Frank asked me last week about the Topaz JPEG to RAW AI plugin and if it was any good.
Well, my response after downloading the free trial and messing about with it is this – it’s CRAP!
All it does is create a DNG file or 16 bit TIFF (you pick) from an 8 bit jpeg.
Should you opt for DNG then the DNG is NOT a raw file, it’s just a DNG with 8 bits per channel worth of information rattling around inside it. And if you opt for 16 bit TIFF then you end up with and 8 bit jpeg sitting inside a 16 bit TIFF container.
For the love of God, how the hell does the marketing department at Topaz think they can get away with this total bullshit – Ai learning my arse………….!
Are they trying to make the inexperienced and unknowledgeable actually believe that this expensive bit of garbage can re-engineer 32,000+ bits per channel from a poxy 8 bits per channel?
If you believe that then all I’ll say is that ‘a fool and their money are easily parted’………
Click image to view LARGE in new window
Click the image above and it will open in a new window. We are looking at 200% magnification of an are of the original raw file (right), a full resolution jpeg created from that raw file (middle), and a shitty DNG created by this abomination from Topaz on the left.
Notice something about the Topaz image – it’s got more artifacts in it than the original jpeg (middle) because there has been some form of sharpening applied to it by the Topaz software – and yet there are NO controls for any application of sharpening in the Topaz UI.
Let’s take something different – a jpeg of a Clouded Ermine.
Click the image to see what the original jpeg looks like.
One of the most stunningly beautiful moths in the UK, this Clouded Ermine is resting on tree bark.
Now let’s feed that jpeg into the Topaz JPEG to RAW AI GUI
And now let’s look at a sectional 400% magnification comparison shall we
Sharpening artifacts again and noise that wasn’t there to begin with.
Seriously, you’d be better off tweaking your jpegs in Lightroom!
I do NOT recommend anyone purchase this Topaz product because it’s rubbish. But what concerns me is the manner in which it is being marketed; I see the marketing as just plain misleading.
I’m not dismissing all Topaz software – DeNoise is brilliant for certain tasks.
But Topaz JPEG to RAW AI is nothing short of misleading junk with a huge price tag – Christ, you could buy 12 months subscription to my Patreon Chanel for less!
Two Blend Modes in Photoshop EVERY Photographer Should Know!
The other day one of my members over on my Patreon suggested I do a video on Blending Modes in Photoshop.
Well, that would take a whole heap of time as it’s quite a big subject because Blending Modes don’t just apply to layers. Brushes of all descriptions have their own unique blend modes, and so do layer groups.
There is no need to go into a great deal of detail over blend modes in order for you to start reaping their benefits.
There are TWO blend modes – Multiply and Screen – which you can start using straight away to vary the apparent exposure of your images.
And seeing as my last few videos have been concerned with exposing for highlights and ETTR in general, the use of the Multiply Layer Blending Mode will be clear to see once you’ve watched the video.
Hope the video gives you some more insight folks!
My Members over on Patreon get the benefit of being able to download the raw files used in this video.
One of my patrons, Paul Smith, and I ventured down to Shropshire and the spectacular quartsite ridge of The Stiperstones to get this image of the Milky Way and Mars (the large bright ‘star’ above the rocks on the left).
I always work the same way for astro landscape photography, beginning with getting into position just before sunset.
Using the PhotoPills app on my phone I can see where the milky way will be positioned in my field of view at the time of peak sky darkness. This enables me to position the camera exactly where I want it for the best composition.
The biggest killer in astro landscape photography is excessive noise in the foreground.
The other problem is that foregrounds in most images of this genre are not sharp due to a lack of depth of field at the wide apertures you need to shoot the night sky at – f2.8 for example.
To get around this problem we need to shoot a separate foreground image at a lower ISO, a narrower aperture and focused closer to the camera.
Some photographers change focus, engage long exposure noise reduction and then shoot a very long exposure. But that’s an eminently risky thing to do in my opinion, both from a technical standpoint and one of time – a 60 minute exposure will take 120 minutes to complete.
The length of exposure is chosen to allow the very low photon-count from the foreground to ‘build-up’ on the sensor and produced a usable level of exposure from what little natural light is around.
From a visual perspective, when it works, the method produces images that can be spectacular because the light in the foreground matches the light in the sky in terms of directionality.
Light Painting
To get around the inconvenience of time and super-long exposures a lot of folk employ the technique of light painting their foregrounds.
Light painting – in my opinion – destroys the integrity of the finished image because it’s so bloody obvious! The direction of light that’s ‘painted’ on the foreground bares no resemblance to that of the sky.
The other problem with light painting is this – those that employ the technique hardly ever CHECK to see if they are in the field of view of another photographer – think about that one for a second or two!
My Method
As I mentioned before, I set up just before sunset. In the shot above I knew the milky way and Mars were not going to be where I wanted them until just after 1am, but I was set up by 9.20pm – yep, a long wait ahead, but always worth the effort.
As we move towards the latter half of civil twilight I start shooting my foreground exposure, and I’ll shoot a few of these at regular intervals between then and mid nautical twilight.
