Digital Dark Room Tips and Suggestions

The story of a photo

T_R_Oglodyte said:

… With that in mind, I picked up a couple of books from Amazon, both of which I can easily recommend.

• "Paint Shop Pro Photo XI for Photographers" by Ken McMahon (Focal Press). …
  
  
• "The Creative Digital Darkroom" by Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggan (O'Reilly Media) …

…

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I took the photo below a couple of weeks ago when I was in Minnesota visiting my Mom.



It was a gray day with occasional snow showers. As I was driving down the road I liked the dark skeleton of tree branches silhouetted against the snow field and the gray sky. The yellow grasses poking through the snow added a nice touch of color in an otherwise gray and somber setting.

When I took the photo I figured there was a picture in there but I wasn't sure I could capture it. Over the next week after taking the picture, I pulled up the photo four or five times and tried to do something with it, but I could never get the image out that I had in mind when I took the picture.

So I saved the unedited photo in my "twilight zone" store - twilight zone means that the photos are stuck in a place where I haven't decided to trash them but I also haven't decided if I want to keep them. So there it sat, neither here nor there.

After doing some additional reading this week in the second of the books I listed above, I decided I was ready to try out some of the things I had just read about. I took stock of the photo and thought about what needed to be done to get the photo more like what I had in mind.

I quickly concluded that added contrast was needed between the sky and the land. I couldn't darken all of the sky, though, because I still needed contrast between the tree and the sky to capture the starkness of the tree. That led me to consider using a gradient pattern to darken the sky, with the strongest darkening on the right side of the photo. I also figured that a darkness gradient in the sky might also add some visual interest The overall picture was also too dark, lacking bright tones, and I though the snow field was a good area to lighten to get the bright tones I wanted. Finally, I wanted the yellows and oranges in the grass to stand out more in contrast to the gray-blue hues dominating the picture.

So I went to work using some of the tricks I had been learning from these books to see if I could actually do that. The end result is below (also posted in the POTD thread).



I'm putting this up because I think it illustrates what you can do if you have the inclination to be a bit creative. I had a hunch there was a photo like this in there - I was pleased that I was finally able to tease it out from the raw image. I'm still not that good at this - there are still some obvious rough spots in the photo. But I hope it gives a sense of what is possible if you are so inclined.

If anyone is interested in the steps I went through to edit the image, I would be glad to describe them.

Split Toning

Toning a photo is adding a tint to a black and white photo. The most common example is sepia toning that is done in the "old time" photo studios to make a photo appear vintage. That's a strong tone, but often black and white photos are given just a hint of toning to soften the harshness of an otherwise colorless photo. This photo, for example, has a very slight sepia tone applied after the b&w conversion.

Split toning involves adding more than one tint to a photo. In the days of film photographers usually did this by paining on the print itself. With digital we can do that much more easily with the monitor.

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Here are the original and the edited versions of the cemetery photo I posted in the Picture of the Day thread last night.

Original:


Edited:


You can see that I cropped and straightened the photo, and worked on the contrast and lighting to focus more on my father's gravestone. In addition, the bumps and shadows in the snow distracted my focus from the gravestones, where it needed to be, so I dragged a smudge tool left to right across the snow to create more a fresh fallen snow appearance with the suggestion of drifting and blowing snow.

But what I really wanted to accomplish with the photo was to suggest the warmth and importance of families and family memories in a cold and harsh world. I specifically went to the cemetery early in the morning so I could capture sunlight illuminating the gravestone at a very low angle, shortly after sunrise. I wanted to offset the warmth of the granite against the snow to create the image.

To get the image that I wanted I decided to try split toning. Sepia is a warm tone, and evokes the natural color of the granite. A light frosty blue is often used to tone winter scenes; it creates a cooling effect.

