It has been brought to my attention that certain material here has been heavily copied by some students who, it seems, cannot be bothered to think for themsleves. Therefore I have taken the action of deleting those posts which I have, reliably, been informed are being used most to CHEAT. This is not an action that I take lightly, but I also DO NOT approve of cheating; if a student can’t be bothered to think for him\herself then that student should not be at University in the first place.
I would also like to take the opportunity to state in very clear terms that nothing that is posted on this blog can be used by anyone else without my express permission, and that includes both text and images - SO DON’T TAKE WITHOUT ASKING FIRST!
I have recently started playing around with Photoshop, well for a few months now actually, as I was told that it is a far superior piece software for the serious photographer. I have always been quite happy with Paintshop Pro, and it has always done the things that I have wanted to do, albeit in a little convoluted manner at times. The trouble is that there are things that I didn’t know I wanted to do, well, that was until I started scratching the surface of Photoshop. For example, take these three photographs:-
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
All very nice, but they do not convey the sense of place; they need stitching together to present the bigger picture, and to give us this:-
The stitched together version
Yes, well, what can I say, other than pretty crap really; no wonder it has not seen the light of day, ’til now. Admitted it does now give us something of the sense of place; Btw, this is an abandoned settlement, Bruach Mhor, on the slopes of Beinn na Drise on Mull. But it is so overexposed (I forgot to switch away from the Auto White Balance on my camera) that there is no sky detail, nor any chance of rescuing it. Well, that was until I had an idea last night when I was looking through this particular set of photos, and found this one:-
Calgary Bay - Mull
Yes, I know, you are now thinking that I have gone quite mad, as these photos bear no relation to one another at all. Well that is perfectly true, unless you have a twisted mind like mine, which saw the possibility of taking the sky from the Calgary Bay photo and stuffing it into the photo of Bruach Mhor. Now this is something that would have taken me a week (well maybe a little touch of exaggeration there) to do with Paintshop Pro, even the X2 version, and consequently would not even have been worth the effort. But I consulted Photoshop CS4 for digital photographers, an excellent resource, and found that it was not that difficult a task after all.
Actually I found it an amazingly simple task, at least once I understood what needed doing. So, off I set, making copies of both images (just in case I did something stupid) before starting the process of deleting what was not wanted in both pictures; the sky in the Bruach Mhor one, and everything but the sky in the Calgary Bay one. From there on in it was just a matter of layering one bit behind the other, sky behind landscape, and getting photoshop to blend the layers together. This still left me with an overexposed landscape to deal with, but a little judicious burning (darkening specific areas of the image) soon sorted that out. All in all it took me something like two and a half hours to complete this task, with several mistakes included in that time, and to produce the final (although I can see another iteration) version:-
A moody Bruach Mhor
Now, this gives me more of the sense of the place we visited whilst heading up Beinn na Drise; that sense of desolation, of being somewhere else in time that I felt whilst taking the photos. I am still not totally happy with it, and I can see that it could benefit from a little more time and thought, but even so I think it is a pretty damned good attempt at rescuing a crap image.
OK all you nice bloggers out there who read my drivel and look at my photos it is time to join the cause, what cause I hear you ask; well it is a simple cause and it is Refugee Week Scotland (15-21 June 2009), just read this from fellow blogger:-
From film festivals to football tournaments, comedy nights to carnivals, exhibitions, workshops, parties and much, much more, Refugee Week Scotland (15-21 June 2009) is an exciting programme of events happening across the country to celebrate diversity and raise awareness of refugee issues.
This year the theme of Refugee Week is HOME. For many refugees and asylum seekers, a new home in Scotland means safety from persecution and a life without fear. But what does home mean to you?
OK so what does home mean to me? Well there is no easy answer to that, being the miserable and misanthropic old git that I am; but I will have a go anyway. If I had only one word it would be Cornwall, where I was born and lived the majority of my life so far. Lucky for you I have far more than one word at my disposal; no, come on, don’t all leave now just when it is about to get interesting.
Location is an important part of home, and my location here in Edinburgh is one in which I feel comfortable and, yes, at home. But it is so much more than that, it is the people I know and love, it is the environment in which I live, and even more than that really.
