Why is a Defringing Tool so useful.

Tonight’s full moon was the classic harvest moon colouring, an orange yellow, even though its late spring here. I’m guessing its all the dust and pollen in the air. So I grabbed my telephoto and took a few exposures hoping to get something decent (most just showed a bleached out disk, the rest had those distracting purple halos.)

There is a new set of sliders in Lighroom 4.2, under the Development Module, there has been a Remove Chromatic Aberration section for a while, way down the bottom of the panel under Lens Correction section. These sliders now give some much easier to use tools to deal with those annoying colour halos and fringes that often show up in many photos, especially in backlight subjects or high contrast areas, low f-stops (fast lenses) and high ISO sensitivity.Tings like the moon and the sun are classic cases as they are much brightyer than the sky around them.  In the Lightroom jargon these halos are grouped under the term a colour fringe, and thus defringing just means removing these colour artifacts.

Unfortunately the way my screen capture works I can not show you  the eye dropper in action, but the tool is very easy to use. You just click on the eyedropper in the Remove Chromatic Aberration panel and the cursor becomes an eyedropper with an associate panel that shows the fringe colour you have picked, by pointing the cursor/eydropper at the part of the halo you want to remove. This then automatically sets the individual sliders in the colour Chromatic Aberration sub panel, that deal with specific colour halo ranges and in most instances does a fine job of removing the colour halos  The slides do let you control which colours to want to remove from the halo and the two markers on each of the purple Hue & Blue Green Hue sliders can be used to set the range of colours you want removed, move them apart to remove the colour halo and “heals” the fringe around the subject. In this case the moon had a purplish rim (it may look red but it is more a purple hue.). I actually tweaked the sliders a little ;lift the strength of the puirple correction.It not perfect, the edge is still a little fuzzy but it is a decent image now.

Instagram Workshop :: Lesson 1

My little post yesterday didn’t include one very important point about Instagram. It uses only square crops! However when you are used to 3:4 and landscape formats the square is somewhat constraining and particularly how you tackle composition does require a rethink. Misho’s suggestion to center the subject and keep the background simple were a great start, but this still left me plenty of room to experiment.

Instagram Workshop :: Lesson 2

This was probably an incidental side lesson, but misho’s approach to adding text captions onto a series definitely helps viewers see the actual story behind his photos (see #wvaindia in Misho’s instagram photostream). This inspired me to think about using a series of photos to tell a story. Here I am using a panorama format to tell two stories of the day. Above is a time series collage of a lesson in Bollywood style dancing. Below is an "interactive" panorama of a multi-image sequence telling a few glimpses of the story of people taking in different aspects of art in the park (click to view and use your mouse to navigate around or click on the play triangle to see a 3D-like slideshow


Who says a photographer shouldn’t be a story teller?

Alternatives to Instagram?

I am booked into a Instagram workshop with Misho Baranovic  a being held as part of Monash Gallery of Art, Art in the Park Day. One prerequisite is that you download the instagram app to your phone, which sounded easy enough! However I ran into a catch 22 situation, both my wildfire and my wife’s iphone use older version of software and the new instagram app will not download to either (without upgrading the operating system). Damn because earlier I had down loaded a previous android version for my wildfire, but soon after testing it, I deleted it and my instagram account. So rather than risking grief on the phones I figured I’d just use instagram via the web BUT you can now only register by using the apps on your phone so I’m locked out now. No matter I don’t mind being away from the popular “must have” and “look at me too” crowd and I have found I usually learn much more in the long run by finding my way around such constraints. So what are the alternatives for me to using instagram?

A quick google search of “Alternatives to Instagram” yields a lot options, and a lot are very anti-facebook, or just anti-apple-verse. The article by Adam Dachis of Life Hacker, covers the angst between the ios fan boys, android-ites and the facebook-haters , with some decent alternatives, both for apple and android. This PC World Slideshow gives some sound alternatives for android users. I quickly grew weary of the opinionated outpourings in many of the other articles and was surprised how little investigation or discussion into what makes instagram so popular. My conclusion is instagram just makes it easy to share photos to the web and its photo filters can help make something boring a bit more zanny! Am I selling instagram short?

So what do I really need to prepare for the, probably nothing, because I already have these capabilities on my phone.. One important aspect of a previous misho workshop was the 3 step work flow on cameraphones 1.Shoot, 2.Edit,3. Share message, and instagram does fit this approach. So my best preparation is probably just to make sure I have these steps covered. The final share step is the big one, clearly i can not upload to the instagram site but I have been uploading to shared sites for a while now and flickr is probably the easiest (not that i have been using it a lot) offering a good range of ways to upload from mobile phones. Albeit with just the fancy filters, with iconoc city names. For the edit step I prefer aviary, for my android, and whilst I only use it occasionally it does have some decent filters and editing features. The shoot step is obvious. I’ll find out tomorrow if I am prepared enough!

