- This topic has 18 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 2y, 3mo ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
I’m working on my burning technique today with the “before” and “after” images below. The “before” image was cropped from a larger photo. I wanted to highlight the fine white fuzzy “hairs” of the stem and bud against a black background. Will this work, does it need more finishing, or is there another way to get to black background? Thanks
-
Hi Marty, I like what you’ve done, it works. Did you use Photoshop or Lightroom? I tried to see if I could do it with the masking tool in Lightroom, but it didn’t work.
-
-
you’ve lost too many hairs on the outer edges. i haven’t dodged or burned anything in years. instead i use luminosity masks or masked adjustment layers. i’m not sure what options are available to you with your software.
the hairs are a little underexposed and (i think cause my monitor sucks) there’s a blue/magenta color cast most evident in the white hairs. i’ve done a quick adjust on the color. normally i’d use the wb sliders in lr, since this is a jpg i did it another way.
i created a new layer, selected all and used filter>blur>average. this turned the entire layer into the average color, which unsurprisingly, was green.
invert the layer to get the opposite color, which is a light pink, set the blending mode to color and adjust the opacity until the hairs turn white (or a grayish color since it’s dark). this was about 22% on my monitor. in the screenshot it says 26% and looks a little pinkish, i changed it after looking away for a few minutes.
-
building on the last screenshot, i added a levels adj. layer and clicked the auto button. it looked too bright so i took the middle slider and pulled it right, deciding that 1.28 looked good. it’s still dark, but the highlights are bright enough that it doesn’t look underexposed.
-
Hi Beth, I thank you so much for your detailed expertise with step by step to help me understand the process. I’ll follow your process step by step to see what I can do in PS with the techniques you describe. You’re a real whiz with the technical details, I appreciate you! Master class 😀
-
-
the selection here isn’t perfect. i could spend a lot more time on it to get it better, but with the bottom being both out of focus and the same color as the background, i’m never going to get a great selection.
if i were shooting this and wanted a black background, i’d use a black background and slide it behind the plant. it’ll save you a lot of time in photoshop.
i made a luminosity mask and using a hue/sat layer i darkened all of the green parts and ignored whatever happened to the white hairs. this destroyed the image, but it was really only used to blacken the background. i did a quick mask of the pod by hand with a big brush since i was never going to get a good selection on that.
i went back to the original and selected the white hairs and save the selection to a levels adj. layer. no changes were made to the levels, it was just to hold the selection. with the selection active (and inverted), i used a black brush to remove the green around the white hairs on the hue/sat 1 layer.
the hue/sat 2 layer removed any leftover greens or yellows in the white hairs. it was quickly masked so only the hairs were affected.
this brought back some of the green background so i created a hue/sat adj.
-
Wow, it’s going to take me some time to thoughtfully process all of this. This is really great feedback to help me improve my post-processing. I can see I have a lot to learn about masks and layers. Lots to ponder and experiment with! A quick question!? How did you know about the blue/magenta color cast in the white hairs in your first response?
BTW, thanks for posting your details of how you tweaked my image through your process. It really gives me a specific reference to look to as I get the hang of this. Great stuff!
-
seeing color issues is a skill that takes time to develop. but once you get it you’ll look at images and just know the color isn’t right. start looking at the white balance of photos and trying to decide if it’s too warm (yellow) or too cold (blue). once you feel comfortable with that, look at the tint to see if there’s too much green or magenta in the colors. and then once you’re good with white balance and tint you realize that sometimes it’s done intentionally. the easiest place to start is areas that are white or grey and see if they’re not a neutral color.
-
-
…seeing color issues is a skill that takes time to develop.
That is so true Beth. A long, long time ago, even before I went to Film school, I was an apprentice in one of the largest Dutch film companies. I was fortunate to be able to learn from all departments. One of the departments was the lab, where they developed, color-corrected, and printed the film (and did all the optical work).
We were working on a feature film, and they let me have a go at color correction. The way it was done in those days, was that we printed the first and last two frames
of EVERY shot in the movie and color-corrected the negative on a machine called the Hazeltine Color Film Analyzer.(If you have the first and last two frames of a shot you have a good chance you get a fair color balance for the whole shot).
Hazeltine reversed the negative into a positive image on a monitor.I corrected the entire film. Those TWO FRAMES of the entire film were printed from the negative on a positive stock. Once printed you could look at the result on film.
