(Re-posted with permission from PhotowalkingUtah.com)

“Thursday August 27th is the date for the next Photowalking Utah free photography Mini-Clinic at the Salt Lake City Library.

The theme of this clinic is “What Makes a Great Photo”. The session will be a town-hall type format featuring four guest photographer panelists. Each of the panelist will present a couple of their images for the participants to critique. As a group we will look at the photos and discuss what works and/or doesn’t work in the photograph.

The goal of the 90 minute clinic will be to give the participants (panelists and audience) the opportunity to pick up some tips on what goes into capturing and presenting a great photograph.

Here are the details:

Date: Thursday August 27th, 2009
Time: 6:30 – 8:00 pm
Location: Salt Lake City Main Library – 210 E 400 South, Conf. room #4, 4th floor
Cost: Free!

As an added bonus, we will have a swap table set up. I’ve been approached by some members of the group that have photography stuff that they would like to give away (namely, photography magazines). Please feel free to bring along any unused magazines or gear that you’d like to give away to a fellow photographer.

I really enjoy facilitating these events and am really excited about the format of this month’s session. Please feel free to contact me (rich@leggnet.com or 801.568.1000) if I can answer any questions about the clinic.

Introduction

I recently ran across this Russell Brown PhotoShop tutorial wherein he presents a technique to make what he calls a Faux HDR image. This doesn’t really have much to do with HDR other than taking a single image and giving it a surrealistic, over-the-top, tone-mapped HDR look. It does not take a scene and get more dynamic range out of it as is typical with HDR. It does take a scene with a compressed dynamic range and expands it to make it brighter while at the same time it boosts color brightness and saturation. You can go watch the video here or, if you’re like me and aren’t a fan of video tutorials, you can read about it below.

Best types of images

This technique works best on images that are not blown out but where the detail is tightly compressed. Typically this happens when a scene is exposed for a bright section, so it’s not over exposed, but has lots of dark areas causing important detail to be hidden in the shadows. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll be using this example image I took on a recent Photowalking Utah event.

As you can see from the histogram, this image has a large bump on the left and a smaller bump on the right indicating a lot of dark and light areas whereas the middle area does not have much going on. The dark areas are not underexposed nor are the light areas overexposed. This can be seen by the two triangles in the top left and right corners. The one on the left will change color when there are details lost in the shadows and the one on the right when the brightest areas are overexposed.

For comparison, here is a similar image that does not work well. It is exposed for the darker areas as evidenced by the wider and smoother bump on the left side. Unfortunately, this causes the highlights to be overexposed and the cloud detail to be lost as seen by the sharp spike on the very left side.

In Camera Raw

The majority of the work will be done in Camera Raw, prior to going into PhotoShop. First, open your image and verify there are no blown out details. As intimated earlier, look on the histogram for images without spikes going off either edge. If you click on the triangles at the top right and left corners of the histogram, Camera Raw will change all the overexposed sections to red and the underexposed sections to blue as a means of highlighting the areas that have lost detail.

Now to get into the main changes. We’re going to be manipulating primarily the Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Clarity and Vibrance sliders. We’ll start at the top of the list and work our way down. When we get to the bottom, we’ll evaluate the image and possibly go back to the top to make some fine tuning adjustments.

Exposure

The exposure will typically need to be adjusted. If on the histogram, the dark area is larger, such as on this example image, then typically the exposure will need to be increased. On the other hand, if the bright area is larger, then it’ll need to be decreased. On this image, if I increase it at all I’ll start blowing out details in the bright areas, so for now I’ll leave it at 0.

Recovery

Recovery pulls the brighter parts of the image down and gives us some headroom on the right side of the histogram to additional changes. This technique typically works best with this set the maximum, so that’s where I’ll put it for now.

Fill Light

Fill Light brightens the dark areas without blowing out the highlights. Again, the images that work best with this technique usually like this set to the maximum.

Now that we’re about half-way through this first part, we can see our image is quite a bit brighter, but has sort of a flat appearance to it.

