Photo Editing

A really important lesson about photo editing for me has been not to worry about it too much. Sure, if you spend more time tweaking the settings you might find a better look, but it's not worth it. This is especially true when you're still learning how to edit your photos, and don't feel confident with the tools.

The key is to remember that this is not the last photograph you'll ever take, and you're in the learning process. There will be other, better photos down the line, and you'll have more experience editing, so it will go quicker and you'll get better results.

If instead you put too much expectation on one photo, you'll stress yourself out trying to make it perfect. I find that if I spend too much time on a photo, I start to get less and less clear about what looks good and what doesn't. My instinct for the photo starts to fade. Worse, I get discouraged and may never finish it, which means all that effort was completely wasted.

Often I find myself looking at a photo that could benefit from some complicated edits. It's important to stop here, though, and ask yourself, is this photo worth the effort? Most often it's not. And if the photo isn't amazing, it's going to be all the harder to stay motivated as you pain-stakingly edit it. So if the photo isn't great to begin with, you should probably just move on.

The only exception to this that I'd make is that it's good to get practice, so if the photo is halfway decent, maybe it's worth going overboard on it just for the experience.

Laguna Beach

For our four-year wedding anniversary, Jess and I left Logan with his grandma and went down to Laguna Beach for the weekend. We had a fun time overall, though we were pretty bummed that it was cloudy and drizzling all day Saturday.

The clouds did make for a great sunset, though.


I couldn't find anything interesting to put in the foreground for this shot, so I kind of gave up on the composition.

All of the best beach sunset photos seem to have a rock or some tide pools in the foreground. It makes sense--you need something in the foreground to give the photo depth, and what are you going to find on the beach except some rocks or maybe some driftwood?

Anyway, the colors were stunning enough that I thought I'd share the photo regardless.

There were also some interesting edits involved here. Check out the before and after.



When you expose for the sunset, the foreground is going to be too dark. Looking at some stunning beach sunset photos on flickr, you can tell that they always bring up the foreground.

Lightroom makes this really easy with its graduated filter tool. In the below screenshot, the filter is the three lines running across the horizon. In the pallete on the right, I can specify what adjustment(s) I want applied across this filter. For this shot, I increased the exposure by 1.33 stops to brighten both the beach and the waves.



You can also do this, of course, in Photoshop or the GIMP. Take a look at my Digital ND filter post for an example.

I boosted the contrast a bit, and brought up the darks as well.

For the saturation, I actually boosted just the oranges. I thought this added some nice punch to the sunset.



You can also do this with the saturation tool in Photoshop or the GIMP--they allow you to select which color you are adjusting.

Finally, I brought the image into Photoshop and did some sharpening and noise reduction. I'm still not very familiar with either of these two techniques, but I got a little help from a video tutorial I watched of another photographer showing what he typically does with his landscape photos.

The changes were very impressive. The best way to show you would be for you to be sitting next to me looking at the image in Photoshop, but I was able to zoom in on some parts and take some snapshots that I think show the effects pretty well.

The first image in each series is the original, the second adds the sharpening, and the third adds the noise reduction.

I sharpened using the "Unsharp mask" with a radius of .8 and an amount of 200 (the tutorial suggested a radius of .8 with an amount between 170-220). This made the waves look a lot better, it was really cool.

You can see in the sky, though, that it also added a lot of noise there. I then used the "Reduce noise" tool with a strength of 7 and "preserve details" set to 40%. I didn't really know what I was doing here; I hadn't found any good tutorials, so I just played around a bit. You can see, though, that this brought the sky pretty much back to where it was without affecting the waves much.





I'll be sure and share more about sharpening and noise reduction as I learn it!

Adobe Lightroom 2

Lightroom is amazing.

Before purchasing Lightroom, I tried to learn what about it makes it so great. The answers I found were totally unsatisfying. Lightroom is generally described as a tool that "improves your whole workflow", from organizing to editing and publishing your photos. That's all true, but a statement like that doesn't tell you how it does any of those things.

After using it for a while, here's what I think makes it so amazing.

The main reason has got to be that it's actually designed for photography. As a result, it is far more intuitive to use than Photoshop, while still giving you most of the power of Photoshop.

The reason for this is that Photoshop is designed for more than just adding saturation and contrast. It's designed for photoshopping images. As someone described it on flickr, "You need Photoshop if you're going to paste in unicorns and rainbows"--you can't do that in Lightroom. Photoshop is for "compositing" images.

Lightroom also does some of the same things that you typically need Photoshop for, but with a much more intuitive interface. For example, one of the most important features of Photoshop over a simpler editor like Picasa is that it allows you to make adjustments to specific parts of an image. You can lighten someone's face, for example, or darken the background. You do this using layers and masks, and only Photoshop and the GIMP have support for layers and masks. While powerful, managing the layers and masks can be cumbersome, and it requires thinking of your image as a stack of layers, which isn't always intuitive.

Lightroom simplifies this with one of its coolest features, a tool called the adjustment brush. The adjustment brush allows you to literally paint an adjustment on to different parts of your image. This is a far more intuitive and manageable approach, and the interface they've created for it is brilliant. Take a look at this video tutorial on the brush, and I think you'll see why this is so exciting.



