General

Warning: If you have no interest in processing images, then read no further.
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Tradition has it that wisdom is passed down through the generations. Well, not in our family; in our family it is passed up.

My main contribution to the upbringing of The Son was to impress upon him the importance of always having a can of WD-40 to hand. In return he has provided me with guidance on a number of topics, including how to make my photos look better. I could pass this wisdom back up the line to my father, but he is long gone and never held a camera anyway, so I will share it with you.

How do you look at your photos? If you are like me you mainly obsess over them on a computer monitor, often zoomed in at 100% so I can fret over the flaws. And how do others see your photos? If you are like me, then they view a reduced version via the web; perhaps on Facebook, Pattaya Days or via email.

If you want your photos to look wonderful full size, perhaps for printing large prints or just to make you feel good when you do your zooming in thing; then I can’t help you. There is plenty of information and many pieces of software that will help you in your quest to produce a wall-sized poster of your art. But if you are looking to produce good looking images at the sort of size you share on the web, then this might be for you.

The Son told me about this after I kept complaining about his photos. We both shot with a GF1 and the same lenses, but his photos always looked crisper than mine. Ignoring the fact that he has a better “eye” for composition than his father, whatever he shot just looked better on the screen. How?

Here’s how:

First, you will need Photoshop. Either the several thousand dollar boxed set of the latest Creative Suite, or a 100 baht copy of some version. Naturally, I recommend the former and use the latter. And you will need a photo to work on.

Whatever software you use to process your photos (I use Lightroom), get the following out of the way first:

1. Make any adjustments you want to the image (cropping, exposure compensation etc.)
2. Remove any noise. If you have noise and have to reduce it, the result will always be a softer image, and the tweak will help resolve that. There are a number of software applications for noise removal, but I find Lightroom to be an adequate solution.
3. If your software has any pre-specified sharpening, remove it. For example, Lightroom has a default 25% sharpening which you should remove by pushing the slider back to zero.

This is how the develop panel in Lightroom looks before I export, no sharpening and some noise reduction:

From Lightroom, I export full-size as a PSD and then open that file in Photoshop.

The tweak has four steps:
1. An initial reduction in the size of the image which will include some mild sharpening.
2. Sharpen
3. Reduce the size of the image again to the final size required, this step will also include some mild sharpening
4. Convert to JPEG and astound the world.

As you work through this, it may seem rather a lot of work to do on every photo. But you only have to do it once. Save the steps as an Action and then just apply the Action every time you want to use the tweak. More about Actions here.

This is the image I am going to tweak:

It was shot in a dark environment at ISO 1600, so I had to remove some of the noise, leaving the image looking a little soft.

So, load it into Photoshop and the first step is to reduce the size. Go to Image/Image size and make the length of the longest side (as this is a portrait image, choose the height) to 2,000 pixels.

Tick the boxes as shown and make sure you choose Bicubic Sharper, this will lightly sharpen the image as it is reduced in size. Click OK.

On to step 2, the main sharpening. First, we are going to change the colour mode of the image to Lab. Go to Image and change the colour from RGB to Lab.

If you want to know more about Lab mode, then Google will keep you busy for hours; all you need to know for the tweak is that it a good colour mode for sharpening.

Next step, head across onto to your menus, select Channels and you will see all the Lab channels highlighted. Click on Lightness so that it is the only channel highlighted, and note that your image has turned to greyscale.

Now it’s sharpening time. Select Filter/Sharpen/Smart Sharpen:

And you will get this:

Make sure you have the various options set as shown above, apart from the sliders which need a bit of discussion.

Radius: 1.2px as shown works well for 12 megapixel Micro Four Thirds size sensors. For larger sensors, like the X100, I find a lower value, around 0.9, works better.

Amount: Play around with this value. You will probably need more than 40 to make a difference, and more than 60 may start to degrade your image. As my test image has been softened by noise removal I am using quite a high value.

There are many things that can influence the “amount” settings. Different lenses, perhaps a bit of camera shake, noise reduction, all can impact how much you need to sharpen. After a bit of experience you will learn what values work best for your images. Click OK when you are happy with the preview.

Sharpening done, go back to Image/Mode and change the colour mode back to RGB.

Step 3, and we are now going to bring the image down to the final size and do some mild sharpening along the way.

