571 - Them There Eyes II

This is an image that I shot on Tuesday. I couldn't post it that day, because my ISP had severe DNS problems. I could resolve most websites, but www.blogger.com was not one of them. Bad luck. The next two days I had no time at all, now it's Friday afternoon, I sit on the train again and try to catch up.

While post-processing this image of an old Volvo, I thought that the method is very simple, takes hardly any time and is so versatile, that I should probably make another tutorial. Here we go:

This time we look at the incredible power of a frequently underused feature - blending modes. What is a blending mode anyway? Well, that's basically the method Photoshop uses when displaying a layer that is on top of other layers. The most frequently used blending mode (and the default) is "Normal". Basically that means that the top layer hides the layers below. Pretty as you would expect it. Think of it as a stack of playing cards. You can see the top card, but nothing below.

Even in "Normal" mode we can make some interesting things. We can attach a mask to the top layer, and by painting on the mask with black, we can hide the layer partially (mask it). It's a bit like cutting away parts of the top card in the stack. We can also lower the opacity of the top layer from 100% to, say, 50%. Now you can see through the top layer like through a colored plastic foil.

Both of these techniques, masking and opacity, will be used, but we will use it on layers of more exotic blending modes.

Let's first begin with a look at the original Volvo as the camera has recorded it. I always shoot "Large RAW + JPEG Fine", which on my D300 means to use the full 12 megapixel, record the sensor data as a RAW file and to additionally produce a JPEG file of the same size and the best possible quality.

This image, the JPEG from the camera, is obviously meant to be about the headlight. I have used my Sigma 10-20 at f4, went very near and focused on the glass. With a lens this wide and with a maximum aperture of f4 (note: maximum aperture = minimum f-number), you have always a big depth of field, but when you focus near enough, you'll still get some background blur. That's what I was after.

As regards exposure, the camera has done what cameras set to matrix metering tend to do. The exposure is pretty leveled out. There is clearly detail almost everywhere in the car, only the reflexes in the headlight are partially burnt out, but that still looks pretty good to me. The house in the background is perfectly exposed but ugly, and although the sky is much too light, it seems to hold detail as well.

I want this to be about the light. As the image originally was, the light was in an awkward position, neither centered nor on a third. I wouldn't want to center it anyway, so let's put it on a third. The Rule of Thirds is no hard rule at all, but here it does well. In Camera RAW I crop in from the left and a little from below, a tiny bit from the right, and at the same time I make the image boring and flat. I do this by using a linear tone curve (medium contrast is the default) and letting the automatics set exposure, contrast, etc.

I don't always crop in Camera RAW. Normally I do it in Photoshop, and sometimes even at the very end of processing. In Photoshop I also choose the option to hide the cropped area instead of deleting it. Then I can always go back with "Image / Reveal All", and that without reverting the other steps made in between. Here cropping in Camera RAW is OK, as I exactly know what I want.

For the next steps I want to have another layer, basically the same, but with even less overall contrast and instead much increased local contrast. This is the layer that I want to use for blending. In order to get such a thing, I duplicate the background layer and use the PhotoLift plugin on it. See "492 - Roughly About Sundown" for more about that. Alternatively you could also use a curves layer to lower the contrast, and then unsharp mask with a high radius and a low amount (well, to get this effect you'd need more of a medium amount). This is not as convenient as PhotoLift and takes some experimenting, but it works quite well. See how we get detail in the sky now. The look of this layer is almost like many HDR images are, unnatural and comic-like. As it is, this layer is still in "Normal" blending mode.

Next we set the blending mode (that's at the top of the "Layers" palette, left of "Opacity") to "Multiply". Eeek! That's much too dark! On the other hand, the sky is nice, the ugly house is mercifully lost in the shadows, and maybe the darkness would do nicely as a vignette.

Let's add a mask now, and then let's paint with a big, soft brush and the color black on the mask. Where it's black, the layer with the mask is hidden. Let's do that on and around the headlight. Ahhh! Much better. The problem is only, that what we have revealed, is still the boringly flat original background.

What do we need now? Basically we want our contrast back, and along the way we want some more colors as well. We don't want it everywhere, we only want it on the headlight, or in other words, we want it where we have painted with black on the mask. I simply duplicate the top layer, change the blending mode to "Soft Light", and then invert the mask. Voilà! A little sharpening with an edge mask, and that's the Image of the Day. Here is a shot of the layers palette.

