I had to tip the camera so much, that I couldn’t get a propper good looking church out of it. The problem with wide angle lenses is, that when ever you tilt your camera, the lines start to scew, and the more you tip, the more you scew the image. And if it gets too scewed you can’t fix anymore, without ruining the photo.

But with this photo I used a different approach. I couldn’t include all of the church easily, so I chose to focus on a part of the church, like the door. As I said the square is fairly big, and I wanted to use the lines in the cobble stones, as lead in lines, but didn’t want terrible much rather boring ground in the lower part of the photo, so I placed the camera very close to the ground, as you can see. By doing this, I can emphasize the lines going through the cobble stones, just as well as I get more room for the church it self in the image.

Taking a low vantage point, some times work really great and emphasize lines, but don’t go low too often. It might spoil the element of surprise, in your photos…

A note on the post processing

The photo a mix of three images.

A 5 shot HDR photo that I tone mapped in Photomatix Pro
A double tone mapped image made in Photomatix Pro.
An image created in Light room

The double tone mapped image, is only mixed in on the bricks and the cobble stones, which makes it even more moody, almost computer game graphics.

The Ghost Driver in the Taco Taxi

Buy a print of this photo.

In New York City on Manhattan I found this totally cool 1950 Studebaker yellow cab parked by the curb. I took 5 handheld shots, with my new Nikkor 24-70mm lens. We were in a big rush, because we had to go back to the hotel to check out, so that we could get to the airport. I did not have the time to consider the scene well enough, because we were half running. And I happened to include a couple of people, that did really work in the photo. And the van on the left hand side was double parked and didn’t move either.

I have been going back to the photo several times trying to process it, but not getting anything interesting. But then suddenly it came to me more by chance than anything else. I’m working on a post, in which I discuss good and bad processing and how to fix some problems with halos. I needed an extreme HDR and pushed the Surreal preset in Photomatix. Photomatix works this way: When you open Photomatix, it uses the same settings you had last time. And by chance I once again dumped my Taco taxi into Photomatix and BAM! That was how my yellow cab should look like. I did dial the extreme a liiiitle bit back, to take the edge of it, but the effect is still very very strong. This is the original 0-exposure:

As you can see, quite a dramatic change. The speed effect I added, because the rest of the photo really doesn’t work too well. The people on the right and the van on the left shouldn’t have been included – so I had try something. I tried blurring the background using gaussian blur, but that didn’t come out very well, and then I tried the Radial Blur with a zoom effect, and that did the trick.

This blurred image I mixed with the original photo, in such a way, that the car remained unblurred, while the rest is blurred.

Notice how the people disappears and how the van suddenly works as a part of the composition. That’s neat.

You can find my HDR tutorial here, including a coupon code that gives 15% discount on buying Photomatix.

How to restore photos of poor quality

Recently I have been looking through some of my older photos. The last 7 years I have been travelling more than I ever have been doing, and during all of that time I have had a growing interest in photography, without ever really getting to the point, where I thought of myself as an amateur photographer. But during this time I have shot some photos, that I have found to be better than “just snapshots”, but unfortunately not shot with the kind of cameras I carry around these days.

My post-processing skills have improved enormously and I amaze even myself what it is possible to do with an image. Recently I decided, it would be fun to see, what I could recover or restore from before I got great cameras.

I have found that I can restore some of my old photos. The main overall problem is that I have shot most in JPEG (do not shoot in JPEG!! Shoot in RAW) and therefore have too little information in my images. But the problems I can in general summarize to this:

Too little information because I shot in JPEG.
Too much digital noise in the photos. This has to be removed, without removing too many details. This requires some decent Noise Reduction software. I mainly use Noiseware.
The mood has to be improved in the photo to create that ‘this is a great photo’ feeling.

The Basilica Cistern of Istanbul

The Basilica Cistern of Istanbul is an amazing place. More than 1500 years ago, while Istanbul was a part of the Roman Empire, a giant cistern was build. A cistern to contain water for drinking. The construction is enormous 138m by 64m and the ceiling is carried by pillars, some reused from even older buildings.

Canon 400D, Sigma 30m f/1.4 at ISO 200, 30mm, f/2.5 and 1 sec.

