Traditional Christmas Family Portrait with Natural Light

This weekend, I took a photo of our family for our Christmas card.  In this post, I'll describe the thought process behind the photo.

Improving Color Consistency with the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport

INTRODUCTION
Different cameras see color differently - even within the same brand.  Color accuracy is not just a matter of getting the correct white balance.  Different sensors simply render color differently.  You don't have to take my word for it.  Check out the test below.

Triggering a Camera and a Flash Simultaneously with the Yongnuo RF603

When Mohammad posted his review of the YN-560TX, there was a question from one of our readers about whether you can trigger a camera and a flash at the same time with the Yongnuo RF603.  The question has been asked on DPReview previously  .This capability can be useful for sports (to capture multiple angles of the same shot), or architecture / real estate, for example.  I have tried several combinations of Yongnuo triggers and flashes without success, until finally I got a combination that did work.  It was so simple that I was kicking myself for not having thought of it previously.

with one speedlight

Lightroom Tip: Adjusting More than 5 Stops of Exposure

Lightroom's exposure adjustment has a range of -5 to +5 stops.  You can exceed that limit by using an adjustment brush.  You can paint the entire screen with a large brush or apply it to any portion of the image as usual.  The effect of the adjustment brush is cumulative and you can apply it more than once.

Note: Of course, this only makes sense if your camera captured detail in the first place.  This won't magically bring back clipped details.

Limits of Highlight Recovery With Lightroom and ACR

I love many things about Lightroom, and one of them is that it is very good at highlight recovery.  However, the highlight recovery tool has limits.

Choosing the Exposure for Dynamic Range

Over the weekend, we visited Knott's Berry Farm, one of the first theme parks in the U.S.  What I like about Knott's is that the lines are much shorter than those of Disneyland therefore we get to experience more rides within the same amount of time.  I also think Knott's has a more interesting variety of rides for young children like our 5-year old, and has more thrill rides (though not as many as Magic Mountain).  Although the production value is not as high as that of Disneyland, it is still quite high.

During our visit the heat was intense, reaching 95°F (35°C), just one degree below the all-time record of 96 for that area, and 10 degrees hotter than the average for this time of the year.  With the sun blazing overhead, the dynamic range was very wide.  I used two different exposure strategies to deal with the dynamic range.

Photoshop Elements 10 Depth of Field Effect

I tried out Photoshop Elements 10's depth of field effect on the shot above.  It's a big improvement over the original shot:

The original shot.  What's with the evil eye, lady?

This is one effect that I can't pull off in Lightroom.  To create the appearance of a shallow depth of field with PSE 10, I used the guided mode to walk me through the steps.  First, I used a selection brush to identify the subject.  Next I clicked on the button "add blur."  Finally I dragged a lever to determine the intensity of the effect.  It's a pretty simple process, although a similar result can probably be achieved using a gaussian blur with a layer mask.

Merging a Group Shot Manually

When you plan to merge a group photo and take the shot accordingly, the results of an automatic photomerge can look great.  But what if you weren't planning on merging the group shot?  In that case, merging a group shot manually may help you get better results.

Understanding Post-Processing by Mitchell Kanashkevich

cover of Understanding Post-Processing

 Besides Rick Sammon's Light It! app, another tutorial I read over the weekend and that I'm excited about is Mitchell Kanashkevich's ebook Understanding Post-Processing.  Whereas Rick Sammon's app is addressed toward beginners and novices, Mitchell's ebook is primarily for intermediate or advanced amateurs and even pros.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mitchell Kanashkevich is a travel photographer who's career as a pro started taking off not too long ago.  He's very modest about describing how he got there, but his gallery shows that his newfound success in his photographic career is no accident.

ABOUT THE EBOOK
Many times, I've taken photos of scenes that had gorgeous lighting to my mind's eye but I felt I was unable to recreate that beauty in the photo that I took.  When I saw Mitchell's photos, I thought that many of his final images glowed with the kind of light that I have sometimes seen and sought to capture.

Mitchell has two ebooks, Seeing the Light and this one, Understanding Post-Processing.  I thought to myself: I've seen beautiful light, so perhaps his first ebook is not the critical piece that I'm missing.  I figured I would probably get his first ebook eventually, but I thought I had more to learn from his second book.

