Topaz Clarity Demo - Top Five Features

May 22, 2013 Light Photographic Workshops

Topaz Labs released a new program/plugin called Clarity this morning. Quick video to show some of the new features. I am a fan of Topaz and have been working this one for a couple weeks. I really like where they are going.

Clarity is 49.99 but you can use the code "claritynew" until the 31st of May and pick it up for 29.99.

Tiny Planet Mania

October 24, 2012 Light Photographic Workshops

It seemed that during the California Photo Festival I could not swing a cable release without hitting a few people discussing or playing with the app called Tiny Planet. The app manipulates an image in a pretty cool way and the result often resembles a small planet in the center of a square frame.

Although the buzz was about the phone app, the process has been around a while and there are many websites and blogs dedicated to the effect. So for all those who do not have the app or if you have it but want to apply a similar effect to your big photos, here is the quick way to do it in Photoshop.

Oh by the way, Jill Waterbury, Light's in house iPhoneography instructor, introduced just about everyone to the app and also requested the Photoshop method. So here it is for Jill and anyone else who wants to play around with their images to have fun and create.

The Photoshop method works best on panoramic images, especially 360 degree panos, but can be done to any image. To demo the process, I will start with a 360 pano I shot during Click.

The basic process is to open the image in Photoshop and then to apply a simple filter called "Polar Coordinates." This filter is found in the Filter>Distort menu. Of note it will only be available with 8-bit images so if you have a 16-bit workflow you will have to change to 8. (Go to Image>Mode>8-bits) Hand in hand with the depth change you may need to convert the image to a smaller color space. For example, Light recommends a 16-bit workflow using ProPhoto RGB. If you go from 16 to 8, you should also convert to either Adobe RGB (1998) or sRGB via Edit>Convert to Profile.

When you choose the Polar Coordinates filter you see the dialog below.

Make sure to select the "Rectangular to Polar" button. When you apply the polar coordinates filter you get the following image.

There was obviously a change but the filter created a "down the rabbit hole" effect and it is not a square frame, not what we are looking for. Interestingly, this effect is found in the app but is called "tiny tube." So before you apply the filter, you need to do two other steps.

First, go to Image>Image Size. In the dialog box, make sure resample image is checked but uncheck Constrain Proportions.

Go to the Width and Height text boxes in the Pixel Dimensions section and make them equal. I normally find the smaller number and change it to the larger. So in the example above, I get this.

Your image will look distorted but go with it.

Next go to Image>Image Rotation>Flip Canvas Vertical and the image will flip upside down.

Now we are ready to go back to the Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates. The result is a tiny planet-like square image.

If you have a 360 degree pano all you have to do is the process described above. If you do not have that type of image you can still do the process. The best types of images to use are those with a

panoramic aspect ratio, images with little detail on the top and bottom, and a strong linear shape but with vertical development in the middle, vertical third of the frame. Even with the perfect image, there may possibly be a few more steps after you apply the filter. So here goes with a normal image.

This image does not have a panoramic aspect ratio (in general vertical images are more challenging to use than landscape) but there is limited detail at the top and bottom of the frame with a linear shape along the horizon displaying strong vertical development.

For any image that is not a 360 degree panorama, the first step is to make sure the horizon is level. After that do everything we did above. You will get the following intermediate images.

Just as before run the Polar Coordinates filter and you get this.

There is the tiny planet but there is a seam at the top because our image ends did not match perfectly. No worries, do a quick retouch and rotate the image to the desired angle and you get this.

A small planet with a volcano or two. This effect can be used on all sorts of images so have fun. Here is one more for the fun of it, this is a composite of a tiny planet and a tiny tube from the same image.

As you play remember to try the opposite effect. If you do not flip the image you can make a tiny tube like this one. (the opposite of the image at the top of this post.)

Fiat Lux!

How to Get Rid of Chromatic Aberration / Jane Conner-ziser

April 12, 2012 Light Photographic Workshops

Chromatic Aberration, in simple terminology, is when the colors in a digital file do not line up correctly and you can see color “fringing” around the edges of objects in your picture, mostly in places where a dark object is next to a light one. This is caused when the lens fails to converge all of the colors to a single focal point due to different wavelengths – and it can be exaggerated if there is movement during the capture process.

Sometimes chromatic aberration occurs only in specific areas of a file, but sometimes, like in this sample, it occurs throughout the image and correcting it can become a big job!

SO, in this article I will share with you the most common options for getting rid of chromatic aberration, starting with the easiest; Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom.

Both ACR and Lightroom have options in the Lens Correction Panel that address chromatic aberration.

If the aberration is slight, all it takes is some visual adjustment of the sliders and choosing the defringing option that provides the best visual correction. Finite. Done – but it didn’t work on this image because the aberration is too severe.

The next option is to consider that the problem is that the color channels are not lining up correctly and perhaps there might be an adjustment that can be made in Photoshop to realign them. There are two options for this. The first involves opening the Channels Window, clicking on a color channel plus the visibility icon (eyeball) on the RGB channel and using the Move Tool to realign the color channels, matching the edges of your image.

This worked well in some areas, but not in others. It is possible to distort (transform) the separate channels … but you must keep in mind that image clarity is easily affected – which brings us to the second color channel option, changing the Image Mode to Lab Color first (Image / mode / Lap color) in order to separate the luminosity (detail and value) of the file from the colors. Once the adjustment has been made, return the file mode to RGB.

