Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Digging in the Shadows

It was a bit early in the season to find snakes sunning themselves on warm rocks, so we were pleasantly surprised when we came a little one slowly crawling up on a rock. The setting was a little creek in our favorite park, just below a bridge. The bright afternoon sun brightly lit up part of the rock. The rest was in the deep shadow of the bridge we were standing on.

Not much of a photo opportunity, but I took a couple of shots anyway.

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This is were post-processing can rescue an otherwise useless photo. I talked about this in a recent post over in the “other corner” of Café Ludwig. You can read all about it here: Lost your friends to the shadows? This photo seemed a good chance to do some “umbraluminology” – that is my term using poor Latin for “the art of illuminating the shadows”.

I always start in Photo Gallery. The histogram showed that the camera was fooled into underexposing the photo. I have it set for “center-weighted” exposure measuring. The sunlit rock is all the sensor would see.

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Moving the Shadows slider all the way to the right brought out detail in the shadow, but not nearly enough.

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Before I reached for more powerful tools I decided a crop would be in order. Then I took a look at what I could do in Picasa. The “Fill light” slider helped some but it was not much of an improvement. I even tried the HDR effect. Nothing there.

Next I took the photo into onOne Perfect Effects 8. I really like the HDR effect that tool provides. With that I could bring out more details from the shadows. The noise also became quite noticeable. My next attempt was to see what I could do with PaintShop Pro. I selected the triangular shadow part and applied some noise reduction. Then I took the whole photo into Topaz Detail for bringing out some of the fine detail. No, none of these tools turned this into a “fine art” photo. But I did pull out an amazing amount of detail. This is not a story about artistic accomplishments but rather an illustration of just how much detail is literally lurking in the shadows of photos. The moral of the story is this: Don’t discard a photo just because the faces of your friends are unrecognizably dark, or that the shadows hide all the interesting stuff. Be aggressive in post-processing.

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Get skilled in “umbraluminology”, there is treasure “in them thar shadows”.

.:.

© 2014 Ludwig Keck

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Museum

I met them at the Museum

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They were not very talkative but told many old tales!

At the Michael C. Carlos Museum

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Museum Photography

Museum Photography

.:.

© 2014 Ludwig Keck