What does "lifted blacks" mean? How does it affect your image? How do I do it in Lightroom?
Lifted blacks refers to the action of increasing the brightness of black areas of a raw image. This can have the effect of bringing out details in areas that previously had none, but if the blacks are too deep, it can result in visible noise.
Most raw processors have a Blacks slider, simply adjust it to lift the blacks.
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I really like the colored-haze in this photo:
http://meiirene.35photo.ru/photo_372234/
How do I do it in Lightrooom?
This isn't a Lightroom effect, it's just the effect of shooting during Golden Hour (an hour or so before sunset in this case, I think), and shooting into the sun: result, warm, soft sunlight. The little bokeh dots floating around appear to be dandelion seeds in the air catching the light.
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I've always been a huge fan of blurry photos, guess in part because almost any camera is able to take blurry photos, though some better than others.
That said, getting to the point of the question, what's the difference between real-time vs post-production blurs?
In general: "real" blur, either due to optical characteristics (including depth of field, chromatic aberation, spherical aberation, and more) or due to movement, is based on more information. It includes the three-dimensional and time aspects of the scene, and the different reflection and refraction of different wavelengths of light.
In post-processing, there's only a flat, projected rendering to work with. Smart algorithms can try to figure out what was going on and simulate the effect, but they're always at a disadvantage. It's hard to know if something is small because it's far away or because it's just tiny to start with, or if something was moving or just naturally fuzzy — or which direction and how quickly. If you're directing the blur process by hand as an artistic work, you'll get better results because you can apply your own knowledge and scene recognition engine (in, you know, your brain), but even then, it's a lot of work and you'll to approximate distance and differing motion for different objects in the scene — or intentionally start with a photograph where these things are simple.
In the World of Tomorrow, cameras will gather much more information in both time and space. The current Lytro camera is a toy preview of this. With a better 3D model, the effects of different optical configurations can be better simulated — and of course motion blur can be constructed from a recording over time.
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The definition of high key photographs is thoroughly answered by @mattdm. What I understood is that a light toned subject is the most important requirement to take a high key image. However, it seems there are other pre/post processing arrangements that needs to be considered. If you see photographer's description on the example image mattdm posted in his reply, there are few things to note:
So my question is: what are the lighting and other pre- or post-processing requirements for a high key image similar to this?
The halogen work lights are a common DIY substitute for more expensive photograhic "hot lights" (such as the Lowel Tota-Lite or the Ianiro RedHead) -- you can usually pick up a 250 or 500 watt fixture with bulbs for under $50 rather than spending hundreds on the "real deal". They're usually much lower temperature than photographic lights, but filters (with film) or a white balance adjustment (video or digital photography) will make up the difference.
The picture is not only high-key, but overexposed for effect. (The overexposure is absolutely not necessary for high key.) If we assume 2 250W lights and a one-and-a-half to two stop overexposure, 3 seconds is not a tremendously long exposure at a low ISO -- hot lights may seem ridiculously bright when you're looking at them, but they can't hold a proverbial candle to the sun or to a flash. The long exposure was probably made, as you assumed, for the etherial quality it lends the subject due to subtle motion.
As for high-key as a concept, it simply means that the majority of the tones in the image are lighter than mid-tone. An image can have a full tonal range and still be high-key, such as, say, a still life consisting of white objects on a white background with full-developed shadows, or a floral macro consisting of a wash of pinks against a light background, with accents of deeps reds and purples. It's just a matter of where the majority (usually the preponderance) of tones in the image lie on the tonal scale.
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I've been seeing various photographers post photos with this type of effect
http://fadedandblurred.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/yangtze-2.jpg
it's a bit washed out, yet retains the crisp detail and the colors are almost pastel?
I am pretty good with photoshop, and i spent hours playing with color/levels/hues/saturation/trying to overlay colors (ala instagram), but it never comes out like this, and if it comes close it's almost by accident.
Can someone provide some insight as to how such effects are achieved? is it just a result of years of tuning ones post processing prowess?
The camera I am using is Nikon D7000.
It looks to me like it could be a bleach bypass. This effect was originally a film-processing technique, but it is often replicated digitally.