Cloning away the unwanted

Clone Tool is an unlikely name for a photo retouching tool, but it is the best way to remove blemishes of unwanted detail from a photo. It works by letting you pick up the another part of the picture and paste it into a different location (usually via a fixed offset. Most decent photo editors (I exclude phone apps which don’t routinely have an equivalent to a clone tool) will have clone tools (it may sometimes be called retouch, blemish removal or even a rubber stamp) and it is probably one tool you should learn to use, but with restraint. The basic operation is to select the clone tool, pick the point you want copied and the select the area you want it copied to  You can the generally move the paste point and the copy point will follow, click the mouse and paste tis new image will be copied. Its quiet natural once you get the hang of it, However if you are copying a lot of textured background you can end up with obvious repeating patterns if you are not careful so it pays to alter the relationship between your source and destination points from time to time and perhaps even the size to the section being copied. In this case I have used the clone tool in Corel photo-paint because I can control the size and type of brush How you set the source area, destination,etc varies a lot in the software so you will need to read the help, or the manual and practice a little. That skill can come in very handy from time to time, like now for me I like the photo of the bush turkey but not the wire fence.
 
A couple of minutes of cloning and the fence has gone. A little tweak of clarity and vibrance to 'lift" the final image.

Autofix Revisited

Its been a long time since I looked at autofix features in software, mostly because I consider them a feature or button that takes up valuable screen space. However I had a prompt to revisit this concept after I noticed a nifty light weight app call Color Leap on the google play site (for android phones). Its claims that “true photo enhancement was never so easy.” seemed a bit extravagant and in need of testing. I have noticed cameraphones have particular limitations when they are pointed towards the light, and particular contrasty backlit subjects. They are often hazy,having flared highlights and underexposed detail, they just look flat!  Well Color leap promises to do 4 common enhancement without any user intervention, no buttons with weird names no sliders. promises to remove under and over exposure, fix problems like smoke, haze and dirty lens smears, reduce “colour” noise in low light conditions and even sharpen objects that are “slightly” out of focus. So it was out with my HTC Wildfire and off to get a few examples. I’m sure I could have taken worse photos, but I just wanted to take some realistic examples and I used my phone’s basic camera so I had an original reference photo (you can also take the photo directly in colour leap) I then processed each “on the phone” from the gallery using the color leap app which is truly as simple and automatic as claimed, with the option to view both the original and processed result using a toggle key overlay at the bottom of the screen. I finally loaded the originals onto my computer and used Picasa’s I’m feeling lucky and Lightroom’s Auto White Balance/Auto Tone Combination. So the verdict:  clearly all the Autofixes offer some improvement but as to which is good, better or best is a more objective judgment.

Original	Color Leap	Picasa/Google+	Lightroom

Whilst I actually seldom use the Autofix features of my software I would like to suggest that as you are learning your own style of photo processing it doesn’t hurt to “have a quick look” at these best automatic attempt at “enhancement” and then do better with your own little tweaks. If you are just looking to quickly upload your photos to instagram, twiitter or facebook maybe color leap will get you there without much effort and no manual to read or complex controls to remember.

PhotoProject :: Stay at Home Eclipse

The total eclipse this morning saw a hoard of photographers heading for Cairns and Port Douglas. Although I would have liked to be with them I was committed to being in Melbourne, which only got a partial eclipse. However this was an opportunity to expand on the telescope image projection technique, I have used back during the Transit of Venus Project in June this year. The method involves using a conventional telescope to focus the image of the sun projected onto a screen behind it. It worked particularly well to capture the partial eclipse, see sequences of images above, which I’m sure would have gone undetected by most in Melbourne despite the cloudless conditions.

As anyone with a decent telescope will know the tricky part is finding the object you want to observe. Under any decent magnification, the sky is a huge place. This is made even trickier because you must never look at the sun directly at any time and especially not through a telescope, so using the small siting scope is out. Then I had a brilliant realization, a bit like in the movie “The Dish”" when they were trying to locate the tiny Apollo 11 in the vastness of space!! (I won’t spoil the plot if you haven’t seen the movie yet, it is worth it). Well I realized I just needed to orient the shadow of the telescope so the barrel just became a circle and was thus pointing directly at the sun. All too easy and no looking directly at the sun required! A few minor tweaks where still required to ensure the projected image of the moving sun stayed roughly on the screen.

No Photos!! Windows Live & Blogger no longer good friends

I was surprised to get this message when I tried to upload a blogger post I had prepared in windows live (as I often do), The error number 500 and description as an Internal server error didn't make a lot of sense and  I just found dead ends searching on Google & Bing but notice a few others have noted similar problems, particularly when loading pictures. So I tried uploading a windows live post with and without an image and clearly the error relates to loading images (mine are loaded via picasa web).

So does anyone have an explanation? Is it problems/changes in picasa web (ie google+ification of the place) or is something broken in windows live writter?

Using the blogger,com web tools to upload pictures is a viable work around for now. But....

Noosa Nights

Available light of the moon reflected on Laguna Bay

Little Rays of Sunshine

After a few overcast days, the sun is shining between the well needed rain showers.

Rainforest Ferns Wallpaper

Rainforest Ferns Wallpaper, originally uploaded by imageo.