As for "improving your workflow", Lightroom has a very interesting approach to managing your photos that I really like. When you make adjustments to your photos in Lightroom, it does not actually make any changes to the original image. Instead, all of the adjustments you make to any of your photos are stored in a single database file. When you're ready to print or publish an image to the web, you export it and the adjustments are applied. This way, you don't end up with a bunch of copies of the same image--for example, the original image, your Photoshop or GIMP image which stores your edits, and the final image. Lightroom manages this for you, so you don't have to come up with some clever file naming and folder scheme to keep it all organized.

One of the greatest things you can say about Lightroom is that it costs less than half as much as Photoshop, and it may be all you need for Photography. With the power of the adjustment brush in Lightroom, there are far less things that you need Photoshop for. And if you ever do really need to do something in Photoshop, there's always the GIMP out there for free. I've also heard the argument that many of the features that you need Photoshop for, such as HDR, panorama stitching, and noise reduction, are done better by other smaller and cheaper pieces of independent software.

This video tutorial shows how Photoshop integrates with Lightroom, and in the process, he talks a bit about what you still use Photoshop for. The edit he does is pretty interesting--he uses the "warp" tool to basically slim down a model's hips. It's kind of scary to think that they can do that so easily!

If you're impressed by what you see of Lightroom, you should give it a try. Adobe offers a fully-functional 30-day trial of Lightroom on their website. Give it a spin and fall in love!

Exciting New Toys

I'm afraid I've gone and done something that may make me less relatable.

For quite a while now, Jess and I have been using the desktop PC that we built for her in college six years ago. Because we built it ourselves, it's a bit of a Frankenstein, with different parts swapped out over the years. Anyway, it's time for a new one.

We wanted something with a more coherent look, so we were thinking about getting a Dell rather than building another PC. Jess was pushing for an iMac, though.

Here's how it broke down. The iMac is super compact, with no tower taking up floor space, and only one cord to plug in. It's also of course very elegant, which is really nice when you're doing artistic or design work--you want your "workspace" to inspire you.

Just weighing price and functionality, though, Macs don't make much sense. They are more expensive than an equivalent PC, while at the same they are less flexible, far more difficult and expensive to repair, and you can't carry components like the monitor forward to future computers. They also seem to be less efficient; compare the system requirements for a video game between a Mac and a PC--the Mac requires twice the horsepower.

In the end, though, I was won over by the elegance and form factor. Jess does a lot of design work, and we both do a lot of photography. We both wanted the work station to be gorgeous and exciting to work at, so we decided the price was worth it.


So we got the bottom-end 24" iMac. The main difference with the more expensive models seems to be the graphics card, which I've learned is not important for design work or photo editing. The most important factor is the amount of RAM, and all the iMacs come with 4GB.

We bought it refurbished, which cut $200 off the price and brought it down to $1299. The refurbished iMac is indistinguishable from the new one, the only drawback is you don't get the beautiful Apple packaging. I hear un-boxing a new Mac is something everyone should experience at least once.

The 24" screen is amazing. If you've used an editor like Photoshop, you know it covers your screen (and often the picture you're trying to work on) with a bunch of palettes. The wide screen is awesome because it affords plenty of room around the photo for all those sidebars.

So now I've estranged myself from my readers because I have a beautiful, fancy new computer that's inspiring to work at, and you're probably back where I was last month, editing on your 14" laptop. But wait, it gets worse.

Jess and I have made due without Photoshop for about four years now, since we started getting serious about photography. As Jess has started to do more design work and photography as well, we've gradually learned more about what we can do in Photoshop and the advantages it has over the GIMP. So... we decided to spring for it.

As you might imagine, I'm feeling mad with power at this point. The universe is pretty much mine to control. Who can stop me now that I wield Photoshop on a brand new iMac?

But have you looked at Photoshop CS4 on Amazon? It's a $700 program! It's an incredible tool, though, and if you know how to use it, it can be almost as crucial to your photography as your $1200 camera. So maybe that puts it more into perspective.

We've also heard people rant and rave about another Adobe program, which works in conjunction with Photoshop, called Adobe Lightroom 2. People will tell you this program revolutionizes photography, and we ended up throwing it in as well. I'm really excited to tell you about Lightroom, though I think it had better wait for another post.


So I feel that I've betrayed you all a bit. Up till now I've been, like many of us, relying on a smattering of free programs for editing, and jumping through hoops to accomplish things that can be done much more smoothly in Adobe's fine tools. Now, I'm sitting on some $2,500 worth of editing hardware and software, which makes more of what I do and share potentially inaccessible. I don't want that to be the case; it always frustrates me when other people share photography lessons with an attitude of "you're interested in photography, so of course you have Photoshop". Hopefully you won't find that here.

The reality is it's a lot to invest for someone still learning, and it makes sense to hold off on it for as long as you reasonably can. But don't let that stop you from taking great photos!

Santa Barbara Fair

Back in April the Santa Barbara Fair was in town. I've seen a lot of cool photos of ferris wheels at night, so I was eager to go give it a try.