What have we done? We have set a strong focus in the image. This is now really about the headlight, nothing else.

Of course the same result could have been reached in a number of ways. There is always more than one way to do things in Photoshop, but I think two layers, that's not too shabby. The point is, that it really pays to know about blending modes and what you can do with them.

This is the image that inspired me to write about blending modes, but compared to the original image, the effects are still subtle. Let's look at something really dramatically bad, and let's try to change it into something usable.

Today I've asked my friend Erich to sit for a really bad portrait. I wanted something terribly lit, an image with a light background (a window), the face looking into the room, being fully in shadow. This is a worst case scenario, something that I would normally avoid under all circumstances, and if I couldn't avoid it, I would use a flash. Still, sometimes such an image is all that we get. It has either been taken by someone else who didn't care, or we had the choice to take it or get no image at all. The first image is straight from the camera. We have extremely harsh contrasts, the background is partially gone and we still don't see details in the face.

The first step is again to convert it in Camera RAW into something flat. The real reason behind this is to incorporate all detail that we can get. The result is even less attractive. Now let's do some blending.

We begin with "Multiply" again. But, wait, what do we blend? For the last image we have used a pixel bearing layer with increased local contrast, but this is not always necessary. You can blend any layer, even adjustment layers. Thus we add a curves adjustment layer, don't bend the curve at all, and only set the blending mode to "Multiply". This has the same effect as duplicating the background and setting the result to "Multiply", only the curves layer takes much less space in the resulting file. But this is not only more efficient, we could even manipulate the curve to fine-tune the effect. No need to do it here, but it's good to know that we can. The effect on the background is OK, but of course we want to paint in the mask to reveal the face. This is what the image to the right shows.

Let's add another curves layer to lighten up the face. I duplicate the "Multiply" layer, change the blending mode to "Screen" (which strongly lightens up) and again invert the mask. Now that's dramatic! For the first time we see the face.

That's positively the right direction, but I want more light. One way would be to duplicate the screen layer, but doing so still does not give enough light, and even worse, the contrast in the face is deteriorating. Let's try another blending mode.

Basically there are three groups of blending modes that work well in such situations. One group darkens the image. "Multiply" is the most frequently used mode of them, "Color Burn" and "Linear Burn" are also useful. A white layer in one of these modes is neutral and does not change the image.

The second group lightens the image. We have already seen "Screen", "Color Dodge" and "Linear Dodge" are others. A black layer in one of these modes is neutral and does not change the image.

Finally there are modes that increase contrast. Light portions of the upper layer lighten the image, dark portions darken it. "Soft Light", "Overlay" and "Hard Light" are the most useful modes in this kind of post-processing. A mid-gray layer in one of these modes is neutral.

What we need here is first some more light, and trying the lightening group shows that "Linear Dodge" does quite well, although we need to dial back opacity to 80%. The first attempt at a mask was a copy of the mask for the screen layer, but then I decided to use a strongly blurred version of that. Furthermore I have painted in the mask to tone down some highlights that would otherwise have burned out. "Linear Dodge" preserves more contrast than "Screen", but it also tends to be aggressive to extreme highlights, so be careful.

The next step is to increase contrast. We don't need much, but some contrast we do need. The most gentle mode to increase contrast is "Soft Light". "Overlay" and "Hard Light" would be next, but for this particular case, "Soft Light" at an opacity of 50% is OK.

Originally the face was in complete shadow and we had no clue what a correct white balance would be. Now though we see that the face is too yellow. The camera was on automatic white balance, and in that insane mix of background daylight and muted interior neon light it actually did quite well. Still, it's too yellow and we'll need to correct that.

There are many ways to correct color, and while I have extensively used Lab color mode last year, my current tool is the "Photo Filter" adjustment layer. We need some cooling here, and the cooling filter of choice for this image is "Cooling (LBB)" at the default strength of 25% and an opacity of 30%. Of the three cooling filters, LBB is the one that has a slightly reddish cast, and that looks good here.

