Beginning Editing (A Review of Google's Picasa)

I think a lot of people are afraid of editing their photos. It's so complicated and involved--there's way too much to learn!

I wanted to step back and take a very elementary look at editing, and try to convince you that the basics of editing are not hard at all, and definitely worth your time.

To do this, I want to show you how to use Google's free and amazing image organization and editing tool, Picasa. There's no fancy software or equipment required here, just a point-and-shoot digital camera and a free tool you can find on the web. You can download Picasa for the PC here or the Mac, here.

Managing Your Photos
Talking about managing photos has always seemed boring to me, but trust me, you'll appreciate what Picasa can do here.

Picasa is a superb tool for organizing your collection of photos. Some highlights are that it allows you to create 'virtual albums' which allow you to create a collection of photos without having them all live in the same directory on your computer. Also, it automatically creates backups of the originals of your photos so that you don't have to invent your own file naming scheme for maintaining original vs. edited copies of your files.

I want focus mainly on editing here, so to get you hyped about Picasa's many other cool features, I'll just point you to a video Google has created to show off Picasa, here.

On to Editing
When Jess and I first started managing our digital photos from trips we had taken and outings with our friends, probably 6 years ago now, we used a Windows tool called Microsoft Office Picture Manager. It had an 'auto-correct' button, and we'd go through all of our photos and auto-correct them. Usually the result was great, but if it was horrible we'd just undo it and move on.

Picasa has the same feature, but with a bit of a Google spin to it, as it's labeled the "I'm feeling lucky" button.



If you're someone who likes to take and share pictures (and of course you are), but doesn't want to learn a lot about editing, just hit this button. You'll be blown away by the results on many of your photos.

Here are a few before-and-after images that have been auto-corrected by Picasa. I honestly only had to hit one button. These are snapshots we took on a trip to Italy in 2005 with a 4 megapixel Olympus point-and-shoot, so nothing fancy here!

Before	After

Eventually you will come across some photos where the auto-correct seems to do more harm then good. I think the "I'm feeling lucky" button is often just the same as hitting both the "Auto Color" and "Auto Contrast" buttons that are right next to it. Typically if you feel like Picasa didn't auto-correct the image well it's because it didn't get the auto color right. Try just hitting Auto Contrast and leaving it at that.

Plunging Deeper
Ready for a little more control, eh? There's a few other simple corrections you can make.

1. Fill Light
On the basic tab, notice the "Fill Light" slider towards the bottom. This is a handy, seemingly magical tool that fixes a common problem with photos. When we take snapshots, we rarely put much effort into getting perfect, even lighting on the scene. Your eye adjusts to different lighting conditions easily, so you don't really notice when, because of the direction or source of light, your subject is actually much darker than everything around it. The result is that your subject looks too dark in the final photo. Fortunately, the fill light tool can help. Push the slider towards the right and you will see your subject lighten up, as if someone had placed a "fill light" on the ground in front of you to brighten your subject.

This picture was taken in front of the Trevi Fountain in Rome. The fountain's in full sun, but we're sitting in the shade. I auto-corrected the image then added some fill light so you could still make out our faces. Man, we look young there!

Before	After

2. Saturation
Go to the Effects page and click 'Saturation'. Most photos can benefit from a bit of a saturation boost, which will give the photo's colors some more punch.

Show some restraint, though! It's easy to get carried away with saturation and end up with some electric colors that don't look natural. Watch the areas of your photo that already have bright colors. If boosting the saturation causes you to lose a lot of detail in those areas, you're going too far.

3. Contrast
Picasa doesn't include a contrast slider, but if you look at the 'Tuning' page you'll see a 'Shadows' slider which allows you to darken the shadows and a 'Highlights' slider that allows you to brighten the highlights.Giving each of these a bump can add some extra contrast to your photo.

Before	After

A little bump to the shadows and highlights can add some nice contrast
Experiment on your own
Picasa has a lot of other neat features, but I don't want to overwhelm you. Just play with what you've seen here, and eventually you'll be comfortable enough to start exploring.