Firstly people, my partner and her son, no names or photos to protect the guilty. My partner and I have been together for coming up to eight years now, seems like more at times, and it has not always been a smooth ride, but, hey, who said life was easy? I would not be here in Edinburgh if she had not moved jobs from Manchester to Edinburgh – we were living in Leeds (YUK!) at the time. Her son, whom I met at thirteen (that is he was thirteen, not me), has just learned that he has got a first at university (no mean achievement), and we have not always seen things from the same perspective, and have had our shouting matches; but I have a great deal of admiration and respect for him. Then there are the many many friends I have here, too many to name, who share a similar philosophy of life as myself, they are important, even to a miserable old misanthrope. But, it is also about being able to be anti-social if one wants to be, to avoid contact with people and retreat into one’s individuality.
As an artist my living environment is extremely important; and here in Edinburgh the living environment is pretty damned good – that is except for all of the crap concerned with the trams – and so close to the West Coast of Scotland (paradise). Pictures convey this much better than words, just look at my photo blogs and you will see what I mean, here are a couple of images:-
Seeing the sunrise on a winter morning
Being close to fantastic scenery...
My photo blogs – Edinburgh Day by Day – Photogenic Scotland – Fotos That Don’t Fit
Beyond this, home is being able to put one’s feet up and shout at Dan Snow for his asinine approach to history, naturally with a glass of red in hand, home is being able to go upstairs and tell the people in the flat above that it really is not good for their health to be playing LOUD music at 3:30am.
Finally, home is being able to sit out on the balcony with a wee dram (sometimes in the dark) at the end of a long stressful day, or when all the dinner/party guests have left and all is quiet once more.
Havin' a wee dram or three...
P.S. Home is not where the heart is – the heart is where home is!
Just a few hints on why it is beneficial to shoot RAW images, without actually getting deeply involved in the technicalities of the advantages of RAW over JPG. All I will say here is that the RAW image gives you much more to work with at the end of the day, although it gives a much bigger files size, ultimately less photos on your card, what you are actually getting is what the camera saw when you pressed the shutter.
For the last couple of weeks I have been experimenting with RAW images, and at first I was not convinced that the increased file size was worth the trouble especially as my graphics package would have nothing to do with the RAW image from my G9, and that despite maintaining that it would handle CR2 (the Canon RAW file extension) images. The ZoomBrowser software supplied by Canon is OK, but very limited, and I basically use it only to convert RAW images to JPG’s for uploading to post on my blogs. A few days ago I was lucky enough to get my grubby paws on a very reasonably priced copy of PhotoshopCS4, and this has made me change my mind about using RAW images, as Photoshop handles them brilliantly. Now I am by no means a Photoshop expert having only been using it for about four or five days, but I know what I want the final image to look like and just playing around with the settings one soon learns the basic techniques to improve the original image.
Now, the best thing to do is provide an example, so that you can see the difference for yourselves. What I did here was to take five shots of St. Giles Cathedral here in Edinburgh, ranging from two stops under exposed to two stops over exposed in one stop increments, with the specific idea of creating a High Dynamic Range, HDR, photograph (I will cover this whole technique in greater detail at some point). These are all RAW images simply converted to JPG with no tinkering whatever.
Two stops underexposed
One stop underexposed
Normal exposure
One stop overexposed
Two stops overexposed
Now I know a little about HDR photographs, which is, basically, a method of producing an image with a greater range of shadow and highlight details. As I say HDR requires a post all of its own, here I just want to highlight one of the possibilities of the RAW image.
So I loaded the five images into the HDR Merge facility of Photoshop and let it do all the hard work of aligning and merging the images together, and choosing the settings that it thought best for the image – these are NEVER to my satisfaction in any of the HDR software that I have tried. So, before saving the image I go in and adjust four of the settings to produce a photo to my own exacting standards. The four adjustments I make are to the Brightness, Contrast, Vibrance and the Saturation, and sometimes, if needed, I sharpen the image a little; but it rarely seems to need it from the RAW image. Only then do I save the resulting image as a .jpg file for uploading to various places, either to post on a blog or to a stock photo website. The beauty is that you still have the RAW images in their pristine unchanged form and can come back to them time and again to produce something different from the original. The problem with JPG’s is that every time you save the image you lose a little of its quality.
