Working with New Techniques

Today I am posting another picture from the West Fork. It’s not a picture that I overlooked in the previous post, but rather one that I am using to test some new Photoshop techniques. I’ll show and describe the photo first; for anyone interested in the techniques applied, read on after the picture.

This picture was taken at the far end of West Fork Canyon, before I turned around to go back to my car. It shows the massive wall on one side of the canyon at the point where the canyon narrows and the hiking trail ends. I’ve used a larger than usual photo to better display the extent of detail achieved by applying some advanced Photoshop techniques to a carefully taken photograph. A good example of the detail can be seen in the upper right hand corner where you can see clearly the rippled texture and subtle colour tones in the lightly coloured rock. This detail is more difficult to capture than the less subtle texture of the rock face on the left.

Now for some technique. Time to stop reading if this doesn’t interest you.

The first step is always to begin with the best photo you can get with the camera. I used a tripod and triggered the camera with a time delay to ensure no movement or vibration that would introduce blur into the picture. I used the “live action” feature on my camera to set the exposure, aperture, and other settings to get the image I wanted. The aperture was set to f10.0, the focal length 22 mm, the ISO setting at 100 and exposure compensation was set to -0.33. This produced a shutter speed of 0.8 sec. which accounts for the “smoothed” appearance of the water.

Camera lenses by their design do not produce the sharpest images possible. A good lens does allow the camera to record a lot of information that can be better seen by computer enhancement of the raw image. I use Photoshop for the computer processing of my images and was fortunate to come across some work by Tony Kuyper, an Arizona based photographer who’s done some great work in developing Photoshop techniques. He has developed a number of “actions” (mini programs used within Photoshop) accompanied by some very well written tutorials to help the user understand what the actions do and how to use them. I’ve used his actions for a couple of years now and receive his updates when he creates new and better ones.

The image I used in today’s post is the first to which I have applied Tony’s newest actions, the “Luminosity Mask Triple Play”. The term “triple play” refers to the ability of the actions to alter the brightness, contrast and detail in one process. Masks are a feature of Photoshop that when placed over an image limit the amount of that image that shows through it. They can be designed to mask all or part of an image, although there would be little point to hiding all of it! Kuyper has developed sophisticated masking techniques designed to selectively allow only certain pixels to show through. The selection can be based on luminosity (brightness) for example, in which case the brightness or darkness of the pixels showing through can be chosen very precisely. It is then possible to adjust those chosen pixels only, making them darker or lighter. The choice of masks allows specific areas of an image to be adjusted, without affecting other areas of the image. This latest series of masks simplifies the process of applying luminosity masks and enables the user to work on the brightness, contrast and detail concurrently. (Brightness, contrast and detail are all attributes of a photo that are affected by changing luminosity).

Having used light and dark triple play masks to work on luminosity attributes, I then used saturation masks to enhance the colours of the image. These masks work on a similar principle but work on the intensity of the colours. Again, it is possible to work selectively on different areas of the image, changing areas where you would like to increase or decrease saturation. The goal here is to most accurately portray the colours as I remember seeing them.

Sometimes, including this photo I will apply a final action (also developed by Kupyer) entitled “Smart Glow”. It applies a luminous glow to the image which can be best perceived by comparison to the same image without it. Adding glow slightly increases contrast in the mid-tones and boosts saturation. The net result of the enhanced colors, softer color transitions, and the intact texture is a very real sense of glow. It applies better in some images than other; it did not come through strongly on this particular one. “Smart” refers to the ability to adjust the level of glow as you work with the image.

The last step in processing an image is to sharpen it. Sharpening works only on the tonal edges of an image. You make an image sharper or softer by enhancing or blurring edge detail to make boundaries between darker and lighter image tones more or less prominent. There are a number of algorithms available to perform sharpening, including several within Photoshop. I prefer to use “Unsharp Mask”, a tool whose name would seem misleading. In this photo, I’ve gone a step further and applied a technique I found in “Photoshop User”. I applied unsharp mask to the image and then filled the mask with black, obscuring any sharpening. I then selectively “brushed away”  the black to allow sharpening to show through at varying degrees in different parts of the image. Areas that I wished to have stand out more are sharper than others. The creek bed, rocks and fallen branches in the foreground are the sharpest in this case.

So why go to this trouble? It is not very necessary for a picture posted on the web. Much of the detail gets lost in the low resolution of a web image. It does become more important in preparing an image for printing, particularly an enlargement. I constantly strive to make my pictures better and I derive satisfaction from a quality print enlargement.