Unfortunately, this option didn’t do very well on this file either! We will be forced to take care of this the old fashioned way – correcting it by hand, one edge at a time. It’s going to take longer but the results will be perfect – here is how you do it:

Make a New Layer and change the Layer Blending Mode from Normal to Color. Choose the Brush Tool and set the opacity to 50%; use a small sized brush (this image was done with the brush size at 5 pixels, just large enough to cover the discolored edges). Hold down the Option (Alt) key to choose the neighboring color, then simply color over the one you want to change. Apply a few coats, reselect, and continue throughout the image. It is faster than you think and the results are worth it!

I dropped in a neutral gray layer under my paint and am showing the color layer in Normal Mode so you can see my work:

The total of my work looks like this:

And the detail looks like this:

The job took just under an hour once I decided upon my strategy, and you can see how important it is to know your software! Options are important when you’re doing real world retouching because you want to get your work done as quickly as possible, but no two images are alike. Always start with the quick option, but learn a variety of ways of doing things so you won’t find yourself stumped on an important image that just has to be better.

This image was going to be printed as a 6 foot mural, part of a three image display with two other images that did not have the same problems as this one so it was really important that the work was perfect and would hold up to the enlargement. I’m so happy to say that everyone was pleased! Awesome!

Thank you for letting me share this project with you!

Jane Conner-ziser is an internationally recognized expert in ACR, Lightroom, Photoshop and Painter. She is an author, portrait retouching artist, painter and instructor living in Ormond Beach, Florida. She has been actively involved in professional photography for over 25 years. Contact Jane at Light Workshops lightworkshops.com or through her websites www.janeconner-ziser.com and www.jczphotographics.com

The Dreadful Banding, Bane of the Photo Printer and How to Get Rid of it!

September 22, 2011 Light Photographic Workshops

by Lee Varis

Most photographers who print their work encounter this sooner or later. It often rears its ugly head in clear sky gradients – the dreaded banding, posterized tonal gradients that break into discrete bands that destroy the smooth appearance of the sky. This is a "digital" artifact that is mostly blamed on 8 bit files! The fact is that banding in a print can often result even with high-bit depth files during the conversion to the printer profile for output. The problem is hard to predict or pre visualize and this can result in wasting expensive paper to discover that you have to "fix" something in the file.

The following image demonstrates the nature of the problem.

It looks smooth doesn't it... but, if we look at the individual channels maybe we can spot the problem...

The green and blue channels don't really show anything but here in the red channel we can just barely see that there might be an issue. It's subtle though so we can't really be certain that there will be a problem. The issue of banding in skies, or any smooth gradient for that matter, has been around as long as digital imaging has existed and there have been numerous attempts to solve the problem. Back in the day, when real high-end imaging was only possible using Scitex and Quantel Paintbox systems the solution was more or less the same as it is today - one has to add noise in some fashion or another to break up the bands. Outputting a file only to discover that there were bands was quite expensive so many shops resorted to adding noise as a standard procedure before outputing anything. However, adding noise often resulted in a gritty appearance and if it wasn't necessary it wasn't desireable.

One of the original Quantel Paintbox engineers, Ed Manning, invented a technique to pre visualize the bands and old timers like myself will still refer to this as "Ed's Curves" – Now its mostly referred to as "solar curves." This technique is still useful as part of our strategy to eliminate bands. Begin by duplicating the background to a new layer...

To setup "Eds Curves," make a new Curves Adjustment Layer at the top of the layer stack and, once you are in the Adjustments Panel, place multiple points on the Curve...

Now, pull the points up and down so that you end up with an extreme sine wave sort of thing like this:

The result puts all the tone transitions on a mostly vertical segment of the curve so we have a lot of contrast between tones – we also have a fairly psychedelic image...

Despite the rainbow color the image shows very obvious sharp ridges running through the sky. We can leave this temporary Curves adjustment on to help visualize just how much noise we need to eliminate the ridges. Select the duplicate layer and run the noise filter: Filter->Noise-> Add Noise...

The idea is to use enough noise to completely hide or obscure the ridges. This is the traditional approach that most prepress professionals use. The problem with this approach is that often quite a bit of noise is necessary and it can lend the image a harsh look...

Sometimes this will not look as bad in a print but there is a better approach. Instead of using the standard noise filter, use: Filter->Brush Strokes-> Spatter...

The large filter dialog allows you to select multiple artistic filters intended for creating painterly effects.

For our purposes, we want to have a high "Spray Radius" and a Smoothness setting of "1"

This filter is much more effective in smoothing out bands in a gradient than simply adding noise. The only trick is in masking off the dark "spatter" of the non-sky elements at the horizon. For that we can turn to the Blending options dialog...

Setup the "Blend If" sliders for the Blue channel as shown above - the idea is to blend through the dark, non-sky tones to reveal the "un-spattered" image in the Background. Sometimes you can get away with only using the slider in the top layer – here I've used both to get a cleaner image. Often you'll have to do a little bit of masking for final cleanup – add a layer mask to the "Spatter" layer and mask out the dark speckles with black.

The final result is smooth with less obvious noise...

Compare this with the original and with the noise version! Spatter breaks up the bands with diffusion instead of adding light and dark noise so there is no grittiness and no bands. At this point you can throw away the Curves Adjustment layer and print with full confidence that you have vanquished the dreaded bands forever!

Remember "Ed's Curves" and use them whenever you have the slightest suspicion that banding may be present and you can clearly visualize the 'bands" before they bite you in the butt...

Learn more incredible digital imaging techniques from Lee Varis at the California Photo Festival, October 12-16, 2011! Lee will be teaching all 5 days during the festival, discussing topics like The Digital Zone System, Mastering Exposure, High Speed Camera Techniques and more!

Click here to see Lee's full festival schedule.