Because I shoot raw the white balance set in camera is irrelevant, and can be balanced with that of the sky in Photoshop during post processing.
The key things here are that I have a shadowless even illumination of my foreground which is shot at a low ISO, in perfect focus, and shot at say f8 has great depth of field.
Once deep into blue hour and astronomical twilight the brighter stars are visible and so I now use full magnification in live view and focus on a bright star in the cameras field of view.
Then it’s a waiting game – waiting for the sky to darken to its maximum and the Milky Way to come into my desired position for my chosen composition.
Shooting the Sky
Astro landscape photography is all about showing the sky in context with the foreground – I have absolutely ZERO time for those popular YouTube photographers who composite a shot of the night sky into a landscape image shot in a different place or a different angle.
Good astro landscape photography HAS TO BE A COMPOSITE though – there is no way around that.
And by GOOD I mean producing a full resolution image that will sell through the agencies and print BIG if needed.
The key things that contribute to an image being classed good in my book are simple:
Pin-point stars with no trailing
Low noise
Sharp from ‘back’ to ‘front’.
Pin-points stars are solely down to correct shutter speed for your sensor size and megapixel count.
Low noise is covered by shooting a low ISO foreground and a sequence of high ISO sky images, and using Starry Landscape Stacker on Mac (Sequator on PC appears to be very similar) in conjunction with a mean or median stacking mode.
Further noise cancelling is achieved but the shooting of Dark Frames, and the typical wide-aperture vignetting is cancelled out by the creation of a flat field frame.
And ‘back to front’ image sharpness should be obvious to you from what I’ve already written!
So, I’ll typically shoot a sequence of 20 to 30 exposures – all one after the other with no breaks or pauses – and then a sequence of 20 to 30 dark frames.
Shutter speeds usually range from 4 to 6 seconds
Watch this video on my YouTube Channel about shutter speed:
Best viewed on the channel itself, and click the little cog icon to choose 1080pHD as the resolution.
Putting it all Together
Shooting all the frames for astro landscape photography is really quite simple.
Putting it all together is fairly simple and straight forward too – but it’s TEDIOUS and time-consuming if you want to do it properly.
But I wanted to try Raw Therapee for this Stiperstones image, and another of my patrons – Frank – wanted a video of processing methodology in Raw Therapee.
Easier said than done, cramming 4 hours into a typical YouTube video! But after about six attempts I think I’ve managed it, and you can see it here, but I warn you now that it’s 40 minutes long:
Best viewed on the channel itself, and click the little cog icon to choose 1080pHD as the resolution.
I hope you’ve found the information in this post useful, together with the YouTube videos.
I don’t monetize my YouTube videos or fill my blog posts with masses of affiliate links, and I rely solely on my patrons to help cover my time and server costs. If you would like to help me to produce more content please visit my Patreon page on the button above.
When we shoot ETTR (expose to the right) in bright, harsh light, Lightroom can sometimes get the wrong idea and make a real ‘hash’ of rendering the raw file.
Sometimes it can be so bad that the less experienced photographer can get the wrong impression of their raw file exposure – and in some extreme cases they may even ‘bin’ the image thinking it irretrievably over exposed.
I’ve just uploaded a video to my YouTube channel which shows you exactly what I’m talking about:
The image was shot by my client and patron Paul Smith when he visited the Mara back in October last year, and it’s a superb demo image of just how badly Lightroom can demosaic a straight forward +1.6 Ev ETTR shot.
Importing the raw file directly into Lightroom gives us this:
But importing the raw file directly into RawTherapee with no adjustments gives us this:
Just look at the two histogram versions – Lightroom is doing some crazy stuff to the image ‘in the background’ as there are ZERO develop settings applied.
But if you watch the video you’ll see that it’s quite straight forward to regain all that apparent ‘blown detail’.
And here’s the important bit – we do so WITHOUT the use of the shadow or highlight recovery sliders. Anyone who has purchased my sharpening videos HERE knows that those two sliders can VERY EASILY cause undesirable ‘pseudo-sharpening’ halos, and they should only be used with caution.
The way I process this +1.6 stop ETTR exposure inside Lightroom has revealed all the superb mid tone detail and given us a really good image that we could take into Photoshop and improve with some precision localized adjustments.
So don’t let Lightroom control you – you need to control IT!
If you feel this article and video has been beneficial to you and would like to see more per week, then supporting my Patreon page for as little as $1 per month would be a massive help. Thanks everyone!
Regular subscribers to my blog and YouTube channel should know by know that I highly recommend Greg Benz’s Lumenzia plugin for Photoshop.
I know many readers of my blog have downloaded the Lumenzia plugin from my links dotted around the site, and previous posts such as HERE and HERE
Lumenzia is just about the best tool you can buy to help you master exposure blending using luminosity masks, but its uses do not stop there – I use it on quite a lot of my images for making ‘controlled tweaks’ in Photoshop.
But it is most readily associated with landscape photography exposure blending.
