Infrared look in post processing

A scene from Kanaka Flats in San Diego County's Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve (the East section). It was quite cold and windy, and as the wind drove clouds across the landscape, the sunlight breaking through them created patterns of light and shadow. I thought it might be worth trying to really enhance the contrast between light and shadow big time in a strong black & white edit, and the recent hike with Ping and the results he achieved with his IR converted camera inspired me to have a go at a somewhat similar look in post processing. Here's the result:


One (NIKON D700, 1/200s @ ISO 200; f/11, 86mm (in 35mm)

I'm quite happy with this conversion, and two photographers on 500px in their comments both indeed assumed that this is a real IR photo. ;) I've been asked in the accompanying Buzz post for some information, and I thought I might as well share it here.


As usual, I'm not giving you a step by step run-down of the process, as there is no "100% formula" for these kind of edits. It involves quite some experimentation, so I'm just naming the most important set-screws to go into the right direction. Time to play!

Needless to say, it's probably no good to try this with a JPEG. :P We need the real thing: raw data. In fact, I noticed that the D700's raw data gives me a lot more latitude for strong edits compared to my S5pro and Shuwen's D90. Maybe it's the 14 bit depth that I'm using, because the S5pro (which also uses 14 bits) is second, while the D90 with it's 12 bit data comes third (from my point of view).

The first step of course is to switch from color to black & white processing in Lightroom. In the black & white mixer (the monochrome version of the HSL panel) you'll want to decrease the Blue a lot while increasing the Orange, Yellow and Green. If the sky doesn't become as pitch black as you want it, you can fine tune that with White Balance (colder means more blue, so darker) and the Camera Calibration (increase blue saturation for "more blue" which also results in darker tones).

It might be useful to adjust the Exposure and play with the Recovery slider to control the very bright Green, Yellow, Orange tones. Usually it's a bit switching back and forth between these and the black & white mixer until you get a pleasing effect. Needless to say, the Tone Curve can and should be used to make the bright parts really pop.

Graduated Filters and Local Adjustments to dodge and burn help to control where you want the bright and dark parts; I pronounced that low hanging cloud left of the tree a little bit for example, and used a graduated filter from the top to effectively remove the topmost part of the cloud, and turn it black. (it can be argued if it's really necessary to go that extreme of course; it certainly draws more attention to the tree - in the end, maybe just a little less would be more... ah, the curse of endless possibilities!;)

While I generally try to keep Color Noise Reduction to a minimum to preserve details, for this kind of edit you'll want to go to the Details panel and apply quite a lot of it (it's at 40 for the above photo). When you turn the Blue all dark, it will result in some really unpleasant artifacts that can be controlled that way. Always inspect the areas in 1:1 view, otherwise you're not seeing the real thing!

Also, inspect transition areas (from blue to other colors) closely for weird artifacts when going to the extremes. Sometimes, there's an unpleasant halo at the edges, and it would require pixel-wise manipulation to get rid of them (the question then is: is it really worth the time? IMHO, the photo better be damn good to justify that). I'm glad that there aren't too many in this shot.

And most importantly: it depends on the photo and the material that you have. Sometimes, it just doesn't work. :)

I still haven't resolved that mouseover script problem so just like last time, I just link to the original here and you can switch back and forth in the lightbox. (as usual, raw data has been interpreted with the "Camera Standard v3 beta" profile in Lightroom, and uses a white balance of 5333/0, and other than the crop, no other edits have been made.)

Artflakes (Prints // Drucke)

Near to the divine (NIKON D700, 1/640s @ ISO 200; f/8, 38 mm (in 35mm)

English

Deutsch

I'm happy that prints of my photos are available in Germany and Europe through Artflakes now, too. They offer the same wonderful "Gallery" prints (Dibond with Acrylic glass) as SeenBy - minus the editorial approval process, which means that I'm able to basically offer any photo that I want in that quality. Very nice! If you're interested in a specific photo (the one above is already available), please drop me a note. The shipping costs in Germany and Europe are rather inexpensive. About the photo: On the way home from a day hike I drove down towards Santa Ysabel from Julian, and just around a bend was this scene. The clouds were moving fast, and so was the light. These are the moments where everything becomes dreamlike: pulling the car into a turnout, opening the trunk, getting the camera, finding the best position... there's no consciousness involved in it... it just... happens because the photo has to be made.

