Project 52 by Frank Miller

[FrankMi]

PS, wouldn't it have been quicker to fell the trees and actually paint the house, then re-shoot it?

LOL! Thanks Dave!

I had actually shot a number of landscapes while I was up visiting my son and didn't decide on this one until I returned. Had I realized that this would be the choice, I would have spent more time getting better shooting angles but at the time my mind was more on the visit than photography.

I'm not sure the owners would appreciate my removing their tree and source of electric power just so I could take a photo!

[FrankMi]

Now that you mention it, I can see it. As my attention was on the after image most of the time I did not notice the HDR effect earlier on. I just thought it was a slightly duller version, well lighted.
Makes sense though to work from there. As you say, not really important, as you were looking for something else entirely.

Thank you Peter, for taking the time to provide feedback.

My primary goal has always been not the process but the final result and although I do a lot of (too often <sigh> unsuccessful) experimentation to develop shooting and post processing techniques, I don't want the techniques to be so obvious that they overshadow the result.

The problem is that I want to see in the photo what I saw at the time I was there. My goal is to find a way to capture that which my eyes can continuously change their three dimensional perspective, focus point, and exposure compensation to see in my mind as I look at a scene. Because of the limitations of the camera, people expect parts of the image to be out of focus, lacking in detail, overly bright or dark, etc., but, this is NOT what we see when we look at the scene with our eyes!

[FrankMi]

Week 16: To Bee or Not to Bee

This week I’m working on selectively sharpening and adjusting the brightness of a Bee. Not just any bee buzzing around flowers in the garden, but a bee that ventured too close to a Pitcher Plant and the plant won.

Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants whose prey-trapping mechanism features a deep cavity filled with liquid known as a pitfall trap.

Foraging, flying or crawling insects such as flies are attracted to the cavity formed by the cupped leaf, often by visual lures such as anthocyanin pigments, and nectar bribes. The sides of the pitcher are slippery so as to ensure that the insects cannot climb out.

The small bodies of liquid contained within the pitcher traps drown the insect, and the body of it is gradually dissolved. The prey is converted into a solution from which the plant obtains its mineral nutrition (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus). Like all carnivorous plants, they grow in locations where the soil is too poor in minerals and/or too acidic for most plants to survive. It uses the insect-traping mechanism to compensate for the lack of minerals in the soil.



Because of the depth of the bee in the plant, this started as a series of ten hand-held focus stacked images. First I opened the set in Adobe Camera Raw to make the initial Global Adjustments. The images was then loaded into Photoshop as a stacked set of layers, aligned using Edit/Auto-Align Layers, then merged using Edit/Auto-Blend layers.

In the image below, we can see that Photoshop creates a selection mask for each image and the combination of all ten masked images provides the final merged image. The Layer 1 image at the top of the stack is created by doing a Stamp Visible (CTL+ALT+Shift+E).

Once the Layer 1 has been created, we can delete all of the starting layers, however I sometimes find that the Auto-Blend doesn’t always select the sharpest part of each image so I might manually compare the Layer 1 with the individual images to see if I want can get any soft parts of the image to be sharper.



Next, I look to see if I need to remove any image noise using Topaz Labs DeJpeg (if the original image was a JPEG), or DeNoise (if the image was RAW). Usually the ‘Mild’ setting is sufficient. I also do my capture sharpening at this point with Topaz Lab’s InFocus. For this image I created two copies of the image with InFocus. The first was set to the more aggressive ‘Common’ setting for just the Bee, and the second was set to ‘Minor’ for the rest of the image as it was already in pretty sharp focus owing to the Focus Stacking done earlier.



Starting from the bottom up, you can see the Layer 1 bottom layer has had DeJpeg Mild applied and mask in the third layer up exposes just the Bee from the second layer up.

I usually check the colour tone using Topaz Labs Adjust and in this case, felt that the image could benefit from a Brilliant Warm adjustment.

The fourth layer up applies Brilliant Warm colouring so it now contains all of the changes made in the bottom four layers.

I then made a copy of the fourth layer and applied the same mask to it that I used in the third layer so that the top layer would reveal just the Bee from the fourth layer. Lastly, I used an Adjustment Mask set to Brightness/Contrast to raise the brightness of the Bee at the bottom of the Pitcher Plant in the fourth layer just enough to make it clearly visible. Following this I used the Stamp Visible to combine all of the layers into one before I cropped the image for posting.

One last step I learned yesterday from Dave Humphries is to reopen the final image in ACR and check the histogram to ensure that the post processing hasn’t resulted in blown highlights or lost shadow details and adjust accordingly.



As a side note, Photoshop looks down from the top of the layer stack, so before the Stamp Visible layer (not seen in the third image, above) was created blocking the view of all of the layers below it, Photoshop displayed the top layer except for where the black hole was in the mask. That ‘hole’ revealed the Bee in the second layer that had the brightness boosted just a bit. Because there was no mask in the second layer, Photoshop could not display anything below this layer unless I changed the ‘Layer Visibility’ eyeball in the box on the left of each layer.

Please let me know if there are any improvements that could be made in the image and also if the processing text needs any clarification or corrections. If you have time, click on the image to open in Lytebox to see if you can determine how many insects the pitcher plants have caught in this image!

Thank you for viewing!

[Goldcoastgolfer]

As always I am in absolute awe of your post processing work - both with the house and the bee (incidentally, remind me to never bother looking at a house advertised in a real estate brochure where you've done the photo for them).

[FrankMi]

As always I am in absolute awe of your post processing work - both with the house and the bee (incidentally, remind me to never bother looking at a house advertised in a real estate brochure where you've done the photo for them).

