RF-Photography

This is a follow up to my original Power of Lightroom article from just about a year ago.  Lightroom has been improved with each new version and while the black and white capability and the Adjustment Brush capability have been in place before v3, I thought I’d take the opportunity to toss in a new article on Lightroom for black and white.  Probably 80% of what I do with editing photos, I do now with Lightroom.  There are still some things I use Photoshop for and I’d never give up Photoshop but Lightroom is a wonderful piece of software. Power of Lightroom - Redux, con't >

When we’re working with tonemapped HDR images, sometimes additional editing is needed or desired.  Why?  Well, if we look at HDR as a way to expand dynamic range and as a way to give us a better starting point; rather than looking at HDR as an endpoint, then it makes sense that additional tweaking may be something we want to do.  In addition to that, the HDR process can sometimes do funny things with colours that we don’t want.  I wrote about HDR being a starting point in an earlier blog post,“The Great HDR Debate” .

What we’re going to look at in this tutorial are a couple methods to work with tonemapped HDR images to give us a the final image we want.  One approach is going to involve layer masks and the other is going to use layer blending modes.  The layer mask adjustment is going to build on my earlier layer mask tutorial.

Earlier this summer I shot some interiors of a well known cathedral in Toronto – St. Michael’s Catholic Cathedral.  My intent when I went into the church was to build on the ‘artistic architectural’ project.  It’s a terrific space with wonderful stained glass and architectural features.  The painting on the ceiling is magnificent. Advanced HDR Editing, con't >

Canvas has become a very popular printing media with the explosion of digital photography and digital printing.  Canvas can impart a very appealing texture and painterly look to a photo.  In addition to printing on canvas, the gallery wrap has become a well used method of presenting the canvas print.  The gallery wrap can be hung as an unframed piece which helps cut down on costs and the look has a finished yet unfinished look that many find appealing.

A gallery wrap is done by stretching the canvas around a set of stretcher bars and stapling the canvas to the back of the stretchers.  These are the same kinds of wooden stretchers painters have used for centuries.  Some will say that only the thicker, 1 1/2″ stretchers can be called a gallery wrap and anything smaller (e.g., the 3/4″ size) is referred to as a museum wrap.  Personally, I distinguish the two this way – A gallery wrap is fully wrapped around the stretchers and stapled on the back.  The sides that wrap around the stretcher frame is either a colour (as opposed to the canvas white) or an the actual image itself.  In this case, whether the heavier 1 1/2″ or smaller 3/4″ stretchers are used, the stretched piece can be hung without a frame.  A museum wrap is stapled on the side of the stretcher doesn’t wrap fully around and the sides of the canvas may or may not be coloured or an extension of the image.  A museum wrap is intended to be framed.

What if we don’t want to lose any of the image by wrapping it around the stretcher?  Then we either need to find a way to fill the edges of the canvas with a solid colour or to extend the image fully to the edges.  This tutorial will walk you through the steps to extend the image to the edges of the canvas but not lose any when the piece is wrapped.  Huh?  Read on. Canvas Ext, con't >

Layer masks are one of the most useful tools in digital editing. The amount of flexibility Layer Masks give you in making selective and subtle changes makes learning how to use them very helpful.

Creating a Layer Mask is very simple. Duplicate your layer then go to Layer>Layer Mask at which point you’ll have the choice to Hide All or Reveal All. Which you choose depends on how you want to use the mask. If you want to use the mask to selectively add an effect to a photo you’ll choose Hide All. If you want to use the mask to selectively remove an effect from a photo you’ll choose Reveal All.

Once you’ve chosen Hide or Reveal, you next choice is in which paint colour you’re going to use to adjust the Layer Mask. If you’ve chosen Hide All then you’ll select white as your foreground paint colour. If you’ve chosen Reveal All, you’ll select black as your foreground paint colour. Painting on a Layer Mask with white reveals and painting with black hides. Layer Masks, con't >

The typical last step in editing a photo is to apply sharpening. Sharpening is necessary because photos straight out of a digital camera or scanned film images tend to be a bit ‘soft’. That is, they don’t have the crispness that we may want.

The most common method of sharpening is to use the Unsharp Mask (Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask). The USM filter will be familiar to those who’ve worked in a wet darkroom because it works the same way the unsharp mask worked in making wet prints. USM isn’t necessarily the best way to sharpen a digital photo; however. First, it’s a destructive method of sharpening. That is, it alters pixel values in the image file. This can be worked around if sharpening is applied on a separate layer but even then it’s less than perfect. Second, it can be a bit finicky to use at times. Getting just the right amount of sharpening can be difficult. It’s also easy to overdue the effect. Overcook the sharpening and you’ll end up with unpleasant bright halos around the edges of elements in the photo. High Pass Sharpening, con't

This is the last instalment in the series of HDR software reviews. If a new application comes along in the future, I may add it to the set and I’m in the process of looking at some new beta versions of a couple previous applications so will likely update those reviews in the future with new information; but for all intents and purposes this is it. What started out as a list of about 5 applications has grown to a 10 part series. From a purely personal standpoint, if I never see the images that have been used in all these reviews again it’ll be too soon. I hope the thoughts I’ve laid out have been useful for some people and perhaps given some insight from the standpoint of a casual user.

This last instalment will look at Picturenaut. I was initially reluctant to include it because unlike all the other applications in the series, Picturenaut isn’t a commercial product. My feeling is that if someone’s offering a piece of software for sale, it’s open to be reviewed and critiqued but if someone’s offering up a piece of software for free it’s a different matter.

Picturenaut can be downloaded from the HDRLabs website which, as many of you probably know, is owned and maintained by Christian Bloch. Christian is well known in HDR circles and is the author of The HDRI Handbook which is highly recommended as one of the two seminal reads for users of HDR both new and advanced along with Practical HDRI. Picturenaut Review, con't >