The 1st image is your original...after that, using Photoshop CS2 - each change below was using the original. The 2nd image is just cropped The 3rd image, I adjusted Hue (-28)/Saturation (+33) The 4th image is adding a Photo Filter of Deep Yellow The 5th image is adjusting Shadow (10%)/Highlight (100%)
Here's the thing - making the minor change in hue/saturation or shadow & highlights can better suit the location where the photo will placed. I tend to prefer tightly cropped photos or tightly framed objects. I then may adjust the photo to better suit the matting & framing.
Although this is more for the other Photolink, I gave it a try.
So I imported the image in CS3 (Photoshop) as a RAW file. You used the 40d at F5.6 and 1/5000 sec on a 28-135mm zoom set at 135mm, ISO 100. To get started, these are ideal setting for the best quality. There is a small "however". At 135mm your largest F-stop is 5.6. With this type of lenses it is better to go to one higher F-stop, like 8,0. Not that you need the dept in field, but just since most lensens perform a bit better. Still the lens has some chromatic abarations on all the high lights in the water, but there is not much to do about it. With these I mean the color fringes at bright and contrast rich areas. You can see the green and magenta lines around them. Since I thought the bird was a little underexposed I changed the light with 1 stop (in the opening panel of the RAW-file). This can be done without any loss of quality. I also thought the picture was pretty blue, but it was late on the day, end of November. So normally the light would look nicer to be a bit more warm. I changed the color temperature into around 6000K. Than I converted the photo into Lab-colors, did some minor changes, set it into the final size (700 pixels wide, after cutting a nice crop) and changed into the light channel (1). There I added some sharpening, which has to be done with just about every digital camera. Benefit: the bird appears very nice in focus now. Downside, the water highlights get even more diffraction. So with more time I could make a path around the bird and only sharpen it, then reverse and soften the water. After all was done I reversed back into RGB and saved the image on the highest quality (12). Ready to go…
As I'm beginning to understand better, I'm realizing there are two knowledge components to effective post processing. 1) You need to understand what will make the image better. and 2) You need to understand what effects and what order to apply the effects to obtain the desired change in the image. I think my biggest problem as this point is I don't really understand the tools, so I don't have a good sense of the types of changes you can make to a photo. As a result, I'm unable to reason about what changes are desirable. It's like I don't have the vocabulary to talk about photo editing. I understand all of the things that you've done, but I could never produce them.
Have you read or come across a good introductory book or online tutorial that you've found useful?
Most of mine was learned via trial and error, but I know I found a book (kind of like a photoshop for dummies) that I used to help me understand more. I'll find it for you. What R&R did is much more detailed. I'm now challenged to play with the RAW file. When you have the software playing with RAW is fun. I have 2 friends that are professional wedding photographers - the big thing these days is to do a B&W or Sepia print and colorize one or two items to make it pop. I did this with a photo for a friend of mine's sitting area of her bedroom. I was a shot of her 2 daughters, their daughter's and her feet. We did it in B&W and then went back & "painted" the toenails. It's a cool effect.
Playing with the filters, the highlight/shadows, & the hue/saturation is pretty simple, they are simple clicks - it's more of finding them in the menu that can be challenging! You are right, knowing the order is critical - if you sharpen at the wrong stage, it looks wrong...of course that's what CTRL-Z is for and not working on your original image.
Dave, understand one part here: Photoshop is a really good program with so many options that it easier to ruin you image than to improve it if you don't know what to do. I think for most people Photo Essentials my be the better option to get started with. Unless you want to paint toenails, like LJ, that's more fun to do with photoshop. However, with you canon 40D there comes a free program too to convert your images. That's pretty good to do lots of your work with. See the Pro-programs are good, but have a very steep learning curve, where the more regular programs are a bit limited but most likely good enough to do 98% of whatever you need in the near future. To select one program, I would stick with one developer brand, like Adobe. Because all their programs act kind of the same way. Ones you learn Corel programs you will be totally lost in photoshop, nothing seems to be the same. Photo Essentials is like a light version of Photoshop, probably extended enough for most people. I started to work with photoshop 2.5 or so, that was like in the beginning of the 90ties. So I grew with the new programs. Starting today is kind of serious stuff since there are so many options from which you have no clue where the hell they are for. So maybe best would be to follow the stuff LJ talks about. It leads to faster results which is more fun to do ;-)
Maybe next sample image could be a dog image, so we try to stick as much as possible with the topic. As you did you can use an image of a bird flying away, but the same from a dog would likely end up in the dustbin. (I hope this all makes sence…). Here one pic from Shousei done with the same procedure as written above.
True, bokeh is very important but also very difficult to get. That's the funny part in photography world. Sharp images are nice, but the part out of focus is even more complicated to get in high quality. A nice bokeh is limited to certain lenses. If the "out-of-focus" part hurts your eyes, than for sure the bokeh is lousy. Leica and Zeiss are most famous for this type of effect. But also some good primes from Canon and Nikon kan do very well.
