Techniques – Page 2 – The Common Sense Photographer

Looking Up

Posted on September 15, 2020 by Jim Roberts

At the beginning of August I was out shooting the almost full moon. It was a clear night and I did get good images using my standard exposure set up for moon shoots. If you want to get good images of the moon start with a medium aperture like F8 and shutter speed of 1/250. Try the lowest ISO you can get way with. You have to shoot in manual mode. A tripod will help but if you are using the Fujinon XF100-400mmF4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR you can probably get a good image like the one below handheld using the OIS. The photo was shot with the Fujinon XF1.4X TC WR tele-converter for a reach of 560mm.

As it happened Jupiter and Saturn were also visible that night. The moon would pass in front of the planets later in the evening. On a lark I pointed my camera in the direction of Saturn not expecting to get much as the viewfinder was not sensitive enough to pick up the small amount of light from that planet.

I brought the images into Capture One and did my normal processing on the moon image which came to my liking. For those of you wanting to take images of the moon try doing it just before the full moon as the shadows give definition. I then turned my attention to the frame with what I hoped contained Saturn. I did see something in the frame. I ended up opening up the exposure by over two stops but there, small but visible was Saturn and her rings.

You know that Saturn has rings and you can find it any night it’s in the sky but unless you look closer you just don’t see the rings. As I pulled up the exposure and saw the rings it was like I was discovering it for the first time. Made my day.

Color Balances

Posted on September 4, 2020September 4, 2020 by Jim Roberts

They painted the castle in The Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. I’m not a big fan of the paint colors. The colors they ended up with just seem to be out of balance for me. They have a saturated purple for the turrets, and saturated grey for the base, and then an almost pink but not quite color on the body of the castle. It’s mostly the pink that I find unbalanced. The purple and pink almost fit into a Triadic color scheme but doesn’t quite work as there should be a green with those two colors to make it Triadic.

Castle with Very Small Dragon Fujifilm X-T2 F9 1/280s ISO 200 18mm

When you are creating an image in studio and especially with model you have lots of leeway with you color grading. When you are documenting an place that is designed to be seen with a standard color you need to be more accurate with you color representation. You can go wrong if you push the white balance the wrong way or if you over saturate the colors. This building just seems to me to be out of balance from a color standpoint.

Spires Fujifilm X-T2 F8 1/750s ISO 200 18mm

I could make the pinkish color more pink and at a good saturation but with Capture One Color Editor but it wouldn’t be true to the actual colors and that is where I feel the actual building colors are out of balance. And you can’t go around overriding the Disney experts.

As I was doing some research into the colors I decided to look to see what the colors of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland are. They basically just duplicated what they had before in Anaheim, CA It seems that the colors were painted with about the same pallet they used to upgrade the castle in 2019. The difference is the pinks are much more pink. Maybe something got lost in translation.

The new color scheme to me is to dark. It diminishes the scale of the castle. Something you always need to keep mind as you process your color images. just as a image with a tilted horizon is out of balance, a color scheme can be out of balance too. For good instruction on color and color grading watch this video by Joanna Kustra

What If We Lit The Moon With A Light Bulb

Posted on August 6, 2020August 6, 2020 by Jim Roberts

White balance is an interesting topic. How the colors of an image are represented are sometimes a subjective thing and sometimes not. Getting good skin colors on a portrait can make or break an image.

White balance is matching the color of your image to a known color temperature. For instance a standard incandescent light bulb has a color temperature somewhere around 2800 degrees kelvin while the sun has a color temperature between 5500 and 6000 degrees kelvin (k). These temperatures are not random numbers made up to confuse photographers. The Sun’s surface temperature is about 5773k so there is a correlation between its actual temperature and what we call daylight white balance in photography.

The lower the temperature given off by the source of the light the more orange it is. The higher the color temperature is the more blue the light is. If the light color is too low, as in infrared, the light will not be picked up by the photographic medium, as in film or a photo sensor. On the other end of the spectrum is light nearing ultra violet which is quite blue and again beyond the range of photography.

While the Sun is a main sequence star with, thankfully, a 10 billion year life cycle, most stars you can see in the sky are larger, faster burning, giant stars with surface temperatures up to 10,000k.

Our eyes and our brain do a pretty good job of correcting the white balance we see normally. Cameras can be way too literal it the way they process colors. Unless we get specific about the lighting conditions, colors in an image can be way different than what we see with our eyes.

Assuming that you have set your camera for the proper prevailing color temperature, daylight, cloudy, tungsten, etc. the colors should be pretty close to what your eyes see. If you are using an auto white balance mode on you camera the camera will take a best guess of what the colors should be.