My family was also in town so we went and I brought my bag and tripod along. I was worried it would be pretty awkward walking around the fair with my camera bag and tripod, but you see, what I didn't realize, is that while I know that I'm just a floundering amature, no one at the fair knows that. In general people didn't seem to notice me, and if they did they probably just assumed I was super artsy and cool. I had a tripod and a shutter release, how could I not be?


A couple interesting things about shooting fairs at night.

I was happy to find that there's plenty of space around the rides to setup and photograph them. People are either in line, or walking through one of the main walkways, and there ends up being plenty of unused room for you to work in.

I was unhappy to find, though, that the lights on the rides are definitely not the only lights at a fair. The ferris wheel, in fact, was ruined by these big bright light poles surrounding and iluminating it. You couldn't take a shot of the wheel without getting one of those blinding white lights in it.


The photos were looking great on the back of the camera. Back on the computer, though, almost all of the photos were sadly out of focus (you can see this clearly in the first photo). I'm not sure what happened. My first thought was that I used too large of an aperture (f/3.5), resulting in too shallow of a depth of field. I probably should have tried a smaller aperture with a higher ISO to compensate; if nothing else, this would have given me more wiggle room in the focusing. The only problem with this theory, though, is that the above photo was taken at f/3.5 and came out just fine (it was the one exception). So it may have just been me failing to focus the lens properly, which is lame.

Better luck next time, I guess!

HDR Photography

HDR stands for "High Dynamic Range". If you've spent some time looking at landscapes on Flickr, chances are you've come across some HDR photos, whether you realized it or not. Some are pretty overtly HDR, like the work of Stuck in Customs. Others are more subtle, and leave you wondering how on earth they managed to capture such stunning colors.

HDR is a technique which addresses the problem of a camera's limited dynamic range (refer back to this older post for an explanation of dynamic range). In an image with both very dark and very bright areas, the camera can't capture detail in both the dark and bright areas, it has to expose for one or the other.

To create an HDR image, you take multiple exposures of the same scene, each at a different exposure. Then, special HDR software combines the different exposures, pulling detail from each one. Finally, in a process called "tone mapping", the software compresses the dynamic range of the image so that it can be displayed on a screen (Not only do cameras have a limited dynamic range that they can capture, but screens have a limited range that they can display).

I'm still new to HDR, so I'm hesitant to explain in more detail until I understand it better myself. Here are some of my first experiments with the technique, though.

To take these three exposures, I used my camera's auto-bracketing feature to take exposures at -2, 0, and 2 stops. Since I'm just playing around, I made things simple and didn't use a tripod. Instead, I set the camera's drive to multi-shot, or whatever it's called. I framed the shot, then held the shutter release and it quickly fired off my three bracketed exposures before the camera moved too much.




There are two options for creating an HDR image. Photoshop includes an HDR tool, but the more popular program seems to be Photomatix. You can download a free, unlimited trial of Photomatix which places a watermark on your final image. This is perfect for playing around and learning the technique. If I decide later that some of the photos are worth having, I can plop down the $80 for the full version.

Here's the result from combining the above three exposures.


Pretty stunning for so little effort, eh?

The original images are all unedited, straight from the camera. And if you give Photomatix a try, I think you'll find that it's quite easy to use. You launch the program, press "Generate HDR Image", then select the exposures you want to combine. The initial image it shows looks pretty strange because it hasn't been tone mapped. The tone mapping screen gives you a handful of sliders and settings to play with. I think you'll find, though, that the settings aren't too overwhelming. You can reasonably just play around with them until you find what you like.

Stuck in Customs has a popular HDR tutorial at his website. There may be other better-written ones out there, though. I'll share what I find.

Here are some other HDR shots that I tried. This one was in the Alice Keck Park memorial gardens in downtown Santa Barbara (funny tidbit--Alice's last name was 'Park', so it's Alice Keck Park Park).







This is the Santa Barbara mission.





There was a small compositional trick I played in this Mission photo that I was proud of. The Mission actually has this big ugly asphalt parking lot in between it and the grass. By getting really low to the ground, I cut the parking lot out of the picture and added some foreground to the image (the grass).

The HDR technique seems to really exaggerate the dust on the lens in the photo of the mission. I need to look into that, I'm worried some of that dust may be on the camera sensor.

Anyway, I'm interested in learning and experimenting more with HDR, and I'm looking forward to sharing what I find!

Where'd you go?!?

A little bit about what I've been up to, since I've apparently been MIA for quite a while.

Life's been busy, both with deadlines at work and with all the new joys and trials that our little baby has brought. I've been doing less photography, and I had begun to wonder if I might be losing my interest in it. I find, though, that I still jump at any opportunity to take an interesting photo (and whine a whole lot when I feel like I've missed one), so I'm convinced that I still love it as much as ever.

So rest assured that I haven't given up on our favorite hobby, and I'm still committed to sharing what I learn.

Fortunately, I think the subject matter of this blog is such that it doesn't have to be updated constantly for it to be interesting. I think I should have more time in the coming months, though, since we have less going on in the evenings during the summer.

Enough about schedules. Back to photography!