Digg just posted a link to 22 Profesional Photoshop Image Enhancing Tutorials. Some are a little over the top or of dubious practicality, but others are pretty slick. And Digital Photography School has another useful one: Enrich Black without Affecting Overall Contrast, which can come in handy fairly often.

Now I’ve just got to start taking more photos!

It’s here.

Finally!

Thinking about a $22,000 lens got me thinking about “real” cameras a bit more. And it occurred to me that Canon is in kind of a weird spot right now.

Their flagship camera has always been the EOS-1. With digital it was the 1D, which was followed by a 1Ds. The s designates that it’s meant for studio work, with a higher resolution but lower framerate. After a while Canon replaced them with the “Mark II” edition of the 1D and 1Ds, and a few years (?) ago, the Mark III edition.

The Mark IIIs were well received. The 1D Mark III supported up to ISO6400 if unlocked, allowing great low-light performance. The 1Ds Mark III is what really got people drooling, though, with a 21-megapixel resolution. I think it was around 10 megapixels that people started saying that resolution wars should really be considered over. 21 megapixels, in the eyes of many, bests medium-format cameras. People shoot for two-page magazine spreads and billboards with lower resolutions.

The awkward sitution comes from the Canon 5D Mark II. The 5D is still a very high-end line, but it’s meant to be second fiddle to the 1D. But the 5D Mark II boasts 21 megapixels, the same as their flagship 1Ds Mark III. It records 1080p video. And what really wins me over is that it gives Nikon’s D3 a run for its money: ISO6400 out of the box, and you can enable “High ISO” support for ISO 12,800 and 25,600, allowing photos to be taken in absurdly low light. It sells for $2,700, less than half of the $7,000 1Ds Mark III.

So it’s high time for a Mark IV series. I haven’t even seen rumors about it yet, which tend to start long before the camera’s released. But here are some of the things I’d really like to see Canon release in a Mark IV edition:

• Higher ISO support with lower noise. I’m not sure many people even imagined ISO6400 in the days of film (though it looks like there may have been such a thing, though it certainly wasn’t sold in Walmart), but the trend has been started. ISO12,800 and ISO25,600 are kind of experimental modes that remain very noisy (grainy). When I’m in the market for a new digital SLR in a few years, I hope it’s got a noise-free ISO25,600, or higher. Consider that increasing sensitivity just twice more would bring “ISO 100K.” Canon and Nikon, it’s a race. You heard it here first. I want the 1D Mark IV to put Canon in the lead, and Nikon to come out with a D4 to try to one-up them, with the end result being a camera that can take photos in dimly-lit rooms without five-figure lenses.
• Get rid of the mechanical shutter. Sample the sensor for the necessary duration. It seems there are design challenges in eliminating the shutter, but it’s really a vestigial organ on a digital camera. This removes a common spot of mechanical failure, and paves the road to higher shutter speeds. I don’t think any camera (possibly excluding ultra-expensive scientific gear) can exceed 1/8000th of a second shutter speeds right now. Accidentally shoot outside at f/1.8 and ISO1600 on a sunny day and tell me it’s not a limit. (Yes, yes, why would you want to do that? Because I needed the shallow depth of field and forgot my camera was cranked to ISO1600. The real question is: why couldn’t the camera handle it?)
• RAM is cheap. Like $10 for a 1GB DIMM. I doubt cameras have DDR2 DIMMs, but why can I only take a couple shots in rapid succession before I have to wait for the camera to write things out to the card? On the flagship model, give us a crazy-huge buffer.
• For the love of God, give us an LCD that we can see when we’re working outside. And while you’re at it, spend the money on a great LCD. Look at an iPhone screen for a while, in fact, and see what 150 dpi looks like.

I haven’t been taking photos as often as I used to. I suppose having a full-time job and a 100-mile-a-day commute can do that. So I wanted to share a few photos, as well as a commentary on the ExpoDisc.

When I first got it, I knew that photographing in Margarita’s would be the ultimate test. They have red lightbulbs. The atmosphere’s great, but the pictures end up coming out like this:

That’s with the camera set up to automatically adjust for the right type of light. Obviously, this is a major headache if you’re trying to take photos. And it’s really not that easy to fix up in Photoshop because the colors come out so far off that you can’t salvage much.

