Red Sky in the morning

I must admit I’m normally still snuggling in a warm bed at this time of the morning, and it has been a very cold spell. However I was up and awake early today and able to capture the first light of dawn. Giving me a great opportunity to compare my “girls” (the three current mistresses, aka photo managers/editors, I’m using rather than picasa/google photos) as I would normally edit/tweak them. The Photo on the right is the original unedited Jpeg. The photos below are edited by AfterShot , Lightroom  and Perfect Photo Suite 9. These three systems render my .pef file (Pentax’s RAW format) differently but their RAW file renders all look very flat compared with the jpeg. I liked the dark silhouette of the trees, so I have left the images very low key and just just concentrated of adding a little extra contrast and vibrance.I also straighten and cropped each version. In the edge they all look somewhat similar, supporting the observation that it probably doesn’t matter a lot which software you use as long as it does what you want.

AfterShot Pro 2, which has become my first stop on my laptop. In this case I have just click on Perfect Clear and lifted the vibrance slider a little. With a straightening and crop to finish. All over in seconds
Lightroom 4.4, was a little more considered and all done in the development module, lifting clarity (rather than contrast) and a little vibrance (not saturation) then straightening and crop.

Perfect Photo Suite 9, was a actually my second port of call but I have left it till last as it seems to match my memory of the moment best. I started in Perfect enhanced (which is where cropping and straightening are normally undertaken. Whilst there I couldn’t resist using their wonderful content aware magic  perfect eraser to remove the two light poles (which would have bee a very time consuming task with a cloning tool on the second post behind the tree). I also finished with perfect effects, a natural Dynamic Contrast, A fall enhancer Colour Enhancer bought back to 60% layer opacity and a soft darker vignette

PhotoProject :: a joiner collage, stitched pano, sketch & HDR

My first day in FNQ (Far North Queensland)
was nice and warm and I had a great coffee with a very late lunch at a wonderful cafe with a great view, so much so I have recorded it in 4 ways,

PhotoEditingTools :: Looking Sharp

I’ve stayed away from the use of sharpening. Especially on RAW files because sharpening often lead to extra digital noise. Over sharpening can be very distracting, producing halos around dark or very light edges, How much sharpening is to much? Its a personal decision. All to often the extra detail in a sharpened image is not real just an artifact. It can happen in HDR when too much contrast is included in the tone mapping. So some restraint is desired and access to good sharpening tools esential. Here I am using perfect effects, which splits the sharpening into three groups. the last two are for the screen (not as contrasty) or printer (which then has a series of paper styles) and is much stronger sharpening (to the point of looking a little scary on the screen). However my favourites sharpener are in a group called Fix Focus. My particular favourite being High Pass sharpening, which is also available in Photoshop & Aftershot Pro

PhotoProject :: Coot Colour

The Eurasian coot [Fulica atra], is very much just Black and White, Ok it has a Red eye. This image of one swimming close in a very muddy Jell’s Park Lake (from heavy rains a couple of weeks back) looks very drab in the out of camera raw view, with just the very basic lightroom rendering undertaken as the image is loaded (and in fact most RAW images tend to look this way)

RAW file straight out of camera	RAW from Lightroom with tonal adjustments	Basic Tonal Adjustments

*Whilst these are RAW images they must be rendered as JPEG to be viewed on the web and been Exported from lightroom as sRGB

Only a little bit of adjustment was required to lift the detail, and remove the flatness but the colour of the muddy water just doesn’t appeal to me. So I figured it was a good time to experiment with a more artist palette slant on the colour and some colourful way to lift this image.

Picasa Saturation Boost	Paint.Net Inverse Colour then Hue Slider & Inverse Colour Again	Cross Processing in Perfect Effects

ThePatch :: Landscape/Sunrise

This was one theme I was really looking forward to, I like the striking lighting of sunsets and sunrise but have learned whilst they make wonderful images they don’t sell as prints, I suspect everyone thinks they can do better themselves with their iPhone or compact digital camera. So I hadn’t been putting as much effort (perhaps subconsciously) into being there at the right time and in the right place recently. However I had figured getting nice reflections off the nearby lake in Jells Park would be perfect. Well nature let me down! I had a week of very ordinary overcast lighting and so little colour. Its not as if I got bored or discourage. There was actually plenty of things going on to photograph. Which reinforced the 50/50 time limit rule, at least that’s what Matt Kloskowski called it in a recently. The idea is to take your intended shot(s) and then take a many again trying something different and perhaps more creatively. You will return home happier trust me! Here are just a few of the things I saw & photographed

Returning to the theme at hand. I only got one morning with much colour and I was not in the spot I planned, but I did find a couple of interesting compositions and thankfully took a couple of bracketed sets. The autoawesome HDR* created by Google+ was very good by their normal performance BUT it was teetering on the surreal, not what I wanted. Oo I redid my own HDR this time using Picturenaut to just merge the images and give me a 16bit file which I further manipulated in Lightroom with some additional tonal and colour tweaks in Perfect Effects 8 ( A sobering thought is I probably wouldn’t have gone that route if I hadn’t seen the google+ HDR*, see the first two images below).