Mitchell's ebook is written with Photoshop and Lightroom in mind, though the techniques can be translated to other software as well, including Photoshop Elements 9 (whew, thank goodness).  His book assumes that the reader already has a good working knowledge of postprocessing programs, so it's not for the postprocessing novice and is written pithily (really -- it's 37 pages).  If, for example, layer masking is new to you, you might find this book challenging.  Rather, his book is for a reader who knows the technical steps of using various features of postprocessing programs, but is looking for direction in applying those techniques to photos.  (That's exactly where I am right now.)

Mitchell first discusses briefly the main tools that he uses, then he goes through 5 case studies of how he used those tools to achieve his final results, step-by-step.  In describing his steps, Mitchell explains his thought process, and shows the settings he used together with screen captures of the edits.  See thumbnails of his book at his website here.  The case studies all follow a similar process, but each one emphasizes a particular tool, thus providing readers with a view of Mitchell's general postprocessing workflow, as well as a better understanding of how particular tools can be used.

How well does the book fulfill its promise?  If you're a photographer with the level of postprocessing skill for whom this ebook is intended, none of the techniques are truly novel or earth-shattering.  However, this guide afforded me a glimpse into a gifted photographer's thoughts as he works on his images, and walking through the images showed me not only how he realizes his creative vision, but more importantly for my purposes, gave me insight and direction for elevating my post-processing work.

Post-Processing Tip: Alternative for Softening Skin

Some post-processing programs have a function for creating the appearance of softening skin.  For example, Lightroom has an adjustment brush for softening skin by reducing the clarity setting (local contrast).  Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3 has a Skin Smoother function that can reduce the appearance of wrinkles.

Sometimes, I get better results with very aggressive luminance noise reduction, either by itself or sometimes together with the built-in skin softening functions.  In programs that have layers, I create a separate layer so that I can apply the effect selectively with a layer mask.


Yes, noise reduction reduces the available detail but you know what?  The subjects who benefit from skin softening (ahem) don't care for the additional detail, and would rather have the appearance of porcelain skin.

Here's a sample shot .... NOT!  I don't have any intention of risking my life needlessly. :)

Basic Postprocessing: Milder Selective Color Effect

Let's say you want to bring the viewer's attention to a selected portion of your image.  One way to do this is to use selective color, i.e. to allow that portion to remain in color while converting the surrounding areas into black and white.  It's a fairly common effect, and some post-processing applications can do this effect automatically.

Here's a demo using Picasa, the free post-processing app from Google.  In the original image, my wife's arm is much too bright and vivid, and is very distracting:

In Picasa, I applied the selective color effect (called "Focal B&W") to bring the focus on our daughter's expression:

I think it's an improvement from the original version.  However, the selective color effect is very prominent, and may not look appealing after a while. 

If you don't have the ability to control the opacity of the selective color effect, an easy alternative to soften the effect is to use warmify:

The result is that the surrounding areas are still de-emphasized and less saturated, but the effect doesn't call attention to itself.

Rescuing an Overexposed Image and Decreasing Contrast (Basic)

This weekend we went to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, CA.  I took the shot above as our toddler (in green shirt) was watching seals in amazement.  I was on manual exposure mode and I exposed for the aquarium then used bounce flash to illuminate our toddler.  Due to the strong ambient light illuminating the water (relative to the dark exhibit), I set the shutter to sync speed (1/250) right away.  I was bouncing flash from dark ceilings so I set ISO at 800, then adjusted aperture until the light meter showed around -0.3 (which turned out to be f/6.3).  I figured that would give me an acceptable tone for the bright aquarium.  If the aquarium were exposed much darker than that I had doubts that I would have enough power for bounce flash.  I didn't have time to take a test shot and I just activated the flash on TTL with -0.3 FEC.

Here is how the shot looked like originally:

Argh! Horribly overexposed.  I think what happened was that TTL-BL tried to match the comparatively bright light in the aquarium with an equally bright flash exposure, resulting in flash overexposure (as well as overexposure).  In retrospect I should have used f/8 or maybe even narrower than that, or lowered the ISO to 400 or so.  The aquarium would have looked less overexposed, and it appears that the flash would have had enough power to illuminate our toddler (or at least not make him look like a silhouette).  If I had all the time in the world, I could have used the flash in manual mode at full power then chimped to find the lowest ISO and minimum aperture I could get away with (as long as it's sufficient exposure for the water).

