davewheelerstuff-blog

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Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was photoshopped

Just playing with Photoshop again.

Simple picture taken in Warwickshire, converted to B&W in Photoshop and then masked so that a few colours could be brushed onto the poor little lamb.

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Spring Walk

These are seven unedited photos, taken on a spring walk in the beautiful Warwickshire countryside.

All were shot in full manual mode, and are detailed as follows:

1. Compton Pools, towards the dam at Combroke Shot using a tripod with an exposure of 1/60 s at f/11, ISO 200, 24 mm focal length. I wanted to include the fence to draw the eye into the picture, exaggerated further by the tree reaching into the frame.

A circular polarising filter was employed to give a little more punch to the blue in the sky and the reflected water.

2. Compton Pools, looking NE Again, shot using a tripod, with an exposure of 1.6 s (yes, 1.6 s!) at f/18, ISO 50, 29 mm focal length. As well as the polarising filter, a neutral density filter was employed, to soften the ripples in the water - which were quite pronounced, as can be seen from the water surface in the distance - enabling reflections in the water to be captured. The most frustrating thing about this image are the small branches in the top and right of the frame, which I would normally remove using photo editing software.

3. Spring lambs This photo was all about patience and gentleness, not wishing to cause the lambs any undue distress.

It was taken handheld, after a period of about ten minutes of approaching the lambs a few feet at a time, using an exposure of 1/200 s at f/14, ISO 200 at 278 mm focal length.

On definite advantage of the mirrorless camera is that the shutter is virtually silent, but with a 90 - 280 mm lens which is the better part of a foot long, operating it hand-held is not easy.

Given the chance, I’d reshoot this with a smaller aperture (larger f-number), because the eye of the further lamb is slightly out of focus.

4. Capability Brown’s garden, Compton Verney This was shot hand held from the gate next to road bridge on the B4086, as this was the only safe place to shoot on this busy road. Exposure was 1/60 s at f/22, ISO 200, 58 mm focal length.

Again, a polarising filter was in play, but I elected not to go with the ND filter because the soft ripples give the picture a hint of a painting.

I was looking for the rule of thirds, with the bridge placed on the sweet spot 1/3 up and 1/3 in from the right. The V of the reflections is designed to draw the eye into the view.

A couple of things are not good. The people on the bridge give scale, but make it look ugly, and the lifebuoy holder is incongruous, bit does add a splash of red. There is an installation on the right bank which also detracts from the image, and the small bush that is on the bank behind the bridge looks like a smudge (at full resolution, it is actually sharp).

This is the sort of image that would benefit from a little post-processing - to add a bit of pop to the sky, and remove some of the features listed above. However, it’s still a nice view.

5. The road bridge, B4086, Compton Verney There is very little room to photograph this bridge, so I was relatively pleased with this shot.

Using a tripod and the ND filter allowed for an exposure of 0.5 s at f/8, ISO 50 at 24 mm focal length. This was to soften the water and make it look a little more fun.

It’s not the best photo: I should probably have removed the twigs on the ground in the front, and it’s never a great idea to have a strong line - the edge of the spillway, in this case - running into a corner of the picture.

What weakens the picture further are the tops of the trees that peak over the bridge in the distance, and I can easily imagine removing them in Photoshop.

I didn’t have it with me, but I think this would be a great shot with a tilt/shift lens, as I could throw the focal plane to get the line of the bridge in focus and blur the foreground and background.

6. Strangulation These ivy strands caught my attention, and I liked the way they twisted around the trunk. Shot hand held at 1/200 s at f/8, ISO 400 at 24 mm. There’s a certain warmth in the colours from the lat afternoon sun.

I also like the way that the other ivy laden trees are there in the background, but out of focus. So we know what’s going on further up the tree.

I was also careful with the positioning of the tree. The right edge of the trunk is very close to the middle of the frame, acting as a divider between the tangled vines on the left and the trees beyond. 

7. The ‘entmoot’ Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings introduces two extremes of characters: the Hobbits, short and childlike, and the giant tree-like Ents. At one point, two of the hobbits find themselves at an ‘Entmoot’, a meeting of the Ents.

This shot was my envisioning of that meeting from the Hobbits’ perspective, looking up at the Ent’s towering above them. Here the ivy does a good job of representing the Ents’ hair.

Shot hand held, virtually straight up, with an exposure of 1/160 s at f/8, ISO 200, 24 mm length.

The focal length was a deliberate choice, as a short focal length tends to elongate the image, but it also afforded the opportunity to imply that there were more participants.

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Colour popping in Photoshop

Duplicate image, use the channel mixer to make the top layer monochrome and then use the eraser to make the colours pop through.

I also inserted another layer and use some some Hue adjustment in the middle layer to produce a somewhat strange orange-tinted strawberry.

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Photoshop fixing and colouring

Multistep processing that went as follows:

1. Converting from Grey to RGB

2. Using the spot healing brush, patch brush and clone stamp tool to fix the spots, scratches and the missing part in the bottom left.

3. Adjusting the Image > Channel Mixer settings to add a bit more oomph to the image (contrast, etc.)

4. Adding a number of layers to apply colours. This involved using various layer modes, such as Color Burn, Soft Light, Color Dodge, etc. For each layer, tweaking the opacity to suit.

