Photoshop

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Boston Financial District

December 12, 2009 in Landscape, Photography | No comments

I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from all aspects of photography, the number of unread blogs I subscribe to is well over 1000 and I haven’t even picked up my camera since going down to watch Mike and Jas surf at the begining of November. We even went hiking up falling waters trail in NH and I only brought my little point and shoot and took 3 pictures that I haven’t looked at yet. Part of it is ennui, part of it is Dragon Age, part of it is that I’ve been reading vociferously but I seem to be reviving. I took another look the images I took with Terry when he was up that first weekend of November and started working on a few of them. This is probably my favorite of the series. The wrought iron sculptures of the sailing ships worked nicely to camouflage the yacht that was moored in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel which stood out like a sore thumb. I don’t like the slight haloing around the buildings but it’s there in each of the raw images to some extent, it’s where the light was the strongest I guess. I didn’t feel like spending hours in photoshop to make it go away so I didn’t.

Boston from the Moakley Courthouse

Taken with a Canon 5DMII, 24-105L f/4.5 lens. Merged to HDR with Photomatix and finished in Photoshop with Nik plug-ins and Tony Kuyper luminosity and sharpening actions

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Tickled Pink

September 1, 2009 in Flowers, Image Processing, Photography, Photoshop | No comments

It’s unusual for it to be still the day after a hurricane comes through, but then again it’s unusual for it to be sunny with awesome clouds the day it does like it was last Saturday and Sunday when Hurricane Bill so why should I have been surprised when it was nearly dead calm after Hurricane Danny passed?  But still it was after we got back from the beach and it gave me a chance to play a bit with some later season flowers.

This is a 13 image composite taken at tiny little increments of focus point on the pink flower.  There are a few ways to process this but I chose to do it all in CS4.  I imported them all from LR2 as layers in one document then used auto-align.  After about 5 minutes it finished and I did a rough crop and went for auto-blend using the stack images command.  10 hours later (it felt like) I got pretty much this result.  The only other tweaks were further croping and a pro-contrast layer from Nik Software’s Color efex pro and then a run of the “make it glow” action by Tony Kuyper and an adjustment of the opacity of the two layers.

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‘Cause if my eyes don’t decieve me there’s something going wrong around here

August 29, 2009 in Image Processing, Landscape, Photography, Photoshop | No comments

I was going through the incredible backlog of images I’ve amassed this summer for two reasons – the first being…well I’ve got this terrible backlog of images I took, uploaded with LR2 (including renaming and a gross keywording) and never looked at because of the photography class I took, and second because I just received a set of tutorials and actions from Tony Kuyper based on luminosity masks. (Which in turn I learned about from a post on Naturephotographers.net a wonderful group of people and fantastic place to learn and be awed by other photographers) I read through the tutorial on handblending HDR images with luminosity masks, tried to do it a few times myself and then decided to heck with it, this guy is amazing, I’m lazy and I want the actions he’s made so I don’t have to do it myself so I used the handy link and for a minimum donation of $25.00 (which is SUCH a bargain) he’ll send you a collection of his ebooks as pdf’s as well as actions. And he’s an awesome guy, he got the zip’s to me in less than 20 minutes and even bothered to look at some of the images in Mike’s and my travel link and say nice things to me! So I had to give it a try.
So after a good dinner out I went looking for a good image to try it on, and instead of one in those 15 folders I haven’t weeded out yet I decided to look at one of the ones from my RISD class and found this…

It's not fall yet! Damn it!

Now looking at the image it nearly made my heart seize…a fall leaf in the middle of August…but it was dull, lacked contrast and over all wasn’t nearly as traumatic as say, going to see District 9 this afternoon (which I walked out of). So it needed some help and now I had this Joe Jackson song running through my head and I began to play with the luminosity layer actions and doing some luminosity painting and finished up with using the smart glow action at 25. And whew…

It's not fall yet, Darn It!

Much better. not my best image but it allowed me to play around with some gross changes to all the different masks as well as some finer painting and give me a pretty striking result. I am still in denial that fall is on its way, especially with the wet, mostly cold summer we had but at least it will be pretty…

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Caratunk Panorama/Photomerge

March 13, 2009 in Image Processing, Landscape, Photography, Photoshop | No comments

I know the brush at the corners is a bit distracting but this was a first try at HDR with some new techniques I’ve learned and it is one of my favorite places. There were exposures were -1.3, 0, +1.3 and the development was done in Photomatix and then transported back into Photoshop CS4 where the ghosting of the swans was removed with masking. The colors were adjusted with Viveza and noise reduction with Noise Ninja. Thanks To Trey Radcliff for his excellent HDR tutorial And a big thanks to the fact that spring is slowly coming our way!

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Image Redux-Or Why Color Profiling Your Monitor Is Key

September 6, 2008 in Landscape, Photography, Vacation | 1 comment

It’s super important to calibrate your main monitor when doing image work.  I’ve known that for years, and I do so regularly.  It’s also important to calibrate the monitor on the laptop.  It’s not as accurate but it’s still important to do.  I know that, I knew that, so why didn’t I do that?  A million excuses among which was that the laptop was brand new and I only got it 2 days before we left.  I’ll never leave home without calibrating the laptop again.  I posted that image from the first day in Arches that was worked on in photoshop on the laptop.  So you don’t need to scroll down here is what that image looked like straight from the laptop:

Image done on Laptop

Image done on Laptop

That was Not what I had seen on the laptop…to me the image is way too saturated, contrasty and dark.

This is more of what I saw:

Redone Image with Calibrated Monitor

Redone Image with Calibrated Monitor

Much lighter, less yellow and red and full of contrast (and yes a different sig since for some reason photoshop on my XP home system doesn’t have as many fonts as my Vista laptop) and overall much more realistic.

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