Monthly Archives: January 2010

Brave New Mall

01/13/10

Georgetown Park, Washington, DC

This is an image you simply could not create with a single conventional exposure.

It’s a handheld HDR, this time using only two exposures: Photomatix HDR and tone-mapping based on two camera JPEGS, exported as TIFF, adjusted in Lightroom [update: this version is from Aperture], exported as JPEG for the web. I tried to keep it looking ‘real’ this time, but if you snoop around in the image you’ll see a few anomalies. I didn’t take the trouble to bring it into Photoshop and fix everything properly.

Amazingly decent result considering the completely ad hoc nature of the entire enterprise.

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Thank You DMV

01/13/10

Georgetown stoop, Washington, DC

Three words you don’t hear together very often!

I had to go down to Georgetown to deal with some car bureaucracy: two hours of my life I’ll never get back. The entire experience was redeemed by the dozen or so photos I managed to take between the DMV office and my car. The light, the environment, and my eye all happened to be on the same page for half an hour. It’s a great feeling when that happens.

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Wild Colored Grasses

01/12/10

I took some significant liberties with the tone-mapping in Photomatix, I’ll admit it.

By the way, I re-sized and uploaded these files directly rather than use Blogger’s uploading because the recompression was totally mucking up the color depth and contrast range in this image. I have noted this previously, but it was especially obvious with this one. It makes me wonder if I should go back and revisit some of my earlier posts. (Grrrr! More work for me will, however, mean better pictures for you.)

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Reader Quiz

01/11/10

Okay, so you’ve been following along as I explore the wonders of RAW format, right? Think you can tell a camera-produced JPEG from the RAW-processed JPEG?

OK, let’s find out! Look for:

1) noise in shadows
2) color balance
3) sharpness with minimal graininess
4) appropriate contrast
5) highlight detail

So, which is the RAW-processed file? Is it…

A?

Or is it B?

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Winter Flowers

01/10/10

Yellow flowers.

Yellow is the color that lasts through the frost and the snow, somehow persisting deep into winter. These buds are preserved in place, but winter is not mocked. The ice and the cold have the last word.

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Textile Design Insanity

01/09/10

Kaleidoscopic design

I’ve just been playing around like a crazy girl! Is there no end to my madness???

No, drugs were not involved. I’m just seeing how outrageous I’m willing to be. (I betcha you haven’t seen anything quite like it before, though, have you?) You’re going to want to check out the large version to appreciate the full lunacy of this image.

Note to self: Get a computer that can handle these large computational tasks with some grace, would you please? Because doing even a half-assed job on these with a feeble machine is downright aggravating.)

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Wires & Shadows

01/08/10

Outlet, wires, shadows. | Click to view larger.

Believe me when I tell you that no camera JPEG is going to give you a result like this. RAW is beautiful (these uploaded files suffer from some meaningful loss of quality).

And here’s a black & white version:

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There is still some color in the world…

01/07/10

Red leaves

It may be winter. It may be cold. But I found these red leaves and they made me glad.

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Totally Inaccurate

01/07/10

Shopping carts.

Sometimes what you want is fantasy, and then the RAW file is the stuff that dreams are made on.

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The Raw Deal

01/06/10

My GF-1 makes pretty nice JPEGs. I haven’t had any complaints, really. But yesterday’s experiment in RAW+JEPG has opened my eyes. Even with my clumsy bumbling in Lightroom, I can see why professional photographers shoot in RAW. Although I’m post-processing these images on a non-color-controlled MacBook Air, I can clearly see why the exquisite tonal and color control afforded by post-processing RAW data is desirable. Here are a few examples (of course all images you see online are now JPEGs, and have gone through an extra level of compression, so some of the subtle differences get lost in the process).

Blue Ice Puddle

Blue Ice Puddle
Image 1: Camera JPEG, tweaked in iPhoto. Not bad!

Blue Ice Puddle
Image 2: Camera RAW, processed in Lightroom. More accurate color balance, better tonal range, increased detail sharpness.

Three Guy Wires

Three Guy Wires
Image 1: Camera JEPG, tweaked in iPhoto. Pretty good!

Three Guy Wires
Image 2: Camera RAW, processed in Lightroom. More accurate color balance, better tonal range, increased detail sharpness.

Pink Pipe

Ice Puddle
Image 1: Camera JPEG, tweaked in iPhoto. Difficult color palette, handled quite well.

Pink Pipe
Image 2: Camera RAW, processed in Lightroom. Guess what? More accurate color balance, better tonal range, increased detail sharpness.

It’s a lot more work, and there’s clearly a whole world of technical expertise I’ve yet to acquire. Fortunately, I have a pretty good technical background in image processing, both from my background as an analog printer (remember the silver print darkroom in days of yore?) and from years of working with digital images in circumstances where image quality was paramount. I can learn what I need to, and my eye is decent. The biggest challenge working from the RAW file is that there are so many instances, so many “interpretations” if you will, of the data that are viable. There is no one correct version. The hard part is to pick a vision for the image and then know when to quit tweaking. Ansel Adams would have loved this technology.

[Update 4/12/2011: Just to show that I'm still learning about post-processing, here are three new versions of these files, done in Aperture.]

Blue Ice Puddle

Three Guy Wires

Pink pipe.

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