For those of you who are already fairly comfortable doing some basic editing, I wanted to point out a couple other tools in Picasa that I think are really neat. One is the 'Retouch' tool, which allows you to easily remove dust marks and blemishes. The other is the 'Sharpening' effect, which applies some sharpening to your photos and can really help your photos look more crisp. Both of these features are things you usually only get in more powerful editors that you have to pay for, so it's really cool that Picasa includes them. I should say, too, that Picasa implements them very well and they're very simple to use.

Conclusion
Picasa's tools for helping you organize and play with your photos are a good enough reason to use it alone, but it also makes editing your photos so easy that there's really no excuse for not doing it. So go download it and have some fun!

Photomatix

This past Sunday was my birthday, hooray! My generous parents bought me a copy of Photomatix as a birthday present.

In a previous post, I explained the basics of HDR and played with a trial version of Photomatix which put watermarks all over the final images. Now I've got the real thing, though, and I'm ready to rock!

It's almost silly how much magic this software works.



I took this photo a couple months back in an effort to get back into photography. Even though the sky was amazing, I had a really tough time framing the fountain, the mission, and the sky. I came home that night really discouraged, but I'm glad I at least captured what I did!

Thinking back on it, what I really needed to do was to get further back so that the fountain would become a smaller part of the composition. The problem was, that fountain is right next to the street and there was a huge truck parked right behind me, so that was as far back as I was going to get. Maybe next time I'll reserve the space by parking in it :).

Thanks again, Mom and Dad, for the cool software!

Time-lapse Sunset

I think I've mentioned before that the back of our house has a great view of the sunset. The house sits on a bit of a hill, so the back end is raised pretty high off the ground, and we have a relatively clear view out to the west. Whenever I see a great sunset in the making out our back door (and they seem to happen pretty often around here), I tend to bemoan the fact that I can't be out somewhere interesting shooting it.

I've found a bit of a solution to that, though. The view isn't quite spectacular enough to make a single photo workable, but I think making a time lapse video can add just enough interest to it to make it fun.

Time-lapse Sunset, October 24, 2009 from Chris McCormick on Vimeo.

Technically, this isn't the first time I've done this. I shot another one of these over a year ago, but never really finished pulling the video together. I've learned a lot from these two attempts, and I think there are some good things that I can do to improve it for next time around.

Here's what I did to create this.

Taking the pictures
The video is composed of 159 shots each taken 10 seconds apart.

To take the shots, I setup the camera on the tripod, and hooked it up to our laptop.

Our Canon 20D came with some software called "EOS Capture" for basically controlling the camera from the laptop (for my own reference, you launch the "EOS Viewer Utility", then find EOS capture in the menu). One of the features is a sort of "intervalometer" which allows you to program it to take a certain number of shots with a certain spacing. I set it up to to take 180 shots at 10 second intervals, giving me 30 minutes. The camera battery wasn't fully charged, though, and it stopped shooting after 159. It's a bummer--you can tell from the video that there was still plenty of color left in the sky when it stopped!

As for the camera settings, I left it on aperture priority mode with an fstop of f/5.6. The lighting obviously changes as the sun goes down, so you need to use one of the camera's auto-exposure modes so that it adjusts. I chose aperture priority because I wanted to make sure that the depth of field stayed constant the whole time.

One thing I forgot about, though, was the white balance. I left it on auto white balance, which probably accounts for some of the shifts in color between different frames. Ideally, I think you'd want to have the same white balance the whole time.

I almost always shoot in RAW format, and with RAW you can go back and set the white balance after the fact. This time, though, I shot JPEG thinking that would save me a step, since the video software would likely need JPEGs. Oops!

Next time, I think I'll leave it on auto white balance, but shoot in RAW, and then go back afterward to apply the same color temperature to all of the shots.

Editing the shots
Yet another opportunity for me to rave about the merits of Adobe's Lightroom. It makes batch editing incredibly easy. You just select one of the photos, perform all of the edits you want to make--color, cropping, and all of that--then just copy those changes to all of the other photos. You select the photo you edited, click "Copy settings...", choose which types of edits you want to copy, select all of the other photos, and click "Paste settings". And that's it, it batch edits all of your photos for you. Sweet!