PS please excuse the lateness of this post I was actually hoping for a good sunrise this morning.

The Oaks Walk in non HDR

Another Photo for the #thesecretlifeoftrees Series compare this with the Google+ Autoaweswome of the same scene in Yestesday's blog post,

This time it is the EV=0 photo only and it has been tonally tweaked (mainly to avoid clipping) and cropped in Lightroom with a touch of clarity, then exported to Perfect Effects, with first a little bit of the sunshine filter then into my favouraite tool Dynamic Contrast but just using the soft pre-set, Rather than those defaulst I have undertaken some adjustments on the detail sliders to enhance the small scale textures (the leaves) but downplay the large scale broad range details (the path & grass) I did consider some colour adjustment but it was starting to look faux HDR so I removed that layer. To end I added the big softy vignette.

Original: imageo.withknown.com/2014/the-oaks-walk-jells-park

Bad Hair Day

The return to cold and windy wintery weather has apparently forced a lot of the birds to ground. This galah suffered the double indignity of being photographed as the wind ruffled his head feathers. Then the image suffered further as I has a play around with textures, layering and boarders in Perfect Photo Suite 8. I’ve also had a play with watermarking, adding a little to alvin’s campaign to bring creative commons licences back to prominence on the social webs

One Duck Done Six Ways

Picasa :: jpeg I’m feeling lucky	Google+ :: jpeg AutoEnhance & Vignette/Blur
AfterShot Pro :: RAW Perfectly Clear & Vignette	Photoshop Elements :: RAW Spotlight Effect
Lightroom :: RAW Tonal Adjustments, Noise Reduction & Vignette	Perfect Photo Suite 8 :: RAW Perfect Enhance, Magic Erase Brush & Vignette

A couple of ducks wandered into the front yard late this afternoon it was overcast and getting foggy so I had to use a high ISO just to get an acceptable exposure with my telephoto lens. While keeping a high f-stop to avoid over narrow depth of field. The resulting images has a lot of digital noise and was just a little flat, but with potential, Giving me the perfect opportunity to see what my many software mistresses might be able to do to lift this shot. I’m not trying to compare the packages for equivalent features, more trying to play to their strengths.

ThePatch :: Decoration/Celebration

I began this week fairly determined not to leave the patch project to the last day, but I did not find to much celebration. There was some decoration in the local shopping mall, but it didn’t scream celebration. In Australia having a Christmas in July Dinner has become a popular family event. Whereas in the middle of summer on a hot day sitting down to the traditional Christmas roasts and rich puddings, can be less than fully appreciated but having a second festive feast in Winter is a perfect excuse for more excess. Anyway some of the Christmas decorations can be pulled out to decorate the table, so that sounded close to the theme.
My first thought was to just use the table decorations under some natural light and get a classic bracketed exposure set to create a conventional HDR. I have also added a little tweaking of clarity on the angel's wings and the tinsel with lightroom.



The results says decoration and is pleasing, but its a very calm celebration!

My second idea was to try an available light shot, something a bit moody, a photography of the angel that has become somewhat of a traditional Christmas in July centrepiece for my family, she needs to be in the spot light. I wanted to set this against Christmas tree lights, just outside the depth of field. That was a plan, but as I was testing out the low light conditions I also got me the idea of including a small crystal angel to add some awe and wonder. I experimented with lighting just with a torch and painting the light where I wanted it (back lit and below on the crystal angel, more straight on for the purple angel). My experiments where a bit hit and miss and I could not get the background far enough away to achieve the bokeh effect I want. So armed with several photos that were ok in one or another area I figured it was time to have a lengthy play in Perfect Photo Layers, to merge sections of different photo and Prefect Effects to give me a better bohek on the Christmas lights.  I am pleased with the result given it is my first foray into these steps and the limitation of the exposures I started with.

