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I really like what you did with the final one there. Excellent PP work. Really pops the colors.

A link to demo vids that explain Luminosity Masks quite well, from Sean Bagshaw's site:

http://www.outdoorexposurephoto.com/vid ... sity-masks

This is his tutorials and demos page, I could link em' directly but it would be rude. Scroll down to the demos.

flip-mode wrote:

So I took another run at the bridge picture from earlier and used some of the masking techniques... new version posted after the quote

And I bet that is much closer to what you saw when you took the picture.

PenGun wrote:

flip-mode wrote:

So I took another run at the bridge picture from earlier and used some of the masking techniques... new version posted after the quote

And I bet that is much closer to what you saw when you took the picture.

I am going to have to do better at consciously noting my actual perceptions versus what the image looks like, but I can say that the sky was not that blue. I find that I am able to pull way more blue out of the sky than was actually seen with my own eye. But it's really hard to say, since in real life my eye is one moment focused under the bridge and adjusted to suit, and the next minute the ground, and the next minute the sky, but never seeing it all together simultaneously as the camera does. Were that the case, I imagine my eye might work more like the camera.

I am so, so glad for this camera... I'll take pictures of my kids that didn't feel worth taking with sh:tty cameras, and so I'll have those to return to for the the rest of my life. It will be amazing to look at them a decade or two from now.

flip-mode wrote:

PenGun wrote:

flip-mode wrote:

So I took another run at the bridge picture from earlier and used some of the masking techniques... new version posted after the quote

And I bet that is much closer to what you saw when you took the picture.

I am going to have to do better at consciously noting my actual perceptions versus what the image looks like, but I can say that the sky was not that blue. I find that I am able to pull way more blue out of the sky than was actually seen with my own eye. But it's really hard to say, since in real life my eye is one moment focused under the bridge and adjusted to suit, and the next minute the ground, and the next minute the sky, but never seeing it all together simultaneously as the camera does. Were that the case, I imagine my eye might work more like the camera.

I am so, so glad for this camera... I'll take pictures of my kids that didn't feel worth taking with sh:tty cameras, and so I'll have those to return to for the the rest of my life. It will be amazing to look at them a decade or two from now.

Some people write little notes for each shot but I just wing it. The human eye does not see anything like a camera, as you said it's all over the place, it uses saccadic motion to look at everything in it's field of view.

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=& ... GE&cad=rja

Nice pic of your son in the tree. That is a good one.

PenGun wrote:

Nice pic of your son in the tree. That is a good one.

Thanks, man. I was eager to share that one with the TR group. It does need some color tweaking. His face is green!

flip-mode wrote:

PenGun wrote:

Nice pic of your son in the tree. That is a good one.

Thanks, man. I was eager to share that one with the TR group. It does need some color tweaking. His face is green!

Yes it is. It is reflecting the tree and is probably right.

As you get into it more you will find colour is tricky. As I have said before, a white horse in the snow on a sunny day is blue. It's the sky reflected in the horses colour. In this case it's the leaves colouring his face.

I usually pick the shot's primary subject and then white-balance for it, unless it completely distorts the background to something so unnatural that it detracts from the subject. For example, last Christmas I took several pictures of my family in a room illuminated mainly by CFLs, which results in a lot of green spectral lines and corresponding "zombie skin" effects. After white-balancing (and warming a bit) to correct the skin tone, some of the background objects went "off" slightly, and I couldn't repair one without distorting the other. So, I erred for skin tone, because that's the first thing that will ruin a picture.

ludi wrote:

I usually pick the shot's primary subject and then white-balance for it, unless it completely distorts the background to something so unnatural that it detracts from the subject. For example, last Christmas I took several pictures of my family in a room illuminated mainly by CFLs, which results in a lot of green spectral lines and corresponding "zombie skin" effects. After white-balancing (and warming a bit) to correct the skin tone, some of the background objects went "off" slightly, and I couldn't repair one without distorting the other. So, I erred for skin tone, because that's the first thing that will ruin a picture.