I didn’t have a tripod so I had to use the rail on the pathways running in and out of the between the pillars. This is the only one I managed to get fairly sharp, but if you look at the original in a 100% crop, you can see that it is far from tack sharp. Taking sharp photos in light conditions in poor light conditions is difficult, because the camera can focus.

100% crop of original JPEG shot.

And this is a 100% crop of the final image.

While the photo will never be comparable to one shot with a really expensive high end camera, it has improved impressively and has become a great photo worth publishing. This is original JPEG photo:

So what did I do to this image? I have done several things.

First I created the overall mood and feeling. I did that in Adobe Lightroom. This is a JPEG and I only shot the one shot. There is no way I can make an HDR out of this image. This means that, what ever is shadows will remain shadows. There is virtually no information in the shadows.
I cropped the image to Portrait format instead of Landscape format. This works better as a composition, but also leaves me with a much smaller photo of 5.1 megapixels.
I did noise reduction, first a little in Lightroom, but when the noise is complicated and fairly strong I have to use another tool. Otherwise I can’t get rid of the noise without losing too many details. I have various dedicated noise reduction software, but I mostly use Noiseware from Imagenomic, which does a great job of reducing noise without losing too many details. And what I especially like about it, is that there is a built-in sharpener too, that works quite efficiently. That I used on this image too, because it lacked the sharpness.

These are my settings in Lightroom to create the overall look and feel:

Let’s do a walk through of the settings:

Exposure +0.48: The original shot is a bit too dark. I increased the exposure 0.48 exposure step. That makes noise evident in everywhere in the photo.

Contrast +26: Almost every photo I make I increase the photo. It makes them pop a bit more.

Highlights +24: Usually I let the highlights go in minus, but in this case I wanted more power in the light areas and this explains the stronger light on the pilars on the left side.

Shadows +100: Make the dark areas more bright. Remember this is a JPEG and there is very very little information in the dark areas. So noise reduction is mandatory afterwards.

Whites +29: This increases the point of how bright the image is by stretching the brightness. If you press ALT while you move the slider to the right, you can see when you start to get blown out white areas.

Blacks -10: It is good to have some black in your photo to make it work. If everything is gray’ish, the photo will be dull and flat. This also goes for HDR photos – there has to black to create depth in the photo. I have increased the dark areas, compensating for having set the ‘Shadows’ to +100.

Clarity +45: Clarity is potent slider. What it exactly does I can’t explain, but it adds some kind of contrast and it does at it says, it makes things more clear. In this case the photo is a bit unsharp and soft and by using the Clarity slider quite a bit I can ‘un-soften’ the photo, which is needed. Careful with the Clarity, it can very easily be overdone.

Vibrance +100: Wow – I think that is the only time I have ever used +100. Vibrance works a bit like Saturation, except that it only works on some colors. Skin colors (red and pinks colors) are less affected. This photo almost only has red colors and therefore Vibrance only has a little effect in the orange on the pillars.

Saturation 0: The photo has plenty of colors, no need to add them.

HSL (Hue, Saturation and Luminosity)

It is a complete section of it’s own. The more I use Lightroom the more I use these sliders to finetune the colors of an image. In this case I found the the Red was too intense, and I lowered the saturation of the red.

Red -42: I reduced the reds quite a bit.

Magenta -38: It has got absolutely no effect on this image. There is no magenta in it, I just dropped it somewhere. I always check magenta, because chromatic aberrations often come in magenta colors. This is one way to remove purple chromatic aberrations.

Sharpening

The photo is a bit unsharp and does require sharpness. I add some sharpness here, but I also add some in Noiseware later.

Noise reduction

I add some noise reduction. If you are not sure, what noise is, it’s grain in your photo that is generated digitally by you sensor in you camera. The more expensive your camera is, the better it handles noise. This is shot with an entry level DSLR – an old one too, which makes it very prone to adding noise to the images. This is the noise in my image (click it up to see the full size):

Crop the Image

Some go against cropping and argue, that it is better to get the photo right in the camera. I disagree. If a photo gets better by cropping, do so. The only problem I see in cropping is that you get a smaller image, and if you want to print it, that might be a problem. This photo is shot as a 10 mega pixels, but I’m left with only 5.1 mega pixels. This is better than an unusable photo, right?

