Colour Composition - complimentary colours

Complimentary colours, those on opposite sides of the colour wheel generally make for an interesting composition.

Color Matters is an excellent site to brush on some of the basics of colour theory

YELLOW colour #photoassignment

I want to photograph something strongly yellow in my home. However most of the candidates I've photographed before.  Hmm. Suddenly it was after dark and this jaunty metal cockatoo was the only yellow thing I could see.

Still he takes an ok photo.

Sunrise

Mucking around in boats :: Yellow Dawn

A Golden Sunset

A little late

I visited Alfred Nicholas Garden late last week, seeking some autmn colour, but I was a little late. One exception was this magnificent gingko tree down beside the lake

What I am looking for from HDR

Its a very overcast day after yesterday’s strong wind but with that calm before a storm feel. Not an exciting time to take a few photographs (yet). What I did notice was a new yellow rose had a few buds about to flower but had been very dried by the winds so I gave them a light spray of water and took a couple of bracketed photos of the new buds.

The close up simple composition gives me a great opportunity to compare three of the HDR programs I have used recently, and specifically to discuss what I like to use the HDR Technique to do. I have written a fair bit about HDR. However few people realize how often I use it. I think that is because I am just trying to create an image as I remember the scene, rather that what the camera recorded. The images above are all a bit dark, but that usually doesn't matter within the HDR process. If I was to process just one image I would choose the one on the right and lighten it a little and increase the contrast. Since I have a RAW file that would be simple.

 

However here are alternative ways to process these photos

Picturenaut

This was my go to program for a long while because it was easy to use, free and could process RAW files (which I reasoned gave the HDR process more dynamic range to work with). Importantly for someone that usually hand holds while taking the bracketed set, it has a decent alignment correction. The ghosting (removing ghost from people or things that moved between exposures) work for small movement but my experience was it could misbehave so I only used it when I saw obvious ghosting without it. I also found that it would often need the EV setting of the images updates (ie they would often just all read EV=0). In the table beside each file used.

 
The HDR image (which can be saved) is very dark like my original photos but when I select Tone Mapping I generally select adaptive logarithmic method and accept the default settings and save it was a .tiff file. Preferring to then finish the result in either Lightroom or OnOne.

 

AfterShot HDR

When the HDR was added to aftershot in version 2 I became an immediate convert. It is also handles alignment (mostly ok). It also handled RAW files (unfortunately version 3 of aftershot Pro does not pass raw files nicely into the HDR merge program, so I must maintain a Version 2 copy just to do HDR) and it is vary easy to set up you just select the files you wish to use and then right click and select to Edit With AfterShot HDR\Exposure Merge

 
The ghosting has to be fixed by masking away the ghosts you don’t want (on specific images) which can be a little tedious but can be much better controlled than the automatic methods. Again the aligned image looks very dark. However when you process the three images into one the image generally looks much better exposed (its not magic the dynamic range is being stretched to fit the image)

 

I have the presets turned off and generally only make some minor tonal adjustments. My preference is to add a little contrast and deepen the midtones and/or shadows. In AfterShot there is an extra step where there are as a number of basic edits to finish the image but again I prefer to save the resulting photo as a .tiff file and then do my finish in Lightroom or OnOne.

Nik Efex HDR Pro

Whilst I’ve had Nik software since google offered it for free download. I was a little slow to try out the HDR merge features. I have been working through the various screen via the rather big collection of presets. To my taste a lot of these are just hideous, those strong halos around constraty edges and super crunchy detail and lurid colours are off putting. Still I like enhanced colours and a little extra contrast so I can see a few presets that are getting me close to the nature feel I am looking for. These include default, balanced, Soft Colour and soft Landscape presets. Nik Efex HDR needs to be run from Lightroom and it has to be started a little differently to other plug-ins. Instead of the normal Edit In option, you have to export the photos to Efxex HDR  Pro via a specific option in the export menu (shown on the right). Lightroom does take a little time to prepare these exports.

 

I am still experimenting with how to do minimal tonal adjustments, but already have discovered that I need to slow down the drama (mostly) and often experiment with structure which is a bit like lightroom clarity and OnOne’s dynamic contrast. Again I prefer to save the .tIff image at this stage and do the tonal finish in lightroom. Perhaps with a little more practices I’ll gain more confidence. For the moment Nik’s Efex HDR pro remains an interesting diversion rather than a go to tool.

In the end I choose the Aftershot Pro .tiff image as having the closest to my feelings looking at the water droplets on the new buds. I finished this in OnOne 10 using the perfect eraser to get rid of the hole in the petal and a small curl of another bud below left, crop in a bit and add my favourite big softy vignette to bring the rose forward from the background a little more.

All of these steps take considerably longer than just processing a single image but I tend to think the extra time spent is worthwhile and creates a stronger and more real image.

PhotoProject :: Seeing More

This is my second project on seeing.