Anyway, no problem - during raw processing, I can recover at least 1 stop (if not more), right?  Well, unfortunately, it so happened that I had been doing some test shots the other day and had left the camera in JPEG mode... doh!

I wanted to try to rescue the photo though.  Here are the things I did (I used Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3):
1. I duplicated the background layer and changed the blend mode of the duplicate layer to multiply.  This will make the image look less overexposed but will also make it look contrasty, which we'll address later.  Note also that this isn't going to recover totally blown pixels.

2. To make the light rays more visible and increase the contrast in the water, I applied local tone mapping.

 
3. Local tone mapping will reduce the saturation.  To compensate, I increased vibrancy.  Vibrancy differs from saturation in a couple of ways: vibrancy doesn't affect skin tones so much, and vibrancy has less effect on already saturated areas (whereas saturation affects all areas uniformly).
4. Because of the multiply plus the local tone mapping, the contrast was really high.  To counteract this, I first created a levels adjustment and moved the midtone a bit to the left.  This changes some shadows into midtones.  Next, to bring down contrast, I created a curves adjustment layer with a reverse S-curve (see below).  I wanted to keep the increased contrast in the water, so I used layer masking to apply the decrease in contrast only to the kids and the highlights on the seals.

Reducing contrast using a curves adjustment this way is better in my view than simply decreasing contrast.  What decreasing contrast does is to squeeze the histogram, resulting in less dark shadows and less bright highlights.  The problem is that blacks start looking grayish, and the image loses its punch.  Here is a comparison with the same layer masking used for the contrast adjustment (check out our toddler's hair):

I did a few more tweaks after that such as bringing down the exposure in a few areas (kinda like burning).  Final result again for convenience:


 I'm no photoshop expert so if you have better suggestions, please feel free to share in the comments below! :D

Post-Processing with Picnik and Picasa

I have been a huge fan of Picnik, the online post-processing application.  It's very user-friendly, has pretty good capabilities, and is reasonably priced (free for basic; $24.95/year for premium). I had previously been flustered by Photoshop and similar apps, and Picnik was the first app that allowed me to start actually learning post-processing because it was so intuitive.

One thing I didn't like about Picnik was that it was online only. It was convenient to use for photos that were already in my web albums, but was tedious to use for photos that were still on my computer (which required uploading them first). And I really disliked not having offline copies of edited photos (unless I patiently downloaded each photo into my PC).

For a while, I kept wishing that Picnik would create an offline version. That didn't materialize, so I just started learning Corel Paintshop Photo Pro. In the back of my mind, I fantasized that Google would try to beat Photoshop at its own game by integrating Picnik into Picasa (another product I like).

Wouldn't you know it, Google acquired Picnik. When that happened, I figured it was only a matter of time before Picnik became integrated into Picasa. That's why when my Picnik subscription expired, I chose not to renew it first, biding my time. :)

A few weeks ago, Picasa v.3.8 came out and it indeed integrated Picnik, at least partially. Now, there is a button in Picasa that lets you launch Picnik. But it's a bit more than that. The photo gets uploaded automatically to Picnik and then saved back to your computer when you're done. My gripe about offline photos therefore was partly addressed. I'm sure that eventually, Picnik will become offline through Picasa. I would bet Google's Picasa team is working on that integration and will release it as a major upgrade: Picasa v5 or something.

If I already have Corel PSP X3, Picasa, and Photoshop Elements 8 (I refuse to use pirated Photoshop btw), why would I subscribe to Picnik? The short answer is that I like Picnik's ease of use and speed. I also particularly like Picnik's ability to 'paint' some effects (like curves adjustments), similar to PSE's Smart Brush. (Corel should take a hint from that idea.) Combined with the reasonable price and the ease of saving photos into different web albums (Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, among others), I think Picnik is worth the subscription. Someday though, I still hope that Google will not only integrate Picnik as an offline application but also acquire Paintshop Photo Pro to provide a worthy challenger to the Photoshop monopoly. ;)

Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3

This past weekend I learned some postprocessing by tinkering around with Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3. 