We can see in the histogram the data is spread apart rather than being bunched up on the two sides. The remaining steps in this section will help give the image some more depth.

Blacks

Now to get rid of that flat look, we’re going to increase the Blacks slider. Adjust it so the dark regions are just starting to clip, as indicated by the blue highlights that Camera Raw shows us. For this image, a value around 40 works well.

Clarity and Vibrance

To get that surrealistic look characteristic of overly tone-mapped HDR images, we’re now going to slide both the Clarity and Vibrance sliders all the way to their maximum values.

Fine tune adjustments

Now that we have all the basic adjustments done, we need to evaluate where we are. At this point, this image is still pretty dark. To lighten it, I go back to the Exposure slider and find I can now push it quite a bit. In fact, I can increase the exposure by 2.5 stops without clipping. If I increase it more, then I start blowing out my sky which I don’t want to do. By leaving detail in the sky, even though it’s not too visible at this point, I’ll have something to work with later to improve it.

Now we’re done with the controls on the first panel.

The next step is to do some adjustments on individual colors. To do this we go to the HSL / Grayscale tab.

And once there, we click on the Luminance tab.

These controls allow us to change the brightness levels of various color groups. What we change and the amount we change it will vary from image to image. On this image, I find that decreasing the Blues and increasing the Purples significantly helps my sky. Based on this discovery, I go over to the Hue tab and find I can help the sky some more by sliding the Purples and Oranges over to the right to around 65. This brings out the colors in the sky and flowers even more. This is an area where experimentation on each image can yield dramatic results.

If you so desire, you can crop the image and apply a vignette. The cropping tool in the top toolbar works well to remove those parts of the image you don’t want and the vignette control on the Lens Correction tab allows you to highlight the center of the image. I choose not to do that on this particular one.

Open in Photoshop

We’re now done with our edits in Camera Raw. Just prior to opening the image, make sure the color depth is set correctly and smart objects is enabled. To do this, click on the label that is centered at the bottom of the Camera Raw screen containing information about the color mode, bit depth, image size and resolution. This will open a dialog. Make sure the Depth is set to 16 bits/channel and the checkbox for smart objects at the bottom is checked. Close the dialog and then click the Open Object button. Doing this will ensure there is no loss of color information in the transfer to Photoshop and the background will be configured as a smart object so edits will be non-destructive.

There are many things that can be done to the image at this point. One of the more common ones for this type of image is to adjust the Shadows and Highlights found on the Image / Adjustments menu. Quite often this type of image can be further enhanced by selectively adjusting contrast in different regions of the picture. I found on this particular one this didn’t help, but it has on others.

Sharpening is another thing that typically enhances most images. The use of either Smart sharpen… on the Filter / Sharpen menu or my High-pass sharpening action can be used. The Smart sharpen tool can give a very edgy look by pushing the controls to high values. My action will give a less edgy look.

After some tweaks to the sky, this is my final version of this image.

And here are a couple of other images processed with this technique.

Summary

In closing, here is an outline of the steps covered above.

Camera Raw
1. Exposure: over or under as dictated by image.
2. Recovery: typically 100%
3. Fill Light: typically 100%
4. Blacks: typically 30-50%
5. Clarity: typically 100%
6. Vibrance: typically 100%
7. HSL / Luminance: as needed for image

Photoshop
1. Image / Adjustments / Shadows and Highlights: as needed
2. Filter / Sharpen / Smart sharpen: as needed
3. Anything else: as desired

(Source: Hooked on Light)

Its amazing what you can do with some simple household items in the photography world. Product photography is a great avenue to explore the usefulness of these items. With product photography, you subject matter can be set up in a controlled environment; the ideal place to try out new lighting techniques and gear.

Finished bike photograph.

Today we’ll discuss what went in to producing a shot of my old mountain bike. In addition to the final shot you’ll see a lighting setup shot that you may refer to as you read through the article. To start things out, take a basic assessment of your shooting environment. In this case I was utilizing my living room. Any room with enough space for you to work can be made to function as a makeshift studio.

