Post processing part 1 – What post processing?

I was asked “What post processing do you do?”

“I really don’t know what I’m doing, but just enough to so that the person is really happy with their shot”, I replied. Truthfully, just “I really don’t know what I’m doing” would be right. I work through a few processes that I’ve discovered but I’m always learning and looking for better ways of doing things. At the moment, I’m not entirely happy with the way I currently process skin.

Anyway, yesterday I took a photo that I really liked – no white balance or exposure correction was required, but I then performed some post processing. The amount of post processing and the actual steps I carry out vary from photo to photo, but this is a reasonably typical example.

Here is a half-size crop (click the image to see the full size) that show the Photoshop alterations – skin, eyes, hair, clothing.The changes are subtle, I hope, but they add some impact, again, I hope :)

Before and after

The final Lightroom adjustments are some exposure gradients, and the obvious crop.

Full image

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 + SB800 at ISO200, 85mm, f5.0, 1/500sec, exposure -2/3EV, flash +0.7EV

After Photoshop

Finally, after some Lightroom tweaks and cropping before publishing

Post process series

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?
Post processing part 2 – The shot
Post processing part 3 – Nice skin
Post processing part 4 – Dazzling eyes
Post processing part 5 – Brilliant hair
Post processing part 6 – Cool clothes (soon)
Post processing part 7 – Final tweaks (soon)

Posing a face

I’m supposed to be witting this blog so that I don’t forget… but I did forget! I watched an interesting video, thought “wow, I must save that”, and then promptly forgot to do so :(

Today I spent ages searching for it again. At long last I found it.

Threatening grass

Here’s a shot that I like, I even like the fun text with it (click on the photo to read that) but I’ve never been 100% happy with the face angle.

D300 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 + SB800 + SB600 at ISO200, 85mm, f2.8, 1/80sec

Rembrandt Lives

David Ziser of Digital Pro Talk gives a great 15 minutes presentation called Rembrandt Lives on posing a face for portrait shots. He says:

Classical portraiture is an important starting point in becoming a good “people photographer”. By knowing the classical basics, we can do out best at creating the and most flattering images for are clients.

It is probably the of stuff that is taught in the first year of a photography course, but since I’ve never done any such courses it was all new and interesting to me. Also, it addressed something that I was starting to get an inkling of in my portraits – how do I angle the face? I hadn’t yet found anything that explains a such concept, and then I stumbled across David’s video which does it so well. Now I’ve got to put it into practice, and then learn to break those rules.

I’m not certain that “Threatening grass” above can be improved by following one of the classical poses; perhaps it is one of those cases where the rules have to be broken.

My notes

These are my notes to act as a memory jogger for me, but make sure that you watch the video; David goes into depth about the poses and suggestions on use.

Full Face Here’s lookin’ directly at you babe

• The axis of the subjects face is in line with the lens axis.
• Pupils are centred in the whites of the eyes.

2/3′s View It defines the mask of the face and is not dependant on the eye direction

• Inside corner of the eye lines up with the tip of the nose. Outside eye always contained in far side of face.
• Don’t let the tip of the nose break the check line, and/or don’t let the far eye hang out in space.

Modified 2/3′s View

• The axis of the subjects face is not quite 2/3s View.
• Pupils slightly decentered in the whites of the eyes.
• Even a little white of the eye shows at the bottom of the eye.

Profile View

• Exactly half of the face.
• Only look for far eye lashes, not eye ball, eye lid or check.
• Pupils looking slight towards the camera side to give centred appearance and reduce eye white on the side. Chin down a fraction to get eyes looking slightly up.
• Keep profile clean.

A shot in the dark

A few days ago I zipped out to photograph a band who I meet last year at the Edinburgh Festival – Mayhew. It was enjoyable evening listening to them and others play, and also fun to meeting other people there enjoying the music.

I usually take shots in bright light, and with a flash, so shooting a band on a dark stage was something completely different. I had to rapidly discover how to take shots in such a dark environment.

The shot in the dark

For stage shooting I learned to use high ISO, large apertures, held holdable shutter speeds, spot metering and ignore colour.

Here’s the singer of Mayhew.

