Before and After: Blue Window
I was browsing through some old photos on my computer the other day, and came across this one that I took about a half-block from Oakland Cemetery a few years ago. The building shown in the photo has since been demolished, but I remembered taking the shot because I liked the color of the boards covering the window and the suggestion of similar colors in the siding. I never did anything with the photo, just kept it, but thought it would be fun to see what I could come up with by experimenting some more with Adobe Lightroom and with the Nik Collection that I downloaded last week. Here is the original, unedited photo:
My first step was to use the Transform panel in Lightroom to shift the photo to a perpendicular perspective, so that it appears you are now looking straight toward the window rather than at the angle shown in the original. The transformation also resulted in a segmenting the photo almost equally into three distinct elements: the siding to the left, the window in the center, and the leaves coming in from the right side and partially covering the window.
At this point, in Lightroom, I made some exposure adjustments to brighten the image overall, to deepen the contrast, and to increase color saturation on the colors in the siding and on the window. The focus on the leaves was not great, so I adjusted sharpness, clarity, and noise reduction to try and repair some of that, but it didn’t really help. Even though the siding and window boards are clear with reasonably good detail, the fact that the leaves were originally out of focus is still very apparent. But sometimes you gotta work with what you’ve got, and see where you end out when you end out there.
I used this image to become more familiar with different capabilities in the Nik Collection filters, but didn’t keep close track of each incremental adjustment. However, the key changes that got me to the result shown below were these:
- Adding structure to create additional detail in the siding on the left third of the photo, which also brought out the scraggly vine running up the wall;
- Using the Remove Color Cast filter to eliminate cyan color from the photo, which shifted the siding colors to blue/gray, purple, and magenta and the window boards from a washed-out light cyan/blue tone to a deeper blue;
- Using the Remove Color Cast filter to remove most yellow color from the photo, which shifted the leaves on the right side into a richer and more consistent green color rather than a yellow/green blend;
- Adding the Classical Soft Focus filter primarily over the leaves and slightly over the window boards to reduce the impression that the leaves were out of focus, and create a soft transition from the leaves to the window boards.
With these adjustments done, I returned to Lightroom and added saturation to purple and magenta colors for the siding and blue for the door, to emphasize three individual color panels in the final image. Here’s where I stopped, with this substantially different representation of the original photo. Click the image to see a larger version.
To see the progression as a slideshow from the original unedited image to the stylized version shown above, click on the first photo below:
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
Before and After: Angels and Lilies
The four photos I have experimented with in this post are from Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. Here I take two passes at each of the original photos, the first to make initial improvements using Adobe Lightroom, and the second to have my first experience with a set of plugins that can be used to apply creative effects to images, described below.
In Lightroom, I emphasized the angel statue by working on the background first: reducing exposure, clarity, and sharpness using graduated filters; and reducing saturation in some of the background colors. I then added a little light and a bit of sharpening to the angel faces using a radial filter. Removing spots followed that and was quite a challenge in these photos; but by zooming into sections of each image, I could eventually differentiate spots of debris from texture in the statue’s plaster, enabling me to remove those that created bumpy shadows or were a distraction to my eye. Lightroom does an awesome job with spot removal, and even though it took a while, the effort did seem to improve the photos while retaining most of the detailed texture of the statue — without damaging the structural smoothness of the angel, her wings, or her gown. As the last step, I adjusted overall sharpness then removed a final few spots that only popped out at the higher sharpness level. I applied similar effects to the single photo of the lilies; though it was the foreground that I de-emphasized since the flowers are set toward the back.
Click the first image to begin a slideshow showing the original, unprocessed images followed by the Lightroom edits described above.
I’ve been wanting to learn more about the Nik Collection 2018 plugins for Lightroom and Photoshop for a while now, ever since I read about them here: Bluebrightly Wanderings and Observations — so yesterday I watched these two YouTube videos about the software. The first one provides an introduction to the seven tools in the collection, and the second a more detailed overview and demonstration of the individual plugins:
Introduction to the Nik Collection
There are an enormous number of functions in the collection, and I’ve barely scratched at the surface, but the two videos gave me an idea of the workflow for using it and enough information to get me started, so I downloaded a 30-day trial of the plugins from the DxO website, here: Download the New Nik Collection by DxO.