This photo is taken with Canon 5D with 80-200 2.8L @ 200mm, 1/500 sec / F2.8. The background blur is really nice (so nice Bokeh), however the left corner below is a little less nice out of focus and shows the "weakness" of the lens. The sharpness of the focused part is very nice. There is also no hard line between in and out of focus, just very smooth.
No sharpening. Just a little exposure adjustment in lightroom and color fading for the first two. Used my canon 5d mk 2, the 24-105mm f/4.0L IS for the 1st two shots, the canon 85mm f/1.2L for the last. Love those lenses.
Wow, that's some cool equipment. That 85mm is very nice for this type of Photography. No wonder this shows such great bokeh! Sharpening can even improve the image a bit, although the basis is already very good. The challenge is to sharpen enough to get a bit more dynamics into the photo without damaging with bokeh. Always do this in the LAB-color space, if you have Photoshop available. Select the light channel and go to unsharp masking. Set in very carefully at ±75%, radius and levels both at 1 to get started. But very important, open the RAW-file, do your corrections first, than move from RGB to LAB, adjust to the final size, then the Sharpening. So if you decide to use 500 pixels width, first resize, than sharpen, never the other way around. To see perfectly well what you are doing, double click the magnifying glass so the image is set @ 100%. If all is done, last step is to convert back to RGB and save as JPEG with compression 12 for best quality. Make sure to use a different name so you don't loose the original. You will see that even with perfect optics as the 85 mm 1.2L you can still improve the image even further. I think you would absolutely fall in love the 135mm F2.0L! (Sorry folks, a bit of Canon talk).
See, you can always take some nice pics at just about any location. So if the moment is more important than the quality this is the way to go. And it looks like you can do even pretty nice stuff with it.
I really love this shot I took of Toby. I get a little too obsessed with the post processing, though. lol Still getting used to my camera. I think i've had it for a month now, wow!
Great pictures! I like the composition of whichever Shika you've captured in the horizon picture, Brad
It's interesting also... I have my own laptop, my phone, and any number of public desktops around work... there is a HUGE difference in monitor quality, I guess, because I can look at the same pictures on 4 different devices and they can be so drastically different. Sometimes distorted even! Makes me wonder how they look on your computers at home.
Brad- I always love shots of Blue. Ahi looks great, and that view is amazing. Kona is a great looking dog. I am amazed with the shots I can get with my iPhone
O.K I have a question, ??
Iam very green when it comes to anything past a point & shoot. I'm not sure if this is just the nature of the game or what, but my camera (nikon D5000) takes so much time focusing I always miss the shot. Is there any way to make this faster. I get so frustrated trying to get the perfect shot, & when it presents itself ..it's gone by the time the pic is taken.
Hello Dave, which lens do you use for this purpose? I think the camera should be fast enough, since it's one of the latest models. However, sometimes they include kit lensen with a low F-stop (is high number, like 5.6 or higher). This means the lens needs lots of light to be fast enough to follow a moving / running dog. It also depends on the setting. You can select "one shot" where the camera sets the focus. You can recognize this, since you could not make a photo out of focus but there is no use for moving objects. There should also be an option to follow moving objects. This should work fine however, if you don't have the exact right spot in focus it may also use the background or any part of the dog. This may lead to out of focus images. You should be able to find one point in the image in focus, but probably the wrong point. If there is none, it might be blur too, caused by a to low shutterspeed. You may post a link where I can look at the full image to take a careful look at it. This is no fun to miss to many cool shots.
Hello Nico,
The lense I have is the one that came with the camera ,it is a AF-S nikkor 18-55 mm 1:3.5-5.6G. I have what is called a sport option which is what I think you are referrring to but it still has to focus for the first shot ,then as long as I hold the shutter down it snaps off shots but the viewing screen is black for all of these shots so I can't even tell if i'm on the dogs or not.
Oh, wow, that sounds very new. Can you see you run into trouble more if you use the long end of the lens (set on 55mm). Because there you have the 5.6 F-stop which might be just to slow for fast moving stuff. There should also be an option that the camera focuses on the subject and, even with motor drive, the camera should be fast enough to refocus in between the shots. But maybe your sports option shoots very many frames per second and to do this, it keeps the mirror locked up. So it sounds like not the ideal option for this. However, your camera has life view, so you should be able to look on the screen and follow the dogs. I just checked some of the items the camera came with, like 3D-tracking (sounds like a moving dog). So it should be well possible, I cannot tell you why it isn't working. Maybe the lens is just too slow. Check out this one: Nikon AF-D 85mm F/1.8. It seems to be extremely fast. It acts like a little telephoto lens on your body, perfectly for portraits or dogs on a bit of distance. Difficult though for getting all three in one shot. But it looks affordable for what it does. Just don't know if you are in the mood for more investments. Also the 50mm f1.4 should be really good. Maybe someone here has some experience with the 85mm lens on a cropped body like your D5000.