I haven't really explored my 'process', but to put it into words, I start with the subject like you detail above, and work my way around. Everything from straightening, to cropping, to white balance, to exposure is balanced there, with secondary corrections like specific color saturation modifications, chromatic aberration removal, and de-noising made only when they don't have an overly negative effect on the subject.

Night shots seem to be a particular challenge here. You have higher ISOs so there's more noise and less dynamic range, both of which limit your ability to balance detail across the image. Worse, shadows tend to turn blue with heavy lifting, and reds quickly become over-saturated. It's not a problem if you don't have a 'reference' blue or red in the frame that can be compared, but if you do, you either have to make a compromise or get more detailed in your edits.

ludi wrote:

I usually pick the shot's primary subject and then white-balance for it, unless it completely distorts the background to something so unnatural that it detracts from the subject. For example, last Christmas I took several pictures of my family in a room illuminated mainly by CFLs, which results in a lot of green spectral lines and corresponding "zombie skin" effects. After white-balancing (and warming a bit) to correct the skin tone, some of the background objects went "off" slightly, and I couldn't repair one without distorting the other. So, I erred for skin tone, because that's the first thing that will ruin a picture.

One of the things the Silkypix RAW decoder, you get with the Fuji X-E1, does well is deal with colour balance. There are, I'm not in windose so I'm guessing, perhaps 8 different flourescent settings, 3 tungsten settings and a raft of natural light settings from bright day to dusk. They work quite well even on CF lights.

I have the Lightroom trial but the Fuji software seems more complete. Now I am a complete newcomer to Lightroom so I cannot really judge it in any useful manner.

PenGun wrote:

I have the Lightroom trial but the Fuji software seems more complete.

I would be shocked if this were true. I'd play around in LR a bit more.

TheEmrys wrote:

PenGun wrote:

I have the Lightroom trial but the Fuji software seems more complete.

I would be shocked if this were true. I'd play around in LR a bit more.

The Fuji software has 'presets', but Lightroom has a slider- which means that you should be able to hit any of those presets as well as every value between, and a great number of values on either side.

Now, I'm not knocking Fuji's software- you can download and purchase loads of presets for Lightroom. But from your example, it sounds like Fuji has included a very focused piece of software, that may not provide the range of adjustment Adobe provides, though it is probably more user friendly. That's one thing that Adobe gets a fail on. They want to be different, like Apple, yet manage to do so in an obfuscated way that requires quite a bit of patience to fully wrap your head around.

Once you do, though, Lightroom (at least) becomes a very powerful and very fast tool as part of a workflow. Plenty of tools do different things a little better, but I don't know of any (aside from Apple's Aperture) that do them all well, and quickly.

A friend of mine from Indonesia, met in Singapore last year for vacation.
(If it looks like she's about to hit me, she probably did)



Taken with a Canon 60D, 15-85mm IS USM, 70-300mm IS USM, 50mm F/1.8 II, and 24mm IS USM, processed like hell through Lightroom to make up for poor, rushed photography and the atrocious low-light noise that Canon's crop-sensor puts out.

*Edit: Flikr permissions are a pain.

Tharp, I don't know why your image isn't showing up, but I looked through the whole set of photos on Flickr and they're all great shots, well composed. Good work, strong work.

flip-mode wrote:

Tharp, I don't know why your image isn't showing up, but I looked through the whole set of photos on Flickr and they're all great shots, well composed. Good work, strong work.

Thanks! It seems Flikr is changing the addresses to pictures; not sure what's up with that, but I fixed this one and checked the others in this thread.

Through a random sequence of events, I stumbled across an old photo that, given the Memorial Day just passed here in the US, strikes me rather differently now than when I first took it.



Even the vignetting from the lens just works with the composition. That image is completely untouched out of the camera. Makes me want to wander back through old photos and see what other jems are lurking...

--SS

This is me with my new Sony 70-400G. Threw them up on Flikr, but I'm thrilled with the lens. I was only using a monopod, so there is a bit of motion blur at 1:1 crops, but I am satisfied for what I was trying to do.

I really like this river. It flooded pretty badly once upon a time. To get the scale of it, notice the bridge at the bottom of the shot.