Given their relative simplicity, the angel statue photos seemed like good candidates for this experiment. To produce the after-results in the slideshow below, I applied several filters to one of the images, including a soft focus filter, a darkening filter, and a whitening filter. One of the powerful features of this software is that you can apply the filters to the entire image, then pick “control points” to reduce or eliminate the filter effects selectively from parts of the photo. In this case, I applied the soft focus filter to the whole image, then removed it from the angel’s face. The effect, of course, should be to draw your eye to the face as the intended focal point of the image, while further de-emphasizing the background yet still keeping it as part of the character of the photo. Once I was satisfied with one photo, I used the plugin’s “save recipe” function — which saves all the filters and settings — then applied the recipe to the other photos in this set.
Select the first image below to compare the images as edited in Lightroom with the effects I applied using the Nik Collection plugins:
The effects, of course, create a completely different kind of image, and the creative options provided by the collection seem to be pretty close to endless. I only used three or four of about 60 effects available … in only one of the seven plugins. Select the image below to see larger versions of the end result (or, the end result for now until I learn more!)
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
Secrets Inside a Grapevine
Earlier this week, on a hot and sunny morning, I wanted to find out what I would see if I stuck my head and my macro lens into the interior of a Catawba Grapevine, behind the broad leaves and long stems twisted throughout an old iron obelisk trellis in one corner of my garden. The Catawba Grapevine is one of two I planted years ago as an experiment; the other is a Concord Grapevine, growing in a four-foot tall ceramic pot, winding up and through the bars of a fan-shaped trellis. Neither one produces grapes any more, but the Catawba has been returning every year for four years, and the Concord has grown back each spring and summer for eight years. In their first couple of years they both produced grapes, though the grapes never matured beyond the size of a pea: birds loved the tiny grapes and it was common for me to see a flurry of wings and beaks jabbing at the grape clusters until they were picked clean.
Both vines continue to grow and develop new leaves, stems, and tendrils until cooler fall weather sets in, when the leaves turn pale yellow, light orange, then brown as they begin to fall off. I looked for some of the tinier subjects to photograph; the photos below show some of the emerging leaves and the lines and curves of the tendrils as they search for places to attach. Sunlight, while very bright when I took these pictures, was filtered through the leaves, caused some harshness and clipping that I adjusted out of the photos as much as possible. At the same time, the sunlight also created some interesting background shapes and colors. Where you see a lot of white in the new leaves, that’s because they’re white on the bottom and shades of green and yellow on the top side.
The tendrils were a challenge to photograph, as the slightest breeze pushed them out of focus, and I’ll likely make another attempt at similar shots on a calmer day. The white clipping on the last photo was driving me crazy: I kept trying to de-emphasize it but couldn’t get it right without creating distracting artifacts in the image. I ended out emphasizing it instead by blurring and darkening the background, so it looks like a little flame instead of a … flameout.
These tendrils seem delicate but in reality are quite strong. The Catawba attaches itself tightly to the iron bars, and frequently latches onto the branches of Chinese fringe flower bushes that are growing nearby. I always thought it was just wind, coincidence, and a bit of stickiness that prompted the tendrils to attach to something, but I learned while researching this article that the plant follows a chemical and physiological process called thigmotropism to seek out and hook to attachment points. The tendrils can discriminate between the plant itself and other attachment points, favoring external attachments over self-attachment. This process can occur quickly: according to The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird:
“When the tendril … finds a perch, within twenty seconds it starts to curve around the object, and within the hour has wound itself so firmly it is hard to tear away. The tendril then curls itself like a corkscrew and in so doing raises the vine to itself.”
There is a description of this process, and some of the research behind it, at The Guardian, here: Scientists unwind the secrets of climbing plants’ tendrils; and an illustrated guide to the parts of a grapevine here: Grapevine Structure and Function (pdf).
Select any of the images below to begin a slideshow. As always: thanks for reading and taking a look!
