Photography Tutorial: Sharpening

Photography Tutorial: Sharpening

What is Sharpening

The unfortunate truth about all digital recording/capturing technologies is that they convert analog signals into samples of the original. The frequency of how often the signal is sampled determines how well the original analog signal will be when digitally reproduced. While modern devices have high sampling rates of 12 bits for each of the RGB (red, green, blue) spectrum colors, this number is actually quite coarse, or crude compared to reality. 

The real world is comprised of infinite numbers of colours and shades, to observe this one has to only look around them, at the sky, forest, water. You will see enumerable shades and tints of the same color; so while capturing a large enough portion of this information to create a (in our eyes) high resolution photograph, the digital recreation pails in comparison to the real thing. 

This creates the problem of an inherent fuzziness or noise in any digital recording or abstraction, due to it being only a fragment of information of the original. So in order to combat this, we employ a technique called sharpening. This enhances the photograph and makes it look "sharp", "in focus", and gives a higher clarity to the photograph. This is also one of the major differences between a professional photographer's photographs and a amateur or beginner's.

So with that lets show you how to sharpen like a pro!

How to Sharpen

While there are enumerable ways to sharpen your photos, and different schools of thought for each one,  a good way to sharpen that works for many different photograph types, is the High Pass filter. The High Pass Filter works by sharpening edges only, leaving non-edges unsharpened. This is the goal of sharpening and what all the various other sharpening filters aim to help you do.

Now on to it!

Step 1: Open Photoshop

Step 2: Open your image

Step 3: Duplicate the original or background layer

Duplicate the original layer (also known as the Background layer in photoshop)

To duplicate the background layer, select it from the layers panel and press the keys CTRL & J at the same time, if you are on a mac press Command & J. This will create a duplicate of the layer. 

Another option is to right click on the background layer and select "Duplicate Layer"

Step 4: Change the blending mode of the new layer to Overlay

The High Pass filter, when ran, turns all non-edge surfaces into a neutral grey colour, this may seem off-putting at first however we made a duplicate layer for this very reason. Go back to the layers panel and where you see a drop-down menu with "Normal" in it. Change this to "Overlay". Switching the panel to "Overlay" causes photoshop to only apply the non-neutral grey areas from the selected layer to the layer below. This means we will only see the edges of our original photograph sharpened.

One side effect right now is that your photograph will appear to have a large amount of contrast, this is to be expected and will only be temporary.

Step 5: Apply the High Pass filter

Now that you've accomplished the previous steps, go to the "Filter" menu at the top of the screen and choose "Other" and then "High Pass".

The High Pass filter is fairly simple to use, there is only one slider to increase or decrease the amount of the filter applied. Checking the "Preview" option on the side will show you your changes on your photo as your move the slider. 

To sharpen with the High Pass filter, start with a low radius value around 1-2 pixels and drag the filter to the right or to the left. If you begin to see halos or glowing around the edges, you have sharpened too much, decrease the radius slider. We used <--> as our value, yours will differ, play with it to find what works for you. How much you sharpen will very from photo to photo, so do not expect your values to always be the same. 

(Optional) Step 6: Fine tune the sharpening.

You can fine tune your sharpening even more so by changing the blending modes, changing the blend to Hard Light or to Soft Light will adjust the intensity of the sharpened layer. Hard Light will increase the sharpening and Soft Light will decrease it. This is at your discretion, try both to see the effects.

So thats it folks! We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it helpful. We look forward to starting on next weeks tutorial and creating something useful as always.

Happy Shooting!

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Flickr: flickr.com/cityscapefire

Photography Tutorial: Composition

Composition and the Rule of Thirds

 When it comes to taking better and/or more interesting photographs, learning about composition and the rule of thirds will give you a boost towards capturing them, that no increase in equipment quantity, quality or simply how many photographs will take can provide. This tutorial was written to help, alongside some photographs, understand when and when not to apply the "Rule of Thirds" to composing your images.

