I made a group shot at our IT picnic last week.
I often do not get to be in group shots, as I’m stuck behind the camera. I really wanted to be a part of this one, so I asked my boss to shoot a picture of me after I shot the group, and I PhotoShop’ed myself into the scene.
This poster was imagined almost 30 years ago. We shot these images of Steve in the living room and printed them by hand at the time. With lots of dodging, I was able to achieve decent results, but was limited to a print 24 inches wide. Thanks to the fact that I preserved the original 6 x 7 negatives, and to the miracle that is PhotoShop, I can now bring it to you with higher quality than I ever imagined. What you see above has been scaled down significantly from it’s original 20,208 pixel width. That’s more than twice the size of an image I recently printed 10 feet wide.
A coworker recently asked for photo advice after seeing the pictures I shot at our company Christmas party. I took the time compose a lengthy response, and figure I might as well share it with my regular readers too!
Hi thedude,
I was looking at the pictures you took at the party. They are amazing. How in the world do you get pictures with the color, contrast, and clarity that you captured?
I’m using a D70, as opposed to the D2x, but figure there is more to it than that. Is it in the lens? Post processing?
I’m looking to upgrade soon, and was hoping you had a minute to offer some advice as to why my pictures have a slightly washed out / less life-like look - regardless of the level of flash.
Thanks!
Where to begin? Well, first - thanks for the very kind words.
There are many pieces to this. Briefly:
ALWAYS shoot RAW. This is not just for the added sharpness, but most importantly, so that you can make tweaks to the color temperature and exposure.
UNDEREXPOSE. In a situation like this where the majority of the image is almost black, the camera needs to know that this is what you want. I underexpose flash shots by .3 or even .7 stops. All of the Affy party images were underexposed by .7 stops. This prevents blown out highlights.
Use a MANUAL setting. Shoot some test shots with the camera. Find an ISO/shutter speed combination that will capture some of the room light. Choose the slowest shutter speed possible and stop down the lens a couple stops from it’s max. The idea is to get the best sharpness and depth of focus while capturing as much ambient light as possible. The Affy party images were shot at f4 at 1/25th of a second with a Nikkor 24-85mm f2.8 lens.
Use the most powerful flash you can find and attach the Gary Fong Lightsphere with an AmberDome. This will warm things up a bit so that the color of the light from the flash is close to the color of the ambient (incandescent) light.
Compose quickly, get in close, push the shutter release at exactly the right moment. :)
Post-processing:
Open a few of the best-looking images in the PhotoShop RAW converter. Adjust the color temperature until they look just right. I like my images to be a bit on the warm side. For the Affy images, 3700 degrees produced the results I liked best. Apply the same color temp to all flash images.
Adjust exposure individually in the RAW converter. Underexposing has its drawbacks, but blown out highlights are really bad. Nothing worse than super-shiny reflections on faces. If highlights are blown out, there is no easy way to repair them.
Create a PhotoShop Action to reduce the image size in steps and apply a tiny bit of smart sharpening filter as you go. In this case the original ~4200 pixel wide images were reduced to ~1800 pixels. Done properly, this will greatly enhance sharpness.
Practice, practice…
Good luck!
Our association recently insalled Macassar ebony wood paneling in our lobby, and although the results are striking, the overall effect is a bit darker than we’d imagined. To brighten things up just a bit, we’ll be hanging some sepia-toned reproductions of four archival images that previously hung elsewhere in the building. Before we go through the expense of printing and mounting the large prints, I used PhotoShop’s fantastic Vanashing Point filter to create these realistic visualizations.
Let’s see how these images compare to the finished installation.
Here are the results. The hand-held time-exposures are a bit blurry, but you get the idea. Looks like I hung the images a little higher than in the visualization. I may need to move them down! I think they look better lower on the walls.
Before and after.
This year’s greeting card began as three images - a classic Christmas painting by Haddon Sundblom, who painted at least one other familiar icon as well as a few stunning pinup girls. The Coca-Cola image came up while Googling “classic Christmas images”. The fact that there was already a little Jimmy in the scene may have influenced my decision. :)
The second image was of a bottle of Jack Daniels, and the third was itself a composite of two goofy-looking shots like this one. The rest of the transformation is pure PhotoShop. If you’re interested in learning more about how this idea developed, download the the PhotoShop file with layers intact here. (10 megabyte .psd file.)
I use a PhotoShop Action to prepare images for my blog. My “Blogerize” action scales images for the site in steps while applying a bit of smart sharpening along the way. The action also converts the images to the appropriate color depth and color space. Since I need to do these things for every image I post, there is no better time-saver in PhotoShop than Actions.
Recently, a friend asked me to send him my Blogerize Action, and that made me wonder about other useful PhotoShop Actions, which eventually led me to Adobe’s own PhotoShop Exchange. Despite the site’s annoying Flash design, there are several cool tools here, including the Action I used to create this fun “collage”. Search for “B&Big Picture”, and get more info about Actions here.
Oh that is SO CUTE!!
–Tres
2 funny
–Grant
Very nice card - how long did it take you to put it together?
–Dawn
(About two hours.)
The e-card is your funniest yet!
–Todd
OH MY GERSH….I just about blew ice water out of my nose!!!!!! You are a nut!!!!! LOL
–Wendy
One of the bestest cards I’ve seen this Christmas!
–Sandy
My goodness, that’s wonderful. And kind of disturbing.
–Hugh
A new acquaintance inspired me to follow through on an idea I’ve had for a long time. The idea is appealing to me because it fulfills a real need, but also because it gives me an excuse to combine some of my more obscure toys and skills to produce something unique.
The idea was to find a better way to create rack elevations, or maps for server rooms. A map like this has many uses but, its usefulness is directly linked to its timeliness. Most server room drawings are created in Visio or some other complex application, and take days or even weeks to complete, so they normally get built once - or not at all, and then never get updated. I made this map in an hour using simple tools - a fisheye lens and the PTLens plugin for PhotoShop. The results - what appears to be a shot of 5 server racks taken from 15-20 feet away is in fact completely impossible. There are just three feet between rows in our server room.
To create this illusion, first I shot 5 images with my fisheye lens in portrait orientation. This allowed me to capture our eight foot racks from floor-to-ceiling from a distance of two feet! Here’s the simple rig I used to shoot these. The unretouched results look like this.
Time now for the fabulous PTLens. I have raved about this indispensable plugin (or standalone app) before. It allows me to take those wildly distorted images and flatten them out like this. Magic!
See where this is going now? A little perspective correction and some crude stitching in PhotoShop produces the results you see in the finished image. It’s not perfect, but I’d say it’s way more than good enough! Way cool.
In the office, I created an image map in ImageReady and associated it with this image. Viewed in a browser at work, many of the servers are actaully links. The links activate something associated with the particular machine - a managemant page, Remote Desktop connection - some links even make an ssh connection and pop up a terminal windows. Fabulous!
Upon close inspection of the full resolution images, I can see that there are one or two things I’ll do differently next time. I will focus manually and use a string to position the lens the exact same distance from the gear in each shot. These things will make for a sharper panorama and will make stitching easier.
Also, while working on this entry I came across this excellent article about using Panorama Tools with the Nikkor 10.5 mm fisheye lens. I’m sure this info would apply to any digital camera with any extreme wide-angle.
I really wish I could take credit for the redesign idea, but it was the always inspirational Before and After Magazine that made me do it. The latest issue contains a story about this attractive site. What peaked my interest is that this design clearly rewards people with a lot of screen real estate. My friends with 24″ displays and Opera are gonna see exactly what I mean. Now would be a good time to press F11, Grant, Orlando.
I’m planning to use one image a month from my site as a 1920 pixel wide background. I already have two or three additional backgrounds mocked-up. With a nifty PhotoShop template, (9 megabyte .psd file) and sed, it’s simple to create them and to swap them out of my blog. There are three pieces, the background, a higher resolution header JPEG (to preserve the look of the font) and a GIF footer.
Hope you like it!
Kelly and I had a wonderful time at your wedding. The 20’s theme was an excellent idea - everyone looked great!
I now have hundreds of photos to retouch, color-correct and otherwise perfect in PhotoShop before they’ll be suitable for display on thedude.com. I’ll be busy for days. I’ll post images as I finish them - that means in no particular order.
Now, where were we? Oh yeah, some people got married and then…
(I DO have pictures of the actual marriage, but they’re not my favorite shots. Everyone gets kind of somber and sometimes even weepy during the ceremony - by far the dullest part of any wedding. No movement - few smiles - let’s just skip it for now.)
Of course you can! Another photographic blunder saved by PhotoShop.
It turns out that one of the greatest things about my new camera is the way it integrates with PhotoShop CS2. The RAW (NEF) file import tool is loaded with goodies. Below are just a few…
Starting on the left above, you can see that CS2’s NEF import tool includes the usual white balance adjustments.
The second screen shot shows the Detail tab. All of the adjustments here work as expected. Sharpening applied here seems to work better than unsharp mask and Luminance Smoothing is very nice indeed. Also note that I have changed the Size setting on the bottom of the screen to a whopping 6144 x 4081. Again, upscaling the image at this step seems to give much better results than upscaling with PhotoShop’s Image Size tools.
The third screen shot on the right above shows tools designed to correct for imperfections in camera lenses. These tools allow you to correct for Chromatic Aberrations and Vignetting. I use the Vignetting tool to ADD a subtle vignette more often that I use it to correct for fall-off. Fabulous!
