The Bayon in Angkor Thom. 2006

This year will mark 8 years since I made the switch from film to digital. From the word go I’ve followed a policy of archiving everything and never deleting. That may see a little unnecessary and possibly overkill but it doesn’t cost much to store and you never know when an old file may prove useful, even if it’s only as an example of what not to do. As I write this, a 2TB hard drive can be had for about US$120 and that’s good for approximately 80 000 RAW files from my Canon 5D Mark II and even more if the files are from an older, lower megapixel camera. By making use of the cataloging and filtering power of Lightroom, it’s quite easy to manage all these images that are scattered throughout multiple drives.

While some images may never be able to be used – out of focus, wrong exposure, etc – others have potential but just need a little time. I like to occasionally take a random dive back into my older rejects from time to time, particularly when a new generation of software is released. Such was the case earlier this week when I found myself with a bit of spare time thanks to a weather delay. Lightroom 4 beta has been out for a couple of weeks and offers a number of improvements in the Develop module and I’ve been spending a bit of time with it. In fact, the last 3-4 shoots I’ve done have had all the processing done in LR4 rather than 3.

Life on the Lake. Tonle Sap, Cambodia 2006.

I fired up one of my archive drives that held photographs from my second visit to Cambodia from 2006 and added them to the new Lightroom. Scrolling through them in the grid view as small thumbnails, I randomly chose a selection of images to work on. They were all photographs that hadn’t been used before for various reasons, mostly because I’d been unable to pull the photograph that I knew was in them out of the RAW file. Running them through the Develop module with the 2012 process version in LR4 finally started bringing the potential out of these files. The photographs that were in my head when looking at these RAW files were now starting to appear on the screen in front of me.

Sitting Under Buddha. 2006

After adjusting the various sliders and a little work with brushes, things were looking good but weren’t quite there. Another version 4 was released recently and that was Nik Color Efex Pro 4. This operates as a plugin from Lightroom but in this instance I decided to go via Photoshop so that I could Color Efex 4 on a layer. Each photograph was opened and various adjustments made to suit the needs of each different image. On the Bayon photograph that leads this post, I masked the effect out on part of the image but for the others here, it was applied in full. I could have used the control points in Color Efex Pro 4 to achieve the same effect but it was a little quicker to just add a layer mask to the area I wanted to reduce the effect on.

In The Boat. 2006

The moral of the story? Delete nothing. You never know when a photo is just waiting for the correct engine to make it work.

Two men engage in a game of Chinese chess while a group of onlookers crowds around them.

You can accomplish a lot in 10 minutes. Case in point are the photographs in this post. I was out shooting some assignment work the other day and heading from one location to the next when I spied these two men playing a game of Chinese chess, with a group on onlookers crowding around. I approached, watched for a while and then photographed a single frame when the time felt right. Other than import it to Lightroom, I didn’t do anything with the photo until yesterday. While waiting for a reply to a message I’d sent, I opened up Lightroom and browsed a few of my more recent photographs that were still unprocessed. This image of the men playing chess, a common scene across the Chinese world, jumped out at me. Below you can see the almost unprocessed version – all it has is a slight crop.

The original.

It doesn’t do it for me. When reviewing the photograph I could see a distinct possibility that existed in the scene but it was one that required a little bit of work to get. Not much mind you – all the variations you see here were created in less than 10 minutes of editing time. For what it’s worth, the opening shot is the version that corresponds to what was in my mind. In the process of getting there however, I tried a few different things, all of which you can see below.

Version 2

Version 3

Version 4

Version 5

Version 6

What this post is trying to get at is that a photograph can have infinite possibilities, and it often doesn’t take a lot of time and effort to explore those possibilities. Lightroom, or any other photo editing application is simply another tool for a photographer to use to achieve the look they want. Some may still persist in their belief that the use of these tools is cheating in some way but at the end of the day, it’s the final image that is the key. Choice of lens, camera format, aperture, shutter speed, time of day, location, software, darkroom processes, film, weather, subject etc all go into making a photograph. None of it exists in a vacuum. Go ahead and play. Experiment to your heart’s content. From the time of the very first photograph in history, and well into the future, that’s what photography has been about.