For comparison, this was the original shot:

I've read a lot of criticism about the X3 from long-time Paint Shop Pro users, but I like X3.  Maybe it's because I don't know PSP well enough to know any better.

What do I like about PSP X3? It's much more affordable than Photoshop and so far seems to handle everything I've needed so far.  On the downside, it does crash from time to time but I've avoided almost all crashes by taking care not to do anything while PSP is processing a command.  Another disadvantage of PSP compared to Photoshop is that there are a myriad of Photoshop resources compared to PSP.  However, PSP seems similar enough to Photoshop that it has been fairly easy for me to learn from Photoshop tutorials and videos and apply the techniques to PSP.

What about X3 vs. Photoshop Elements 8?  I have both and in my view, X3 is more intuitive and user-friendly than PSE8.  PSP also has layer masks that work the way they're supposed to (instead of the workaround needed for PSE).  Here's a comparison by PC Magazine.

In summary, Paintshop Photo Pro X3 is a capable photo editor that is much more affordable than the industry standard image editor Photoshop.  For casual (as opposed to professional) family photographers who are new to photo editing and want to get started in photo editing without having to make the significant investment required for Photoshop, PSP X3 deserves a close look.

Disclosure: I'm not affiliated with Corel and have received no compensation (monetary or otherwise) for this blog entry.

Dodging and burning family photos

What's dodging and burning?

Dodging and burning are the processes of lightening ("dodging") and darkening ("burning") the exposure of parts of a photo. The picture below illustrates the tremendous improvement in tonality and subject three-dimensionality that can be achieved with dodging and burning.

How do you do it?

There are many ways to dodge and burn, not just using the dodge and burn tools that come with many postprocessing software. Here's one way to do it in Picasa Premium to improve tonality.

1. Load the picture in Picasa, fix the basics first (white balance, saturation, exposure, crop, etc.), then click on the create tab.
Here's a sample picture:

2. Under the Create tab, click on Advanced, and click on Curves.

3. Darken the subject. If the background is too bright, darken it as well.

- Click on the middle of the curve and drag it slightly to the lower right. Observe the change in the picture as you do this. Drag it to the point where the shadows you want to create are the right shade.

- If you want to darken both the subject and the background you're done with this step. If you want to darken just the subject, go on by clicking on the paintbrush icon beside the fade slider.

- In the Effect Painting dialog box, click on "reverse effect" checkbox. The image will revert to its original.

- Paint the subject with the darker exposure. First, make sure the Effect tab is selected (because you're "painting in" the shadow effect). Choose an appropriate brush size, select 0 for hardness and 100% for strength. Now paint the subject.

- If you want to, you can change the darkness by adjusting the curve.

4. Add the highlights.

- In the Effect Painting dialog box, click on the "Original" tab (because you're "undoing" the shadow effect from step 3). Choose an appropriate brush size, select 0 for hardness and around 66-75% for strength. Now paint just the brightest highlights. Generally I find it more effective to click repeatedly than to drag the mouse. The effect is easier to control and looks more natural.

- Reduce the strength to 33% to 50% and paint the next brightest highlights.

- Reduce the strength to 25% and paint the least bright highlights.

- If you wish, you can readjust the contrast of the created shadow by adjusting the curve.
Here's an exaggerated sample:

5. Click Apply to finalize the curves adjustment. Save it. You're done.
Here's the result:

Test your understanding of the above process: if you started out with an underexposed photo, how would the process change?

If you start out with an underexposed picture, then you can skip step 3. In step 4, adjust the curve to the upper left until it's where you want the highlight shade to be. Click on the paintbrush icon, click on the reverse effect checkbox, select the "Effect" tab (because you're "painting in" the highlight effect). Paint progressively from brightest to least bright highlight.

If you started out with an overexposed photo, how would the process change?

One method would be to "paint in" the shadows. I find that to be difficult, because it's harder for me to imagine the correct shadow placement. Instead, I would either fix the exposure first, then proceed as normal, or use a similar process as normal, except:

- I would drag the curve deeper.

- I would darken both the subject and background.

- When "painting in" the highlight, instead of starting out with 66% strength for the brightest highlights, I would start out much lower, depending on how overexposed the picture was.

