Control of specular highlights

I should be posting the second part of using a light meter but I decided to tackle another specular hightlight issue. The spoon in the above image caused me all sorts of problems. I wanted to show the shape and texture of the spoon. The shape of the spoon causes problems because from its point of view it sees a large majority of the room. To solve the problem I placed a huge diffuser over the spoon. This wasn't enough to show the curvature of the spoon, so I placed a gobo on the diffuser which resulted in the dark shape in the spoon. Now we have texture and curvature detail. Job done.

With a little help from the Sekonic L-758DR

This image was created with a heap of help from my light meter. Without it I would not have had full control over the Contre-Jour effect I was seeking. I needed to expose the background by one stop over my working f stop of f/10 to take the background to 255/255/255, pure white. But I also wanted to get a little bit of wrap around effect through the diffuse material out back. I ended up with f/22 on the background which gave me a high key effect plus a bit of wrap around light around the subjects face, body and limbs. The background ended up being 2 stops over the working f stop of f/10.

The beauty about the gear (light meter) I used for this shoot is that I had total control over the process.

I will be going through the process of how I used the incident metering option in my next post.

Light Meter Sekonic L-758DR 1 of 3

I seem to be spending more and more time away from the computer with camera in hand. Lightroom has certainly changed things for me.

Last week I got myself a Sekonic L-758DR Light Meter and it's fantastic! Why does anyone need a light meter? Most cameras these days have very capable in built reflective light meters that do a superb job. Hang on did I say REFLECTIVE light meter. Yup, that's where the problem starts.

We have two types of light metering available to us (assuming you have the hardware), Reflective and Incident. If you have a digital camera, you have reflective metering on tap. So how does this work?

The inbuilt light meter measures the brightess or luminance of the light reflected from the subject. Unless the overall tonality of what's in your viewfinder is 18% grey the light meter will give you less than optimal results. Lucky for us most mixes of light reflected in a scene results in about 18% grey and we will end up with a property exposed image.

The problems start if we have a scene that is not 18% grey. To further explain this, let's say we want to snap away at a scene made up of mainly snow, maybe we have a few people in the scene, but snow dominates! If you let the camera do its thing by metering the scene for you, it will produce an image that is underexposed. Why? Well, the camera exposure sensor is pre programmed and assumes that your scene is 18% grey (mid grey). The snow will therefore be underexposed and you will end up with a dark mid grey scene. These sensors aren't very smart. Not yet anyway. On the other hand, let's say we are shooting a bunch of very dark people working in a coal mine. Not likely, I know, but go with me on this one. The sensor will again assume an 18% grey scene. You take the shot and end up with a lot of grey people working in a grey coalmine.

Many photographers know the limits of the camera when in this situation and either expose brighter in the snow scene by either leaving the shutter open longer or opening up the aperture, or a bit of both. Or if in aperture priority more (AP mode) increase the EV (exposure valuation) by 1.5 to 2 stops. Bottom line is shoot around 2 stops over the "proper exposure" when shooting a very bright scene. If shooting a very dark scene and you want the result to replicate the actual scene underexpose the scene by 1.5 to 2 stops.

Part Two to follow next post.

Ring Light Image

I love the catch lights in the eyes. I deem the ring light project a success! Think I'll be using it in future.

As usual click on the image to make it bigger.

Ring Light

Apologies for not putting out a tutorial for a while. I've been busy building this 1500 watt ring light. Images to follow. Made with a rubbish bin lid, 10x 150 watt bulbs and a few screws.

Specular Highlights

This image has had all sharpening done in Lightroom to create specular highlights in the skin. Settings are Amount 54 Radius 1.2 Detail 63 Masking 33.

If I was applying sharpening to female skin I would increase the masking to smooth out the skin. Settings of 25 1.0 25 and 70 respectively would have acheived a better look on womens skin. Click on the image to see the specular highlights.

Open Your Eyes

This was a tough one. My Portrait Photographer Maree Turner asked me to open the little girl's eyes. At first I thought this would be a breeze as Maree had given me two similar images of this shot, one with the little girl's eyes closed and one open. I initially thought that the new feature in Photoshop CS3 would solve all my problems. The idea here is to drag one image into the other and use the auto-align function by going Edit>Auto Align Layers... unfortunately this function didn't solve my problem as the eyes of the little girl in each image were to far apart to work. In the end I had to do the whole thing manually by dragging one image into the other. I then used the warp function to match the eyes. To help with the process I reduced the opacity on the top layer and then matched the eyes. Then I applied a layer mask to the top layer and painted in the open eyes. Job done!

Skunk Lighting

I'm testing out some new lighting techniques so no Lightroom or Photoshop tips here, apart from standard sharpening in Photoshop.

Don't be too hard on yourself

This image was made with two exposures and auto aligned in Photoshop CS3. This feature is fantastic and allows you to blend images without a tripod. All you need to do is bring both images into Photoshop CS3, drag one image to the other image, then select both layers. Go Edit>Auto-Align Layers... use the default mode in the dialog box that comes up. Once the layers have been auto aligned, the last step is to create a mask on the top layer and use a black or white brush to blend in the layer below.