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO2000, 85mm, f1.4, 1/100sec

Camera settings

I am glad my even in such loud place, I was glad that I have camera set not to make any noise (d1 Beep: off). I was sometimes shooting over a person’s shoulder, so a camera going beep in their ear would have been disturbing. I also have the low light auto-focus assist light turned off (a9 Built-in AF-assistant illuminator: off). The musicians can’t see much because of the strobing stage lights but once again, it would have annoyed other people in the audience. And no way to a using a flash – that would have annoyed everyone! So I had use my camera in “dark-mode” :)

I made one setting change, I already have the LCD brightness very low (Setup menu, LCD brightness: -2) but I set it the lowest of -3. Even then it seemed bright in the darkness of the audience space. The LCD can only be adjusted from -3 darkness to +3 brightness. This range is fairly limited; you can still see the full gamma chart at -3 and at +3. It would be nice to be able to set it even darker and a lower contrast so that I can still see the images, but not light up myself at the same time! I only need to check composition and focus. For stage photography with crazy lighting, I don’t really care the colours, surprisingly.

Along with reducing the LCD brightness, I should have also made another setting change. Next time, I will also turn off the auto view of the images (current set to c4 Monitor off delay, Image review: 4 seconds) but instead, I simply half pressed the shutter immediately after taking photos to get turn the LCD off when it displayed an image. I would shot a series of images, then check them later – I didn’t want to check them immediately.

One thing that I did like was being able to press the function button, right where my fingers were on the body grip, and bring up the camera info display. When I needed to look at the camera settings, the info screen was a very fast and very clear way to see everything. The LCD displayed in night mode (black background, grey text) which was perfect. The function button is still set to let me change the focus area (f5 Assign FUNC button, FUNC button + dials: Dynamic AF area) but I’ve now added spot metering to it too (f5 Assign FUNC button, FUNC button: Spot metering). I used to have this setting do nothing, but quickly being able to do spot metering I sometimes find useful. I don’t do it often do spot metering using the function button while looking through the viewfinder, but when I do, I put up with the LCD suddenly coming to life below my eye. Of course, for the photographing of the musicians, I had the metering mode switched to spot metering anyway.

Shooting

Making the shots also involved a quick bit learning. The obvious was high ISO, large aperture (have I told you that I love my 85mm f1.4?) and shutter speeds that I could hand hold.

The stage was light by a few coloured stage lights, and then flickered in steaks of moving colour and strobes. I wanted the person well light, particularly their faces. Talk about impossible! I tried to spot any lighting pattern, but it seemed random. In the end, I spot metered for the face, fired off rapid shots, and quickly looked to see if anything was good. I was only looking for good focus, exposure and a good image. If the colours were something crazy, that didn’t really mater since I have so much flexibility in changing them during post-processing. If the colours were really wild, then that would probably make a good shot too.

What editing can Lightroom do?

Tonight I was asked, “what editing can Lightroom do”?

I use Lightroom as my library management tool. It allows me to sort and find all my photos with ease.

I also use it for most of my initial gross editing too. A few things I use pretty much all the time are file conversion, white balance correction and cropping. Frequently I use exposure and saturation corrections too. This type of change that is made to the entire the photo is what I call “gross editing”. Some slightly more localised editing is possible in Lightroom such as vignetting and gradients – this sort of editing only affects certain regions of a photo.

Here’s an example of the original photo (cropped) and after I had finished the gross editing in Lightroom.

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO2000, 85mm, f1.4, 1/80sec, cropped

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO2000, 85mm, f1.4, 1/80sec, cropped and post processed in Lightroom

There are also some finer selective editing features in Lightroom too; these affect really small areas that you choose. Spot correction and red eye correction are two examples, and both work reasonably well. You can also use a brush a change the exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity and sharpness over areas that you paint. But personally, I find that the brush does not give the control or the very careful selection that I want. And for the kind of portraits I do, I think that spot and eye correction can be done better elsewhere.

Lightroom is fast and easy to use, but the Lightroom adjustments were not quite enough for me with this photo. To complete it, I used Photoshop. I made very fine changes to the musician’s eyes, hair, and some other tweaks, in particular to the overblown forehead and ear. The final version is here.