Reducing the noise in a photo in a third party tool

When you shoot photos in poor light conditions your camera will most probably generate digital noise. There are many tools that you can use to remove digital noise. I have used several. There are Noise reduction in Lightroom, but it is not the most optimized tool that I know. It takes away too many details, but I find that Noiseware from Imagenomi really does a great job of reducing noise and keeping the details. But it also does a quite efficient sharpening. A side-effect in reducing the noise, is that you get a softer photo and therefore need to add sharpening – and having it built into one application I find very convenient.

Gullfoss in Iceland

Travelling in Iceland brings you around to see the some of the most amazing wonders that Earth has to offer.

If you are staying in the capital Reykjavik, you can go on a one day trip by car or get an arranged tour that covers the Golden Circle, which brings you to Geysir, Gullfoss and Thingvellir.

The Great Geysir rarely erupts now a days, but Strokkur which is right next to The Great Geysir, will erupt every few minuts. It will go as high as 35 m.

In the photo you see the great waterfall Gullfoss (the Golden Falls). It’s an amazingly big water fall that falls in two large falls as you can see and it looks like the water just plunges into Earth.

The last stop of the Golden Circle (or first depending on which way you drive) is the old historical and cultural center Thingvellir. The vikings used to use the area for it’s parliamentary discussions. However, Thingvellir is also interesting from a geological point of view, because it is lies at crest of the mid-atlantic ridge. There’s a great cliff ridge that marks the edge.

How did I shoot and post-process this photo?

I shot this photo in rainy conditions using my Nikon D600 with my Nikkor 24-70mm lens. Because it was raining I had to wipe the lens all of the time. To wipe the lens you should use a fiber cloth, to avoid getting any scratches.

What I really wanted when I took the photo, was not to freeze the waterfall, so that I could count every drop, I wanted this silky long exposure waterfall. I started using my Lee Big Stopper filter, which is a 10 stop ND filter (Neutral Density filter), but I thought it was too much and switched to a Lee 2-stop ND filter instead. But what is an ND filter (Neutral Density filter) anyway? A 2 stop ND filter will block the light just so much that I have to double my exposure time twice, which means if the shutter speed was going to be 1/400 sec it would be 2*2*1/400, which is 1/100 of a second. It’s like putting a pair of sunglasses on your lens.

In broad daylight a 2 stop ND filter is not quite enough, so I also made the lens as slow as possible, by stopping it down to f/22. Which is the lowest value my lens will go to, and then I shot at ISO 100.

I shot this photo as a 3 shot exposure bracketed shot (AEB), which gives me three photos. One exposure which is 2 steps too dark, one normal and one 2 exposure steps too bright. Like this:

Minus -2 exposure: EXIF: ISO 100, 28mm, f/22, 1/15 sec

0-exposure: EXIF: ISO 100, 28mm, f/22, 1/4 sec

+2 Exposure: EXIF: ISO 100, 28mm, f/22, 1.0 sec

As you can see in the darkest -2 exposure, the water is somewhat frozen, and that was not what I wanted. But from the middle exposure the water looks like silke long hair falling over the edge, just like I wanted it. And the same goes for the +2 exposure.

So what I did in the post processing, was to do an image using Photomatix Pro. I did a fused/natural image and then I did a version in Adobe Light room. The version from Lightroom only had to make the water fall look great, because I was going to use the image from Photomatix for the rest.

The two images I loaded into Photoshop as layers and placed the Photomatix image on top, and by adding a layer mask (here you can see how to do that), I punched a hole through my top layer to get the water fall from the layer underneath. This way I was able to have my Photomatix and my Lightroom version form the final image as a blended image.

Why didn’t I just use the waterfall from the Photomatix version? Well, I do like the looks a waterfall that has the silky look. I had taken my time to use an ND filter to get longer exposure times to get that exact effect and Photomatix just ruins that, because it blends three images that are “ghosted” (not identical) in the water fall. At other times, when I take photos of the sea, with waves, I might like the water to be ghosted, because it adds and effect.