An awful lot of people have asked me if I’d do a set of comprehensive training videos on how to use Lumenzia, but that would be a little difficult to do without on-going additions as the plugin is frequently updated with new facilities.
But I’m pleased to say the Greg Benz (the plugin author) has just launched a comprehensive training course for Lumenzia, and I have bought the course myself!
Yes, that’s right – I’ve bought someone else’s training!
After watching the videos that Greg has put together I can honestly say that the course is excellent – as you would expect.
The course is hosted on Teachable – so you don’t have to download any huge chunky videos either.
For those of you who already have the Lumenzia Photoshop plugin you can get the full course by clicking on the following link:
Greg covers everything you need to know in order to leverage the power of Lumenzia. And anything that gets people to use Photoshop gets an extra ‘thumbs up’ from me!
Greg is the one trainer I know of who does what I do with my training videos – supply RAW files to support each of the lessons.
You will get raw files from various cameras including some D850 files, so you will have the added bonus of seeing how these cameras perform in the hands of an expert photographer.
So, I strongly urge you to use the links above and purchase this great training course from Greg Benz, and get to grips with Lumenzia.
You might be wondering why the heck I’m promoting training from someone else.
Well, the reasons are two-fold; I’ve already said that logistically it would be a nightmare because of the fundamental updates.
But more importantly, I’d never be able to teach you how Lumenzia works any better than Greg himself – he IS the plugin author, so it stands to reason!
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Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.
Well, I’d like to say the past week has been a blast, but Adobe screwed any chance of that happening by releasing version 7.3 of Lightroom on the 3rd/4th.
The week actually started off quite well with me uploading a Raw Therapee basic “get you started’ video:
I’d planned to get out and do some photography, and do some serious SEO work on my YouTube channel.
But when I turned my machines on at 6.15am on the 4th I was greeted with some queries from clients and blog/channel viewers about some new fangled update for Lightroom.
Then the CC update panel told me I had application updates for Photoshop and Lightroom, so we clicked update on both.
I’m a bit of a Photoshop junkie, and I always look forward to any update if I’m honest, just so I can go and have a play with it!
But I’ve been a bit ‘meh..’ over Lightroom for quite a while now, for a few reasons.
Firstly, it’s trying to become some sort of pathetic 1 stop shop image processor, catering to the ‘instant gratification brigade’ INSTEAD OF what it’s meant to be – a superb digital asset management program and a raw processor designed to work in conjunction with the KING of image processors – PHOTOSHOP.
Secondly, it’s unique demosaicing algorithm is ludicrously outdated in comparison to C1, Iridient and RT, and its capture/input sharpening controls leave a lot to be desired. Anyone who has been sensible and bought my massive sharpening training knows exactly what I’m talking about here, as I demonstrate these facts more than a few times!
In point of fact, on the demosaicing front, it’s not as clever as that found in either Canon DPP or Nikon Capture.
But, with a bit of patience and effort, you can strip all the crap background adjustments away, and get back to a relatively neutral starting point; as I’ve discussed many times previously on this blog.
So, once the updates were done, and I’d had a quick look at Photoshop, I fired up the new Lightroom v7.3 – and immediately wished I hadn’t!
Heading over to the Adobe Lightroom Forum I see A LOT of very upset users.
Strangely enough though, heading over to YouTube I see the exact opposite!
But, positive or negative, all the buzz is about the new profiles.
Lightroom v7.3 Profiles
There are tens of thousands of Lightroom v7.3 fan boys out there, plus even more users with a low level knowledge base, who do NOT understand what a ‘profile’ is – and Adobe are using this as a massive marketing tool.
Lightroom v7.3 profiles are simply Lightroom v7.2 PRESETS, re-bundled into something called a profile, and shoved into a different location in the Lightroom GUI.
The subtle difference is this – if you have a preset that gives a ‘certain look’ to an image, when you apply it, the relevant sliders in the dev module move.
But if you have a ‘profile’ that gives the same visual appearance, when you apply it the relevant sliders DON”T move.
A PRESET is a visible, front GUI adjustment, and a PROFILE is a buried, background adjustment.
You’ll see this corroborated by an Adobe Forum Moderator a little later on..
A preset shows up in the control sliders, and you can easily tweak these after applying the preset.
Application of a PROFILE however, gives you no control indication of what it’s done, so you can’t tweak its adjustments because you can’t see them.
Profiles just pander to people who basically want Adobe to process their images for them – harsh, but true.
Presets – for me, the few that I make are simply to save time in applying settings to remove Adobes processing of my images.
But for years there has been a third party after-market revenue stream in preset bundles from certain photography trainers – buy these and your images will look like mine! So presets too steered their purchasers away from actually processing their own images, but at least those presets were designed by photographers!
Anyway, for those that haven’t seen the two videos I upload to YouTube about Lightroom v7.3 they are embedded below:
I was expecting a mixed response to those videos, from the sane and sensible:
Click me – good old Franky!
Click me
to the plain stupid:
Click me – I’m worth a read!
but I wasn’t expecting the raft of these, this is the tamest:
You have to have a thick skin if you stick videos on YouTube, but what the f**k does a comment like that achieve?