The Story behind Many More Mistresses

Towards the end of last year just when I was settling for just two of my many photo processing mistresses I had a change of heart, mainly out of disappointment with adobes suspected creative cloud related hassles and the quirks of trying to spread lightroom across a few computers, this lead me to see I was really carrying two separate photo streams, one for my RAW files, one for the Jpegs, with subtly different ways of moving the photos around. So why haven't I just bitten the bullet selected one format and one software package. Well if I did it would probably have to be Lightroom, but there is the rub, she is a very high maintenance choice, everything has to be done her way or not at all. She is really only good at one computer and one photo collection relationship. She can be wonderfully talented when it comes to lifting the magic out of a boring Raw file, but I she can demand a lot of time. She can process jpeg but seems to deliberately stops short of her best. She does have a nice companion now in the form of the Perfect Photo Suite from OnOne, which can undertake some of the areas lightroom falls a little short without creating any compatibility or reload issues.
 
Picasa was almost always there, and is on every computer antway, fulfilling the basic needs . She tackles the standard enhancement without fuss, doing them quickly and she seems to get along with other software and computers, not that she doesn't like taking control of her home territory, but she will accommodate the odd stray and share when necessary. Picasa, was slow to take up processing RAW but she can and does it in a very google I'm feeling lucky kind of way. Her talent is doing a decent job of the basic editing and management of my needs for Jpeg files but I'm not so sure of her on-line alter ego, google+ photos. She always seemed to love and nurture my collection of photos. I am finding AfterShot Pro is a nice compliment, she both sees the possibilities of further post processing and in handling the update of metadata in .xpm sidecar files.

The previous few post have looked at the combination of software I run on some different hardware in different work spaces. I think I will remain a man with many photographic mistresses for some time to come.

• On the Road with more than One Mistress

• Letting My Mistresses into the Office

• The Many Mistresses in my Studio

On the Road with more than One Mistress

This is undoubtedly the area where there has been the most coming and going, change and rethinking. For a long while I kept two separate laptops, one for my consulting work (originally what is now my studio laptop) and a another one (originally an XP, which is still running but seldom used) for my photographic work. I now have a newer laptop (well its 3 years old already).
Carrying two laptops when I travels was just a bit of a luxury, so I either got by using a small netbook and/or I put any specialist tools I needed on a USB Key using the portable apps format if it was a “work” trip. This actually sever me well enough but meant I had to leave the heavy lifting (detailed post processing stuff) until I got back home. My main goto portable programs on this Darkroom USB key are RawTherapee, The Gimp and XnView. AutoStitch and Picturenaut also work perfectly well off my USB drive. This stuff has moved to a larger USB and the green lanyard has changed to a more heavy duty orange version but it still lives in my camera bag, along with a USB SD card reader. So if I didn’t have a laptop with me I could use the netbook or find a library or cyber cafe and I could review the Camera’s card contents at a larger size (providing the computer I was using had two USB ports) and I could perhaps process a stitched panorama, HDR or a RAW refinement, if time permitted I don’t use the Key to hold photos, except for perhaps some post processed image I just created. I had a test version of picasa on there for a while but it had to store its main directory on the PC so it wasn’t really portable, and this began the move to using XnView more extensively. I have recently put the portable version of chrome onto the key as well. There are a number of times when this simple USB key proved invaluable letting me perform something that would have been impossible on the average airline lounge or cyber cafe grunt computer.
Slowly different software began appearing and disappearing of my main laptop (mainly to better handle RAW files). Usually for a specific reason, like I need to edit diagrams and photos for my consulting work. Since this laptop is 64 bit I did start to notice some of the performance improvements, particularly in processing video and lesser but still noticeable improvements in lightroom (development functions particularly). The OnOne’s Perfect Photo suite are 64 bit so this laptop was the best place to set it up and it plays very nicely with lightroom. Whilst perfect photo isn’t really a RAW development system per se, its browser can read my RAW files. However the combination of lightroom (to do the basic RAW refinement steps), followed with a round trip into one of the Perfect Photo add-ins, suits me and gets the job done. I always put picasa on any computer and it looks after my Jpeg work fine, it is still my favoured way to upload photos from my camera.  I have found that AfterShot Pro is also great in this inital photo review, rating and culling process.
The only hassle I am finding is the space used having this software on the computer is not an issue, but it is the space eaten by the photos if I leave them on this laptop too long. Saving RAW+Jpeg consumes disk space rapidly! There are also some limitation and cautions about moving processed photos around a network, but that will have to be another post.