It’s underexposed and boring, but here they are after I calibrated my camera with the ExpoDisc to the light hitting the fake flowers. It’s not quite perfect in my mind: it’s got a tiny bit of a green cast. But something like that is easy to fix in Photoshop. (The problem was that there were “green” lights in the parking lot coming in through the window, red light bulbs indoors, and orange light coming in another window from across the street. It’s pretty much impossible to have things look great in that case.)

This is an entirely unrelated photo, but I was on a long car ride and decided to practice panning. (Car companies almost always do this for their photography.) I shot at ISO100 and f/8, so that not much light was coming in. This meant that a fairly slow 1/30-second exposure was needed. At 60 miles an hour, the trees in the background became blurred, since 1/30-second was entirely too slow to “freeze” them. But since we were roughly matching the speed of the car, it remained in place on the frame, causing the car to “jump out” as the only object that’s not blurred. Besides looking cool, it gives a sense of motion. The sun was setting, and a little Velvia Vision magic helped bolster the already-nice light. It might not win any awards, but it’s still a shot I’m happy with.

I tend to look skeptically on claims of megapixels. As I think I’ve mentioned before here, I have a 20×30″ print hanging up, taken by my 6-megapixel EOS 10D. Now I shoot with a 10-megapixel XTi, but typically keep it down at “Medium” quality, which is a 5-ish megapixel image. The reason is that I can take many more pictures, and that there’s no good reason for me to exceed it.

One thing I lament, though, is how “short” 200mm can be, even with a 1.6x crop. (So it’s effectively a 320mm lens.) I think the 100-400mm zoom (loving that it has a Wikipedia page!) would do the trick, though it’s a $1,500 lens. (On sale at Amazon?)

At the RedSox game, I bumped the resolution to its full setting. In a, “that’s really not quite an accurate statement” way, I effectively had a 5-megapixel, 400mm setup. Because 5 megapixels is all I needed anyway, this “zoom by cropping” thing actually works pretty well.

The main problem I’m noticing is that at 10 megapixels, I’m seeing a lot of imperfections in images that I didn’t see at 5. It doesn’t ordinarily matter anyway, since no one views images at 100% in ordinary situations, but I really feel like all the extra resolution does is amplify imperfections inherent in the lens.

Yesterday I was in the back yard working, when I noticed the setting sun was illuminating a fern in the woods, causing it to glow brilliantly while its surroundings were black. This would be a good photo.

By the time I came back out, the fern had fallen into the shade, but the light continued to be just right.

Often, losing details in the shadows or highlights of a photo isn’t desired. Sometimes it takes special precautions (e.g., bracketing for HDR) to not lose any details. But there’s something neat about having a strongly-backlit leaf that’s so bright compared to the background that everything else is pitch black. That photo might be a little too fine-artsy, but I still like it.

Here, the background was also backlit, just less so, but your eyes are still drawn to what they should be. And I’m loving that this lens, as cheap and light as it is, can be pretty darn sharp. (I did do software sharpening afterwards too, but that’s SOP.)

There’s a close-up of a few of the leaves, complete with two Daddy Longlegs.

Shooting those last night, BTW, was one of those times when I switched to full-manual*. I spend a lot of time in aperture priority, but photographing a strongly-backlit leaf isn’t something the camera’s metering is really meant to deal with, so it was overexposing by a good deal. I locked it at 1/250-second exposure with good results.

I took a set of 99 photos, but many were flawed. The biggest problem was that, for some of these photos, the sun was just out of frame, so even a lens hood didn’t work. For some I tried to use my hand to block out some more light, but there’s a fine line there, where you go from not quite blocking enough to having your hand in the frame. (Although with a long zoom and a decently fast aperture, the only effect was minor vignetting… Which in some of these photos wouldn’t have showed.)

Going to Fenway tonight, though I suspect 200mm will be far too short for anything all that good.

* The EXIF will betray that I actually went to shutter-priority, but since the camera wanted a wider aperture and the lens was already wide open, switching over to full-manual to ‘lock’ the aperture would have done exactly the same thing.

