646 - Harley Heaven

I've spent this weekend working in Vienna, and last night, Sunday, when I left work, it poured down like mad. My first idea was to take public transport, but I finally resisted the temptation. I mounted the Sigma 30/1.4, took the umbrella out of my Lowepro Rover AW II backpack, secured its rain cover (AW means "all weather"), and off I went. Mostly caring about the camera, I was slightly wet upon arriving home, but I had quite some nice images. What finally made it is this one, a Harley parked in the rain.

The Song of the Day is "Harleys & Indians (Riders In The Sky)" from the 1994 Roxette album "Crash! Boom! Bang!". Sorry, no video, but last.fm has a sound sample.

643 - Here's That Rainy Day

Thursday was rainy. I took some mediocre images in the morning, while it was still dry, and some more interesting in late afternoon in pouring rain. I don't have the time to process all of them, but this is one of my favorites. Again I use a more or less out of focus background and a sharp foreground, and this time it is a variation on the concept of "601 - Rainy Day in June". The lens used is the Sigma 30/1.4, and it took me some attempts to find the ideal aperture of f4. Here we have just enough definition in the background to vaguely recognize people and umbrellas, and enough blur to keep the image timeless and general.

The Song of the Day is "Here's That Rainy Day". I have it on "Magic Voices", a seven CD collection of all records made by the Singers Unlimited. Unfortunately I have no sound samples, but of course YouTube has plenty of other versions.

635 - Out Of Time

We live in a time of big shopping centers. Malls, some central streets, they collect all the traffic, and many of the small shops near our living quarters had to close. This is in a way regrettable, but if everybody who regrets it now, had gone out in the past to actually shop there, they wouldn't have had to close in the first place. That's how we feel: we cherish the sentiment for a past that we would not want to live in.

"Uhren" is German and means "clocks" as well as "watches". The Song of the Day is "Out Of Time" from the 1966 Rolling Stones album "Aftermath". I've linked to the UK version of the album, because that's what I own. Hear the song on YouTube.

626 - Gotta Travel On

After yesterday's somewhat lengthy post, I'll keep it very short today. This is the image for Monday, you see, instead of catching up, I managed to get even two days behind now :)

Monday afternoon I left Vienna for a one-day intermezzo in Carinthia. We had concert tickets for Tuesday evening. On my way to the Underground, I regularly pass this building, Justizpalast. You've seen it in "141 - Memories of Summer", in "336 - Split Decision / Up In The Sky" and "154 - The Triumph of Parliamentarism" was taken from its roof terrace.

I had the Sigma 30/1.4 mounted, and when I saw the light/shadow pattern caused by the shadow of a flag falling on the wall, I decided to get very near and use extremely shallow DOF. Well, in fact f4.5 was what I ended up with, and even with that I was already at 1/4000s. In hindsight I like it better as it is anyway. Any shallower and the image would considerably loose depth.

The Song of the Day is "Gotta Travel On" from Bob Dylan's much despised 1979 album "Self Portrait". On youTube I have not found it by him, but as this is an old standard, there are other versions, for instance this one.

622 - Stormy Weather

This is certainly no great photo, the yellow reflection to the left is much too distracting for that, but it does one thing very well: it accurately shows the light that caused me to take it in the first place.

Technically this is not an HDR image. It was made from one RAW file by combining three different versions, using luminance masks, "Blend If" sliders, an extra layer in "Soft Light" blending mode and a photo filter.

I could probably have found a better composition, but I was in a hurry. I crouched in the middle of the street, sheltering myself and the camera from the heavy rain with an umbrella, using a short time when there were no cars. Pretty inconvenient :)

Here is one more image with the same Sigma 30/1.4 lens. I kinda like it, though neither my artistic contribution is overwhelming, nor is it that of the graffer. Sometimes I wonder. I can understand what someone could get out of making graffiti, at least a certain kind. Some graffiti are art, even if Ted disagrees :)

But where does this trend to use stencils come from?? Why do people do that? There is nothing at all artistic in it. Even a monkey could do that. Why bother? Do you have any idea?