Finally, who is he? Check out www.mayhewmusic.com :)

Focus on Imaging

A few shots from the Focus on Imaging expo.

Gear, printing, presentations thinly veiled sales pitches and lighting

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f2.5

Haute dryad

I got kicked off the Hasselblad stand for sullying their model with my Nikon :) They were letting people shot this model with demonstration Hasselblads – obviously that would not be a good enough test to decide if you were going to spend £50,000+ but at least you could have a play.

D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f2.5 at ISO800, 70mm, f4.5, 1/640sec

Dryburgh Abbey

Today I went to Dryburgh Abbey with a few other Flickrites. It was great to spend a day with them, the weather could not have been a better spring day, and Dryburgh Abbey is an amazingly peaceful place to visit… but… I’m just not that much into architecture photography.

I think that I can look at building and admire it from an aesthetic point of view, and probably even more from an engineering point of view. I also think that I can appreciate the work to create amazing buildings, it’s symbolism and meaning but when I try to photograph them, I know that I fail badly. What I don’t know is why I suck as architecture photography.

Am I useless at it because I don’t find it as interesting as people photos, is it because I simply don’t know the mechanics of how to take a good building photograph? Most likely, it is some complex codependent mix of both. But I do know that when I’m photographing people, I enjoy it a lot. And that when I’m photographing buildings, I enjoy it a little less.

Should I force myself to learn architecture photography, to take more building shots? Should I get a book or two, or a wide angle lens? I would like to, but for now, I think not. Instead, give me a room full of people and I’ll happily photograph them, while my Flickr friends, some of whom are simply the most outstanding architecture photographers, can photograph the room. I don’t know how they do it, but they can really create some magic. Since photography is a fun hobby for me, I have the luxury to pick and choose what I photograph, so I’ll continue to enjoy what I enjoy – people photography, and a day with my Flickr friends. Even if it does mean going to such splendid sites such as Dryburgh Abbey :)

Is it spring yet?

D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f2.5 at ISO200, 24mm, f8, 1/100 sec

In the bar

This is a quick shot taken in dark bar. I had borrowed the awesome Metz 76 MZ-5 Digital flash and bounced off the high white-ish ceiling. That flash is fantastic – it is just like walking around with a portable softbox! But I’m not familiar with it and can’t always get the shots; often I ending just nuking the photo with too much light but when I get it right, it is outstanding.

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO400, 85mm, f2.5, 1/80sec

This photo could have been improved with a reflector under the person’s face, and with better focus on the eyes (it is a fraction burly). The great catch lights in his eyes are thanks to a small lamp that I was sitting next to – I must remember such positioning.

Looking at this photo again, it looks like there is some banding in the background. Banding is where colour transitions are not smooth – have a close look at the dark red area just above his right ear. I don’t know if this is because of the monitor I’m using right now, or export to jpeg process or something that Flickr did, but it is not there in the full size original – the D700 managed to capture beautiful graduations :)

A zoo visit

I had fun at a small local zoo today – the Five Sisters Zoo. The staff were brilliant and let us, a group of Flickrites, into some of the cages!

Kune Kune pig

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO200, 85mm, f3.2, 1/125sec

Bengal Owl

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO200, 85mm, f2.8, 1/200sec

A night-time wander

The News Steps (of course)

While going for an evening stroll, I did a quick test of high ISO on the D700. I took about 95 shots to get this – why so many? The background lighting is from a fairground ride and I was trying to capture some motion blur. In the end I couldn’t quite get the composition right, plus it was almost pitch black and I was getting cold. I had completely forgotten about the high ISO – it was that good! :)

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 at ISO1600, 85mm, f2.5, 1/125sec

Where’s the snow?

I had the chance to go up north into the Highlands – it should be been fantastic with lots of snow and ice but instead, it was just very wet :( Still, it was fun and chance to play with my new gear.

RIP Glencoe Stag

Sadly, just weeks after taking this shot of this stag, it was shot again, but by a gun :(

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO400, 85mm, f2.8, 1/50sec

Scottish weather

Luckily I had my gumboots!

D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f2.5 at ISO200, 24mm, f18, 8sec