Frosty sunday morning

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Tadpole

Full Member
Nov 12, 2005
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f/8.0 1/600 iso 160 saved as a tiff, file


The image was first desaturated, (there was not a whole lot of colour in it anyway) then put through a program called Dynamic-photo HDR. I increased the brightness of the image by 10 and the colour by .1 surface smoothness was increased by .38. the image was then cropped by 10%.
On my monitor this looks quite stylish.
what do you think?
 

shocks

Forager
Dec 1, 2007
174
0
Devon
sorry too burnt out for me. I love the idea though, I'm firmly in the critic but cant do camp.....
 

Cobweb

Native
Aug 30, 2007
1,149
30
South Shropshire
I like it as it is, but I am a bit bothered about the whites being blown out :)

To counteract the whites being blown out, I personally would:
duplicate the background layer,
apply a gaussian blur with a radius of 10-15.
I would then drop the opacity of that layer down to about 30% to give an ethereal /foggy glow about it :)
It would make it look misty and really cold.
 

Tadpole

Full Member
Nov 12, 2005
2,842
21
59
Bristol


Well that seems to work really well, (I like sharpness) but a bit of blur seems to suit


I like it as it is, but I am a bit bothered about the whites being blown out :)

To counteract the whites being blown out, I personally would:
duplicate the background layer,
apply a gaussian blur with a radius of 10-15.
I would then drop the opacity of that layer down to about 30% to give an ethereal /foggy glow about it :)
It would make it look misty and really cold.
 

AJB

Native
Oct 2, 2004
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Lancashire
My boss always told me to get it right in the camera, I'm yet to wrap my head around doing the clever stuff back at home, but a nice picture all the same.
 

Cobweb

Native
Aug 30, 2007
1,149
30
South Shropshire
AJB, in the field you can breathe on the lens to get the foggy effect.

The best place to breathe is on the rear element (take off the lens and breathe on the glass that goes into the camera) if you can't take the lens off, just breathing on the front is okay.

You can buy fog filters, but breathing does the same thing.

I look at photoshop as a darkroom, the gaussian blur trick is basically the same a holding a soft focus filter or bit of stocking over the enlarger glass in the wet darkroom.

Getting past the initial revulsion of it being digitally enhanced is a major step. The next one is knowing how to duplicate darkroom effects in it.
:)
 

AJB

Native
Oct 2, 2004
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Thanks - as a pro for 20 years I'd worked out that you could breath on the lens (That’s not meant to sound too condescending :)) but I would NEVER advise anyone breath on the back element of a lens, the one thing you don’t want in your camera is water vapour! And I’m well versed in Gaussian blur and it’s over use.

I suppose the point I was trying to make with naivety for effect, was that it saddens me that there is so much reliance nowadays in correcting image problems electronically at the expense of photographic technique.
 

Tadpole

Full Member
Nov 12, 2005
2,842
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Bristol
My boss always told me to get it right in the camera, I'm yet to wrap my head around doing the clever stuff back at home, but a nice picture all the same.
When I started using a camera, I'd carry a bag half filled with filters and two camera bodies, one with black and white film and one with colour film (never got into the whole shoot on slide thing) I'd have to make the choice of wasting a half roll of film so I can change from b&w to colour or the other way round, or shoot in colour and make the change in processing. Same with film speeds shoot on Kodak 100 200 400 1000, and have to either push the process or pull the process. Print to Matt paper, semi gloss, full gloss.
I see no difference today with digital cameras and the PC post editing process. I can play almost as much as I did back then, almost. except Now I can do it almost instantly, and If'n I have my laptop with me, I can check to see that the image is ok, and reshoot it if it is not.
That has to be a good thing:D
 

Cobweb

Native
Aug 30, 2007
1,149
30
South Shropshire
Thanks - as a pro for 20 years I'd worked out that you could breath on the lens (That’s not meant to sound too condescending :)) but I would NEVER advise anyone breath on the back element of a lens, the one thing you don’t want in your camera is water vapour! And I’m well versed in Gaussian blur and it’s over use.

