Image Processing

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Flutterbyes! (or any excuse to shoot my 5DMII)

February 11, 2009 in Camera, Critter, Photography | 1 comment

If you’re from Rhode Island the idea of driving from Providence to Warwick means you need to pack a lunch and maybe make hotel reservations to stay overnight…for a 20 minute drive.  No, seriously.  It does.  People from RI don’t drive far, a 3o minute commute is almost unheard of and I’ve had patients leave my practice because they’ve moved to the next town over (but yes, they come back after the first few visits to a new dentist, and complain about how long it takes to get there).  So when I showed up at work on Tuesday with a thumbdrive full of butterfly pictures did I get oohs and ah’s?  Only after I was roundly berated for driving 2 hours through beautiful country (well except maybe for Worcester) to get to Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory.   I’ve been bugging Mike (:P) for about 6 months to go up there and I think he finally got tired of my nagging to go with me.  We had an awesome time, even if the butterflies had it in for him, mobbing him to the point of irritation (they liked his lotion apparently).  It also was a great opportunity to play with the new 5DMII and I went armed with a backup battery and 2 extra cards since I was going to shoot full raw (21mb) instead of sraw1 that I had been doing and I wanted to see how good it looked.

The place is awesome, unfortunately the sun wasn’t out for most of the day so the light was not great, very diffuse and required use of my 580EX flash, which I really need to get more proficient in use with anyhow.   The low light also allowed me to really see what was true or not true about the low noise at higher ISO.  And…it’s true, it’s true.

A Swallowtail Butterfly (I don’t know what sub-species, didn’t take the card to identify them like I should have) at ISO 800, no flash, 98mm f/9:

Swallowtail Butterfly

And this is the 10% crop to show the detail in the wing:

Swallowtail buttefly

I’m impressed.  The only work done to the image was in LR2 adjusting the exposure, the black point and brightness and a touch of sharpness with smart sharpen in CS4 and my sig.  There is noise, no doubt but it’s less than I see sometimes when I use ISO200 on my 30D, and the resolution.  Oi!  I’ve been in heaven working on these images.  I don’t know if I can afford to shoot full raw all the time, it chews up a 16G CF card  pretty quickly and even with 2.5TB of backup hard drive space they are hogs.  I suppose I could be much better in just deleting the raw files I don’t plan on using but I just feel like I never know what might strike my fancy in times to come.

Owl’s Eye Butterfly:

Owl's Eye Butterfly

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When bad things happen to good files

January 15, 2009 in Camera, Photography, Photoshop, Vacation | 1 comment

The keyword to protecting files is redundancy.  Merriam Webster defines redundancy as “superflous repetition” or “an acto ro instance of needless repetition” which is true but essential in file management.  How many times have you heard people say they lost documents, files, images because they forgot to backup, or they never backed up because they didn’t have a problem?  Way too many, and I’ve always winced when I hear those words “oh, I don’t have anything important so I don’t backup”  Well, nothing important until you miss it…

I’ve always thought I had a great system for backing up.  I actually don’t import my images to the hard drive on my computer, I used to do that then spin them off onto a external drive as a backup then to a second drive when I had to delete them off my C: drive because of space requirements (redundancy, redundancy redundancy).  But when I started to use lightroom I realized that wasn’t going to work well since I would have to then reassociate the files with the catalog when ever I moved them off the C: drive.  I have a 1TB drive with a firewire connection so I decided to use that as my image drive and then use another 1TB drive that is USB as my backup.  With the firewire connection I never noticed a delay in processing with CS4 or in LR2 so that was great, and I had plenty of room to work with. I use Beyond Compare to check that folder against the other image folder in my other external drive to make sure things are up to date and all revisions are reflected in both drives.  When I’m actively working on a project I don’t compare as often as I do when I do small shoots, which could be daily.

Which brings me to the title.  In the middle of working on the photos from Antigua in Lightroom2 I suddenly had an urge to look at some images I took earlier in the year and post them up to flickr (I’m not really ADHD, I just needed a break from culling and grading images).  Easy-peasy I use the import tool, selected the folders that hadn’t already been imported into LR2 and poof there they were.  Did what I wanted, then went back to working on the Antigua images.  Finish the Antigua images, port the .jpgs I wanted to Mike and then review some more images from earlier in the year and then 2 days ago remembered I hadn’t backed up the Antigua folder since I had started working on images.

