Tag Archives: HDR Efex Pro

New Low Saturation Post Processing for Antique Vehicles

12 Wednesday Jun 2013

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M3A1 Scout Car at WAAAM. (Rick A. Brown)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here and for my return I thought I’d post about how I’ve further refined an earlier technique I wrote about here. Inspired by Joel Grimes’ online training at Kelby, I played around with my earlier method until I arrived at something I truly love.

The method starts with a three shot HDR that I merge in Nik HDR EFex Pro 2. I process it to be a little flatter than I want the final product to be with slightly exaggerated detail. Of course, I prepped the RAW files by applying the chromatic aberration reduction and reducing the noise a little. When I finish with the HDR merge, I then open the file in Photoshop. I open the file in Nik Silver Efex Pro2 and process this image to be a little flatter than the desired finished product with good defined detail. I start with either the High Structure (Harsh), High Structure (Smooth) or Fine Art preset. In the final, I want the subject to have more structure than the foreground, so I use whichever preset will lead to that result the easiest.

After finishing with Silver Efex Pro2, I convert the background to a regular layer and move it above the Silver Efex layer and change the blend mode to soft light. Next I stamp the visible layers on top and apply a 16 pt Gaussian Blur. Change the blend mode of this layer to overlay and reduce the opacity between 60% and 40%.

Next Stamp all visible layers to the top and apply a Color Efex Pro4 recipe I discussed earlier here. This applies Tonal Contrast and Detail Extractor. Brush this effect on to only the vehicle and then reduce the opacity of this layer as desired, I find 70% is the average setting.

Finally, you may want to stamp all visible layers to the top again and apply Darken/Lighten Center in Color Efex Pro4.

Have fun!

Take a look at the rest of my 5/11/13 WAAAM Photos.

WAAAM Membership and the March Second Saturday

04 Thursday Apr 2013

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Recently, I became a member at WAAAM. As a staff member there mentioned to me, I’m there so often that in the long run it will probably be less expensive for me. Not to mention, I hope to become involved with some volunteer work around there, although the distance to the museum and my focus on my career would mean that a regularly scheduled volunteer commitment would probably be impractical.

Thus, when I went over to the museum for the Second Saturday in March, it was my first time to be there as a member. When I arrived the woman at the front desk recognized me and knew that I was now a member, so she checked me in before I even got out my membership card. Once in the museum, many of the staff and volunteers made mention of me joining the museum as I walked around. (Not all were aware, but I’m sure it was greater than 50%.) I consider this fact to be illustrative of how friendly a place WAAAM is.

As far as the Second Saturday event itself; the weather was beautiful, perhaps a little too beautiful for a photographer. I did my usual of photographing the airplanes and cars that were outside for the day’s activities, with the major difference being that there was a fairly good opportunity to photograph the Waco APO as it was determined that it was easier to get the YPF out to fly by pushing the APO outdoors first. One of the APO photos is what I’ve decided to use as my cover photo for this collection of images.

The presentation for this Second Saturday was about navigation for airlines circa the ‘40s and ‘50s. This presentation was immensely interesting and I think it’s safe to say that everyone is glad for modern navigational tools.

While at the museum, I ran into some photography friends. I didn’t know they would be there, but had a feeling they might be. This led to a friendly dinner at the end of the day, an always welcome way to conclude a great day at the museum.

All in all, it was a fantastic day. Take a closer look at my images from the March, 2013 Second Saturday at WAAAM.

More Oregon Covered Bridge Photos

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

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In November, I continued to photograph Oregon’s covered bridges. These bridges make for wonderful subjects; iconic, evocative, and often in photogenic locations.

One thing I definitely learned with them in November is that some subjects are definitely better photographed at some times of the year rather than others. At the beginning of the month, we still were in the stages of a kiss of Fall color on an otherwise green setting. These circumstances led to great photos, even if I would’ve preferred a little more Fall color. By the end of the month, the trees were mostly without leaves and anything but white skies became rare. This led to significantly less attractive images, so much so that I decided to put off photographing more covered bridges until Spring or we get snow with all the right circumstances to allow me to get to the bridge to photograph.

Take a closer look at these covered bridge photos, look at the earlier covered bridge photos, or look at my landscape portfolio.

 

Aviation Composite Portrait Methodology

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

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USA, Colorado, Rocky Mountain National Park, Composite portrait of man with his RC plane. MR (Rick A. Brown/www.moosephoto.com)

With all the cool stuff I’ve recently posted to my web page, I had a hard decision deciding what to blog about today. Eventually, I decided to describe how I made this aviation themed composite portrait. You may remember, I wrote about this idea here, when it first popped into my head.