With Picnik Premium, you can modify the process above to "paint in" different effects. For example, in our toddler's birthday album, I made the aquarium much more vivid by applying the Velvia preset in the curves, and using it to paint just the aquarium.

From Maty's 2nd Birthday

Where do you learn more about dodging and burning?

I'm still very new to this myself. The classic reference is Ansel Adams' the Negative but I haven't even seen or read it.

Please share your results, techniques and resources by posting links in the comments! Thanks.

Basic Postprocessing for Newbies

Note: this post is a follow up to this post on planning and this post on execution.

I know very little about postprocessing but it's made a big difference for my pictures. If you haven't tried it, you're missing out. Basic pp is easy and doesn't take much time.

From Maty 23+ Months (Las Vegas, with Brayden)

We took the shot above for our kid's birthday invitation. Straight out of the camera, it looked like this:

The unedited shot looks unremarkable to me. But I spent literally one or two minutes on pp and got to the final result above. A good return on investment in my view. :)

PHOTO EDITING SOFTWARE

I don't have a professional photo editing program like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. I've tried fiddling with them in stores and got overwhelmed by their complexity. And Photoshop is way too expensive for my needs at the moment. Instead I use:

• picasa (free)
• www.picnik.com (basic is free, premium is $25/yr), and/or
• Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 (came free with a wacom digital tablet).

PP programs can help you with

• Exposure
• Color
• Composition.

For the shot above I benefited from all three uses.

BACKGROUND INFO - WHITE BALANCE

White balance (wb) is the color cast of the light in the picture. Extreme examples: Incandescent lamps cast yellow light. Sodium parking lot lights cast greenish light. Fixing white balance means making the color cast neutral or changing it actively.

Check this out to learn more about white balance:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm

Most of the time, your camera's automatic white balance does an ok job of neutralizing wb. But in this regard, DSLRs don't seem to do as well vs. point and shoot cameras. There are many ways to make sure that wb is correct when you take the shot but I'll write about that next time. This entry is only about pp.

BACKGROUND INFO - HISTOGRAMS

Skip ahead if you know this or don't want to bother with details.

A histogram of a picture shows progressively from left to right how many pixels are dark (left) and bright (right). There are separate histograms for white, red, green and blue channels.

It's a guide for exposure. If the pixels are in the leftmost or rightmost column, then the picture does not show any detail in those pixels except to show them as pure black (leftmost) or pure white, red, green, or blue (rightmost).

More info here

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/histograms1.htm

ACTUAL EXAMPLE OF BASIC POSTPROCESSING

I used Photoshop Elements for the result above, but I've recreated the changes using the free version of picnik.com to allow anyone to practice with them. Even the free version of picnik is just as capable as PSE for basic adjustments, and the premium version of picnik holds its own for moderate PP.

Steps for PP in picnik:

1. Go to picnik.com, and upload the picture from your computer or from an online album. Move your mouse over the picture and click on the down arrow on the bottom right and select edit.

2. correct the white balance.

- click on colors

- if there's a white or gray part of your picture, you can click on neutral picker and select that part.

- adjust color temperature. Generally people look better in slightly warm-looking light. Flash is also slightly bluish so you generally have to warm up the image a bit if you used flash (as I did here). Here I set temperature to 19, which is less warm than the result above.

- adjust saturation. I prefer saturated colors. Here I increased to 4.

- click ok

3. correct the exposure.

- click exposure

- click on advanced

- adjust the highlights and observe the histogram. Here I moved it to 28. The histogram shows that the sky gets blown out but that's ok. There's no detail there anyway.

- click local contrast and adjust. I really like this effect because it makes the subject look more three-dimensional. I tend to move it as high as I can without the image looking strange, then I back off a bit. Here I adjusted to 16%.

- click ok.

4. crop if necessary.

- click on crop

- click on "no constraints" and change it to the ratio you want. Here I picked golden ratio.

- adjust the crop. To follow the rule of thirds, keep the points of interest near the intersections of the lines.

- click ok.

5. save your work.

- click "save & share"

- if saving to an album, choose whether to replace the old file or save as a new one. Here I saved as a new file.

- click on save

That's it. You're done.

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