So, after doing the basic adjustments to the image I created two different toning layers, one a very strong sepia and the other a more subtle frosty blue. In a photo shopping program you do this with a Hue/Saturation/Lightness adjustment layer, selecting the "colorize" option. The colorize option renders the underlying layer as black and white, with tinting applied using the hue and saturation selections.

I then painted masks for each of the tinting layers to hide or show the tinting layers as desired. In the mask for the blue tint, I screened out all of the gravestones in the cemetery, so that no cooling would be applied to them. In the mask for the sepia tint I screened out everything but the gravestones, so that sepia toning would be applied only to the gravestones. In addition, I applied the sepia toning full strength to my father's marker, with the sepia toning applied at progressively decreasing strength as the markers were located more to the back of the picture.

The end effect is a combination of warming and cooling effects that gave me the effect I was looking for. All of the graves are warm toned against the cold snow. Again, to me that evokes the strength and importance of families and ancestors in the world; that's true for everyone so all of the gravestones are warm. Of course, my feelings are strongest for my father, so his marker is front and center and receives the full warming effect.

An additional thought on the split toning for this photo. This photo isn't about great scenery or arrangement of colors; it's about emotion. By converting the photo to black and white with toning, the only visual elements are the lighting and contrast, and the interplay of warming and cooling. To me, that reducees the photo to its key elements and ups the emotional impact.

Some discussion of these photos in the PotD thread: http://www.tugbbs.com/forums/showpost.php?p=609715&postcount=1347







George - I like the partial color version best. A couple of suggestions of things to play around with if you like.

1. I think the photo would benefit from a tighter crop. I would try to remove all of the distracting background above the flowers in the background and the bench that shows up in the left bottom foreground. I would also try removing about half of the space between the man and the left border, leaving the man centered in the left one-third of the photograph.

2. I assume that you did the partial colorization using a mask and/or a layer. The attention created by the contrast between full color and full black and white seems to me a bit strong. I would adjust the mask over the man to reduce the colorization; my first try would be to use about a 50% gray in the mask, which would reduce the color contrast by about 50%.

3. The yellow flowers in the original are a nice visual component in the original that is almost totally lost in the b&w version. I would try making a selection on the yellow flowers (in Photoshop there is a menu tool to select based on color ranges that should do much of the work) and either apply some yellow tinting or allow about 10% to 20% of the color to come through. You want to add some visual contrast, but it needs to be more subdued than the man.

4. Similar considerations might apply to the blue flowers as the yellow. Because the blue flowers aren't as strong an element in the composition as are the yellow flowers, my thoughts here aren't as strong. Another approach for handling the blue flowers would be to redo the b&w conversion using a blue filter. That will cause the blue flowers to lighten up considerably in the conversion, and give greater contrast with the foliage.

My husband had the opportunity to work with several well known professional photographers. He told me that, in many cases, it's not art but it's science and persistence that pays off. I guess if I took 500 pictures of a mountain at various times throughout the day, I could find one that could be considered artistic. As this thread points out, taking the picture may be only a small percentage of the work, manipulating it in the darkroom (or the computer) is where the real work takes place. Personally I think it was just his effort to get me in a dark room! I didn't fall for it!

Steve,

This was first attempt at any of this stuff and will continue to learn the photoshop stuff.

I appreciate your comments. I knew that the top created some problems. Cropping from the top didn't work for me. I think having the top out of focus would work much better.

I will post another photo that I had previously prior to reading this thread.

I fully understand the comments about cropping the bench etc. However, that would have changed the meaning of the pic for me. The pic from side to side represents to me that here we have an elderly man who has a lot to offer all of us. He sits on the end of the bench representing that he is in the later stages of his life but wants to share that life and experience with anyone who will sit on the bench with him. Placing him in the center of the pic represents his importance to all of us.

nightnurse613 said:

My husband had the opportunity to work with several well known professional photographers. He told me that, in many cases, it's not art but it's science and persistence that pays off. I guess if I took 500 pictures of a mountain at various times throughout the day, I could find one that could be considered artistic. As this thread points out, taking the picture may be only a small percentage of the work, manipulating it in the darkroom (or the computer) is where the real work takes place. Personally I think it was just his effort to get me in a dark room! I didn't fall for it!