Specify the size of the longest side. I use 1000 pixels, which is the size you see when you click on a Pattaya Days image. If you are producing an image for Facebook, use 720 pixels. Click OK.

That’s the processing done. Final steps are to save the file as a JPEG. Go to File/Save As and save your masterpiece as a JPEG:

Done!! If you have been following along and creating an Action, now is the time to stop it.

Your Action should look almost like this:

What it won’t have is that little box next to Smart Sharpen. Click on the space to add that box. Now run your action against another image. A dialog box will pop up to allow you to specify the sharpening settings. When you close that box, the Action will finish and you file will be created. Easy! You can also put a flag against the second “Image Size” step if you want to pick different sizes from time to time. Save your Action. Now you can use it anytime without having to step through the process.

Here is the result of the tweak on my test image:

And this was the image before the tweak:

View full size by clicking on them; the improvement is subtle but the processed image has more pop and clarity.

Here’s another one. Shot at base ISO with the GF1, there was only a tiny bit of noise to remove and the image was OK without the tweak. But even so, the tweak gave it a little something extra (click to view full size):

Original:

Tweak:

If I am putting photos on the web, most will go through the tweak process first. I think it is worth the minimal effort. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Some additional thoughts:
- You will note that my Action is called Facebook Portrait. This is because, when I defined this Action, I specified height parameters on the two image re-size steps,as we did in the example. You will have to go through the process again and build another Action where you specify the width, this can then be used for landscape orientation images. If your image is square, you can use either!

- This works with shots taken in RAW. If you shoot JPEG; change to RAW, your life will be better in many ways. If your camera doesn’t shoot RAW, buy another camera (and make sure it doesn’t have a flappy mirror).

- Why not just dial in more sharpening in Lightroom? Because this approach gives a much better result for very little additional effort (once you have set it up). It has The Son seal of approval, what more do you need to know?

- Why is this particularly good for Micro Four Thirds cameras? Because many of them have a little noise in the image, even at base ISO. Get rid of that noise, run this routine, and all your photos will look better. Mine do.

- Generating PSD files and subsequent JPEGs will take up space and will be hard to manage? Not if you delete them once you are done. Note that my saves go into a temporary data file. Once the JPEG has been uploaded to the web, the PSD and resulting JPEG are trashed. I can always generate another one if I need it.

- Why don’t I just save you the effort and provide you with these Actions? If you can’t be arsed to work through the above yourself, leave a comment below “Dear Spike, I am a lazy git, please send me the Actions.” Make sure the email address is valid because that is where I will sent them.

Spend the morning introducing a friend to the delights of Lightroom, surely the most competent and complete photo processing program on the planet.

I take him through the elegant cataloguing, keywording and search facilities, more than sufficient for me to ensure that I can gain easy access to any one of my more than 50,000 photos in my library, and where I can select, process and where necessary delete, more than 1,000 photos at a time after a heavy photo session.

He declares himself not really interested in that because he can already manage his images by keeping up to three copies and renaming them and fuck knows what else he does; but it sure as hell is not nearly as elegant as Lightroom. Anyway, I abandon further discussion on the cataloguing features and start on the develop module where he perks up and declares himself interested, whilst reminding me he can do pretty much all of this already, albeit using three or more ancient programs, none of which offer non-destructive editing I am sure.

Developing his images is not as good as it could be because he only shoots JPEG. When I suggest RAW might give him better photos, he complains about the file size. I refrain from pointing out that the 3 JPEGs of the same image that he maintains nowadays might be smaller than using a single RAW file and Lightroom; it’s just not worth it.

Get Lightroom installed on his laptop and send him away, doubting he will ever use it again.

After a frustrating morning, I spy a rather attractive plant on the balcony and decide to point various cameras at it:

First up is the Panasonic GF1 with a second-hand Yashica macro lens, total value of the gear; around 24,000 baht. Lovely, manual focus; easy to shoot.

Next is the 33,000 baht Fuji X100. Auto-focus with an attempt at manual focus refinement. A bit of a click and hope exercise.

Last, but by no means least when it comes to weight and price, we have the Canon 1D with the 300mm F2.8 lens and an extension tube; a 300,000 baht combination. Manual focus using the rather clunky Liveview feature.