Coastal scene, Yilan, Taiwan

When I posted a step by step walk through of a landscape photo from Taiwan entitled Dawn In The Evening a few weeks ago, I received a number of requests for more blog posts of that nature. Today I bring you another one, this time called Coastal Visions. You can see the result above, so let’s take a look at the steps involved in creating it. Firstly, a little background as to how I can to photograph this particular seascape in the first place. I’m currently working on an article for a magazine and needed to get some shots from Taiwan’s east coast to round it out. A couple of days ago, a change of dates by a festival left a couple of photographer friends and I with a free day, a car and no plans. I mentioned the assignment shots I had to get and asked them if they’d be interested in heading to the coast. I figured it’d only take me a half hour or so to get the images for the magazine leaving us the rest of the day for a bit of exploration. And that was pretty much how things proceeded. We made a stop at a waterfall, then headed to one of the three locations I had earmarked for my editorial shots. It was better than expected so we spent some time there and then drove up the coast. The photograph I’m presenting today came from one of my backup locations. We pulled into the area to check it out even though I already had everything I needed. Needless to say, the conditions weren’t right anyway for my assignment but we were presented with a beach that had great potential for landscape and seascape photography. So that’s what we focused on.

I set up camera up on a tripod with a particular vision in mind. I wanted to capture longer exposures to create a certain atmosphere in the photograph. To that end I selected an aperture of f16 and ISO50. That didn’t give me a long enough shutter speed to get the effect I was after, so I attached a variable ND filter and experimented until I got something approaching the look I was after. My shutter speed for this image was 2 seconds which corresponded to about 4 stops of filtration. Below is the image as it came into Lightroom.

The scene as it looked on import at Lightroom's default.

The first steps were a couple of basic adjustments. I went into the Lens Correction panel and selected the profile for the lens I used, straightened the horizon and made a couple of minor adjustments to the exposure. I added 0.26 to the exposure and pulled the blacks back to 0 as you can see in the screenshot below. I also removed a distracting spot in the water. I’m not sure exactly what the spot was – it wasn’t dust so I guess it was a reflection or something. Under that is the image after these adjustments.

Lens Correction (l) and Exposure (r)

After basic adjustments.

The next step was to open the image in Nik Color Efex. I went to the landscape filters and selected the Bi-Color Filters, choosing the moss preset 3. That was saved and back to Lightroom it went. Below is a screenshot of that, as well as the image as it appeared after the adjustment. The photo is looking better now and I could have even chosen to go with this look, however I had a particular vision in mind and this was just one of the steps on the way.

Nik Color Efex

The photo after Nik Color Efex.

This next step also made use of some Nik software, in this case, Silver Efex for a toned black and white conversion. This software has recently been updated to version 2, although I haven’t made the upgrade yet so the screenshot below is from the original. I know some of you are probably wondering why I bothered to use Color Efex and then immediately after convert it to black and white. The short answer is because it worked. Initially I’d gone straight from Lightroom into Silver Efex and then on with the later adjustments and couldn’t get it to work correctly. As soon as I added the Color Efex step, everything worked fine. Why it worked like that is something I don’t know. As long as it did worked, I’m happy. That’s not to say there was anything wrong with photo processing it without Color Efex, just that I had a specific goal in mind and it wasn’t being met that way.

Anyway, in Silver Efex I went into the Stylizing panel on the right, opened the Toning section and chose preset 6 which is a blue toner. I then backed off the strength about 50%. Below is the screenshot and the image as it came back into Lightroom.

Nik Silver Efex, blue toner.

Nik Silver Efex

Back in Lightroom now, and this is the point where the need for Color Efex was apparent. I went into the Develop module and selected one of X Equals excellent presets, in this case the Velvia 100 preset. This provided the much needed rich blue tone in the foreground water that I was seeking. At this point I also elected to crop part of the sky away. Below you can see the results of those two steps.

X Equals Velvia 100 and a crop.