And why did I use HDR in the first place? Well in this case it is strictly not necessary, because there is not a lot of dynamic light, but you can also use Photomatix, to get an “effect” or mood into your photo. This I do a lot and I did it in this. But no, it wasn’t necessary.

Disneyland Paris – The Space Mountain

This is one of my very first HDR shots I shot. It is shot hand held with my old Canon 400D and the old 18-55mm kit lens. I think this photo is a proof that it doesn’t take professional gear to make great photos. I shot three exposure bracketed shots (-2, 0 and +2). I shot it in june 2012, before I really knew anything about HDR or post processing.

What’s most interesting about the post-processing is the mirroring of the lower part of the image. There was a large container like construction I couldn’t avoid having in the photo. I tried another angle, but that didn’t work, so in the end I shot with the construction included.

I have did the tone mapping and really liked the result, but I didn’t like the construction, so the photo has been lying around for some time, and then recently I picked up the photo again, and tried to remove the construction.

This is the original:

#1 This the top of the ugly construction and it ruins the photo.

#2 This part of the image I mirrored and merged into the right hand side. The photo is close to 100% symmetric, but I had to do a little shuffling around the pixels to get it to look well enough to deceive the eye. There are probably many ways to do this, but the way I did it, was to load the image into Photoshop, and then duplicate the layer (CTRL+J) and then select the lower layer and press CTRL+A to select all of the layer. And then I flipped the layer like this:

And then I used a Layer Mask to paint through. What a Layer mask does, is punch a hole through the layer it is attached to, but only where you paint black on the layer mask. This is the procedure to add a layer mask and paint through to the layer underneath:

And notice how the layer mask is painted black in one corner, making the layer below visible:

Breaking the Ice

This winter lasted a long time, but now spring has finally arrived. During the winter time I have had many opportunities to photograph ice in the fiords around Roskilde. This particular day I ventured out on the ice with a tripod and two cameras. It’s a very shallow part of the fiord and should I have gone through the ice I would have been in to the knees, no more than that. The ice does funny things around the rocks. It looks like small frozen vulcanos. There are many rocks in this area, and I shot a few of them.

About the post-processing

I have had some problems trying to get the ice look good. Ice is basically grey’ish, maybe with a blue tint, but is not that colorful. However, when the colors of the sky reflect in the ice, you can get a little color out of it. My project has been to get some intensity out of of the ice, while still believing that it is ice. Ice is blue and the mind accepts it to be blue.

The photo is a 5 shot HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo, but to make the final photo I have used two different images I made in Lightroom from the 0-exposure and one I made in Photomatix Pro.

This is the original 0 exposure photo:

As you can see a flat and dull photo and certainly not reflecting the reality. But you can also see that almost everything is visible. There are no completely blown out areas of white, neither is there any pitch black areas. This means that there is not a lot of dynamic light in this scenery and no real need for HDR software like Photomatix, but Photomatix not only assembles several exposures into one High Dynamic Range image, it also does some post-processing of the image. The post-processing can also be applied to single photos and give really great results. In this case I had 5 different exposures, and I used them all, simply to get a better quality of image in the shadows, but I could have used just this single photo.

#1 The sky is dull. I started playing around with the sky in Lightroom and exported two different versions of the 0-exposure, and I anticipated that I would use one of those two skies in the final image. I made a beautiful one and then I did a more dramatic one. I made the two in Lightroom, because Photomatix often makes a grey’ish sky, and that does not look good. This is something I have learned over the past couple of months and come to realize, that Lightroom is pretty for making gorgeous skies. In this case, however, I was tricked – Photomatix did the best sky.

#2 The area with the golden colors reflecting in the sky has to come more alive. I did that by amp’ing up the saturation and by adding a little softness to area.

#3 Clean up. I do it every time and it makes a difference! It really does. Try and compare. In this case I used the Lasso select tool in Photoshop CS6 and then pressed SHIFT+F5 for a content aware fill. In some situations it does amazing work. And then I used the Healing Brush remove a larger number of stones and ice peckles both close the Rock and further out in the distance. This does take some time, but it is worth the effort!

This is the first of my images exported from Lightroom. You can see three horizontal lines. That is a Gradient filter. The effect starts from the lower line and reaches the maximum effect at the top line.