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Obviously, something he did worked for you!

nightnurse613 said:

I guess if I took 500 pictures of a mountain at various times throughout the day, I could find one that could be considered artistic. As this thread points out, taking the picture may be only a small percentage of the work, manipulating it in the darkroom (or the computer) is where the real work takes place. Personally I think it was just his effort to get me in a dark room! I didn't fall for it!

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That's a brute force approach. As your skill and knowledge increase, though, you find that you can do more composition in the field which means less time in the "dark room". Often four or five minutes spent setting up a picture will save an hour of work photoshopping. Or it will mean the difference between even having a picture worth working vs. one that just gets dumped.

Back in the days of film, most photographers had no choice but to think through the photo in the field. The brute force approach is only possible because of digital cameras.

I have to say that I still do a lot of brute force photography. That's how I can end up with 500 exposures in one half-day of shooting in Alaska. (Plus the fact that I bracket almost everything I shoot so I wind up with three exposures for every picture.) I have become more skilled at field composition, but for me that mostly just means that I have more photos from the field that I'm reluctant to discard!!!

If you use the machine gun approach you may well get the occasional shot that is a winner, but you won't have the faintest idea how you produced it and won't be able to reproduce it.
For me the big advantage of digital over film is the ability to see the result immediately and to be able to adjust and re-shoot accordingly. Although I generally avoid chimping I will check shots much more if I'm in a location I'm unlikely to be able to revisit to shoot again.

Keitht said:

If you use the machine gun approach you may well get the occasional shot that is a winner, but you won't have the faintest idea how you produced it and won't be able to reproduce it.
For me the big advantage of digital over film is the ability to see the result immediately and to be able to adjust and re-shoot accordingly. Although I generally avoid chimping I will check shots much more if I'm in a location I'm unlikely to be able to revisit to shoot again.

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To me there are two big advantages with digital. First is that I can try shooting a scene in a variety of ways to see what works out the best. I can zoom in or out, work with depth of field, change my perspective on the subject, etc.

Second is that even if I'm not sure the setting will make a good picture, I can shoot it anyway and see what happens. When I download my pictures and start reviewing I'm often surprised at how one of those "quick" photos turns out to quite nicely.

Were I shooting with film I would have passed on the opportunity; with digital I figure what the heck and shoot.

T_R_Oglodyte said:

To me there are two big advantages with digital. First is that I can try shooting a scene in a variety of ways to see what works out the best. I can zoom in or out, work with depth of field, change my perspective on the subject, etc.

Second is that even if I'm not sure the setting will make a good picture, I can shoot it anyway and see what happens. When I download my pictures and start reviewing I'm often surprised at how one of those "quick" photos turns out to quite nicely.

Were I shooting with film I would have passed on the opportunity; with digital I figure what the heck and shoot.

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I agree with all that Steve. When I said "You" I wasn't meaning anybody in particular with my 'machine gun' analogy, nor do I believe you fall into that category. The ability to take multiple variations is, as you say, one of the great benefits of digital.

Comments on my POTD Post Winter morning on the Snake River Plain

Here's the original:


And here is the final product:



As I reviewed this photo I thought it might work better as a black and white. First I cropped the photo to what I thought was a better overall image. After trying several B&W conversion options, I settled on an infrared film effect, with the flare increased somewhat above default settings (that increased the haloing), and I turned the grain setting to zero. Next I did a digital noise reduction to smooth out the entire picture. (The photo was taken in 2003 with an old 1.5 megapixel camera that also had a primitive (by current standards) photochip, so there is a lot of noise in the picture overall. The noise is particularly noticeable in the blue sky and the steam plume.)

