Fleeting Glimpse Images : Visions in words ~ Sagas in light: Image Editing

Retouche'

Mon, 05 May 2008 16:57:24 GMT

del.icio.us Tags: retouching,image editing,Corel,photoshop,portraits

"It's not what's in the mirror-it's what's left inside." ~ Stevie Nicks, Sometimes It's A Bitch

The lure of Image Editing Software is subtle, seductive and self-indulgent. Nothing reinforced this like the recent event of taking my own passport photo. The purpose of a passport photo is to give a reasonable likeness of yourself to identify you when traveling abroad or attempting to gain reentry to your homeland. After taking the photographs of my wife and I in the most flattering light I could find, the temptation to touch us up a bit was overwhelming. Long story-short, I maintained control and did only the most minimal of retouching so that our photographs wouldn't be too far from the truth.

The following exercise is not as indicative of self control.

I took this self portrait while working out a lighting set up for an upcoming shoot. I used a Canon 100 MM F2.8 Macro-a lens too sharp for traditional portrait work. I decided it was a little harsh and needed softening. I used some varied techniques to 'Hollywood Up' my image.

Most of my retouching skills were learned in books and seminars. Katrin Eismann's book, Photoshop Restoration and Retouching is a great place to start. It has many techniques that can be applied to all image editing software packages. I used Corel PhotoPaint in today's exercise for example.

Here is the end result of my efforts. It is an example of self-indulgent over retouching. While I love the way I turned out in this retouch, I know, after letting it ruminate a few days that it was too much. This is a problem with editing software. People don't step back and think about what they've done.

One of my latest workflow operations is to evaluate what I have done through the lens of time. I find that I am over exuberant in editing an image because I am caught up in the adrenaline rush of the process. After leaving it sit for an hour, a day, a week, and then revisiting the project, I find I can often dial back my editing a bit and achieve a more realistic and ultimately more pleasing result.

Here, I have overlaid the completely retouched image with the original file. By setting the transparency to 33% or, the opacity to 67 percent if you prefer, I can softly fade the retouch into the original yielding a more realistic, yet nicely retouched image.

I liked the image even though it was just a lighting test and my expression is a little wide-eyed. One of the tricks Hollywood and tabloids us to make celebrities larger than life is to enlarge the eyes slightly-only a 102% or so. I had done this in my original retouch but forgotten to take it back when I did my final blend. So I did it again.

Split Screen showing retouching before and after.

You can see now the eyes are subdued and not as large as in the original retouch. I am happy with the final product and feel that it represents me well. It is what is inside but perhaps not what is in the mirror. After all, the goal of portraiture is to give the rendition we expect of our loved ones and ourselves. If we have to sit on it a day or two and then dial it back to reality - the delay is worth the effort.

Final Image after Retouching and Partial Reversal

The Three Cs of Image Editing (Part 7)

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:13:03 GMT

Color

Now that we have finished with the first two Cs: Crop and Contrast, we can begin to work on overall color. Hopefully, the process of cropping and adjusting the contrast has eliminated or revealed any problems the image may have with color. Ideally, you would wish for perfect color but that is seldom the case. If it is, you and your equipment have conspired to reveal a perfect scene in all its glory. Let's pretend things are otherwise.

The first thing I look for is any image is an overall color cast. Most of the time color casts are a result of the color of the light illuminating your subject. When you shoot in incandescent lighting, overall orange casts pervade your image. Shooting in fluorescent can produce a yellow or green cast.

In this product photo of transmissions, the light source was mixed-as it often is. There is diffuse sunlight coming from the windows behind, fluorescent overhead fixtures and incandescent spots. The tiles on the floor where mostly white so we know we have some yellow and some orange casting the image.

There are a couple of ways to correct these images. As always, ideally, you should get it right in the camera and have your white balance set as closely to the lighting conditions as possible. One way to do this, provided you shot RAW is to adjust the white balance on the RAW file by selecting a neutral item with your white balance eyedropper or moving the white balance and tint sliders.

If the cast has appeared after you've done quite a bit of editing or you shot the original image in JPG, you have to rely on other methods.

Conversely, the image may exhibit color casts only in certain areas or in specific color ranges. These are usually the result of subtle magnification of the lighting in a scene and/or the use of different lighting on specific areas of your subject. The cloud shot above has violet shadow areas in the clouds and needs a specific adjustment. Another example of this would be a portrait of a person shot next to a window where the person is properly balanced but the interior surroundings are cast by the interior lighting.