In the right hand side, you can see the settings for the Gradient in the top section. In this case I ded a fine tuning of my global changes. The global changes you find in the section below (the middle one you can see). In the middle section you can see how I simulate HDR in Lightroom. This is done by lowering the Highlights to -100 and raising the Shadows to +98 (or 100). This gives a flat HDR looking photo, but by adding some contrast and clarity things starts looking really good. I amp’ed up the saturation too, to get a great looking sky. The Black and Whites I also adjusted a little bit to add a little more punch the image.

The second image I generated from Lightroom is a more dramatic one. As you maybe can see, some of the ice from this image, is in final image. The sky from this image I didn’t use.

And below is my image from Photomatix Pro. I found a really nice processing in the “Exposure Fusion” and “Method: Fusion/Natural”. I have some presets that I use and then I adjust them a bit, when I find something that I like.

In this case the sky turned out really nice and I ended up using this sky. I also blended the Ice with the second image, giving a more blue color to the ice.

These three images I loaded into Photoshop as layers, along with the five original shots, giving me all together 8 layers. I then started mixing the final image, by using layered masks (see my tutorial on blending layers in Adobe Photoshop here). As it turned out, I never used anything from the original shots in the final image, but only from the three images displayed here.

The Court of Law

One day after work I went out to shoot some photos. I was thinking of shooting the Opera House in Copenhagen. But on my way I passed the Eastern High Court of Denmark and saw the shadows from the gate, and I shot those instead of the Opera House.

Shooting the photo

My idea was to use the shadows as lead in lines and I really liked the color of the sky along with colors of the building. Preferable I would have liked to have door a little further to the left in the image, but a car was there and I couldn’t really get it to work. I tried several different compositions until suddenly the gates opened and I gave up doing more shots. I tried a couple of shots with the open gates, but it didn’t work.

The photo I took close to the ground on a small Manfrotto table tripod with an extension. With the extension fully extended it gets a little unsteady, but it is usable. I always have that one with me, if I don’t have one my full size tripods with me. Careful when you use such a small tripod in such a busy area, people are prone to kick your camera like a football, because they don’t see it.

The idea of going close to the ground, is to make the lines appear stronger, and the have less dead space from the road.

About the processing

This is the original shot, here you can see the tip of the car and a bit more of the road. That is too much of the street, but I could go into the street, because it was quite busy. The street it also way too yellow, and there is a nasty lens flare.

This is my primary post-processing to the photo done in Adobe Lightroom 4. I use Lightroom a lot and find that I can do so many things with it. Most of the post-processing I did to the photo is done in Lightroom, only the perspective crop and the the clean up in the photo is done in Photoshop. It looks like, that Lightroom 5 will allow me to get that done within Lightroom too.

I originally intended the photo to be an HDR, but it appeared not to contain a whole lot of Dynamic light, so I only did a standard post-processing to the photo, using the 0 EV version of the photo.

Lets run through the settings.

Exposure: I lowered it ever so slightly with -0.36 EV step to get the image just a little darker and more moody.

Contrast: This I raised to make shadows on the street appear more prominent.

Highlights: The slider affects the bright areas in the photo and either makes them lighter or darker. This I lowered to amp down the strong light from the lamp.

Shadows: Works like highlights, only it works on the shadows. I also lowered this to get the shadows on the street to become stronger. It is not that often I lower the shadows, but in this case I did it intentionally.

Clarity: This I raised to get more grittiness in the street and more texture in the building. It is a very potent slider and you should handle it with care.

Tone curve section: Here I adjusted two parts of the highlight area, I raised the Highlights a little again and but lowered the lights. How does these work compared to Highlights in the section above? The tone curve allows you to do more detailed adjustments, and they are applied on top of the settings. I often end up using both the slides both in the top section and in the Tone Curve section. Tone curve can add a more controlled contrast to the image. I use the slides, even though I could drag the curve around. I find that I can work the sliders in a more controlled way, than moving around the curve with my mouse..

HSL section: This section I really use a lot too tweak colors in the photo. In this case I removed all yellow saturation and lowered the orange. There is yellow in orange, but Lightroom is clever enough only to remove the yellow. So I got rid of my yellow street, but kept my orange building. In a later final touch step I removed all saturation in the street, to get it completely grey.