I was pleasantly surprised by what my little 55-200mm Sigma can do! I’ve noticed that if you’re not exacting in aligning the polarizer, you lose a lot of contrast, BUT it’s very easily fixed in Photoshop. I’ve also noticed that, short of focus problems, most everything is easily fixed in Photoshop. (I’ve stopped thinking of the images out of the camera as the final product, really.)

Shot at ISO 1600, with less noise than I’d expected, even after ‘lighting up’ the shadows a bit in Photoshop. There’s noise if you look for it at high resolutions, but I’d forgotten that 1600 can be quite usable.

As I mentioned at the top of the post, I’ve started doing a lot of post-processing in Photoshop. It’s something I hadn’t really been tuned into until I started doing a lot of photo enhancement, but a lot of images have a sort of ‘haze’ to them. (Shooting through a window, or shooting through a misaligned polarizer, will do this… But some cameras with crappy metering equipment do this on their own.) That’s easily fixed with Levels. Some images aren’t quite as tack-sharp as they should be, which can also be tweaked in Photoshop. Even the best cameras have imperfect dynamic ranges, leaving some details in darker areas obscured, and brighter portions overexposed (”blown out”). So my workflow (that’s a major buzzword right there) is to align images (rotate as needed, and adjust any that have sloping horizons), perform a Shadows & Highlights enhancement (CS2 and newer, I believe, have this feature, which is invaluable!), adjust Levels, and then apply an unsharp mask (I’ve been tending towards Smart Sharpen, 55% over a 1-pixel range, but it gets tweaked as needed.) Periodically I’ll play with Variations to get colors just right, and boost (or tone down, depending) an image’s saturation, but that’s only as-needed.

That’s straight out of the camera. Not necessarily a bad picture, though a bit underexposed for my liking. (I’d gotten a batch of slightly overexposed shots, so I set it to underexpose slightly, which ended up being a mistake.) But here it is after 60 seconds in Photoshop:

It’s a striking difference: the apparent ‘haze’ has been lifted: the image is brighter (properly exposed!) and sharper.

It’s really not a great shot, but I tried the obligatory HDR shot:

It’s an okay shot, but I think it’s a case where HDR really isn’t appropriate. It ends up being a very busy shot, and the very bright (very saturated!) colors in the crowd end up drawing attention away from the batter.

I’m also becoming a fan of panoramas. I’m glad Mr. T recommended Windows Live Photo Gallery or whatever it’s called; it’s worked pretty well. This ended up being a GIGANTIC photo (15297×1263 pixels, and that’s AFTER a very heavy crop, since my images didn’t line up that well, leaving huge black areas on the top and bottom). The downside is that there’s really no good way to view it; Flickr’s next size up (if you click through) is 1024×85 — 1024 pixels is a good width, but an image 85 pixels tall is practically useless. After that is the original, which I don’t recommend unless you have a fast connection and a lot of time to scroll around.

Anyway, it was fun… We left at the close of the 6th inning because it was getting late, but we (Manchester Fishercats) were losing 8 to 14. But I got some good pictures.

I think the best thing about SLRs isn’t their elimination (well, exponential reduction) of shutter lag, nor the support for high ISOs, or even advanced exposure and metering modes. It’s that even at relative high apertures (f/5.6), you can keep a shallow depth of field. Consider this photograph:

(Does anyone know what type of flower this is, BTW?) The photo wouldn’t be half as good if everything were in focus, as a normal camera would have rendered it. But by throwing the distracting (and ugly!) background out of focus, the shot comes out a lot better. I don’t entirely love the depth of field on this one; I wish you could see a little more of the plant clearly (which would have required that I stop the lens down a bit more), but I also wish the background were even further out of focus (which would have required that I open up the lens a bit more). BTW, a little bit of HDR going on here, as it wasn’t the best lighting.

There’s another example. Too shallow, or at least, I should have manually selected the autofocus sensor to use one on the left, so that all the caterpillars were in focus. But the background (green and purple bushes) are pleasantly blurred, keeping your attention on the tree.

Here I totally disregarded the rule of thirds. I like it anyway. The other leaves were pretty nearby, so they’re only slightly out of focus. But again, it draws your attention in closer.

