Perils of photographing a waterfall

The image I posted yesterday needed some cleanup. The misting was so strong that within a few seconds, my filters would be covered in drops. Too fast to prevent by working fast, so I knew that digital tools would have to be involved in rescuing the images.

Right: Before extensive Photoshop spot healing tool work
Left: After

I had lots of trouble with drops on the filters as the below image will make very clear:


Amazing what is visible at 11mm and f/22. Obviously that image is a total loss apart from the novelty of showing it here. The dark corners are due to the stacked ND and polarizer and are visible when zoomed out all the way to 11mm on the Tokina 11-16mm and largely disappear when I apply lens distortion correction in Lightroom and crop a little. The price of stacking filters on a ultrawide lens I guess.

The Ethics of Editing

The lighthouse - left: artist's interpretation, right: original view.

The above shows a small project I was working on. It is a picture of the lighthouse on the wavebreaker at the tip of the harbour of Volendam. In the distance you can see Marken and a ferry boat heading for the Volendam harbour. When I took the picture I was struck by the stark symmetry of the stones and the lighthouse but couldn't do anything about the ugly steel and wood structure on the right hand side. So I photoshopped them away to see what it looks like without that structure. My Photoshop skills are not superb so this is not perfect but it clearly gives an impression. It's no Gursky (who extremely heavily edits his images to the point of complete fantasy) but I like the increased starkness. The right hand side of the above image shows the image without the editing. While a nice illustration, I remain ambivalent about such editing. Interestingly, while I was doing my cloning, Google Reader popped up the latest article on the Luminous Landscape by Peter Eastway. The article describes how the image was taken from a dull landscape to a sunbathed glowing hillscape. The sunspot on the nearby hill in that image is completely Photoshopped in. It never existed. The description of the treatment mirrors earlier ones on a castle in Italy and a rock formation in Australia. Especially the latter one makes me uncomfortable as the image never happened at the same moment. The sunlit rock is from a different image than the dramatic clouds. While it makes me uncomfortable, you can't argue with results. Eastway's images are quite dramatic and spectacular. Gursky's pictures sell for millions of dollars. So perhaps my ambivalence is holding me back. In the end the art is in making the artist's vision come out. This doesn't have to be limited by the drab reality of the conditions that were present at the moment of the taking of the picture. Most photographers will edit out jet contrails or overhead powerlines. At what point does this go over the line?

Photographic links of the week.

Pictures of the central plains ice storms
Cool family shots (from John Nack's blog)
Amazing areal images from London. (From Rob Galbraith's blog)
Summer in the southern hemisphere.
Funny juxtaposition.
Rash of naked hikers in the swiss Alps? I thought this has always been popular and not something new?
Why icebergs are blue (this is the correct explanation!)
Gigapan released their panorama robot.
Capture video with any Live View capable Nikon DSLR, even those that don't support video capture!
Win good stuff in the Aperture Nature Photography Workshop contest.
Beautiful images from one of my favorite National Parks. I found this guy's website after searching for images of a lake I wanted to photograph this spring. I do lots of photography in RMNP myself as many of you will know.
Most poignant photos of the Bush presidency selected by some major photo editors.
Inauguration day (NPR).

Awesome tip at Luminous landscape

As I am pretty sick today, and cruising some photography fora, I was reminded of a tip I read about a while ago. The tip consists of making selective zonal adjustments to make elements in the image pop. The article shows some amazing examples, such as the steaming trees which can be made from a fine image into an amazing one by a few very simple adjustments. Take a look at it and I am sure you'll think of some places to use it. For me, it caused me to revisit an older Rocky Mountain National Park photo where you see a tree backlit by the rising sun. I remember the whole tree having sort of a shrouded halo, which never materialized in the actual capture. On the left is the Lightroom original and on the left is the best Lightroom rendering obtained by increasing fill light to 32, the recovery to 10, and reducing the blacks to 3, and I cropped a little. No changes to white balance, clarity, vibrance or saturation. This made it a lot better than the original already, but still lacks pop.



Sort of OK but pretty boring, which is why I never really looked at it I guess. Only now, scouting for images that might benefit from this treatment did I come accross it. I took this image and in Photoshop, I selectively brightened the glare in the tree, while keeping the tree dark, darkened the sky selectively with another curves adjustment layer and played a little more with the foreground to make some sparkles in the snow and give some detail in the trees.

This is the result:


Much better. Note that this sort of treatment is very similar to how the program Lightzone operates, which can do zone masks for all its tools too. That looks like a very interesting program. I should try it sometimes.

Softproofing for sRGB?

