From idea to finish: Grass in the wind
A good image does not always present itself immediately. On the contrary, often enough it is the result of approaching a subject that seems to have some interest, trying different angles and crops and finishing the image in post-processing. In this series I want to show my thought-process from the first glimpse to the final image. I don’t plan to publish articles in this series on a regular schedule, but when I have a bunch of photos that are good examples of this process I will discuss it here.
When I was out on a photo walk through a nearby forest and the surrounding fields I saw this grass growing between the way and a field with cut grass. The light breeze made some of the stalks move, while some stronger ones remained relatively steady.
The first try can be called nothing more than a snap-shot. Initially, I was taking photos of the scene behind it. The focal lenght (95mm) and the high aperture value (f22) don’t concentrate the eye on what matters: the grass moving in the wind. The high aperture value was needed to make the movement visible with 2 seconds of exposure time (at ISO 100).
The first obvious improvement to make was getting closer. Keeping the tripod on the same place I zoomed all the way in to 200mm, concentrating the eye more to the grass. Being closer, I could chose a shorter shutter speed to show movement.
But still there are several things wrong here: I chose a 1 second exposure. In situations like this it is a matter of trying until the balance between movement and sharpness. Here 1 second is too long. Everything is moving, which is not what I had envisioned. The aperture value of f18 is still too high, leaving the image too dark and the background too sharp at the same time.
Another thing: Even if I am closer to the grass, I am not close enough. There is too much going on in the lower part of the image, distracting the eye from the moving heads I wanted to show.
To find my final crop I moved the tripod a bit closer and lower, thus having the darker part of the field as a background for the brighter grass. This one is getting quite close to what I wanted. The focus is on the moving grass.
Still – it could be better: I opened the aperture (f10) to blur the background more, but still it is quite present. At 0.3 seconds the exposure is a bit too dark. The other “issue” is that there is too much grass in movement – even if I like how that movement is captured, I miss something to rest the eye.
This is what I came up with in the end. I opened the aperture to f8, while keeping the exposure time at 0.3 seconds, and waited for a moment with less wind. The grass in the foreground is almost still, while there is movement going on in the back. The image shows dynamics. Plus, the field in the background is reasonably out of focus. I am quite happy with the image.
When watching it on the computer I liked the subtle green colors, but wanted to concentrate more on the movement and contrast of dark and bright areas going on here. In Lightroom I converted the photo to black and white and increased both Exposure and Blacks quite a lot to pronounce highlights and shadows. Watching the image in color now would be eye-blinding (I tried). But in black&white it is just right for me. I added a sublte split toning with yellowish highlights and blueish shadows to increase the contrast a bit more, using the settings seen at the left.
The result is the image seen at the top of this post.
While I am discussing here in quite a detailed form what led me to the final result, these are mostly thoughts that came while watching the images and analyzing why I liked the last one more than the others. When I am outside shooting my thoughts are more like “Nah.” or “Hm, quite nice. Let’s try another one.” (or the German equivalents). It is more about feeling, and for me it was interesting to see why I felt about the photos the way I did.
Recovering an old photo print
Today I remembered to scan an old photo of myself that has been standing on various shelves since years… the color lost a lot of its brilliance and got somehow yellowish over time.
Here is what I did to make it look like new again, using Photoshop (any other image processing software should have the same features, maybe with different names). Click on the thumbnails to get a bigger image:
1. I scanned it directly into Photoshop, made the image a bit bigger than the actual photo to be able to crop more precisely than the scanner software does.
2. I scanned it in the wrong orientation, so it has to be rotated 90 degrees clockwise.
3. The next step is cropping the photo (c).
4. Now we can begin to recover the photo. First the colors have to be corrected. I am using a levels layer for that (click on the small black/white circle in the bottom of the layers palette and chose Levels or select it in the Adjustments palette in CS4).