An experiment in de constructing a photo using lightroom, corel painter and a wacom bamboo tablet., to sample colours and some textures from a photo but interpreting them are different brush strokes.

Sculptural Garden

The maroochy bushland botanical gardens has a wonderful sculptural garden, with many works my contemporary international sculptors, all beautiful situated in natural setting.

 

This work, “the Passage”, by Jean_Paul Chablais is very impressive, made in Sandstone and tallow wood, from a tree that was felled to make room for the carpark. Unfortunately after its commissioning it developed a serious flaw and cracked. Rather than try to repair it the artist wanted the parts used separately, the small pool below the broken piece, shown below, now attract wonderful birds.

 

 

 

Water Under the Bridge

I’m positive this is all natural straining, but can you see the semi-stylized horse image? Somewhat reminiscent the animals in the Spanish Cave Paintings, it is developing on the wall under the Tooway Creek Bridge, at Moffat’s Beach. Water on the bridges is obviously leaching out calcium, salt and some iron but the black oxide straining is very typical of all the exposed rocks along the coast here and I suspect it maybe manganese and possibly has an algal or bacterial component. Whatever the staining is it is it is creating a pretty remarkable piece of art.

Dust Devil in the Detail

I wrote long ago about DSLR’s “dirty little secret”, dust on the sensor. Back in the film days and dust on the film plane generally stuck on the film and “ruined” just a single image. However in a digital camera dust on the sensor just sits there and leads to blemishes on frame after frame. Dust tends not to be a problem in compact cameras and cameraphones because they are sealed, but an SLR that takes different lens has a mechanical mirror that simply sits in front of the sensor and when the the lens is being changed the internal parts of the camera including the sensor behind the mirror are effetely open to the environment. Dust or fine sand particles, even insects can easily find their way to the sensor and because the sensor is frequently charged up and discharges as it records images and small statically charged particles are frequently attracted and stick to the sensor. So first rule is obviously not change lenses in a sand storm, or even a breezy day, or at least be careful. I take my cameras into a lots of hostile environments and I’m convinced with care and cleanliness in handling you will be fine but dust can suddenly turn up at the least expected times. Sometimes it is very obvious, like the dark shadow on the image below, and sometimes it is more subtle, like the fainter shadow on the left.

Some Cameras, like my Pentax which took the above photo, have special mechanisms that shake the mirror and this can be set to be operated manually or automatically at start up. Others like my canon have a feature that lets you photograph a plain white, or near white background, then detects dust marks and gives you the opportunity to remove then from the image beginning captured. Nice enough features but  still think that being able to manually cleans the sensor is the best option. [I must add a disclaimer here that may just be an urban myth, or worse a ranson-ware style fear campaign. There are lots of posts on camera and photographic sites that warn that manual cleaning a sensor may void a camera’s warranty. So check you cameras manual before you fork out a lot on having your camera “cleaned”] The procedure is pretty safe but requires the camera having a set up feature that will lift the mirror (both the Pentax and the canon have this feature). It is important that this next step is performed carefully, you simply need to use a gentle air stream to blow over the face of the sensor and carefully blow off the small particles. The sooner you get the dust of the easier it will be shift. Never use a brush or cloth on the surface of the sensor, Just a few simple puffs that direct a gentle airflow over the sensor is generally all that is needed. I have an old style lens blower brush and I simply remove the brush and use the blower by itself. but you can buy special compressed gas sprayers specially designed to clean cameras and lens if you want to spend a little extra. If you camera can be cleaned in this way you should find sufficient detail of the best procedure to do it in your camera manual.

I also posted earlier that the best way to check for dust on the sensor is just to take a few pictures of a clear blue sky, I still think this is a superior method than taking a picture of an evenly illuminated light surface, as recommended in many photographic websites and books, because the subtle small dust shadows are much harder to see. Sometimes the dust can be on the lens (or within the lens elements) but this produces a much more defuse shadow and frequently has give away lens flares associated with them. External dust on lens can be removed with the same gently blower methods but internal dust and dirt within the lens does require skilled specialist cleaning

Even when there is a horrible big shadow on you best ever digital photo, all is not lost. There are lots of tools around to “retouch” blotches and spot that are perfect to remove these blemishes. If you software doesn’t specifically mention dust look for a clone tool. These usually have two small circular zones, the first read whatever is with the circle and the pastes it over in the second circle So all you need to do is locate the first circle over and un-blemished bit of photo close to the dust particle that has the same colour, tone & texture and then position the second circle over the dust spot, click the mouse and the blemish is gone The catch is they are usually often very manual tasks and take some time to do well. So its much better to keep your sensor clean.

Bushfire Sunset

It has been unseasonally dry in southern Queensland and the bush is a tinderbox with several fires burning through the ranges. Even in adversity there can sometimes be beauty.
For PhotoFriday‘s topic Change of Season

The Glass House Mountains

Kookaburra sunbathing

Its been very hot and after a quick "birdly bath" in a rock pool this kookaburra sat and dried his feathers in the last of the days sun.