There’s the best example. The trees in the background were across the street, and thus extremely out of focus. The camera focused on the leaves, which are tack sharp.

And now, I’m going to go finish mowing the lawn. There were just too many photo opportunities I noticed…

Although I’m attending a Fishercats game tonight… It’ll be my first time with an SLR there. Let’s see how that goes.

I joined my family today in central/Northern New Hampshire. It was opening day at Clark’s Trading Post, a favorite of my brother. My brother encouraged me to go with them, and the forecast called for a decent day, so I figured I’d tag along. The area’s always been quite photogenic, and I figured it’d be a good chance to continue my exploration into HDR.

That’s the train at Clark’s. This is what I like to think of as a halfway-decent HDR shot: a close inspection will reveal some technical flaws, but it’s normally a difficult subject to shoot well. It’s largely a black train, glossy in parts, matte in others, but it also has shiny metal highlights, plus the sky. This isn’t to say that it can’t be photographed, just that the results are ordinarily less than stunning. What I like about this shot is that your first thought isn’t, “What type of surrealist artwork is this?!” As seems to be typical of my shots, the sky looks kind of wonky, but overall, I’m happy with the shot.

There’s an example of the type of stuff I’m still on the fence about. It’s just kind of jarring in a way, as the colors, while “correct” in a sense, are unnatural. Rather than correcting for the fact that the camera can’t capture the whole scene the same way the human eye might, it goes further and does something even our eyes can’t. It’s a little surreal, but the style is growing on me. (Trivia: look closely and see how many things you can spot wrong. When stitching together multiple photos in which people are moving, things are bound to not quite match up right. They’re fairly subtle in this photo.)

There’s another building, again showing the more “legitimate” aspects of HDR photography in my mind. (Besides the ghostly half-man.) This would ordinarily be a lighting disaster. The building was receiving what was almost direct sunlight, while a dark shadow existed. And the sky was somewhere in between. In this case, I think the blended exposures work perfectly. The same goes true for this shot:

I didn’t know how it’d turn out at first… It looks like a simple shot, but it wasn’t! My typical method is to set my camera up for auto-bracketing, taking three shots in a row, one properly exposed, one too dark, and one too bright, thus increasing the odds that there’s a good shot in there somewhere. Often the main one looks good, but I know that some of the details from the others will boost it when converting to HDR. In this case, though, none of the three worked. If the bottles looked good, the wooden headstones were washed out. If the wall looked good, the grass was far too bright. I had a nicely-bracketed set of three bad photos. Fortunately, Photomatix worked it magic and produced a good shot.

We eventually tired of Clark’s and went exploring the area. Lost River was nearby… I pondered what lens to take, since it wasn’t practical to carry all of them, and made the right choice to bring my wide-angle 18-50mm lens. And here I realized that shooting for HDR, much like switching to using two computer monitors, starting to carry a cell phone, or buying high-thread-count sheets, is a habit that rapidly becomes very hard to break. I’d take a “normal” shot, but realize that parts were under- or over-exposed, so I’d retake the shot as a bracketed set of three, and spent some time in the car ride back home on my laptop merging them.

This is at the Lost River section; hardly the best shot, but a quick-and-dirty example of an ‘acceptable’ use of HDR. The trees are well-lit, and so is the sky. Difficult to pull off with one exposure, but a piece of cake with three and HDR!

As we went along, I noticed various parts of running water. (I thought this was a lost river… Pretty easy to find.) I’d never actually taken the stereotypical long-exposure moving-water shot, so this served as a good opportunity. I set the camera to ISO 100 (pretty insensitive to light, very low noise, but meaning slower shutter speeds), and stopped the lens down to f/22, which gave me about a one-second shutter speed. I set the camera down on a railing and pressed the shutter. Viola!

But I was curious… How would my newfound obsession with HDR play into this? Could you “bracket” that type of shot, and merge them with any success?

I actually didn’t expect this to work, but it ended up being one of my favorite shots from the day. The shots were something like 1/3 second, 1 second, and 2 seconds, so I expected that the water / person would have moved too much. As luck would have it, they didn’t, and the result was that shot. (A nice side-effect is that I rarely remember to stop the lens down for landscapes, but I necessarily did here… At f/22, everything, in theory, is in focus. Although if you look closely, you’ll notice that some of the photo is kind of soft where things got matched up slightly off-kilter.