Lightroom unfortunately does not support softproofing and it would be very useful for certain applications such as seeing how your image will turn out in print. Softproofing works for that case because a printer's gamut is usually much smaller than the monitor profile (usually close to sRGB) in places. In others, it is wider and there soft proofing is not very useful. Here for example is the sRGB gamut of a typical monitor (wireframe) compared to the gamut of typical US offset print (SWOP):


You can see that there is a large amount of color missing in the blue, green and red parts of the spectrum as you would expect because CMYK is a subtractive color model instead of additive such as RGB. On the other hand, the SWOP spectrum has much more definition in cyans and yellows. This is the origin of the widespread use of adobeRGB as a working space for offset as it will encompass most of the cyan lobe. If you softproof an image in photoshop for the CMYK process, you'll see many of the colors shift tremendously and you can correct for this.

On the web, I see many calls for softproofing in Lightroom so that you can predict how an image will look on the web. These calls are misguided however, and arise from these people having badly calibrated monitors and looking at the images in non-color managed apps such as Internet Explorer, or Firefox before 3.0 beta. In reality, soft proofing apps for sRGB is useless, since if you do it right, you will NOT see a difference at all. This owes to the fact that most monitors are approximately sRGB in gamut. Here for example is the gamut of a typical Apple LCD display compared with sRGB(wireframe):



You see that the display's gamut is smaller than sRGB everywhere. Almost every LCD screen (except the new wide gamut LCDs that very few people have - they are not cheap) is like this. Don't believe me? Here is an image with lots of colors outside the sRGB gamut softproofed for sRGB on my MacBook Pro:



Now look at the same non-softproofed:



Exactly the same indeed! Another reason that I think people get this wrong is that they do not set up the softproofing correctly. This is how you have to set it up for correct results:



You should NOT check the preserve RGB numbers button as you will not see the result of conversion to sRGB, but of when you would simply assume the image was in sRGB instead of the source profile (prophotoRGB in this case). My guess is that lots of people do this erroneously and think that their image changes a lot when going to sRGB. Concerning Lightroom, this means that if your image looks good on screen in Lightroom, it WILL look good when exported to sRGB. Of course, you cannot do much about your audience not calibrating their screen and not using color managed browsers, but using sRGB gives you the largest probability the colors will be correct.

P.S. Note that I used the color LCD profile supplied by Apple for the comparison above. If you hardware calibrate a Mac Book Pro display (even the LED ones) you'll see that the actual gamut is even smaller, making it even more impossible that you could see the effect of sRGB soft proofing on such a machine. ONLY when your display's gamut is larger than sRGB will you be able to see the effect of soft-proofing for sRGB.

A (mildly) Lightroom workflow for printing at costcos and getting superb color

Update: see edit at the end:

Update II (5/20/08): Lightroom 2.0 has made this workflow unnecessary. Check out my post on it.

I decided to detail my printing workflow I follow in Lightroom and Photoshop. This workflow will yield photographs up to 12"x18" (the largest most places print in 1-hour service - not a real limitation) with color and dynamic range rivaling and in some cases exceeding very expensive inkjets, but at a fraction of the cost. I use costcos for this purpose as they are fast, good, provide icc profiles and close to where I live, but I am sure other comparable labs will do fine too with a similar workflow. Labs that use Noritsus or Fuji Frontiers will all have very similar quality. My local costcos uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, which is somewhat thin for larger prints, but gives excellent color fidelity and deep dynamic range. The machines raster scan a laser at three colors over this paper to expose the paper which is then developed using conventional chemical processes. You're actually getting a real photograph from a digital file. The workflow I'll discuss is done in photoshop, but you could use any program that can convert images between icc profiles. For example preview.app from Apple. This sort of sequence is necessary because Lightroom will not export directly to arbitrary icc profiles. Hopefully that will be built in in a future version?¹

Preparation:
1. The first step is to download and install the icc profiles for your lab. Costcos makes them available on their photo upload pages, but they are actually done by dry creek. You can see if you can find your lab there. Download them and install them in a place where photoshop and other color managed apps can find them. On Macs that is simply ~/Library/ColorSync/Profiles or/Library/ColorSync/Profiles. On windows it is somewhere deep in the crypts of the OS. Check this page for instructions. Once installed, you should once every few months check if there is an updated profile.
2. Set up photoshop correctly. Many photoshop installations are setup incorrectly due to bad information floating around on the web. The way You should set it up is to respect embedded profiles and warn for profile mismatches. You get to the dialog in Edit:Color Settings. See below for a suggested setting:

Here I've disclosed the extra options, but they are usually correct. I'm just showing them for reference. The setting for the RGB working space is not that important. Setting it to ppRGB just makes photoshop throw up fewer warnings. When you get a color space mismatch warning when loading a file, always choose "preserve embedded profile." NEVER EVER choose "discard"

So only the top two options are meaningful. Now you have setup Photoshop correctly and it is time to describe the actual workflow:

Workflow:
1. Select the photos you want to print and crop them to the desired aspect ratios of your final prints. Typical print sizes are 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, 8x12, 12x18, etc, so your usual ratios are 2x3, 5x7 and 4x5.