In post processing we can adjust the color balance to what it should be or we can apply a color correction to give an image the impact that we perceived when we took the image. We use the white balance dropper in your choice of image processing software to choose an area meant to be white.

Beyond using an algorithmic method like the white balance tool, we can also adjust the white balance to suit our eyes. We can warm or cool the colors of an image by adjusting the white balance slider (and the tint slider see previous article) If an image is too warm with white things looking orange we can apply a blue cast to the image to bring it back to what we want the color to be. Alternately we can also apply an orange cast if the image is too cool.

So if we had lit the moon with an incandescent light when the color balance was set to daylight we would end up with a very orange moon like on the left side of the moons above.. To correct the color balance to get the moon back to the expected white moon we would move the color balance slider towards the 2800k side to correct the moon back to the middle ground.

And the opposite is also true, warming a color balance by introducing a lower temperature will turn the blue moon white then orange.

White Balance And The Mostly Ignored Tint Slider

Posted on July 30, 2020July 30, 2020 by Jim Roberts

Setting the white balance of an image is more than just if it needs to be warmed up or cooled down. The image may also have a green to magenta tint to it. Watch a Youtube video of someone processing an image. If it’s not a moody night image then the presenter will almost invariably say the image needs to be warmed up a bit. This is especially true if the image has a human in it. For some reason cameras seem to prefer a slight cyan coloration to skin.

Changing the white balance of an image (in raw format please) is straight forward. Find the white balance eyedropper in your image editing weapon of choice and click on an area that should be a neutral gray. The image is evaluated and a change to the Temperature/Kelvin slider is adjusted to remove an incorrect color balance. You can also just pick from the drop down to tell it what kind of balance you want. Daylight, Tungsten or a number of other choiced based on the camera you used.

While most adjustments seemed to be made to the color temperature of an image you also need to be aware of the tint of the image. And what you say is the tint? The tint is for adjusting the green to magenta color cast of the image.

You probably don’t pay a lot of attention to the Tint Slider but it does change when white balance is adjusted and anytime you might want to reduce a green or purple cast to you image. One example would be if someone was sitting next to a large green plant there may be a green cast on their face.

The following image was shot off a bridge where the light was rather interesting. It was shot mid-morning at 10:24 am so the sun was getting pretty high in the sky. Not a golden hour shot at all. I have my Fujifilm X-T2 camera set to auto white balance so it was interesting to see what white balance it used.

Here is the white balance as dictated by the camera.

You will notice that the camera gave this a tint of 14.7. The scale for tint is -50 to +50 with the minus side going towards green and the plus side going towards magenta.

And with the white balance set to daylight.

You can see that there is a purplish color cast with the as shot balance and you will notice that tint is 14.7 which is moving the tint towards the magenta. When we adjust to daylight the tint goes down to 2.1 and we don’t have the shadows being rather purple.

There is nothing wrong with adjusting the white balance Kelvin slider to warm or cool your images to what pleases your eye, just remember you can also adjust the tint for the same reasons.

A First Look At Color Grading

Posted on July 25, 2020July 25, 2020 by Jim Roberts

I’ve been thinking about “Color Grading” a lot lately. Anyone processing photos digitally has so many people giving their opinions on to color grade your images that it can be very confusing about the way to get the best from your still images. The movie industry is the origin of the color grading where it involves a lot of technical terms like Log, S-Log and other things that I have no clue of their meaning. In a movie you use color grading to link the parts of a story by creating an overall feel by using consistent colors to different parts of a movie or to reinforce the images on the screen. For more information on color grading in movies start with this video: Why are Films Shot In Two Colors?

I’d like to put that at the far end of the workflow of developing an image. There are a lot of things you can or should do before you get to that final color grade step. If you do them correctly then you may not need to spend any time at all fixing the color in you images.

The first step you should take is to make sure you monitors are calibrated. Use any of the available hardware tools for to get the color right before you start. I use the Datacolor Spyder X Pro. If you don’t get the colors that you are seeing right then you have no chance of getting them right when you are adjusting them.

All the discussion below assumes that fact that you are shooting in raw for whatever camera system you are using. If you don’t shoot raw then any other discussion about color or color grading is moot as the camera has already decided what you image is going to look like.

Next is using a good color profile for your image. You can start with the color profiles you camera manufacturer provides with each camera. The processed jpg image you see on the back of you camera using one of the profiles that you manufacturer has provided. Standard, Landscape, and Vivid are some of the profiles provided. (Hint: set your camera to Vivid when shooting sunsets). Current versions of Lightroom and Capture One can be set to use the camera profile when importing you images. If you are using Lightroom you may need to explore beyond the standard Adobe Color profile that Lightroom applies as a default. There are a number of other profiles that Adobe provides that may enhance your image.

