Posts in Category: Lightroom
3/24/2009
Surf Foam
A day of particularly foamy surf, which left all kinds of interesting patterns on the beach. Each lasted only a second before it dissolved so you had to keep your wits about you and your finger on the shutter release. This particular extended line never happened again while I was there.
I cropped the image in Lightroom to place the leading line at the left corner.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F5.6 @ 1/1000 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom I cropped as above, and straightened the horizon slightly. Graduated filter to darken sky. Clarity and Vibrance, and a very mild sharpen. Because the sharpening routine in the camera, due I think to the angle of the lens to the plane of the image (tipped down), had already sharpened the horizon portion of the image quite a bit, I used less sharpening than normal, and applied a bit of luminance noise reduction.
From Around Home.
3/17/2009
Dawn: Hebrides
Back to Scotland for a time. Dawn from the yard at the our B&B on North Uist in the Hebrides.
The sky dominated the landscape, but the landscape itself holds interest, with the lochs in the midground and the tiny flowers in the grass in the foreground.
Exposure was particularly difficult as all the light was in the sky, and exposing for the sky left the foreground very dark. This is a shot that requires previsualization of the what can be done in postprocessing (and what can not). Only recently, months after my first attempts, have I leaned the tricks in Lightroom that get me close to what I saw while standing there.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F4.0 @ 1/60th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom I used three graduated filters. One down from the top to darken and intesify the sky. One up from the bottom to lighten the foreground and increase both global and local contrast. One in the center to intensify the dawn colors. Plus some Fill light to bring the foreground up even more and global adjustments for Vibrance and Clarity. Sharpen landscape preset.
From Scotland.
3/10/2009
Sunset Cliffs, San Diego CA (click for SmugMug views)
Another recent shot from San Diego. There is a tiny city park along the cliffs behind the Nazarene College on Point Loma, overlooking the Pacific. I found my way there while waiting for the military gate on the road to Cabrillo National Monument to open. The cliffs are heavily eroded, relatively unstable earth, carved by water into intricate shapes that always remind me of Stalagmites, and the flowing formations of calcite found in caves. In this shot the formations form a strong foreground for the open ocean ocean and low clouds, with the deeply shadowed side of the jutting headland taking the midground.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F5.6 @ 1/500 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom, I pulled back the sky with some Recovery, added Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel, and use the Sharpen landscape preset. A good deal of Fill Light was needed to bring up detail in the shadowed headland. Since the sky was still too light, I applied a very selective Graduated Filter effect reaching down just beyond the horizon, and set to about -.6 EV (exposure). This darkened the blue of the sky and made the clouds right on the horizon stand out more.
From San Diego 2009.
PS.
This image was selected for Flickr’s Explore when I posted it to my stream there.
3/8/2009
Mission Bay Marina, San Diego CA (click image for Smugmug views)
We will get back to Scotland, but I thought I would post some fresh work for the next few days while I process images from San Diego (where I am a the moment).
The conference is at the Mission Bay Marina Village Center, just behind the seawall and beyond the flood control channel for the San Diego River. This shot was taken through the wall of windows which is directly behind my booth, sort of between customers.
From past experience it is a pretty typical San Diego sunset. I used my tip the camera up and let the meter read the sky, lock exposure, and reframe trick to bias the exposure for the sunset at the expense of the foreground.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F4.0 @ 1/80th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto, manually biased for the sky.
In Lightroom I used some Recovery for the sky (even with the bias it was still too light). My usual Presence settings: Added Clarity and Vibrance, and Landscape sharpen preset. I also cropped off some at the bottom to eliminate some distracting foreground detail.
The sky was still too light and the foreground too dark, so I applied Lightroom’s graduated filter effect. This is my first experiment with it, and it is indeed a powerful tool. I drew the filter over the image from the top and adjusted the level of the effect to get the sky to where I wanted it. That still left the foreground too dark, so I added Fill Light in the Exposure panel. The result is an image that is a very close approximation of what I actually saw out the window. I will be using the graduated filter effect a lot more now that I have some experience with it.
By the way, exposure is only one of the parameters you can change with the graduated filter effect. You can also change the brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, or sharpness. Powerful tool indeed.
