Photodigitary

Photoshop and Over-Processing

Again and again, I see photographs from students, advanced amateurs and even pros that have color that is way out of whack for what looks right in prints, in contests, in critiques and even submissions to publications. This is a real problem. For pros, it will make a lot of editors to return pictures immediately. In contests, these photos are eliminated from competition just as fast.

The problem comes, I think, from the days of colorful prints and slides from film. This was what sold and people wanted these vibrant, though often unrealistic, colors. Still, the photos looked okay. When photographers went digital, they wanted something similar, so they went to Saturation in Hue/Saturation. This is a very heavy handed tool and not something to use right away anyway.

Still, Photoshop was used to over adjust tonalities and colors. It isn’t just colors and saturation, either. When photographers discovered Shadow/Highlight, all of a sudden shadows gained unearthly brightness and the photos gained a Photoshop look (this can happen from any version of Photoshop, Lightroom, or any other image processing program). I have seen way too many strong adjustments that make the pictures look too “effecty.” This isn’t wrong if you are trying to do an illustration, but most of the shots I am talking about were meant to be “real”, not illustrations. This is especially a problem in nature photography when the photographer pushes colors beyond what looks like the real world.

The best way to adjust color is to set your blacks and whites first to give the image some guts for contrast and color, then your mid tones for brightness, then adjust individual colors only as needed with saturation. I have some information on this workflow in videos on my website at www.robsheppardphoto.com. I also cover it completely in my book, The Outdoor Photographer Landscape and Nature Photography with Photoshop CS2.

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HDR and Digital Photography

As I explore High Dynamic Range photography, I find I am really enjoying capturing images of scenes that were difficult to impossible to photograph before. Sensors in cameras just are limited compared to how we see the real world. They can’t always match what we see. By shooting several exposures of the same scene (from a tripod mounted camera), we can combine these exposures into a single image that is much closer to reality (I find Photomatix from HDR Soft, www.hdrsoft.com, works best).

This technology is actually caught a lot of photographers and publications by surprise. Some say such multiple shots is “unfair” and not real photography. Some publications refuse to run photographs that are done this way saying that they are not true photographs but illustrations.

I find this rather silly. As one who studied science in college and worked as a naturalist after that, I want the real world to be in charge of what is true in a photograph and not obsolete technologies or limitations of technology. I recently saw some rather spectacular photographs of Stonehenge in a National Geographic magazine that were shot at night with artificial light. Those photographs had nothing to do with the reality of the world, but everything to do with dramatic technology. Nothing was mentioned in the captions that this was a rather artificial situation.

Yet if a photographer were to present an HDR image to the same publication, the editors there would qualify it as somehow not real or label as an illustration. I have to wonder when editors are going to start to get it about digital photography and that hiding behind old ways of doing things can keep us from seeing the world with fresh eyes and seeing it better.

I had a participant in a recent NANPA Road Show ask about such things, basically wondering when magazines would be more open to digital technology that helped us photograph better, when in fact such publications were perfectly open to any other technology. He was around 30 years old. I told him this would probably happen when baby-boomers of my generation were out of power. Every older generation seems to want to put a lid on those young “whippersnappers” who want to change their way of doing things, and of course they label that younger generation as being unethical and wrong for wanting such change. That is especially ironic given where the baby-boom generation came from in the 1960s.

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Auto White Balance

I just finished doing a new set of critiques for my BetterPhoto.com classes. I consistently see problems with color because of white balance, specifically, using auto white balance.

White balance actually started in the video field. I was using it when doing videos back in the late 1970s. You always had to match your camera to the light, so you would put a piece of white paper in the light and tell the camera to make it neutral. Maybe because I did so much white balancing over the years way before digital photography that this is a part of the craft of photography and I don’t use auto white balance much.

I hear all the stories, how cameras are so much better today in their auto white balance (true), how you can always change white balance when you process RAW (also true, and you can change it for JPEG’s, too, even though a lot of people tell you that you can’t), how it is just easier to use auto white balance, and so forth. Yet I hear no one say that you shouldn’t get the best exposure from the start (even though it can be adjusted somewhat in the computer), or that you shouldn’t think about the best composition as you photograph (compared to cropping the photo later). These are all part of the craft of photography, and I believe, white balance is, too.

Why don’t I like auto white balance? Well, I do on occasion. It is perfect if you are moving among different settings, such as a news photographer might do. Or when the light is hard to figure out. But mostly white balance tends to cause a number of problems. First it can be very inconsistent. You can even photograph a person with the wide setting of a zoom, then the telephoto setting and find the skin color is different in both photos because the camera saw different things in each frame and so white balanced differently. Or you can follow a subject as it moves across a scene and find it changes color because the camera saw different backgrounds and changed the white balance.

