Waiting for better colour tools

Photographic software, particularly editing software, has been dominated by adjusting the RGB Red Green Blue numbers. But human perception of colour is slightly more complex in capturing filtered colours on a light sensor under bayer filters or viewing a screen of  LEDs light emittingdiodes, coloured red green and blue-ish . Further  many graphic artist had complained mixing coloursd in graphic software,  doesn’t necessarily create the same colours that you would expect in a mix using pigment paints.

In the end I had to just live with these limitations.

However things are changing a few graphic applications will now more naturally mix pigments for graphic software. What I wish to discuss here is a surprise addition to the update 1.21 to Lumina Neo. It includes a new section called Color Harmony. The two top sliders will be very familiar to ligthroom Photoshop users but with slight different colours on the top slider, which is not called Tint but Brilliance. Instead of starting at green and moving to a magenta it runs for a bluish grey green to a red. I suspect is colour harmony is very much inspired/controlled by the NCS system which still dominates many European countries.

Colour Contrast is something I will also discuss later as it deserves a bit more investigation.

Split colour versions of pigments, as warmer or cooler versions when mixing intermediate colours, have been a long standing practise of how artists have traditionally bought a lot of drama and harmony  into their artisticworks. On a flat surface, like a painting or photograph, cool colours tend to recede warm colours tend to come forward.  

Portrait photographs have known this even back in the film days. Using various filters of coloured lights to enhance their work and bring the sitter to life. In the smartphone world there are “warmify” apps to liven your selfie and deeply buried option on most digital cameras to alter th colour temperature of the photo output. Cannon is renowned for their “warmer” sensors. These digital tools usually apply to the whole image

Why these Split Colour Warmth sliders are different they change warm and cool components of your picture separately. This is a bigger deal than I originally thought. Here is a simple example of a young bougainvillea “bloom”, actually just new leaves that are orange before turning magenta, taken at my studio window. I’m a little amazed how much impact can be achieved when you separately adjust the whoops and cool have on the photo. I’m expecting to have a lot of fun with these sliders.

 

Colour Balance adds nuanced refinements, combining tonal/luminance steps with more detail colour adjustments. It is also an area I wish to explore further.

 Finally I should point out the Film Strip at the bottom of my screen capture above, this has been a long asked for addition to Luminar Neo. It allows you to see several thumbnails of adjacent images in the catalogue and you can rate and compare them directly here

Accidental discoveries in lightroom

I’ve been using lightroom as my primary photo editor again on my travels, because my light HP spectre with its SSD drive have made lightroom fast enough again. There are things about lightroom that still hold me up and things about the way it has to organise everything in her own way that still frustrate me. In particular how to handle working copies. in my case these are files being past onto third arty plug-ins like Nik Software Efex range, OnOne and Perfect Exposure. What happens is the little PCPlugin windows pop up and I can chose to  edit a copy with lightroom setting (the default and most common response), a copy without lightroom settings (seems to only works with jpeg files) or edit the original (except this doesn’t work with most plug-ins). Then there is a small dialogue area at the bottom which contains the file format you will use in the exchange (jpeg, Tiff or PSD).This is all fine and I’ve done it hundreds of times because I just press ok, but the annoying part is lightroom now takes the copy and the original to the very end of your photo series. If you have more than say 50 photos in you directory this can be a few screen’s scrolling away of forever removed on the film strip. It is a tedious interruption to my thoughts and concentration.I have found one work around, just change to a different folder in the library module and back to the folder you working in, and Voila the files are back in their normal order, but these is even more tedium and frustration. Ahhh!!! Then I notice after I had done this at least once (but sometimes twice) the photos where not copied to the end of the folder on the lightroom screen but arrive beside the original in the alphabetical/numerical order or the origin photo.

The next discovery, I’m sure must be documented somewhere, but I just haven’t found where, is that photos in subdirectory/folder get displayed in the parent directory. I came across this by accident. To get my autostitch panoramas I need to export my starter images (they are now often HDR and tiff format) into jpeg because autostitch only works with that format. So I normally export it to a specifically named directory over in my photo scrapbook. Unfortunately it doesn’t take long to forget where an image is in that confused space. At some point while I was travelling, and probably late at night, I accidentally reset the the destination of export from lightroom from a specific location to same folder as original plus sending it to a defined subdirectory. Suddenly the export shows up beside the original? Not only that I could then create my panorama and import that back into lightroom in the sub directory/folder and it to shows up in the parent folder also. I don’t have to have duplicated files over in another scrapbook folder! Then I can stack the whole series behind the panorama (gaining a lot more organizational control of this folder)

Whilst I have been using lightroom for a long time, (I stopped upgrading from version 4.4) have read the manuals in detail and many guides I can not find ant documentation relevant to these discoveries/”features”. Coincidentally I did just watch an Ed Gregory You Tube video (below) that exploits this “feature” of photos in the sub directories/folders showing up in the directory above. 

I’m never a fan of fixed workflows, so you don’t have to follow his approach meticulously just be inspired and know you can use sub folders/directories to house various working and exported versions of the photos but still see all the photos grouped together in the parent folder/directory.

Here is what I adopted on my last trip that seems to work seamlessly for me. I still use picasa to load and do the preliminary culling of my photos and I load the photo into daily folders with the name format YYYY-MM-DD this means that they automatically get sorted into chronological order. Using picasa is way faster still compared to lightroom and because I still shot RAW+jpeg I can cull the RAW/Jpeg pair at the same time (you don’t see the jpeg file in lightroom). I can als “”touch up”, crop, email and post the jpeg to the web immediately is I want (eg email photos to the family). When I’m ready to post process I just point lightoom to import from this gallery. Doesn’t take long and lightroom has happily loaded the requited details into her catalogue and ready to be useful. This is when I rate my photos and I’m trying out the star rating idea present in Jeff Harman’s PhotoTaco podcast (Culling like a Pro) below.