Getting closer to my desired result now but a couple of steps to go. Making use of Lightroom’s graduated filters, I applied three. The first came straight down from the top to lower exposure in the sky and introduce the purple tone and the other two were at 45 degrees from the upper corners to brighten them in compensation for the more global darkening of the first grad filter. I could probably have painted the changes on with an adjustment brush instead but I find the grad filters to be a bit easier to work with and more even in their adjustments. The images below show the first grad filter and one of the compensatory angled ones.

Graduated filter to lower exposure and add tone.

Graduated filter to brighten upper corners.

Finally, a couple of minor bits of subtle dodging. I selected an adjustment brush, set the exposure to 0.56 and the brightness to +24 to very slightly lighten the rocks along the horizon, and another brush with exposure of 0.64 and brightness +36 to lighten the large rock on the right side.

Dodging with an adjustment brush (red).

And there you have it. I’ve now got an image that meets what I had in mind at the time of shooting. Like any sort of image editing of this nature there are multiple ways to achieve the same end result. Mouseover the image below to see the before / after versions of it. If you have any comments, I’d love to hear them.

Dawn In The Evening

Some photographs are nothing more than being in the right place at the right time. Cases like that, turning up sometimes seems like it’s all that you need to do. Other photographs require a lot of planning and preparation with a fair amount of patience thrown in for good measure. Then there are others that you see in your mind and know it’s possible to create even though the conditions you’re faced with aren’t optimal. Such was the situation I found myself in last Sunday. My wife’s company organizes a monthly event for staff and clients and this time they decided on a day trip to the tourist village of Jiufen on the north coast of Taiwan about an hour out of Taipei. It’s a popular place for Taiwan photographers but this wasn’t meant to be a photography trip but it is a picturesque place and most, if not all, people were carrying cameras of various kinds. As we wandered through the lanes and alleyways of Jiufen, the group split up and headed off in directions with plans to meet back at a certain spot at a certain time. We found ourselves in a tea house that had an excellent view of the East China Sea to the north and the foothills stretching away westward towards the city of Keelung. As I looked out over the hills, I could “see” an image in my mind that I thought would look great. That’s what you see at the top of the page which I call Dawn In The Evening. Why? Well, my mental image before I picked up the camera was the same type of view but as a first light kind of photo not an evening photo. Now when your view is west, you’re obviously not going to get the same effect in the early hours of the day but with a bit of work in the digital darkroom, it’s possible to create something similar. Take a look after the jump at the original unedited RAW image as it came into Lightroom.

View as it came into Lightroom

As you can see in the histogram above, the photograph is about one and a half stops underexposed. If I had have been there specifically for photography, I would have spent a bit more time with it at the time of shooting to ensure a more accurate exposure. When I shot this I was in the middle of a conversation and pretty much just picked up my camera and shot from my seat in the teahouse. My idea for the shot had it being a lot cooler, so the first thing I did upon import into Lightroom was change the white balance. I selected tungsten from the white balance menu and that looked like a pretty good starting point to me.

Tungsten white balance.

As you can see, the simple act of changing the white balance has pushed the exposure to the right while giving it the blue tone that brought things closer to my original intention for the image. There’s still more to be done though, starting with a crop. You can’t really see it in the above images but when viewed at 1:1 in Lightroom there were also three bright spots in the lower right that came from what I think were motorcycle headlights or LED street lights. As well as cropping (keyboard shortcut – R) to remove some sky, I used the spot removal tool (keyboard shortcut – Q) to remove the distractign bright spots.

Cropped and some spot removal.

Things are looking better but my original idea had a darker foreground with the image lightening as you move through it to a pink / purplish sky. A couple of graduated filters got me started on that. Immediately below is a graduated filter for the sky that adds some tone and under that one for the foreground that darkens it. The second one served to brighten the sky though which weakened the effect of the first graduated filter but still left a bit of tone. Between the two is a screenshot of the filter placement for the first graduated filter.

Graduated filter to tone the sky.

Screen shot of the graduated filter for the sky.

Graduated filter to darken the foreground.