Thus, the task for you, as always is to evaluate your image and determine if the cast is:

A single color cast across an entire image
Multiple color casts across the entire image
An unnatural color in a small area of the image
An unnatural color in a small color range of the image

Depending upon your evaluation you will tackle the problem in different ways.

Color casts across the entire image are best handled by using a Channel Mixer type of function. There are Color Balance Tools, Target Balance Tools, Channel Mixers, Hue Saturation and Lightness, and a host of others depending upon your Image Editing application. Some programs have several methods of adjusting color.

In this dialog from Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo you can quickly adjust a color cast to a more acceptable balance.

When you have a selective area in an image where the color is off, you can usually turn, with an expectation of success, to a Hue Saturation and Lightness adjustment, hereafter referred to as HSL. I tend to prefer Adobe Photoshop's HSL tool.

The tool allows you to split the six color channels and then use an eyedropper to assign the color range you wish. In addition, you can use the dual sliders at the bottom to expand, contract and feather the range of the color adjustment. You can control the hue(the movement of the color in to the adjacent areas of the color spectrum), the saturation (the amount of a give color-it's richness) and the lightness (how light or dark that color appears).

To take out those purple shadows, I selected the magenta channel as it is little used in my image and then used an eyedropper to select the purple in the clouds. I then made a course negative saturation adjustment to see if I had all my color selected. I was missing a little of the magenta area so I slid the slider to the right to expand my selected range. Then I adjusted the saturation, hue and lightness to my taste and created the color correction you see here.

Now, we have removed a cast and corrected a single color range so we that we have an image with reasonable color fidelity. Still, the color looks a little flat. I remember those greens being a lot more poignant. In the next installment, we will talk about correcting image saturation.

The Three Cs of Image Editing (Part 6)

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:08:19 GMT

Mid-tone Contrast

As we've adjusted our exposure as described in Part 4 and our shadows and blacks in Part 5, it is now time to turn our attention to adjusting the mid-tone contrast of the image.

The image of a cloud deck over farm fields was taken from an airplane just after take off from my home in Minneapolis. The image, having been adjusted up 1/4 stop to expose the whites properly and having had the blacks or shadows pulled down using a RAW Converters' Black Control, is now ready for mid-tone evaluation.

For me the tool of choice is the Tone Curve. If you are a Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo or a Adobe Photoshop user, the tool is called Curves. Today, I am working in Corel PhotoPaint so we will call it the Tone Curve. Here is an example of the dialog.

The dialog is pretty simple. Your black and your white are anchored on the null line that represents an unadjusted image. You have the ability to adjust the entire image at once or to split the channels into red, green and blue and adjust each individually. One of the first things I do is give myself a finer grid with which to work. Working in 1/4 divisions doesn't give me the precision I feel I need so I <ALT><Click> in the grid to make it into a 10x10. Then, I establish anchor points at the 10,10 and 90,90 markers to hold my blacks and whites in place because I have already worked them to the value I prefer.

Now that I have that done, I can begin to work on adjusting my mid-tone contrast. The curve tool is a subtle device. A little change can go a long way which is one of the reasons I like to be in the 10x10 grid mode. I seldom move more than 10% from the neutral line in any adjustment. Adjusting the curve is as simple as clicking and holding on a spot and dragging it up or down to increase or decrease exposure in the mid-tonal range.

Here is a grid adjustment where I have anchored my end points 10% in. Looking at the 3rd, 4th and 5th points that were added, I have deepened the shadows slightly, brightened the middle range and then pulled back some of the highlights.

Note that no point was moved more than a few percentage points from the neutral slope line shown in the default.

Play with the adjustments and note what they do. If you are moving an area you don't wish to move, click on the curve in that area to anchor it and then go back to the area you wish to adjust. Be careful. A lot of points or a lot of adjustment makes for posterization in your image.

The difference in the adjusted image is subtle as desired. There are better tones in the white areas with softer shadows on the tops of the clouds. There is also more detail in the dark areas immediately adjacent to the shadows. The real gain is in the detail in the patchwork farmland below. You can now see definition in the fields and the rays of sunlight more clearly.

Our blacks, whites and mid-tones are now just where we wanted them. Oh no! Our shadows have turned purple. That is why I adjust contrast before color. Looking at the initial image it wasn't terribly obvious that we had a purple cast in the shadow areas of the clouds. Now that we've adjusted contrasts, that color cast is very obvious and we can go after it.

Next time.

