More Bicycles in the Snow

I find this image much better than the previous two. I read somewhere that if you cannot explain why something is good, you cannot repeat it, and as a “head person” I tend to agree. So let me try and critique this image and see if I can put into words why I like it.

Even though this image is somewhat abstract, it’s very clear that it is showing us two bicycles covered with snow.  So without giving it much thought, I called the image “Bicycles in Snow.”   But the main subject are clearly the three red lights.  Like in real life their strong color causes them to immediately stand out  and draw attention to themselves.  Here however they appear as cheerful spots of color and not in their typical warning function.  If you are so inclined, you could even interpret them as signs of life within an otherwise cold and colorless image.

(So we already have a literal and an abstract interpretation and then the juxtaposition of warning and cheerful.  That’s enough for me to call the image a keeper and give it three stars.)

Looking a bit longer I notice the interesting texture of the snow and the nice contrast to the black frame of the bicycles.  Also the strong lines leading upwards and to the right, thus strengthening the notion of cheerfulness and optimism.  But there is also an ellipse that starts with the bicycle frame of the right side, follows the handle bars to the left, and then continues down along the mud guard of the left bike.  And there, while traveling along the ellipse, our eyes meet the three red spots of color again — very nice!

I approached this scene with my wide-angle zoom attached to the camera.  I knew immediately that the angle-of-view is too wide, but my fingers were too frozen to change lenses, so I got in closer and took a few shots.  That caused too much exaggeration in the lower-left corner, so frozen fingers or not, I mounted my 50/1.8 and took one last shot.  While evaluating the images at home I was immediately drawn by the tight framing of last image.  That image has the further advantage of being shot with a prime lens of normal focal length, so it has tons of detail throughout.

(Which accounts for the forth and final star.  But I won’t give a fifth one because the image lacks strong impact and memorability.)

In terms of editing I didn’t do anything special.  Other than a very slight crop from the right, I cloned a piece of trash in the upper left, I strengthened the saturation of the red lights and desaturated the yellows completely (there was a yellow sticker of the left bike’s mud guard that was visible despite the snow).  All of this took about a minute in ACR.  I then opened the image in Photoshop and run two actions: one produced the preview above and the other the large image that appears after clicking on the preview.

Now tell me please, do I file this image under “places / Hamburg” or “transportation / bicycle” or “seasons / winter”? 

Good Morning!

The view from my living-room this morning.  A phone call woke me up and after I hung up, still half asleep, I took three images and let Photoshop merge them automatically to a panorama.

The Histogram — Light Meter of the XXI Century

The 2008 fall/winter program of the local Volkshochschule¹ (VHS) came out today, and I will be teaching a course called “The Histogram — Light Meter of the XXI Century.” Since I like teaching, I’ve been wanting to do a photography course for a while now. My course will take place on Nov 1 and 2, four hours on each day.

On the first day I will explain what the histogram is, how to set up the camera to display the histogram and how the camera controls affect the histogram. Then I’ll get into the more controversial topic of how does an optimal histogram look like. And for the RAW-shooters I’ll explain the “expose to the right” idea. On the second day I’ll explain how to manipulate the histogram using brightness and contrast, levels and curves. And we will do lots of examples in ACR and Photoshop.

I’ve been teaching photographic concepts to my friends for quite a while, but this is the first time that I will be doing it officially. So I’m quite excited.

¹ Volkshochschule = German school for adult education. It’s similar to a community college, but it does not grant any degrees.

Making a Black-and-White Photograph “Sing”

I’ve received a few questions about what “tricks” I’m using for my black-and-white images. Well, I’d say that I don’t use any tricks, just the tools of the trade. Let me show you…

Here is a typical image straight out of the camera. It’s quite good already — it shows an interesting face with a very intense gaze, it’s sharp and well exposed.

But naturally there is room for improvement. In Camera Raw I cropped to a 3:4 ratio, increased the exposure some, darkened slightly and increased the contrast a good bit.

