Château de Chambord

An interesting technique with landscapes and cityscapes is the use of a texture over your chosen image. It often gives the image a weathered look.

The process is a simple one. Paste a texture over your chosen image and change the blending mode to something suitable. Overlay is a good choice but try some others as well. You can lower the opacity to suit.

You can save this file in a tiff or psd format, to save your layers in case you wish to make future changes.

Texture files to use for your overlays are easy to make or obtain. Google “free textures” or try taking some images on your own. Good subjects are old walls or out of focus shots.

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The Motion Blur Filter in Photoshop can provide the impact of movement to an object in your image. We are going to use the image above of a stationary train in Toronto’s Union Station which has some interesting Spiderman advertising on the side. This image was processed in HDR in order to get the range of shadow to highlights.

There are two ways we can give a look of motion to the above  image… with the train in motion and the background stationary, or the reverse.

Lets try the background blurred and give a look as if we were panning with the movement of the train. First we add a duplicate copy to work in (Layer>>>Duplicate Layer). Next step is to select the train only. There are numerous ways of doing this but I use Quick Mask (Click the icon at the bottom of your tools menu panel). A double click on the Quick Mask Icon brings up a small menu which allows you to choose whether your actions will select or mask areas. I choose select, and then work with the Mask tool to draw over the surface of the train. As I work I will see the area I have chosen turn pink. If you choose an area you don’t want included, just change the foreground color from balck to white on the icon above your Quick Mask icon and the brush can be used to remove previously chosen parts.

When you are happy with the chosen area, click the Quick Mask icon to get out of that mode.

Now we use the motion blur filter (Filter>>>Blur>>>Motion Blur). Make sure your angle matches the direction of motion you want and then adjust the distance to to what looks good to you. Click enter, deselect (Select…Deselect) and you can see the resulting image. Hopefully your image will now look as if you panned your camera with the motion of a moving object and have a blurred background.

Motion blur the background

To give a look as if the camera stayed stationary and recorded a blurred moving object, just follow the same procedure above until just before the Motion Blur Filter. Invert your selection (Select >>> Inverse) and then proceed with the Motion Blur as before. The result should be a stationary background and a blurred object.

Motion blur the object

Note this could also be done in an adjustment layer if you thought you might want to make future changes. When there is only a little processing involved like this example, I tend to plan on re-doing the processing should I wish to change it.

I used Photoshop CS4 for this but it should work in many earlier versions.

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Christmas Header

One of the best ways to learn about some of Photoshop’s more advanced features is to follow through some of the excellent tutorials to be found online. The Christmas header above was constructed by adapting an excellent Tutorial at Adobe Tutorials. Some of the interesting things in this tutorial are blending options for layer, use of the pen tool, and custom shapes.

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A few days ago I posted a HDR image of a Ukrainian Church. I had some fun in photoshop to produce the above. If you would like to try it, you need to have an image which is relatively plain on the top and the bottom, and the middle portion is at about the same level on each side, because they will eventually be joined.

Here is the procedure

Go to Image>Image Size and make your image square ( you need to have Constrain Proportions Unchecked)

Flip the image over Image>Image Rotation>Flip Canvas Horizontal

Filter>Distort>Polar coordinates (Check rectangular to polar)

Now you need to do some cleanup to get everything to match.

That’s it. Have fun.

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Borers Falls: Finished Image

For my purposes, HDR processing is successful if the viewer is not sure if it was used. Lets call this HDR Lite.

I have been working on a project to photograph Ontario’s waterfalls, and often these images have a large dynamic range. Consider that these images my be required to record the near white of the water to the near black of rock crevices and it is easy to see that it could be a problem for any camera.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing is designed to tackle this type of problem, it is a process where a series is taken of the same scene with a range of exposures. An example may be three images taken at -1, regular, and +1 exposure. These are then combined in the computer for a composite image. I use Photomatix for this.

Minus 2 Exposure

0 Exposure

Plus 2 Exposure

Above are the base exposures used at -2,0,+2 exposure (You can click on them for a large resolution). While I didn’t want an extreme example of HDR processing, I did want to bring out the natural fall colors as well as the complete dynamic range. Photomatix has different processing methods available but each on their own was not what I was looking for. Lets take a look.

Details Enhancer

The above image is the result of using Details Enhancer at the default settings. I like the foliage detail it has brought out but it lacks contrast and is too light.

Tone Compressor

This image above was processed using the Tone Compressor method. I like the contrast and color but it is too dark and lacks detail.

Lets see if we can get this porridge just right. I opened both images in Photoshop and copied one as a layer to the other. I then adjusted the Opacity of the second layer to incorporate the best features of each image. This can range from 30-70% but often I find I am happy with it at 50%.

For waterfalls, HDR processing has a bonus in that it gives the water a nice blur.

Thanks for reading this, I hope you find it useful.

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Keeping the same proportions

1. Keeping the same proportions

For many end uses, I find it useful to keep the same proportions as the original, usually 2×3 or 3×2. This is a simple task with the crop tool. Just hold down the Shift key as you drag the tool across the image and you’ll find that the crop has been restrained to the original proportions.