The Three Cs of Image Editing (Part 5)

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:13:39 GMT

del.icio.us Tags: Image Editing,Levels,Contrast Enhancement

Contrast Continued

After a brief interlude discussing histograms and pixel leakage, we can return to the middle C of our Crop, Contrast and Color, discussion.

In Part 4, we worked on getting our image exposed properly. As with anything in digital photography, getting it right in the camera is always preferable. Sometimes circumstances dictate that you will have to make an overall exposure correction. We will assume that is completed.

Adobe Lightroom Adjustments

After getting the overall brightness or darkness of an entire image adjusted to scene or to taste, I usually turn to my shadows and highlights. If you are editing your image in a RAW conversion tool, many have a highlight recovery tool to help you recover subtle detail in the highest exposed portion of the image. I normally adjust this first-carefully watching for changes to parts of the image which I don't consider highlights but may change none-the-less.

Photo Paint Brightness Contrast Tool

Without benefit of a RAW Converter, you are likely going to be working initially with a Brightness/Contrast Control to make certain your highlights are not blown completely to white.

After making certain my highlights are as close to white as possible without large portions of the image going to white, I begin to work on the shadows and black portions of an image. Now, I want to caution you not to take your exposure up on every image to ensure the image's highlights go to white. That isn't always necessary or desirable. Some photos have no part of the scene brighter than gray and it is acceptable to leave the brightest portion of the image at a realistic setting. Otherwise, you will run the risk of making an image look blatantly artificial.

In this shot of center-pivot irrigated fields taken from an airplane, you can see the image is flat. There is nothing remotely close to white in the scene. The histogram bears this out as well. Most of the tones fall in the middle of the histogram and there are a smattering of highlights and almost no shadows. It would be foolish to push this image's brightest areas to white just because 'highlights should be bright'

This is a case where it is expected that you will evaluate the image and realize that the exposure is pretty good and that pushing or pulling of the overall histogram is not required.

But, as I said earlier, I go after the shadows next. The shadows of my crop circles image are a little flat. The light, the haze in the air and shooting through the several-layered window have conspired to create a washed out image. In this scene I am fairly certain there are areas which should be darker. So I will adjust the black point, either using the RAW dialog above or using a Level Adjustment (Adobe Photoshop, PSP) or a Contrast Enhancement (Corel PhotoPaint).

Pulling the Shadows Slider boosts the contrast of the image. The Shadows are closer to black.

I increased the exposure slightly to balance the image and the resulting histogram shows the range of the image has increased from just over one F-Stop to three and one half.

The temptation to drag the darkest part of your histogram to complete black is difficult to resist. Major contrast and dark shadows give mood and drama to an image. It is a 'taste' thing. Deep the dark tones to your taste but don't be afraid to back off your adjustment and see if you can find a reasonable setting.

Photoshop Levels Controls

You will notice, too, in the adjusted crop circle image that the colors have been saturated as a result of dragging the shadows toward black. This is why I don't adjust color first. Now that contrast has allowed more saturated colors to appear, I can see color casts and color deficiencies that were hidden in the flat image above. We will go after them later.

PhotoPaint Contrast Enhancement Control
(Note that adjustments are made on the top side of the histogram-unlike Photoshop where sliders are on bottom of the histogram)

Now that I am satisfied with the overall exposure of the image and the placement of the darker shades in the shadows, I can begin to tackle the mid-tone contrast. Even though Levels and Contrast Enhancement commands allow you to adjust position of the mid-tones via the Gamma Control, I almost never use this adjustment. I prefer to adjust my mid-tone contrast independently so that I can gain finer control.

Those mid-tones will have to wait for the next installment.

The Three Cs of Image Editing (Part 4)

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:11:23 GMT

Now that we have our image safely cropped by virtue of having straightened it, corrected its perspective, and trimming for story impact and content, we can move on to the second C in the three Cs: Contrast.

Contrast

Contrast is the process by which we adjust the overall exposure of an image and its internal relationships to the lights, darks and mid-tones. There are some who advocate that color adjustments should be performed at this stage but I am adamantly against it. I often find that color casts are not readily apparent in images or remain hidden until exposure, white and black points, and mid-tones are adjusted. I would rather adjust the contrast and discover a color issue than adjust color, then adjust contrast and then have to adjust color again. There are too many things that can go wrong in adjusting color twice.

Evaluating the image, much like was done in the series on crop, is the first thing you should do. At a glance does the image look dark? Does it look light? If it does, does the darkness or lightness detract or add to the story (or drama) of the image?