We then went to the Indian Head Resort, where, in a welcome break from $15 admission tickets, we paid 50 cents to climb the tower. (In hindsight, they should have paid me to climb that thing!)

Doesn’t it look big and scary? Nevermind that I used a wide-angle lens feet away from the base to distort the perspective, nor that I made it an HDR exposure to boost the ominous dark clouds that really weren’t that ominous or dark.

That’s the Indian Head. For those easily confused like me, the Indian Head, and the Old Man of the Mountain are two separate things. I initially remarked, “It kind of still looks like a face,” before realizing that it was the Old Man that came tumbling down, not the Indian Head.

This was yet another one of those shots that was pretty tricky. I pulled out a polarizing filter for this one to try to boost contrast and get the sky to not look so gloomy; you wouldn’t know from the picture, but it helped. You also wouldn’t know from the picture, but this, too, is an HDR shot.

Facing the other way, I decided to take a series of shots holding the camera vertical, intended to be stitched together into a panorama. Since I have under 500MB free on my hard drive (?!) and since I couldn’t find PanoTools or any of its ilk, I ended up trying Windows Live Photo Gallery, which I installed at Mr. T’s suggestion but never got around to using much. (I also brought the image into Photoshop, where I cropped it and tweaked it.)

I’d like to give it good reviews, as it was very easy and quite intuitive. The problem is that I’m fairly certain this isn’t actually how things looked. The pond looks right, but I’m fairly certain that there were more ‘humps’ off to the left. I’m really not sure what happened, but the end result looks good, so I’m happy.

I brought my brother to organ lessons today, which are held in an old (18th century, I believe) church in Amherst. So I brought the camera along in anticipation of some more HDR fun.

This is a so-so interior shot. Note that it’s kind of noisy (grainy), I’ll touch on that in a bit. Also note, just as an interesting tidbit, the green cast on things: it was sunny outside and there were lots of green trees right outside the window. This shot, in my mind, is more about what HDR should be used for: getting ‘appropriate’ results where the camera normally wouldn’t hold up. To get detail in the pews and yet not have the upper third of the image ruined by the windows would ordinarily be difficult.

Here, side by side (I hope) are two versions of the same thing. They were both taken from a set of three bracketed shots. That is, I have the camera take three shots back-to-back, the first “normal,” the second overexposed (too bright), and the last underexposed (too dark). The underexposed one gets the detail in the sky and clouds well, but the foreground is really dark. The overexposed one fills in all of the details that would otherwise be too dark, such as the leaves on the tree.

The problem is that, after seeing both, I don’t like either. The “exposure blending” one looks natural, but very washed out and dull. The HDR one, by contrast, looks absurdly unreal, but is very contrasty, colorful, and preserves all the detail.

That’s a building right next door to the church that burned down. (And has been sitting there in ruins for months.) It’s weird how the tree in the upper left seems almost like it was Photoshopped in because the lighting doesn’t match at all. This is actually a case where HDR helped more than it hurt, though: getting any details in the charred part of the building and the white part of the building, with the sun reflecting off of it, was impossible. Here, HDR helps both co-exist. Of course, the sky looks bizarre (why does it change colors like that?), the purple tree at far right looks unsettling, and the trunk of the car in the lower right of the image exhibits noticeable “ghosting” (or is that a reflection?).

Finally, we have this image. Despite the fact that I was basically shooting into a window with sunlight streaming in, it was quite dark. I shot at ISO 800 and f/3.5, and got 1/50, 1/100, and 1/25 shutter speeds when bracketing. The ISO was fairly high at 800, but the XTi performs well and has negligible noise. UNLESS you try to pull lots of detail out of the shadows, as Photomatix apparently does. At a quick glance, this is an OK shot, but look at the walls and their graininess. If you view it larger, it’s even more prominent. Further, the image came out a bit soft, so I’d like to have applied some sharpening in Photoshop, but that just accentuates all the noise.

So I’ll concede that HDR has some benefits, but that it’s easy to overdo it. And, above all, shoot at a low ISO if you want good results!