Colourful Shades of Grey

I have been working on a new photo impression series of wildlife, and have been working on ways to bring the process closer to the way and artist might create the image. In particular I wanted to achieve a characteristic Australian colour scheme, but at the same time keep the colours to a harmonious scheme an artist might choose. I began using an old favourite utility from big huge labs, called colour palette generator. This take a photo, analyses the colours and produces a harmonious set of colours based on that photograph. I did this for all the images I am contemplation turning to mosaics and discovered that all the images shared 5 shades of grey, a mid grey, a light grey, a blue grey, a warm grey & and olive grey. I then used another favourite software tools called Just Color Picker, Which allows you to point to any group of pixels in an image on screen and displays its code in a variety of formats: HTML, RGB, HEX, HSB/HSV and HSL. It was the RGB codes that I would use later. At this point I made notes of the contrasting and complimentary colours which are displayed in the lower panel of just color picker. Just to make sure the colours worked I then made a series of watercolour & pen compositional sketches, to give myself more confidence that these automated colour tools where not leading me astray, and that the 5 shades of gray where in fact a good foundation for the colour scheme of my photo mosaicing process.My next task was to generate my palette of tiles that both followed this colour scheme and also complimented the texture within my photos. I was again using Apophysis, a free fractal flame generator project, which has the facility to control both the flames shapes, and thus texture and also the tonal gradient, and colour scheme. I made up 75 fractal flamed coloured tiles using 5 sets using backgrounds based the 5 shades of grey with 5 rotations of the patterns using 3 tonal gradients that used complimentary colour schemes.The final step was to use mosaic creator, which is a very powerful mosaicing tools, that can create a mosaic based on a source photos using a palette of other images (my file library shown below). For this series I choose to use a random grout (a visible gap between tiles) based on a colour enhanced version of the source photo.

Spiraling into Divine Composition

I need to begin this discussion by making a strongly held point, that most people intrinsically know good composition and will probably do better than say “the rule of thirds” or similar composition “rules”, just using their eye. However I must admit I have been having a bit of fun trying figure out why the Fibonacci Spiral (its called the Golden Spiral in Lightroom) might be a composition aid? The ratio behind the fibonacci series is roughly 1.618, so it doesn’t neatly cut a shape into one third two thirds but it is close. so I have heard this gold number referred to as the rule of thirds on steroids.  More importantly it has been known to artists as the Divine Proportion since the renaissance, and often used unwittingly by artists and architect before that.


I have found two ways to use the spiral as a guide. Firstly using the inner focus of the spiral to target the main point of interest (the ducks head in this example). So you need to toggle the orientation of the spiral overlay (using <shift> O repeatedly in Lightroom. Alternatively I have found the outer arc of the spiral a good place to line up strong contrast changes, letting them follow the sweeping curve (not shown here). While this second approach doesn’t draw your eye to a specific focus point but it does guide your eye around the image, in a pleasing way. The android app ProCapture has an onscreen Fibonacci spiral to aid composition, which is also fun on the phone because you see it as you are taking the photo..

Many Mistresses but Master of None

For the past couple of years, I have been dithering over which is the “best” photo management software to use. I have been a big fan of Picasa since I first downloaded it but I also have had the software supplied with my cameras (all good but unfortunately not universally appealing) I’ve also got Windows Live Photo Gallery running it on a few computers, and I have Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Elements on my “photography” computer  (I have never actually got enthusiastic enough to outlay on the cost of Photoshop). On my old laptop I still have an original version of Corel Photobook (which I still like).  I also have Corel Painter, with a Wacom tablet and  CorelDraw Creative suite X6, (mainly for its illustration capabilities) and its Corel Photo-Paint is a favorite for “special” editing needs, especially its smart carver & clip mask. Then there is a whole menagerie of special tools (picturenaut, autostitch, mosaic creator,geosetter, noiseware and not to forget paint.NET), Just in case I also have Portable Gimp and XnView on my USB Portable apps key and adobe photoshop express and aviary apps on my android phone. I have a great collection of photo utilities but I suspect they are getting the better of me, I often find myself following one processing path only to realize I might have been better going a different route.