I was so proud of what I did. Then my lab mentor came to take a look.
He looked at those TWO FRAMES prints by hand, took a glass Cyan Filter, hovered it over the print to show me that the entire film was way too red. (and of course also magenta to the green and yellow corrections to the blue)It took me a long, long time to get a little bit better and now, 40 years on, I am still not very good at it.
But now the process is a bit easier digitally.
-
-
-
- https://www.instagram.com/anniemax_images
- ahornsbyimages.com
- Allows Edits: Yes
Allows Edits? Yes@erik-fransman Fascinating experience with color, Erik. Thanks.
@martye Marty, this plant is very photogenic – I love it. My comment is that the green in the image is too saturated and has too much blue in it. (Of course, as Beth mentioned, it’s hard to know what each of us sees in our monitors.)-
Hi @annehornsby Thanks for your comment! I’m just starting to learn about finessing saturation and color. Photography is definitely a work in progress with lots of moving parts! 🙂
-
I think @loki has the right idea. Like Beth, I haven’t used the burn tool in a long time, at it’s much easier to layers and layer masks to be more precise.
IMHO, since you’re already crossing the ethical threshold of heavily manipulating the image, it would be a LOT easier to do one of the following:
1. Photograph the plant in a controlled setting such as a studio, where you could choose the background and set up your lighting.
2. Place a piece of black mount board or black cardboard behind the plant to create the black background.
3. If possible, find a plant which is located in front of a dark background or position yourself such that the plant is in front of a dark background.
Any of these three solutions would produce results which are far more natural than burning down the background in post processing.
While we don’t always have a choice of locations, there are often other things that can be done to cleanup and simplify our pictures.
For example, take this image I made of a cormorant flying across the lake that’s about ten minutes from my house:
Other than cropping and some minor toning to the bird, no other work has been done to this image.
When I saw the bird flying across the lake towards the rising sun, I purposely positioned myself so that the background — which was in the shade — would be behind the bird, knowing that when I exposed the bird properly, it would drop out and become black.
-
@kwongphotography Thanks for your suggestions on ways to a dark/black background, I’ll keep them in mind. Your cormorant example is stunning, thanks for sharing! I’m still in experimental/learning mode, so appreciate your pointers on different techniques.
As for “ethical threshold of heavily manipulating photos,” you got me to research detail on that concept. I do understand that it’s been an ongoing debate in photography for a long time, and also on this forum – for example, on whether vignettes are allowable or not. I readily admit my emotional and sentimental influence on my work. My father who was a dentist also became an avid impressionist oil painter in the last half of his long life. He was devoted to learning and growing to perfect his technique during his whole lifetime as an artist, so I proudly follow his footsteps digitally through photography instead of oil paint. I fully disclose edits I make to my own work, which BTW are required by the contests I participate in. Advanced edits are allowed as long as you name the techniques and software used. I recently have been enjoying a digital painting software called Krita suggested to me on this forum. Instead of using Lightroom presets, I prefer to do my own edits with PS Elements to maximize my learning with different techniques. I’m playing around a bit with free presets but am still largely focused on exploring my own tastes.
-
@martye Even based on strict journalistic standards, you haven’t breached any ethical standards — IF you used the burning tool or adjustment layers and masks to produce your dark backgrounds. Under journalistic standards, you’d be permitted to dodge, burn, make color corrections and adjustments to the tones in your images. Basically, anything that you could do in a darkroom other than create a composite of several images would be permitted.
Where you could get into trouble is if you were to use another tool such as the paintbrush tool to “paint” in the black background.
What I really should have said about ethics is that it’s a VERY slippery slope and for many, starting down that slope lands them in situations where their final images don’t remotely resemble their original pictures – with content being added, removed, etc. The issue can be very confusing for many people – especially beginners – and it doesn’t help that even publications that SHOULD be upholding strict ethical standards DON’T.
A good example of this is the picture that W. Eugene Smith made of Albert Schweitzer in Africa. The story goes that Smith spent a lot of time in the darkroom printing this famous image to fix an extreme flare issue in the bottom right corner of the image. The picture was published in Life magazine in November 1954.
