My Photoshop routine

Recently I've developed a routine (action :D) in Photoshop to post-process my pictures. Nothing really fancy, but it gives me the results I want :)

The whole thing is based on layers (what a suprise) and the Overlay blending mode.

This is the image 'straight out of camera', which -in this case- was a Nikon D5000, with the kitlens.

The photo itself is good, nicely rendered colors and contrast... so all in all the D5000 is not a bad camera :)

But it's just too raw...

So I run my Lightroom template "_t_PSPreFlat" which makes the picture look very flat.

This way the picture looks rubbish. No contrast, no colors...

But this is exactly what I need :)

So I open the picture in Photoshop as a Smart Object.

To do so: Right click the image -> Edit in -> Open as Smart Object in Photoshop

And then comes the Post Process.

First of all I make 3 copies of the layer, but not just normal layer copy. I use 'New Smart Object via Copy' 2 times, so I have 3 separate Smart Objects and not just 1 but 3 times. The reason why I need it like this, because with normal Layer duplication you will have the same Smart Object on the 2 (or more) layers and once you edit the object on one the changes will take effect on all copied layers, while if we have 3 separate Smart Objects the changes will only apply for the actual layer (and it's duplicates).

My first layer (the bottom one) sets the very basics for the picture. It can be a little bit oversaturated.

What I usually do on this layer is setting the Vibrance to +75 to +100 and the Saturation somewhere between -75 and 0. This will set the 'extra' color on the picture by 'oversaturating' the parts I want to be very colorful.

As of brightness and contrast I keep the contrast -50 but adjust the brightness to have the desired 'exposure'. If needed the Recovery and/or the Fill Light can be used to get a bit more flat picture. Same applies for Clarity, if I want a bit more 'creamy' picture then -75 to -100, if I want more contrasty picture then +50 to +100.

The next one (middle) is a grayscale layer to set the contrast of the image.

First of all I convert the picture Grayscale on the 4th tab of ACR (remember it's still a Smart Object!). Then I set the White Balance to something totally crazy: +50000 / -150.

This will set a bit flat but still contrasty image I can finetune for the contrast I want. Usually I don't touch the contrast slider, but play with the Blacks and sometimes Recovery and Fill Light as well. Clarity can go from min to max depending on the picture's need, but usually goes +50 to +100.

Depending on the picture I add some 'sharpening' or 'detail enhancing' layers. This is basically 2 High Pass layers created from the Grayscale Contrast picture. It's important to set the Clarity 0 for this or else the High Pass layers will go crazy :)

I use a High Pass (5) layer to enhance the fine details of the picture or just parts of it. To strengthen this I use a Levels layer together with the High Pass layer making it very contrasty.

On this picture I wanted the eyes, the hair and mouth to be sharp, so used layer mask to achieve this. The transparent part is what's green on the picture on the left.

The other High Pass layer is a bit stronger, I set the High Pass value to 25 on this one. It can come handy when I want to make the picture very strong in hard details and I don't have too much bokeh, just like I had it with my picture of the old homeless woman: Juli neni

On this picture I only wanted to use it for the eyes and the mouth and some parts of the hair as well.

Of course to strengthen the effect I use Levels on this layer as well.

The last one from the 3 Smart Object layer is the one on the top which sets the overall color tones for the picture.

The first thing I do is setting the Clarity to -100. This will already make the picture a bit creamy... For the colors I set the Saturation high (+75 to +100) and to control extreme oversaturation or just want a bit 'washed' picture I use Vibrance to control the overall saturation of the picture (-75 to 0).