This time the task is it pick something photographed before and re-photograph it from a different perspective, that could be up close, a significantly different perspective as from above, using a different camera, or your phone, or ipad, use  different lens, wide angle or telephoto, make the subject out off focus, under expose or over expose, find a simple geometry as a composition … take between 10-20 variations.

I’ve taken this bowl of artificial flowers a couple of times already this year, mainly because of the lighting and shadows. So I’m trying to avoid repeating this and not follow this to closely, but still see flowers and colour as well as some geometrical views of the pot to make interesting composition. Take at least 10 and then compare them as thumbnails. The one experiment I do like most was the close up free lensing (taking the photo with the lens unattached), top left.

The secret here is to forget the subject or more specifically the name of the object, and look for interesting details and perspectives.   This photo might normally be a reject because the strong vignetting at the top (a natural consequence of the lens detached and slightly tilted, yet in this photo is helps define a more abstract composition. Whilst still a recognizable flower it is the folds and colour that are what you first see. The objective here is to see something new and original.

Comfortably Numb

Yellow Orchid II

A photo posted by norm hanson (@apimageo) on Aug 19, 2016 at 4:56pm PDT

 

The Pink Floyd song (my I am showing my age) comfortably numb (I prefer the Van Morison cover) contains the lyrics

There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb

This nicely summaries how I feel about uploading to on-line services, on the go. Once upon a time I thought I had it figured out but that is now just a smudge on the horizon. On my recent trip I totally lost confidence in google (and using picasa to upload to google “Private” photo albums, By the way, If you share a photo or photo album on google it is no longer private, just the weird address will be hard to guess). The waves of change are confusing and too often surreal like someone talking but no sound a kind of metaphysical painting in a very still piazza. I can feel/see something happening but it is hard to comprehend and where it is going. Thus I am shrinking back on the number of ways and places I try to share my work. DropBox for private shares, Flickr & Instagram for public shares with the occasional Tumblr. I am well over the pain of change and things not working or being deprecated, I just want to be Comfortably Numb.

http://myscratchings.tumblr.com/post/149207230105/test-2

 

PS All three versions of these flowers where processed on and posted from my phone.

PhotoFriday :: Blossom

Hibiscus in the Sunshine

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Blossom

PhotoFriday :: Yellow

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Yellow

First signs of spring

The flush of bright yellow on the wattles, is a sure sign winter is coming to an end

PhotoFriday :: Sunrise

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Sunrise

Yellow Spires

The Patch :: A bit of Green & Gold

This weeks the patch theme is your colours & celebration, which would normally suggests sporting club colours for an Australian, we are deep in the "real" football session at the moment, but I felt the our national sporting colours, green and gold would be a better choice, not that I'm following the soccer. I think the hockeyroos did good. In the back of my mind I remember that the colours are derived from the wattle, which does start to bloom this time of year, so I went in search of some and managed to find one brave young tree just starting to bloom. There are plenty of buds on the older trees so the bush should be a glow with yellow over the next few weeks.

The story of how these colours became official and in the public domain is interesting,

PhotoFriday :: The Lemon

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Simplicity

Yellow Moon

The full moon is not so much a harvest moon as just an indication of just how dusty it is out here

Colour & HDR

I took this series of photo after spilling a pile of fish oil tables on a place mate and turning them around I noticed the refraction made for very interesting patterns of light and it wasn’t long before I had shaped the pile into the crude outline of a fish (my love of self reference got the better of me here!). I then waited for see what google+’s auto backup and auto awesome might do. Well it was not so exciting in terms of the stop motion (on the left) but the HDR effort (below left) got me think about controlling colour in HDR in general. So I have run a couple of HDR using the picturenaut tools I am familiar with. the results where pretty amazingly different (shown below). Individually they are all fine but the alteration of the colour is as dramatic as the “contrasty “HDR look””. I have always like the idea of stretching the dynamic range of an image, which is what the HDR technique promises, and I have used it to get closer to what I actually remember seeing at the time. The issue that is very clear to me here is stretching the contrast can significantly impact the colour. In any case this is probably one of the examples where HDR has not added to the impact of the photo I actually much prefer the +0.5 EV (slightly over exposed) unaltered JPEG image (above) anyway

Google+ HDR Details of tone mapping approach unknown?	Picturenaut (all defaults)Using Standard Weighting and Photoreceptor tone mapping (aka Reinhard) with 8 bit jpeg output	Picturenaut (my Approach)Using Mid Weighting, Colour Balancing and Adaptive Logarithmic Tone mapping (aka Drago) with 16 bit tiff output and  a few final tonal tweaks in lightroom

Silky Oaks Golden Crown

  The outburst of yellow florets on the silky oak seem earlier this year and perhaps fuller than usual. Normally the golden flush is in the week leading up to Christmas.

Yet another sunset

Photofriday :: Artifical Light

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Artifical Light