Anyway, F**K all that. At the end of the first video I do say that if I find anything out about the new default sharpening amount in Lightroom v7.3 I would let you know in a blog article.
So I headed over to the Adobe Lightroom Forum to beg the question – it only took 10 minutes and an Adobe moderator addressed the question, and a bit more besides.
I’ve screen-grabbed it so please click the image below to read it:
I’m interesting so CLICK ME!
So, the important take-aways are:
nothing has changed
and
part of an effort by Adobe to offer a more pleasing “out-of-the-box” rendering
and
At the ‘base’ level nothing has changed. The demosaicing algorithm is unchanged, MelissRGB is still the default colour space within the UI, and the Adobe Standard profile (DCP) for each supported camera is also unchanged. Likewise, the Camera Matching profiles are unchanged.
and
All of the new Adobe Raw and Creative profiles are built on top of Adobe Standard (i.e. Adobe Standard remains the base profile for all supported cameras). As such, these XMP based profiles apply settings under-the-hood.
Conclusion.
So basically the whole version update is geared SOLELY towards people with a camera who want instant gratification by allowing Adobe techs to process their images for them.
As someone who’s understood the photography process, and watched it evolve over the last 40 years, I count myself as something slightly more than just a fat bloke with a camera.
Forget about all this “I care about my images” garbage – I KNOW what constitutes a technically sound image, and ever since the inception of PV2012, Lightroom has been on a slippery slope towards losing it’s full professional image maker credibility.
Like many others, I still use Lightroom, and I always will. As I said before, it excels in Digital Asset Management, and it’s Soft Proofing and Print facilities are really without equal.
Have they improved any of those features? In a nutshell, NO.
My monthly subscription has gone up by £25 a year, and for my money I’ve now got even more work to do inside the dev module to make sense of my raw files. If you’ve lost the understanding of what I mean, go and watch the 2nd video again!
Am I even remotely thinking about dropping my subs and using another application?
I might look like a cabbage, but I’m not one! My £120+ buys me access to a constantly updated installation of the finest image processor on the face of Gods Earth – the mighty Photoshop.
And for those without the required level of prior knowledge, that privilege used to cost in excess of £800+ plus serious upgrade fees every couple of years. That’s why there was such ripping ‘trade’ in torrenting and cracked copies!
So overall, I’m quids-in, and I can think of Lightroom as something of a freebie, which makes even Lightroom v7.3 good VFM.
Added to that, I can always open a raw file in RT and get a 16bit ProPhotoRGB tiff file into Photoshop that’ll kick Lightrooms version into the last millennium.
But I can’t help it, I do resent deeply the road down which the Adobe bosses are taking Lightroom.
What they should have done is make CC into an idiots version, and re-worked the Classic CC into a proper raw editor with multiple choices for demosaicing, a totally re-worked input sharpening module, and interface the result with the existing Print, Soft-Proof and DAM.
But of course, that would cost them money and reduce their profit margin – so there’s no chance of my idea ever coming to fruition.
I take my hat off to the guys in the C1 dev team, but C1 is far too hostile an environment for any of those thousands of idiots who love the new Lightroom profiles – because that would mean they’d need to do some actual processing work!
And if C1 is hostile, then RT is total Armageddon – hell, it even sends me into a cold sweat!
But photography has always been hard work that demanded knowledge before you started, and a lot of hard learning to acquire said knowledge.
Hard work never hurt anyone, and when does the path of least resistance EVER result in the best possible outcome?
Never – the result is always an average compromise.
And good image processing is all about the BEST IMAGE POSSIBLE from a raw file.
Which brings me nicely back to my sharpening training – get it bought you freebie-hunting misers! GO ON – DO IT NOW – BEFORE YOU FORGET and before I die of starvation!
DO IT!
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Over 11 hours of video training, spread across 58 videos…well, I told you it was going to be big!
And believe me, I could have made it even bigger, because there is FAR MORE to image sharpening than 99% of photographers think.
And you don’t need ANY stupid sharpener plugins – or noise reductions ones come to that. Because Photoshop does it ALL anyway, and is far more customizable and controllable than any plugin could hope to be.
So don’t waste your money any more – spend it instead, on some decent training to show you how to do the job properly in the first place!
You won’t find a lot of these methods anywhere else on the internet – free or paid for – because ‘teachers cannot teach what they don’t know’ – and I know more than most!
As you can see from the list of lessons above, I cover more than just ‘plain old sharpening’.
Traditionally, image sharpening produces artifacts – usually white and black halos – if it’s over done. And image sharpening emphasizes ‘noise’ in areas of shadow and other low frequency detail, when it’s applied to an image in the ‘traditional’, often taught, blanket manner.
Why sharpen what isn’t in focus – to do so is madness, because all you do is sharpen the noise, and cause more artifacts!
Maximum sharpening should only be applied to detail in the image that is ‘fully in focus’.
So, as ‘focus sharpness’ falls off, so to should the level of applied sharpening. That way, noise and other artifacts CAN NOT build up in an image.
And the same can be said for noise reduction, but ‘in reverse’.