The noise reduction effect was too drastic in the snow field in the mid ground and in the main portion of the steam plume above the factory, so I created a second layer that was the b&w conversion without noise reduction applied and placed that layer below the layer that had noise reduction. I then put a 50% mask over the snow field and the steam plume in the noise reduction layer to bring back a bit of the detail in those areas.

Personally, I'm more satisfied with this B&W conversion that any of the others I've done (save for the cemetery photo discussed above).

Note of encouragement: I didn't go into this with any notion of what to do beyond the fact that I wanted to attempt a B&W conversion. I had no idea what conversion technique would work best or even if a B&W conversion would work best (though I thought it might). After opening the file I just went by trial and error.

If you want to play around with B&W conversions, just grab some images and try things. There are several different ways to do black and white conversions, including color channel adjustment layers, hue/saturation/lightness adjustment layers, film effects (with lots of options to apply filers and specific film effects). Just play with them to see what they might do. That's all I've done.

T_R_Oglodyte said:

If you want to play around with B&W conversions, just grab some images and try things. There are several different ways to do black and white conversions, including color channel adjustment layers, hue/saturation/lightness adjustment layers, film effects (with lots of options to apply filers and specific film effects). Just play with them to see what they might do. That's all I've done.

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I couldn't see your final B&W conversion pic but this is one I experimented with different photoshop filters with layers and masks. I first tried a sepia filter but ended up with a combination of that and the original photo -

sepia filter -



then masking that with the original background -

Brett said:

I couldn't see your final B&W conversion pic

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link fixed

Brett said:

but this is one I experimented with different photoshop filters with layers and masks. I first tried a sepia filter but ended up with a combination of that and the original photo -

sepia filter -

then masking that with the original background -

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tinting is fun and quite rewarding!!!

IMHO - I think that the background might be a bit strong. I would try applying a mask to reduce the strength of the colored background - start at about 50% strength - and see what that does to the photo.

The other thing I might do is a bit of lightening of the deepest shadows around the eyes and on the neck on the statue. There are lots of ways to do this. I usually do that in one of two ways.

The easiest way is to duplicate your tinted layer and make it the visible layer, then paint over the areas you want to lighten using a soft dodge brush at about 30% opacity. Make multiple passes if necessary to get the desired amount of lightening. Dodging is a destructive technique; that's why you do it on a duplicate layer.

Another method, which is harder but nondestructive and more flexible, is as follows. Create a new curves or levels adjustment layer for the layer (or layer group) with the tinted statue, but do not make any adjustments. Instead set the "blend mode" for the layer to "screen" and dial the opacity down to about 50%. Your photo should now look overexposed. Next fill that entire adjustment layer with black, thus totally masking the effect of the layer. Now select a soft brush with about 30% opacity and paint over the black on the adjustment layer in the areas you want to lighten. Use multiple passes if necessary. When you are done select the entire mask and apply a Gaussian blur to eliminate any rough edges in the mask.

This second approach is non-destructive and offers very close control for selective lightening.

You can also do the same thing by using a curves or levels adjustment layer and masking out everything but the area you want to lighten. I generally find, though, that the lightening created by using the blank adjustment layer gives results that are more satisfying than what I can usually get with a curves adjustment.

rklein001 said:

I've had pretty good results with the free Picasa2 program.
Besides cropping, redeye reduction, and straightening, there's an "eyedropper" function where you click on an area that you know to be gray [a white shirt in shadow works best] and it rebalances the color of the entire shot.

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Thanks for the tip. I downloaded Picasa3 after reading your post. I am impressed with the software especially for the price :whoopie: . It is basic but has some good features. I like that the pictures could be cropped in a 16:9 format.

The Importance of Composition and Using the Rule of Thirds

Over on the POTD thread I posted this photo:



This is a frustrating photo for me. I really like it, but after I reviewed it I realized I flubbed the composition. Had I taken a few more moments to set up the photo I could have a much better photo.

What's wrong with the photo? This is what I see.