And then there is color temperature. Getting the white balance right is so important. Cameras today do a pretty good job of getting the white balance correct. Having a correct white balance means that your other colors will look right too. I find it interesting that most of the time I watch someone else process an image they tend to want to “warm the image up a bit”. Cameras may just be leaning a little to the cool side.

If you, like me, is using a Fujifilm Trans-X camara there are a number of film simulations that are provided as profiles you can use. The film simulation that you have your camera set to will be used by Lightroom or Capture One to process the raw files when they are imported. You can also change the profile after import if you find a profile that works better for a particular image.

If you have picked the profile that pleases you then normally you won’t need to do a lot of saturation adjustments. Although it doesn’t hurt to see what the saturation slider does to the image. I’ll leave you to adjusting the contrast, white and black points, clarity, and other such things for another time.

The big thing for me is that if I’ve applied a Fujifilm film simulation to an image I’ve already chosen how I want my image color graded. So I don’t do a lot of further color processing on my images. For the above “Sunset with Blue Sky” image I used the Fujifilm Provia simulation and just lightened and saturated the blues a bit. Other than that it is the sunset I saw that day. It was a great day for sunset images.

Capturing Neowise (with nothing but our wits and our series 7 de-atomizers)

Posted on July 21, 2020July 21, 2020 by Jim Roberts

Everyone seems to have gotten great images of the comet Neowise, everyone but me. From others images it looked like it was very bright and high in the sky and that anyone with a point and shoot could have gotten a good image of it. Not so much. So the question is how much persistence do you put into getting a shot. I had a number of challenges that I had to overcome to get an image.

You may have to click on the image to see all the stars that are in this shot along with Neowise. When I exposed this image I could not even see Polaris (the Big Dipper). Has a lot to do with the street lamps in my area. That and that due east (this shot was facing northwest) is a sports complex with about 15 baseball fields all lit up for some summer night games.

I shot this on my Fuji X-T2 with the XF 10-24mm F4 R OIS lens open to F4 and an 8 second exposure. ISO was 3200. I used a compass to get to the proper orientation for the shot. The time stamp on the camera was 9:35pm so it was about 45 to 50 minutes after sunset.

It can be really easy to get flustered and miss shots when things are not perfect. If we could only take pictures of the comet in the studio. So it take a focus (pun not intended) to keep after the shot until you get it. I may just go out tonight and see if I can get a better image with a different lens. I could have used my XF 16-55mm F2.8 R lens (above was shot at 17.5mm) and see what the extra stop affords me. Same image would be 4 seconds at 3200 ISO or 8 seconds at 1600 ISO. Of course there is alway the chance that the clouds here in Florida will move in and obscure the sky.

Moral of the story is to be persistent. Use you knowledge of your camera and photography. And learn a thing or two along the way to getting an image.

Note in passing: the XF 10-24mm F4 R OIS is on sale at Amazon (at the time of this article for $300 off which is a really good price. Not sure how long that will last.

Working Hard On an Image, Behind the Scenes

Posted on July 16, 2020July 16, 2020 by Jim Roberts

Yesterday’s post was an image I admit I had a struggle getting to a point where I was happy with it. Today I want to show how I started out with the image and how I got it to a place where it got two (count them, two) Wow’s on Instagram.

Like I said yesterday I really wasn’t happy with the series of images I took of my wifes new Persian Shield plant. I captured the images with my X-T2 and the Fujinon XF80mmF2.8 R LM OIS WR Lens. The plant was out in the back lanai and was shot about 2 hours after sunrise. The plant was in the shade of another plant so there was just indirect daylight on the image.

This is the image as it came from the camera with the standard Capture One import processing applied. I shoot using the STD/Provia camera profile as a default and I think I had this image underexposed by a full stop. I usually have a -2/3 stop compensation but I didn’t want any extraneous sun blowing out the image.

THe image is pretty boring as there isn’t a main subject or focal point, mostly purple leaves. After staring at it for a while I decided to try a 4×5 crop of part of the image to see if I could find a better balance. Below is the image after cropping.

There are a few adjustments on the image and I changed the camera profile to Velvia as this image is all about the bright purple. I adjusted black and white points. As an aside I usually have the levels tool set those points but end up back off the white point as I always think it gets to bright if left at the defaults. I made a few HDR adjustments and added a little clarity.