So image sharpening needs to be applied in a differential manor – and that’s what this training is all about.
Using a brush in Lightroom etc to ‘brush in’ some sort of differential sharpening is NOT a good idea, because it’s imprecise, and something of a fools task.
Why do I say that? Simple……. Because the ‘differential factor bit’ is contained within the image itself – and it’s just sitting there on your computer screen WAITING for you to get stuck in and use it.
But, like everything else in modern digital photography, the knowledge and skill to do so has somehow been lost in the last 12 to 15 years, and the internet is full of ‘teachers’ who have never had these skills in the first place – hence they can’t teach ’em!
However, everyone who buys this training of mine WILL have those skills by the end of the course.
It’s been a real hard slog to produce these videos. Recording the lessons is easy – it’s the editing and video call-outs that take a lot of time. And I’ve edited all the audio in Audacity to remove breath sounds and background noise – many thanks to Curtis Judd for putting those great lessons on YouTube!
The price is £59.99. So right now, that’s over 11 hours of training for less than £5.50 per hour – that’s way cheaper than a 1to1, or even a workshop day with a crowd of other people!
So head off over to my download store and buy it, because what you’ll learn will improve your image processing, whether it’s for big prints or just jpegs on the web – guaranteed – just click here!
Become a patron from as little as $1 per month, and help me produce more free content.
Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.
A lot of people imagine that there is some sort of ‘magic bullet’ method for sharpening images.
Well, here’s the bad news – there isn’t !
Even if you shoot the same camera and lens combo at the same settings all the time, your images will exhibit an array of various properties.
And those properties, and the ratio/mix thereof, can, and will, effect the efficacy of various sharpening methods and techniques.
And, those properties will rarely be the same from shoot to shoot.
Add interchangeable lenses, varied lighting conditions, and assorted scene brightness and contrast ranges to the mix – now the range of image properties has increased exponentially.
What are the properties of an image that can determine your approach to sharpening?
I’m not even going to attempt to list them all here, because that would be truly frightening for you.
But sharpening is all about pixels, edges and contrast. And our first ‘port of call’ with regard to all three of those items is ‘demosaicing’ and raw file conversion.
“But Andy, surely the first item should be the lens” I here you say.
No, it isn’t.
And if that were the case, then we would go one step further than that, and say that it’s the operators ability to focus the lens!
So we will take it as a given, that the lens is sharp, and the operator isn’t quite so daft as they look!
Now we have a raw file, taken with a sharp lens and focused to perfection.
Let’s hand that file to two raw converters, Lightroom and Raw Therapee:
I am Lightroom – Click me!
I am Raw Therapee – Click me!
In both raw converters there is ZERO SHARPENING being applied. (and yes, I know the horizon is ‘wonky’!).
Now check out the 800% magnification shots:
Lightroom at 800% – Click me!
Raw Therapee at 800% – Click me!
What do we see on the Lightroom shot at 800%?
A sharpening halo, but hang on, there is NO sharpening being applied.
But in Raw Therapee there is NO halo.
The halo in Lightroom is not a sharpening halo, but a demosaicing artifact that LOOKS like a sharpening halo.
It is a direct result of the demosaicing algorithm that Lightroom uses.
Raw Therapee on the other hand, has a selection of demosaicing algorithms to choose from. In this instance, it’s using its default AMaZE (Alias Minimization & Zipper Elimination) algorithm. All told, there are 10 different demosaic options in RT, though some of them are a bit ‘old hat’ now.
There is no way of altering the base demosaic in Lightroom – it is something of a fixed quantity. And while it works in an acceptable manner for the majority of shots from an ever burgeoning mass of digital camera sensors, there will ALWAYS be exceptions.
Let’s call a spade a bloody shovel and be honest – Lightrooms demosaicing algorithm is in need of an overhaul. And why something we have to pay for uses a methodology worse than something we get for free, God only knows.
It’s a common problem in Lightroom, and it’s the single biggest reason why, for example, landscape exposure blends using luminosity masks fail to work quite as smoothly as you see demonstrated on the old Tube of You.
If truth be told – and this is only my opinion – Lightroom is by no means the best raw file processor in existence today.
I say that with a degree of reservation though, because:
It’s very user friendly
It’s an excellent DAM (digital asset management) tool, possibly the best.
On the surface, it only shows its problems with very high contrast edges.
As a side note, my Top 4 raw converters/processors are:
Iridient Developer
Raw Therapee
Capture One Pro
Lightroom
Iridient is expensive and complex – but if you shoot Fuji X-Trans you are crazy if you don’t use it.
Raw Therapee is very complex (and slightly ‘clunky’ on Mac OSX) but it is very good once you know your way around it. And it’s FREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Iridient and RT have zero DAM capability that’s worth talking about.
Capture One Pro is a better raw converter on the whole than Lightroom, but it’s more complex, and its DAM structure looks like it was created by crack-smoking monkeys when you compare it to the effective simplicity of Lightroom.
If we look at Lightroom as a raw processor (as opposed to raw converter) it encourages the user to employ ‘recovery’ in shadow and highlight areas.
