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More Manual Strobe Photos – Catalina Island 8-03

2 February 2010, 11:43 am

Sea Star Catalina Island Sheepshead Catalina Island Yet Another Garibaldi Catalina Island
More manual strobe (non-TTL) shots. And some seriously murky water. This day did have nice weather, it was August and the sun was out and the weather was warm. But the water was very murky as you can see in the shots. Although some of the photos look kind of surreal.

But I was really getting the hang of this manual strobe. This is using the diffuser cap I stuffed with extra layers of frosted mylar to give extra diffusing power. I like the way the light was just falling off the subject and allowing lots of blue and green to show in the background. I also got a few shots of an Abalone I fed kelp to. Only one shot of three had a decent exposure and it was questionable, but I posted it. It was so cool because I broke off a small piece of kelp and laid it in front of him, and he lifted his shell and snatched it up. In the photo I posted you can see a second piece of kelp I tried to offer, but he wasn’t interested.

As far as photoshop on these photos, the way I light these shots still leaves plenty of room for my usual levels and curves adjustment layers. The strobe lights the foreground and adds to reds, but where it drops off the color situation is the same as without a strobe. In many of these I could subtract a little red along with subtracting plenty of blue and green, and get some nice results, rather than mostly adding a little red as when using no strobe at all.

Filed under Dive Trip Photos. Tagged Abalone, curves, diffuser, kelp, Levels, murky, strobe
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Mudslide Catalina Island

20 January 2010, 4:02 pm

I saw on TV news this morning that Catalina Island’s Avalon Harbor suffered a serious mudslide during this present rain storm. I’m not sure but it may have occurred yesterday. The news story showed video of the Golf Cart Rental in Avalon collapsed by and partially buried in mud! Other business were also affected and the damage was substantial. Hopefully all are okay.

I’ve been searching the web for more news on this but have not been able to locate any. I’ll post more info and links if I find them.

Filed under General Misc. Tagged Avalon Harbor, mudslide, rain, storm
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Masking Filters — When to (actually) sharpen digital images.

13 January 2010, 1:36 am

A good digital photo can be over sharp to begin with and so sharpening is not always your first priority. Then again pictures do sometimes come out “less than perfectly focused.” The temptation is to think, “why not sharpen this blurred photo?” But no, everyone tells you, you can’t fix an out of focus shot. And you think, “then why all the tools?”

Out of focus shots, such as below left, can be made serviceable, as shown at right, with Smart Sharpen or Unsharp Mask or there’d be no need for those filters. It’s good to be able to recognize which photos can be brought back to something usable and some basics to make it happen.

Blurry photo of sea anemone Blurry photo of sea anemone

Above left the image is blurry overall, and more so where the anemone’s appendages are moving. And that’s what will make this fix work. To look realistic the background doesn’t need to be sharp and the appendages can’t look sharp. So like blurring the shrimp image in the previous post about masking filters, the entire image can be duplicated to a new layer and sharpened with the aim of making the center of the anemone look good. Then similar to the shrimp example, the sharpened background and whipping appendages can be painted out on a layer mask leaving only the center of the subject sharpened, but still looking natural and un-retouched.

Filed under Photoshop Underwater. Tagged blurry, filter, layer, mask, sharpen, unsharp
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Manual Strobe (me?) — Catalina 6-03

12 January 2010, 6:14 pm

Anchor resting on the bottom floor near the Catalina Isthmus. Anchor resting on the bottom floor near the Catalina Isthmus. Anchor resting on the bottom floor near the Catalina Isthmus. Anchor resting on the bottom floor near the Catalina Isthmus.
These are photos I shot, with a strobe actually, on a trip to Catalina in June 03. The vis was not too great, and the day was partially sunny. This was the second time I took out this strobe. It’s a DS50, hooked through the housing to the camera, so it is fired manually by the camera, but not TTL. It has maybe two intensity settings, I think the new DS51 has something like 6.