As I want a bit more creamy effect on the picture this layer gets a Smart Filter as well with Gaussian Blur set to 25

As you can see the layers on their own look terrible but combined with Overlay can give me the final result I want. And yes, this is the steps I use with almost all of my pictures I post-process in Photoshop. I also have some Lightroom Templates... but that's an other post :)

Photos moved :)

From now on I will keep this blog for tips and tricks I use and the photos will be published at Posterous, as I find their engine better for photos :)

TIP: Clarity to support Noise Reduction in Lightroom

On Pentax Discuss Mailing List someone asked about the Noise Reduction of very high ISO pictures with Lightroom. As most people know there is a built in Noise Reduction tool in LR, but you can't install plug-ins like Noise Ninja or Neat Image. But if you want to batch process images or you only have Lightroom to work with then there is a little trick to get just a little more details from high ISO pictures where you need to apply very strong Luminance NR.

Putting Clarity to a high value (+100 for example) you can get a bit more details by increasing the "micro contrast" on the picture. I've made an example, the picture above was made with ISO12800 and very little light.

Luminance was set to +100 and Detail was set to +50 on both pictures, the only difference is Clarity (0 vs +100).

Noise Reduction test (click to open in better resolution):

Clarity is set to zero (left side) vs Clarity is set to Maximum (right side)

See the 'extra' detail on the forehead and on the hand. Also on the wall next to my head you can see that little spot on the picture on the right. As you can see with the clarity set high the picture does not looks that much washed up even with Luminance Noise Reduction set to it's maximum.

Welding Glass and White Balance.

Earlier I was posting about using a Welding Glass as "ND" filter. As the Welding Glasses usually have a green tint (you can get gold or black aka. neutral as well... but that's quite hard) the picture will have a very strong green tone.

Out of Camera: Heavy Green Color Cast

Obviously shooting in RAW can give you the possibility to modify White Balance in Raw Development Software, such as Lightroom for Windows. The problem is that the green tint is so strong that it's almost impossible to get rid of it.

White Balance 'corrected' in Lightroom: Slight Green Color Cast

But is it possible to push LR further than it's normal possibilities? Obviously the answer is yes. With a custom color profile you can extend the White Balance possibilities of Adobe's Camera Raw (used by both Photoshop and Lightroom). Doing so you can get rid of the green color cast entirely.

Custom Camera Profile Used: No more green color cast

Comparison: Without the Welding Glass Filter

So how can you create the Custom Camera Profile for the Welding Glass?

It's very easy, you only need a white led torch. Usually they're going for 1 GBP on Ebay. So first you have to create the custom white balance in-camera. As I have a Pentax K-r I will write down the steps for this camera but it should be very similar on any other camera.

Step 1: Create a custom White Balance with the Welding Glass on

• Put the camera on a tripod if you can as you will need long shutter speed. What I did I turned the camera upwards so the torch will be in balance on the top of the Welding Glass.
• Find the correct exposure, where the torch does not get overexposed too much and it gives you a nice green "halo effect"
• Go to White Balance settings and choose Custom White Balance and press the Shutter. It will take the same picture you did earlier to find the exposure. When the camera requests find a spot on the picture where it has the green halo and move the little green square there. Press OK to accept it and your picture should turn grey now.
• Set this as your new White Balance and take a picture of real world with correct exposure. The picture should look OK, no sign of green tint.
• Make sure the picture is saved in DNG format!
  For other camera formats you will need to convert it to DNG with Adobe's DNG Converter

Step 2: Create the Custom Camera Profile

• Import the DNG picture into Adobe's DNG Profile Editor
• Go to the tab: Color Matrices
• You can play a little with the values there, for example I raised the Saturation for Red +50 and for Blue +25 and played a little with the White Balance as well untill I've got the picture I want.
• Go to Options tab and give your Profile a Name.
• In the menu go File and Export your Profile (you can do this by pressing CTRL+E)
• Save it to the folder:
  C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles or ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles/

Step 3: Use the Custom Camera Profile.

• In Lightroom:
  On the Develop Tab scroll down to Camera Calibration and choose your new Profile.
• In Photoshop:
  When opening a Raw file Camera Calibration is the third to last tab. It has an icon of a camera.

By having this Custom Camera Calibration Profile you can shoot with any White Balance, though you won't be able to see the 'real' colors on your camera.

The Wheel of Time

I believe this picture needs a little explanation :)

I guess most of the viewers curious about two things: How it is done and what equipment I used?

