This is a photograph of an ice storm in Yosemite Valley. The lines in the ice on the trees could easily have looked “yucky” when they were sharpened. We’ve all seen oversharpened photos. Yucky. Now there’s a technical term for you!

Fortunately, there is a better way than conventional sharpening tools. I use the image of the Yosemite ice storm to demonstrate the sweetness of selective sharpening with LAB color for compositional purposes in my latest Photo.net column about creativity in the Photoshop darkroom.

Here’s the full description: This tutorial has nothing to do with turning blurry or shaky hand-held images into tack sharp masterpieces. Rather, the point of the article is to teach you how to sharpen selectively or compositionally using LAB color. This can be done to direct the viewer to certain parts of the image. Harold Davis walks you through how to convert to LAB color, and then how to apply a series of sharpen masks and layers to selectively and artistically sharpen your images.

Check out Sharpening in LAB Color, and then try your hand at sharpening your own images with this way cool technique.

My new column, Creating HDR Images by Hand [Part II], is up on Photo.net.

This is the third column in my Creativity in the Photoshop Darkroom series. Previous columns:  Intro | Multi-RAW Processing | Creating HDR Images by Hand [Part I].

You might also be interested in my sequence of seven columns for Photo.net, Becoming a More Creative Photographer.

On a bright, blustery winter day I wandered the Marin Headlands with photographer and friend Steven C. It’s amazing how close this beautiful area is to downtown San Francisco. This shot is looking towards the opening to Tennessee Beach from the ocean side (you can’t see the beach itself).

This was a day of extraordinarily heavy surf, and I spent most of my time photographing the explosive action of the waves—as close to the action as I felt safe. But I couldn’t resist an overall shot of the spectacular landscape, captured in full, living RAW color, multi-RAW processed to extend the dynamic range, then converted to black and white using a layer stack of Photoshop adjustment layers, primarily the Red Filter preset and the Infrared preset (for the sky).

In other words, the photo is a sort of non-HDR HDR created by hand—meaning that the tonal and dynamic ranges are greater than you would normally get from a single capture, rendered in black & white, and without the garish look so common in HDR photography.

I shot these alstroemeria blossoms (Peruvian Lilies) on a lightbox. I combined seven exposures at shutters speeds ranging from 1/4 of a second to 5 seconds. Each exposure was shot at f/64 and ISO 100, all were (of course) tripod mounted with great care taken not to move the camera between exposures. I used my 85mm perspective correcting macro lens.

I used layers and masking in Photoshop to combined the exposures. The hand-HDR process was biased towards overexposure because this tends to emphasize transparency.

The black background was accomplished with a LAB channel inversion. You’ll find this technique explained briefly on my blog and in greater detail in The Photoshop Darkroom.

Overall, I think the result looks much more like a painting than a photograph—a good thing in this case.

Related stories: Meditations on Transparency; Cherry Medley; Poppies En Masse.

The lighting, photography, and post-processing of this image all had the same goal: to increase saturation and tonal contrast and create a kind of “Georgia O’Keefe” effect. This is a set of techniques I’ve already used in my Variegated Rose (shown at the top of Photoshop Credo).

Lighting: I positioned the rose (a cut flower) so the light source (in this case the sun) went obliquely across the top of the flower so it created deep shadows. I controlled the shadows by positioning some sticks in front of the flower to selectively deepen the shadows.

Exposure: I used the tripod collar on a telephoto macro to mount the lens on the tripod, and pointed my camera-lens-extension-tube rig straight down on the rose. I used a magnifying eye piece for precision focus.

I combined three versions exposed at different shutter speeds to create the version shown, but all the versions were biased towards underexposure.

Exposure data: Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens, 24mm extension tube, 3 combined exposures at 1/2 second, 1 second and 2 seconds, each exposure at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

Post-Processing: As noted, I started by combining three captures using layers and masking to increase the tonal range of the composition. After collapsing the composite, I cleaned it up—it’s amazing how little “gribblies” tend to show up in extreme macros.

Next, I combined the background rose layer with itself twice, using Multiply and Screen Blending modes—once again with the idea of increasing contrast and tonal range. Layers and masks controlled the scope of the effect to specific areas.

I used two of the Nik filters from Color Efex Pro in my next pass—Glamour Glow and Tonal Contrast—to further my goals of enhancing both contrast and saturation in a selective and attractive way.

The most important Photoshop move meant converting the image to LAB color, and blending it selectively (using Normal and Soft Light modes) with an Equalization of the AB channels of a duplicate version of the image.

You’ll find more about my flower photography techniques in Creative Close-Ups: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques and more about my post-processing ideas and workflow in The Photoshop Darkroom: Creative Digital Post-Processing.

Needless to say, this level of Photoshop work in a house teeming with kids over Christmas break requires a good set of headphones and some great music—in this case Rosanne Cash’s The List.

“I believe that digital photography is an entirely new artistic medium—it is as different from film photography as film photography was from what came before it.” Thus starts my credo about working in the Photoshop Darkroom.

This credo—or statement of beliefs—about digital photography and post-processing is the introduction to a new series of columns about making creative use of Photoshop.

The columns so far:

• Introduction and credo
• Multi-Raw Processing
• Creating HDR Images by Hand (Part I)

Enjoy!

These two images of blades of grass wet with raindrops illustrate a digital solution to a technical photographic problem that could not be solved using film—and cannot be achieved in a solo digital capture. Some things just take more than one.

Consider that as you get very close to a macro subject that depth-of-field gets very shallow. Now suppose you want a great deal of your subject in focus—like all the drops of rain on the blades of grass shown in these two images. At the same time, you want a nice, soft focus background. Yum!

You can try a conventional approach: stopping your macro lens all the way down to the smallest aperture. Unless you are truly parallel to the subject, and the subject doesn’t have much width, you will not be able to get everything you want in focus. And stopping the lens all the way down probably means that the background soft focus will not be quite so dreamily soft.

The digital answer is focus stacking, which involves shooting multiple images at different focal points. Eac individual image can be shallow in terms of the depth-of-field.

The top image is made up of five orginals, and the bottom from seven. If you magnify the bottom image enough you’ll see a bit of unsharpness—but this comes from movement of the blade of grass in the wind, not technical focusing issues.

Once you have your set of originals, they can be aligned and combined in a Photoshop stack, as I explain in detail in Creative Close-Ups on pages 124-131.

View this image larger.

If you look at this Photoshop composite, the building blocks I used to create it may not be immediately apparent. Some viewers have thought apple peels, others have suggested a shell, combined with an ornate column.

Astute readers of this blog will recognize Straight Shot (in a color version) combined with the variegated rose in Curves (turned on its side). Creating a complex composite like this one in Photoshop reminds me of nothing so much as doodling—perhaps proving that those painful years in graduate school were not entirely wasted!

I should think it would be puzzling to be caught on this staircase—a giant knot apparently suspended in space with a path that goes on forever.

Origins: Twisted Stairs, Stair to Heaven, and Study of a Twisted Stair.

If the perspective in this Photoshop Darkroom creation seems twisted, well, it should. Here’s the original twisted stair and an abstraction I made from it. I’m going to keep playing!