The Song of the Day is "Stormy Weather", one of my most favorite songs, a Harold Arlen composition, this time interpreted by Ethel Waters. I found her by chance, searching for versions of "Stormy Weather", not knowing that it was actually her signature song. Well, it's probably excusable, she was slightly before my time :)

I have it on a compilation of recordings from between 1931 and 1934, but that does not seem to be available any more. Instead you could probably get this one called "Am I Blue?". Hear it on YouTube.

621 - Right Place Wrong Time

Leaves are falling??? Sorry guys, that's the wrong time. Up the trees again please, I'll tell you when you're due :))

We have storms here in Vienna these days. Well, nothing that would overly impress our friends in the US, but for a mountainous country like ours they are pretty strong. This image is from Wednesday morning, I'm still a day behind schedule.

The Song of the Day is "Right Place Wrong Time" from the incredible Dr. John's 1973 album "In the Right Place". Hear it on YouTube.

619 - An Afternoon Walk

Sometimes it is much trouble coming up with a single good image, and sometimes the trouble is, that I have so many that are quite nice, but not a single one that really stands out.

This is what we call a Mofa. That's the abbreviation for "Motorfahrrad" or "motor bicycle". This is an old one and it is a Puch. We had quite some of their bicycles so far (just check out my collection of Bicycles, a lot of them are Puch), but they have made motorbikes as well, some bigger, some like this one. I remember, when I was a child, the postmen used them. Well, that was at the end of the sixties, early seventies.

Monday afternoon was very hot and I slowly strolled home, taking one of the routes that I especially like on such hot lazy afternoons. It leads through one particularly sleepy part of Vienna's 8^th district. This is neither a historic region nor a shiny one, much of the architectural body is from the 1920s/30s, it seems to have been heavily bombed in WW2 and hastily mended in the fifties, but even that is now some time ago, and this part of the city has the charm of a place where people live but are quite not there. In fact that may well have been on that hot afternoon. I guess everybody but me was swimming :)

Originally I had wanted to stay at work longer, but I was still tired from my late-night arrival from Carinthia, and instead decided to go home. For part of the walk I used the Sigma 70/2.8, for the other part the Sigma 30/1.4. Both are among my favorite lenses.

Sometimes I wonder what people think when they see me standing or crouching there, and sometimes they even tell me. Just as I was taking an image of ivy on the garden side of a house (i've omitted it here), an old man came by and said "What are you photographing here? The ivy? But that's everywhere!".

He is right, and that's exactly the way most people run around. Ask them what they've seen, and you get a "Oh, nothing special". That's wrong. Everything is special around us, everything is unique, so are our lives, and if we fail to see and recognize it, then we fail to live at all.

The Song of the Day is "Lazy Afternoon" from the fabulous Holly Cole's 2003 album "Shade". Sorry, no lyrics, not even sound samples, Amazon does not like Holly or Holly does not like Amazon. I don't know. There is no video on YouTube either, but it's still the Song of the Day. You have to believe me :)

613 - Shiny Things

It is only now and only slowly, that I find the time to enjoy some of the books that came out of SoFoBoMo. One that particularly inspires me because of its wonderful fresh look on details "in between", is Esther Emma Jongste's "Colorful Daily Details". I'm loving it and it influences the way I see. Yesterday's telephone receiver (which is currently on Fine Art Photoblog) came out of that, and in a way today's image as well. After two weeks of fisheye images I enjoy being back to small details.

It's early in the morning now, I was too tired to post yesterday. Work is tough at the moment. When I left, light was already failing. I probably should have asked two guys, who were practicing bicycle jumps, if I could take some images. I would even have had my flash with me, but after 11 hours of work I could not muster the energy. Pretty silly though. I guess I could have gone away with some first class action shots.