Now that colors and tones are about right, it is a good time to clone out some blemishes of the skin. Remember, this is not about altering the image, it is about removing distractions that are not part of the personality of your model. Everybody has some red spots at times, but nobody considers those spots essential for recognizing the person. They are alway in different positions, it's only the photographic image that would lock them in place. By removing them, we only reveal the archetype the sits below. Good riddance.

We could stop here, but a little beauty blur is always nice in a portrait, and even more so when the image quality is already stressed by an attempt to pull detail out of deep shadows. I call this my "neutral blur", and I have an action for that. Basically it goes like this:

Select the whole image, "Copy merged" and paste into a new layer. Duplicate this layer. Set the first one to "Screen" mode and Gaussian blur it with a radius of 30 pixels. Let Opacity at 100%. Then set the other one to "Multiply", blur it with a radius of 5 and set the opacity to 60%. Group the two layers and set the opacity of the group to what looks good. Here I have used 70%.

For women we would probably leave it at that, but Erich is a man and here we want a tad more definition. I could have used a PhotoLift layer, but instead I "Copy Merged" again and use unsharp mask with an amount of 60 and a radius of 60 pixels on the result. An opacity of 50% is ideal in this case.

Impressive? Certainly. It's not that I did this in zero time, not at all. Especially the mask of the "Linear Light" layer took me some time, but I guess the result clearly recommends having a look at blending modes.

One note though: Don't expect such extreme manipulations to work with JPEGs taken with a point-and-shoot camera. Photoshop can't do wonders. Noise and JPEG artifacts will frequently restrict how far you can go. For maximum malleability you need RAW files and a DSLR.

The Song of the Day is again "Them There Eyes", but this time it's not Louis Armstrong, this time it's Anita O'Day and her 1957 collaboration with the Oscar Peterson Trio "Anita Sings the Most".

542 - The Show Is Over, Say Good-Bye

Welcome to the second edition of "Fine Art Explained".

Every once in a while I write a Photoshop tutorial, and that can be for one of three reasons: I could have found an interesting technique that I like to share ("448 - Down In The Hole" is such a case), I could have found an interesting tool or plugin (in "492 - Roughly About Sundown" it's PhotoLift), or I feel that I have found an interesting solution for an originally unspectacular image, something that I am proud of. In the latter case I simply show how I develop an image from ground up. That's "Fine Art Explained", and "511 - Gasoline Alley" was the first example.

Yesterday was a drab, cold day, and I left work early, heading not west, towards home, but east into the city's center, the first district, the part that was walled from medieval times until the walls were torn down under Napoleon Bonaparte.

Near the northern border, near the channel that comes in from river Danube, is a gothic church, "Maria am Gestade" (Saint Mary by the Waters), and from its western facade there are stairs down to a small place called "Am Gestade". This is our stage. Here I took an image of a man walking down the stairs, here I made a series of photos, trying to capture the spirit of the place.

I had to wait some time until the place was empty, but I used the time nevertheless, making image after image, looking for something that would work. I finally settled with this image: Nikon 18-200 VR at 18mm, 1/100s and ISO 280. Much of the stairs in the foreground, a door and the yellow lines, in the background the curving row of houses that leads into the unknown. No sky. This image and the image of the man walking down are JPEGs straight from the camera.

Whenever I am at that point, I ask myself: "What's wrong with this image? What is too much, what is missing?". Here the answer was clear: the expanse of the place lacked contrast and most of all a focal point, a center of interest. OK, I thought, maybe I can use the man.

I opened up the image of the empty place in Adobe Camera RAW, applied some basic adjustments there, and then loaded the second image, the image of the man, converted with the same parameters, into another layer. There was a gully to the left of the man, and I used that to rotate, resize and skew the top layer. This was easiest when I set the opacity of the top layer to 50%, so that I could see the gully on both layers. Moving, rotating and skewing took its time, and, as you can see, the result is not perfect.

The reason is, that the images were taken with different focal lengths and different perspectives, but after I had applied a black mask and by painting with white on the mask revealed only the man, it did not matter at all. The man had neither hard edges, nor did he have to have a certain alignment to any edges in the image. Organic forms are very forgiving in that regard.

You see, I have combined two images, and one of them has been scaled to less than half its size. The result of this scaling is most certainly an increased relative sharpness of the scaled-down image. In this case it was not so pronounced, but had it been, then I would have had to slightly blur the man now.

