Shot with a $95 lens and hand-held FourSquare against a yellow wall in the office. PhotoShop makes it perfect.

I have mentioned this invaluable tool before at thedude.com, but it’s worth mentioning again.

My workhorse lens is a rather cheap Nikkor 24-85 mm. Although sharpness is acceptable, the lens suffers from complex distortion. At the widest zoom setting, the distortion is like a wave – barrel distortion in the center and pincushion at the corners. This causes very annoying “M” shaped lines near the outer edges of the frame.

 
One answer to this problem would be to spend a bundle on the excellent Nikkor 24-70 mm lens I’ve been coveting for some time. It’s considered one of Nikon’s best lenses ever and, unfortunately, that is reflected in its price.

The other answer was to whip out the versatile PTLens. This $25 program runs stand-alone or as a PhotoShop plugin. Using it could not be simpler. Just open the image in PTLens and click Apply to completely eliminate distortions introduced by your particular lens. PTLens does this by reading image EXIF data and applying corrections from its extensive lens database. PhotoShop’s built-in Lens Correction tool can not do what PTLens does. It’s amazing.

PTLens can be used in other ways too. It can eliminate Chromatic Aberration and be used to simulate the effect provided by view camera tilts and swings. A must-have tool!

I have some free time today, (Kelly’s in far-out Fresno) so I’m preparing one of my Burma images for printing. I plan to take advantage of the ridiculously good deals at Elco Labs, and print an image 52 inches tall on metallic paper. I’ll have the poster mounted and hang it on the wall above Kelly’s desk. But first, a little visualization brought to you by PhotoShop’s awesome Vanishing Point filter!

Move your mouse over the image below to view the wall before and after I hang the poster. Sorry Mark, we’ll have to move your excellent Paris poster to another wall. :)

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.

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!

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.

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.