Here's one (rough) method to try in photoshop:
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I'm interested in efficient processing of RAW photos on Linux. I've played with RAW a little, but so far I've always reverted back to JPG as I can't be bothered to spend hours doing post-processing. But if I could find a pretty quick way of tweaking RAW photos then I might try again.
There are many tools for working with RAW files in Linux, but which of them let you do things like:
or is RAW post-processing simply not worth doing if you don't take the time to process each photo individually?
May I suggest RawStudio? It has support for batch operations of the type you're asking for, and has dramatically simplified my post-processing workflow over my old approach of ufraw + GIMP. If you're familiar with similar "workflow" products on other platforms, the UI should feel pretty comfortable.
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I recently came upon the image below, and more like them on Stephen Wilke's website, and was wondering how the image was made.
It really seems that there would be some form of post processing, but by the seemless flow of the image, it looks like the edits may have been very complex. Is there a simple way to recreate this style?
In your question I recognise two parts:
Take one photo of the daytime situation, take one photo of the evening situation. Use a tripod for the photos and let it stay there between the shots so the composition stays the same. Another possibility is to tether your camera to a laptop and use the daytime image as an overlay during the night-time shoot. This enables you to replicate the composition as well.
By placing the two photos over each other and masking one part of the night photo revealing the day photo (or the other way around) will give you the basic image. From here you need to fine-tune your mask such that the night image flows over into the day image. Gradient masks might help.
Other remarks
The use of a tripod also enables you to shoot with a long shutter time. This is needed such that the cars show a blur, which implies motion. A wide angle lens is needed to capture the whole scene in one go.
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I've created a few photos of the Moon using a Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope and a DSLR. I've tried different ISO settings, shutter speed, bracketing to find the best settings.
Here I show a (reduced size) example photo (ISO 200, 1/250 sec, digital processing: +2.5 EV)
Here is a smaller part of the Moon:
What is the best way to digitally postprocess the images? I've read several articles mentioning noise reduction and image stacking but without any details. For instance there are several noise reduction techniques, which one is the best here? How many photos should be taken for image stacking? Is it the best to take the photos with the same settings...
I would read this article for information on stacking and how to properly stack photos: http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/index.php/category-technical/145-long-exposure-astrophotography. The relevant information is farther down in the article.
Looking at your shot, it appears that there is a fair amount blur, I'm guessing due to incorrect auto-tracking? Before doing any stacking, since this is the moon, and exposing the moon is a LOT easier than exposing stars...I would make sure your auto-tracking is correct. Its difficult to do, but once you have your mount set properly, you should be able to get MUCH sharper photos with a lower ISO setting, an not need to do any stacking.
If you are interested in photographing the sky or stars, then stacking is a much more useful tool, as getting a good, clear, bright exposure with low ISO of the sky requires either one very long exposure, or several long exposures stacked. Stacking definitely helps manage noise.
For more on Astrophotography, see this post: How do I get started in Astrophotography?
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I want some suggestions from Lensbaby users.
I have the plastic optic, double glass and fisheye optic. I use the composer.
The recent new optics: Sweet 35 and Edge 80 seem very intriguing and I want to buy one of them, but not sure which one to get. I know they have the in-built aperture which will be a lot more convenient, but will the Sweet 35 be very similar to the double glass other than the fact it's now wider? I've heard the blur is not as smooth as the blur in double glass. (updated: here is the link about the highlighted blurs: here)
Also if I could shoot on a normal SLR lens and work on post-processing, is it easier to create the effect of the Edge 80 or the Sweet 35? The Edge 80 is just tilt-shift focus with a line-focus thru the photo, am I right? If that's the case, should I be getting the Sweet 35 instead because the effect can't be reproduced? But I have the double glass already; would it be an overlap? I don't have a Canon tilt shift lens, so maybe the Edge 80 is a better choice?
Sorry for being so long winded. I really have no idea which lens I should get.
Thanks so much.
The effect of the Edge 80 can be approximated in software, but using a tilt lens is generally considered to be both easier and better in terms of actual results. (Real lens blur is hard to fake without a 3D model.)