The first time I shot with this strobe (5-03) the lighting was way too harsh. I took it out a second time that day with the diffuser cap on and it was still too harsh. This trip I outfitted the diffuser cap with 10 or 20 layers (I forget) of frosted mylar all stacked and trimmed and fitted inside the cap and I think it worked great, and haven’t really tinkered with the amount of frosted mylar since.

None of these shots are really great. Here I’m busy trying to come up with some working exposures and am not too concerned with composing something serious. I did start to hit on some shots where the subject was lit and still the background maintained some ocean color and hadn’t turned moonscape black. I’m into getting ocean color in my backgrounds when shooting daytime, even when I’m using a strobe.

Filed under Dive Trip Photos. Tagged diffuser, exposures, ocean color, strobe, TTL
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Masking Adjustment Layers and When (not) to Sharpen — Mantis Shrimp Photo

31 December 2009, 3:04 am

ex.1 Mantis Shrimp After Photoshop

Click to view larger images.

Many times, if I’m getting my exposures right, and there is adequate lighting, i.e., I’m not too deep and the visibility is not too poor, the resulting photos will clean up nicely with a simple levels adjustment and maybe an added contrast curve. Then there are the other times when maybe the lighting was not quite right, or there are some challenging camouflage issues between fish and reef, where a photo may require several specialized adjustments. In addition some of the adjustment layers may also require special masking. Some layers my even need to be duplicated and treated with special sharpen or blur filters. This mantis shrimp photo at left happened to be such an image. The final has one Levels adjustment, one Selective Color and one Curves. The selective color and curves are masked to affect only the shrimp or the background, and a duplicate background layer is treated with filters and masks to further separate the background from the subject.

I will walk through these steps and touch on various reasonings for the actions taken. The first move is levels, seen below right, next to the original. Much of the blue-green cast is removed, but not so much as to completely disguise the fact that the scene is underwater. But now something else catches my eye. In my memory of the dive this creature was brightly colored. Moving from the largest problems to the smallest, I’ve addressed the levels and now move to the more specific problem of cleaning up the creatures brighter colors. I’m choosing a selective color adjustment layer to deal specifically with the saturated colors of the subject shrimp. Under the color cast of the ocean our minds “fool” our eyes into seeing these colors more brightly than the camera initially captures them. The color information is still there to be captured by the camera and brought out with Photoshop, or our minds wouldn’t know how to “fill in the blanks” in our perception.

ex.2 Mantis Shrimp Before Photoshop ex.3 Mantis Shrimp Levels Continue reading ‘Masking Adjustment Layers and When (not) to Sharpen — Mantis Shrimp Photo’ »

Filed under Photoshop Underwater. Tagged adjustment layers, blur, Catalina Island, color, Contrast Curves, Levels, Mantis Shrimp, masking, professional, saturated, selective, sharpen
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New Movie — Lion’s Head Reef, Catalina 11-07

29 December 2009, 10:28 pm

Link to Lion's Head Reef movie on youtube This is a movie of Lion’s Head Reef shot with my newer Fuji E900. It’s a 9 mega pixel camera. I had good visibility this day, it was November but very nice weather. I made this video in Final Cut instead of AfterEffects. This one’s different from my previous movies though, in that you can hear my bubbles underwater. My older camera couldn’t record sound.

Filed under Underwater Movies. Tagged aftereffects, final cut, fish, garibaldi, shallows
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Sheep Crab, Bat Ray, Lobster Photos, Catalina 4-03

20 December 2009, 1:17 am

Sheep Crab Bat Ray
These sheep crab photos are particularly cool. I also really like the Bat Ray 1 photo. According to my dive log, this dive was west of Emerald Bay, and my notes say the vis was not great but not bad. I think the photos, once photoshopped, turned out really good, so this tells you something about how much help photoshop really is. As usual I just did one levels adjustment and may have added a contrast curve on few. Other than that, I did nothing fancy for any of these shots.

My log also indicates that I ran out of batteries quickly, and that I saw a nice sized Leopard Shark. Apparently I ran out of batteries before I got a photo of him.

Filed under Dive Trip Photos. Tagged Bat Ray, Contrast Curve, Levels, Lobster, Sheep Crab
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Mantis Shrimp Photos, Catalina Island 3-03

17 December 2009, 12:16 pm

Mantis Shrimp Weird Fish Kelp Beds
These Mantis Shrimp photos are way cool. These guys are dangerous! Supposedly they are the fastest creatures alive. Those pretty yellow front appendages are actually razor blades, and they use them!

Photoshop moves? Well I did some nice masking on the Mantis photo number two. I did my usual levels adjustment and added a bit of a contrast curve. But then I did a nice Selective Color adjustment on the yellows to clean up his yellow razor blades. That selective color adjustment affected the surrounding rocks, so I masked it out of the background to let affect only the mantis. As is typical with digital photos, the background was way too sharp so I also did a Lens blur on the entire image and used the same mask to mask out the blurred shrimp, leaving a sharp shrimp and slightly blurred background.

I’ve seen some insanely laughable things on the web by so-called photoshop authorities where they actually sharpen the edges of the subject of a photo to make it “pop.” This is so Bass Ackwards it makes me cringe. Sharpening a digital photo is already a no-no, but sharpening the edges of a subject? Super no-no! When sharpening you want to sharpen everything except the edges! What a laugh! When you want to emphasize a subject, you blur the background, not sharpen the subject. Yeesh. View Mantis photos 1, 3, 4 to see how the background looks when not slightly blurred. In photo 2 the shrimp pops but the background looks natural.

Filed under Dive Trip Photos. Tagged Contrast Curve, Levels, Mantis Shrimp, masking, sharpen
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Catalina Island, Church Rock 12-02

7 December 2009, 2:54 pm

Garibaldi at Church Rock Scuba Santa Fish gather in kelp Jellyfish
Here are photos from my dive trip to Church Rock at Catalina Island, 12-02. This was a great dive trip on the Mr. C for their annual Christmas Dive.

We dove the west side of Catalina which is really cool because usually we’re diving the East side. We dove Church Rock and then points in between Church Rock and Avalon. We moored in Avalon overnight and went ashore at night.

This was a tough batch of photos to work with. The weather this day was cloudy and almost raining. But we had great visibility this day. These shots were all taken before I adopted my strict “slightly underexposed” rule and made working them even tougher.

I’ve found when working with Photoshop, either with “normal” photography or with underwater, working an mildly overexposed photo is always much tougher than working a mildly underexposed photo. With that thought I eventually landed on a technique that allows the most usable photos underwater, and that is to always shoot just slightly underexposed, just slightly left of center of the light meter, dead center as second option, and never right of center if possible.

One simple levels layer in most cases was not enough, occasionally on these I’d throw a second levels and make a small targeted move, this helps a lot on though shots. Some were so dark, I’d use a cheater curve, a curves adjustment layer giving a good tug up on the tree-quarter tones. Then add a levels adjustment layer, making sure the levels was on top of the image and underneath the curve, and work my levels that way. After that I’d go back to the curves and readjust. I work back and forth that way in all cases. The more adjustment layers I add, the more I’ll re-visit and re-adjust previous layers. This gives better results than setting an adjustment and then forcing all following adjustments to work with the first. In this batch I was using curves first, just to allow me to see the changes being affected in levels, then I’d re-do, hide or eliminate the first curve, adding a second targeted levels or a different adjustment based on hints gained when working with my “cheater curve.”

Filed under Dive Trip Photos. Tagged adjustment layers, Avalon Harbor, Catalina Island, cheater curve, Church Rock, curves, Levels, light meter, overexposed, underexposed
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Santa Cruz 10-02 Before and After

2 December 2009, 3:51 pm

Santa Cruz Isl Underwater Wall Before Santa Cruz Isl Underwater Wall After Santa Cruz Isl Sun Star Santa Before Santa Cruz Sun Star After
Here is a select sample of before and after shots from the Santa Cruz Island gallery previously posted. The comments on the “Before” shots tell what moves I made to adjust the respective following image. Enjoy.

Filed under Photos Before and After. Tagged Santa Cruz Island
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