Using BOTH can cause halos along high contrast edges, and edges where high frequency detail sits next to very low frequency detail of a contrasting colour – birds in flight against a blue sky spring to mind.
Why do I keep ‘banging on’ about edges?
Because edges are critical – and most of you guys ‘n gals hardly ever look at them close up.
All images contain areas of high and low frequency detail, and these areas require different process treatments, if you want to obtain the very best results AND want to preserve the ability to print.
Cleanly defined edges between these areas allow us to use layer masks to separate these areas in an image, and obtain the selective control.
Clean inter-tonal boundaries also allow us to separate shadows, various mid tone ranges, and highlights for yet more finite control.
Working on 16 bit images (well, 15 bit plus 1 level if truth be told) means we can control our adjustments in Photoshop within a range of 32,768 tones. And there is no way in hell that localised adjustments in Lightroom can be carried out to that degree of accuracy – fact.
I’ll let you in to a secret here! You all watch the wrong stuff on YouTube! You sit and watch a video by God knows what idiot, and then wonder why what you’ve just seen them do does NOT work for you.
That’s because you’ve not noticed one small detail – 95% of the time they are working on jpegs! And jpegs only have a tonal range of 256. It’s really easy to make luminosity selections etc on such a small tonal range work flawlessly. You try the same settings on a 16 bit image and they don’t work.
So you end up thinking it’s your fault – your image isn’t as ‘perfect’ as theirs – wrong!
It’s a tale I hear hundreds of times every year when I have folk on workshops and 1to1 tuition days. And without fail, they all wish they’d paid for the training instead of trying to follow the free stuff.
You NEVER see me on a video working with anything but raw files and full resolution 16 bit images.
My only problem is that I don’t ‘fit into’ today’s modern ‘cult of personality’!
Most adjustments in Lightroom have a global effect. Yes, we have range masks and eraser brushes. But they are very poor relations of the pixel-precise control you can have in Photoshop.
Lightroom is – in my opinion of course – becoming polluted by the ‘one stop shop, instant gratification ideology’ that seems to pervade photography today.
Someone said to me the other day that I had not done a YouTube video on the new range masking option in Lightroom. And they are quite correct.
Why?
Because it’s a gimmick – and real crappy one at that, when compared to what you can do in Photoshop.
Photoshop is the KING of image manipulation and processing. And that is a hard core, irrefutable fact. It has NO equal.
But Photoshop is a raster image editor, which means it needs to be fed a diet of real pixels. Raw converters like Lightroom use ‘virtual pixels’ – in a manner of speaking.
And of course, Lightroom and the CameraRaw plug in for Photoshop amount to the same thing. So folk who use either Lightroom or Photoshop EXCLUSIVELY are both suffering from the same problems – if they can be bothered to look for them.
It Depends on the Shot
The landscape image is by virtue, a low ISO, high resolution shot with huge depth of field, and bags of high frequency inter-tonal detail that needs sharpening correctly to its very maximum. We don’t want to sharpen the sky, as it’s sharp enough through depth of field, as is the water, and we require ZERO sharpening artifacts, and no noise amplification.
If we utilise the same sharpening workflow on the center image, then we’ll all get our heads kicked in! No woman likes to see their skin texture sharpened – in point of fact we have to make it even more unsharp, smooth and diffuse in order to avoid a trip to our local A&E department.
The cheeky Red Squirrel requires a different approach again. For starters, it’s been taken on a conventional ‘wildlife camera’ – a Nikon D4. This camera sensor has a much lower resolution than either of the camera sensors used for the previous two shots.
It is also shot from a greater distance than the foreground subjects in either of the preceding images. And most importantly, it’s at a far higher ISO value, so it has more noise in it.
All three images require SELECTIVE sharpening. But most photographers think that global sharpening is a good idea, or at least something they can ‘get away with’.
If you are a photographer who wants to do nothing else but post to Facebook and Flickr then you might as well stop reading this post. Good luck to you and enjoy your photography, but everything you read in this post, or anywhere on this blog, is not for you.
But if you want to maximize the potential of your thousands of pounds worth of camera gear, and print or sell your images, then I hate to tell you, but you are going to have to LEARN STUFF.
Photoshop is where the magic happens.
As I said earlier, Photoshop is a raster image processor. As such, it needs to be fed an original image that is of THE UTMOST QUALITY. By this I mean a starting raw file that has been demosaiced and normalized to:
Contain ZERO demosaic artifacts of any kind.
Have the correct white and black points – in other words ZERO blown highlights or blocked shadows. In other words, getting contrast under control.
Maximize the midtones to tease out the highest amount of those inter-tonal details, because this is where your sharpening is going to take place.
Contain no more sharpening than you can get away with, and certainly NOT the amount of sharpening you require in the finished image.
With points 1 thru 3 the benefits should be fairly obvious to you, but if you think about it for a second, the image described is rather ‘flattish – looking’.