In Photoshop CS6 I did:

#1 Remove nasty flare. I did that with a combination of content aware fill and clone stamping until it looked nice.

#2 I then did my usual clean up. Some might argue, that the stuff really was there, and therefore it should also be there in the photo. I find that the images a better and stronger image by taking my time to remove the rubble and signs on the wall and gates. I’m not making a portrait of reality, but I am making a photo.

#3 I cropped the photo in a way to avoid the large square in the lower right hand corner, but keeping the sewer cover in the left corner. And then I straighten the image a bit, using perspective crop. I did that to get rid of the building on the left, with loosing my sewer cover.

Lightroom 5 beta is available – and Jack the Ripper

I just had a quick look at the upcoming Lightroom 5 and some of the new features listed and I’m already very excited! I work a lot with Lightroom 4 and I’m amazed at what I can achieve with it, but there are some tasks, that always requires that I start up Photoshop. One thing I do not like about starting Photoshop up, is that Lightroom then generates a TIFF file, and TIFF files take up space on my hard drive. And even though hard drives are fairly cheap, it is becoming a problem to make back ups, carrying them around etc.

One thing I really love about Lightroom is, that everything I do to a photo in Lightroom is applied on top of my RAW file. If I make multiple virtual copies, to which I can make other adjustments, so that I have got several different photos, based on the same RAW file, but most important I still only have one photo on my hard drive. A great bonus from this feature is, that I can always dial back and press Reset.

But there are some features missing in Lightroom, which really pushes me into Photoshop. I use a wide angled lens a lot. 80% of my photos are shot at a wide angle lens, and quite often I have to shift the camera upwards or downwards, and when I do that, perspective gets distorted. That is a side effect from using a wide angled lens and some times it can be used as a feature, at other times it ruins the photo, if not straighten up. In Photoshop I use the “Perspective crop” tool to solve these problems. It does a decent job, but sometimes it squashes the the photo too much, like making the Empire State Building look like a small fat 20 story skyscraper.

In Lightroom 5 there is going to be a new Upright feature, aimed specifically at this task. This I’m really looking forward to. It can both save me from having a TIFF file around, and maybe even doing a better job than Perspective crop in Photoshop?

Another thing that pushes me into Photoshop, is when I want to do content aware removal of things. I can only remove round things in Lightroom 4, with the clone stamp, which is fine for removing sensor dust spots, but not satisfactory, when I clean up my photos by removing lamp posts and other stuff from my photos, to make a more clean photo. But in Lightroom 5, there will be an advanced Healing Brush.

Then there are some new features:

The Radial ND filter, can be a cool thing too. The Gradual Neutral Density filter I already use a a lot to make adjustments to a sky, by lowering the exposure on a very bright sky, increasing the contrast etc. to get the details and texture more clear. This gives a more balanced photo. The new Radial ND filter I guess can be used for some fun stuff on round objects, like the sun, faces etc. You can probably achieve similar things with the existing brush tool.
Smart reviews. I don’t think this feature will be usable for me, with my current workflow. The idea is if you are using your laptop is your primary machine to handle your photos, then you got a problem, when you are on the road. You can’t bring all of your photos along, because they take up way too many gigabytes to fit on your small laptop hard drive. What this new feature allows you to do, is to work “off-line” of your primary storage (like a NAS), on low resolution versions of your photos. You can do meta tagging and adjustments. I figure adjustments are post-processing. Though this is quite cool for some, I do have a much more powerful desktop computer, to do my primary post-processing on. For some this might be cool.
Photo book creation – I think not. I stick to www.pixum.com to make my family albums. They offer excellent quality and excellent flexibility. But of cause I will look at it, when Lightroom 5 is a available.

Adobe Lightroom 5 will also include a number of minor features and enhancements. More information is available here.

To create todays photo I have used the clone healing brush and the perspective crop in Photoshop. It is a 7 shot HDR photo, and I used Photomatix pro, to create both a single tone mapped image and a double tone mapped image, which I mixed with the original ones.

The original photo is not a bad one, but neither perfect.

#1: I removed the branches. When I straighten the church, some disappeared, but I ended up removing them completely. When I took the shot, made sure, that they were included and did not cover the church. I used the brush healing tool in Photoshop.