Do a perspective crop

2. Do a perspective crop

You can change the perspective while you are cropping. After dragging your crop tool to create a marquee, you can click on the Perspective checkbox on the tool’s menu at the top. This allows you to shift any of the corners of the marquee, increasing or decreasing the perspective from that side.

Crop and Rotate

3. Crop and rotate

After dragging your crop tool to make a marquee in your image, you can rotate your crop before finalizing it. Just hold your mouse outside any corner and click and hold when the double arrow shaped courser appears. You can then drag your marquee in the direction you wish to rotate. Double click inside the marquee or hit enter to finish.

Hide your crop, don't delete

4. Hide your crop, don’t delete

I can find little real world use for the next secret of the cropping tool, but its kind of cute. It needs to be done on an image layer rather than the background, so double-click on the background layer in your layers menu to convert it. After setting your marquee, click the Hide checkbox and complete your crop by hitting the Enter key. If you change to the move tool (The up arrow at the top), you will find you can move the image around and the portion that was outside your crop will appear, as it was not deleted. I suppose this might be useful if you wanted to look at various crops of a certain size.

Crop to match dimensions of another image

5. Crop to match dimensions of another image

Select the crop tool and make the image whose dimensions you want to match the active one. At the tool menu bar at the top, click on “Front Image”. Applying the crop tool to a second image will automatically provide a crop if the same dimensions as the first image.

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Orchard (Before)

One of the secrets photo editors have used for magazine images is saturating colors through Color Burn. It is especially effective for Landscapes. Of course not all landscapes benefit from this type of processing but a great many do.

It is a simple process:

Add a duplicate layer (Layer>Duplicate Layer)

Change the Blending Mode to Color Burn. This is easy to do with the Layers Menu open (Window>Layers), then clicking on the small window on the top left and choosing Color Burn. Make sure the top or duplicate layer is highlighted.

This will probably be too strong, so you will want to reduce the opacity by changing the top right window in the Layers menu. Often about 20-30% is a good choice.

Thats it!

Orchard (After)

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One of the downsides of DSLR cameras is that the sensors seem to be magnets for dust, which can sneak aboard when you are changing lens. This is a problem when using the new video mode available with cameras like the Canon 5d MarkII. Of course, best practice is keeping everything as clean as possible.

However, if you finally caught up with an Ivory-billed Woodpecker and found dust spots on the video, here is a method of removing them using Photoshop, Lightroom and a free program called VirtualDub.

The first step is to open the MOV file in Photoshop (File>>Import>>Video frames to Layers)

You will see that Photoshop will only open 500 frames at a time due to the resource intensive nature of this operation. If you don’t need 500 layers, do yourself a favor and use the import dialogue to reduce the number of frames imported.

One they have been imported, you want to export them as individual files. You use (Files>>Scripts>>Export Layers to Files). This operation like the preceding one takes a long time. You may want to close any other programs to let your computer work full time on them.

We now import these files into Lightroom in order to work on the dust removal. It can’t be done in Photoshop as a batch as Photoshop will not record cloning or healing tool operation in an action.

Once the files are imported to Lightroom, we go to the Develop module and use the Heal tool to rid ourselves of the dust spots on one of the images. We then Select all the files and hit the Sync button on the bottom of the right hand side menu. We check “Spot Removal” in the dialogue box and hit OK. Once the files are processed we return to the Library menu and Export them to a new directory.

It remains to compile the files into video frames. I use a wonderful free program for this called VirtualDub. Once I have compiled the video, I can add the audio track from the original file.

The video above shows 5 seconds of the original and then the cleaned version.

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Image with blue cast

I took this photo of a Common Pochard in La Camargue, France. A first glance tells me that it has a decided blue cast because there is a simple process to get rid of it. It goes like this.

If you set up this procedure in an Action, you can do it in seconds. You can download the following action and load it into your Actions menu. After running it, you need only adjust the Opacity (I have the action set at 12% opacity)

Download Cast Correct Action

After

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Front

Middle

Back

One of the new features in Photoshop CS4 is the ability to Increase the Depth of Field of a final image by composing multiple images of the same subject taken at different points of focus.

In order to test this I set up some sophisticated and expensive equipment. I jammed three pens into a cardboard box. I used a Canon 180mm Macro lens which has a very small depth of field and took three images, manually focusing on each of the pens in turn. The processing is as follows:

• I stacked the three images as layers.  Files>>Scripts>>Load files into Stacks (Check “Attempt to automatically Align Source Images”)
• Click on the three layers in the layers view to select them
• Edit>>Autoblend Layers (Check Stack Images and Seamless Tones and Colors)

Photoshop makes masks of each, choosing those parts that have the most detail. The resulting image is below.

Resulting Image

A pretty good result although it was admittedly not a tough test. I did a quick test with a more complex landscape scene, and there were a few small things that needed cleanup after.

Some things to keep in mind:

1. While Photoshop will align the images, you want them very close. Use a tripod, mirror lockup, shutter release.. anything to keep a tight precise result.
2. This is a very memory intensive operation. I reduced the files to 6mg and 8 bit to make it easier. This becomes even more important with larger number of files stacked.
3. You can also stack the images in Bridge and use the Edit>>Align Layers Command in Photoshop.

Macro shooters should find this feature very useful.

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