Bell of Doom starts ringing here…

I go to beyond compare to copy the sub folders from my Sandals Antigua folder over to the backup drive, then start doing something else.  A few minutes later I look over and it says “35 minutes remaining 2500files” or something similar.  Huh?  So I stop the compare and start looking…It seems that when I imported all of those folders to LR2 I did not fully go through all the menus and I imported and copied those folders as subfolders in my Sandals Antigua folder instead of importing the files at their current location.  Well, no worries I’ll just delete all … those … subfolders… which I did, all … those … subfolders.  Including those subfolders that contained all of the exported PSD’s and DNG’s and .jpgs that I had been working on from the Antigua trip.  All .. those… nicely … nestled … subfolders …

Which, because they were deleted via beyond compare, are not in the “trash” or anywhere to be found.  So all of those .psd’s that I had with their nice layers, the HDR’s and photomerges I  had done that I hadn’t finished … yet … will not be finished unless I go back through all of those images and re-do them.

So what do I bring out of this.  a)  I’m lazy.  If I had imported the files to start with on my C: drive and worked on them there then exported them to my Image drive I would have somewhere along the way had a copy of the subfolders because I backup my whole C: drive every week to (yet another) drive.  Yes I have a drive farm on my desk, some day I’ll invest in a Drobo. b) no matter how good I try to be and how good my backup systems are there is still room for error and I am very human and make very big errors.  c) I have to think twice before hitting delete, or only deleting via explorer, not using the back-up software to do it.  and d) When I go to bed I will have a good cry over all that work, gone.

At least the good news is that my 5DMII has been shipped, and to continue to prove just how human I am, I see that somehow my shipping address is very very wrong.  This has been a long week.  I shall call Adorama in the morning, right now I will play some Titan Quest and slay some poor, unsuspecting Gorogons or Satyrs, then I shall go to bed and dream of lost .psd’s

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A little nip and tuck

September 30, 2008 in Image Processing, Landscape, Photography, Vacation | No comments

When I go out to take pictures I am hoping to create an image*, there’s something that I see that I want to portray through the camera.  A lot of what that is comes from just looking at a scene before I ever bring the camera up to eye level or stoop down to tripod level, but it used to be that what I saw is rarely what I got, although I am getting better at visualizing the more I shoot.

The eye and the brain are selective, they automatically crop out what you don’t think is important or shouldn’t be in the picture and concentrates on what draws your eye in.  The camera doesn’t have this automatic filter and often when you download the images or get that roll of film back from the lab those beautiful pictures you thought you took aren’t quite what you imagined.  There’s that branch that is sticking out of the back of the sheep, or the big shadow on that wall, the leaf in front of the birds beak, there is too much sky, or too little, etc.   There was an article recently in Earthbound Light Photography Tips talking about  “a use for old slide mounts” and how using an old slide mount can refine your vision.  It’s a great aid but nothing works better than actually getting out there.

No matter what, whether you use slide, negative or digital, no matter how good your vision is sometimes you need to crop, and a little cropping can make the world of difference in taking an image that you think has potential and turning it into Yeah, it was like that in my mind.  I’ve had a few of those from our trip to Utah but none so illustrative as this one taken from a bit off the Grand View Overlook trail at sunset.  Looking back towards Green River Overlook the setting sun illuminated the cliffs and even though there weren’t any clouds to make the sky very interesting there was some good color above the Mesa.   I set up a few times to try and translate what I was seeing without the camera into what I was seeing through the camera, I finally took what I thought I saw but when I got home and opened the raw file this is what I had:

Uncroped landscape

Not really what I saw but not too bad.  So with a little cropping at a time and then some levels, curves and a bit of color correction this is what I came up with:

Sunset from Grandview Point trail towards Green River Overlook.

Removing much of the sky which to me was dead space really makes the difference.   It took a ho-hum kind of picture to a much prettier image.

*Mike had an interesting conversation with a  woman we met up at double arch who did not like using the words “take” an image or “take” a picture.   To her it meant that you were removing something and taking it away, she also didn’t like the word “capture” for the same reason.  The woman was or is an art student who started school studying photography but then moved to scuplture.

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