Whether the Sweet 35 would be too much overlap with the standard double-glass optic depends on how into all this you are. In "mundane" non-LensBaby photography, a 35mm lens and a 50mm lens usually are happy side by side — they're part of a "standard" set of prime lenses, not competitors. On an APS-C camera, the original LensBaby lenses are in the focal length range normally used for portraiture, while the Sweet 35 is a "normal" focal length. I think the less-attractive blur is not because of worse design, but simply a matter of what you get with this construction and a wider angle. Not necessarily bad, but just what it is.
So, between the two, I think the key questions are:
Of course, since this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, the answer very well may be yes to both. In that case, I say go with whichever is speaking to you more now, and get the other when a space in the budget opens up again.
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I know that the on-camera flash tends to produce poor images in general (the subjects are washed out, and the light from the flash isn't very powerful). But... sometimes there's no other choice but to use the on-camera flash and hope for the best. So I'm wondering, what is the best way to recover these images are in post-processing?
My question is similar to this question about fixing blown-out highlights; however, I'm interested more in things I can do to improve the entire image quality -- so this might include things like better color balance, ways to make the subject look less flat, etc.
I'm interested particularly in answers that use tricks or techniques that aren't necessarily "obvious", but might be considered "tricks of the trade" by professional photographers (I assume they have to deal with this problem sometimes, too?) -- I have both Lightroom and CS5, and am reasonably proficient with their basic use, but I know I'm probably just scratching the surface of their power. So nothing's off-limits for this answer -- if you have a solution, but it requires 20 layers and 15 different brushes, I'm all ears!
Edited to add: Note that I'm asking about photos that I've already taken, so any preprocessing tips are not helpful to me. Additionally, I do have a bounce flash, but there are certain settings in which it's not useful (if, say, there's nothing to bounce off of!), and the only way to get any light into the frame is direct hard light. My question is about how to make the best of these less-than-ideal shooting conditions in post-processing.
Here are a few ways I have fixed washed-out photos be it from the flash or just in general.
Adjust levels - I will slide the black slider to the right to darken the photo. Sometimes if only part of the photo is washed out I will use a mask on the levels to darken only what I want to. This masking can get complicated and I recommend looking up some tutorials.
Curves is another tool I have used but can be a bit tricky.
High Pass Filter to bring details into the image and sometimes helps the washed out look. For a tutorial on the high pass filter check here.
Shooting in RAW and adjusting the sliders sometimes is all that is needed
Burn to image to darken where needed. You can do this in Photoshop non-destructively by creating a new layer, filling the layer with 50% Gray (Hex is #808080) then change that layers Blend Mode to Overlay, Then Burn on that layer (Dodge will also work on the same layer)
Create a black layer and change the blend modes to soft light.
Duplicate photo and change blend modes to see what helps darken the photo. Again advanced masking is sometimes involved and experimentation is required to see if this will work for your photo and what blend mode will work.
Use a plugin like Topaz Adjust to change the photo.
PS Photo Filters can help.
I will sometimes use a combo of the above.
The biggest trick is experimentation with filters, settings, etc in PS to see what happens. But always remember...HAVE FUN! =>
These are all done in Photoshop CS5/CS6. I do not have any examples I can currently post or I would.
I hope some of these help!
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I used the Instagram Lo-Fi filter a lot and wonder how I can reproduce the effect in Photoshop...
You will find lots of Instagram filters as Photoshop Action, created by Daniel Box. They are good and really useful :)
http://dbox.tumblr.com/post/5426249009/instagram-filters-as-photoshop-actions
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When I go out for a shoot, I usually come back with 50 to 200 pictures based on that day's productivity. I am a busy person when I am not photographing. Here is the problem, post processing consumes a lot of time. Sometimes I lag behind in post processing and the pictures pile up to be processed. Ultimately, I can't keep up. Of course, I present only a chosen few out of the lot. So doesn't it make sense to process only those that I want to present/show? Do I miss out on something if I don't post processing everything I shoot?
EDIT
mattdm helped me rephrase the question better. So the questions as it stands after mattdm's answer and comments is -
Is it worth spending time on photographs which are good but which aren't my very best work?