Now the face is much more dominant, and the eyes, mustache and beard are more vibrant. I could leave the image in color, but it begs to be converted to black and white. But before doing that, I inspected the whole area at 200% magnification and removed any dust, skin blemishes, etc. That small triangle of background in the upper-left corner bothered me too, so I filled it with pixels from the turban.

The next step was to look at the three individual channels. I liked the green one much more than red or blue one, so after experimenting some, I settled on -20, +170, -50.

There — the clash of the skin and turban colors is gone, but the image lacks contrast. I added a contrast layer and it did wonders to the face, but made the turban too bright. I counteracted that by adding a mask and limiting the contrast increase to the face only.

Now the eyes, forehead and especially the right quarter of the face became too dark, so I added a lightening layer and a mask that revealed the effect only in the desired areas.

The right eye is still too dark, which I corrected with a lightening layer.

The most noticeable problems have been addressed now, but the turban, the mustache and the background in the lower-right corner are still too bright. I counteracted that with a darkening layer.

Now, that’s already very good! In fact, this is the first version that I printed and showed around. I even glued it on my wall and stared at it for a few days. After getting over my initial excitement, I started noticing further possibilities for improvement.

First I darkened the brightest areas of the turban, shirt and collar as they were drawing attention away from the face.

Then I darkened the edges and corners of the image a good bit.

The light area of the background on the left-hand side and by the much brighter background on the right-hand side bothered me immediately, so made them very dark, almost without any detail.

And that’s where I am right now. Admittedly the last three changes were quite subtle, but in my mind, they are the ones that make the image really “sing.”

I’ve been staring at the version above for a while now and I can’t think of any further improvements. I’ll look at it again tomorrow, and if then too I don’t see anything that bothers me, I’ll make a second print.

That print might reveal further problems and lead to even more adjustment layers, but for now I’m satisfied.

By the way, here is what my layer stack looks like right now:

UPDATE: It is now one day later. This morning I didn’t see any problems on screen, so I made a 10×15 cm print on cheap glossy paper. When it came out, I immediately saw three areas that just had to be improved. I lightened the white collar on the right-hand side, then lightened the whole image a tiny bit. Finally I spotted the very dark area in the middle of the chin, which, although perfectly natural, was too obvious and distracting.

I’m making another small print right now, and if that one holds for a day, it will be time for an A4-size print on pearl paper.

Review of Mastering Black and White Digital Photography

I am still on a quest to improve my black-and-white photographs, and I am still looking at various books. I’ve already reviewed two books (review 1 and review 2) which were not quite what I was looking for, but Michael Freeman’s Mastering Black and White Digital Photography is quite good.

The book delivers exactly what the title promises — clear and practical advice about how to create good black and white photographs using digital methods. It is divided into 5 chapters.

Chapter one, The language of Mono, is supposed to be an introduction: why do we make black and white photographs, what makes a good black and white photograph, what to watch out for when making black and white images. In other words it’s more artistic than technical, but with 16 pages only it’s too short to cover the topics in any depth at all. In fact, the book would probably be better off without this chapter. Or how about showing 16 gorgeous black and white images without accompanying them by superficial comments?

Chapter two, Color into Grayscale, covers just about everything you need to know about converting a color image into black and white. On 50 pages it discusses the channel mixer in great detail and shows you how to “place” any color anywhere on the brightness scale. Several pages are dedicated to achieving realistic skin tones of dark, light and Asian skin.

Having attained a black and white image with optimal relationships between the gray tones in chapter two, chapter three, Digital Black and White, shows you how to optimize the appearance of such an image: maximizing the dynamic range, retaining shadow detail, preventing blown highlights, various methods of adjusting the tonal distribution, dodging and burning using layers and layer masks. There is also a discussion about noise, upscaling, scanning negatives and positives. All in all, quite interesting 40 pages.