Knowing that this wasn't going to be much of a masterpiece, I edited the photos pretty hastily. I boosted the contrast and saturation, played with curves a bit to add more contrast to the sky, and cropped it into a 16:9 aspect ratio for HD video.

Creating the video
I was able to pull together the video in iMovie. I haven't used iMovie before, so it took me a while to figure out how to set the spacing between the jpegs. A couple notes for my own reference:
- Once the jpegs are ready, import the photos into iPhoto first, then from iPhoto to iMovie. If you go straight to iMovie, the order of the photos gets mixed up
- Set the frame rate by selecting the images and clicking the 'Inspector' button. Go to "Clip" settings and set the duration of the images.

iMovie would only let me go as high as 10 frames per second, but videos typically run at 30fps. I found that there's a powerful UNIX-based command line tool called ffmpeg which you can use to create these videos. Next time around, if my shots are looking more promising, I think I might put the effort in to using that tool to get a smoother video. The speed of the cloud movement was pretty good, so to balance out the increased framerate, I would try taking the pictures 5 seconds apart instead of 10.

Jail House

While I was out behind the Mission last weekend, I found that one of the stone ruins back there was this old jail house with no roof. It seemed like the perfect subject for a shot of the night sky.


18mm, 2 minutes at f/4.0 and ISO 800

There was some wind earlier this week that blew away all of the haze in Santa Barbara, so I jumped at the opportunity to try out this shot on a clear night.

A recent gift from my wife came in handy on this outing; she got me one of those huge 4 D-battery Maglites. It made it a little less terrifying tramping along the trail in the dark, and was really helpful for lighting up the jail house so that I could focus the lens on it.


The funny thing was, once I had crossed through the park, I realized the jail house was on the complete opposite side, and there was a road literally right behind it! Oh well, though; walking through the dark made it more exciting :)

To set this shot up, I mounted the camera on the tripod at its lowest setting, maybe 8 inches off the ground, and used the cable release. I had planned to get more of the building in the shot, but there was a big bush there blocking me from backing up anymore. The trees in the background also constrained the angle that I could shoot at if I wanted the sky in the picture, so this seemed like pretty much the only way to frame it.

It took 5 test exposures to get it right. At these shutter speeds, I was out there for a good 30 minutes just to get those 5 shots. For the final shot, I opened the lens wide at f/4.0, then set the shutter speed to 'bulb' and timed the exposure manually with a sports watch for 2 minutes.

I had done one earlier exposure at 4 minutes, but found that at that length the stars movement is pretty noticeable. "Star trails" are a pretty cool effect, but if you go that direction I think you kind of want to go all the way, so I stuck with 2 minutes and bumped the ISO instead.

I probably spent a couple hours playing with this photo to get the look right. I discovered that an important problem with taking photos of a starry sky is the camera's white balance. If you're not sure what white balance is, there's a superb article on the subject here. The problem was that the light on the building came from the headlights of passing cars, and the headlights have a much different color temperature than the light of the stars.

Camera auto-WB, 4450K	2900K

Because of the complexities here with the colors, it was tempting to just go with a monotone treatment and make this a black & white or maybe sepia image. The contrast between the cool sky and warm light on the stone was just too good to pass up, though.

There were two different approaches I could think of to resolving this white balance problem. One would be to bring the image into Photoshop, divide the building and sky into two layers, and adjust their white balance separately.

Another approach, which I decided to go with instead, was to use the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom to select just the sky.


Selecting the sky using the adjustment brush

I desaturated the sky (not completely, though) and applied a light blue color (I have to thank Jess again for helping choose just the right color of blue for this). This had the added benefit of cleaning up what I think must have been noise in the stars--the stars were all slightly different colors in the original.

I read an interesting tutorial on creating really dramatic star trails, here. I hope I get a chance to try it out!

