Photoblog 2.0

Shaving Spirals, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Briefly noted: a photo composite created from the shavings left after sharpening a pencil.

Pencil Shaving I, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The shavings from a sharpened pencil, shown above and below, were almost discarded, but made an interesting pattern.

View this image larger.

A little moisture made the shavings slightly transparent, and I photographed them on a light box for transparency using my 200mm macro lens augmented with a 36mm extension tube.

I couldn’t resist inverting the images and extending the spiral in Photoshop. This one really needs to be seen larger.

View this image larger.

If you haven’t seen much of me lately, and if my blog posts have seemed a bit thin, it’s because I’ve been getting my new book The Photoshop Darkroom: Creative Digital Post-Processing out the door. At this point, the project is essentially done. The publisher, Focal Press, has a September 15, 2009 publication date set, and The Photoshop Darkroom is available right now on Amazon for pre-orders (hint, hint!).

I’m very proud of my new book. I think it presents Photoshop and digital photography in a new and revolutionary way. The concepts explained are basic, and simple once you know them, and have a great deal of power.

This is not a tricks, bells, or whistles book, and it is not about the latest and greatest version of Photoshop. My book presents extremely detailed instructions for achieving the results shown, and almost all the techniques in the book can be done with older versions of Photoshop.

I’m particularly pleased to be published by Focal Press. Focal has a distinguished history of photographic book publication, and they’ve been very supportive of this unusual project.

You’ll find more information about The Photoshop Darkroom, and links to sample content below the cover image.

Front and back cover (PDF)
Table of Contents (PDF)
Introduction (PDF)
Sample content (Expanding tonal range by using layers, a layer mask and gradient to multi-RAW process a landscape, PDF)

From the back cover: The Photoshop Darkroom offers limitless possibilities for photographers looking for jaw-dropping results, using powerful and innovative creative post-processing techniques. If you want folks to ask “How did you do that?” then this is the book for you!

The images in The Photoshop Darkroom will inspire you and help you unleash your creative potential. You’ll learn to view your own digital photography with new eyes.

Step-by-step directions show you real world examples of how to achieve the results you want from your photography and post-processing.

• Learn how to work with RAW image files
• Understand the Photoshop darkroom workflow
• Multi-process RAW files
• Create High Dynamic Range (HDR) images by hand
• Use layers and masking for compositing
• Best use Photoshop’s tools to create stunning black & white images
• Create striking color effects using LAB color

Information about the cover photo.

Poppy Duet, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I cut these poppies from my garden and photographed them on a lightbox. I used my 85mm PC macro lens and five exposures at f/48 between one second and ten seconds.

Starting with the lightest exposure (ten seconds), I dragged the other exposures on top in Photoshop using hand-HDR layer masking to create the transparent effect.

Poppies on Black, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I created the image of poppies on black by inverting the L (Luminance) channel of the white version (below) using LAB color in Photoshop.

The white version of the Poppy Medley is a hand HDR combination of five tripod captures with the flowers resting on a lightbox. I used my 85mm PC macro lens, stopped down to f/51, with five exposures at times ranging from 1/2 of a second to eight seconds.

With the five exposures, I created a layer stack in Photoshop, and used masking and the Brush Tool to “paint” in selective transparency.

View this image larger.

We’ve been working on the section of The Photoshop Darkroom that treats black and white imagery, so how fitting that a client should ask for black and white images of the Golden Gate Bridge. I always love these projects out of the blue because they lead me in new directions.

View this image larger.

Without getting into specifics (you’ll have to wait for the book for them), the ideas behind black and white imagery in Photoshop are pretty straigthforward. There are a number of ways of converting the RGB file created in a camera to monochrome—as Phyllis puts it, some good, some bad, and some just plain ugly—but here are the important concepts that transcend the technique specifics:

• Don’t set your camera to take black and white photos. The only thing in-camera black & whites are good for is pre-visualization. You don’t want to drop the color information yet.
• Pick images that work in monochrome. Usually, color isn’t really important to these images and they have a strong and graphic compositional sense. Often, these are high contrast photos with obvious directional light sources.
• Use the tools of the creative Photoshop darkroom to add value to the image in color before beginning conversion.
• Pick a black and white conversion technique that allows you to use the color information in the image as part of the conversion. Simply dropping the color channels is an awful idea. The Channel mixer and/or black and white adjustment layers work well.
• Plan to use layers and masking to process different portions of the image differently. This increases tonal range, and allows you to have very black blacks and extremely white whites.

Here are some more black and white Golden Gate Bridge images.

View this image larger.

View this image larger.

View this image larger.

View this image larger.

View this image larger.

View this image larger.

View this image larger.

Related story: Nautilus in Black and White.