On the next 28 pages chapter four, Image Editing and Effects, discusses further important topics: conveying a specific mood, image toning, duotones and tritones and some less important ones: bas relief, solarization, posterization, hand coloring.

The last chapter, The Print, is once again too short to have any depth or value. On 10 pages the author touches on the topics of desktop printers, creating contact sheets, printer calibration, ink and paper and mounting and framing an image. Not only is the information here utterly short, it is also dated. The printers discussed are the budget Canon Selphy and Pixma without a word on the higher quality ink jets like the Epson 3800. Instead of talking about third-party monochrome ink-sets, Michael Freeman should have better discussed the now-standard black-and-white modes of the printer drivers and their ability to produce stunning black and white images with the standard ink sets.

So what’s the final verdict? I’d say that the book is definitely worth reading and the information presented in chapters 2, 3 and 4 more than makes up for the weak chapters 1 and 5. Simply concentrate on pages 26 — 144.

And now a question. Are there any even better books out there? Something more artistic maybe? I feel like I now have a grasp of the technical side of black-and-white, but I need a ideas on further increasing the impact of my images.

B/W Portraits from India

What’s wrong with me?!?! I went to India, came back with 1187 images, and the first ones that I’m showing here are in black and white?!?! From the country that people go to to experience color ?!?!

The first thing that I did to my images was to group them according to their location (so I could apply metadata easily). But in any one location I took images of people, animals, buildings, temples, etc. and it just seemed right to group the people together, animals together and so on. So now I have directories according to the image content, and the first directory that I started organizing and editing was “portraits.” I started with about 100 images and after some light image editing, sorting and rating, I’m down to 62 images that I’ll probably end up keeping. Of those, the faces of the older people seemed the most expressive, and — you got it — older faces lend themselves very well to black and white.

So here are my four black-and-white portrait picks from the 2008 India images.

“Radiant Vista” Videos

I’ve been so terribly busy in the last two weeks that I haven’t even taken the camera in my hands. But I’ve not given up on photography totally. For example, I’m watching the Radiant Vista videos that I collected during the past few months (while concentrating on reviewing my old images and having no time for anything else).

I was very excited when I first discovered Radiant Vista and I started visiting the web page at least once a week in order to download the image critiques, Photoshop workbenches and video tutorials. Even with the authors sometimes going on a bit too long about spirituality and creative vibes and the advertisements for their own books and workshops having become more aggressive in recent weeks, I still find the content quite interesting and worth my time.

Review of Mastering Digital Black and White

I’m now through with the second book that I recently bought in order to learn more about digital methods for creating good black-and-white photographs. The review of the first one can be found here and today I will talk about Mastering Digital Black and White / A Photographer’s Guide to High Quality Black-and-White Imaging and Printing by Amadou Diallo.

Let me start off by saying that this is a good book. But, and this is a big “but,” the book has little to do with black-and-white photography. Whereas the book by John Beardsworth spent more than half of its pages teaching me general things about image composition, the book by Amadou Diallo spends about 80% of its pages on technical things like tuning Photoshop, calibrating my monitor, etc. Don’t get me wrong, these are all extremely important things that everyone should know, but they simply don’t belong in a book about black and white photography! No one in this day and age starts out immediately with black-and-white photography. We all learn photography, composition and basic Photoshop editing in color. At some point we want to experiment with black-and-white, and we do not need all this stuff repeated in a text about black-and-white!

But enough ranting! Who is this book for? It’s definitely for the technically oriented photographer, someone who does not care or already has mastered the creative and artistic part of photography and who is looking to understand the ins and outs of the digital process. If you are just starting with digital, you should probably look somewhere else for help. If you’ve already read a bit about JPG vs. RAW, color spaces and profiles, linearization of your ink-jet printer and so on, then this book will be on your level, but I think that there are better texts out there, (different texts for different topics) that treat each topic with the necessary depth and breath. What Amadou Dialo has done is survey these topics and illustrate them with CS3 dialogs.