Mid-Day Shooting

Parenting sure is a wild ride! Just when you think you've adapted to life with them in it, they change and you have to adjust to a whole new set of challenges.

A few months ago Logan learned to crawl. He's easier in a lot of ways now--he doesn't cry as much, I don't feel like we change as many diapers, and he's getting funner to play with every day. BUT, he's mobile now, and requires a lot more supervision (almost constant). No more sitting him on the floor with some toys and turning your attention to something else.

It's much harder now to find free time to enjoy more 'stationary' types of relaxation like reading, editing photos, or writing blog posts. It would also be asking a lot more of Jess now for me to leave her with Logan and go out shooting. So things have been pretty quiet on the photography front for a few months now.

I was whining to Jess yesterday about how I really wanted to get back into it, but didn't know how to make it work; right now I'm really needed at home at sunrise and sunset to help get Logan up and to help put him down. But Jess raised an interesting question: can I really only shoot at sunrise or sunset? My first response was yes; the light and the adventure during those hours is a big part of what I love about photography. But, she made a good point, and I decided that for the sake of getting back into the hobby, I'd find ways to shoot during the day.

I spent some time on flickr looking for inspiration (click here for a practically endless slide show of 'interesting' photography posted to flickr in the last 7 days). Here's what I came up with.

• You still want nice diffused light. You can find this anytime of the day if you look in shade from plants (the light is diffused by the trees) or light fabrics.
• A cloudy day will also diffuse the light, though it means you can't count on a blue sky for your image.
• You can take a relatively bland image, then play with different effects during processing to create something interesting.
• You can work with the harsh light to create a high-contrast image with both very bright and very dark areas.

There's a beautiful home nearby that has this awesome "cottage in the woods" feel to it. I thought it'd be fun to snap a pic of it, good-light-be-damned, and then play with the image to enhance that fairly tale feel.


I just cropped the photo down and used a Lightroom preset called "Aged Photo" to achieve this.

Here's the un-cropped original. Cropping really helped me out here--I was having a tough time framing this photo and was feeling discouraged, but a little cropping and I think it turned out great! The white security camera sure is distracting, too, so I cloned that out.



I took this next photo on some trails behind the Santa Barbara mission.



My wife gets the credit for editing this one. She cropped it, took the shadows way down, and added a vignette.

Here's the original.



I'm glad I've found some ways to get back into photography; hopefully you'll start hearing more from me!

Sunset at Hendry's Beach

50mm, 1.3 sec at f/22, ISO 200

Just a few days after I spent the morning at Butterfly beach (the subject of my last post), I noticed some beautiful clouds in the sky towards the evening, which could make for a great sunset.

I had obviously already put a lot of energy into photography that week, and felt like I might have had my fill of adventure. I checked the tides anyway, and they were a perfect height for the rocks at Hendry's Beach (about 3ft).

Our house is great for "monitoring" the sunset. Out the front windows we have a great view of the mountains, and you can see how the clouds are looking there. Out our back porch, you can see where the sun goes down, and how the clouds are looking over the ocean.

Still undecided, I kept running back and forth across the house checking the clouds every 5 minutes (this has pretty much become a daily habit). Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, so I got permission to leave my loving wife with the baby, grabbed my gear, and headed to the beach.

After I got back that night, I was convinced I would never pass up another sunset again.

50mm, 6.0 sec at f/22, ISO 100

I hadn't yet had a chance to look over and process my photos from Butterfly, so I hadn't learned all of the lessons from that shoot yet. I had learned, though, to make sure that in my photos the water actually went past the rocks. In a lot of my photos from Butterfly, the water didn't even reach the rocks.

I was a little more careful with my compositions this time around, but it was still pretty frantic. I'd look one way in the sky and say, "wow, look at that!", take a few pictures, then look behind me and say, "oh my gosh, look at that!"

50mm, 5.0 sec at f/22, ISO 100

Looking over the photos, there are definitely a good number that make me wonder what I was thinking when I took them--the compositions are so bad I must have just been trying to fire off shots to capture some cool bit of light in the clouds. But, there were clearly a few that turned out great.