I suppose the point I was trying to make with naivety for effect, was that it saddens me that there is so much reliance nowadays in correcting image problems electronically at the expense of photographic technique.

I'm sorry if I came across as condescending, it wasn't meant :)

begin rant

I agree completely that there are too many people out there calling themselves a photographer who haven't a clue with what they are doing and all the time they are shooting, they are thinking... "I'll fix it in photoshop" There are quite a few people like this in the wedding industry and it's a very sad state of affairs. Personally I'm fed up with brides ringing me up and asking if I can fix their photographs done by a cheap/crap photographer who was shooting on P mode the whole time and lighting and posing went out of the window. I imagine, that there are many, many 'photographerwannabees' in every sector. It's annoying :(

If someone is an amateur and has no idea what they are doing ('cause us pro's make it look easy ;)) and is just taking pics for fun, then charging someone a couple hundred quid to photograph their wedding and telling them that they are a pro, just because they spent £3000 on a prosumer camera and a couple of f2.8 lenses should be illegal, but it isn't, unfortunatley.

/end rant

AJB, do you have a site of you pics? I would love to see them :)
 

AJB

Native
Oct 2, 2004
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Cobweb - you really didn't - I was just pulling your leg, a bit :)

But I agree with you completely, the majority or my pro work (I'm no longer working as a phot and I'm only just starting to consider it a pastime again) has Crown Copyright and I wasn't allowed copies. But after qualifying in photographic science I was “schooled” by old fashioned highly skilled photographers who knew what could be achieved and expected it from you too. This was not just professional pride, the vast majority of our work couldn’t be repeated (although I did once have to ask Thatcher to come back and stand still!), it had either been blown up, killed or was just too expensive – you didn’t get it wrong or make sure you got killed :) And this was in the days before electronic retouching.

Now I admit most of my reticence to embrace Photoshop’s ability to rescue an average picture is probably misplaced pride, but just imagine what you could do with it if you started with a well exposed, composed sharp quality image.

No, that’s a lie, what I don’t like is that people who don’t know any better think they can do without all the skills I spent years acquiring – it’s a cheat! But that’s only my opinion and I’m sure many will want to burn me in effigy for having it – I don’t care :)
 

Cobweb

Native
Aug 30, 2007
1,149
30
South Shropshire
I agree, I don't like people who think they can do what I do after reading the photoshop manual and taking a day course in the basics off photography.


I used to think that using photoshop to enhance was cheating as well until someone pointed it out to me that it was just like you were working in a darkroom :)

I trained underneath the old school pro's as well, (I was an assistant from the age of 13) so I automatically get the best I can in camera (I get really guilty and afraid that Dave will find out if I don't) and then work on it a little in photoshop.
Actually I only tend to dodge & burn and sharpen in Photoshop nowadays. I do everything else in the raw converter in Lightroom. If I get a crappy pic, I don't print it... and then I spend time on feeling bad that it didn't work and then get over it and figure out why I messed up.

Unfortunately, if we shoot in raw, there has to be some processing involved, it's the nature of the beast I'm afraid. Raw files are usually slightly soft due to the anti-moire filter in front of the sensor and the contrast is pretty grim as well, even with the best lenses.

I'll have a party the day they bring out a camera which can shoot raw that looks as good as film.
 

Tadpole

Full Member
Nov 12, 2005
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Bristol
Now I admit most of my reticence to embrace Photoshop’s ability to rescue an average picture is probably misplaced pride, but just imagine what you could do with it if you started with a well exposed, composed sharp quality image.
Thanks

Oh and "The Years you spent taking Pictures" I spent working for a living, :rolleyes:
I was not able to indulge my hobby as I had a full time Job, maybe that is why I can only take average images.
 

Wayland

Hárbarðr
Snip> but just imagine what you could do with it if you started with a well exposed, composed sharp quality image.

