Category Archives: photoshop

Lightroom tidbits

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I’ve been giving Lightroom 3 (now 3.2) a real workout for the last few weeks. I’ve been importing my back catalog in massive chunks and making a quick pass at adjusting the original RAW files rather than importing the images that I had already tweaked previously in Adobe Camera Raw. This is a pretty big-stroke process right now — I’ll come back later and expand keywords and tweak the highly ranked shots — but it’s been a really interesting process to see the images improve. I’d like to think that the improvement is due to my own advancing skills in RAW processing, but the fact is that much of it is really due to improvements to the software over the years. Better processing algorithms and better controls.

I’ve been importing my 2006 images from Chile most recently and have noticed a couple of major advancements. One is Lightroom’s much improved ability to get rid of noise in high-ISO shots. Images that have never seen the light of day will now be going into my stock files because the noise that would never have passed Quality Control is now all but gone. Amazing. I’ll share some examples in the coming posts.

The most noticeable change in the images from Chile, though — especially Valparaiso — is how much more control I have over color now. Valparaiso is a city that is all about color. Colors you never thought you would see together, you’ll see in abundance in Valparaiso. Capturing some of these colors on film would have been frustrating. Sure, Velvia would have made that row of multi-colored row houses really pop. But then you’d round the corner to find a weathered, grey facade with the most subtle hues and you’d be cursing yourself for having 20 more exposures of that super-saturated film in your camera. One of my most favorite things about digital is just that — you can make decisions on a shot-by-shot basis and not be stuck with a film decision you made 10 exposures ago. Did you pop in a roll of ISO 800 film to shoot that dark church interior? Too bad now that you’re out in full sun and all kinds of contrast. No, being able to adjust ISOs and saturation levels for each individual image is a game-changer.

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And that flexibility doesn’t stop with in-camera controls. Lightroom (as well as all other image processors, really) lets you tweak color and contrast in ways that film selection alone never even came close to. The Vibrance slider in the Presence panel has become one of my favorite tools. More subtle than the Saturation slider, it affects the blues and greens more than already-saturated reds and yellows. Very nice. And the sliders for adjusting the hue, brightness and saturation levels of individual colors take that control to another level.

One other set of controls that I find myself using more and more often is the new perspective correction panel — actually the “transform” controls in the lens correction panel. While I still prefer the “distort” controls in Photoshop, it is nice having some of this ability in Lightroom. The controls take some getting used to but they are a welcome addition.

I’ll go into more detail on each of these and other Lightroom features in future posts and show some examples.

Hotel shot, take two

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I returned to the Eldridge Hotel for another twilight shoot last night. You may remember a recent post where I shot it from a rooftop across this street. This time I went street-level and parked myself under a tree along the sidewalk catty-corner from the hotel. I was again going for a long exposure with some traffic streaking and a combination of the dying light in the sky and the warm street lights.

I’m discovering that this particular building is not lit very well, nor do there seem to be many lights on in the windows in the early evening. My solution has been to merge several shots together. The image above was a quick attempt this morning to see how it might look, but I’ll need to do a more involved layering later. While I was locked down on a tripod, I was also changing apertures. The differing depth of field between shots means that I need to mask out some areas to preserve the focus where I want it. Otherwise I end up with ghostly halos around the foreground elements.

The advantage I gain by using multiple shots is that I can use one as the base image — here I’ve chosen a later shot with a good sky — and then “paint in” elements from other shots. One example is using a shot taken earlier in the evening where the building itself had more light on it. While it’s nearly silhouetted in the base image, I put the earlier exposure on a layer above, added a black layer mask to hide it entirely, and painted the building back in using white as my foreground color. I could reduce the opacity of the upper layer to better blend it and achieve the level of light that I wanted on the building.

Another advantage was that I could get more traffic streaks than what actually appeared in any one photo. I picked dark shots from my bracketing that had good headlight and taillight streaks, stacked them on layers above the base image and set those layers to “lighten” in the layer mode menu. That made only the areas that were lighter than the base image visible — in this case, the light streaks.

Headlights from the street to my left would also occasionally throw some light into the leaves of the tree above me. I was also able to paint in some detail there using the same technique as I used on the light streaks.