The image is from the new San Diego 2009 gallery.
3/5/2009
Heather Road
Most roads on the Hebrides (at least on the Uists, and Benbecula where we spent out time) are one-lane, with pull outs every 1/4 mile or so for meeting cars. It works surprisingly well. This is a local road that runs down the middle of North Uist, and it very definitely off the beaten path. We drove the length of it and did not meet more than one or two cars.
And, of course, Heather is Scotland. And so too are the plantations. We saw them all through the highlands, and here they from the green triangle on the right horizon.
I love the play of the light across the landscape in this shot, taken about 10 AM, when the Hebrides summer sun was still about as low as we get it in Maine at 6 AM.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F4.0 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom, I applied quite a bit of Recovery for the sky, added some Fill Light for the foreground, as well as Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel. I also boosted the luminance of the magenta, purple, and green channels to make the landscape and the heather, in particular, more vibrant.
From the Scotland gallery.
Close up
3/4/2009
Highlander
Okay, you can’t visit Scotland without bringing back one of these. Actually, if you use Google Earth and look at the spot where I took this, there is already an image of what is probably this very beast looking over this very fence there.
Sony DSC H50 at about 250mm equivalent. F4.5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
In Lightroom, some recovery for the sky, and a little local burning of the highlights. Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel. Landscape sharpen preset.
From the Scotland gallery.
3/3/2009
Hebrides Sunset Loch: click image for larger views at SmugMug
We arrived on North Uist in the Hebrides, via the ferry from Skye, in the long long sunset. That far north it seems the sun hangs on the horizon for about 3 hours. As we drove down the island toward our B&B, we were just about pulled off the road by scenes like this. Just a little unnamed loch, with a fishing pier.
The light of the sun from behind the low clouds was clearly the subject, and always a challenging one. I exposed a variety of shots, metering on the foreground, the sky, the horizon, etc. To change the metering, my quick and dirty approach is to center the area of interest and use the exposure lock (half press the shutter release), then to reframe for composition. By including more or less sky in the metered position you and dramatically bias exposure, and you can immediately see the approximate effect on the LCD. This version was exposed primarily for the sky and the foreground was brought up in post-processing: though I have others were the sky is even more dominant.
I also cropped out a significant section of dark sky to aid the composition.
[I should mention that this is a Hebrides sunset. The sun was 30 minutes to an hour above the horizon and the color is from the low clouds. In the Hebrides, the sun hands at and just below the horizon for what seems like hours. It did not get dark for at least 3 hours after this shot, so the challenge of bringing the foreground up to natural levels was particular to the scene. Even this does not show the foreground as bright as it was in reality.]
Sony DSC H50 at about 800mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
Besides the Fill Light and Curves necessary to bring up the foreground, I applied some Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel. Because the foreground and high clouds (away from the sun) was dark in the original, I had quite a bit of noise once the curves were set, so I used Lightroom’s noise reduction sliders to smooth out the color.
See more of Scotland in the Scotland gallery.
PS.
After some discussion on one of the digital photo groups, I decided to go back and do some dodge and burn on the image using Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush. I selectively darkened the sky half a stop, and brought up the midground hills about the same, while bringing up the foreground rocks almost a full stop. I also increased the contrast of the foreground rocks, and the saturation of the midground hills on the right. This was a quick and dirty experiment. I would work much more carefully for a keeper.
Lightroom dodge and burn
And here it is using Lightroom’s Graduated Filter effect.
Graduated Filter effect.
3/2/2009
Glencoe (Glenshiel) Scotland: click for other sizes on SmugMug
As promised, more brooding Scottish scenery.
One of the most famous views in Scotland, maybe in the world. The pass at Glencoe, with the view of the Seven Sisters (weather permitting), looking out over Fort William. Site of one of the most infamous battles in the world, the massacre of the McDonnalds by the Campbells in 1692, apparently at the order of the King of England.
Take a long look at the image before reading any further please.
The trouble with flying visits, most visits to anywhere really interesting for that matter, is that you only get one chance, one day, often one moment, to capture something that, in reality, you would prefer to spend a lot of time with, over days and weeks, to get a really satisfying image. Maybe even that “you would need to spend a lot of time with” etc.