Anyway. I decided for the slow route, and on my way home I took a series of images of the usual things, cars, street corners, graffiti and such. This closeup image of a car back light is what I liked most.

The Song of the Day is "Shiny Things", again from the great Tom Waits' Opus Magnum "Orphans". Take the time and hear into the sound sample on Amazon's site. The only thing I've found on YouTube was an arrangement for ukulele, but - hey, why not? It's a pretty little melody.

Bill Birtch and I are playing ping pong with these songs from Orphans, every once in a while he chooses one and then I do, but they are really that good. Oh, by the way, Bill has a pretty nice image of a bicycle over there. You know, I love bicycles :)

612 - Private Goes Public

It's a funny feeling, now that SoFoBoMo is over for me as well. I feel ... relaxed. The pressure is gone. Sure, I will go back once more and produce the physical book, but there is no deadline to that.

Do I feel tired? Do I need a creative break? Not really. I probably need more sleep, yes, but otherwise I feel as creative as ever. I guess the reason is, that I have not spent much time shooting, actually not more than six hours. Most work went into post-processing, and that, although tedious, was fascinating and interesting. After all, I have never before tried to create such a big and consistent body of work, much less from one shooting. In a way it was a similar experience to that of making the exhibition in January.

Yesterday night, on the train from Carinthia, I have tried my next book, some "Best of 2006/2007", just a compilation of the best images of the first 15 months of my blog, and although it was technically no problem, the result was rubbish. This is another lesson: I may have the means now to produce a book in very short time, but this is no substitute for a vision and for proper planning and design. Otherwise I may produce something in the form of a book, but it won't be a good book :)

Now for today's images. Actually I like both of them. The vandalized telephone receiver caught my eye because of the color and, even more so, because of the curve of the cable. I finally settled for the other image though. Austria is currently host to the European Soccer Championship, and today was the match Austria vs Germany. Thousands of people were on the streets, mostly on their way to one of the public viewing areas in the so-called fan zones, and what I saw in Westbahnstraße, was one of the funnier ideas. Some people had taken a TV set out onto the sidewalk, along with some furniture, and were viewing in public. Someone made a video, and they really seemed to enjoy themselves. Oh yes, Austria lost 0:1, but that was to be expected :)

The Song of the Day is "Private Goes Public", the last song on the European version of the 1992 Suzanne Vega album "99.9 F°".

586 - SoFoBoMo - Editing Till Daybreak

This is an image that I made Wednesday morning. I had risen early to write Tuesday's entry, and this is what it looked like, out of my kitchen window. Well, sort of. I had seen the strong color contrast between the artificially lit window frames and the blue outside. I took some images, and when I felt satisfied, I went to the computer and found ... the memory card already in the card reader. I had taken the images into the internal buffer, and when I turned the camera off, they were gone. Oh well, there's a first time for everything, I guess :)

Of course, when I returned to the kitchen, the light was gone. What you see here is a careful and thorough reconstruction of what it would have looked like when taken earlier. No problem, just a little work with color temperature, color relations and tonal values. Why easy when you can have it the hard way?

SoFoBoMo progresses. Not in wild strides, but it does. Still, I'll have to speed up now. The problem is, while some images come easy, some really need attention. This one, for instance, took me three iterations until I was satisfied with the distribution of light. Now I feel it's perfectly balanced, but that's after more than an hour of work.

Another problem is the forest light. I want a wide variety of colors, but there must still be a green cast. I need to control contrasts and I want nice vivid saturation, but without being gaudy. See the problem? Here we have the result of another two hours. And still I have no idea of how to make a book :)

The Song of the Day is "Daybreak" from Lisa Ekdahl's 2002 album "Heaven Earth & Beyond". No sound samples from Amazon, but at least a commercial with part of the song on YouTube. A nice song and quite fitting, as I see day break while I write these very words.

585 - SoFoBoMo - No Progress On A Rainy Tuesday

Forget about yesterday. It was a rainy, gloomy day, I had supposed to make big strides in editing SoFoBoMo images, but instead I lay down early (just for an hour) - and slept till morning. Thus: no progress.