The downside of this kind of shoot is that I’m tied to one position for about an hour. I usually move around and find different angles, trying to make the most of the light as it changes and fades. Here, I need to dedicate myself to one angle and stick with it in order to have all the layers I need for the final product. Last night the sky was surprisingly dramatic for a short period in the middle of this sequence an I regretted positioning that tree where it hid the sky but I was committed to stay put in order to keep all of the images registered. Since this is a local shot for me, it’s not such a bad thing. I’ll just keep going back and trying different things.

Breathing new life

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With my recent investment in new hardware and software updates, I’m finally making a real time-investment in putting together my master Lightroom catalog. When I first went digital (after dabbling for a while, I made the serious switch in 2003), I archived all of my RAW files to DVD. Everything that wasn’t ridiculously hopeless got archived. Then I made my tweaks to the best shots and archived those, provided them to stock agencies, etc. My file names are chronological so the only real way of finding things was by searching by the date of the shoot. That, and I had a crude Extensis Portfolio database that provided thumbnails of all of my images and their pathnames, which showed which DVD they were stored on.

That was my system until a year or two ago when I began to migrate to using Adobe Lightroom as my main image cataloging system. I believe it was my trip to China in late 2008 when I began processing everything through Lightroom instead of Bridge and ACR. Everything from that point forward was in Lightroom, but everything prior was still in my old non-system.

Now, as I have downtime between shoots, I’m making the effort to add my digital files from 2003-2008 to my master catalog in Lightroom. After that is done, I’ll need to address my scans from transparencies that predate 2003, but that’s another kettle of fish.

The beauty of re-processing some of these older images is that they can often be improved by the advances made in RAW processing software in the intervening years. The shot at the top of this post is one example. Shot in the fall of 2003 while working on a story about Indiana’s covered bridges, this was originally three vertical shots. The plan was to use them to make a panorama in Photoshop, but it was a time-consuming task at the time.

100723bridge_sotc Here was the situation: This particular covered bridge was located right next to a newer, concrete bridge that replaced it. They were so close together that I couldn’t get the whole bridge in frame with my 17mm lens because there was no room to back up. This photo of the two bridges gives you some idea of the setting.

So, I did what I could do. I backed up under the concrete bridge until it was just out of view. Then I fired off three vertical shots from left to right, making sure I had plenty of overlap along their common edges. I planned at the time to eventually stitch these three photos into a panorama, but I knew it would take some time to correct the wide angle distortion, mask the overlapping edges and tweak the sky and water to get a seamless blend. I set them aside for later.

“Later” came when I imported this shoot into my new Lightroom catalog last week. Seven years have passed and now stitching a panorama is automated. In Lightroom, you can select the three images and go under the Photo menu to Edit In > Merge to Panorama in Photoshop. The software takes it from there and you end up with a seamlessly blended, distortion corrected panorama in no time. Now I have one more covered bridge shot in my library.

Many other tools have been improved in the last seven years and I’ll share some other salvaged photos as I move through the files. It seems like Adobe’s image editing suite has arrived to a point where I can be comfortable making this kind of a huge time commitment to cataloging my images now, without having much worry that I’ll regret taking this path a year or two down the road. Sure, I expect things to continue to improve, but the overall system now feels mature enough to move ahead with confidence that time isn’t being wasted. That’s a good feeling.

Next up: a couple of small things that aren’t completely obvious in Lightroom that make life much easier…

Shooting local

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An assignment in my own home town has spurred a new personal project. When I moved to Lawrence, Kansas, a couple of years ago (has it been that long already?) I had intended to begin documenting the town photographically. While it seems like shooting in your own “back yard” would be the easiest thing in the world, it’s amazing how hard it can be to actually get out and do it. It’s too easy to get distracted by work, or mowing the lawn, or just plain every day life. When I’m on the road, I’m there to shoot and nothing else so it’s easy to stay focused. Even if the weather isn’t perfect, I’m out shooting because I only have limited time on location. When I’m home, it’s easy to say “maybe the light will be better tomorrow night”.