The next image shows a small but important step. I have cleaned up the image and removed unimportant but distracting details. The most obvious is the glaring puddle in the background, near the right edge. It's extremely high contrast, and the eye is naturally attracted to high contrast. Some smaller specks of litter on the stairs and some near white points in the far background also had to go, because they were in positions where I absolutely did not want to lead the eye. Basically the idea was to make the man the single most important focal point, and everything else, even the door included, his arena.

There is not much difference in the next image. I have selected the yellow of the stripes (Select / Select Color Range) with a narrow range (fuzziness set to around 50), and then added a "Hue/Saturation" adjustment layer, automatically taking the mask from the selection. Here I added a healthy dose of saturation to the yellows, making them pop. In another "Hue/Saturation" layer I have desaturated some already very saturated reds in the far background. I did this, knowing that I would add global saturation later, and I wanted a level ground for all colors.

Compared to the JPEG from the camera, I had already increased mid-tone contrasts a bit in the RAW converter, but I really wanted strongly increased local contrasts, making the textures come forward. At the moment my tool of choice is PhotoLift, a plugin that allows a broad range of manipulations of local and global contrast. See more about it in "492 - Roughly About Sundown". I used +80% local contrast, -20% global contrast, -10% brightness and +20% saturation, and the resulting layer has an opacity of 50%. Basically this is experimentation. Use what looks best.

The tonal foundation was better now, with the bulk of the image shifted more down into the mid-range, and with a healthier distribution. Next I added some standard adjustment layers: a levels layer for setting black and white point, a curves layer for mid-tone contrasts, both in luminosity mode. Then I pushed saturation quite a bit. The result looks punchier, less muddy. You see it best in the wall textures, but I admit that the effect is subtle.

Such forceful contrast manipulations tend to make the image look unnaturally sharp and grainy, and in many cases I add something that I call a "Neutral Blur". This is an Orton-like effect, but without the glow. You get it by copy-merging the stack onto a new layer, duplicating that layer, setting one to mode "Multiply" and 60% opacity, the other to "Screen" and 100%, and then blurring the multiply layer with radius 5 and the screen layer with radius 30. Group them and set the group's opacity to 50%.

This "Neutral Blur" is exactly that: neutral. It does not change overall tonality and it does not affect colors, but it gives the image an aura of substance. It's hard to explain and in these screen shots it's certainly hard to see as well, but when you try it for yourself, you will immediately recognize it.

Of course the image has again lost punch now, and here I normally apply some high pass sharpening with a radius between 1 and 2, here like most of the time 1.5. This again brings back the punch without looking unnatural or sacrificing the "substance" gained through the blur.

Remember my warning concerning compositing and that one may have to blur a strongly shrunk layer? Well, something similar had happened in the meantime. The increased local contrast of the PhotoLift layer, together with the high pass sharpening, had produced a trace of a halo around the man. Thus I copied the high pass layer, inverted it, masked it with black and painted in the mask with a small white brush along the man's contours. Perfect. The halo was gone. If this wouldn't have sufficed, I could have clipped a levels adjustment layer into the inverse sharpening, thereby increasing its effect.

Now we're almost there. I added a vignette to accentuate the focus and finally sharpened the image in Lab and with an edge mask. A vignette is something that you see in many if not most of my images. It helps to direct the eye and it adds drama to the scene. Depending on the scene and the strength of the vignette, this can be quite some drama :)

So far the workflow was very reasonable and now comes the sin: I was not really impressed with the image, and I decided to remove the gully. Eeek! A pixel-bearing cleanup layer on top of all these adjustments! Ugly. But ... I did it. I was too lazy to redo sharpening, blurring and high pass sharpening. It was late and it was only meant as an experiment, just to see how it would look like.

Well, it made a world of a difference. Suddenly the man perfectly worked as a focal point. I had not recognized it all the time but, as useful as the gully had been while compositing, as distracting it was now.

For your reference, this is the whole layer stack again, only the group with the neutral blur not expanded.

The title of this image is a line from the Song of the Day, "Take A Bow", from Madonna's 1994 album "Bedtime Stories". Maybe that's only me, but I can't remember ever having seen a better music video. A marvelous piece of art. See it on YouTube.