Which is best? Not much to choose between them. Looking at the full size images, the Canon has a certain crispness to it; but not 267,000 baht’s worth of crispness. Plus it’s a massive, ungainly combination. Using the Fuji is a reminder that it doesn’t shine with macros, and using the GF1 is a reminder as to what a bloody wonderful little camera it is, even with a 3,000 baht second-hand lens on the front which wasn’t even designed for use with that camera. By far and away my tool of choice if I was going out to shoot flowers and the like.

The GF1/Yashica combination celebrated its win by taking a couple of even closer-up shots. Rather pleased with the second one, after I had tweaked it a bit in Lightroom:

“I want to try and photograph a glass properly.”
“Why?”
“What the hell else do I have to do while waiting to die?”

This was the essence of the conversation I had with my wife after I had spent several hours messing about with glasses and my camera. So far, the score was: Glasses 2 – Camera 0; assuming you were scoring based on breakages; but they were just some old, rather valuable, cut-glass sherry glasses that my granny used to own, so nothing to get too concerned about. My wife was more concerned about the hours of fiddling, what was the point?

It all started with a photo in a forum. Just a couple of glasses, but the capture was perfect. They were delicately outlined, there were no stray reflections, they looked fantastic. The poster referred to a book that had guided him to the result: Light:Science and Magic. A quick trip to the Amazon Kindle store and the book was on my iPad.

The book explains the science of light in the context of photography and it is a fine, if somewhat dense, read. After a couple of chapters of theory I skipped to the section on photographing glasses and was ready to begin. At the same time, neighbour Nik had also acquired the book, had skipped to the same section, and a joint exercise was undertaken.

I won’t bore you with the details (yeah, I know, it’s too late), but the concept is that your light source comes from behind the glass and goes through (or around, if you want a dark background) an opening that exactly matches what you see through your viewfinder. As a result, and based upon clever, scientific theory which I don’t recall because I either skipped it, forgot it, or didn’t understand it; the light passes cleanly through the glass to your camera sensor and gives you a crisp outline.

Great in theory, understood or not, but not so great in practice because in reality there is light bouncing off the glass from all manner of other light sources in a room. So our first effort looked like this:

Quite crispy from a distance, but look closer and you can see all sorts of reflections which should not be there. We spent more than hour removing pictures from the wall, opening and closing curtains and moving furniture; all to no avail; there was just too much light bouncing around the place.

But now, courtesy of even more shitty clothing display hangers and the entire stock of black plastic sheets from Friendship Supermarket, I have this:

Mr. Heath Robinson would have been proud.

Notice the clever vents to allow only small amounts of light to penetrate whilst allowing space for a cat to escape after it has infiltrated the structure and increased the lead of glasses over camera to 3-0. The bit of tape that holds on the “roof”, until it doesn’t and the roof comes crashing down. 4-0. The complete absence of anything that might be construed as design. Damn, I am good at this sort of thing.

An initial test with some of the few remaining pieces of glassware was quite encouraging.

The clever science explains that the further away the object is from the light source, the more distinct will be the outline. I felt that the outline on the right of the glass had passed through distinct and was now intrusive; so I moved the glasses back towards the light.

Now the outline was a little fuzzy; presumably somewhere between the two locations was a sweet spot.

I was not to find out, because she who must be obeyed suggested that if I didn’t get my head out of my miniature plastic shanty house and take her for some crucial shopping, I would not have long to wait before death visited me.

Sadly for you, to be continued.

Took a photo of my camera with my new lens attached:

Click for a larger view and you will notice that while the lens may look crispy and new, the poor camera is looking decidedly ragged. Fourteen months of continuous usage have taken their toll and Mister GF1 is looking ready for retirement.

Fortunately, I have funds saved for a new “investment”. Unfortunately, there is no micro four thirds camera on the market which takes my fancy right now. Going to have to carry on with the grubby GF1 until Panasonic or Olympus get their act together. Meantime, I will console myself with buying more lenses. There’s another one in the mail…..

The inaugural meeting of the “my condo micro four-thirds owners group” was held this morning. The meeting concluded that we still had space in a photograph for some more lenses and Mr. Ebay will be consulted accordingly.

Those with a passing interest will note that, nestling next to Nik’s red GF1, is a brand new Panasonic GH2. Photographers in America are spontaneously combusting in their attempts to acquire one of these new machines; but Nik has contacts in Hong Kong and got his yesterday. Being an exceedingly nice chap, he handed it over to me this morning to play with. Some sort of review will follow; you have been warned.