First, the center of balance is off. There's a lot of detail on the left side of the photo, but not so much on the right. Visually that over-weights the photo to the right.

Second, the foreground rocks are far too prominent. They occupy almost the entire lower left quadrant of the photo. But they are not the focus of the photo; in fact they compete with the crashing wave for attention. As a small strip framing the photo on the photo they would be excellent, but as a major photo element they don't belong. Plus there's obviously a second wave crash behind them that cries to be part of the photo, but which the the rocks obscure.

Third my eye longs to see the end of the point that is cut off on the left side of the photo. It just seems incomplete to sense that I'm that close to seeing the end of the land, and not quite be there.

What happened when I framed the picture is that I was paying too much attention to Ha'upu (the tall mountain) and not enough attention to the crashing waves. I applied the "Rule of Thirds" but in doing so I was thinking too much about getting the mountain on the one-third vertical axis. Had I thought about the picture more, I would have moved to a different location to my left and farther forward, and changed my angle a bit. In doing so the foreground rocks could have just been a frame on the bottom of the photo, I would have captured both wave crashes, I would have been able to extend the line of site to the end of the point, and I could have centered the wave crashes at a more powerful location along the left third vertical axis.


*******

To illustrate the other side of this and show how much composition adds to a pic, I've grabbed one of my favorite photos posted by TUGger KristinB.

Kristin is a master of many elements of photography, not the least of which is composition. Her photos on the POTD thread are always very well arranged and composed. I especially like this one of hers:



The two most prominent birds sit at the lower right and upper left power points. Further the birds in the foreground all sit on a diagonal line that runs from the lower right corner to the upper left corner of the photo, right through the power points. Then the lower tree branch the passes through the lower left point forms a secondary diagonal that echoes that primary diagonal line. Finally the heads of the birds from a third parallel diagonal line that passes through the upper right power point.

Finally there is a secondary horizontal line formed by the pink birds that runs right along the lower horizontal one-third axis. This line is muted because those birds (except for the one on the left) are mostly obscured by foliage and branches. That line provides a nice softening counterbalance to the overall diagonal lines in the rest of the photo.

Meanwhile the center of the photo has virtually nothing of interest.

This photo has splendid grace and balance. While Kristin has a good eye and good equipment that she knows how to use, I think that her sense of composition in photos such as this are what really elevates her work.

Thanks, Steve, but it's funny -- while I love this shot for the serendipity of getting all the birds together, I don't consider it one of my best composed shots, LOL! I think it's because of the one spoonie that's partially sticking into the lower right hand corner. I have to clone it out in Photoshop before I'll really be happy with this image...

KristinB said:

I don't consider it one of my best composed shots, LOL! I think it's because of the one spoonie that's partially sticking into the lower right hand corner.

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You're just going to have to add a shotgun to the kit you take out with you. Much faster than Photoshop.

Keitht said:

You're just going to have to add a shotgun to the kit you take out with you. Much faster than Photoshop.

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Keith,

:rofl:

Kristin,

Where was your picture of the birds taken?


Thanks

Richard

MULTIZ321 said:

Kristin,

Where was your picture of the birds taken?


Thanks

Richard

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At an island rookery near Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge, Florida. I went there with Captain Tom Carver, who runs fishing charters most of the year. He's also an avid photographer who takes photographers out to this island during the slower times for his fishing business in the winter. A great guy, I can highly recommend him, I've gone out with him more than once, and my friends have gone out with him as well. I'm going back in November and my hubby and I are going to go out with him on a fishing charter this next time.

KristinB said:

Thanks, Steve, but it's funny -- while I love this shot for the serendipity of getting all the birds together, I don't consider it one of my best composed shots, LOL! I think it's because of the one spoonie that's partially sticking into the lower right hand corner. I have to clone it out in Photoshop before I'll really be happy with this image...

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Yeah - I can see that. I think I would be tempted to clone him out as well.

But that's a bit like a painter just making the last few brush strokes.