HDR Photo with the iPhone

The new 3G iPhone is one good camera to have integrated with your cell phone.  The main feature for HDR is the ability to select different areas of the scene and at the same time bracket your exposure. Then with Photoshop or other similar photo-editing apps, combine these multiple exposures into an HDR photo.

Its often been said by many photographers that the best camera is the one you have with you and for many of us this means a simple built in camera with our cell phone. Only simple if compared to many full-featured cameras today but if you just look back some 20 to 30 years, these camera phones are just amazing.

3 exposures used for combined image

The iPhone automatically adjusts its exposure setting for the area selected within the focus box. By tapping different parts of the image, it changes its focus and it also adjusts the exposure compensation for selected area. Select a dark area to lighten and a bright area to darken. Try and select uniform tonal areas and watch how image adjusts.

The 4 different exposures taken for the pond image above. In the end I only used 3 of them.

Without a tripod or other solid support getting multiple exposures of your image with the iPhone, that overlap perfectly, is not an easy task.  There are some tips that can help you achieve better results:

Try to lean yourself or arm against a solid stationary object. If not possible, lean or squat so your elbow can rest on your leg or another part of your body.

Once you have your scene selected examine the 4 corners carefully as these memories will be the markers for ensuring that the next image is reasonably aligned. With practice you can get quite close. One problem if they are too far off is the final image area decreases to only the overlapping parts.

For complex scenes like the frozen pond above, take many images by selecting different areas of the image for focus. This will ensure wider coverage and sometimes all you need is a small area to add in and alignment is easier for smaller parts.
 

Just at sunrise with moon near treetops

In Photoshop, I use the difference setting in layers mode to align the images. Once I get the area of the image I will be using reasonably aligned I use either the Transform or Warp functions to fine-tune specific problem areas.
 

Don’t spend too long on aligning the 4 corners, as it’s easier to just copy layer and align the new area that you wish to use. Normally the change in angle distortion between images is only notable over the entire image. Small sections work fine.

I find that with the iPhone’s wide angle, that any small movement creates bigger distortions at the edges of the image.

It’s not a prefect tool but when the camera phone becomes the best camera you have then with multiple exposures you can get good photos in high contrast settings.

First Snow Fall of the Season
The other day we just received our first snowfall and nice 2” or 5 cm of the fluffy stuff.

As I was heading out for my morning walk, the sun now stays at a low angle a lot longer and the fresh tracks in the snow were being side-lit on the inside edges which gave them a luminous glow.

It’s interesting to watch the tracks that we leave.  Each track, whether they’re from boots or bikes, are different. 

 


Strange how great it seemed that day because 2 days later we had 10” or 25cm of snow. A lot harder for a walk-about.

Niels Henriksen

Web Makes Poor place for Photographs

I was working on set of images from a walk I did about 2 weeks ago to shoot from the top of a large hill, which was the highest point in a radius of 25km. While I was trying to bring out all the fine detail of leafless branches this winter scene it occurred to me that the blog readers will not truly be able to see this detail and therefore may not appreciate the quality of this image. In a large print It is fun to explore the different parts as you scan about the image.

With the other problems I have had with some images being displayed on the web I thought that the web just isn’t that great a place to show your images if you are trying to manage your quality. This is an over simplification as there are many images that do look just fine on the web, but there are still problems.


Fine Detail

The images I display as well as those from many other photographers have been reduced in detail to make them easier to see on a computer monitor. I mostly keep mine to a max width of 800 pixels. Most of the blog readers have resolution 1280 pixels wide or less. There are a few at 1920 px but this seems to be the maximum size. This is a reduction of more than 1/5th in image size.

Any images larger than this resolution will either get compressed by the browser to fit the screen resolution or the viewer will have to scroll around to see all parts of the image. Not the best of solutions. Nothing beats looking at a well-made photograph when printed 16x20 inches in size.

This image was created using 3 Adobe Camera Raw smart layers. The base layer was set to normal default settings, which keeps some of the softness in the treetops. For another layer I increased clarity and the luminance and saturation for the yellow, orange colours and reduced for the cyan and blue channels. I then masked in some parts to give them more visual punch to these parts of the image: the yellow tree branches and the white birches. For the last layer I wanted the distant hills to have more of a cool darker blue tone.

Color Temperature

At first I thought that this was only applicable to monitor White Balance settings, where most people have the monitor set too high in colour temperature, either 7,500 or 9,000K which will tend to make any subtle purple tones almost completely Blue in Hue.

But this also happens with prints where the colour temp of the lights, from Red incandescent, to the blue of bright fluorescents impact the colours. The eyes have the ability to auto correct and therefore it is hard to see a colour cast when viewing a print, but it is still there. If you have ever been in an underground parking and observed the colour on a red car under tungsten (3,200K) lighting, it almost has a muted brown-orange hue, not the bright red you se outside in daylight

It seems that either medium has its own set of colorcast problems. Monitor having too much blue cast and home indoor lighting either too much red (incandescent) or fluorescent ( can be blue or red).


I used 2 B&W layers to create this final image. The first layer I increased the luminance and saturation in ACR for the yellow and green channels and darkened the blue and cyan for the sky. I wanted the green pine needles to go very light when I applied a B&W layer in Photoshop. With the large reduction in Blue channels the sky went to dark near the top and the bottom edge stayed light. By creating another ACR smart layer I could control the sky color better and with its own B&W adjustment layer and then I masked in this sky.


Dot Size

Most monitors these days are LCD types and these have sharp edge contrast to do the construction of the pixels. There are no gradations between LCD pixels, it goes instantly from one color to the next.

Most of the current ink jet printers using a print dot range of 240-360 dpi create images that have ultra fine and subtle tone and edge transitions. I have always enjoyed a printed image over its LCD version even at higher resolutions.