After reading and learning the techniques taught in Matt Klaskowski’s,  Photoshop Compositing Secrets: Unlocking the Key to Perfect Solutions & Amazing Photoshop Effects for Totally Realistic Composites and acquiring my studio lighting, I thought that a composite portrait of a pilot with his plane flying over his shoulder would be something fantastic I could offer my clients. So I immediately set upon creating an example piece.

I started with the portrait of my Dad, the RC pilot. This was actually the first serious project I undertook with my lighting kit. I went with a gridded strobe behind and to one side and a bare speedlight on the other side (I currently only have two studio heads.) I then placed a beauty dish without the diffusion sock above and in front. Ratios were set so that the lights behind and to the side were considerably stronger than the front light. Once I got this image into the computer I lightened the shadows considerably, darkened the highlights significantly as well and set the clarity quite high in Lightroom.

(Rick A. Brown)

Next I decided on what to use as a backgound. I decided to go with this old sunset at Rocky Mountain National Park.

USA, Colorado, Rocky Mountain National Park, sunset from Forest Canyon Overlook. (Rick A. Brown/www.moosephoto.com)

This is an image where an HDR image was merged with a standard image to arrive at this image. You can see a more detailed account of that process here. A general overview though, is that I tone-mapped the image in Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. This yielded overall a great image, but I hated how the sunstar looked. So, I picked the original image where I liked how the sun looked the best, layered it on top and then masked everything else out.

Finally, came the plane. This took a while as initially we did not have a plane that looked cool enough, in my opinion. Furthermore, I was initially planning on taking the image of the plane in actual flight and we needed to get good enough to fly the plane at me safely. Well eventually we got the super cool Carbon Cub from E-flite and we figured out a more controllable way to get the image. We hung the plane upside down from monofilament and placed a strobe such that it would closely match the light that should fall on the plane if it were actually flying in the image. Then I placed a fill flash near the camera.

(Rick A. Brown)

This shot was then brought into Lightroom and processed along the same lines as the portrait.

Then came the actual compositing. I opened all the images in Photoshop and selected my Dad and the plane in their respective images using the techniques of quick select and refine edge as described in Matt’s book. Let me tell you the plane was easier to select, even on the sort of messed up background. I think this is because planes have very defined edges where us Homo sapiens have fuzzy edges with all of our hair and what-not. I output these selections from refine edge as “new layer with layer mask.” I then drug the images into the background image and placed them where I wanted them.

Then came the step of trying to make the portrait and plane look more like they belong there. I started by selecting the mountain and sun part of the landscape and putting that on its own layer and using the Average Blur filter to create a swatch of color. I initially tried the whole landscape, but with all that blue sky, it resulted in gray. I then blended this with the portrait and plane on color mode and adjusted the opacity of the layer so that it only gave the two items a little color. Then I stamped all visible layers to a layer on top, the famous [shift][ctrl][alt][e] shortcut. I then opened Color Efex Pro4 and applied the Tonal Contrast filter on Balanced mode to unify the image and give it a little of the gritty look I wanted.

My final step was to make the prop look blurred. I tried to merge from a photo of the plane running, didn’t like that. So I used Radial Blur in Photoshop. This was quite difficult to get lined up correctly and even now, it sort of looks wonky. Thing is, I like it the way it is now.

Take a closer look at this image and look my entire portrait portfolio.

 

Scio Area Covered Bridges and HDR Efex Pro2

29 Monday Oct 2012

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Covered bridges are always a popular photographic subject. Fortunately for me, Oregon has many of these architectural treasures.

Recently, I spent a few days photographing the covered bridges in the Scio area. This is one of the towns particularly known for the bridges as there is a fairly dense cluster of them in the area. It’s interesting when you photograph covered bridges that many of them have great places for you to photograph them and with some there are very few vantage points. You can tell looking at this gallery the difference by the relative number of photos of the various bridges.

When we were out photographing the covered bridges we also ran into a few other things to photograph, that you can see in this gallery, including a “stray” cat that was quite pretty and very friendly. I had some photos that had to be thrown away due to motion blur because the cat was rubbing against my legs and the tripod legs.

This was also a project that I did a lot of HDR with. I would say that nearly every image here was either tone-mapped using HDR Efex Pro2 or Lightroom was used in such a way to expand dynamic range. I can tell you that with Lightroom 4’s new abilities in this regard it can be difficult to make the choice of which to do.  Obviously, there are times when the dynamic range is sometimes wide enough that the tone-mapping option is necessary. Then there is a gray area where Lightroom can do it on its own, but it’s a push in the shadow areas. I usually make the choice in this scenario based on two issues; how much detail I need in the shadow areas, and how much noise can be tolerated. HDR Efex Pro2 does a better job of separating tones in the shadow areas and will keep the shadows cleaner.