You may find a gem you overlooked — something which you passed over but which on further inspection works better for you than an image you selected on the first pass. This may simply be a detail that wasn't obvious, or that a blurry image caught a far better expression than a sharp one, or it may be that some creative work brings out something in an otherwise overlooked image.
You may get some benefit from looking at the images you didn't select, and identifying for yourself why you didn't select those. You might not necessarily want to post-process these, but winnowing your work is an excellent way to learn.
Another thing to consider is to work on taking fewer pictures you're not keeping. That's a challenge, particularly in these days of ten-frames-per-second burst rates and no obvious monetary cost for each one. There is, as you've clearly discovered, a cost, though — each click means some amount of later work. Beyond that, you may find that putting more thought into each image means you bring home the same chosen few, surrounded by less baggage.
To me, a holy grail of photography is making every shot a "keeper". I'm nowhere near that, but getting closer. One thing I noticed is that when I take a number of shots, it's usually the first that's the best — that was the moment, and the rest are just second-guessing. Learning to second-guess less leaves me more time for the next moment.
As with other affectations like shooting with only prime — no zoom — lenses, this is a luxury in having photography as a hobby. I don't have to get the shot to sell to a client or put on the front page. If I miss something because I wasn't clicking enough, or didn't have the right focal length on the camera, I try to learn from that too, and be in the right place the next time — because, hey, there's always tomorrow (and if there isn't, no one will be there to look at my photographs anyway).
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I have access to the below software and I use all of them at various times. I do not have a specific workflow and would like to start following one.
The general process that I follow is this:
How can I improve my workflow? I shoot JPEG.
The biggest step you could take is to commit to either Aperture or Lightroom. These applications are both trying to fill the same space in a photographer's workflow, and they each work best if they are the primary tool that you use. By committing to a single application for importing, organizing and processing your images, you will be able to put the full features of the application to use and get the value out of your investment.
Since you also use Photoshop, I'd actually be leaning towards Lightroom, as it has a clean integration between the two, but the choice is yours.
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I am interesting in achieving results like Andrzej Dragan's portraits. I have been through lots of tutorials, but none of them actually provide good enough results. What major steps should I follow in terms of shooting and processing to get such results?
Also, why does this effect not work really well with faces that do not have wrinkles/creases?
The thing missing from the tutorials you been reading is probably in the preparation of the original image, and the missing ingredient, years of experience and practice!
Dragan could be the most imitated style on the internet with the possible exception of Dave Hill. Dave gets paid a lot of money for the shoots he does, despite the plethora of tutorials online promising the Dave Hill look. It seems there's no substitute for the real thing.
This is not to say you shouldn't try, just that you shouldn't expect an online tutorial to reproduce the results of a seasoned pro.
To get you started along the road to perfecting the look you want I would suggest the following:
Start with the correct subject. You ask "why does this effect not work really well with faces that do not have wrinkles/creases?" — this is due to the fact you can' create contrast without some sort of detail, or you'll just wind up with a huge amount of noise as there's nothing else there to enhance in a perfectly smooth face! This brings me on to the next point:
Lighting. You need sculpted light to give you something to work with in the image. Hard lighting and strongly directional light will get you close. A high-resolution image which is properly exposed, sharp and in focus will make everything easier.
Experiment and understand the relationship between global contrast and local contrast and techniques to manipulate both of these.
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How to modify local contrast of a photo in Lightroom 4? The only thing comes into my mind is to use the brush tool. Is there any other way to achieve this or a plug-in to let me modify the local contrast of part of the image?
I'm not a Lightroom user (often), so I'm not overly familiar with what's available natively, but you might find a plug-in like Topaz Adjust 5 to be just about the right size and shape of ticket. It works from within both Lightroom and Photoshop (and any PS plug-in compatible editor, as well as a standalone with a free lightweight host), and offers both global and local adjustments. The ability to paint effects in and out is, I think, a deliberate nod to the environments that won't allow you to play with layers in the host program.
(No affiliation—I'm even deliberately avoiding the affiliate program—just a very satisfied user.)