This image was shot down from out of my living room window. Yesterday that was all creativity that I could muster. Forget about yesterday.

The Song of the Day is a Blues. It must be. "Rainy Tuesday" from the 1963 Alexis Korner album "Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated". A video? You're kidding!

584 - SoFoBoMo - Slow Down

Niels Henriksen of "My Camera World" today asked me to make the "additional" images on the blog a bit bigger, e.g. double their size. Well, I admit, on a 24" monitor they come out a tad small. The problem is, what I use here are sizes that get automatically generated by SmugMug, my image host, upon upload. The thumbnails are the smallest size, but the next size, "small" is already three to four times bigger. That's too much. On the other hand, creating the images at sizes fitting into a 200x200 square and uploading them myself, that would take me much more time than I can afford. Sorry Niels, I've tried, but "small" makes the page look horrible. As I see no easy solution, I'll to keep things as they are.

SoFoBoMo progress is slowing down. I have processed only three images tonight, one of them here for your pleasure. What I do at the moment is making all basic adjustments of color and contrast, clone things out, apply vignettes, re-light parts of the scene to support flow, and some things more. I will certainly have to come back to some images though. Later, when all these basic steps are done (before end of the week), I'll get back to colors and try to create more of a consistent "look".

As regards my daily photography, today that was restricted to my way home from work. Vienna is a beautiful city, and "Spittelberg", the historical center of its 7th district, even more so. The first image is of an alleyway partially obscured by the branches of a tree. Like all other images of today it has been taken with the Sigma 30/1.4, this one at f1.4.

The next one is the image that I originally wanted to take as Image of the Day. It's part of a lattice in front of a window of a historical building.

Finally I decided to take the chairs instead. They better fit the title of today's SoFoBoMo report. Oops! What's that? Titles choosing images??

Like the alleyway this image is an unprocessed JPEG right out of the camera. It has a slightly greenish cast that I easily could have removed, but that's what the light is in this old, mossy backyard. Sometimes a cast is not a cast but simply atmosphere :)

The Song of the Day is "Slow Down" from India Arie's 2002 album "Voyage to India". No video, sorry.

580 - Two of Us

These are the images of yesterday, Thursday. Not exactly my most productive day, but nevertheless I could take some images on my way home.

Both images for today were shot with the Sigma 30/1.4, my most-used lens at the moment. It's funny, at any time I have such a lens that I keep on the camera almost all the time, and that I return to quickly, after I have been forced to change. The 30/1.4 was hardly used at all for almost half a year, now it's back in fashion.

The first image, the flowers, was more of a safe image to fall back, should everything else fail. These flowers grow in a park that I pass by when leaving work. I have no idea what they are called. Anybody?

When I had already given up searching, shortly before I arrived home, I saw what you see in the Image of the Day, a twisted wooden stick in front of a local flower shop, in extreme side light, lit by the low sun.

I took two exposures, one horizontal, one vertical, and when I inspected them later, none was satisfying. The horizontal had this very delicately curved shadow that vanished in the corner, but it lacked the light stripe at the right side. The vertical had this stripe, but the best part of the shadow was missing and the lower part of what was left of the shadow was plump.

What you see here is a combination of the two images, made using Photoshop's "Auto-Align Layers" and "Auto-Blend Layers" functions. Both are new in CS3 and they are one of the many reasons why it's a good idea to upgrade, even when you have a camera that is supported by an earlier version. In my case, with my Nikon D300, I didn't have the choice anyway. As an incentive to upgrade, Adobe chose to make Camera RAW 4 incompatible with CS2 and to not support new cameras in Camera RAW 3 :)

The Song of the Day is "Two of Us", of course from the 1970 Beatles album "Let It Be". See a video on YouTube.

579 - Boulevard Of Dreams

I don't crop my images very often out of their original composition. I do crop, yes, but mostly to take care of a slight oversight, correct a sloppiness of execution. I don't normally do something like what I've done here.