HDR Efex Pro2 is the best I’ve seen at creating HDR images that look like normal photographs. Recently, a webinar was posted on the Nik Software site that helped me perfect my technique in this regard.

The first thing I do is go into the tonality panel and set the overall brightness to a point close to my desired end point. Then I go into the Tone Compression panel. Starting at the defaults, I play with the drama slider and determine if I like the Natural or Deep setting more on the specific photo. Next I reduce the Tone Compression slider as far as I can and still have detail wherever I need it.

Next step, I do Tonality adjustments. I increase the contrast slider to about +20. Then I adjust the shadow, black, highlight, and white sliders to get the full dynamic range. Then I consider increasing structure a little. Then I go into color and boost Saturation at least +10 and no higher than +25.

This finishes the overall photo, but I add the finishing touch of a vignette. There’s something about a subtle vignette that makes the photo look more real to me.

USA, Oregon, Scio, Hoffman Bridge across Crabtree Creek in early Autumn. Digital Composite, HDR (Rick A. Brown)

Take a closer look at my covered bridge photos.

WAAAM Post

06 Monday Aug 2012

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As perfect mood setter for this entry, I just finished my post process on my images of the Northwest Classics event at the Tillamook Air Museum. I wasn’t expecting to do much photography there, so all the post I needed to do was a bit of a surprise.

Anyhow, this is the promised discussion of post processing of the WAAAM Second Saturday photos I promised.

When I post process aviation photos, plugins by Nik Software are very important. This shoot is a little special in that regard, because it was my first aviation photography experience with the new HDR Efex Pro2.

Let’s start with an HDR intended to look realistic. (I’ll leave judgement as to whether it does or not to you.)

J3 Cub and L4 Grasshopper at WAAAM (Rick A. Brown)

How I start all my HDR work is to go to the image sequence in Lightroom and crop the first image as desired and then apply chromatic aberration correction and the other lens corrections if I desire on that specific image. (HDR Efex Pro2 also does a great job of chromatic aberration correction, I just find it easier in Lightroom.) Then sync these settings to the other images in the sequence.

Now, export the sequence into HDR Efex Pro2. The plugin initially opens into a merge dialog box. The extra time it takes to work through this dialog is a minor annoyance, but the improvement it allows in ghosting correction is worth it. I always turn on the alignment, don’t know why but even a sequence shot on a solid tripod seems to need it. Ghosting gets turned on if any object was moving during the sequence. Pick the image that best gets rid of the ghosting and play with the blend percentages while looking at the suspect object through the loupe. I already corrected the chromatic aberration, so I check this off. After this is done click the “Create HDR” button.

This will open the image into the main UI. At this step, I start in the Tone Compression panel. I initially adjust the tone compression and method strength really high to help illustrate the changes being made and then adjust it back down later to taste. Starting with the depth setting try the normal, strong and subtle settings for taste. Turning this off makes the image flat enough that it won’t really work for a realistic looking image. Leave the detail on its default realistic setting and the drama to its default natural setting. At this point, adjust the tonal compression slider as far to the left as you can and still have the dynamic range you need.

Going to the Tonality panel it’s hard to give specific advice as this is all to taste. I can advise that these sliders essentially work like the Lightroom sliders and mention that I usually boost the contrast and structure a little bit. Use all the other panels to taste, sometimes I do a lot with them and sometimes nothing.

Then there are the surreal images.

WACO UBF-2 at Western Antique Aeroplane and Automobile Museum (Rick A. Brown)

For these, start the images the same way. The first difference is when you reach the detail slider in the HDR method. Sometimes I move this slider to “accentuated”, such as in this image. The most important difference is to set the drama slider to sharp. Immediately your image will have a very cool, hyperreal look. Then it’s just a matter of doing the tonality and other panel settings to taste.

Then there’s some images where I used the Color Efex Pro4 recipes I mentioned earlier on my blog.

(Rick A. Brown)

This image was done with the aviation enhancer recipe that includes Pro Contrast, Detail Extractor and Darken/Lighten Center. This was done instead of HDR because I didn’t want to do a sequence right then because I was avoiding scattered showers.

Then there were a few images that I did nothing more than Lightroom adjustments, such as this first person view from the 1908 Stanley Steamer.

First Person view from Passenger seat of 1908 Stanley Steamer at WAAAM (Rick A. Brown)

Take a closer look at my WAAAM gallery.

The Importance of Nik Software Plugins

29 Thursday Mar 2012

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(Rick A. Brown)

Today, I thought I’d tell you a bit about the importance of Nik Software plugins, to my new portrait portfolio.