2. Export your photos from Lightroom using the prophotoRGB profile (why ppRGB? check here) in a 16-bits Tiff or psd. At this point I use two different workflows depending on mood. I either scale in the output dialog of Lightroom, or in Photoshop. You should scale to your desired size at a resolution of 300 ppi approximately as this is the approximate resolution of the photomachines.



It s a good idea to create a preset for this.

3. Open one of the exported files in Photoshop.

4. If you did not yet scale to the final size, do it now using the Image->Image size dialog. Again, use 300 ppi for the resolution and type the size in inches or cm of your final print, making sure you have "resample images" checked. This will calculate the actual needed image dimensions in pixels for you and scale to that size. At this stage I use bicubic sampling for the resizing, but you could use whatever algorithm you prefer or perhaps a plugin such as Genuine Fractals.

5. Sharpen for final output. The machines have a resolution of 300 ppi approximately, but they are soft at that resolution which you should try to counteract to get the best prints. You can use many third party sharpeners for this purpose, but to keep this tutorial simple, I'll show you how to use the unsharp mask in Photoshop. Before I open this dialog, I usually zoom the image to 50%. The filter can be found in Filter->Sharpen. Zooming to 50% is a very old trick that allows you to judge the effect of the sharpening fairly well on screen. The settings below are fairly typical for me. An amount of about 150%, a radius between 0.5 and 1 and a threshold of 5 (to avoid sharpening noise).



This should look only slightly crunchy in the 50% preview in the big window. Experiment with this to see what works best.

6. Now comes the important step.² In the Edit menu, choose "convert to profile." In the dialog, choose the profile for your printing service:



7. Convert to 8-bit color (Image->Mode->8 Bits/Channel.

8. Save as a reasonably high quality jpeg:


Make sure you do not select the embed color profile option. The machines ignore the profile anyway and the profiles are usually around 1.5 MB, so to save you upload time, do not embed it. Give it a name that describes which profile you used and to which size you scaled it so that you can identify it later.

9. Repeat steps 3 to 8 for all your photos

10. Upload to your lab and print!

You can easily create a Photoshop droplet for all this if you basically always go to the same size. Also check out my older articles detailing how to use the print panel in Lightroom to do basically the same thing, but including logos and such. Here is the original article and here I explain how to add borders and such.

Notes:
¹ At this point I should note that you could do this all with just sRGB files. However, in my experience, the color reproduction is not as good as I like. Using custom profiles gets me exact color reproduction.
² At this point you could first softproof to correct for any out-of-gamut colors. I'll leave that for a later article.

UPDATE: Timothy Armes brought out a plugin for Lightroom that does all this without the need for Photoshop.

Relevant example for ppRGB vs adobeRGB

I realized after the last post that I need to give a real world example. The example that I am going to give is from the recent shot below:

.

I took this into Photoshop in 16-bit ppRGB and softproofed it to the profile of my local costco's Noritsu and to adobeRGB. In both cases, I show the gamut warning (in grey).

Here is the soft proof for adobeRGB (click for large version):


As you can see a lot is out of gamut in the mountain area that is lit by the rising sun. Especially the green of the trees is far out.

Now take a look at the same for the local costcos:


Far less is out of gamut. Especially the green/yellow of the lit trees is not at all out of gamut, while it was in adobeRGB. This clearly shows that in real world images, you lose colors that even not so wide gamut machines can print if you use adobeRGB as a working space. Of course, there are not really any displays that can actually display these colors...

Lightroom 1.2 and ACR 4.2

Adobe just released the Lightroom 1.2 and ACR 4.2 updates (use the adobe updater app in CS3). It includes support for the yummy Canon 40D and, for me at least, it solves the weird watercolor paint effect that some pictures took on in Lightroom 1.1. This is a must have update if you use either.

Manual dynamic range reduction

I played a little with HDR software but wasn't always happy with the results. Often it would look better to just combine exposures (if done, otherwise just one RAW image) and use masks derived from the images. So I tried to play with an older image that had a correctly exposed sky, but several stops underexposed foreground (it was dawn inside a canyon). I simply used a mask generated from one of the color channels with a exposure adjustment layer in PS. Came out quite well I think: