Keeping Cool in the Summer Shade
After a dark and stormy night, it’s been a hot and humid morning … so I put together a small gallery of ferns, berries, flowers, vines, and ‘shrooms beating the heat in the summer shade.
Click the first image to begin the slideshow and enjoy the shade; stay cool!
Before and After: Flickr Reboot – Orchids
For my Flickr Reboot project, I decided to start by working on photos I’d taken of orchids at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, thinking that the variety of colors, focal lengths, and scenes in these photos would help me explore the capabilities in Lightroom as well as the tools and filters available in the Nik Collection by DxO.
I first cropped and straightened the images in Lightroom, then removed any distracting spots as well as any artifacts created by dust on the camera sensor or lens. If I thought the image would be improved by darkening or softening its background elements, I used graduated or radial filters to make those alterations by decreasing exposure, clarity, and sharpness. For some of the images, I increased saturation on or shifted some of the colors (usually those in the blue, purple, and magenta ranges) just a bit, since I knew I might apply additional color, saturation, or contrast adjustments using the Nik Collection filters. Given that the focus and light characteristics of all the images was similar, I typically applied the same amount of sharpening and noise reduction to each one before moving on to continue processing with the Nik Collection.
The Collection includes a tool called DFine 2 that I used on each photo to further reduce noise, which the tool accomplishes by taking a few seconds to analyze the image and apply an automatic noise reduction. To this point in the workflow, everything was pretty straightforward and once the noise reduction was applied, I had a good idea whether to keep working on an image or move on to a different one. With several hundred to choose from, it seemed smart to be strict about culling those I thought might yield unsatisfactory results. Obviously, the rejects aren’t included in this blog post … 🙂 … although it might be fun to bring up a few examples of the “fails” and write about those too.
I spent most of my time adjusting the images using the filters in Color Efex Pro. It was a little intimidating at first to determine which ones would be most useful, since some of the filters are more aligned with technical improvements and others introduce creative effects. All of this is very subjective, of course, especially when there are so many choices and you can readily convert any photo to something completely different by selecting different filters. But since my goal was to improve the photos rather than significantly change their appearance — and after processing some and starting over several times — I ended out using certain filters frequently and in a similar sequence, like this:
White Neutralizer: This filter removed color cast from the photos, brightening and clarifying the whites and altering some color characteristics. Though I used it on every one, its effects are very evident on the first four, where white in the blooms is much more like “pure white” in the after-image. The filter also shifted purple to light blue, and the extent of that color change was easily adjusted with the filter’s settings.
Brilliance/Warmth: I used this filter to adjust color saturation and emphasize contrasts between colors, mostly to the foreground elements of individual images.
Darken/Lighten Center: This filter was a lot of fun. Its settings allowed me to brighten specific areas in the images while simultaneously darkening other areas. The filter lets you set your own image center with a point-and-click and define the size of the area to be brightened, so you can stab at an area of the image then decide how broadly you want to apply the effect. This one is most evident in the second to last photo, where I wanted to re-balance the lighting over the cluster of orchid blooms.
Tonal Contrast: While this wasn’t necessarily the only filter I used to alter contrast, I found that it did a good job of enhancing the distinction between foreground and background elements. Very evident in the last photo (though applicable to all), the effect of the filter was to increase the appearance of depth by further darkening and softening backgrounds beyond Lightroom graduated filters, giving the foreground elements more color, clarity, and presence.
As a last step, I ran all of the images through Nik’s Output Sharpener, mainly to apply sharpening, structural detail, or additional focus to specific parts of each image rather than the whole. I learned pretty quickly that I had to be careful about applying too much sharpening with this tool, and that it was most appropriate (since I had already globally sharpened the image in Lightroom) for selective sharpening.
I’ve added a “Nik Collection” category to this site; my previous posts exploring the software are here.
Over the weekend, I’ll be attending two webinars presented by DxO Labs: one providing an overview of all the tools in the Collection, and one about advanced features. I will take notes!
Select the first image below to slideshow through the before and after versions; thanks for reading and taking a look!
Quotes from My Library: Transitions
This is the third post in a series I started earlier this year, featuring quotations from books in my library.
The section below includes quotations about making life transitions — movement from any one life stage to another or to several others — as discussed in Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra. For me, the strength of Ibarra’s book lies not as much in its career advice as in its focus on the psychological aspects of making any transition or life change. Ibarra elaborates on how transitions occur in terms of practical experience, and how this experience will feel over time — as an exploration of “possible selves” even in the absence of an explicitly identified end result. For Ibarra, planning and introspection must take a back seat to experimentation and reframing our stories as we move toward newly defined identities.
Ibarra rounds out the book with comprehensive practical advice, and the cumulative effect of the book is to create a safer and more comfortable personal space for engaging with and working through any life transition. Highly recommended: Ibarra’s writing repays study of its substantial and unique ideas that have value well beyond what can be represented in a few quotations.
From Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra:
“Many of us feel a tug between well-paid, challenging, or stable jobs and the vocations we have practiced on the side, in some cases for the whole of our professional lives. Becoming a musician, a writer, an artist, a photographer, or a fashion designer at midcareer entails big personal sacrifices and typically dumbfounds the people around us, who fail to see why we don’t simply keep our passions safely on the side.”
“Since we are many selves, changing is not a process of swapping one identity for another but rather a transition process in which we reconfigure the full set of possibilities.”
“To launch ourselves anew, we need to get out of our heads. We need to act.”
“We learn who we are — in practice, not in theory — by testing reality, not by looking inside. We discover the true possibilities by doing — trying out new activities, reaching out to new groups, finding new role models, and reworking our story as we tell it to those around us.”
“During the between-identities period, we feel torn in many different directions. Although there are many moments of reflection, this is not a quiet period: A multitude of selves — old and new, desired and dreaded — are coming to the surface, noisily coexisting.”
“[No] matter where we start, our ideas for change change along the way, as we change. Where we end up often surprises us. For these reasons, as much as we would like to, we simply cannot plan and program our way into our reinvention.”
“How do we create and test possible selves? We bring them to life by doing new things, making new connections, and retelling our stories. These reinvention practices ground us in direct experience, preventing the change process from remaining too abstract. New competencies and points of view take shape as we act and, as those around us react, help us narrow the gap between the imagined possible selves that exist only in our minds and the ‘real’ alternatives that can be known only in the doing.”
“Old possible selves are always more vivid than the new: They are attached to familiar routines, to people we trust, to well-rehearsed stories. The selves that have existed only in our minds as fantasies or that are grounded only in fleeting encounters with people who captured our imagination are much fuzzier, fragile, unformed…. Whether it takes months or years, living [these] contradictions is one of the toughest tasks of transition.”
“Change takes time because we usually have to cycle through identifying and testing possibilities a few times, asking better questions with each round of tests, crafting better experiments, and building on what we have learned before…. Which self we test hardly matters; small steps like embarking on a new project or going to a night course can ignite a process that changes everything….”
“Self-creation is a lifelong journey. Only by our actions do we learn who we want to become, how best to travel, and what else will need to change to ease the way.”
“We don’t find ourselves in a blinding flash of insight, and neither do we change overnight. We learn by doing, and each new experience is part answer and part question.”
“Once you head down the path of discovery, there is no going back.”