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Is it possible to get better results from Levels / Curves adjustments by converting 8 Bits/Channel photography to 32 Bits/Channel?
Just by example, Photoshop's Info panel shows the following information:
If I understand correctly, "8bpc" = 8 Bits/Channel.
But what if I convert the photography to 32 Bits/Channel:
Would that reduce the "combing" effects in some situations or help getting better results in any other way?
Switching to 16 or 32 bits will indeed reduce combing (or posterization, quantization whatever you call it) after multiple edit operations.
Every time you use a multiplicative operation (such as levels, contrast adjustments, curves, colour balance etc. etc.) you'll likely end up with values that are not whole numbers. Apply a long sequence of such operations and you compound the errors until you start to see a visible degradation in image quality.
For example if you apply a levels adjustment and take the 255 level down to 127, you effectively half the brightness value of every pixel. So 133 becomes 67 (it's actually 66.5 but 8 bits can only store 66 or 67). Now later on you apply a levels adjustment that doubles the brightness value of every pixel, 67 becomes 134 - an error of 1. You've lost information, after the two adjustments there can only be 128 possible brightness values in the image instead of 256! If you look at the histogram you see gaps for every odd number, and the graph will resemble a comb (hence the term combing).
If you convert your image to 16 bit by padding on the right with zeros, 133 becomes 34048. Divide by 2 and you get 17024, multiply that by 2 and you get 34048, which converted back to 8 bit (by shifting right) and you get 133! No loss of precision has occurred.
By doing your operations in a higher precision space you effectively store fractions, which retain more information and are then rounded only once when you've finished manipulating the image (as most output devices still only support 8 bits per channel).
If you take an 8 bit image and apply only one operation and convert back to 8 bits you wont see any benefit, however after several operations you will.
Here are some examples:
Original 8bit per channel image
Here it is after I've crushed the levels down to 13, and then back up to 255. Posterization is visible in the sky as we've lost the intermediate values. This is clearly visible in the histogram which features only a few spikes.
Here I tool the original image, converted to 16bit, and then crushed the levels all the way down to 2 and back (effectively dividing by 128). This would have complete destroyed the 8 bit image (it would be reduced from 16 million to about 27 colours!) however the manipulation is not visible in the image, and only just detectable from the histogram.
I edit all my images in 16 bit mode, this provides very good protection against rounding errors. 32bit is probably overkill, you'd have to a huge number of operations to see the benefit of the extra precision.
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I have recently started to play with Panography, which is a style of stitching pictures together, however on my first couple of attempts, quite a few of the pictures that I took were distorted towards the middle of my scene; many of the objects weren't correctly aligned. Is there any way to remove any way to remove this distortion that before I take the picture?
It's hard to give a specific answer without knowing more about your post process workflow, but here are a few things you can try:
Tripod to improve alignment of objects, or - even better - a tripod with a panoramic head.
Shooting and a narrower field of view (shooting at 30mm instead of 17mm for example), this may help reduce lens distortion, though at the expense of having to take more images to cover the same area view.
Tilt shift lens. Expensive! But will produce the best results possible.
However, I think your best bet is to try better software. Photoshop has a panoramic feature that handles distortion, color differences, and other abnormalities quite well. If you already have Photoshop, it's under File -> Automate -> Photomerge. There are other software packages that may also do a good or better job.
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I was browsing Behance and came upon these pictures: http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Little-Things/402879
I was wondering how he got this miniature style effect? I'm guessing a Gaussian Blur on a strip of the picture in Photoshop...but couldn't get right. What's the step-by-step process for doing this with software?
(For getting this effect with a special lens, see What's the best way to create a tilt-shift photograph?)
Basically you want to simulate the shallow depth of field you would get when photographing small objects. This can be done either with lens with tilt function (i.e. special purpose lens called either a tilt-shift or perspective control lens) or by selectively blurring an image in post.