Oh yes, two more things: I have done what I normally don't ever do, I have changed an Image of the Day. I had been very unsatisfied with "539 - Heading For the Light". Head over and compare for yourself.

The other thing is this image. I made it shortly before the Image of the Day, not far away, and it is another 16 layer job, but that would be a different story.

511 - Gasoline Alley

How many layers have your Photoshop files? And what are the things that you routinely do to your images? And why are you doing them? Let's have a look at one image of mine, shall we?

This particular place is a place that I pass by very often. It's on my way from home to the Underground. I always wanted to take an image of this old pump, because it looks so ... old, so out of time and place. Unfortunately there are only two reasons for me to take the Underground: I am either in a terrible hurry, or it rains. Both are not exactly ideal conditions for taking photographs. Yesterday morning it did neither rain nor was I in a hurry, I was only so packed, that I decided not to walk to work.

I made three shots, kneeling on the sidewalk, and this is the one that I finally used. Let's have a quick look at what came out of the camera.

The most obvious difference is the sign on the wall. It is red, which would not be a bad complement to the other vivid color green, but it is extremely high contrast, in an awkward place composition-wise, and it is very modern, compared to the pump. Was that enough reason to throw it out and divert from the path of photographic truth?

Well, if you have followed my blog for any longer time, then you already know my stanza, but instead of repeating it, I shall refer you to my friend Ted Byrne's classic essay "When To Sign A Photograph?". I pretty much agree with Ted in this regard, and that's for "photographic truth" :)

Now, having exposed myself as an unscrupulous forger, let me explain my reasoning for taking this sign out. I said it is in a compositionally awkward place. Why that, you ask? That's a power point, being on the cross of two thirds. Conventional wisdom says that's good, isn't it?

Right, but this is an image that I wanted to take for a very long time, and the reason for wanting to take it is the old-fashioned green pump. I always saw the pump, never the sign, thus this must become an image about the pump, and the sign, being in such a lucky spot, does not contribute at all. It is modern, it is high-contrast, high-saturation, it pops out, it competes badly, and that's the reason why it must go.

Cloning out the sign proved harder than I had thought. My first attempt was to create a new, blank layer, and then to clone with a soft brush, always sampling a bit from above, a bit from below, and that with a clone source turned by 180 degrees to avoid repeating patterns. You remember, the clone source palette is one of the innovations in CS3, and it allows you to clone as if from a rotated source. Very handy, and from near, while I worked, the result looked promising indeed, but to my dismay the cloning was clearly visible from a distance. Why that? Well, the problem lies in this particular kind of texture. It is relatively fine and it is uniform, with uniformity being the culprit here.The soft brush had made the cloned texture less crisp, and that difference clearly showed from a distance. Essentially I had replaced the sign with a blotch that obviously stood out.

I could have tried it again with a harder brush and less overlap, and probably I would have succeeded, but in such situations a simpler technique produces superior results. It goes like that:

With the rectangular marquee tool I have selected a patch below the sign, copied it with Ctrl-J on a new layer. With Ctrl-T I went into free transform, rotated the patch by 180 degrees and moved it over the sign. Then I added a mask and by painting into the mask with a small, soft brush, I began taking away from the patch until it only covered roughly the sign.

This revealed another little problem. The sign was in a place where a diffuse shadow from above began. The patch was from below, thus it was too light, at least in its upper part. A curves darkening layer in luminosity blending mode and with a gradient mask applied, the layer clipped into the patch layer, took care of that.

In a similar manner I took out a minor distraction in the upper right corner. The drain cover and some high contrast dirt were taken out by conventional cloning. Neither of them had anything to contribute to the pump. They only brought clutter and unrest to an image that was meant to give a calm feeling of nostalgia.

At this point the image was still looking flat, the colors dull, a bit too blue, and the distribution of tones did not leave much detail in the pump.

I tackled contrasts first. The tones in the dark part on the left side were OK, but I wanted to have more detail in the pump itself and on the walls. In other words: I needed to increase local contrast. I discuss local contrast in detail in another tutorial, suffice to say that I used the PhotoLift plugin again, decreasing global contrast by 20% and adding 80% local contrast.

The result was pleasing across the image, and I did not use a mask as I normally would. I only used a levels adjustment layer to set a black and a white point. This is the result so far. Suddenly we can see the blemishes in the body of the pump, and the wall textures come forward, just as the pump itself. The levels adjustment was in normal blending mode, thus I have increased saturation as well, which is OK here. Had I wanted to avoid influencing colors, I would have used luminosity mode.

What about the BP sign? It is in the same old-fashioned style as the pump, it has the same green, it would perfectly go with the pump, it only has to come forward. It needs more glow, so let's make some glow.

The first thing I did was to add a curves layer with a steep rise in the lower tones. I used blending mode "color dodge" to boost the colors as well. This did not give me enough boost, thus I duplicated the layer. Then I made a merged copy of the image so far, blurred it with a radius of 7 pixels, applied it in screen mode at opacity 50%, and these three layers finally gave the glow.

Next comes the idea of balance. In this case it is the balance of tones, and especially tones in the corners. The right upper and lower corner needed to go darker, in order to balance the darkness of the opposing corners to the left.

This is no hard rule. Images are thinkable where two light corners on the right oppose two dark corners on the left, but, remember, this is neither an image about corners nor an image about opposites. It is an image about a gas pump. This particular gas pump is fairly in the middle, and therefore the corners need to be balanced.

I added another darkening curve in luminosity mode, and used a mask to restrict it to the lower and upper right corner.

At this point, in many cases I boost saturation as far as it does not burn out any channel. Of course there are images that need much more subtlety, but it is always a good idea to try and see what you get.

Well, what I got here was too much yellow, not enough red and no balance in the blues. Dealing with color, I primarily set color temperature in Camera RAW, but when I find later that I was slightly off, I often use Photoshop's "photo filters". They are intuitive, easy to use and can be tamed with masks. Here I used a plain red filter on the bricks to the left and behind the base of the pump. It is subtle, but it makes a difference. Then I raised saturation in general by 20%. Of course this was much too much for the pump, thus I painted in the mask with black over the pump, in effect applying the saturation on everything but the pump.

At this point I felt that the upper part needed some cooling. Therefore I used a cooling filter on the upper right corner and, for balance, on the lower left corner as well.

Of the predefined photo filters, "Cooling Filter (82)" is the most effective, but it has s strong cyan component, cyan cancels red, and that is not what I want here. "Cooling Filter (80)" is rather neutral and "Cooling Filter (LBB)" has a violet tinge. That was what I used.

As a last step I sharpened a merged copy in LAB and used an edge mask to restrict sharpness to the edges. Voilà, here we are: 15 layers.

Most of the changes that I have made were rather subtle, but in combination they have changed the image completely. Now it is exactly what I wanted it to be.

Does it show what was there? Certainly not. Does it show what I saw? Probably. In any case it shows what was important to me and made me take the image in the first place.

Coming to the Song of the Day at the end, I wouldn't have thought that I have only one song with "pump" in its title, one "Jumpin' In The Pump Room" by Charlie Shavers, and that clearly did not fit. Thus Rod Stewart has his second appearance within days, again from the same live album, this time with "Gasoline Alley", my only song with "gasoline" in the title. With its backward looking, romanticizing attitude it is probably not the worst match.

492 - Roughly About Sundown

It's Tuesday morning now and I'm finally back again with the long-overdue entry for Sunday. This is an odd assortment of images, and most of them have not even been taken on Sunday at all. The reason is ...

I have a new tool. It's Pixel Vistas PhotoLift, a Photoshop filter costing 40 US dollars. I found it by chance, browsing ads on The Online Photographer. PhotoLift is a tool to manipulate local contrast in an image. Using Photoshop's "Unsharp Mask" filter with a high radius and a low amount (termed HIRALOAM by Dan Margulis, see also here) can be used to achieve a similar effect, but with much less direct control and not with the same accuracy as PhotoLift. PhotoLift is available on Windows for Photoshop up from CS, and on the Mac for CS3 on Intel processors only.

Let's begin with this image of a house in a small village in Carinthia. It is about the balance of two windows, a piece of roof and a piece of ground, but it is also about texture. In this first image I have used a layer created with PhotoLift, set it to blending mode "Multiply" and a reduced opacity of 50%, this way burning the texture into the wall. The original was not overexposed, but the wall was very light, thus the mode "Multiply".