My final processing was done with Nik Software (version 3.0? which it the latest). I do all the Nik adjustments in Photoshop so that I can control and if necessary re-adjust any changes. Once I open an image in Photoshop I don’t make any further in Capture One. If I find I need to make an adjustment like cleaning up a dust spot I delete the Photoshop .psd file and start again. To convert to Photoshop you use the Edit With menu item and choose Photoshop as your destination. Capture One creates the .psd and launches Photoshop to process your image as a Variant.

Once the image is in Photoshop the first thing I do is convert the background layer to a smart object. I do this so much I set up a hotkey to automate this process but you can right click on the layer or go to the Layers menu to make it a smart object. I then launch Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4 and apply any filters I want to get the image looking right. My tastes change over time but I usually apply the Detail Extract to sharpen up the image and a bit of Pro Contrast which gives it more depth. And finally use the Darken/Lighten Center as a Vignette.

Once the image is processed by Nik I bring it back into Photoshop. In this case I added Nik’s Dfine 2 to reduce a little noise as this image was shot at ISO 640. After applying the changes the layers panel looks like the below. I you then want to adjust something in Color Efex or Dfine you can click on the filter to bring up Nik with the same filters.

Smart Object Layer with Nik Software Applied.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with borders on my images. Alway used to be black 10px border but now I’m testing a white border. In either case I have an action that applies the black border that I can adjust the style to white if it fits my mood.

With all the adjustments done I close and save the .psd file which update the variant in Capture One. I usually then compare the variant with the base adjusted image. If there is something more I need to do in Photoshop I can use the Image/Open WIth menu item to bring it back into Photoshop with all the layers intact.

And the final image looks like this.

Working Hard On An Image, Persian Shield (Strobilanthes dyeriana)

Posted on July 15, 2020July 15, 2020 by Jim Roberts

The wife has been adding plants to the back yard. One is this Persian Shield (Strobilanthes dyeriana) which has striking purple colors. I’ve been fighting with images of this plant for two days trying to get an image I like.

I think I finally found an image which I am happy with although I just went out with a different lens to try some other views of the plant. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow to process the new images. This image was shot on the Fujifilm X-T2 and the XF 80mm F2.8 Macro. Sometimes you have to work then rework images to get what you want. And sometimes it’s best if you leave it for a bit then come back to it. Sometimes you just need to say no.

Creating a Style in Capture One

Posted on July 13, 2020July 13, 2020 by Jim Roberts

As stated in the previous post you can create new styles to make it easier and faster to develop an image to a specific look. You can pick and choose which adjustments you wish to include in each style. To start from the Styles and Presets panel click on the ellipses (…) on the panel header and the Save Style dialog will pop up. Select the values you want to have in your style then click the save button at the bottom of the dialog. You then give the style a name and a place to live in the hierarchy. Get verbose with the naming. If you have a Fujifilm Classic Chrome style you might want to put that in the name.

There may be some options that do not make sense or make sense only with specific images from the same camera. For instance if you have an image from a recent Fujifilm X series camera they you can apply the Classic Chrome film simulation and save it as a style. If you then attempt to use the style on an image from another non-Fujifilm camera you are not going to get the color grading that the Classic Chrome simulation provides.

Capture One Styles Versus Presets

Posted on July 12, 2020July 12, 2020 by jrnoded

If you were wondering what the difference between a style and a preset in Capture One (I’m on the latest version Capture One Pro 20 (13.1.1)) I’m about to tell you.

A preset is specific adjustment for a single tool. You can make a preset for something like Vignetting where you find yourself commonly applying a -0.5 amount a lot. You set the Vignetting amount to what you want like 0.5 or -0.75 then click on the three lines icon (they call it the hamburger icon) and click Save User Preset. You give it a name like Minus 0.75 or Plus 0.5. Once saved you can quickly apply it to your current image by clicking on the hamburger icon again and picking the preset you want. Note that some of the tools come with standard set of presets that you might want to explore. Check out the Levels presets.

A Style allows you to save the current state of multiple tools. If you have a look or color grade for a particular shoot you can save the state of multiple tools. This makes it quite quick to apply a look to multiple images quickly and consistently. In this particular case I adjusted the above image and really liked the color and contrast so I created a style. Creating a style gives you the option of which tool changes you want to incorporate into the style.

I then edited another image using that style to create a very similar feel. Makes it quite easy to get a cohesive feel to your images.

Once you have applied a style (or more than one since that is also allowed) you can make further adjustments to any of the tools to hone in on the image that you saw when you made the image. In this image I added a little more contrast.