Overall, it was an amazing sunset and I had a lot fun.

18mm, 15.0 sec at f/22, ISO 100

Some thoughts from this outing:

• I came prepared with some shorts and rubber flip-flops; in most of these photos, the waves went up past my feet and left seaweed wrapped around the legs of the tripod.
• I put polarizing filters on the lenses I used. I'm not sure how significant the polarizing effect is in the evening, but the filters protected the lenses and hopefully cut some of the light to allow for longer exposures.
• In composing these seascapes, you have to consider the shape of the clouds! Capturing the colors and the movement of the water is one thing, but taking the shape of the clouds into account makes this tough. Most of the photos just captured a segment of the clouds and their color, but cut off the edges. It would be really great to capture more of the cloud formation and tie it in to the rest of the composition.
  

Jess and I are taking next week off and I'm sure we'll be doing a lot of photography, so hopefully there will be some exciting stuff coming up!

Butterfly Beach

A few weeks ago, I got up at the lovely hour of 5 am and drove down to Butterfly Beach in Montecito to catch the sunrise.

I always check the tides online before going to the beach, and this was the lowest I had ever seen it. I was kind of afraid that when I got there the ocean would be gone and I would be able to see all the way to the bottom.

Sure enough, "the ocean was gone", and there were some beautiful rocks exposed down by the waves.



To smooth out the waves, I made the exposure as long as possible. I set the aperture to the lens' minimum of f/22, and I set the ISO to the minimum of 100. This got me up to a 5 second exposure. The above photo, though, was actually overexposed and taken with a 20 second exposure.

While photographing these rocks, I knew the scene had a big range from dark to light, so I decided to bracket my exposures in case I wanted to try blending the different exposures. I bracketed the shot at -2, 0, and +2 stops. As it turned out, the +2 stop image (20 second exposure) looked the best. The water in the 0 stop image (5 second exposure) was pretty smooth, but it didn't have the same eerie atmosphere that this one has.

Are you ready to see the before and after? Because I don't think you are... :)



Where'd the color come from, right? First, I brought the whole image down 1 stop in Lightroom because it all looked over-exposed. Then, I added a graduated filter over almost the whole image to bring down the sky by another two stops. This brought out the clouds which were hiding in there, but they were still pretty white-washed. So I added a blue tone to the filter, and that's where the color came from. I think it works well because, if you compare it to some other properly exposed photos from the morning, the sky color is actually a pretty close match, though maybe just a bit more surreal.

I also played some with the -2 stop image, since it captured the colors in the sunrise. It's probably not a serviceable image because of the obliterated foreground, but I liked the sky and the reflection too much not to share it.



The moon crept in there at the edge of the shot. The moon was blown away in the +2 image, but you can actually still see its reflection in the water if you look closely.

After editing the -2 stop exposure, I was stoked, because I was thinking that I'd just blend this image together with the +2 exposure and get the best of both worlds. I've read a few other photographers mention blending in different exposures to get the perfect "seascape" shot, so I figured I was golden. It didn't work out at all, though. That sky is just far too dark for how light the foreground is in the other one, and there was just no way to believably blend the two together. I'm really glad I tried the blue tone in the +2 image, otherwise I probably would have just given up on the whole shot.


This was my first attempt at using rocks as a foreground, so I definitely didn't have a clear idea of what I was doing. I pretty much spent the whole time running around experimenting--I wasn't focused on finding and composing a perfect shot. A few photos still turned out really cool, though, and I definitely learned a lot in the process.

I was amazed at how that 20 second exposure turned out, but the below photo is really more what I was envisioning that morning.



This photo was taken with a 1/2 second exposure, and I love the way it captured the movement in the water. The photo as a whole isn't too great, though. The wave on the horizon is distracting, and the original image was badly underexposed, so the final edit has a lot of noise in the foreground.

The next time I go out, I think I'll try taking more photos around this shutter speed. I should also be able to adjust the aperture and ISO to overexpose it a bit and bring out the foreground better.

One last photo from the morning before I leave you.


Thanks for stopping by!