But point 4 is somewhat ambiguous. What Adobe-philes like to call capture or input sharpening is very dependent on three variables:
Sensor megapixels
Demosaic effeciency
Sharpening method – namely Unsharp Mask or Deconvolution
The three are inextricably intertwined – so basically it’s a balancing act.
To learn this requires practice!
And to that end I’m embarking on the production of a set of videos that will help you get to grips with the variety of sharpening techniques that I use, and why I use them.
I’ll give you fair warning now – when finished it will be neither CHEAP nor SHORT, but it will be very instructive!
I want to get it to you as soon as possible, but you wouldn’t believe how long tuition videos take to produce. So right now I’m going to say it should be ready at the end of February or early March.
UPDATE: The new course is ready and on sale now, over on my digital download site.
A few days ago I uploaded a video to my YouTube channel explaining PPI and DPI – you can see that HERE .
But there is way more to pixel per inch (PPI) resolution values than just the general coverage I gave it in that video.
And this post is about a major impact of PPI resolution that seems to have evaded the understanding and comprehension of perhaps 95% of Photoshop users – and Lightroom users too for that matter.
I am talking about image view magnification, and the connection this has to your monitor.
Let’s make a new document in Photoshop:
We’ll make the new document 5 inches by 4 inches, 300ppi:
I want you to do this yourself, then get a plastic ruler – not a steel tape like I’ve used…..
Make sure you are viewing the new image at 100% magnification, and that you can see your Photoshop rulers along the top and down the left side of the workspace – and right click on one of the rulers and make sure the units are INCHES.
Take your plastic ruler and place it along the upper edge of your lower monitor bezel – not quite like I’ve done in the crappy GoPro still below:
Yes, my 5″ long image is in reality 13.5 inches long on the display!
The minute you do this, you may well get very confused!
Now then, the length of your 5×4 image, in “plastic ruler inches” will vary depending on the size and pixel pitch of your monitor.
Doing this on a 13″ MacBook Pro Retina the 5″ edge is actually 6.875″ giving us a magnification factor of 1.375:1
On a 24″ 1920×1200 HP monitor the 5″ edge is pretty much 16″ long giving us a magnification factor of 3.2:1
And on a 27″ Eizo ColorEdge the 5″ side is 13.75″ or there abouts, giving a magnification factor of 2.75:1
The 24″ HP monitor has a long edge of not quite 20.5 inches containing 1920 pixels, giving it a pixel pitch of around 94ppi.
The 27″ Eizo has a long edge of 23.49 inches containing 2560 pixels, giving it a pixel pitch of 109ppi – this is why its magnification factor is less then the 24″ HP.
And the 13″ MacBook Pro Retina has a pixel pitch of 227ppi – hence the magnification factor is so low.
So WTF Gives with 1:1 or 100% View Magnification Andy?
Well, it’s simple.
The greatest majority of Ps users ‘think’ that a view magnification of 100% or 1:1 gives them a view of the image at full physical size, and some think it’s a full ppi resolution view, and they are looking at the image at 300ppi.
WRONG – on BOTH counts !!
A 100% or 1:1 view magnification gives you a view of your image using ONE MONITOR or display PIXEL to RENDER ONE IMAGE PIXEL In other words the image to display pixel ratio is now 1:1
So at a 100% or 1:1 view magnification you are viewing your image at exactly the same resolution as your monitor/display – which for the majority of desk top users means sub-100ppi.
Why do I say that? Because the majority of desk top machine users run a 24″, sub 100ppi monitor – Hell, this time last year even I did!
When I view a 300ppi image at 100% view magnification on my 27″ Eizo, I’m looking at it in a lowly resolution of 109ppi. With regard to its properties such as sharpness and inter-tonal detail, in essence, it looks only 1/3rd as good as it is in reality.
Hands up those who think this is a BAD THING.
Did you put your hand up? If you did, then see me after school….
It’s a good thing, because if I can process it to look good at 109ppi, then it will look even better at 300ppi.
This also means that if I deliberately sharpen certain areas (not the whole image!) of high frequency detail until they are visually right on the ragged edge of being over-sharp, then the minuscule halos I might have generated will actually be 3 times less obvious in reality.
Then when I print the image at 1440, 2880 or even 5760 DOTS per inch (that’s Epson stuff), that print is going to look so sharp it’ll make your eyeballs fall to bits.
And that dpi print resolution, coupled with sensible noise control at monitor ppi and 100% view magnification, is why noise doesn’t print to anywhere near the degree folk imagine it will.
This brings me to a point where I’d like to draw your attention to my latest YouTube video:
Did you like that – cheeky little trick isn’t it!
Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
If I process on a Retina display at over 200ppi resolution, I have a two-fold problem:
1. I don’t have as big a margin or ‘fudge factor’ to play with when it comes to things like sharpening.
2. Images actually look sharper than they are in reality – my 13″ MacBook Pro is horrible to process on, because of its excessive ppi and its small dimensions.
Seriously, if you are a stills photographer with a hankering for the latest 4 or 5k monitor, then grow up and learn to understand things for goodness sake!