The idea is to only use three stars, set lightroom to auto advance, and then just hit the 1 2 or 3 key on you keyboard. This works in both the library and develop modules but works best on library if you also want to swap between thumbnail and full screen view of just a few images. The important thing is to go through your entire days shots. Each time you rate a photo you will moved onto the next. With a little concentration on the image and one hand over the relevant keys you can become very fast at this.
One Star is for the set up and background shots you want to keep but not process further
Two Stars is for any average shot, they maybe nice but are not the best in the days shots
Three Stars are for those shots with great potential that warrant a bit more post processing.
You will undoubtedly find that the two stars make up the majority of your folder but that’s life. Any non stared images should be deleted now (but I normally get rid of those in picasa when I load the photos). If like me you do a daily backup now is the time to do it.

Next I set the filter in lightroom on rating to plus 3 stars and I only have a few images to consider. Often I will also demote a few NQR (not quiet right) photos to further trim down what I need to do. Suddenly 2 hours post processing drudgery become 20 minutes of fun!

The final piece of magic that these discoveries lead to was using the subfolders to hold working and then exported versions, would allow me to see all the photos from one day in one place. I’m not sure if final should be a sub directory of Work (where I do my post processing) or a folder at the same level, Keeping my Final work separate and easily found is the important aspect here. I definitely need to have the option of separating the image size and finish (ie post processing sharpening) in he exported versions. I just have two sizes (small for the WEB or Full resolution for possible printing. My scrapbook mess is now obsolete! (not sure yet if I will try to back that diversity into this new structure, I suspect that will be too much work). There is some duplication of files, but they are at least stored more logically close to the original images. I also returned to using the colour labels to help understand the type of images within the daily (Parent) Directory/Folder. Yellow for HDR , Green for multi image panorama stitching or collage, Purple for family snaps, Red for images posted on the web.

I don’t want you to follow my process exactly but be inspired to simplify the way you organize your photos and/or reduce the time taken or tedium to give more time to be creative.

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

Creating a PhotoImpression for the final patch

My final entry for the patch, was a photomosaic of all my weekly entries over the year. There are several photomosaic programs around, andreamosaic is a good one which is free to download. To the best of my knowledge there is not a photoshop add-in/filter that can make this type of collage. I have developed my own technique, I call the results photoimpressions, and I have used a variety of software to prepare the image but use a wonderful little utility called mosaic creator to construct the actual mosaic, it has a free trail, a lite and a pro version. The pro version is reasonably priced and gives you the ability to create you own patterns (tile tessellations) and ability to produce enormous mosaics, but would still I recommend you try it first.

The basis of my approach is I am trying to think of colour and composition as an artist might when confronted by a blank canvas. So the first step is like the composition sketch. Not all images are suited to creating a mosaic, you need a strong composition, with a good mix of positive and negative shapes. I often do this step with monochrome versions of the photos.


The next step is to prepare all the tile images, which I usually
put in a separate sub-directory (so they are easy to load) and reduce the resolution (about twice the resolution of the size on the final mosaic, this save time and disk space). I also like to control the colours in the palette of tiles. In this case last week’s theme was contrasting colours so I wanted to stick with strong primary colours. The entries through the year are a wide variety of colours, so I decided to run them through a variety of post processes. rather than use the saturation slider, which can make images look very lurid I have instead used the vibrancy sliders in lightroom to simply enhance and/or suppress colours. Alternatively I used some OnOne presets for lightroom to limit the image to a single primary colour.



The final step, like any mark making by any artist, is very important to conveying your style and intention. I particularly like mosaic creator because I can use a range of tile shapes (as long as the make a regular tessellation). Different shapes create different textures and can have a big impact on the final image appeal. To help strength the lorikeet I have also opted to have gaps between my shapes (simple puzzle pieces) and have the original image showing through the gaps. Also in this case because I only have a limited number of images I had to choose reuse duplicates of the images, and ensure that they are not use too close together, rather than have then used once and resulting in a  very course mosaic, Finally I wasn’t happy with my first few trials, so i ended up converting the lorikeet image to a posterized image with only a few version of the R G B colours (I used paint.net for this). This helped to keep the final colours “cleaner” Then I chose to sample both the toning and colour during the mosaic creation step.

You will need to zoom in to recognized the individual patch entries

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.

An insight into (unobtainable) beauty

This story and blog project called Before & After by Ester Honig, a journalist has done the rounds on various social media (I found the original links through Google+). Much has been made about the cultural significance of how beauty is conceived, I feel this might have been overplayed and stereotypically discussed so I will jump over all of that and bring the focus back on using photo post processing to create unobtainable extremes in the name of beauty (or trickery)

 

Ester’s Objective was -

“In the U.S. Photoshop has become a symbol of our society's unobtainable standards for beauty. My project, Before & After, examines how these standards vary across cultures on a global level.”

Have a look at the results and see if you agree with me. Some of wonderful, gorgeous tweaking and enhancement of  natural potential. Others are clearly over the top and not appealing. The underlying issue is how can we tell what is authentic? When most people believe every photo captures reality how long will it take for them to become very cynical. How will this effect the perception of those that want to use post processing to be creative rather than for trickery?