Getting the exposure right in the camera is always preferable so that the overall brightness of an image doesn't have to be modified. As is often the case in the real world, the camera, the scene, and your technique will contrive to give you a perfect exposure. Sometimes this happens-sometimes it is elusive. Other times, a perfect exposure does not tell the story you wish to tell and an exposure adjustment will aid you in telling your story.

When I look at a photo, I ask myself: "Is there anything white in this scene and is it white in the image I have captured?" Nature contains white in clouds, snow, bright lights, and other instances. It is not a photographic sin to portray that there are whites in an image. If the whites are not white, or things that aren't white are white, exposure needs to be modified to reflect this. This can mean brightening a dark image or lightening an image.

Common Coarse Adjustment Exposure Controls

PhotoShop Control

PhotoPaint Control

Software can accomplish this through a variety of means. Histogram adjustments are common tools. Every software package for image editing has them. RAW converters typically call this an exposure slider which can pull an image up and down by several stops. Image editors call them different names and include coarse tools such as Brightness/Contrast. Medium grade tools such as Contrast Enhancement, Level Adjustments, Histogram Adjustments, are three of the names from Corel PhotoPaint, Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo. Finely tuned tools such as Curves, Tone Curves, targeted adjustments, lenses and other items can get dialed into proper contrast. The bottom line is that even though software differs, you can achieve similar adjustments if you can ID the tool you need.

Various Software's Contrast Adjustment Tools showing similarities for adjustment of the the Histogram.

Corel PhotoPaint Contrast Enhancement Dialog

Adobe Photoshop Dialog

Paint Shop Pro Photo Dialog

Move the image's exposure until the image looks right to you. When you are satisfied with the overall brightness of an image, you can begin to work on the other items.

"Wait, Rikk," you say. "I am still a little fuzzy on this whole histogram thing. Can you explain that?"

I can-but that will wait for the next installment.

The Three Cs of Image Editing (Part 3)

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:17:08 GMT

Continuing from Parts 1 and 2, we are discussing the first of the three Cs: Crop.

When we left off we talked about cropping an image to strength the inherent story in the image. Sometimes, however, you want to tell a specific story with an image or multiple stories with an image or fragments of the image. In this case, you are bending your will to the photograph instead of letting the photograph guide you.

	In this uncropped image, we have two men standing on a beach with surf driving in. The man on the left has a motion picture camera in his hands. The image tells a strong story already. But it can also be carved into additional stories.
	In the first crop, I have isolated the man on the right and placed him dynamically in the frame. He is point at something. What? The story of the image has changed drastically and this picture could be used for purposes for which the uncropped picture wouldn't.
In the second crop, I have isolated the man on the left. He has been placed in a nice Rule of Thirds location. This is an image of a man standing on a beach filming a boat on the horizon. The surf in this image is not as threatening and it conveys a different emotional intensity. Without the distraction of the pointing man on the right, it becomes an image about the cameraman and his craft. But we're not done with this image. Other crops and other stories are possible.
	In this crop, I've come in tighter and made the tension between the opposing interests of the two subjects the story. Is this why Sea Monsters are never caught on camera? The witness and the cameraman are pointing different directions?
Maybe you just need a shot of surf for the background of another image, composition or layout. Don't be afraid to scan your images for corners, elements and patterns you can use elsewhere. By cropping the men out of this image, I have created a usable stock image of a wave breaking on a sandy beach. I didn't have to go out and buy an image, I just took a fragment of one I had and made it suit my purpose by cropping!	a
	Crop number five is much like crop one except that it is vertical and it concentrates on the beach rather than the waves, ocean and sky. By doing this crop, the reflection of the pointing man becomes more prominent and can be accentuated as a design element. To my eye, it makes the man look like he pointing more along the beach and less out to see than in crop one. The story has changed slightly even though the subject has not.
This crop is about standing on the beach. We don't see pointing or filming or waves crashing or sky. We do see sand. We do see reflections. This picture tells a story different from any so far and could be used for different purpose.

In the final analysis, there are many ways to crop an image. You can let the image's inherent story dictate the crop or you can let the story you need to tell guide your crop. Many images have multiple stories and multiple crops to get you to the image which tells your story of the moment. Try different crops on your images to better tell a story or tell a different story.

In the next part of this article on the three Cs, we will grapple with the concept of contrast.

The Three Cs of Image Editing (Part 2)

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:57:23 GMT

Continuing on from Part 1, I will continue my discussion of the first C: Crop.