The user interface of PhotoLift is rather simple and lacks finesse. You can set the strength of the effect with a "Local Contrast" slider and the type of effect with a drop-down "Texture". Texture can be set between "Coarse" and "Very Fine", basically determining the "locality" of the effect.

Applying this effect can clip highlights and/or shadows, therefore you have the usual red and blue clipping indicators. They can be switched on/off with two buttons at the bottom, but you really want them on. If you see clipping, you can decrease global contrast with the "Global Contrast" slider, and in case the clipping is only on one side (highlight or shadow), you can shift brightness, to bring the image back into the middle of the tonal range.

The effect can be applied with two "Tools", a paint bucket that fills the whole image, and a brush that you can use to paint the effect into the image. There is an eraser as well, and finally you can set an opacity for the effect.

In practice I found the brush much too slow. I always use the paint bucket, and instead of applying the effect partially inside of the plugin, I use a Photoshop mask on the resulting layer. That's much easier.

Here we can see the dramatic difference between the image with and without the effect. It's striking.

There are two more issues with the plugin, the first being only a slight annoyance: It lacks a "Reset" button but it remembers values between invocations. I hate that. This effect has to be set individually for each image, and without a "Reset" button, I have to manually reset everything upon startup.

The other issue is due to the interactive nature of the plugin, i.e. due to the ability to use a brush and an eraser, and that are more or less unusable anyway. As it is, this plugin can't be a parametric filter, and therefore it can't be used as "Smart Filter", and in actions it will always pop up. This is an unfortunate design decision that I would strongly suggest to reconsider. I would drop the concept of "Tools" at all, make the filter parametric and of course add a "Reset" button :)

Now the question is: is this filter for you? When would you apply it and for what types of images? Let's look at some examples.

The first one is rather obvious again. This is the promised image of the way that I went up the mountain Dobratsch late afternoon on Saturday. I was on the shadow side of the mountain, the tonal range goes from very light sky near the horizon over dark sky in the zenith to almost black patches of ground coming through the snow. In the final image, reduced to 8 bits, there is not much tonal range left for the texture in the snow. It looks flat.

And now the same image, but with PhotoLift applied to the snow area. What a difference again! Suddenly we can see texture.

I have not tried to apply this effect to 8 bit images and, frankly, I wouldn't, because although there is enough tonal reserve in the RAW file, that is hardly true for a JPEG. On the other hand, I always shoot RAW+JPEG and never manipulate JPEGs at all, so that's not a problem.

I leave you with three more subtle applications of the effect. This image of a farm house in our village in Carinthia was flat in the concrete areas to the left. I have partially applied the effect to those areas, in "Normal" blending mode and with decreased opacity. That's a pattern in general: I tend to make the effect rather strong, and then reduce opacity. This often leads to more control, and I can always revise my decisions later.

This image of a damaged mural on a church in Carinthia had the effect applied to the damaged areas only. I would do that to put emphasis on the fact that it's damaged.

The final image is a B&W image of a bridge, and here I have subtly increased local contrast on the underside, making the concrete texture and the shimmering light from the reflections of the water more tangible.

And what about the Image of the Day? The only image beside the mural, that was actually shot on Sunday? It has the effect as well. Here I have used it in "Screen" mode with reduced opacity on the wall of the church. It brightens the main subject and at the same time makes it rough. This image is of course an HDR image made from multiple exposures, tone mapped in Photomatix Pro and brought to life in Photoshop.

The Image of the Day and the way up the mountain were shot with the Sigma 10-20 at 10mm, all others with the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro, as usual on my Nikon D300.

The Song of the Day is the Gershwin standard "Treat Me Rough", interpreted by Ella Fitzgerald. If you don't have them, why not get all of the "Song Books"?

454 - Walking The Dog

You like this image? I do. I invented it. Actually when I was there I saw the potential, but in reality I've made these colors up. Hey, no street looks like this!

Or do some? It's interesting how easily we accept colors, and even so outlandish ones as in this image. Out of the camera this was all yellow. Shades of different yellows. What I did in Camera RAW, was to put a gray point in one of the mid-yellows, with the intention to make the background blue. Not too blue, but blue. The yellow became a tad too greenish, thus I created a vignette with a red filter and a curves layer for darkening. The result was considerable color depth, paired with the depth created by the vignette. From there on I did some painting with light to accentuate the path, overlayed a B&W layer in mode "Soft Light" to push contrasts, and finally I strongly lightened the woman walking the dog, giving her back the original yellowish color to completely separate her from the background. What else? Oh, some minor cosmetics, a blur, Noise Ninja, only the usual stuff.