#2 The sky I worked with, to emphasize the light in the mist. That is an important part of the mood. I increased the contrast and saturation a bit.

#3 The church I straighten to a certain level. I can’t straighten it completely, because it makes a small fat church, which is not the reality. The compromise is somewhere in between completely straightened and this. Ideally I would have gone further away, but that was not possible.

#4 The acid color of the light from these lamp posts I didn’t like, so I worked with the colors, and mixed that into my final photo. I did that, by making a new layer in Photoshop, opened the Hue/Saturation dialog (CTRL+U) and dialed back some of the yellow and green. I then mixed the lamps into my image.

#5 These lamps are blown out, but because I shot it in HDR I can achieve the moody great look from the lamps, in stead of just a white blob. There is not a lot of dynamic light in this photo otherwise, but the lamps I save.

#6 I then used more healing brush to remove the snow. I used a clone stamp after wards to get a better result on the cobble stones.

#7 The cobble stones is the double tone mapped image. What I get from the double tone mapped image, is the lovely reflections from the lamps and the many details and textures in the cobble stones.

This is one of the photos, where you might ask “Why HDR it?” – well I got more details within the windows of the church and on the lamps. I also got more shots, so that I could remove people and the car coming around the corner. And then it added some of the magic, mysterious Jack the Ripper mood.

Chicago Michael Jordan Steak House Stair Case

On the first floor of a sky scraper on the magnificent mile in Chicago we had a great big american steak, that doesn’t get any better, at Michael Jordan Steak house. It was superb. While sitting there, I was looking at this fantastic hand painted ceiling of a kind of African style. I took a picture of that (to be published later). While taking that shot, I looked down the hall way to the area with elevators, which looked interesting too. I walked down there, and saw something more fantastic. I saw this Egyptian stair case on the first floor in a skyscraper – wow, how did that ever get there?

About the processing

This shot is a very typical double tone mapped HDR photograph. You can see it from the strong enhancement of the details. When you do a double tone mapped HDR, the details are enhanced quite a bit, and you have to be careful not to over do it and you have to be aware that you are moving into a surreal zone. Many photographers don’t like this area, because it doesn’t portrait reality as it looked. No, true enough, but neither does black and white photos. A double tone mapped image is like a painting. I put no less work into making a double tone mapped image, than I do into making any other image. It doesn’t make it less good, than any other photos that it is a double tone mapped image and I like it, and many people really do. But some there are people who don’t like it.

This is the 0-exposure original image:

#1 Notice how the details are enhanced, compared to this original photo. While this is an ok’ish photo, I like the double tone mapped much better. The rug on the floor also has got a lot more detail and texture. I like that in the final photo. A double tone mapped image is an HDR image that you created with Photomatix Pro, and that you tone map once more. This is easily done, by clicking “Tone mapping” once more in Photomatix. The photo goes complete crazy, and you have to turn down the saturation and the luminosity to achieve the desired effect.

#2 I have straighten the photo up. As you can see the lines are tilting, and that is because I was using a really wide angled lens at 14mm. And because I tilted the lens slightly upwards, the lines start to get really tilted. This is an effect, but also a nuisance, that you have to learn to handle. I straighten this one in Photoshop, by using Perspective crop tool, but I could also have done it in Lightroom, by using “Lens corrections -> Manual -> Vertical and horizontal” sliders.

The photo is a 5 shot HDR, that I merged in Photomatix Pro. I have tried making double tone mapped images in Nik HDR Pro 2, but haven’t had a lot of succes with the results.

Caught In Pixels

Caught In Pixels

Tutorials

Gone – 1 year anniversary

Roskilde Cathedral by Night – Change your vantage point

Shooting the photo

A note on the post processing

The Ghost Driver in the Taco Taxi

How to restore photos of poor quality

The Basilica Cistern of Istanbul

Gullfoss in Iceland

How did I shoot and post-process this photo?

Disneyland Paris – The Space Mountain

Breaking the Ice

About the post-processing

The Court of Law

Shooting the photo

About the processing

Lightroom 5 beta is available – and Jack the Ripper

Chicago Michael Jordan Steak House Stair Case

About the processing