I am selecting the little grey eyedropper in the dialog. With that I can define a neutral grey area in the photo. I am selecting the grey hall in the background at the right. A click on it – and the colors are much more balanced.
CTRL+E (Mac: CMD+E) combines the two layers to one.
The curves dialog has the same eyedropper-tool by the way so it doesn’t matter which dialog to use.
5. I a curves layer I raise the curve a bit in the middle to brighten up the midtones of the photo. CTRL+E (Mac: CMD+E) to flatten the image again.
6. Now it’s time to remove any dust-spots on the photo. It is not much and the spots are just small, so I can easily stick to the spot healing brush (j) on this photo. I zoomed in to 200 percent to better see the details.
7. Now we’re almost there. Compared to the print I have lying on my desk the colors are still a bit washed out. A quick trip to the Lab color space fixes this easily: I converted the photo to Lab (Image->Mode->Lab). The I duplicated the background layer (the only one that is there). I clicked on Image->Apply image. Now I selected the a channel in the Channel drop-down and Soft light in the Blending drop-down.
As the effect was a bit too strong I reduced the opacity in the dialog to 80 percent (usually I am on 30 to 40 percent, but here I needed a stronger setting). That makes the colors pop in a way that is not too obvious but effective. Flatten the image (CTRL/CMD+E) and convert the image back to RGB.
The image got a bit darker again, a repetition of step 5 fixes that.
8. My last step is to add a light sharpening. The image is a bit noisy, and to not enhance that even more I am using the high pass filter here (Filter->Other->High Pass). First I duplicated the background layer, then opened the filter dialog and chose a very low setting to only accentuate the strongest borders.
That layer is changed to the blending mode Overlay in the drop-down in the layers palette. The results is (subtly) more sharpness without increasing the noise too much. The last step is to flatten the image and save it.
That’s it, the image (from the late 80s if I’m not wrong) is recovered! Here is the final result (right), compared to the original scan.
St. Peter and the Moon
Last monday I had an assignment in the cathedral of Schleswig. I am following the restoration-process of the organ there and visit it frequently at the moment. When coming out into the cold I saw the sky opening and revealing the moon just beside the impressive main tower.
I got my tripod out of the car (I always have it there with me, just in case…) and made a series of 3 shots with 2 exposure steps difference to be able to create an HDR photo at home.
The biggest problem was the ugly greenish light from the streetlights, opposing the reddish/orange reflection of the city lights on the upper part of the tower. So I made a custom white balance on the ground (snow makes a great white card!) which resulted in a pretty purple sky, while the lower part of the tower looked quite natural. See image on the left.
So, I preferred to have a properly colored sky and set the white balance on the RAW files accordingly in Lightroom and exported them into the HDR software (Photomatix).
The result after tone mapping was like it can be seen below… pretty greenish. That needed to be fixed in Photoshop, as well as the weirdly rendered area around the moon. By mixing the tone mapped version with one of the original photos I could fix the sky and the lower part of the tower.
Some sharpening and color enhancements (like giving a bit more of punch to the red light on the big window to the bottom left and the tungsteen colored light out of the small window) gave the result seen at the top of this post.
(Here is the image as it came straight out of Photomatix:)
The ancient Pilot
This image was taken last year on a model air show not far from here. Beside the obvious stuff (flying lawnmowers and the like) they also had some old real machines flying over the place. One of them was this old biplane, coming in low.
I was looking for a good subject to play with faking an old style photograph and this photo matched the requirement quite good I think. A quick resume of how I made it, more or less by trial and error: I loaded the photo from Lightroom to Photoshop, converted the photo to sepia colors with a gradient map, and put a curves layer on top for some more contrast. Then I added three layers with different textures, playing with different blend modes (I ended using “overlay” and “normal” with low opacity), another desaturated layer of the original photo in “soft light” mode to get back some detail and fine-tuned the contrast and color in adjustment layers and added a light vignette.
The original photo is in my portfolio (objects).