Ultra-high resolution monitors are valid tools for video editors and, to a degree, stills photographers using large capacity medium format cameras. But for us mere mortals on 35mm format cameras, they can actually ‘get in the way’ when it comes to image evaluation and processing.
Working on a monitor will a ppi resolution between the mid 90’s and low 100’s at 100% view magnification, will always give you the most flexible and easy processing workflow.
Just remember, Photoshop linear physical dimensions always ‘appear’ to be larger than ‘real inches’ !
And remember, at 100% view magnification, 1 IMAGE pixel is displayed by 1 SCREEN pixel. At 50% view magnification 1 SCREEN pixel is actually displaying the dithered average of 2 IMAGE pixels. At 25% magnification each monitor pixel is displaying the average of 4 image pixels.
Anyway, that’s about it from me until the New Year folks, though I am the worlds biggest Grinch, so I might well do another video or two on YouTube over the ‘festive period’ so don’t forget to subscribe over there.
Thanks for reading, thanks for watching my videos, and Have a Good One!
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The Importance of Finished Image Previsualization (Patreon Only).
For those of you who haven’t yet subscribed to my YouTube channel, I uploaded a video describing how I shot and processed the Lone Tree at Llyn Padarn in North Wales the other day.
You can view the video here:
Image previsualization is hugely important in all photography, but especially so in landscape photography.
Most of us do it in some way or other. Looking at images of a location by other photographers is the commonest form of image previsualization that I come across amongst most hobby photographers – and up to a point, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong in that – as long as you put your own ‘slant’ on the shot.
But relying on this method alone has one massive Achilles Heel – nature does not always ‘play nice’ with the light!
You set off for your chosen location with a certain knowledge that the weather forecast is correct, and you are guaranteed to get the perfect light for the shot you have in mind.
Three hours later, you arrive at your destination, and the first thought that enters your head is “how do I blow up the Met Office” – how could they have lied to me so badly?
If you rely solely on ‘other folks images’ for what your shot should look like, then you now have a severe problem. Nature is railing against your preconceptions, and unless you make some mental modifications then you are deep into a punch-up with nature that you will never win.
Just such an occasion transpired for me the other day at Llyn Padarn in North Wales.
The forecast was for low level cloud with no wind, just perfect for a moody shot of the famous Lone Tree on the south shore of the lake.
So, arriving at the location to be greeted by this was a surprise to say the least:
This would have been disastrous for some, simply because the light does not comply with their initial expectations. I’ve seen many people get a ‘fit of the sulks’ when this happens, and they abandon the location without even getting out of the car.
Alternatively, there are folk who will get their gear set up and make an attempt, but their initial disappointment becomes a festering ‘mental block’, and they cannot see a way to turn this bad situation into something good.
But, here’s the thing – there is no such thing as a bad situation!
There are however, multiple BAD REACTIONS to a situation.
And every adverse reaction has its roots buried in either:
Rigid, inflexible preconceptions.
Poor understanding of photographic equipment and post-processing.
Or both!
On this occasion, I was expecting a rather heavy, flat-ish light scenario; but was greeted by the exact opposite.
But instead of getting ‘stroppy about it’, experience and knowledge allow me to change my expectation, and come up with a new ‘finished image previsualization’ on the fly so to speak.
Instead of the futility of trying to produce my original idea – which would never work out – I simply change my image previsualization, based on what’s in front of me.
It’s then up to me to identify what I need to do in order to bring this new idea to fruition.
The capture workflow for both ‘anticipated’ and ‘reality’ would involve bracketing due to excessive subject brightness range, but there the similarity ends.
The ‘anticipated’ capture workflow would only require perhaps 3 or 4 shots – one for the highlights, and the rest for the mid tones and shadow detail.
But the ‘reality’ capture workflow is very different. The scene has massive contrast and the image looks like crap BECAUSE of that excessive contrast. Exposing for the brightest highlights gives us a very dark image:
But I know that the contrast can be reduced in post to give me this:
So, while I’m shooting I can previz in my head what the image I’ve shot will look like in post.
This then allows me to capture the basic bracket of shots to capture all my shadow and mid tone detail.
If you watch the video, you’ll see that I only use TWO shots from the bracket sequence to produce the basic exposure blend – and they are basically 5 stops apart. The other shots I use are just for patching blown highlights.
Because the clouds are moving, the sun is in and out like a yo-yo. Obviously, when it’s fully uncovered, it will flare across the lens. But when it is partially to fully covered, I’m doing shot after shot to try and get the best exposures of the reflected highlights in the water.
By shooting through a polarizer AND a 6 stop ND, I’m getting relatively smooth water in all these shots – with the added bonus of blurring out the damn canoeists!
And it’s the ‘washed out colour, low contrast previsualization’ of the finished image that is driving me to take all the shots – I’m gathering enough pixel data to enable me to create the finished image without too much effort in Lightroom or Photoshop.
Anyway, go and watch the video as it will give you a much better idea of what I’m talking about!
But remember, always take your time and try reappraise what’s in front of you when the lighting conditions differ from what you were expecting. You will often be amazed at the awesome images you can ‘pull’ from what ostensibly appears to be a right-off situation.
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