Letting My Mistresses into the Office

With the resent death of a couple of my hard drives located in my “comms room” (actually a cupboard) and/or the studio I had to rethink what was attached to my LAN and where it was located. This meant simplifying things reducing the number of network driver and bringing the router, ADSL internet modem and network drives into the office and removing a lot of cables, a patch panel and even the Fax! Leaner, meaner and easier to manage now. I still have a RAID system (a Netgear Stora) to keep a mirror of all the working directories around my Network, but I don’t store music or photos on it anymore. My Photo Archive now sits on an external hard drive which hangs off the main office desktop (it is the one computer I leave turned on most of the time). Since this is where the archive lives I figure I needed to have an index or catalogue (not in the lightroom sense) of what it contains also on the office desktop, but that is the catch there is not one system that can really managed my them all.

So….

If you look on the upper right hand side, of what is otherwise a very business like place, you will see a few of my photographic mistress have moved in. Its started with picasa, which is on all my computers, but soon included lightroom (to better handle the RAW) and then XnView (mainly to bulk add/update EXIF & IPTC metadata), AfterShot Pro (faster than lightroom) and then Perfect Photo Suite (its 64 bit and doesn’t work on the studio computers), So I have two teams now, the jpegs and quick look stuff (Picasa & Aftershot Pro) versus the RAW and more intense pair (Lightroom and Perfect Photo). I had to turn off RAW viewing in Picasa, to force it( and me) to focus on JPEG but things seem to be going ok (for now!). I tend to avoid too much post or re-processing here, instead I either export jpegs or make a sub-collection of RAW file and export them as a lightroom catalogue backup, to be used on my laptop or studio computers. Then reimporting the updated catalogue. This round trip to other hardware is not such a pain because the files are shared across a couple of share network drives (P: for the Photo Library itself & S: for Scrapbook, working projects etc).
As long as they behave themselves I figure these photographic mistress may stay.

One RAW to SDRplus & FauxHDR

opularity brings copycats and there are now a lot of HDR style presets, filters, “Dragan Effect” methods and straight out HDR Fakes. These normally split the image into a series of layers that generate re-blends to emphasis contrast, detail and possible saturate some of the colours. Like the true multi-image HDR they can de used to excess and produce scary lurid photos but they can also produce strong results when used with care. I quite like the results that can be produced with the OnOne Perfect Effects HDR look filter, particularly when used in conjunction with Dynamic Contrast and/or Tone Enhancer filters on underlying layers.

 

There are also several methods to bring the tone mapping approaches into processing a single RAW image. The Digitial Photography School gives a nice tutorial on creating a fauxHDR look using a set of simple tone stretching methods in lightroom presets. I have a very similar preset I’ve called SDR+ but I don’t include exposure, white balance or noise reduction., and in DPS’s example. I prefer to fix white balance first (as tone stretch can introduce significant colour casts). I only adjust exposure and noise after the preset is applied if necessary, and I’m a fraction heavier on the clarity slider.

 

One simple application to uses this approach is hdRaw, which can take a single RAW image and stretch the tones in a number of common tone mapping like ways, Rather than calling this true HDR I have seen it called SDR+ (Standard Dynamaic Range Plus) but it can achieve much the same effect as a multi-image HDR image tone mapped in the same way. You can even create your own presets, so I have made a basic Reinhard to suit my atheistic.

There are quiet a few techniques around that suggest you create a pseudo under exposed and over exposed image from your single raw file and then use these to generate a conventional HDR but to be honest this is a lot of work and you still start with the same dynamic range of intensity anyway. I think you are better experimenting with some of the approaches above when you only have a single RAW photo.

At the same time I was writing this post by +Iain Harley, from The Patch community on google+ gave a heads up in this link on The Changing Face of HDR Photography which does nicely summarize that HDR is developing and its really all about reproducing the beauty you see and feel when your take the photograph.

ThePatch :: Real Estate Marketing

I’m not exactly the marketing type and estate agents leave me uneasy, so I figured this theme might be a real challenge for me. I did a bit of research of real estate ads in the paper and a then the little A4 posters in the agents windows. So their photos might in general be ordinary but a lot of effort had been put into the “over the top” descriptive headers. Rather than drive around and look for a specular house, I figure I should photograph my place (not for sale by the way) but perhaps in an “over the top” way like the agents descriptions. A long exposure night shot seemed to hit the spot after a tweak or two in perfect effects not sure I’m so good on the real estate speak headline itself.