What is the Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds (image of its overlay above) is a visual rule for composing visual scenes which states that a image is most pleasing to the human viewer when the subjects, zones, or regions are composed in the image along imaginary lines. These lines bisect the image into nine quadrants or sections. It is seemingly counter-intuitive to apply such a mathematically precise type of rule to the 'image arts', but it works very well for the subjective field. The composing of subjects or scenes with the focus being along the lines and at their intersections creates a sense of balance in the image, and can be used to draw out motion, perspective, size and volume emotionally in the viewer. This rule allows for making a photo not too static and not to visually complex and busy.

The Rule of Thirds in use

So you can see how to overlay the rule of thirds mentally when composing a scene, below are some examples of the rule of thirds in use, to explain why and how it works in action.

The focus of this photograph is the tree sapling on the rock cleft, its positioning towards lower right corner on the intersection of the first horizontal line and the second vertical line of the rule of thirds grid is attractive to the viewer. The shadow to the right of the tree is balanced into taking a third of the photo approximately which compliments feeling the sapling is jutting out on it's own.

The rule of thirds is easier seen applied to this photograph with the lines of composition trisecting the photograph into thirds. The lines of division divide the solid sky, from the foggy trees, from the less-foggy more-clear foreground. This creates pleasing planes of composition for the images horizon.

As stated above, the rule of thirds can be used to cause the viewer to experience greater feelings of motion when looking at your photographs. In the photo above, the waters route from the upper right corner of the photograph to the bottom left corner, paints a track for the eye to follow when viewing and in that, provides more visual action perceived.  

Sometimes however, you may want to showcase symmetry or a static image and have your subject in the center of your photograph. This is OK! The rule of thirds is meant to be broken, in the above image the rule of thirds is both broken and used at the same time. The suns rise between the buildings, being the central focus of the photograph, captures the viewers eye and then brings it down to the intersection through the street car lines. The eye then meets the stopped car and cross-walking man on the road, which provides more interest. This is just our example of breaking the rule, we trust you'll have no problem violating it yourselves to get better images, it is just another tool in your photography utility belt. 

If your liking what your reading here, give my flickr page a look, and/or follow me on your favorite social network.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityscapefire/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/shutterscience

Twitter: https://twitter.com/shutterscience

Creating the Lomography look

Creating the Lomography look 

aka. How to create your own Instagram photos

In recent years with the advent of consumer smartphones, certain apps on the app market has made it possible to take photos that look like they were taken in a Lomographic camera. These photographs usually feature odd and/or unique colouring, strong vignettes, light streaks, blur and high contrast. These apps and modern lomographic film cameras take their cues from a photographic movement that began in the 1990's when the creators where inspired by cheap russian toy cameras, such as the LOMO LC-A. 

This tutorial was created to let you create the lomographic look in a more controlled environment than Instagram or a cheap camera and with your digital camera. So dig up or take a few photos you'd like to experiment with and lets begin!

Below is a photo of James Gray, musician extraordinaire, at a wedding he played. This will be the subject for Shutter Science's tutorial.

Step 1: Open your image

Step 2: Create your selection

Select the Lasso tool and then change the feather to 70-90. Then draw a loose circle around the subject of your photo.

Step 3: Invert the selection

Now that you've slected the subject, we need to invert that selection and select everything but your selection

In the menu bar go to Select and then to Inverse, which will then invert our selections.

Step 4: Create the vignette shadow

With your selection inverted, create a levels adjustment level and tone down the mid tones and highlights of the selected rim of the subject, this will create the illusion of a vignette. After you have done this flatten your image.

Step 4: Creating the right colours

Lomographic photographs have very rich and unique colour tones, the next stop is to replicate that in our photo.

Add a curves adjustment layer now, and individually select the colour curves to play with them. You will see we went with an 'S' curve for ours, experiment to find what works best for you.

Step 4: Blurring

Lomographic cameras are notorious for having lens blur. The fourth and final stage in our tutorial will be replicating this soft focus look in our image. Duplicate your background layer and create a clipping mask on this layer.

Then select the brush tool and set it to be black. While having the clipping mask layer selected.