Smith’s archive of negatives were donated to the Arizona State University school of journalism. While going through the archive, someone found the original negative of the famous 1954 image and discovered that the silhouette of the saw and hand in the bottom right corner was NOT present in the original negative. Obviously, Smith felt that the image needed something more and the time he had spent working to remove the “flare” was actually spent adding the silhouette to the final print.
I recall reading an article in American Photographer magazine (which is no longer published) where the editors said they did not believe adding the silhouette was an ethical violation because it didn’t change the actual intent of the picture. I couldn’t disagree more and know that if I had done something like that in my newspaper days, I would not only have lost my job, but also blacklisted from working as a journalist. Even now, it would be taboo.
We all have to make a decision as to where we stand on ethics, but it’s important to understand that certain standards need to be upheld in some industries, such as in the field of journalism.
If your goal is to produce “art” literally anything goes.
However, I’d like to point out that even when changes have been disclosed or in captions, this information often gets separated from the images, so the content may end up misrepresenting the scene viewed by the audience. A good example of this is when images are composited to show the Milky Way over a sunset-lit landscape. A caption would normally be used to explain that the image is a composite, but should it become separated from the picture, the audience would be left with the impression that it’s possible to see that actual moment if they were to go to that location when in fact it’s impossible.
For this reason, I choose not to heavily manipulate my images and strive to make them look as natural as possible. I strive to capture images which are as close to the final product as possible, which saves a LOT of time.
Here’s an example of how I saved a LOT of time by using a piece of black cardboard behind a flower which was outside under the mid-morning sun. I also used a flash to fill in the shadows and enhance the color.
In this example, I didn’t breach any ethical standards by changing the background, as I was only making the picture for a friend. I saved a LOT of time by using a piece of black cardboard and no post processing was necessary.
-
@kwongphotography Wow, what an interesting life you’ve had with so many diverse experiences. Thank you for sharing more about your perspective which makes perfect and necessary sense for journalistic endeavors. I’m reminded of how wonderful it is that LS welcomes all perspectives in our search for photographic excellence.
I can appreciate the strategy of using a piece of black cardboard behind flowers. I plan to try that indoors, but am not sure if it’s practical outdoors since I don’t have an assistant and travel as light as I can. I haven’t experimented with fill flash before, so I’ll definitely keep that in mind. Thanks for sharing this beautiful rose against the black background.
-
@martye It wouldn’t take much to put up a small piece of black cardboard and doing so can save you hours of work in post processing.
Off the top of my head, I can see using something like a lightweight Manfrotto Nano light stand:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/612771-REG/Manfrotto_5001B_5001B_Nano_Black_Light.html
Then use a few spring-loaded clips to hold the cardboard to the stand:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1592097-REG/impact_ssc_a10b_steel_spring_a_clamp.html
If the cardboard is really small, masking or painter’s tape would also work.
You may even be able to just carry a piece of cardboard and use something already present in the environment to hold it up. I think when I made the picture of the rose, I placed the rose and vase on a table which was already present and then used a jar or bottle I found in the yard to hold the cardboard.
Speaking of flash, another method which you could use to darken the background is to light the plant artificially. If the amount of light which is falling on the plant is greater than the obejcts in the background, the background will naturally drop out.
This could also be done with reflectors (which you can make using cardboard and aluminum foil) or simple video lights such as the inexpensive LED models sold on Amazon.
If you’re interested in learning more about lighting, there is a web site called Strobist you might want to check out. The site teaches the basic concepts of lighting which goes into great detail about how to use these techniques with inexpensive or DIY equipment:
https://strobist.blogspot.com/
David Hobby, the founder is a former news photographer who worked for the Baltimore Sun. One of the things he often emphasizes in the lessons is how much you can do with very small, portable flashes, lights and light stands.
David also has a lot of suggestions for making equipment more travel-friendly, such as drilling a small hole into a leg of the Manfrotto Nano stand I mentioned above, through which a strap can be attached, making the stand much easier to carry.
-
-
-
@kwongphotography Thank you for always pointing me in new directions with helpful links. I’ll take a look and see what I can do – after I get the focus technique with my new macro lens under my belt. You are right, the autofocus is very slow. Manual gives me a new set of problems (handshake), so I’m getting in more practice with my tripod which is a good thing. It’s been very windy here lately which is a real challenge, but I’m going to stay focused on the arboretum and wildflower blooms as long as they last. I may at least try a piece of black cardboard for now, I should be able to pick one up a a dollar store somewhere. 😀
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