A few more shots of my grown up husky boys Reno and Rico in the place they love most: Snow. They love to dig out the rabbits, so their faces get rather muddy.
Comments
The 1st image is your original...after that, using Photoshop CS2 - each change below was using the original.
The 2nd image is just cropped
The 3rd image, I adjusted Hue (-28)/Saturation (+33)
The 4th image is adding a Photo Filter of Deep Yellow
The 5th image is adjusting Shadow (10%)/Highlight (100%)
So I imported the image in CS3 (Photoshop) as a RAW file. You used the 40d at F5.6 and 1/5000 sec on a 28-135mm zoom set at 135mm, ISO 100. To get started, these are ideal setting for the best quality. There is a small "however". At 135mm your largest F-stop is 5.6. With this type of lenses it is better to go to one higher F-stop, like 8,0. Not that you need the dept in field, but just since most lensens perform a bit better. Still the lens has some chromatic abarations on all the high lights in the water, but there is not much to do about it. With these I mean the color fringes at bright and contrast rich areas. You can see the green and magenta lines around them. Since I thought the bird was a little underexposed I changed the light with 1 stop (in the opening panel of the RAW-file). This can be done without any loss of quality. I also thought the picture was pretty blue, but it was late on the day, end of November. So normally the light would look nicer to be a bit more warm. I changed the color temperature into around 6000K. Than I converted the photo into Lab-colors, did some minor changes, set it into the final size (700 pixels wide, after cutting a nice crop) and changed into the light channel (1). There I added some sharpening, which has to be done with just about every digital camera. Benefit: the bird appears very nice in focus now. Downside, the water highlights get even more diffraction. So with more time I could make a path around the bird and only sharpen it, then reverse and soften the water. After all was done I reversed back into RGB and saved the image on the highest quality (12). Ready to go…
As I'm beginning to understand better, I'm realizing there are two knowledge components to effective post processing. 1) You need to understand what will make the image better. and 2) You need to understand what effects and what order to apply the effects to obtain the desired change in the image. I think my biggest problem as this point is I don't really understand the tools, so I don't have a good sense of the types of changes you can make to a photo. As a result, I'm unable to reason about what changes are desirable. It's like I don't have the vocabulary to talk about photo editing. I understand all of the things that you've done, but I could never produce them.
Have you read or come across a good introductory book or online tutorial that you've found useful?
Playing with the filters, the highlight/shadows, & the hue/saturation is pretty simple, they are simple clicks - it's more of finding them in the menu that can be challenging! You are right, knowing the order is critical - if you sharpen at the wrong stage, it looks wrong...of course that's what CTRL-Z is for and not working on your original image.
Maybe next sample image could be a dog image, so we try to stick as much as possible with the topic. As you did you can use an image of a bird flying away, but the same from a dog would likely end up in the dustbin. (I hope this all makes sence…). Here one pic from Shousei done with the same procedure as written above.
ISO 1600, 1/10, f/4.0
ISO 1600, 1/10, f/4.0
ISO 800, 1/60, f/2.0
This photo is taken with Canon 5D with 80-200 2.8L @ 200mm, 1/500 sec / F2.8. The background blur is really nice (so nice Bokeh), however the left corner below is a little less nice out of focus and shows the "weakness" of the lens. The sharpness of the focused part is very nice. There is also no hard line between in and out of focus, just very smooth.
d5000 VR 18-55mm 1/1600 40mm 1000 ISO
I really love this shot I took of Toby.
Still getting used to my camera. I think i've had it for a month now, wow!
Tony - iphones take pretty nice pics, huh? I see a lot of them on flickr.
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Here are a few I took the other day...
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4042/4309256295_96b2daa06a.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4031/4309251349_8291d1894f.jpg
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http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2790/4309258457_ce031e21fd.jpg
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Dave pointed out you can see me in Kona's eye...
Brad - I really love the second one with Ahi. If there was no fence, I'd say she was a wild coyote or wolf looking out into the distance
&...Dave has good eyes! LOL ~
It's interesting also... I have my own laptop, my phone, and any number of public desktops around work... there is a HUGE difference in monitor quality, I guess, because I can look at the same pictures on 4 different devices and they can be so drastically different. Sometimes distorted even! Makes me wonder how they look on your computers at home.
Brad- I always love shots of Blue. Ahi looks great, and that view is amazing. Kona is a great looking dog. I am amazed with the shots I can get with my iPhone
Iam very green when it comes to anything past a point & shoot. I'm not sure if this is just the nature of the game or what, but my camera (nikon D5000) takes so much time focusing I always miss the shot. Is there any way to make this faster. I get so frustrated trying to get the perfect shot, & when it presents itself ..it's gone by the time the pic is taken.
The lense I have is the one that came with the camera ,it is a AF-S nikkor 18-55 mm 1:3.5-5.6G. I have what is called a sport option which is what I think you are referrring to but it still has to focus for the first shot ,then as long as I hold the shutter down it snaps off shots but the viewing screen is black for all of these shots so I can't even tell if i'm on the dogs or not.