By this point I’m almost done. In fact, the photograph is looking pretty good now and I was almost tempted to leave it as that. But in the quest for just a little extra, I took the image out of Lightroom and into Nik Color Efex 3.0. Below is a screenshot from the software. I elected to use the skylight filter with a strength of 40. As you can see, it added that tone to the sky that I had visualized.

Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 skylight filter

I could probably have either skipped the Lightroom graduated filters and done it all in Nik Color Efex Pro or spent some time with the adjustment brushes in Lightroom to achieve the same effect but this is the way it went this time. By this point I’m done and the result is the photograph you see at the top of the page. You can mouseover the photo below to see a before / after version of it.

Boats in the river - using X Equals Kodachrome as a starting point.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Lightroom Develop presets relased by the team at X Equals. They have a few different packages available, all of which I’ve previously reviewed. If you don’t remember those reviews or just want to see them again, follow these links to the reviews and then head over to X Equals and pick the presets up for yourself.

• Creative Production Presets
• Cold Storage Volume 1 Presets
• Cold Storage Volume 2 Presets – Color
• Cold Storage Volume 2 Presets – Black and White

With the very recent demise of the famed and much loved Kodachrome, X Equals has gathered together of the their Kodachrome presets into one pack and made it available as a free download. In addition to the previously available versions, there’s a new one called Kodachrome Memorial that seeks to capture the essence of a Kodachrome slide. You can follow this link to download these presets for free. Each preset comes with 4 different options – default, grain, mix and tone. The new Kodachrome Memorial features a fifth option called toning.

Kodachrome presets

Here you can see the different presets at their default as well as a straight from camera, unprocessed shot. These have had no further processing done on them – normally I use presets as a starting point and do some extra editing to them, but for purposes of this post I haven’t.

Strraight from camera

Kodachrome 10 v1

Kodachrome 10 v2

Kodachrome 25

Kodachrome 64

Kodachrome 200

Kodachrome Memorial

Kinmen, Taiwan

We’re diving into Lightroom again for today’s phototip and this time looking at dust removal. One of the potential issues you may run into with a DSLR is the issue of sensor dust. Although the more recent generations of DSLR introduced feature some kind of sensor cleaning mode that typically works to shake any dust off the sensor, it still becomes a problem at times. This is even more of an issue if you have an older model DSLR that doesn’t have a self-cleaning mode or are (re)processing older files. Dust will be most noticeable at smaller apertures when depth of field is greatest. There’s nothing worse than a big dust spot marring the sky in an otherwise beautiful landscape photo.

The first step is to search out the dust spots. They should be noticeable at standard screen size but there may also be a couple of smaller ones that will only appear when viewed at 100%. The Spot Removal tool is found in the Develop module immediately under the histogram. It’s the round circle next to the crop tool or just use the keyboard shortcut “Q”.

Spot Removal

Zoom in (press “Z”) on the image so that you can easily see the dust spot. You’ll notice in the options for the Spot Removal tool that there are two choices as to how you operate – Clone or Heal. Clone will make an exact copy of pixels from one part of the image to another in the same way that the clone stamp does it in Photoshop. The other choice is Heal and this is the best one to work in. Heal works in much the same way as the healing brush in Photoshop by attempting to match the tone, texture and hue of the surrounding pixels.

To remove dust spots, simply set the size to be large enough to cover the spot, leave the opacity at 100% and click on the spot. It will place the cursor over the spot and a second circle will appear. Drag this to the area you want to sample from and click again. You’re done. I usually find that Lightroom selects a suitable area pretty well on its own, so you may find you don’t need to drag the spot much at all. Press the “Y” key to pull up a before and after view side by side so you can compare.

Before and After

Because the spots are on your camera’s sensor and don’t move from shot to shot, you’ll probably find that all photos that were taken at a particular time have dust spots in the same place. Fortunately, you don’t have to individually remove the dust from each. After you’ve cleaned the first image up, right click on the image and choose Settings > Copy Settings from the pop up menu. In the copy settings dialog, check only the Spot Removal box. Now, all you need to do for other images from the same shoot is to right click on them and choose Settings > Paste Settings. It will remove the dust spots for you. While it’s always best to have no dust spots in the first place, they can’t always be avoided and so Lightroom offers a quick and easy way to deal with them.