First about the equipment. It was made with a Pentax K10D with a Tamron Adaptall-2 01BB 24mm f2.5 lens. Personally I love this lens, one of my favourite photos -a HDR called Dreamland - was made with this lens. The lens feels well built and luckily I have a very good copy of it. To achieve this long-long shutter-speed (381 seconds or 6 minutes 21 seconds) I had to greatly reduce the amount of light. To achieve this I used a welding safety glass, reducing the incoming light with 12 EV and on top of that a Cokin ND8 filter (-3EV) to achieve an effective 15 stops longer shutter speed, all packed in a Cokin filter holder with 55mm filter thread adapter. It was put on the top of a Giotto's tripod and used a home made wired remote controller to keep the shutter open for the desired amount of time. I also used a MS-Excel sheet made by me to calculate the shutter speed on my Nokia N97 and used the built in timer function on my other phone, an INQ Mini 3G. I also used my friend, BP, to entertain me while I was waiting for the shot to be made :D

Things you have to be careful about when doing long exposure shots is you have to block the light's way trough the viewfinder as it can effectively ruin your picture. Another issue is the lens casting reflecion on the welding glass, so you can't have the sun at the front of the camera. Luckily in the afternoon the sunlight came from behind. Another issue comes with the Cokin filter system, the light goes in at the sides of the filter holder, so you have to create a kind of shade to eliminate this as it will light the dust particles on the glass creating flares on the picture. This was when the case for my tripod came in, as I used the casing for covering the camera from behind, including the viewfinder and I used it's belt around the filter holder as a sunshade. Looked silly enough but it was effective :) Yet you can still see a little dust-flare on the lower left corner of the picture.

To calculate the correct shutter speed I used a little excel sheet I created earlier. The whole thing is based on the formula for calculating the EV, which is
EV=LOG2(AP^2/SS)-EC
Where is
EV = Exposure Value
AP = Aperture
SS = Shutter Speed
EC = Exposure Compensation (for ISO I used ISO100 as 0, ISO200 as +1, ISO400 as +2, ISO800 as +3... etc. and ND2 as -1, ND4 as -2, ND8 as -3... etc.)

From this you can get the Shutter speed with the formula
SS=(AP^2)/2^(EV+EC)

First I made a test shot without any filters on ISO100, f4 and got a shutter speed of 1/640. This gives an EV of 13,32. So I added the modifiers, such as -15EV and f16 and got a shutter speed of 13 minutes and 39 seconds. As it was cold and the sun was about to go down I've decided to choose half stop faster on aperture so f11 for a bit faster aperture speed. This is how I got the shutter speed of 387 seconds which is 6 minutes 27 seconds. I set the egg-timer on my INQ Mini 3G (which is a great and very cheap phone) for 6'20" and begun the capturing.

The result... well it was green.

The original picture with Auto WB and Auto Tone.

So in Lightroom I was setting the White Balance manually for 5452K / +150. Yes, Tint to +150. A little play with the other values and voila, up there you can see the result :)

Just a side note: The above formula only works with digital cameras as with film you need to add a multiplier because the different nature/system behind film photography.

"True Color" Infrared

In Infrared photography the Hoya R72 (and other filters that cut around 720) is known as "False Color"IR filters. Those filters along with the IR light letting some red light trough as well. Then a little Photoshop (or any other software :P) and you have blue skies and all the goodies.

But based on the experience I shared in my last post I had the idea to use the ND8 filter(s) for IR photography...

Well I love the results :) Even though the weather wasn't the best and -oh well- the trees don't have too many leafs which will make IR photography a bit better, but I still got a couple good results.

Here is the 3 shots I found worthy for sharing. Postprocess is only setting the white balance and a little play with levels.

The ND Anomaly :)

I've decided to make a little test with the ND filters. Since a while now I wanted to find out how 2 (or more) ND filters would act together. What will we get if we put 2 ND8 filters together? Will it be ND16 or ND64? Or maybe something else?

