Maserati for sale

There's nothing like a black car for reflections in an HDR image.

This Maserati is for sale at the corner of Lincoln and Washington in Marina Del Rey at Platinum Motors. Only $70K and it's yours!



I made the HDR from 3 hand held exposures. Once again I had to use CS4 for alignment of the 3 frames. CS4 has good aligning tools for handheld shots.

I tonemapped the resulting HDR in photomatix. I usually use most of the top half of the enhance detail tab pulling the dials back and forth and seeing what looks best. This file was no different.

I used photoshop then to adjust color levels and even out the exposure. I also used noiseware to tone down the noise levels. After this I used Nik Color Effects to tonal adjust some more. This one probably has been processed over the top.

This image was uploaded and then I ran Fractalius on the result.



First I dup the layer. On the duplicated layer I run Fractalius, using the glow 80 preset.I select the canvas and copy it. I then create a mask for the layer and paste what I copied into the mask. This allows the original image to show through.

I flatten it and what you see above is the result,

Pink Skies In January.

Looking east over the Los Angeles basin during the last hours of daylight often shows a pink ambience to the sky and city beneath it.



It happens every winter in Los Angeles. It's caused by a combination of recurring events. The sun's position changes during the year as we all know and in the winter it is at its southern most position. The sun sets around 5pm in Los Angeles in January and still before 6 in February. That combined with the suns rays travelling through the atmosphere and the dirt in Los Angeles' atmosphere produces this pink color this time of year.

This is from January 10 of this year.



It is the same every year. This is college crew team rowing in the same area in January of 2007.



Actually it's not just January but early February as well. Here's one from February of 2008.



This was shot on the back of the Santa Monica Pier. The crosses on the beach are for the dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq. This is about the sky though and NOT intended as a political statement. There are other blogs for politics all over the internet. All I was intending here was to show the eastern Los Angeles sky as being pink in the winter.

White balance does come into play of course as I tend shoot on the blue side more often than not. However warming up the white balance only makes it appear more towards orange but pink just the same.

A little bit on processing - generally I use photomatix to generate HDR's unless the alignment is terribly off, then I use Photoshop CS4. In the last two I used lightroom to generate multiple EV's for the HDR as each was a single RAW file. All were tonemapped in photomatix and edited in photoshop for exposure, sharpness and noise removal.

Orton and Fractalius at King Harbor

I think I overblurred this one in the Orton process. I'll explain.

I started with 6 exposures selected out of 15 I shot. It was dark so my exposures were long. The drawback of this is that the boats and everything else on a Sunday evening was moving. So I picked the best ones out of each EV in lightroom and generated the HDR in photomatix. I tonemapped it there also, using similar steps mentioned in other posts below and brought the resulting 16 bit TIF file into photoshop.

I tried shadow highlight in photoshop first but got a lot of banding which sometimes happens so I only used levels and noiseware before the Orton. This effect is based on Michael Orton's sandwich technique.

The digital version starts by duplicating layers in photoshop, then duplicating the top layer again. I then change the blending mode on the very top layer to Screen. I merge down and duplicate this layer again.

Now I take the top layer and sharpen and sharpen edges using those basic photoshop filters. (This step by the way was added thanks to the tip by Chris Anderson) I change the blending mode on this top layer to multiply. I then go down to the second layer and use a Gaussian blur. This creates the sandwich which for the most part is pretty saturated which explains some of the blue tint in this image. The other reason for the blue is my custom white balance setting. This white balance setting on the camera has nothing to do with the real world anymore as it was set a few weeks ago in the late afternoon with a grey card.

I had the Gaussian blur setting at 15.8 radius which looks like it was too high. This varies by image.

I finish this part off by flattening the image. Now it's ready for Redfield's Fractalius.

I first duplicated layers again and ran Fractalius with the preset of of Glow 80. I'm new at Fractalius so I just went with the preset. I then copy the entire result and paste it into a mask for that layer. This allows the white to remain and the rest of the image to show through.

Here's the result:



Since I don't really know Fractalius yet this image the other one I did earlier looks like a drunken spider laid his web all over the Harbor. I've seen some nice work with Fractalius, but I haven't learned how they do it yet.

Addendum - I went back and cut the blur in half and replaced it on flickr.

2nd Addendum - The blur still appears to be too much - I'll probabloy cut it in half again if I do more of these.

Vertoramas at King Harbor

I was asked how I do one of these vertoramas, so I'll go through my way here.

I begin of course at the shoot. I use AutoBracket either on my G7 in CHDK mode or my 5D. This one was shot with my 5D:



I set my autobracket to -2, 0, +2. I try to start around what would be a correct 0 exposure and shoot 3; raise it a full stop; shoot 3 more; lower it two full stops; shoot 3 more and so on until I get a nice range. I'll have some duplicate exposures, but I'll narrow it down in Lightroom.

I do this for a high view and a low view trying to be careful to rotate the tripod head down in a straight line. After I have my two sets I'm ready to import these into Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom is a database/darkroom for digital photos. Here I make each group of shots into a mini collection and strip out duplicate exposures. Along the ocean you have watch for cloud movements in photo series for HDR as a moving cloud will create a digital "chatter" which doesn't look too good. So I try to choose those that are as close to one another as possible. I also may do a noise reduction here, if the image is dark to begin with.

Once I've gotten 6 to 9 exposures in a row, a stop apart each, I export each group to generate my HDR's. In this case I used Photomatix. Here tonemapping is a personal style or taste thing. Everybody has their own way of adjusting their images. I have mine which you can see here in this image. I generally try to get the bell curve of the histogram as near to the middle as I can. The rest is trying different options to see what I think looks good at the moment.

I write out a .tif for each the top and bottom sections and bring those into photoshop. I use the automate merge function in interactive mode and combine what originally was 30 images into 1 final HDR Vertorama.

Those are the steps I use to make one of these.

White Balance Ooops

Fisherman's Moonrise

A Flickr photographer asked me how I did this shot and edited it. It was a little involved and actually was caused by not resetting my white balance from a previous shoot.

This is what I told her:

Late yesterday afternoon I went to the dock across from Fisherman's Wharf in Marina Del Rey to shoot the moonrise. I was disappointed as I had to wait until it got higher than the low clouds which had moved in.

Since I wasn't pleased by what was happening, I got distracted and forgot to reset my white balance. I had set the white balance on my camera to custom a few nights before to shoot a sunset which was rather yellow. So the camera did a lot of coloring you see here.

I took the best 8 exposures at f16 and ISO 100 out of 15 auto bracketed shots. I combined them in photomatix into an HDR which I then tonemapped in photomatix also. I usually start out with the defaults, then I first look at the white and black levels. The moon was overexposed in most of the shots so I lowered the white level and left the black level alone. I turned up microcontrast as the wharf was quite a distance across the inlet. I increased saturation a little but not as much as this looks. I also raised the strength level to 90%. By now my image was on the dark side so I shifted the gamma to the right which brightened the midtones. I then saved out a tif.

I brought the tif file into photoshop and used imagenomic's noiseware to clean up the noise in the sky. I use levels, and shadow/highlight to make a nice bell curve out of the histogram. I then adjust exposure, enhance contrast and sharpen using smart sharpen or unsharp mask, I can't remember which one but generally it's which one works best.

I also have written a filter in filter forge which I sometimes use to give it an Orton effect. I didn't use this on this image though.

There you have my basic routine but I did't limit myself to this as every photo is different. Sometimes I drop the image into every filter I have just to look at it.

As I told her above this is pretty much my standard routine with variations for all my shots.