Create a brush the size of your subject by manually increasing brush size or pressing the '[' and ']' keys respectively to lower and raise the size. Click once to make a black spot the size of your focal area around your subject, you will not directly notice this, look in the layers panel to see the silhouette of the brushes work.

Next, after selecting the duplicated image layer, go to filter and then to gaussian blur to add your blur, the filter is quite powerful so experiment to find the right strength. After that your done! Congratulations!

Completed! 

Here's our finished photograph! Ready for sharing!

Thanks to our model James, make sure to check out his music at: 

http://www.facebook.com/jamesgraymusic1990

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeRWfnK5TV41F0utOJXHVLw

http://music.cbc.ca/#/artists/James-Gray

Back to the Basics Part II: White Balance

Back to the Basics Part II: White Balance

How it works

White balance is a setting contained within your photographs that determines the adjustment of colours within a photograph needed to match the colour of light shown by the light source. The object of this matching process is so that white objects appear white under varying lighting conditions. While most light sources appear white to the naked eye, the truth is there is a wide range of colours cast by traditional light sources. For example, light from the sun is a very cold blue and a traditional tungsten light bulb gives a very warm orange to red colour. The imaging sensor in modern digital cameras reproduce the colours cast by these lights exactly, and without processing and white balancing, the colours in the photograph would seem to change from light source to light source. Normally auto white-balance would correct any issues, however it is not perfect and for greater control and artistic leverage, the manual function for white balance can be used to derive very different results. These differences are illustrated in the photos below.

 

In this photo you can see that it has a blue colour cast over the photograph, while the background is a orange/ red. this is because there is three different light sources in the photograph, each with its own band of light.

In this corrected version, you can see we've adjusted for the blue in the photograph, however the background is still very orange due to it being a separate colour cast to balance for. It is recommended that you try and minimize the number of differing light sources as it becomes a nightmare to edit more than one at a time.

Back to the Basics Part I: Exposure

Back to the Basics Part I Exposure

Hey! Shutter Science has been writing a Camera Basics tutorial series which will start this week! We will cover the topic of exposure and how it relates to modern digital cameras. Alot of cameras come with auto functions that take care of exposure for you, while it works it does not provide you with the highest quality pictures. Understanding how exposure and how to manually control it, will provide you with a new skill set to bring to the table when you are shooting.

What you will need:

• A DSLR or point-and-shoot digital camera with Manual function.
• Thats it this time!

How it works

When you use your camera to take a photograph, you are exposing a digital imaging sensor to light. Before the light hits the center, there are two ways of controlling how much light is picked up by the sensor. These controls are called the Aperture and the Shutter. The latter of which this blog is named for. In order to manipulate these controls you must have a camera with manual mode.

Aperture

The aperture in your camera is a mechanical opening that changes in size to admit more or less light into the lens/camera body. The sizes it can open and shrink to are setup in measured increments and are known as F-Stops. The numbers step up from F1.4 to F5.6, F8, and F11. As the F-stops number increase in value, the smaller the opening of the aperture, and consequently the less light allowed into the camera. It is important to note that with each increase in F-stops means half as much light will be let in.

Shutter 

The shutter is a mechanical blind for the imaging sensor. It opens and closes at an again incremented and predetermined speed allowing only light to reach the sensor for so long. Shutter speeds are measured by fractions of a second, 50 means 1/50 or one fiftieth of a second, and 125 means 1/125. There are also speeds longer than a second or less, which we will touch on later.

How long you leave the shutter open for can vary depending on the situation or the scene and how bright it is. A sunny day may require a shutter speed of 1/200 and an aperture of F8, while a overcast, or cloudy day could be 1/60 with a F-stop of F4

Leaving your shutter open for different lengths of time when properly exposed by balancing out the apertures setting (ie if it is really slow such as if you are shooting a long exposure), can produce different effects in your photographs, especially where motion is concerned. A few photographs will follow to detail this.