No, that’s a lie, what I don’t like is that people who don’t know any better think they can do without all the skills I spent years acquiring – it’s a cheat! But that’s only my opinion and I’m sure many will want to burn me in effigy for having it – I don’t care :)

I hear what you are saying but in exactly the same way as a wet photographer has to understand the workings of a darkroom to produce a negative that is optimized for printing, a modern photographer has to understand how the software can be used to bring out the best from a digital image.

For example, let us say we are shooting a low key image with all the tones lying in the bottom four stops of the dynamic range of the sensor.

Following traditional photographic practice the capture would be rendered from tones 0 (Black) to 128 (Mid Grey) in each colour channel in an 8 bit image. Fine you might think.

The problem is that the lowest stop of that capture would be rendered with just 16 tones and the brightest stop with just 64 tones.

Any attempt to open up those tones so that they can be properly rendered by a printer will result in posterization and noise being introduced in the shadows.

By understanding this, I can now deliberately over expose my image by one stop, resulting in the top stop being rendered with 128 tones instead of 64 and the bottom stop with 32 instead of 16. In the software you now have twice the tonal range to work with and the end result can be darkened to produce the image you wanted.

Because we are now hitting the sensor with more light the ratio of signal to noise is improved meaning less noise and a smoother tonal range than the traditional correct approach.

I cut my teeth shooting 5x4 or 10x8 sheet film and working in the darkroom to produce prints.

The books on my shelves then were Cootes, Adams, and the like. Now they are Fraser, Eismann and Grey.

Nothing has really changed, I still need to really understand my medium to get the most out of it.

For me it was a steep learning curve because I had to discard most of what I thought I knew and re-learn for the new technology.

The only pictures I missed or lost along the way, were pictures where I thought I knew better from my years of almost redundant experience.

I'm sad that the old days are gone too, but that is what they are now, the old days.

Photography has been revolutionised by digital imaging. When I first started out I kept looking at my old archives and thinking I must scan them someday because there is some really good stuff there.

Now I realise that my best work has been taken in the last few years and it's all digital, and yes, Photoshop is an important part of that, just like the darkroom was in the old days.
 

Wayland

Hárbarðr
Thanks

Oh and "The Years you spent taking Pictures" I spent working for a living, :rolleyes:
I was not able to indulge my hobby as I had a full time Job, maybe that is why I can only take average images.

Oh, forgot to say Tad, there's no such thing as an average photograph.

The most important audience in the room is always yourself, everyone else is just a critic and you know what they're like. ;)
 

AJB

Native
Oct 2, 2004
1,821
9
56
Lancashire
Oh and "The Years you spent taking Pictures" I spent working for a living, :rolleyes:


I’m sure you didn’t mean that to be as insulting as I have taken it, I’m sure it’s just another example of poor communication. But the years I spent as a photographer were amongst the toughest of my life, having seen a number of my friends killed on duty, one by my side when he was decapitated , doing our “easy” job, I take offence to your quip. I had to do things to contribute to the population’s safety that 20 years later still give me cold sweats in the dead of night, and helped push back the frontiers of both imaging science, weapons and aerospace systems and contributed to the twentieth century’s biggest terrorist investigation as well many other actions I will not discuss here and I did them with a group of dedicated professional people who worked as a team for the good of others.

I would prefer it if you did not comment on my career again as I find it offensive and I would think the families of my dead colleagues thought they were “working” and not indulging themselves when they were killed.
 

Wayland

Hárbarðr
A bit harsh AJB.

I think Tadpole missed your earlier comment

My boss always told me to get it right in the camera, I'm yet to wrap my head around doing the clever stuff back at home, but a nice picture all the same.

And thought you were saying his picture was

Snip>
Now I admit most of my reticence to embrace Photoshop’s ability to rescue an average picture is probably misplaced pride, but just imagine what you could do with it if you started with a well exposed, composed sharp quality image.<Snip

that was not a well exposed, composed sharp quality image.

It's all too easy to get the wrong end of the stick and get wound up around here at times.
 

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