I also knew that I would be achieving the shot with artificial light from camera flashes; this saves me from having to spend time worrying about the amount/quality of the ambient light. With a space picked out you can begin to set up your shooting environment. The key to this shot lies in a common household item: bedsheets. There are two in this shot. First is a plain black sheet anchored to the bookshelf behind the bike and allowed to gently slope down to the floor. A second plain white sheet was anchored to the ceiling and stretched out above the black background anchored to a pair of lightstands. This white sheet forms a sort of awning over the area where our subject will be placed.

The purpose of this white sheet is diffusion. The white fabric will transmit light through it, but it the process it will spread out, or diffuse, the light we use. Diffused light equals soft light. Soft light equals flattering light that will illuminate our subject evenly and avoid bright reflective hotspots on the metal bike frame. As far as the camera is concerned, the sheet becomes one giant light source even though we may actually be firing multiple lights through it.

Our sheet set up, two softboxed Alienbees strobes go up on stands. Placed up high and angled down, these two lights pass through the large white sheet to illuminate the bike below. You might ask why use the softboxes if the bedsheet is diffusing the light for us? Double diffusion baby. The softboxes give the light some direction to keep from shooting unwanted spill everywhere, but they also provide their own soft light which will make the final output through the sheet even better for our subject.

Lights up, its time to bring the subject in. With the bike positioned on our black background, position your big lights where you think appropriate and shoot some test shots. Play with aperture and power levels of your strobes to get the desired amount of light on the subject. The final lighting issue on the bicycle was the seat. The black seat on a black background disappeared into nothing. To solved it I placed a small hotshoe camera flash with a narrow grid on it directly above and behind the bike (but below the big white diffusing sheet). The flash provides a little kiss of light to the top edge of the bike seat and the spot grid prevents the light from spilling to other areas.

The final problem with this shot was the limitation of space in my room. My black bedsheet background was almost too small to accommodate the bike on it and when shot with a wide angle lens, I was left with a lot of distracting background elements in the completed picture. In photoshop I painted out the unwanted background images leaving me with a simple, clean, black environment for my finished bicycle shot.

It is time once again (where has the summer gone?!) for the Utah State Fair Photo Contest. The process of entering contests is a good exercise because it motivates you to take a critical look at your body of work and choose images that you would like others to see. The act of printing completes the photographic process and is very rewarding. Printing is a very important part of the presentation of your entries. When you go to look at the other Fair entries, take a few minutes to look at the printing presentation. What paper type was used? Was it a high quality print? Did the cropping enhance or detract from the image? Would a border have helped? Is it well mounted and did it stay that way? We are here to help you with these decisions. We have years of printing experience, and print with state of the art inkjet printers on high quality archival papers.

As an incentive to enter the Fair, we are offering to those who print a winning Fair entry, to bring your ribbon to us (you have every right to show off your accomplishment!), and we will offer you your choice of one of the following:
1) One free size upgrade to the next standard size on your next printing order (ex. from 11×14 to a 16×20).
2) One free mat on your next framing order (we already offer 10% off your framing order if you have your pictures printed at Pixels).
3) One free paper upgrade from photo paper to a fine art paper, which includes canvas, satins, velvet and watercolor paper.
4) One free 10 minute lesson in a Photoshop skill, printing set up, or camera operation of your choice.
Entries can be submitted September 3rd, 4th and 5th at the Fair Park. Go to http://www.utah-state-fair.com/exhibitors_and_competitions/competitive_exhibits/living_arts/photography.php for all the details. This website is an excellent resource for guidance on entering, including criteria for judging and guidelines for making your selection.

It can feel a bit out of your comfort zone to enter a contest. The flip side of this is that it is very satisfying to go through the process and maybe even win a ribbon! Many of our novice photographers at Pixels have propelled their passion forward by entering the Fair contest. In the end, you will have a print that you can proudly display at home or in your office. You can do it!

Come see us! Our hours are Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 7:00 pm and Saturday, from 10:00 pm to 6:00 pm. We are at 8934 S. State Street in Sandy and our phone number is (801) 233-9090.