The two packages picasa and lightroom are my definitely favorites because they are both non-destructive editing systems. They leave the original untouched, and instead of adjusting the pixels in the image itself, they store the process that is used to edit the photo and can reproduce the exact same result again whenever the photo is viewed or printed.. Picasa is great in its easy of loading new photos and scanning through load of photos its fast and has nice basic editing tools (cropping,straightening and “light” exposure controls. Windows Live Photo gallery is also fast but it not transparent in how it edits photos and where it puts the originals, it is not as obviously non-destructive and has fallen from favour. I’m also a fraction worried (ok quiet worried) that google will strangle the life out of a nice mature package like picasa as they rebadge and social network it into just a google photo product . The new Lightroom is really a better way to edit RAW files and has a more serious editing features, However it is really slow to load in a lot of RAW photos, painfully slow even in the 64 bit version. Thus I tend to load everything into picasa, review it and tag what I like and only take a small subset into Lightroom. My biggest hassle is remembering, did I do the adjustments in Lightroom or Picasa or both! The really annoying issue is that neither program can (or deliberately wants to) see the adjustment they other has made. Or was it a special edit in Corel Photo-Paint or a final cleanup in noiseware?  Keeping track of all the foibles of this many mistresses is not as easy as it might appear, but it would be nice if they at least talk to each other, and stop the gossip of who’s prettier or a better housekeeper.

So am I going to settle down and just choose one system, one workflow and ignore the rest. I doubt it, vive la différence.

Eagle's Nest

Golden Horizon

A 10 photo series were taken as a few late afternoon rays of sunshine, lit up the reeds along the lower reaches of the Tarwin River, to create a golden horizon. Then stitched together into a single panorama with Autostitch.

PhotoFriday :: Blue Horizon

A bit of déjà vu, One Horizon in a 9 Photo Collage.
For PhotoFriday‘s topic On the Horizon

PhotoProject :: Always Handy

Continuing Yesterday's mobile abstraction challenge. This time all steps, shot, edit & share, all performed on my phone.

TextFilters over CameraPhone Images

These found abstractions of the same sculpture outside the monash gallery of art where taken with three different camera phones. I was thoroughly enjoying the experimental mobile photography workshop with Misho Baranovic, especialy the Shoot,Edit,Share message. Whilst the photowalk task was to take a background texture and overlay it over a subject, all on the phone. I tried a few Aviary filters, on my android, and they remined me of the Alchemy add on to corel paint.. Thus I have cheated by uploading my images to a computer and doing the text-brush filter on the computer, not the phones, but I like the result,

PhotoProject :: Self Reference, Self Portrait 3 CameraPhones

This self referencing attempt was more challenging than I have envisage, and less successful than I hoped. Primarily because of the degeneration of the image on the phone screen as it was photographed by the next phone. I’m still not sure if this is a limit with the marco capabilities of the phones or the difficulty they have focusing on the image on an LCD screen (my preferred explanation). The exercise also highlights how differently each phone handles white balance (seen as colour cast shift between screens).

So here is a semigraphic storyboard of how it was done

		My old Noika did not actually take this image but it was very much part of the original self-portrait
		My Android Wildfire was then used to take a photo of the Nokia, with the original self-portrait displayed
		A borrowed IPhone was then used to photograph the Wildfire with the photo it had just taken. I must admit I had immense troubles getting the iPhone to focus
		All I I had to do to finish was use my Pentax to photograph the iPhone. Simple really.

Happy River Gum

River Gum on the edge of Dandenong Creek enjoying the regular rainfull this year.

Windy Small World

A cormorant sheltering from the wind has been polar transformed with Photoshop Elements, to create a windy tiny planet.

HDR from one RAW Photo?

