Making "Early Morning"

I’m happy to use the opportunity of PhotoCritiQ’s new blog feature to talk about making one of my favorite images, “Early Morning”. (Image at right.)

This is literally a photograph of my backyard. I’ve done variations of this shot a thousand times, some not too shabby, but none that has captured the essence of the place as well as this one, however banal it may be as an image.

Taken on 7/10/07, the day dawned with hot, humid conditions. Pretty close to steamy. I was up early and noted the developing elegance of the morning sky. I decided to try a series of shots from the roof, using a wide-angle lens and a sequence of overlapping landscape shots to later stitch as a vertical panorama.

My objective was to capture the ambiance of the pool and umbrella paired with the tidal inlet and developing sky. By using a shot sequence, I would be able to expose and focus separately for each zone of the image, promising some degree of a hyperfocal result.

On the downside, I am not particularly fond of heights and did not use a tripod because the light was rapidly changing, so the series would have to be handheld.

The EXIF data to the right is for one of the shots. Speed was used as the variable for the five shot sequence, with aperture and focal length held constant (obviously). The time markers shown are off by two hours because of DxO's demosaicing. The actual shots were taken around 6:00 am.

 


 

 

At the left are the five raw captures used to create the panorama. Unfortunately, I did not keep a copy of the unflattened photomerge file. If memory serves, though, I used the interactive merge option and ended up not using the frame that is one down from the top.

Each of the raw captures got individual treatment in the raw converter to maximize the files’ details in the context of the forthcoming photomerge. The obvious vignetting is a regular feature at 17 mm with the hood on and a polarizer in place. I live with it.

I used Photoshop’s auto-align and auto-blend features and ended up with the image shown above. While quite flat, the level of detail and range was perfect

 

 

At the right is a screen shot of the layers panel of the processed file (omitting print output adjustments and final sharpening).

For me, this is a pretty simple file. Most of the work was controlling contrast by tonal quadrants and doing color corrections in localized areas. Most of the masking work used intersected luminosity masks, as shown in the channels palette screen shot below:

 

For the eagle-eyed, yes, I did have to do a skew adjustment much later in processing than is optimal to image quality.

 
by Patricia A. Minicucci on October 11, 2007, 2:50 am Tags:

Comments:

by Aaron Falkenberg, Thu October 11, 2007, 11:01:06 , modified October 11, 2007, 11:09:56
This is quite interesting Pat, I never would have guessed a set of horizontal images merged together. Your processing goes beyond my ability with layers; I have a bad habit of working "quick and dirty" on the image itself. I'm curious, though, how big was the raw merged image, and how big was it with 15 layers? How do you go about creating "intersected luminosity masks?"

I want to add that I think this new "blog" feature is great. Pat, you've done a fine job. I was about to do one, too, but can't since both my backup image drive, and my boot drive became corrupt during a restoration :-( If the file recovery goes as planned, I should be back up and running soon.

Lastly, could you send in the right direction of that mini-tutorial on recovering highlight detail from one channel based on information from the others?

Cheers,
Aaron
by Patricia A. Minicucci, Thu October 11, 2007, 12:04:35
Hi Aaron:

When I am using photomerge, I'd typically set the raw converter to output one or more steps down from the file's native size to prevent having a gorilla file on my hands. (On the other hand, if you have the patience for it, you can make very big, very high res images.) For this image, I used one step down, which outputs a file that is 64 MB in size. The unflattened merge file was likely around 800 MB. Cropped and flattened, the file for this shot came down to 72 MB. With processing layers, size shot up to 500MB. Adding output sharpening, et al (which I do not save with the file) probably brought to 750 MB or so for print work. Cropped pixel dimensions for the final file were 3133 X 3976.

Using luminosity masks (which are self-feathering and therefore invisible) is just the neatest trick in the book. You start with a garden variety luminosity mask (Cmd-Opt +~ on the Mac, Alt-Control+~ on the PC) for any selected color channel. Using Shift-Alt-Ctrl+click (Shift-Cmd-Opt+click on the Mac) on the active mask will "intersect" the mask with itself, creating ever-narrowing selections of brightness areas if using a standard "lights" mask and ever-narrowing selections of dark areas if using the inverse of the lights mask. I learned this from Tony Kuyper's outstanding tutorial, located here;

http://www.goodlight.us/writing/luminositymasks/luminositymasks-1.html

He even publishes an action that will create the masks for you. Once in hand, creative usage is almost infinite. For example, you can add a gradient to a mid-tone mask to localize the mask to certain areas. Or use a curve on the mask itself to strengthen or weaken its effect. By using the add or subtract selections features, you can hone the masks to any thing you want. I find this technique indispensible. Steepening a curve with a basic midtone mask does more for image clarity than anything else I know.

The discussion on channel mixer as a means of recovering highlight detail was here:

http://www.photocritiq.com/set?setid=105;photoid=20792
by AmilcarBarca, Fri October 12, 2007, 13:47:16 , modified October 12, 2007, 13:48:21
Hi Pat,

I agree with Aaron, I find the addition of blogs a great feature and one that you have put to good use, I love your first entry and I am already waiting for the next one ;-)

What I find most inspiring in your workflow is how well organized and neat your process is. Like Aaron says, quick and dirty processing is tempting, especially when there are quite a few steps involved.

I have to thank you for sharing the luminosity masks technique a while ago - I started using them back then and I haven't stopped since - they are easy to use and produce spotless mask blending, it amazes me that they seem to be fairly unknown.

Thanks for posting this and for all your help,
Mamen
by Mihai Suciu, Fri October 12, 2007, 21:08:54
What a great thing you're doing here, Patricia! I've studied your steps and the links provided - a whole new world is opening up for me here. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with us! Best wishes!
by Patricia A. Minicucci, Sat October 13, 2007, 11:48:41
Thanks Mamen and Mihai. Fun to do but a bit of a hassle re formatting. Cindy is on it, though. It is a great feature!
by Alberto Conde, Sun October 14, 2007, 16:01:59
Hi, Pat. Many thanks for sharing this superb work. I'll be avidly reading and learning your good and interesting technique.

I think I'll contribute, myself, some similar idea to this new feature because the blog feature is fantastic. A great discovery for someone that has been away for a number of days while moving to a new appartment in downtown Madrid.

If ever any of you come to town please let me know because you are all invited here: A spacious place with some 200 sq.mts in a beginning of 20th C. building. The only drawback is that we are still waiting for thelephone - and internet line - to be connected!
by Juan Riera, Wed October 24, 2007, 15:35:53
Patricia, I am unable to read the text above in your "making of". I guess the resolution of image is not well adapted to my monitor? Btw, I have just discovered today your images, posts and comments. Great work.

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