It's not hard to do, but there is something you need to ensure in the original capture, and that is a high vantage point. This is a must, not only are most miniatures shot from above, but you need a steadily progressing depth from top to bottom. This is especially true when using a tilt-shift lens as your only option is a gradually increasing blur, it's possible to fake shallow depth of field from a ground level image but you would have to do an awful lot of very difficult masking if the furthest part of your scene is in the centre of the image, and the result wont look as good anyway.
Here's a walkthrough of one of these I produced for the University of York magazine. Here's the original image (actually part of a panorama) shot from the back of a tower crane!
Next I played with the saturation and colours to make it look a bit like a model (if you look at model railways the trees are always an unnatural shade of green!)
The next few steps are not strictly necessary but I wanted to push the illusion of this being a model as far as I could! I photoshopped in in some dirt, hairs etc. and a few plastic model railway figures (again most of this was inspired by studying images of model railways on flickr):
When doing this sort of thing it's important to add a shadow, even if very diffuse (the whole scene was shot on a cloudy day, so there were no strong shadows) to help ground the figures:
Here's the final prep'ed image (I decided the dead fly was too much!)
Now to do the actual blurring, now we want to simulate the model going out of focus, which means blurring with an increasing radius from top to bottom. The best way to achieve this is with the photoshop lens blur filter. This takes a "depth map" image, which is a greyscale image where the brightness indicates the radius of the blur at that point.
A simple gradient from top to bottom would do, but it gave the effect that the bottom of the building was more blurred than the top, which wouldn't happen in real life as they would both be at the same depth, to attempt to fix this I modified the depth map slightly:
Here's the final image. The effect isn't quite perfect, the trees in the foreground don't look quite right (a lot more fiddling with the depth map would have been required), but it was enough to fool a lot of people.
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When I shoot a photo and load it into my image editing software and start playing with curves and sliders, sometimes I go so far. For example I increase the saturation and I keep increasing it till it doesn't look so good cause the photo becomes very saturated and unnatural, but I don't feel that till someone take a look and says that colors are too strong or I go away for sometime and come back to look at the photo and I say to myself what I was doing! It's too way saturated. Same goes with exposure, clarity, sharpness, ....
So when should I stop myself and say that's enough? Should I always review my photos after editing them by a day or two? Sometimes I can do that but sometimes I have to print the photos and I need to get them done. Any techniques that can help in this situation?
I've found a useful technique is to switch between the original and the edited version. By doing this even minor changes sometimes look drastic, which could work against you sometimes, but it's a perfect representation of just "how far" you've gone with the edits. You can see how true you're staying to the original photograph and how unnatural things start to look even if that is your intention.
Taking time away from the photo as you mentioned is a really great method too, but as you said their isn't always time for it. With the same idea in mind, if you have other photos to edit you should move on to them once you're a point you're happy with on the current picture. Once you've gone through editing all the photos, start at the first and work your way through again. That should give a little reset time on each photo.
What exactly "too far" is, is up to you as the artist. But I mainly use the first technique as a gauge to see just how much editing I've done.
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Is the term Gaussian blur used strictly in post-production, or can it also be used as a term for an out-of-focus area in your image when you-re taking the picture? I'm pretty sure that bokeh is used to describe an area out-of-focus when you're taking the picture, can gaussian blur also be used when you're taking the picture?
It's not appropriate to use the term "Gaussian blur" for the out-of-focus parts of an image, because "Gaussian" refers to a specific blurring function. It's the same Gaussian curve that you may know from the "normal distribution" or "bell curve" in statistics. A bright point that's smoothed by a Gaussian will taper smoothly from a bright center to a dark edge.
Example of bright points with Gaussian Blur, made in the GIMP.
The out-of-focus parts of your photograph are not smoothed in the same way. Instead, an out-of-focus bright point in your image will appear in the shape of your aperture. So if your lens isn't stopped down, it will look like a bright circle. It doesn't taper smoothly from the center to the edge like a Gaussian does. (If your lens is stopped down, you'll get a polygon instead of a circle—for example, a hexagon if your aperture has 6 blades. But the same point applies: It doesn't smoothly taper from bright to dark like a Gaussian does.)
In the above picture, notice that the out-of-focus lights are evenly filled circles, not Gaussian profiles (which would fade gradually from a bright center to a dark edge).
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