Nik plugins played a part in every one of the images in this portfolio, to varying degrees. For example the image above had a great amount of Nik plugin work involved. To begin with the background image was shot as a three image HDR and merged in HDR Efex Pro and tone-mapped to create a grungy, exaggerated detail look. Then the portrait image was shot in the studio with gridded lights behind and to the side of the subject and a beauty dish above and slightly ahead. Then the image was imported into Lightroom 4 and the shadows were brought up a lot, the highlights got taken down almost as much and the clarity got around a positive 40. Then both images were imported into Photoshop CS5 and composited according to the techniques found in Matt Klaskowski’s Photoshop Compositing Secrets. At this point, I used Color Efex Pro 4, and applied Tonal Contrast to the portrait to give it a similar grungy look to the background and Bleach Bypass was applied to the entire thing to help them look like one image and desaturate the image as well.

(Rick A. Brown)

Then there’s an image like this one, where Nik plugins received much less of a workout, but I still used Color Efex Pro 4 for the Lighten/Darken Center filter. I felt the image needed a vignette, and this produced what I felt was the best looking one of the various methods I had available to me.

Megan Points playing cello (Rick A. Brown)

Finally, there’s an image like this one. The initial use of Nik plugins was just the Lighten/Darken Center filter, but then I moved it into Silver Efex Pro 2 and processed it using the Low Key 1 preset  and toned it with the copper toner.

In general, you can see that I think the Nik plugins are very valuable. I am eager to use them in this sort of imagery.

Snowy HDR

10 Friday Feb 2012

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Canada, British Columbia, Mt. Seymour Provincial Park, snow at edge of woods, Digital Composite HDR (Rick A. Brown)

I recently returned from a photo shoot in British Columbia, where I got to photograph with a good friend. (I usually do my photography without other serious photographers around; not by choice, but by chance.) One of the two main goals we pursued was snowy landscapes. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out as well as we would’ve liked for three reasons; first there wasn’t much pristine snow around, second was the combination of our lack of snow shoes and that I could be in better shape – making me tire quickly, finally that it now appears that I was fighting a virus and didn’t realize it – also making me tire quickly. However, we did make some snowy landscape images.

It was a bright sunny morning with cloud shrouding the valley below and the city of Vancouver. It was beautiful, but a bit contrasty. This led to a discussion between us about whether HDR would reveal the texture in the snow well or conceal it. After some discussion we were leaning towards concealment. Despite this however, I decided on bracketing those images where I felt HDR could possibly be helpful with the thought that I would process the best compromise exposure or delete the sequence if HDR destroyed the texture in the snow.

After arriving home I worked these shots up using Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro and Jason P. Odell’s Natural Landscapes 03 preset. Turns out, our tentative prediction was wrong. HDR shows detail in the snow quite nicely and I decided on the HDR version of the image to be the one to go “public.”

Backlit Starburst HDR

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

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First of all I’d like to mention that the gallery above includes a couple images other than the ones that I am discussing here. All of these images are of the state capitol in Salem, Oregon.

My goal in these images was to create an image with a beautiful sky and starburst sun, while still retaining good detail in the building. The first step was to position the camera such that the sun would just be peaking around the building. I used the shadow of the building to aid in this process. If you position yourself at the edge of the shadow, you will be very close to where you need to be. This was the fun part of the process, chasing shadows around downtown Salem appeals to my quirky sense of fun.

Once you find the right spot, (you’ll need to move often if you plan on taking more than one image) setup a auto exposure bracketing sequence that is as dark as you think you can get away with. The hard part here is to get a good looking sky, thus you need some pretty dark frames.

After getting home I load the images into Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. The main parts of the process were to use low tonal compression then place a control point on the building and brighten it and increase the structure a little.

Well, I think now I’m going to go try the Lightroom 4 beta.

Night HDR

03 Tuesday Jan 2012

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When looking at HDR photography, I often found the night photos to be the most impressive. Well, I recently did it for the first time. It is way cool, but there are a few oddities compared to doing it in the daytime to watch out for.

My biggest suggestion is to use live view and manual exposure. With the 5dII at least, the camera I was using. If you dial in a lot of exposure compensation for your base exposure it sort of squeezes the range it can shoot in the Auto Exposure Bracketing sequence. Shooting manual does away with this problem. So I set a manual exposure using exposure simulation in live view. I set the f/stop to f/16 and adjusted the shutter speed to fit as much of the values into one histogram as I could. I then set the sequence to two stops each over and under.

The other oddity here is that the shutter speeds are so long, that it’s hard to keep track of where you are in the sequence, etc. I had a moment when I thought my camera was malfunctioning, when all that was wrong was I had locked the button of my release down.

In post processing I loaded the images into Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. Can’t tell you a whole lot more as I processed each image differently.

Give this night HDR thing a try, the results are wonderful.