Settings

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Cross processed in Lightroom.

Cross processing is the processing of film stock in chemical solution that’s not intended for that particular type of film. Commonly, it’s processing color negative film (C-41) in solution that’s intended for color reversal (slide) film (E-6). It can create some interesting effects and the look is quite popular in certain genres of photography. Few people shoot with film these days though but that doesn’t mean the end of cross processing. The effects can be easily simulated in Lightroom and in fact, there are a number of develop presets available that will do it for you automatically. It’s always useful though to know exactly what is going on behind the preset, so here’s a look at one way you can cross process from scratch in Lightroom.

Original

You’re going to be using the Split Toning controls for creating the cross process effect but before you do that, make your basic adjustments to exposure, contrast, crop and so forth. Like any develop processing technique, it’s important to start with a good image. Cross processing in not meant to rescue a poor image but enhance an already good image. Once you have the basic adjustments, move into the Split Toning panel.

Starting with the highlights section, click on the color swatch and change the color of the highlights. You can also do this by dragging the slider around but you’ll get finer control with the flyout color picker. For the highlights, I’ve gone with a yellowish color. You can adjust the saturation by moving up and down the color picker – the higher you are, the stronger the color is. Once you’re happy with the choice for highlights, repeat the process with the shadows. Here, I’ve chosen a greenish color. In general, cross processing features yellow tones in the highlights and green-blue in the shadows, but of course, you can do anything you want. Both of these can be adjusted later so don’t fret if you can’t get it exact the first time.

Split Toning

Once you’ve got the basic tone worked out, all that remains is to adjust the balance between the shadows and highlights. If you’re after a more yellow type look, give some bias to the highlights by dragging the balance slider to the right. If you wish to emphasize the greens, drag the slider left. Here I’ve chosen a value of -25 to make it a little more green than yellow. Once you’re happy with it, export and move on to the next image.

Cross processing is often a technique that people either love or hate. I confess I probably lean more to the hate side – this phototip may be the first time I’ve actually shown a cross-processed photo although I’ve certainly done my fair share of experimenting with it. Like any technique, the key is matching the end result to your personal creative vision. If you can achieve that, it really doesn’t matter what others think.

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Apartments

Tucked away at the bottom of the right hand series of panels in the Develop module of Lightroom is a panel called Camera Calibration. It’s not the most descriptive name they could have chosen which is probably why most people ignore it when processing their RAW files. Although it’s called Camera Calibration, what it actually does it apply the camera’s Picture Styles (Canon) or Picture Control (Nikon). These are the in-camera JPG profiles that optimize a photo depending on a predefined style. When you shoot in RAW, these profiles are not applied automatically by the camera, so if you want to use them, you need to add them in processing.

Next time you import a RAW file into Lightroom, add the Lightroom Develop Preset “Zeroed” to it. This pulls the photo in without any default processing done to it and it will probably look pretty terrible. This is the true RAW file – normally Lightroom’s default adds a small bit of processing to it (Blacks to 5 for example). Now go over to the Camera Calibration panel in the Develop module, and click on the menu next to the word Profile. You’ll get a series of options for inbuilt camera profiles depending on whether you use Canon or Nikon. If you use another brand, you may be out of luck because I don’t think there’s an option catering to you. If you’re a Canon user you’ll see the following options – Nikon will have similar option but with different names.

• Adobe Standard
• Camera Faithful
• Camera Landscape
• Camera Neutral
• Camera Portrait
• Camera Standard

It’s worth spending some time experimenting with these. Lightroom defaults to Adobe Standard but that may not be the best starting point for your photographs. Moreover, different photographs may benefit from different profiles. The only way to find out is to try. Take a look at the differences in the image below and you’ll see that they can differ quite markedly in some cases.

Different Canon profiles

You also have the option to manually adjust each profile although if you’re going to make any major changes, it would be better to do it by the usual develop processing methods that you normally use. One other point is that if you see Embedded as a choice, this is because your image has been shot in JPG and not RAW, in which case your profile will have been applied at the time of exposure.