Well finally I found the first clue on E-Bay in the form of a cheap chinese ND8 filter for the Cokin P holder. So spent a few quids on it and tonight I did the test-run myself.

The result is what I expected, which is somewhere near to ND64 which is 6 stops.

Also it turned out that the cheap chinese ND8 filter is about a half stop weaker than the Cokin one and also makes the pictures slightly softer.

But I found out something else as well :) As you can see on the pictures above the 3 ND8 filters together is nowhere near the same colors as the one without the filter. The picture is way more reddish. It's the same thing as I experienced previously with the vario-ND filter, which is the ND filters do not block the IR light. To test it I only needed an IR sensitive camera and as we know most households have one so does mine. So I grabbed my modded Panasonic FZ50 and made a quick test. The result is the Cokin ND8 filter does not block ANY IR light, while the cheap chinese filters reducing with approx. one and quarter (1.38 to be precise) stop.

Now this leaves me to some new ideas in IR photography, as we could use the ND filters stacked together as IR filter in a way... so basically we can let the IR light get to the sensor along with _some_ colors as well, a bit similar to the IR filters that cut around 720 nm, just they will let in _all_ colors instead of just a bit of red.

Just for fun I included my good ol' 11 DIN welding glass. The result is with the K10D it did what I've expected, which is a bit more than 11 stops, well closer to 12 stops (that means it equals an ND4K filter) and it cuts the IR light almost entirely.

Now what I am curious about is: are the other ND filters act like this as well or only the Cokin system ones? I mean what about the Hoya ND400 filter which is about 8.5 stops quite similar to the one where I put the 3 ND8 filters together*? Maybe that's why I only found B&W shots with the ND400 filter? Unfortunately the ND400 filters are expensive so I can't try it myself but if someone has one could share the experience with me :)

* - Theoretically the 3 ND8 filters together should be equal to an ND512 filter.

And now... the test shots:

TEST: CPL + reversed CPL as ND

As many of you know me, I love to do some tests and I always wanted to have a ND filter :) Long ago I made my experiments with 12 DIN wielding mask glasses used as filters but they weren't neutral density. These days I made a try with 2 CPLs (Circular Polar Filters) and had quite good results. Here are my experiences and a result :)

I ordered 2 cheap CPLs with 82mm diameter from Ebay and a step down ring to be able to put it on my CZJ Flektogon 50mm f4. Why this lens? Because I can make Tilt photography with it... so why not mix the two later? :D One of the CPLs got it's glass reversed and that's the one I had to put in front of the 'normal' CPL. These total around a bit more than a tenner... so not that expensive :) I will add a step up ring from 55mm so I can use my Tamron f2.4/24mm and could make long expo IR shots as well :)
So the test setup is: Pentax K10D + PSix->PK Tilt Adapter + CZJ Flektogon 50 + Cheap CPL + Cheap reversed CPL

• The pictures became a little 'contrastless' so shooting in RAW and after editing is necessary.
• Close to 90 degrees difference (where basically the 2 CPLs are 'killing each other') the whole picture turns to be blue...
• The white balance is going off to the cool side (pictures become 'blueish'). Again with after edit it can be corrected.
• The trees becoming 'rusty', it's the same effect I've noticed with Full spectrum photography done with the Panasonic FZ50 (this means both visible and IR light recorded), this makes me believe that IR is getting trough somehow... will make tests with the IR sensitive PanaFZ50 later.
• If I change the order of the filters (reversed on lens and normal CPL on 'light's side') then it doesn't has the darkening effect but still makes this blueish coloring... O.o
  

And here's the test shot (no filter vs filter turned to useable maximum):

Meet the redneck in me :)

Photo was taken with a little help from my friend, Nandor
(he took the picture based on my intructions :D)

Nikon D5000 first impressions

So as some of you may know I've sold my K20D, FA50 and DA12-24. The reason behind the move is money. I've bought a Nikon D5000 with kit lens and a retour plane ticket to Budapest :)