Ich freue mich, dass ich Drucke meiner Fotos jetzt auch über Artflakes anbieten kann. Die Firma bietet die gleiche tolle Druckart an wie SeenBy (Aluminium Dibond hinter Acrylglas) - nur ohne das Auswahlverfahren, was natürlich bedeutet, dass ich jetzt praktisch jedes Foto in dieser Qualität anbieten kann. Wer Interesse an einem ganz bestimmten Bild hat (das obige ist bereits verfügbar) möge mir bitte eine Nachricht zukommen lassen. Die Versandkosten innerhalb Deutschlands und Europa sind sehr günstig. Zum Bild: auf dem Weg nach Hause von einer Tageswanderung fuhr ich heimwärts auf der Straße von Julian nach Santa Ysabel, und einfach so nach einer Kurve war da diese Szenerie. Die Wolken bewegten sich schnell, und mit ihnen das Licht. Das sind die Momente in denen die Dinge wie im Traum ablaufen: das Auto in die Ausweiche steuern, den Kofferraum aufmachen, die Kamera rausholen, den besten Standort finden... da ist irgendwie wenig bewusstes Handeln involviert. Es passiert einfach, weil das Bild gemacht werden muss.

Third-party lenses (and a blog recommendation)

The most recent issue of the german Photo e-mag "Foto Espresso" contains an article by Roger Cicala from LensRentals.com that I found very interesting: "Things you should know about your lenses, but may not." (I subscribed to their blog immediately - looks like a lot of interesting articles there!)

I want to broaden the notion that "Third-party lenses are different on different mounts" to a more general (and perhaps most obvious) "Third-party lenses are different." ;)

Compared to my Nikon lenses, the Sigma 12-24 for example (now replaced with the 16-35VR Nikkor) had much warmer colors - my default white balance of 5333/0 which I apply on import (because I'm using UniWB) works nicely for the photos taken with any of my Nikon lenses, but I had to reduce the color temperature to get the same colors for photos made with the Sigma. A hindrance in the workflow, and perhaps a reason why some people do not consider third-party lenses at all.*

My old "hiking lens", the Tamron 24-135 (now replaced by the new 24-120VR Nikkor) on the other hand, had an absolutely terrible light transmission: it required exposure times TWICE as long as any of my Nikon lenses. One could say that the Tamron 24-135 has a built in ND2 filter. :P

I've always been wondering why I reach these sky-high ISO's so quickly when using a polarizer, even in bright daylight, and the reason was of course not the polarizer, but the lens itself. I only found out about that when I made my 50mm comparison, and not many lens test websites include the transmission (T-stop) in their tests.

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I sold the Sigma 12-24 not because of that, but because of the limited usability - I replaced it with Nikon's new 16-35 f/4 VR wide angle zoom which is much more versatile because it's "long" end at 35mm allows for almost somewhat "normal" photos. Also, it's not possible to use filters with the Sigma (just like the 14-24 Nikkor.) 16mm is still very very wide - it's really really tough to work with 12mm, there's always something in the frame that you'll only notice at home on the big screen, because the viewfinder is just too small to notice details in the composition. I love the extreme wide angle effect, but in the end, versatility won.

Rainy Day / Wimbachtal

Here's another photo from Nationalpark Berchtesgaden. On the way to the Wimbachgries, a short detour leads through the narrows of the Wimbachklamm (it's a "toll hike", the small fee or 2 or 3 Euros is used to maintain the wooden planks and walkways that lead through the gorge).

The weather in May 2010 was quite lousy, and May 13th was no exception. This is the view at the exit of the Wimbachklamm, where the gorge opens up into the Wimbach valley that eventually ends high up in the Wimbachgries (the hike to the Wimbachgries is quite a walk, it's not much of an ascend, but quite a distance).