Images are about stories. An image can tell a story. It can tell a story better with a crop. It can even tell several different stories with different applications of the crop. There are two distinct paths to cropping a photo:

1. Let the story the photo is telling you dictate the crop.

2. Let the story you need to tell dictate the crop.

Taking the first path requires an evaluation of the aesthetics of the image to divine the most powerful story within the image. Once you have found the overwhelming story, the crop process is initiated to place the strongest elements in places which will create the most tension or drama in the scene. This normally means moving a central element to a place that is other than the edges of the frame or dead center. Dead center is deadly is good advice when applying any crop. Make certain that by cropping an image you don't move the center of interest into the middle.

	Horizon-centered Crop is where the image was cropped so that the horizon is close to the center of the image.
	Subject-centered Crop is where the primary subject is placed at or near the center of the image.
	Dynamic Crop is where the subject is placed off center and the divider of the horizon is placed at a less divisive location

As you can see in our examples of Split Rock Lighthouse from the North Shore of Lake Superior, crops create different pictures. In the Horizon-centered crop, the image is split in half and gives two competing sections. The Subject-centered crop takes on the image of snap shot It is a picture of a lighthouse at sunrise and no more. The Dynamic Crop was done in the camera. This is the full-frame image. It has much more tension and drama than the other two crops and the colored cloud layers and the subtle reflections all serve to draw your eye into the scene.

This brings up a good point. Image editing programs are all well and good. With them you can do amazing things to your images. All photography is a compromise. You are taking a slice of the world when you snap the shutter. Make certain you take a good slice. By cropping in the view finder consciously when you capture the image, you are eliminating much work later and giving yourself more pixels with which to work later. If I'd taken the first two images as they are shown here, I would have had very little with which to work to make those pictures more dynamic.

There are many methods for cropping dynamically. Rule of Thirds is a great starting point. There are many others.

For review, we are discussing the first C in image editing: The Crop. You now know to straighten and correct perspective before applying a crop because these two operations will crop your image by virtue of their nature. We've also discussed finding the story in your image and finding a way to present that story in a dramatic fashion. In the next installment, we will discuss creating the story we chose with the image we have and the ways of finding multiple stories within an image.

The Three Cs of Image Editing (Part 1)

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 04:30:09 GMT

When I am asked to teach people how to approach image editing-for whatever purpose, I take them to the pneumonic that I hold as mantra. "Start with the three Cs."

Before I get too far in this article, I should tell you what the three Cs are.

Crop • Contrast • Color

I always start with these three concepts (another C) whenever I begin evaluating an image from a digital camera or a scanner. The order is deliberate and some gurus council adjusting one or the other of these before another. This is what works for me so I stick with it, teach it, shout it from the mountaintops.

Crop, to me is the natural place to begin. I want to work on the part of the image that tells the story. This usually means cutting off pieces of the image to make the focus stronger or to remove extraneous, even distracting, material. That is why I always straighten an image first. Woah! You say. Straighten? I thought you said Crop! I did. There's no mistake here.

Look at this image of Devil's Tower. By straightening the image, the gray corners appear marking images from the original footprint of the image where no pixels now exist. Not only that, the angles of the rotated image now require a crop tighter than the original image as noted by the red line. Thus, without applying a crop, the image is smaller than it was. It would be terribly disappointing to crop this image for content and then realizing as you straighten the image that you don't have enough pixels to finance your crop.

The same is true of perspective corrections. When you do a perspective correction you create the same gray triangular regions but they are not symmetrical like straightening voids. Perspective correction by leaning a picture in or out-either top-to-bottom or left-to-right, further reduces the number of pixels you have to work with. That is why it is imperative to have the image capture as close to level as possible and if practical, in the field of perspective you desire. No sense in wasting a large percentage of those precious mega-pixels.

The reason I crop first is to, first of all zero in on my subject and enhance its drama in the frame. Second, cropping often eliminates issues in contrast and color. Brightest parts of the image tend to be at the top and darkest at bottom. Distractions tend to the left or right. By cropping those portions out you may save yourself the trouble having to adjust them latter. You never want to adjust the exposure or color of an image to fix a problem area only to crop that problem area out later. (Actually you should never adjust an entire image to correct an isolated problem but we will cover that in another article later)

Now that we have our image straightened and perspective corrected we can get with the business of doing the actual crop. Sometimes the end format of the image will dictate the crop but the better, more aesthetic, way to tackle the image is to let the story of the picture dictate the crop. We will pick up these choices next time.