The final result well take a look for yourselves:-
The normal image shot as a JPG file
The HDR image converted from the RAW images and saved as a JPG
I don’t think it takes a genius to see the difference in the two photos, especially if you click on them and compare the larger images. This is just one of the many benefits of shooting RAW images; but, for me, the main reason is that I am not in any way changing the originally shot image, and it is always there for me to come back to and re-work in any manner that takes my fancy.
Yes indeed this post is nothing more nor less than a shameless piece of self promotion. After all if one does not blow one’s own trumpet who else can one rely on to blow it?
I have two new projects up and running the first of which went live eight days ago on the 12th Feb.
Foto's That Don't Fit
This is another photo blog to show photos that don’t quite fit into a particular niche, or that are particular favourites of mine from the past present and future. I think that I have most of the settings as I want them, but like most things one has to live with them for a while and make any little changes from time to time until it fits the original idea…
The second project relates to the first in some ways. I have a whole load of, even though I say it myself, damned good photographs just sitting aorund on my hard disk doing nothing in particular. In looking a whole load of photo blogs that I regularly visit I have noticed that they are increasingly offering their photos for sale. Now, being a bear of very little brain, it has taken me a while to figure out that this might not be such a bad idea after all; so yesterday I took that all important first step…
Photos available from Redbubble
I mean if one doesn’t try new thing one will never know whether or not they will work; it now remains to see how long I can actually maintain the interest in these projects before some other stream of inspiration zaps through my tiny mind…
I just read this comment left on this post:-
hi there, just found this site. out of the blue, i`m looking for another version of this theme [Titian v Manet], maybe someone could give me a lead ?? i saw a framed piece of newspaper from the 18somethings`s with two women in the venus/olympia set up, the laying one being white, the other darker one with a fan to cool her friend down. noone knows where to start looking for the original artist. looks like printed sepia, but then, that`s only the newspaper perhaps.
thanks.
lamo
I would also be very interested to find out more about the work mentioned in this comment, as I think it would make for an interesting comparison to the Titian and the Manet. If anyone knows anything about it pleas leave a comment and if possible a link to either more information or an image…
We went off to Islay for Christmas which gave me a chance to really acquaint myself with my camera and what it can do. I started playing around with the bracketing feature which provided some interesting results; it is good to be able to hold the shutter button and get three photographs of different exposures, one under exposed, one normal, and one over exposed, like those below:-
Normal
Under exposed
Over exposed
Now this is all very well, but what to do with them, none of them actually reflect the scene photographed. Then, whilst attempting to rescue what I actually saw with my graphics package I reached for the HDR (High Dynamic Range) merge function. What it actually does is to take, in my case, three photos, align them one above the other, then allow you to change brightness and contrast settings before merging them into one HDR photograph just like the one below, which was constructed from those above…
Taken beside the Laphroaig distillery on Islay
Update Dec. 31 2008
For those interested the graphics package I have been playing with here is Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate, which I find much improved on my previous version, and equal to Photoshop (which is seberal times the price). P.S. for anyone thinking of buying this package it can be found much cheaper than on the official website, from places like Amazon for instance.
Happy Christmas to all, and may Santa not leave you a smelly stocking…
In a post a while back I talked about getting creative with a camera, and looking back at it I began to think about the photographs I had taken with my previous camera. Now that camera did not make it so easy to get creative, and some of the photos came out as quite mundane efforts indeed, here is an example:-
The original version of a sunset over Loch Melfort
Indeed, this is a good photograph, but nothing more than that; it does not portray that sunset as I remember it. So, as I am playing around with a later version of my graphics package, to see if it is worth buying the upgrade, I thought I would see if it was easy to actually restore the above photograph to the glory that I had actually photographed back in August 2006. I was surprised to find that it was quite simple, see for yourselves:-
The enhanced version of a sunset over Loch Melfort
As I said it was quite a simple matter to achieve this vast improvement in a rather mundane photograph, and to turn it into something worthy of the subject. At the end of the day all I had to do was to play around with the brightness and the saturation levels; I substantially reduced the brightness and then gradually increased the saturation levels until I achieved the desired effect without making it look too artificial. The end result is much more as I remember that particular sunset.
You Should Be a Painter |
|
And you’re even tempered enough not to cut your ear off in the process! |