So... after the K20D the first thing I've noticed about the D5000 is the size and how it feels to hold. As it is much smaller than the K20D it's less 'handy' for me. I am also missing the upper status LCD but that's something I can live without. After a few hours of holding and shooting :) I got used to the smaller body and now I feel it semi-confortable. It really reminds me my FZ 50 (size, holding in hand and the 'interesting' way the LCD is folding out).
Basicaly I didn't really need a big and expensive machine. I've became a photo-hippie lately so my philosophy now is to have a good sensor (at least APS-C), a fix 50mm and anything but Canon (yes I am a Canon-hater). So that's why I've chosen the cheapest model from Nikon (well that would be the D60 you may say... but c'mon D5000 has better sensor and folding out LCD screen with live view). Now the only thing I've to do is to convince Fuze to sell me his AF-S 50mm :D

The first thing I've noticed while using the D5000 is the dark and small viewfinder (again compared to K20D) but as the hours spent together started to increase I've got used to it. And we shouldn't forget there's the option of Live View and the Folding LCD! Now that's just brilliant for so
meone like me who likes to make photos ground level. I haven't really tried MF lenses with it yet (just very very briefly) so I've no idea about manual focusing with the optical viewfinder, but I believe there won't be too much problem as I've already did manual focusing with my dad's D70s (which has a small and dark viewfinder as well :D). But talking about focusing, it's time to mention the AF. I found AF quick and very silent with the kit lens and what made me some real hard times with the K20D, the D5000 focuses precisely. With Live View the AF is quite slow (like a compact) but still useable.

The picture quality of the D5000 is amazing. Yes. It is. It has the same sensor as the D90 and Nikon claims to have the same (or near) noise level as the D300. I've made a little test and I believe Nikon made a very very good job regarding the noise level of the D5000. You can find the test here. It's a series of 100% crop from NEF file converted by Adobe
Photoshop Lightroom 2.4 without any modifications. I think it speaks for itself. Keep in mind it's 100% crop, so 1:1 pixel-level. If you resize then you can hardly see any difference between the shots, and with selective noise filtering you can get extremely good results even at ISO 3200. So I can say that you can use all the 'real' ISO settings of the D5000 (ISO 200 - ISO 3200) and also the Lo settings (down to ISO 100), but the Hi settings is quite useless (up to ISO 6400).

Another thing I've noticed about the D5000 while using is the shutter sound. No it's not a shutter noise. It's a sound. The D5000 is a very quiet camera. I wouldn't use it at sound recordings :) but it's much more quiet than any camera I've ever used (tbh there aren't many). And top of it all there is the quiet mode which is based on the slam doors closing mechanism (greatly slowing down for dampening at the end). It causes a little shutter lag, but eliminates a part of the sound of the mirror slamming.

I've already tried the AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing) feature of the D5000, well in this field the K20D was better, as I was able to configure it to make the 3 or 5 shots by pressing the button once. Oh yes, and I was able to make 5 shots not just 3 (unsure about the D5000... maybe I can set it up somehow :D).

The D5000 has a very good dynamic range, really no complaints about it. The colors of the D5000 are a bit too vibrant for me sometimes, but as I shoot in RAW it's not a problem :)

I've bought a 8 GB card and a small Lowepro bag with the camera (as there was a sale at Curry's with this setup :D) and now I can carry the camera all the time as it's much lighter than the K20D and much smaller as well. With the K20D one of my problems was that I was too lazy to carry it all the time as it was quite heavy.

So overall my first impressions are very good. I believe we will have a lot of fun together :) and once I decide to move further on the 'food-chain' of Nikon (D700 here I come! :D) then this camera would be my ideal candidate for being converted to Full Spectrum (like my FZ50 at the moment).

Oh and one thing! The folding LCD has a very good feature: it can be closed and I can get cured of the DSLR sickness: chimping after every picture. :D

Few pictures:

(Re)Born!

As my Flickr Stream got full recently (I just don't have the "mood" to get a Pro account) I will keep posting my pictures here.