Lightroom's new Painter Tool

The Painter tool is new in Lightroom 1.1

When viewing a collection or folder and you're in grid view in the Library Module a spray can icon appears in the grid tool bar. The spray can has a vertical tag icon and the tooltip says "Painter". On rollover we see some dots emerge from the cans nozzle. So you select the spray can and it comes off the tool bar (there is a darker circle showing where it belongs). Clicking on the circle puts it back. But you find yourself wondering what the hell does it paint. With the tool selected a partial answer is evident because you now see "Paint : Keywords" with a text field next to the Painters circle. It turns out you can type keywords in the text field and then "paint" them onto multiple images. In fact successive paints will toggle the keyword (i.e if the keyword already exist it is removed. Nice :o)

But wait there's more! Keywords is one option of many. You could also choose to "Paint" a :

Label
Flag
Rating
Metadata
Settings
Rotation

Settings is pretty interesting as it lets you paint on one of the presets (i.e Sepia tone, Grayscale, sharpen) or your own user defined settings. Rotation is sort of fun as you watch a whole row of images rotate clockwise.

It still feels sort of odd to be "painting" on keywords or a rotation. But ignoring the metaphor it's a very useful tool if you use any of these attributes. I use keywords to order my collections and I use ratings when working out image preferences. The keywords I use in bulk. Though ratings I tend to use on one image at a time. But I'm sure we all have very different workflows so this will suit different users in different ways. Give it a go. I'll be posting a video on the Painter soon.

Two shots in the top 0.1% of images on flickr.com

Flickr has a very interesting stream called "Explore," in which they give a shout out to what they think are really cool photos.


The rankings in Explore for all dates change all the time even for dates in the past. Photos are uploaded to Flickr at a rate of around 400/minute and are constantly being viewed, faved, and commented by millions of members. Interestingness rankings are recalculated for all photos many times per day. Photos uploaded a day, a week, even a year ago, are still receiving activity in the form of views, comments, favorites, etc. And all of that activity affects each photo's Interestingness ranking, even for photos that were uploaded years ago. Explore is very dynamic. When you browse through Explore on any date, you are viewing what the Interestingness algorithm has selected as the highest ranked photos at that moment.

So to get your images on this selection you are competing with 500,000 additional images every 24hrs.

Lucky for me I have a ranking of 67 and 120 for these two images. Rankings change very quickly so you can be dropped at anytime.

Sharpening in Lightroom at the Howick Camera Club

I will be giving a short tutorial at the Howick Camera Club on Mon 24th Sept. It will cover image sharpening and making sense of the four Detail sliders.

Lightroom Catalogs

Me preparing for my Lightroom tutorials

I should be able to get this week's video out by Friday.

Maree Turner - Portrait Photographer

Maree Turner is a Wedding and Portrait Photographer. She's asked me to run a few of her images through Lightroom/Photoshop. Things are definately easier when you have fantastic images to deal with first. Maree's work is a joy to play with. Here are a few images I've tweeked to make the images pop.

Here are Maree's contact details:

Maree Turner
Photographer
Associateship Photographic Society of NZ
Qualified Member of The New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers
Multi Award Winner
maree.design@xtra.co.nz
www.mareeturner.co.nz
09 271 5406
0274 741 479

I'll be giving a few details in the comments section of this post this afternoon.

Lightroom, where does it fit in?

Before I start on the up and coming weekly video tutorials, I want to mention a few things about where Lightroom fits into the family.

Firstly, it's been built from the ground up for photographers. You can use Photoshop if you like but not to the same speed as Lightroom. Being a database driven application, it moves at a blinding pace so best get your coffee and chocolate all set before you start as rendering is a thing of the past.

Lightroom has five main modules and these will expand to more in the future. But for now we have The Library for sorting, working with metadata and managing your entire library of images. And they can sit anywhere. On a local hard drive or any number of external hard drives.

The Develop module, for processing your RAW, JPEG and TIFF images. You can do all sorts of things in this module that doesn't require you exporting your images to Photoshop. 90% of your time you will find spent here for image manipulation. Maybe 10% of the time will require you sending the image to Photoshop for some deep pixel massaging.

The Slideshow module blows Bridge out of the water, I can't see why anyone needs bridge any longer. All Bridge does, Lightroom does better and faster.

The Print module is simply fantastic, no need to go through 35 steps to make sure all the setting are correct for printing at home as is the process in Photoshop, here in Lightroom we are in a better happy environment, it even smells better.

Finally we have the Web module. With a little digging you will be able to post galleries in html or flash form on the web, but I will be covering this later.

So follow me along next week.

Bob Jones knows good wine

I popped over to a good friend's place yesterday morning to help him out with Lightroom. As I was leaving he gave me a bottle of red...oh my it's good! Thank you Bob and if you need another favour, just let me know!

Lightroom 1.2 Update

Not a ground breaking update like 1.1

But, in Lightroom 1.1, some photographers had complained that the software applied overaggressive noise reduction when importing raw images, the unprocessed image sensor data without any in-camera processing. Adobe apparently took heed with Lightroom 1.2.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.2 Update

Corrections for several issues including XMP auto-write performance, Vista grid display errors and noise reduction for Bayer patterned sensors. Additional camera support for the Canon EOS 40D, Fuji FinePix IS-1, Olympus EVOLT E-510, Panasonic DMC-FZ18 and more.

Lightroom weekly video

I've been thinking about the best way to post lessons on Lightroom. As many don't know the first thing about it, I've decided to start from the beginning. I recently promised to give twice weekly video tuts on Photoshop and Lightroom. What was I thinking. I don't have the time.

My new approach is to give a weekly tut on Lightroom starting from the absolute beginning. I'm in the process of setting up the videos so it may take a week or so to get the first one out.

Light Control and Lightroom

Here's an interesting question that may get your brains working.

Apart from the fact I did use Lightroom to close the image of Shelley down, another reason exists for having such a dark background and it happened at the time of shooting, not during manipulation. The image was shot at midday in my lounge with the ambient light flooding into the room. It was bright!

So how is it possible to make the background go almost totally dark while exposure properly for the subject? Any answers, fire away!