Rainy Day (NIKON D700, 1/125s @ ISO 200; f/8, 50 mm (in 35mm)

This photo is further proof that bad weather doesn't mean bad photos, on the contrary! I mentioned that a couple of times here already. And for that reason alone, I miss the bad weather from Germany sometimes. We live far enough inland that the coastal fog of "May grey" and "June gloom" doesn't affect us very often, and all that sunshine... it's tough. Photography wise, I mean. ;)

Needless to say, as the "distance" (time-wise) to the photos grows, I'm becoming less attached to reality and allow myself more heavy post processing on these older photos. A while ago I promised to publish photos that make it to SeenBy here for comparison, and while I don't think I kept up with that all the time (sorry) I was finally lucky enough to please the editors with this image, so here it is.

Please click on the link to see the original as imported into Lightroom, raw data interpreted with a white balance of 5333/0 and the "Camera Standard v3" beta profile.

The Fotomoto script breaks my mouseover-image-swap script for some reason and I haven't received an answer from their support unfortunately. You can switch back and forth between the final edit and the original when you click on the photo above (or the link) to open it in an 800 pixels high version in the Lightbox (this doesn't work when you read this on Buzz or in a feed reader of course). It's not as convenient as the mouseover thingie, but better than nothing. :)

The biggest impact on the edit comes from working with the colors in Lightroom's HSL panel again - shifting Hue, Saturation and Luminance around heavily (Luminance of orange, yellow, green and aqua are all at +100, for example). Other shameless tweaks include a lot of fill light*, highlight recovery, a lot of vignetting, 4 graduated filters to change colors and brightness, added or subtracted clarity with local adjustment filters, tweaking the tone curve... and sensor dust removal! ;)

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*) the original is the typical "dynamic range limited" photo: in order to prevent blowing out the highlights, you have to sacrifice the shadows and bring them back later, at home.

Fischunkelalm

I'm revisiting my photos from the visit to Bavaria's Königssee and Obersee at the moment because I've not really been happy with them, especially the editing job. Here's one of the photos that I re-processed now, and it took a while to get an edit that I am happy with. This is the Fischunkelalm at the Obersee of the Königssee.

In late Spring and Summer, Fischunkelalm is the destination for numerous visitors that take the boat to Salet and then make the easy 1/2 hike to the hauntingly beautiful Obersee. They are serving simple and hearty food and beverages. When we visited the area on a weekday in mid May, it was still closed however.


Fischunkelalm (NIKON D700, 1/125s @ ISO 2200; f/8, 48 mm (in 35mm)

I'm beginning to learn how important it is to not only take care of the composition in terms of where to place objects that should be the center of interest in the frame, but also how the distribution of lighter and darker areas adds to it. Vignetting is the most simple and obvious tool to achieve the effect where the center of the frame is brighter than the corners, but it sometimes is a somewhat crude tool, and other times it's not enough, or works in the wrong spots. (and I've written about vignetting here before, only to find out later that I'd written almost the exact same thing something like 1.5 years before - yes, some things just keep on bugging me...)

So the two tools that I use the most in Lightroom (besides vignetting) at the moment are the graduated filters and the local correction brush for darkening (burning) or brightening (dodging) certain areas. And it's not a technique that was "invented" with digital post processing, oh no - the terms "dodge" and "burn" come right out of the traditional darkrooms.

The two presets that are built right into Lightroom are really good for that because they are very subtle (only adding/subtracting about 1/3 EV to the areas they affect). I found that setting the "Flow" of the adjustment brush to something between 60 and 70 (with "Density" at 100) is helpful so as to not immediately apply the alteration in full effect, but being able to add an additional brush stroke or two to intensify the effect. The only problem is that, with multiple adjustment brushes used, Lightroom really comes down to a crawl - and that's on a Core i5 3.2 GHz with 8GB memory... :P

Other than that, the above photo has received a quite massive amount of color treatment, shifting the values in both the HSL panel and the camera calibration (plus white balance) back and forth until I had the look that I wanted. You can easily see that the greens are still rather vivid, which is of course the result of using a polarizer in Spring. It was just too much, but when I looked through the viewfinder and the greens popped so much, I was amazed, and didn't really think about it.

The longer I'm using polarizers, the more I find that it is better to not fully polarize. To counter the overly vivid and saturated greens, I reduced the green saturation to -45 and increased the green luminance to +55 at the same time to lighten it up. In the camera calibration, I increased the green saturation - this brightens the colors more than just adding "traditional" saturation.