The reason for it is, that I see a randomness in any format. Sure, there are proportions that please the eye more than others, but once the proportions are set, you only have the problem of using this frame to cut out a piece of reality, isolate it, make plausible the claim that this is a piece able to stand on its own, a piece that has its own, independent meaning. You make this claim at the time you take the image, and it may have merits or not, but if it has not, you have failed initially.

Only in rare cases I initially frame an image in full knowledge that I will crop it to, say, square, framing it for cropping from the beginning. Normally all other cases are essentially failures. Sure, something can often be done, some of it by cropping out of the original composition, but most of the time this still tastes like failure, and rather than cropping, I go out and take the image again. My ways are and my life is, that this is frequently possible and feasible. Then I go out and try framing again, doing it until I have what I intended or am satisfied that there is no proper solution.

Not so here. I was satisfied with the original. There is only a tiny crop from the right, that brings the strong verticals more on a third, but otherwise I have not touched composition. What I have done by cropping is the application of new proportions, cinematic proportions, proportions that tell the story better than others. I don't do this very often.

Why do you crop? Do you? And if not, why not?

The Song of the Day is the excellent "The Cutter" from Echo & The Bunnymen's 1985 album "Songs to Learn and Sing". Enjoy the video on YouTube.

578 - Twisted

Bicycles fascinate me. Well, you wouldn't have guessed :)

It's easy to see why. A bicycle has a very simple architecture. Straight lines in the frame, ellipses as wheels, and then there are these wonderful curves in the cables of the brakes. Take these simple lines and some lines of pavement, a wall or other such elementary pieces of architecture, and you can do all sorts of geometric tricks with them. And then there are these angles that bicycles take, when leaning against a wall or a signpost. It always looks somehow cool and ... twisted?

The Song of the Day, "Twisted", is from Lambert, Hendricks & Ross 1959 debut album "The Hottest New Group in Jazz". I even found a video on YouTube. The divine Annie Ross, accompanied by Count Basie on piano. Not shabby!

576 - All The World Is Green

That's just another pretty landscape for Sunday. I was up to something different, but things did not work out as intended. I'll see into it today.

The Song of the Day is "All The World Is Green" from Tom Waits' 2002 album "Blood Money". See him perform live on YouTube.

574 - Light Out Of Darkness

Normally I don't do this. I've already shown this portrait as a second example in the tutorial for Tuesday, "571 - Them There Eyes II". On the other hand, this was not the Image of the Day for Tuesday, and the image was actually shot on Friday, as an example for an utterly badly lit portrait, a worst case example, thus the timing is OK, because this is the entry for Friday. And then, apart from the fact that I had nothing better, I am also pretty damn proud of what I've achieved here :)

If you are curious now and haven't read the tutorial yet, just follow the link above.

The Song of the Day is "Light Out Of Darkness" from Shirley Horn's 1993 album "Light out of Darkness (A Tribute to Ray Charles)". Sorry, neither video nor lyrics are available.

573 - The Bicycle And The Wall

As a child I have lived in an old house with yellow walls. Warm, yellow walls on a summer day, this still evokes the feeling of comfort in me. We may not remember the first two years of our childhood, but there are unconscious kinds of memory as well.

Something of that must have gone through my mind when I saw this bicycle leaning against a wall. The warm orange of the body and the yellow of the saddle only added to the feeling. And, did you notice? It's a Puch!

The Song of the Day is "Marlene On The Wall" from Suzanne Vega's 1985 self-titled album. See her perform live on YouTube.

572 - As I Went Out One Morning

As I went out Wednesday morning, I began shooting when I walked down the stairs. I shot plenty more images that day, mostly documentary, and this is what stuck with me.

"As I Went Out One Morning", the Song of the Day, is from Bob Dylan's "John Wesley Harding", one of Bob's masterpieces, even when I wasn't generally received as such at the time.

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".