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Jiufen, Taiwan

Browse through any photo sharing site and you won’t have to look too far before you come across an image that has a tilted horizon. Most of the time, these shots occur as a result of inexperienced photographers not taking an extra second at shooting time to double check things in the viewfinder but I have seen them pop up in professional retail photography from time to time as well. I should note that some people use tilted photographs as an intended artistic effect, however these will often have a dramatic tilt to them. When unintended, the sloping horizon is much more likely to be less angled. Fixing these in the processing stage is a pretty straightforward matter though, so let’s take a look at how to correct it in both Lightroom and Photoshop.

Lightroom.

Crop and Straighten in Lightroom

Begin with your photograph that has a crooked horizon and press “R” to open the Crop and Straighten tool. Click on the ruler that is immediately left of where it says Angle to select the straighten tool. Now, all that’s left to do is move over to your image and click on the horizon to place one end of the ruler. Hold the mouse button down and drag the tool across the screen along what should be the horizon, releasing when you have drawn a line. How long your line is will depend on the photo – in a scene such as this one it’s a pretty defined horizon so I’ll typically use about 2/3 of the horizon in forming my straightening line. Once you release the mouse button, Lightroom will automatically rotate the image for you. Easy. Once you get the hang of it – and it’s pretty simple – straightening a horizon only takes a second or two.

Photoshop.

Ruler tool in Photoshop

With an image that’s already open in Photoshop and needs straightening, the procedure is just as easy. Introduced in Photoshop CS5 is a dedicated straightening tool that makes the job much easier than it used to be (and it used to be quite easy). Simply select the Ruler tool from the Toolbar – it’s found with the Eyedropper tool, so if you don’t see it, right-click on the Eyedropper to access the flyout options. Now, simply find the horizon, click and drag from left to right across the screen. Once you’ve drawn a line that you feel is suitable, all you have to do is click on Straighten in the menu bar up top and Photoshop does the rest.

Straighten in Photoshop

So there you have it. Now there’s no excuse for showing photographs with tilted horizons.

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National Palace Museum. Taipei, Taiwan

Dodging and burning are terms used to describe the selective adjustment of exposure tones in a photograph. It is (was) a commonly used darkroom technique for print making that renowned photographers such as Ansel Adams utilized at high levels of proficiency. Careful use of the techniques allows certain areas of the photograph to be emphasized while others are given less importance, an important tool to help draw the eye. Dodging is the brightening of a section of the image and burning is the darkening.

In Lightroom, adjustment brushes can be used to dodge and burn. First introduced in Lightroom 2, this is a powerful tool that allows non-destructive adjustments to be made quickly and easily. It was not unknown for photographers to spend days in a darkroom selectively dodging and burning to get things just right, but in Lightroom this process is much simpler.

Inspect your photograph as a whole and note where your eye is drawn. We are naturally attracted to brighter areas before darker areas so if you have important detail that you want to stand out or areas that you deem unimportant, look to adjust accordingly.

Adjustment Brush set for dodging.

To select the adjustment brush, either click on the brush icon above the Basic panel or use the keyboard shortcut “K”. If you wish to dodge, increase the exposure and brightness, and if you wish to burn, decrease them. You may also want to slightly increase to contrast and clarity to add a little more pop. In my experience, selecting a medium-high amount for Feather and a low Flow gives the best results.

If the area that you are going to adjust is very distinct, go ahead and select the Auto Mask option. At any time, you can press the “O” key to get a red overlay on the areas you’ve adjusted. To add you adjustments, simply paint over the area you wish to change.

The red overlay shows the mask. Here I've dodged the building.

Each image can have multiple areas adjusted. Simply click on “New” to create a new adjustment brush. This will put a second (third, fourth etc) pin on the image in the location you want. This is useful if you want to brighten one secition a lot, another section more subtly and a third needs some burning. If you want to come back to any of your adjustments in the future to further refine them, simply double click on the pin.

That was the 300th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.