Second, the color is often not that great. This is especially true with nature photography. I see this again and again. I see it so much from my workshops and classes that I can almost always look at certain photos and say, “Auto white balance, right?” and the answer is yes. Too often auto white balance shifts the color the wrong way. In nature, color casts are normal, but auto white balance is not set up for nature’s color casts. In addition, colors will shift from image to image even though the light has not changed. As soon as students start using preset or defined white balance, I see a definite improvement in color.

I know, a lot of photographers say this is no big deal because they can change the white balance in Photoshop or Lightroom. There are some problems with that. First, it is a workflow thing. Why should I have to think about changing my white balance? Why shouldn’t I set it right in the first place so it looks good from the start? And if I have to change it, what do I change it to? The list of white balance “settings” you see in Photoshop or Lightroom are not the same as your camera’s settings. They are interpretations of the scene’s colors based on Adobe engineers’ algorithms that examine your photo. The only white balance that is the same as that set by your camera is the way it comes into the program (as set by you). Further, if you have several photos with varied colors due to variation in white balance, which is correct? And if you choose one, you now have to fix the others. There are a number of workflow issues here that increase my work at the computer with AWB (auto white balance) and I am not interested in more work. Finally, AWB usually does a really poor job with sunrise and sunset conditions and gives very weak colors.

It is hard to give specific WB settings to use as cameras are different (even cameras from the same manufacturer when they have different sensors and/or internal processing, which does affect RAW, too). I find that I like my Canon 40D set to Electronic Flash WB for general outdoor shooting, then Shade or Cloudy for those conditions. I find that I can use the Cloudy setting more often for general outdoor shooting for my Olympus E3. Cloudy or Shade settings can add a nice warmth to outdoor shooting, especially for sunrise and sunset, but they can also make certain scenes too yellow. You have to know your gear and what works for you.

The custom or manual WB setting can be a great way to really lock in color, too. You can get a nice warming effect with it by going down to your local paint store or Lowe’s or Home Depot and getting a light blue paint card. White balance on it using the custom setting — the camera removes that blue and warms up the scene!

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Lightroom, Nature, Photoshop | 1 Comment »

Native Plant Gardens For Photography

I have taken part of my yard and turned it into a native plants garden. I have long wanted to do this, so when my wife and I bought this house a year ago, it seemed like the time was now. The yard was just grass and I didn’t want just grass. Grass is high maintenance and requires too much water and other stuff, so I wanted to reduce its size. Now that is actually a big deal since we live in the LA area and lot sizes are small. Still, I also wanted a garden that was drought tolerant, which my natives are.

A native plant garden gives me a lot of great subjects for photography. I work at home much of the time doing books, articles and preparing for classes and workshops. It is easy to take a break, go into my garden and see what is blooming. Then I can grab a camera at any time and take a picture of something interesting. These are true native plants growing in their native conditions, too, as that is the only way I will grow them. I have even done this when I needed a quick illustration of something in a book or for an article. I can shoot it, prepare the image and have it off to a publisher immediately. Plus I have flowers that bloom in the winter, so I have something that can be photographed all year round.

I think there are a lot of interesting things about a native plants garden, besides the obvious that you are using native plants. I think they ground you in your surroundings because what you see in your garden, you connect to in the natural areas of your state. In addition, such a garden reinforces all the plants in ways that you don’t get any other way. I get to know them by name, by shape, by leaves, by flowers, in ways that are hard to do in the field. And of course, I get great subjects that are always available. I am starting to get “wildlife” in, too. Bees and wasps are coming to the flowers, plus I saw a red admiral and a hummingbird this week. As more plants flower, I am sure this will improve, too.

I had a really nice red buckwheat but it seemed to be more interested in growing leaves and stems than flowers, so I ripped it out. I am starting to do some of this sort of work. I have to find the right balance of plants that like my soil and have a good plant structure plus flower when they should! In a way, this also keeps me connected with how ecology works. I see immediately how plants respond to their environment. I am uninterested in forcing a plant to “produce” in my garden. Over the years, a lot of people have liked certain plants, then arbitrarily put them into their yard, regardless if the plant was adapted to it or not. They try to force that plant to do well, even though the plant cannot respond well to that environment. I think a true native plants garden forces you to work with the environment rather than trying to overpower it.

And of course, you get lots of opportunities for photographs!