Fast shutter speeds will freeze motion in a very clear way as opposed to the blurred effect that a long exposure creates. As you can see in this photo the high shutter speed freezes the water cascading off the rocks into individual rivulets of water. It is worth noting that any shutter speeds under 1/60 or even 1/80 for that matter are too slow to be taken while holding your camera, this will add a type of motion blur called shake to your photo. Camera shake comes from your body's inability to hold the camera perfectly still for that time period, this is okay though, thats why we have tripods.

Slow shutter speeds capture motion very differently, and any object or scene in motion on a long exposure will leave trails of motion blur as the objects travel across the scene. As you can see in the photo above, the water is smoothed out in this scene as it runs off the rocks and takes on a gassy smokey look.

Creating a Timelapse/Stopmotion video

Creating a Timelapse/Stopmotion video 

Dear Reader, 

This is ShutterScience's first video tutorial. The creation of the video does not require video capabilities on your camera, however you will need to either have a interval function, an intervalmeter, or manually take a frame as often as necessary (more on that later). We hope you enjoy the tutorial and it opens new possibilities for you when out in the field.

What you will need:

• A Camera (DSLR)
• A Tripod
• Windows Live Essentials
• Photoshop
• Intervalmeter (Optional: only needed if taking frames manually isn't desired and your camera does not have a interval function)

How To!

Preprocessing

Step 1: 

Choose your scene/focus of the end video and setup your camera on your tripod and frame the shoot.

Step 2: 

Either set the intervalmeter/interval function on your camera to take a frame about every 5-10 seconds. How often and how many frames you capture will dictate the fluidity of the video and its length.

Step 3: (Only if you are trying to create a stop motion video, skip to 4 for solely timelapse)

Move your actors, objects or scene elements a small bit each frame and then capture that small movement with a still. Keep taking stills until you have completed your wanted animation.

Step 4:

Now that you have captured your scene, go home and upload those photos to your computer.

Having done this brings us to the next stage! Processing!

Processing

Now that you have all these files on your computer and before we can create a video you must make any visual changes to the stills you feel necessary. So open Photoshop and Open all of those photos in camera raw. Make sure to select all the photos and click synchronize so that your changes to the one are applied to all of them.

Step 1:

Now that you have your folder of images ready and have downloaded/installed Windows Live Essentials if you didn't have it already. Open Windows Live Movie Maker.

Step 2: 

Click on "Add Videos and Photos"

Step 3: Now Navigate to your folder in the "Open" dialog box and select all your photos. (make sure they are arranged by name to save you the trouble of sorting them into the correct order)

Step 4: 

Select all your photos. (Click on one and then on your keyboard press "CTRL" + "A"

Step 5:

Click the Edit tab at the top, and change the duration of your photos (make sure they are still all selected!). The shorter you make the interval for each photo the quicker the video will go. We found that for our example video .09 seconds was best. Play around with it and see what your prefer.

Step 6: 

If you want to add a Title to your video click on the "Home" tab and then click "Title" right next to the snapshot button. This will bring you back to the text tools tab where you will be able to specify settings for your video's title.

Step 7:

Next we will be adding music to our video. This is an optional step we added so you have the option to do so or not. Go back to the Home tab and now click "Add Music" a small option box will open asking you to click one of two options. We selected "Add Music at the current point".

Once the "Open" dialog box opens, navigate to your audio/music file and select it. Then click "Open"

              

Step 8: 

Now that you have added in your music you will notice it is above all of your slides. This is good and means you have followed the steps correctly.

Step 9: 

Now that you have laid out the groundwork to create your video; lets create it! 

Click "File" (the blue box above paste, beside the Home Tab) at the top and go to "Save Movie"

A new dialog window will open asking where to save it. Specify the location and hit "Save".

A progress bar will appear as Movie Maker makes your video!

When it is completed, you will be presented with a window saying "Play Movie" or "Open Folder". Click whichever you prefer, however if you click "Open Folder" it will open a new Window to your video's location.

Step 10:

Your done! Congratulations on creating your first Timelapse or Stopmotion video!

You can find the example video "Setting up a Tent: a Timelapse" on the ShutterScience YouTube Channel through this link:

http://youtu.be/ArXLzktS3fE

Or just Click Play!