It was an icy cold day and the camera did correctly capture the cold hue in the shadows. There are times where you don’t want WB corrected.


Screen Contrast

By far, this is the one attribute that causes the largest photo alterations. I have 2 sets of double LCD monitors. One is calibrated, the other is only a cheaper type used mainly for pallets and tools. On the cheaper monitor the photos all look drastically different.

I know exactly how my images should look and when I also observe on other monitors, there are drastic tonal changes. Darks becoming brighter and high light tones being almost blown out. Many displays tend to increase the contrast of the image.

Just a slight LAB adjustment to increase color contrast.


Summary

No medium is perfect I on average I find more consistent results from printed images but how do you display your works of art and hopefully convey to someone remotely the quality you intended when they are viewing on questionable display monitors.

I don’t have any answers to solve this but I know when I display in a gallery or art fair at least the viewer and I are looking at the image in the same light.


Niels Henriksen

Winter Fog – Great Photography Weather

I was going to say the ”best” weather but I’m sure that it’s not really the case as there are a few downsides over more perfect weather, especially if you hate the cold and then have to be near cars when there is fog.

Still I think this is an excellent opportunity to take great outdoor photographs.

There are 2 photographic styles that winter fog (snow on ground and fog) has the ability to enhance, such as simplify a scene and abstractness.


Simplify

There is much said about our need to simplify our photographic images. To reduce the clutter that takes our focus away from the focal point(s).

In sunnier weather this can be achieved by in-camera or after cropping of extraneous material out of a scene. Using a shallow DOF to blur background when foreground is the interest or evening using contrast to affect elements within the scene.

Fog naturally achieves a lot of this by itself by simplifying the image into those parts that are still visible within the fog. Add winter and especially snow cover and it has become even more simplified in texture.

This is the actual mask created for one of the images and was completed in under 3 minutes.


Abstractness

Abstract image allows the viewer to see an object that is either being lit a certain way to reduce full visual detail or at angle to leave out some detail to make you wonder exactly what you are seeing.

Fog and snow does some of this by removing detail, as clarity quickly diminishes as distance increases or may be lost into the fog.

This time, while out driving, I did stop when there was any inkling of interest in the landscape. I thought a few images would be good candidates for selective contrast adjustments and they were already nearly B&W in colour depth.


Photoshop Enhancements

In this series of images I wanted the majority of focus to be on the trees in the foreground and I used several techniques to enhance these trees, at the same time reducing the clarity of any other elements, in some way, as if the fog had been stronger.

The key element was to darken and increase the contrast of the foreground trees and soften and reduce contrast for objects in the background.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 through the ACR Interface allows you to load both layers into a Photoshop file. One set to enhance the softness of Fog and the second loaded as a smart layer with different ACR settings.

Base Layer
Clarity set to –80

And another layer adjusted to make the tree branches stand out better and loaded as a smart-object.
Clarity set to +80

There just needs a mask created to permit the finer detail of the branch layer to show through and then final curves layer to adjust brightness in some tonal ranges.


Quick and Simple Method to create fine detail Mask

It might seem at first glance that creating a mask for the 3 trees would be a laborious job but there are simple tools to quickly help you make such a mask.

For this type of masking, I usually do the editing directly on the channel layers Tab but for Photoshop Images I also did same using normal Photoshop layers. Either way it will work fine.

For these types of masks with fine detail, it’s always good to zoom into regions of the branch tips where background is to be removed. I carefully watch the branch tips during any of the adjustment processes.

The next set of 6 images shows the progression of changes through the various steps.
Not all masks will need this many steps. The process remains the same until there is good enough separation of mask and then a little cleaning for final mask.

Since I am mainly using Screen mode to further lighten the background, I will adjust the curve of each mask to first compensate for this overall lightness. I apply a curves layer first to set the black point of curve near the left most part of histogram, which also extends the range of blend mode effect.

In the Channel Tab method I would duplicate the best of the RGB channel (contrast separation) and then in this order

Cntrl-M (set curves)
Cntrl-A (select all –channel)
Cntrl-C (Copy all)
Cntrl-V (Paste back into same channel)
Then before anything else, FADE to desired blend mode


For the purpose of this article, I will be using the standard layers in Photoshop to create the mask. The first image was made using the channel method.

Duplicate Blue channel to new layer

Curves layer and set dark point to 0/50

Cntrl-Alt-Sft-E which takes all active layers and makes a new layer on top. This layer will then be set to Screen mode for contrast effect.

For channel method
Copy channel (select All and Copy and then Paste into itself and fade to screen mode.

Then new curves layer and set dark point to 0/28

Cntrl-Alt-Shift-E once more and set to screen mode

I then quickly create a mask for the 3 trees by going around the branch edges and then filling the rest of the trees. In the Channel Tab mode I just erased the lighter background material. This mask may be used later and that is why I created it.

Use mask to duplicate layer and set to Multiply mode to darken the trees

Then a final curve Cntrl-M with low point set to 0/120 to really darken the mask and we have the mask image shown as the second image in this article


It may seem a little convoluted but when you are familiar with the copy-paste and fade to blend mode on channel masks then these become second nature as you play around to see which mode produces the best effect you want.

This close-up section shows how the branch tips are being preserved through the copy and fade actions and the few curves adjustments. (Normal, Blue Channel), the 2 screen blends and then the final with the multiply layer and mask.

In the above image you can just make out the outline of a house on the right side of the image.

Another Fog image this time with a singular tree in foreground and the soft tree shapes in the backgound

Niels Henriksen

For a fellow blogger who has done horses in the past I included a workhorse playing around in the fields further down the road.