In California, check out the California Native Plant Society (www.cnps.org). In Southern California, check out the Theodore Payne Foundation (www.theodorepayne.org) and the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden (www.rsabg.org).

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Nature | Comments Off

RAW files and sensor information

I have been working on a simplified digital photography book and am going over the edited text. And I found a common mistake from the technical editor. He said that RAW files capture all of the information from the sensor. This is a very common idea, yet it is misleading at best and incorrect in many cases. It is also a common mistake from the RAW guys who have not actually worked with camera manufacturers. The problem is that it tells you some wrong information about RAW files.

Information from a sensor is analog and is converted into a digital file in what is called the A/D (analog/digital) converter. At this point, the RAW file is changed, both in getting less AND more than the sensor actually captured. It gets less information because analog data is infinite and digital is finite, so some information is lost as it is converted. It gets more information because proprietary processing in the A/D converter will affect noise, color and tonal information, and camera manufacturers are pretty proud of what they do here. Some manufacturers even do something called “preconditioning” where they process the analog data coming from the sensor before it is converted to a digital file, making that signal better.

A JPEG file actually comes from the RAW file. It is not, as is sometimes implied, simply a reduced RAW file with important data thrown out. It actually represents the smart, in-camera, automated processing of a RAW file. Like all automated processing, it has its advantages and disadvantages, but a big advantage is that a photographer doesn’t need to do the processing him or herself.

The point of RAW is that you get a whole lot more information to work with when processing a photo. A JPEG file ends up with 256 levels of tonal information, while a RAW file has over 4,000. Now if you don’t do much to that RAW file, those 4000+ levels are meaningless, because our visual system doesn’t need them to see a good digital photo. However, that 256 number is close to our minimum. So if you start making some big changes to your original image, you can lose those steps, which can reduce the quality of your photo (as long as those steps are needed for the image).

With RAW files, you gain a huge amount of flexibility. You can work hard to bring the most from an image in a program like Camera RAW or Lightroom and get excellent results. You can pull more detail out of dark and light areas. If you need this capability, JPEG will never suffice.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Equipment thoughts | Comments Off

Image stabilization and tripods

I just returned from a NANPA (www.nanpa.org) Road Show where I did the digital photography sessions. One program I do is called Better Digital Photography … Guaranteed. And I got a common question, What about image stabilization and tripods? Image stabilization helps keep your camera still when handholding it, allowing slower shutter speeds and still getting sharp photos.

This is a very good question and the answer depends on the image stabilization technology. I worked with some of the early image stabilization lenses. The early Canon 75-300mm IS lens was a good little lens, actually very good for its price. Canon warned not to use it on a tripod. I had some discussions with my friend, George Lepp, about this and later lenses — he was convinced that you could use them on tripods. I had noticed that when on a tripod, the lens would sometimes arbitrarily shift as if it were looking for movement that was not occurring. That seemed to cause unsharpness at times, so I avoided it. Later, George discovered the same thing when he compared newer technology in image stabilization to older lenses.

Image stabilization comes in two ways — inside the lens where lens elements move to compensate for camera movement (Canon and Nikon do this, as well as independent lens manufacturers, Tamron and Sigma), and from a moving sensor (inside the camera) that compensates for camera movement (Olympus, Sony, Pentax all have cameras that do this). There are advantages to both, but to me, I would tend to buy into a camera system for its system, not for one form of image stabilization or another.

Today’s image stabilization lenses and the built-in sensor stabilization work fine on tripods. In fact, there can be a real advantage to using them with certain tripods. I’ll explain.

While in Pennsylvania before the NANPA Road Show, I did some shooting in the Amish country. My grandparents lived there after they retired and are buried there. I traveled light and took a Gitzo Traveler tripod. This is a little carbon fiber tripod that weighs only a couple of pounds, but it is quite stiff and sturdy. It folds up on its center column to make it smaller and it comes with a small, but strong ballhead. It travels really, really well, which is especially important these days of added baggage charges from the airlines.

I knew such a tripod was “best” with a lighter camera and lens, yet I still traveled with some telephoto power. So I found a great farm at sunset with the sun behind it, but it was hazy, the shutter speed was slow, and I didn’t know if I could get away with shooting the equivalent of 400mm on 35mm (I was using 200 mm on a Four Thirds format Olympus E3). But the combination of internal image stabilization (the sensor) with the tripod was perfect. George used to tell me that he felt he could travel with a lighter tripod when using image stabilization. As I shot a bit more, I discovered this was really true. Image stabilization plus a good, lightweight, carbon fiber tripod really did give me a combination that gave absolutely sharp images.

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