But nothing kicks me into action like a paying gig so, when an assignment came along for a story on some local civil war sites, it finally got me out of the house. First stop: the Eldridge hotel.

The Eldridge was burned down on multiple occasions during the years leading up to the civil war by pro-slavery raiders. Rebuilt each time, it is now a local landmark. I wanted a new angle so I contacted my friend, Doug, who offices across the street to see if he could get me on the roof. Being the great guy that he is, he did just that.

After popping off a few exposures of the KU campus (above) I settled into the shot I had in mind for the Eldridge. I wanted a long twilight exposure that mixed the sunset with the street lights below. I framed it up on the tripod and attached the release cord. Then it was just a matter of firing off a few shots every few minutes as the light faded and the shop lights came on.

In the end, I combined a few shots to get this one:

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Since I had shot several variations while locked down on the tripod, I could easily stack different exposures on layers and “paint in” elements of each using layer masks. The bulk of this image is one shot, from late in the set where the sky was darkest, but I did paint in some of the facade of the hotel from a shot prior to sunset to give more detail and balance the contrast a bit. I also painted in a few people on the sidewalk that appeared in various exposures.

I’m going to keep exploring other angles for this shot. The microwave tower behind the hotel is distracting (I could Photoshop it out but not for an editorial shoot – darn those ethics) and I would rather be on an angle with the hotel to add some dimension to it. Next time I’ll try shooting from street level, diagonally across from the building and see how that works.

It’s nice to have plenty of time for this project. Unfortunately, I can’t always spend so much time on each shot but, in this case, I’m looking at the assignment as an excuse to do some work I’d wanted to be doing for myself anyway. And it all goes into the stock files eventually.

The mother of all upgrades

It’s an exciting and scary week around here. I’ve been putting off upgrading my old G5 Mac tower for far too long. It was running fine but beginning to get a little tired. I could respect that. I get a little tired, too. But then Snow Leopard came along — running only on Intel-chipped machines — and I began to fall behind. Still no biggie. No real urgency. And that became my downfall.

Now we have an update from Adobe to the entire Creative Suite — CS5. A few days later, Lightroom 3. I held out until after the WWDC just in case Apple made any updates to the Mac line-up (something without a shiny screen maybe?) but, when there weren’t, I pulled the trigger and placed my order. Or should I say “orders”. Piles of boxes have started to arrive and the installation process has begun but I think I’m in for a multi-day process. Common sense has always told me to just update one thing at a time. Then, if something goes crazy, you know what is likely to blame. There will be no such common sense this time. New hardware and all new software. If there is a conflict, I’ll have one heck of a time figuring out where it is. Luckily, that doesn’t happen as much as in the old days. I also tend to stick with just the necessary software — not a lot of system modifiers, etc. that can lead to trouble. Call me overly cautious but I make my living with these Macs and I don’t care to spend my time trouble-shooting software conflicts when I can be billing hours.

With all of these updates there will be a slight shift in the focus of this blog. I plan on doing more technique and how-to posts, sharing what I learn about the new features in Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, Aperture, etc. We’ll see how it goes but this may be just the first phase of this new direction. Exciting times for sure.

Adobe CS5 announced

Just a quick note to say that Adobe has announced Creative Suite 5 today, including Photoshop CS5. That’ll put a hitch in my day. Guess I’ll be watching new feature demos ’til the cows come home. Rather than list a bunch of links to the product information, I’ll just link to the post I ran across on John Nack’s blog. He has provided links to several sources and will surely keep it updated as new reviews surface. Actually, upon further inspection, I see that he has started a CS5 category here for future posts. Shipping for Photoshop CS5 should begin within 30 days, according to the press release.

Happy 20th birthday, Photoshop!

PS: Does anyone else think it’s odd that Lightroom isn’t part of Adobe’s Master Collection or the Creative Suite for that matter? And Lightroom 3 does not seem to be a part of this announcement.