Gotcha

After my recent lament that I have waaaaay too many photos I decided that, for a change, I shall not bring the camera with me on my walk at Lake Hodges with Toni yesterday. And guess what - the light was gorgeous of course.

In the late afternoon the coastal "May grey" clouds were penetrated by the sun, rays of light falling rather selectively on the landscape or water here and there, creating very interesting patterns of light and shadows. The best I could do was to use my Android smartphone, so I thought I'd just share this here.


Lake Hodges

This photo was made with the free "HDR camera" app. That's actually what I meant in my post about the ancient behaviour of modern technology: this little app takes three exposures with ONE single tap on the screen and merges them into an 8bit JPEG. It was windy so the app had a hard time to merge the swaying grass properly, but the important parts of the image look good. I just added a little bit of fill light in Lightroom because the difference of -1/0/+1 was not big enough for the overall rather brightly lit scene. Here's another one:


Lake Hodges

It's quite a difference between the Android smartphone and my D700, that's why I wished my D700 would allow me to create a 32bit HDR file (in the OpenEXR format, for example) with ONE tap on the shutter (I would do all the tonemapping and stuff myself at home of course, just like I develop my own raw data now).

Valley of the Moon

Two weeks ago we visited a very fascinating place: the so-called "Valley of the Moon" in the Jacumba Mountains Wilderness of the Sierra Juarez Mountains. It bears the name of the nearby settlement called Jacumba in San Diego County, but is actually in Imperial County, while the Sierra Juarez Mountains for the most part belong to Mexico. (since it's so close to Mexico there's a lot of Border Patrol presence, we had three encounters.)

I have already shown one black & white photo in a before/after comparison post. (at the moment, the Fotomoto script breaks the mouseover image swapping script, I haven't looked for a solution to that problem yet, sorry.) That photo is clearly the "winner" of the day, it was also selected by the friendly Picasa team to be featured on the Explore page and so far, it gathered more than 85,000 views already.

I completely missed this area in Jerry Schad's "Afoot & Afield in San Diego County" hiking book because it's crammed all the way to the end in the the desert regions, but thanks to our friend Hans (who also acted as a guide and driver) we were able to discover this remarkable spot. Unlike any "State" parks, it is BLM managed land so you're not restricted to stay on trails, can enter it on the dirt roads (if you have a high clearance 4x4, that is...) and dogs are allowed too. :)

It's often compared to Joshua Tree National Park and indeed, the sand and granite boulders and formations are very similar to the sights in Joshua Tree's "Wonderland of Rocks" area - but I have to admit that I liked Valley of the Moon better than Joshua Tree. :)

Just one thing... the place is insanely windy. I never experienced something quite like that. I know it can be windy in the mountains, but I found myself exposed to such strong gusts of wind only at or near the summits, whereas here the strong wind was a constant companion on the entire hike. Some of the huge boulders are actually hollowed by the constant wind and sand working on them (some photos of these wind caves are in the web album). But even despite the wind, it's a place we definitely have to further explore. :)

Modern technology, ancient behaviour

Coming to think of it (after I mentioned bracketing in the last post)... all somewhat modern DSLR of the past 2-3 years have a Live View feature, many of them video recording as well. Why is it necessary that the mirror flaps up and down and up and down when using bracketing? It would certainly limit camera shake if it was just moved once for the complete set of bracketed shots, only opening and closing the shutter (which causes far less vibration).

But then again... why does the shutter open and close? The sensor state can be read without the shutter opening and closing - otherwise video recording wouldn't be possible. I don't know, is there any difference?

It's also quite odd that cameras with enourmous processing power (converting something like 5 to 8 frames of raw data per second into JPEG files) are still not able to do "more" to the data. I mean... I can download a free "HDR camera" app for my Android smartphone, it takes three single exposures and blends them. The result looks good (for a smartphone camera). OK, some modern DSLRs have built-in HDR features now, but the resulting files are always 8bit JPEGs if I'm not mistaken - why?

I can't help but notice how odd it is that all the high class, high speed, highly specialized camera gear behaves so oldschool. Why isn't it possible to, say, get a 32bit HDR file that combines the raw data of 5, 7, 9 bracketed exposures with just ONE single shutter release?