We did stop here for about 10 minutes, and I was able to get out away from the car, up a little trail through the heather to grab this shot. But the ferry from Skye was waiting, and we had a schedule to keep.
It a case like this you take the light and the weather you get. End of story.
This was not an easy shot. The range of light in the sky was too great and exposing for the highlights left the foreground way too dark. Believe me, I tried it. Then too, the camera was not working at its best aperture and I knew there was danger of Chromatic Aberration and Purple Fringing on the exposed edge of the mountain on the left. (One of the limitations of any long zoom and most Point and Shoot sensors.) Still… got to try.
The result took a lot of work in post. Ligthtroom dealt with the CA and PF fairly well, and I could bring up the foreground with Fill Light and curve adjustments, but I had a large area of over saturated sky that I did not like. I exported the file as a Photoshop document and opened it in Photoshop Elements 7.0 (simple as choosing Edit in External Program from the Picture menu). There I used the clone stamp, set at 10% transparency, to paint some clouds over the burned out section of the sky. I don’t like to do this, but needs must. I will very likely never get back to Glencoe again. I saved the file, again, as a Photoshop document to preserve all the detail, and finished editing in Lightroom, adding some Clarity and Vibrance and using the Sharpen Landscape preset, pulling up the luminance of the purples and greens a bit in the HSL panel.
The final image is a close approximation of what I really saw, and what I wanted to capture in the fleeting moments I had there. Best I could do.
It is shots like this that make me think long and hard about whether I should be carrying a DSLR on these trips. ???
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F4.0 @ 1/125 @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.
From the Scotland gallery.
2/28/2009
Scots Weather along the A82
One of the hardest things to photograph is weather. Atmospheric effects. Fog. You see things with the eye in weather that you just can’t capture in an image.
But you can try.
This valley along the A82 in the Highlands somewhere between Glasgow and Skye was filled with the coming storm, or passing storm on that day, and I was after the veiling effect of the cloud against the mountains on the far side, and that little bit of sun (almost…well at least a lightening in the atmosphere) creeping up the valley ahead of the cloud.
With a shot like this, you do your best in camera but you know that most of the work will be done in post. I counted on the Recovery slider in Lightroom to let me pull detail from the veiling cloud and shot on Programed Auto. As it was, the image required both Recovery, and some fill light, as well as a bit of adjustment of the curve at the high end to balance the light for this effect. I also moved the black point slightly to the right to add intensity. Some Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel, and a touch of added saturation for the yellows in the HSL panel. Landscape sharpen preset.
I also applied a slight crop at the left and top…left to eliminate a bit of road and two cars, and then top to balance the composition. This had the advantage of shifting the little grove of trees in the mid-ground off center, which I like.
With all that I got close to what I was after. Close enough. With weather, that is about as close as you get. If I stand back from the memory and just look at the image, I like it!
From Scotland.
PS.
After some comments, especially concerning hot white area at the upper left (fully saturated) I decided to take another crack at post-processing this image in LightZone. If you don’t know LightZone, it is wonderful tone mapping program, with some very unique features and abilities, not to mention a powerful set of styles: presets which make major effects possible in a single click of the mouse. Though it is designed, like Lightroom for that matter, to work primarily with RAW files, it does wonders for jpegs, if there is enough data in the file. In addition to dealing very effectively with a wide range of light values, it provides local contrast enhancement which can bring out a startling amount of detail in a landscape, pumping up the molding or modeling of even small details until they look much more 3 dimensional.
Take a look at the image below and compare it to the Lightroom version above. In a single click of the “relight” button, LightZone shifted the tone values to bring the burned out white area in the upper left back, but there was evidently enough information even in the burn to provide shading, so that the area was not filled with solid gray. The light now flows naturally from dense cloud cover in the right to misty cloud on the left. I used LightZones sharpen and color tools (adding some luminance and saturation), and finally applied a second relight to pull up shadow values and deepen the molding of details. The result is impressive. Not necessarily more true to life, but certainly striking.
LightZone Version
For a larger view, click the image.
S. Ingraham