Normally I don't do this, but here to the left is the image that the camera saw. It is intentionally overexposed, but not very far from what boring reality looked like.

I like this image, because I've made it :)

Sigma 70/2.8 at f2.8, 1/30s and ISO 3200.

The Song of the Day is "Walking The Dog" from the 1964 Rolling Stones album "The Rolling Stones (England's Newest Hitmakers)". See a video, albeit with very sub-standard audio quality, on YouTube.

448 - Down In The Hole

Friday. You know, I love these days. Always in a hurry, and always the stress to capture an image in the few minutes that it takes me to get from work to the railway station, on my way from Vienna to Carinthia.

If possible it was even a tad harder today than normally. Then, already on the train, browsing through the images of today, I found this image of a pit on Südtiroler Platz, and though it was fundamentally flawed, I kinda liked the textures, the metal, the coldness, and thus I decided to de-flaw it. That's what I spent the next hour with.

I cropped off the top, I cloned out snow in the foreground and a plank, all with the intent of making the pit seem bottomless and its walls of indistinct height. Other than that I used a technique that I have used on "446 - Hide Away" two days ago as well.

This technique is pretty effective on noisy images or images with focus problems that you nevertheless want to print in high resolutions. Basically we want to do two things: accentuate what edges we have, and increase detail, but both without increasing noise.

One way to accentuate edges is high-pass filtering ("Filter / Other / High Pass"). You can vary the radius and mask the effect where you don't want or need it, but as all sharpening techniques it also accentuates noise, which is exactly what we don't want. There are two ways around that.

High-pass filtering is always applied to a pixel-bearing layer, and then the result is used with blending mode "Overlay". One way to avoid increasing noise, is to duplicate the background (or "Copy Merged" - "Paste", if you already have a layer stack), applying noise reduction to the duplicate and doing the high-pass filtering on that. Noise reduction algorithms smear away fine texture detail, but they leave hard edges intact.

In this case I used something else: I applied an Orton-like effect to the background, using one of the blur variants that I frequently use, and that's what I call a "neutral blur" (as opposed to a "glowing blur"). Basically you make two duplicates of the background or the merged underlying layers, one of them in "Screen" mode, blurred with radius 30 (works fine for 10 and 12 megapixel images) and at 100% opacity, the other in mode "Multiply", blurred with radius 5 and 60% opacity. The result has an Orton-like effect, but without any changes to saturation. As a side-effect, this pretty well eliminates noise.

A variant would use a "glowing blur", and instead of "Screen"-30px-100%/"Multiply"-5px-60%, I would use "Screen"-30px-80%/"Soft Light"-5px-100%. Normally I group both blurred layers and sometimes change the opacity of the group.

With that "neutral blur" in place I applied high-pass sharpening, followed by "Filter / Stylize / Find Edges" on another merged copy. I have desaturated the result and used it in blending mode "Multiply" with an opacity of 50%. Finally I have applied the usual levels, curves, saturation layers.

Click at the thumbnail to the right to see how this looks at the various stages. In the end you have something that looks very similar to the original tonally, but it has no noise and much finer detail. Of course this is invented detail, but that does not matter. It is a similar situation to that where noisier images sometimes look more real than noise-free ones. Sometimes it does not matter what details you have, it suffices that there is detail at all.

EDIT: As requested, I have searched for an easy way to share the PSD file. Well, the original has more than 300 MB, thus I have cropped it to 200x200 pixels and eliminated a vignette layer that was irrelevant for the purpose of demonstration. The result was cut down to 1.3 MB. I have uploaded this file to a free public hosting service that gives 10 GB per month of free bandwidth, i.e. 700 downloads per month. Drop me a comment or an email if you encounter this limit. I'll happily send the file to you per email, or I may even consider upgrading to a commercial hosting plan without bandwidth limit. Here is the link: http://www.box.net/shared/f7fjqcwsgg

The Song of the Day is "Down In The Hole" from the 1980 Rolling Stones album "Emotional Rescue".