The book starts out with a black-and-white gallery of about 30 images, which I found good, but not as inspiring as images by others. The print quality of the images in this book is average at best.

The next 40 pages are a survey of modern computer equipment that has pertinence to digital imaging. They cover CRT vs. LCD, DVI vs. analog, Mac vs PC, CPU, memory, hard-drives, video cards, configuring Photoshop, external storage, scanners, ink-jets, paper types, spectrometers and test images and charts. The section on printers lists current prices, size, weight and paper-handling capabilities. Do you now see what I mean? It tells you what you should think about, but it does not go into enough detail to teach you something. And what does this all have to do with black-and-white photography?!?!

Now come 33 pages of good discussion about calibration and Photoshop settings and 40 pages about the histogram, RAW converter, basic RAW editing and film scanning. Everyone working digitally should know this stuff!

Then come 52 pages of “Photoshop in Black and White” — a section that introduces Photoshop, its tools, palettes, levels (forget about levels!!!), curves, 16 pages on blending modes, exactly 3 pages on color-to-black-and-white conversion (wow, in a book about mastering black-and-white!!!), one page on sharpening and one page on soft-proofing. Hmmm, I would have expected that this section fills the entire book!

The book continues with 40 pages about “Black-and-White Ink-Jet Printing”: color vs. monochrome setting in the printer driver, economics of ownership, roll vs. sheet paper, printer profiling, inks, output sharpening (good!), and Photoshop’s printer settings.

Next are 27 pages about the imaging workflow. This is interesting, but teaches hardly anything new.

The book finishes with 32 pages about limited-edition prints (including law regulations, but probably applies only to USA) and 28 pages about assembling and presenting a portfolio.

So, should you read this book? I’m hesitating here, but it’s a good technical book, so I’d say yes, but because of its survey nature of the state of digital photography in 2007 and not because of its black-and-white content.

Review of Digital Black and White Photography

Recently I decided to learn more about digital methods for creating good black-and-white photographs. I looked around on Amazon and after reading quite a few descriptions and readers’ opinions, I ordered three books. I’ve now finished reading the first one: Digital Black and White Photography / A step-by-step guide to creating perfect photos by John Beardsworth.

Even though I didn’t learn much from it, I’d say it’s a nice introductory text to photography, image composition, digital editing, black-and-white conversion, several Photoshop effects, and presentation of digital images. Despite the subtitle’s claim that the book is a “step-by-step guide to creating perfect photos,” all topics are treated at a relatively basic level. But this is not necessarily a bad thing — like I said, the text is probably very good for beginners.

The book presents virtually all topics on exactly two pages, the only exceptions being “converting color to black and white” (6 pages) and “optimizing tonal range” (4 pages). Each pair of pages contains 5 to 7 images, a short explanation for each image and 4 or 5 short paragraphs with the main text. One probably cannot learn very much from such short texts, but you’d be surprised by how much information fits on two pages, especially when the accompanying images are carefully selected. Whenever necessary, the book shows a screenshot of a Photoshop dialog or of the layers palette.

Digital Black and White Photography starts with 14 pages dedicated to the (digital) camera, lenses, focusing, exposure and flash and follows with 34 pages on composition, learning to see and on light quality. The section is entitled “how to shoot great black and white photos,” but the material applies equally well to color photography. The next section is “digital imaging techniques,” and that’s where most of the interesting stuff is. Unless you know quite a bit about the digital workflow, you’ll probably learn a good bit from these 34 pages. Even Russel Brown’s two-layer technique for converting to black and white is explained, although the name “Russel Brown” is never mentioned (but who knows who really invented the technique anyway).

The book continues with 22 pages dedicated to “simulating classic darkroom effects” where you learn how to emulate sepia toning, split toning, infra-red film and how to darken the image borders. You also learn about hand-coloration, bas relief and solarization, but I doubt that anyone really needs these techniques.