I took this photo as a juxtaposition of the linear abstractions of industrial might versus the tenacity of the living world. It is also ideal to demonstrate some of the advanced tone mapping that be easily carried out on a single RAW file. Tone mapping is normally associated with HDRi techniques, which take the tonal ranges from a set of separate exposures. However much of this tonal detail can be recovered from the details in a RAW file.

I love the new controls for tonal adjustments in Lightroom 4, they give very good controls over the overall tonal scale. Some folk like to use the histogram, you can just click in the region of the histogram graph you want to adjust and just stretch it left or right.  I prefer to use the tonal sliders found in the Basic tools under the develop panel. I also use clarity and vibrancy under the presence section lower down in the basic tools. Importantly you can also avoid “clipping”, which is adobes term for when a pixel value is adjusted to either the maximum shadow (black) or absence of shadow (white). The loss of details in these “clipped” regions are a common give-away for and over-cooked post-processing of digital photos. You want to stretch the histogram so it just touches the ends, but not stretch so much the graph builds up at the ends (in which case the small triangle above end of the histogram can be clicked to show (in red) the area of this clipping and loss of details.

A very interesting alternative, is to use a new kid on the block from almalence (who also developed the HDR Camera app). The process is incredibly simple, you just drop and drag a photo to the hdRAW program and it generates a series of presets that apply a number of conventional tone mapping algorithms (see screen capture below). I like the “natural” preset which is based on Reinhard‘s tonemapping algorithm , which I felt most closely matches what I saw when I took the photo. Clicking on the selected image takes you a larger preview and a few sliders for further adjustments.This natural preset is close to my little tweaks on the tone slides in Lightroom.

By the way, taking multiple photos at different bracketed exposure settings definitely gives you more information on the full dynamic range. Unfortunately I hadn’t taken such a set of photos in this case.The big advantage being able to get close to this extended range from a single photo, so that moving objects are not ghosted and its much easier to post-process.

Now you see it, Now you don’t

 
The late afternoon storm, bought dark skys and a few glimpses of sunlight (and rainbows). I took the opportunity to try out my recently "refound" polarizing filter (it is an old filter from film days, and often used back then, but it had been hiding from me for a while). Turn the filter through 90 degrees, took the rainbow from maximum intensity to almost impossible to see.

More Low Light HDR

I most admit working with long exposures and movement was fun.

There was a great downpour just before the sunset yesterday, and the lights of city traffic where making great reflections of the wet roadway. So why not try some HDR, the movement of course, makes it very difficult to properly register the images. However my android HDR Camera+ app actually did a good job (see image to the right).  Almalence have developed their own HDR algorithms for precise alignment and moving objects handling.

I have this app settings to keep the three bracketed exposure so I was also able to try out how well luminance and picturenaut could handle the movement. Quiet well it appears (albeit with some distinct colour casts, see images below reproduced here for those that want to tut tut at the lurid colours). Both picturenaut and luminace have auto registration and ghost removal features, and many more tone mapping features but I personally prefer the in phone processed image from HDR Camera+

Abstraction via Long Exposure with Movement

I visited an interesting exhibition on Photographic Abstraction current on at the Monash Gallery of Art. What struck me most was the wide range of approaches and techniques and yet how strongly they followed photographic traditions. Then the realization that I had taken many similar photos as experiments, textural context and possibly specifically with a screen wallpaper in mind. Just last week I in fact played around with the idea of taking a very long exposure but moving the camera during the last part of the exposure. The image below is taken on a dark night, with a couple of house lights in the distance, Using a 30 second exposure I moved the camera to point at a street light (just off the original aspect). Resulting is some superimposed horizontal stripes of light in an abstract composition.

PhotoFriday :: [Not] Summer Colour

Its a little hard at the moment to take summer colour photos down here in Australia, because it is still winter. However something that look a lot like summer colour are our wattle, with bright yellow flashes on display whereever a bit of bush survives. This wattle is our national emblem and is probably the origin of the "green & gold" colours for our sporting and olympic teams.

For photofriday's topic summer colour