The camera app on my smartphone also has a panorama mode - I bet most compact cameras have that too nowadays (sweep panorama, or something). I start the process by releasing the shutter once, a frame in the display then shows me where I have to move the camera, and when it matches, the shutter is automatically released again, repeat until 180 degrees are covered. The camera app does all the stitching and aligning. But not in DSLRs.

And it surprises me that, with the success of all the camera apps for smartphones, that no camera vendor has embraced that idea for "classic" cameras, something like a "preset store" for entry level DSLR cameras that features all the funny instant camera, aged film etc. looks.

I wonder if any of the smaller camera makers will eventually start with that, waking the big companies like Canon and Nikon up, speeding up the glacial speed at which really innovative features are added to expensive gear. But as long as they can get away with it...

Just too many photos

The good thing about digital photography is that releasing the shutter doesn't cost you money anymore. Just today I found the advice in a newsletter for photography classes that you should release the shutter often and capture as much as you can of "this special light" and "that special occasion" etc. etc.

Many photos don't cost money anymore indeed, but instead, they cost time, and they require more attention. We do have good software to help us with that, but it requires discipline if you don't want to get lost in your own giant stash of photos. Let me take this photo for example:

Skeletons (NIKON D700, 1/160s @ ISO 720; f/4, 120 mm (in 35mm)

It was made on a recent hike to Garnet Peak in Laguna Mountains - it's a nice spot, Laguna Mountains slowly rise up to something like 5500ft (about 1650m) from the coastal side, and then plunges down into the desert (Anza Borrego) in a rather steep drop. The views extend all the way to Salton Sea and are quite amazing in afternoon light. Most likely in the morning too. ;)

On the way to Garnet Peak, I passed by this group of dead trees. I found their pattern and appearance quite attractive, so I made a photo (duh, really?). It didn't turn out quite that good, I could immediately see that on the camera display - the sun was still too high up in the sky and the light too harsh (about 16:30).

At the summit of Garnet Peak, I've been using my polarizer, and because exposures can be somewhat tricky for the camera then, I usually switch to bracketing and make three exposures: normal, -1EV, +1EV (the D700 doesn't allow bigger steps than 1EV, it's quite a nuisance). I then pick the best exposure at home.

On the way back the light was far more pleasing (about 18:30 now), the camera was still set to bracketing, and when passing by these dead trees I made a set of bracketed exposures. Now the exposure count for one and the same subject is at four already. And if you're like me, that's a rather mild example. Think of macros... many different attempts with different apertures, focal points, compositions, then throw in a bit of (bad) luck when shooting hand held and it's windy, and you end up with something like 20 or 30 shots of a single flower. Good thing they're patient.

When importing the photos to Lightroom, one step is to auto-stack multiple exposures by capture time. I then have a look at the best exposure, move it to the top of the stack, collapse the stack - and forget about it... I don't want to know how many useless stacks of photos I have on my harddisk because of that. It must be hundreds.

However, while evaluating the three bracketed exposures of the above scene, I got carried away on the overexposed version (because I wanted to see if it was still "good", highlight-wise) - and I overlooked that it is actually slightly blurry... because 1/80s at 120mm focal length can be tricky even with a stabilized lens when it's windy, and windy it was!

I didn't finish processing the photos that night and when I went back to them two days later, I had forgotten about that. I simply saw the version that was already "pretty good" and published it - to find out afterwards that I published the blurry version, because that's what I mistakenly started to work with. Needless to say that applying the edits to the correct photo and replacing it online took even more time. Embarrassing.

The lesson for myself is: select more radically, reject more radically, get rid of the bad ones more radically. And pay more attention to the details. :P

I browsed through my January and February folders in Lightroom to do exactly that. It's good to have a little bit of "distance" maybe, time-wise I mean. I was able to reject, remove and delete more than 600 photos from these two months alone - six hundred! And I wasn't even overly hard on myself. That's something like 11GB of wasted hard disk space.

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Funny sidenote: I submitted that photo to SeenBy, and it was rejected. When I uploaded it to Flickr, the first comment from a fellow user was that he would love to have it as a print in the SeenBy style (behind acrylic glass). I would have loved of course to redirect him to SeenBy to get the print... instead, I just gave him the file. :P