View this image larger.

Yesterday, a beautiful day with plenty of cloud cover and a strong wind, and the garden in full bloom, was perfect for indoor photography of flowers. I placed this dinner-plate-sized clematis blossom on a light box for transparency, and combined six exposures. All were skewed towards high key, meaning a right-facing histogram and and over-exposure bias (according to the camera, but what does the camera know?).

The clematis on white was my Annakin Skywalker, and I started the conversion process to Darth Clematis and the dark side (the image below) by converting the image to LAB color and inverting its L (Luminance) channel. From there, it was building up the dark side piece by piece through at least fifteen layers.

Note: if my silly Star Wars metaphor means nothing to you, you probably don’t have kids of the right age, and may the force be with you!

View this image larger.

In my passionate embrace with Photoshop, I often don’t make as good notes as I should about exactly what steps I’m taking. That’s why I save the history log of my Photoshop moves to the metadata of each image. To set this up, open the General tab of the Photoshop Preferences dialog and make sure History Log is checked. Choose to save the log items to the image metadata (you can also save it to a text file). Finally, make sure that the Edit Log Items drop-down list is set to Detailed.

Adding your Photoshop History log to your metadata will increase your file size, and it won’t tell you everything. Painting on a layer mask with the Brush tool is just listed as “Brush.” Photo metadata is often incomplete. You won’t learn from the image metadata that I combined a number of exposures (you just get the background layer). But all that said, you do a pretty good picture of the steps taken.

Recently, the history log of my Photoshop moves started showing up in the EXIF data published by Flickr. If you scroll down the links, you too can read the Photoshop history log of this Clematis, and on the dark side.

Speaking of Flickr, and the community of photographers and artists on the Internet generally, I find myself excited about the way I am constantly exposed to new ideas and artists through contacts on Flickr.

I belive that photographers need to look at visual artists beyond photography (for more on this topic, see this interview with me). M.C. Escher has obviously influenced my composites.

Lately, I’ve been exploring the work of Jacques Hnizdovsky, pointed out to me by a Flickr friend, a twentieth century artist known for his paintings and woodblock prints. Hnizdovsky’s work is intelligent, humorous, and photographic in the best sense of the word—astounding for imagery created as woodcuts. A true inspiration.

Tunnel View, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Briefly noted: This is the view from Tunnel View in six progressive captures, with the forest area that’s in shadow combined using Photomatix HDR and the sunnier sky and rock formations added using hand layer masking in Photoshop.

Structure, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Structure (above) is pretty much a straight inversion of the L (Luminosity) channel using the LAB color space of the Dandelion shot (below).

View this image larger.

Ruffles Have Ridges, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I “discovered” (or perhaps “realized” would be the better verb) that there’s no reason I can’t combine flatbed scans at different exposures using hand HDR techniques. This Iris is from three flatbed scans.

No magnificent piece of equipment, the flatbed scanner is an older Epson 1660. Even so, it delivers wonderfully high resolution by camera standards (although of course there is no lens). Add to this the fact the software that comes with the scanner provides an RGB tone curve adjustment, a histogram that you can shove to the right or left, and a levels adjustment, and there’s plenty to play with.

To facilitate the capture, we constructed a black box, open on one side. I placed the Iris, fresh from the garden, face down on the scanner, and placed the black box over the Iris. I still had to mask out the background in Photoshop to fill it with true black, and (as always with scans) there was quite a bit of dust spotting.

The fun thing: this is really a digital era arts & crafts project, and pretty easy to do for anyone.

Capture: three combined RGB Epson 1660 flatbed scans at 1:1 and 3200 dpi.

Related story: Iris Scans; Revelation and Hiding; Nautilus on Black.

Koi, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

At the Hagiwara Japanese Tea Garden I photographed the Koi (which are of the Carp genus) with the idea of having some Photoshop fun.

My thought with the collage you see below was to recreate a symmetrical surface division sketch by M.C.Escher. This proved to be harder to execute than I expected, even considering that I had Photoshop’s rotation and reflection tools at my disposal (and I didn’t have to draw each individual element). The pattern I ended up with is interesting, but it doesn’t have the effect I had previsualized.

View this image larger.

Related story: Calling Alice.

The Destination Recedes, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The tunnel of trees leading to the historical RCA Marconi wireless communication center is long enough. Make it even longer in Photoshop, using the technique I explain in World without End, and it seems like the destination truly recedes.

Late in the afternoon of a bright autumn day I arrived in Yosemite Valley. The valley was already in shadow, with only the tops of the surrounding cliffs lit by the sun. I stopped along the banks of the Merced River. With my camera on my tripod, I snapped five exposures of the scene, all at the same aperture (f/7.1). My exposure time varied from 1/15 of a second to 1/125 of a second.