LOL! Thank you for the complement, Malcolm, the feedback is much appreciated!

I was hoping that by posting the steps I used to get the result that it would help others trying these techniques or perhaps I could get some tips for improvement.

[Letrow]

Nice work Frank. It is the kind of stuff I would like to do as well, but TBH I am a bit fearful of starting the process (just thinking of the amount of work involved, as I am a lazy PPer).
The end result looks very sharp.

[oldgreygary]

Very interesting to read about the PP techniques that you apply Frank. I am rapidly coming round to seeing the possibilities with these techniques. The 'crispness' of the image shows off the plant and its visitors to its best. Nice image.

Cheers for now

Gary

[FrankMi]

Nice work Frank. It is the kind of stuff I would like to do as well, but TBH I am a bit fearful of starting the process (just thinking of the amount of work involved, as I am a lazy PPer).
The end result looks very sharp.

Thanks, Peter. In my case it is easier to do some PP than it is to get out and shoot on a daily basis. I guess its really the total effort that produces the result and some folks would rather be in the field with their cameras than at a desk. Can't say that I blame them!

[FrankMi]

Very interesting to read about the PP techniques that you apply Frank. I am rapidly coming round to seeing the possibilities with these techniques. The 'crispness' of the image shows off the plant and its visitors to its best. Nice image.

Cheers for now

Gary

I'm glad you like it, Gary and I hope the steps will help folks overcome the reluctance in giving it a try. If you stop and take a look at the workflow it is fairly automated and doesn't take much effort but like most new things, it may take a couple of kicks at the cat to make it part of your natural process.

For example, anything I see that might benefit from multiple exposures I just pop the camera over to Bracketed Exposure (often without a tripod) as easily as I set the other controls. For a scene like this I almost automatically switch to manual focus, check the focus depth, and pop off 6-10 images (again, often without a tripod). Do I use them all? No, but they are there in case I decide back home that I need more DoF for a particular image.

[FrankMi]

Week 17: Do I Hear a Worm?

This week's goal is to use the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) technique.

One sign of old age is doing the same thing all the time and I certainly don't want to be accused of being stuck in a rut so this week's image is as close to SOOC as I can get. A simple subject with typical sharpening and cropping but not much more. I just hope it's not too boring as I'm not quite yet a beginner in wildlife photography.



Can you hear the peep-peep sounds and smell the fresh-cut grass?

[Donald]

One sign of old age is doing the same thing all the time and I certainly don't want to be accused of being stuck in a rut so this week's image is as close to SOOC as I can get.

When one possesses talent, they all start coming out looking good.

[Andrew76]

Yep, I'd agree with Donald. I'm not much for wildlife myself, but that's a very nice shot. Simple, but very, very effective. Nice work Frank!

[Dave Humphries]

Yep, good one Frank

How did you get it?
130mm is quite short for a small(ish) bird.

Set up (low) on tripod and remote release?
Or 'play dead' yourself on the lawn?

Cheers,

[FrankMi]

Thank you for the feedback Donald and Andrew!

How did you get it?
130mm is quite short for a small(ish) bird.

Set up (low) on tripod and remote release?
Or 'play dead' yourself on the lawn?

I used 'The Force', Dave!

The Canon SX40 has a crop factor of 5.588, lets say we round it to 5.6 so 130mm is actually 727mm FFE. With the excellent IS in this camera, this was a hand-held shot and almost full frame. It is amazing how well this new breed of cameras are performing.

Kinda makes me feel like 'Captain CameraBug'!

[Geoff F]

The only thing I would consider changing, Frank is to crop a fraction closer on the bottom to reduce the area of out of focus grass by around half. There is plenty of space to lose a similar amount from the right edge.

If only you could have shot that bird actually having a 'tug of war' with a large worm it would be an absolute prize winner.

[FrankMi]

The only thing I would consider changing, Frank is to crop a fraction closer on the bottom to reduce the area of out of focus grass by around half. There is plenty of space to lose a similar amount from the right edge.

If only you could have shot that bird actually having a 'tug of war' with a large worm it would be an absolute prize winner.

Easily done, my friend, except for the worm part! I would have loved to catch the Robin with the worm - that would have been super!

[Goldcoastgolfer]

Not much to say there - another excellent shot Frank That really is some excellent detail you've captured there.

[FrankMi]

The goal for this week is to enhance a rainbow so that it is easier to see in the image.

We were in the Mediterranean, traversing from the Ionian Sea to the Tyrrhenian Sea at the Messina Strait. The gap between Sicily and the mainland of Italy is less than 2 miles wide at this point. It had been raining and for a brief few minutes, the sun peeped through the clouds behind us and created a rainbow in front of the ship.

I was able to get a few shots before the sun went back behind the clouds but none of them clearly showed the rainbow.

Here is the SOOC image:



This is after typical post processing:



To enhance the rainbow I used a tutorial from this location. I haven’t as yet learned the technique well enough to control the width of the rainbow, but here it is after applying the tutorial:



It is easier to see the changes if you open the image in Lytebox and use the arrows to switch between the three images.

[Andrew76]

Wow, that's pretty cool, Frank!! Very nicely done - mind you, it's a pretty decent job on pp, even without the rainbow!

[FrankMi]

Wow, that's pretty cool, Frank!! Very nicely done - mind you, it's a pretty decent job on pp, even without the rainbow!

Thank you Andrew! The PP was the typical isolate the sky, land, and water as individual layers and treat each with what is best for that layer.