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Man on a wire

Playing with Photoshop. 

Firstly, the large guy to the right of the Sun was Clone Stamped from another image.

Then, using the Clone Stamp tool one of the two telegraph wires was removed, using a small brush size and careful repositioning of the source to avoid leaving visible evidence of the cloning.

Finally, the small guy was selected using the Magnetic Lasso tool, and then copied and pasted onto the wire, resizing and tilting to suit.

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College panorama

Shot using a tripod and 24 exposures at full frame (24 MP).

As it was evening, ISO was set to 400, with various shutter speeds at f/9, focal length 50 mm, and using a tripod with manual settings.

The resultant image, when merged in Lightroom, came in with a resolution at a little over 50000 pixels x 7000 pixels, or roughly a 350 MP image.

There are a few wobbly joins, and definitely a distorted view, probably caused by choosing the “cylindrical” merge option in Lightroom.

On a small MacBook Air it took over two hours for Lightroom to merge the images. But it is amazing that a file this big can be handled on such an underpowered laptop (it only has 4 GB of ram).

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The stuff of nightmares

Start with the picture of an apple.

Add a picture of a face containing an eye, and using a soft brush, erase around the eye. Duplicate and reverse the eye to make a pair.

Using a burn brush, add a few bits of shadows into the eye to make it look as though it lies within the apple. Use a dodge brush to lighten a few highlights.

Now find an image of a mouth and repeat the process, including using burn and dodge to add a bit of texture and to blend the edge.

The hair comes from an image of a monk’s wig. Again, some soft erasing, rotating and resizing to give the apple that tonsured look. Blending the edge using a very soft erase, and again adding burn and dodge to blend. 

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More playing with Photoshop

A downloaded brick texture, some cloning, a bit of burn to break up the pattern and some Chalkduster text.

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Photo manipulation in Photoshop.

Taking the base (provided) image, pieces were extracted using various lasso tools, and then pasted into a new image. Tweaking a few layers, and adjusting the sizes and orientations of the pieces, gives you a silly image.

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Golfing panorama

Sometimes, you don’t have your fancy DSLR to hand. In which case, the mobile phone just has to do.

This is winter golf, Saunton-style. With the afternoon sun going down behind us, our shadows from the elevated 16th tee on the West course almost reached the green, 175 yards away.

It’s not bad for a tiny lens and sensor, with the phone in panorama mode.

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Panorama using Adobe Lightroom

There are days when I find Adobe Lightroom pretty impressive.

The panorama above was shot using 16 individual pictures - with quite extensive overlap - RAW, at full 24 MP resolution. I used an ISO of 50 because it was quite a bright day, focal length of 50 mm at f/9, with varying shutter time depending on the meter reading of between 1/15 and 1/50. The focal length was chosen to mirror an approximation of the angle of vision of a human. All focusing was manual, but the camera was mounted on a tripod.

I have marked the boundaries of the sixteen individual shots in the lower image.

Apart from asking Lightroom to merge the photos, no post-processing was performed.

The final stitched image, auto-cropped by Lightroom, has a resolution of 30489 x 5746 pixels, or a little over 175 MP (the image uploaded here is cropped to a long edge length of 1280 pixels).

On reflection, I was a little cautious with the overlapping, and it might have been interesting to add or even a fourth layer upwards. The tripod definitely helps, though, as it keeps the camera fixed.

One useful camera aid was its level indicator. When I set the camera up, I turned this on to ensure that the camera was level, and tested it through the 180 degree rotation used in the picture. 

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Multiple exposure

Shot using a tripod, f/8 at 1/15 s, ISO 800, no flash.  Three exposures, taken using the 12 s self-timer, combined using Photoshop by overlaying the images and erasing appropriate portions of each image.

The three underlying images are also shown.

Entertainingly, I tried the Interval shooting mode on the camera for the first time, but couldn’t work out how to stop the interval mode!

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This is a photo-stiched image generated from many images taken in the college atrium. Shot in S-JPG mode, f/5.6, ISO 200. Manual, hand-held.

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Portraiture in the studio, using a single Bowens Gemini light, which had the benefit of a modelling lamp so that it is a little easier to get the lighting effect that you're looking for.

Shot hand held in manual mode, f/8 at 1/160 s, ISO 100, 90 mm.

The images were shot in RAW and loaded into Adobe Lightroom, with some minor cropping and adjustment to the white balance (and, in one case, conversion to B+W).

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Flash experiments Tripod-mounted, 61 mm at f/11, 2.0 s, ISO 200. This is an experiment with setting the flash to fire at the end of the exposure. The image is somewhat altered by the firing of other flashes, which gives a slight stroboscopic effect.

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Foreground / background Tripod mounted, 49 mm at f/3.6, 1/11 s, ISO 320 There's some interesting art in the college. Using a wide aperture allowed the camera to focus on one of the two, to give an interesting pair of pictures.

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So where is Room B601? Tripod mounted, 49 mm at f/3.6, 1/30 s, ISO 200. These two signs made an interesting juxtaposition. The first directs you to Room B601, the second tells you where Room B601 is. Made for a fun pair of photos.