Decade in review: 2002

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

In 2002 I made my last major trip with with film — to Ireland. By this time I was shooting with a Nikon F100 and was just dabbling in digital with a Coolpix 990 (I’d actually had an Apple Quicktake earlier but never really found a way to use it professionally). I took around 250 or 300 rolls of film on this trip and — in those early post-9/11 days — begged for handchecks in Kansas City and again in Chicago to avoid x-ray exposure. I had already removed all of the film from their boxes but they were still in their transparent plastic canisters and kept together in a giant transparent ziplock bag. The handchecks involved taking each roll of film out of its canister and swabbing it before moving on to the next one. Repeat this process a couple hundred times and you’ll nearly miss your connection.

This was also my first international press trip (although still as a “spouse” to my writer-wife) and it was a whirlwind. We had left our home around 4:00 in the morning to catch our flight from KC to Chicago, then had an overnight flight to Dublin but neither of us were able to get any sleep on the plane. If I’m not mistaken, we were in the last row, center section, where the seats won’t recline because of the bulkhead that separates the cabin from the bathrooms. We landed around 7:00 a.m. and were picked up at the airport for a full day of touring. We ended up in Belfast that night, finally checking into our hotel around 11:30 p.m.

Thirty minutes later (and you can bet I was already sleeping) the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the hotel. I’ve never felt so sick in my life. The next morning we found out that the alarm had been triggered by a member of our group smoking a cigar in their room. They never came forward to identify themselves so the rest of the trip became like one of those murder-mystery trips with everyone trying to figure out who was on floor 7 and who had been seen with a lighter, etc., etc.

It was a brutal schedule but we were rewarded with scenes like this:

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I shot this across the road from our hotel while everyone else was getting their luggage loaded on the bus. Or maybe we were getting off the bus and checking in — I don’t know. I just remember running across a pasture to stand on a fence and get this shot before the fire went out of the sky. One thing about press trips: you can always be certain that the best light will occur while you’re either on a bus or inside a restaurant. If you want to be out shooting in that light, you have to be quick. (I also learned on a later trip that you should always stay by the bus until you’ve seen your own suitcase get loaded… but that’s another story.)

I loved Ireland and we had pretty decent weather during the whole trip. We went into Northern Ireland, up the Antrim Coast to the Giant’s Causeway, and then cut across the island to the southwest to the Dingle Peninsula and the Ring of Kerry. I’ll leave you with a shot from the Dingle Peninsula. This is nice and saturated on it’s original Velvia but I thought I’d knock the color back a little this time and go for something a little more subtle. It’s nice to have that flexibility now, not only with digitally captured images but also with scans from old film shots.

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Working the sunset, part 3

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One more from my Puerto Vallarta beach session. I was beginning to feel like I was shooting greeting cards — sunset over ocean surf, footprints in the sand, etc. — so I decided to play a little. Call it a game of “don’t drop your camera in the water”. As the waves would pull back from the beach, I would follow them out. Then, as they came rolling back in, I would hold the D700 down almost to the sand and run backward in front of the waves firing off exposures all the way. I wanted to capture some motion and convey the feeling of the waves coming in. I experimented with several shutter speeds — this was f/6.3 at 1/13th of a second. Strong sharpening in Photoshop helped bring out some interesting texture in the distant wave. Technically, I doubt there is much that’s “right” about this photo but I do feel that it captures the moment better than a static shot. At least that part of the moment that I was shooting for. In the end, whether it’s a success is up to the viewer.

Grape harvest

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Yesterday morning found me back at Holy Field Vineyard and Winery, shooting the harvest. The grapes weren’t quite ready for last week’s visit but this time the parking area was crowded with cars and the fields filled with people picking and toting fruit.

I went to the ground for this shot and held my D700 with the 17-35 Nikkor down in the grass, blindly pointed upward. I had imagined the shot as being a silhouette as the sun was directly behind the central worker but once I opened the file in Adobe Camera Raw, I was amazed at how much detail I could actually pull out of the shadows without losing the blue sky. In the past I’ve found that the Fill Light slider would create some weird outlines along high-contrast edges if taken past 10 or so. Here I’ve cranked it up to 54 and things look fine. I’m not sure if that’s an improvement in ACR, or the D700’s files can handle it better, or if this particular shot is more forgiving. At any rate, the recovery is amazing.

Michael C. Snell photography blog

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