RMNP June 1 (1 of 5).jpg by TylerDillon, on Flickr

This is Long's Peak taken from within Rocky Mountain National Park @400mm/5.6. Rest of info is in the exif.


RMNP June 1 (3 of 5).jpg by TylerDillon, on Flickr

This one I used in-camera HDR to get this one. I did a bit of PP with white balance, but that was it.


RMNP June 1 (2 of 5).jpg by TylerDillon, on Flickr

I just really liked that I stumbled across this group of horseback riders.


RMNP June 1 (4 of 5).jpg by TylerDillon, on Flickr

Edit : Not digging the auto cropping that happened. Any help would be appreciated.

Beautiful.

TheEmrys wrote:

I'm thrilled with my new Sony 70-400G.
RMNP June 1 (3 of 5).jpg
RMNP June 1 (2 of 5).jpg

Edit : Not digging the auto cropping that happened. Any help would be appreciated.

Gorgeous shots. TR's forum software automatically crops images. Does Flikr give you a thumbnail option less than 900 pixels wide?

Yep! Fixing now.

Oh, and thanks!

I was walking the dog at the park yesterday and saw a fantastic looking tree - I believe it is a Beech Tree. I went back this morning to snap some pictures. The pics didn't turn out as well as I hoped - the sky is too overexposed - but it did give me a chance to do another deep dive into post-processing. Here's the before and after:

'Fraid I like the before better. The deeper shadows and dark lush green of the leaves give it a heavy forest feel.

--SS

I'm with SS on this one, not that I'm faulting you- it's a very challenging shot, where the camera got the colors right. Actually, it's a very good shot! The only thing it really needs (if anything at all) is a slight adjustment to the highlights and an adjustment to overall contrast, balancing with exposure. The end result, though, will be very close to the original shot. At least that's what I found in my attempt at it in Lightroom .

I appreciate your honesty guys! Yet, my own preferences are still inclined toward the adjusted image

It was (for me) a difficult shot. I used a tripod. Forgot to disable "steady shot" and I'm wondering what difference it would have made - would the image have been sharper? I took the shot at probably -3 EV, but I honestly am not 100% certain. It was done in manual so the EXIF doesn't show the automatic metering data. I know it's underexposed a little bit since I was trying to anticipate the bright sky.

I need to develop my process better. I was thinking about that yesterday as I was looking through the weekend's shots. I'm not sure how I need to improve it, but I know it needs improvement. I need a very basic process of how to approach a scene, analyze the lighting of the scene, and then respond to that lighting.

As for the image adjustments, the most profound adjustment I made was simply adjusting the overall levels and then the brightness (actually pulling down the brightness after adjusting the levels). The ten other adjustments I made each had only incremental effects.

I tried again- increasing contrast and balancing the exposure helped the most, but I did make a number of small adjustments that probably didn't help much.

For camera settings, I think you did it right- your challenge when dealing with overexposure in the shot is to get enough detail across the composition that will allow you to balance the exposure between subject and overexposed areas in post. I had to deal with this over the weekend; I decided to leave the overexposure (essentially shooting at what the camera was telling me was ~+2EV) and deal with it in post, which seemed to work well, but remember that's on a Canon with Canon RAWs. You'll have to decide how the Sony RAWs work best .

A few shots from the Dallas World Aquarium with the 100L and 70-300 IS USM on the 60D:



I did take quite a few shots of fish, however, apparently I'm still challenged in that area, as my keeper rate approached 1/20. I don't really like the few that I did process, either, but that's the rap .

FWIW, I've shot indoor exhibits at both the zoo and the museum and gotten similar keeper rates. The lighting conditions are extremely challenging, especially when shooting with a long telephoto, and the subjects are not always static, so the "shoot 'em all and let post-processing sort them out" method is sometimes inevitable.

EDIT: Also, this.

That's awesome. I knew I liked that shot for some reason .

Some wild roses from a massive bush that is just starting to fill out well. This with the XF 60mm 2.4. I will return soon with my XF 14mm 2.8 when it's in full bloom.