The closing chapter is titled “showing and sharing your pictures” and uses 14 pages to briefly touch on monitor and printer calibration, paper and ink types, creating a slideshow and burning it on a CD-ROM, creating a presentation and burning it on a DVD, and uploading images onto a web-server. All these are treated very briefly, but at least the reader is made aware of the possibilities and is encouraged to look for further information.

The book is printed very well (not quite like a fine-art book, but much better than a textbook), and if you are a relative beginner, it’s probably well worth its price. However be aware that it contains very little content dedicated exclusively to black and white. Then again, if you know how to use your equipment, know something about image composition and about digital editing, it will be very hard to find any book that teaches you something new with every page.

Upgrade CS2 … to Lightroom?

I’ve been working with Photoshop CS2 for a few years now. At first I was struggling with all the options, settings, tools, palettes, etc., but having read Bruce Fraser’s “Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2” and “Real World Adobe Photoshop CS2” I felt much more confident, and since then sorting, rating, searching, adjusting a RAW image, editing a PSD file or producing JPGs or various sizes have become second nature to me.

But when Lightroom and then CS3 came along, and many people upgraded. I didn’t want to spend any more money on software, so I’ve been waiting patiently. But I’ve read and watched enough tutorials to know that ACR 4.x offers some very welcome new features.

Now that I am finished with looking through my past images and want to start editing the winners, I would like to have access the new “recovery”, “vibrance” and “clarity” sliders, the new B/W capabilities and split-toning in ACR, the loupe in Bridge/Lightroom, the spot editing in Lightroom, editing JPGs in ACR and so on…

So I’ve been thinking of purchasing either Lightroom or the CS3 upgrade. But Adobe is being ridiculous with their European pricing. In the USA Lightroom costs $299 and the CS3 upgrade is only $199. In Germany each one costs a whooping 296€, the equivalent of $430!!! I know, I can get a slightly better price be Amazon.de, but that’s not the point — CS3 is still double the US price!!!

Anyhow, I decided I’ll try Lightroom anyway. I’ve had it for about 5 days now, and I am impressed. It’s a very slick and functional piece of software, much more user-friendly than Bridge 1.x and ACR 3.x. If one doesn’t already have Photoshop, it’s easily worth its (US) price.

But I do have CS2, so for me the question was, what does Lightroom get me? I thought, I’d use Lightroom as the front end (Bridge and ACR) and CS2 as the image editor (layers, masks, actions, soft-proofing, etc.). This setup works well, but it’s not optimal. You have to turn on “Maximize compatibility” in CS2 so that Lightroom is able to import and preview your PSD files, and before opening a RAW file in CS2, Lightroom creates a PSD file (which you might not want to keep).

About 6 months ago Adobe quietly released ACR 3.7 and the release notes said that the new version is able to read Lightroom’s XMP-files. I wanted to try that, so I edited a few RAW-files in Lightroom, opened them in Bridge and ACR 3.7, and sure thing, all the edits, including spotting, were there — cool! But JPG edits didn’t survive… For whatever reason, Lightroom does not write XMP files for JPGs, so CS2 has no way to know about your edits.

The “Slideshow”, “Print” and “Web” modules are also very good, but I can print better from CS2 (soft-proof) and make my own Web galleries. I won’t be as fast, but definitely more flexible. Lightroom’s slideshow functions is surely better than the slow and inflexible one CS2, but CS3 will surely be an improvement.

So now I’m simply confused. If I didn’t already have CS2, I’d probably get Lightroom immediately. But since the combination of Lightroom and CS2 does not offer any significant advantages over CS3, I guess the real question is … “When will CS4 be available?” If soon, I’ll wait and go for CS4 directly, but since I guess that’s at least two years away, I’ll probably have to bite the bullet and upgrade to CS3 soon.