The longer exposures captured the details in the shadows, but blew out the highlights on the cliff tops and the sky, while the shorter exposures rendered the sky acceptably, but lost all nuances in the reflections in the river to darkness. My plan was to combine the exposures to create one image with the best characteristics of each individual exposure.

Yosemite Afternoon, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

HDR

Combining multiple captures to create an image with an exposure range beyond that possible in a single capture is known as High Dynamic Range imaging, or HDR for short. The trick is to compress the extended range into a single image that is pleasing, will display on a monitor, and is reproducible. Note that the exposure latitude within a single RAW capture also gives rise to the possibility of using HDR techniques using different versions of the one RAW file as the input, a technique that I’ve dubbed multi-RAW processing.

Hand HDR

Whether combining different exposures, or different versions processed from a single exposure—or even both these techniques at once—my approach has been to work in Photoshop to use layers, masking, the Gradient tool, and the Paintbrush tool to combine the variants. You can see an example of the results of this hand-crafted approach to HDR in the six-exposure blend that I used to create Yosemite Morning, taken the day after I shot the series used to create the Yosemite image that accompanies this story.

I’ll be writing more about the details of my hand HDR process in an upcoming book—I also teach the technique in workshops—but for now let me mention some downsides: it is labor intensive, time consuming, can look funny if the layers aren’t masked very carefully, and can be close to impossible to achieve in areas that involve complex interconnected details in mixed light.

Photomatix

Since we live in an age that tends to want instant results, most people try experimenting with software the does the HDR for them. I’m no exception, but I’ve been unimpressed with Photoshop’s HDR automation.

So I was excited recently to get to play with Photomatix, which is probably the leading HDR software. The Yosemite image above, and the floral close-up below were both created in part with Photomatix. As you’ll see, the words *in part* are crucial to understanding Photomatix’s place in my scheme of things.

View this image larger.

With Photomatix, HDR generation is a two-step process. You open the images in Photomatix, and the software generates an HDR composite. Then, in a process called “tone mapping”, you tweak the settings used in the mathematical algorithms that reduce the tonal range in the combined image in order to generate a single attractive and reproducible version.

Workflow

As a practical matter, I found Photomatix’s rendering of my RAW files unacceptable. So my workflow went like this: I opened the set of images in the Adobe Camera RAW plugin, applying the same settings to each (experimenting with different RAW conversion settings on each file included is also possible, of course, although it adds more variables and complexity). I opened the files that resulted from these conversions in Photoshop, and saved them in the TIFF format (because Photomatix doesn’t read native Photoshop PSD files).

Next, I opened the TIFF files in Photomatix and generated the HDR composite. As the documentation warns, the HDR image doesn’t start out looking too good, so I worked to tone map it for more attractive characteristics. When I was satisified that the image was the best it could be, I saved it as another TIFF file.

Combined Approach

Some parts of the resulting HDR image were pretty wonderful (for example, the trees on the right). Others, not so good (the sky had a burnt, burnished quality, and the water was murky). I ended up layering-in versions in Photoshop to fix portions of the Photomatix generated image (the same general remarks are true of the floral image that also accompanies this story).

If my workflow with Photomatix sounds like a lot of work, you are right, it was. Then again, I’m happy to work if it helps my work (if you catch my drift).

Life is simpler but less rich

Also, my life would have been simpler in Photomatx if I’d shot in-camera JPEGs. The truth is that the markets for my work often require extremely high resolution, and JPEGs just won’t do. I’m almost never happy with JPEGs compared to my results when I do the RAW conversion.

Conclusion

Paradoxically, I’m left with an appreciation both for what Photomatix can do with HDR, and for the limitations of the software. I’m sure I’ll be using this software to process some portions of my imagery, just as I’m sure that my final versions will require hand work and layer masking with other versions of the files.

If you are an image creator who cares about your craft, the limitations in HDR software amounts to a good reason to learn hand HDR—combining many different versions shot at different exposure times, and processed individually from hand-tweaked RAW conversions, using layer masking—even if you expect to primarily be using automated HDR programs like Photomatix.

With the kids and Phyllis asleep, over the course of a long winter night I “painted” in Photoshop to create this quartet of abstractions from a single capture of paper tree bark.

View this image larger.

Some other abstractions and the stories of where the images came from: Tin Can Alley; Oakland of My Mind; From Architecture to Fantasy; Stove Top Abstractions; Masked Avenger; Changes; Cherry Medley; Weaving.

One Good Eye, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

It’s not everyday you photograph a succulent like the one below, and when you look closely you see an eye peering back at you. Then, as if in a dream, you realize it is your daughter’s eye!