yamahito

I need help for an idea for the first picture on the Cardiff Photomarathon I talked about back in April

Looking at the gallery the first picture has traditionally been the entry number - mine is 153.

My first idea was a couple of guys in rugby shirts, shot from the back, with the numbers ‘15′ and ‘3′ on it. Nice tie-in to cardiff, with the Millenium Stadium and all. Except that no-one will admit to owning a numbered shirt.

I did think about setting an analogue clock to seven minutes to two, but I thought that the chances were a) it’s probably been done (almost but not quite in this picture) and b) it’s a bit too obscure to stand out much.

Doing the same thing on a digital clock is almost certainly the most unoriginal thing in the entire world since some cleverdick first made a hyperbolic comparison for effect.

So does anyone have any suggestions?

Following on from part 1

The left column are reference images: the original at the top, then an orangy duotone, then an orange/green tritone.

The middle column: at the top, a blue colorization layer, then the two duotones, all applied in a Hue blend mode.

The right column is the same as the middle column, but is using marcus’ technique (technique 3 from part1) to desaturate the less colourful parts of the images. This also eliminates the colour casts from the shadows and the chips in the background wall.

If the above interested you, you can have a look at the full size image (>2MB jpeg).

Following on from my photoshop vibrancy challenge, I thought I would talk about some photoshop techniques I’ve been playing with for changing the saturation on photographs. All thumbnails are clickable.

Original shot

Apologies to my niece Megs: I took this photo without letting her pose for it with the result that she doesn’t have some fake grin and posture in it

Technique 1: Colorize in Hue Mode

a simple but effective technique I picked up last summer:

Create a HSB adjustment layer, colorize, then use the ‘hue’ blending mode.

the greys are desaturated, and although the tone is monochrome, you retain some of the depth and range of the original.

Technique 2: Duotone in Hue Mode

The first image here is the tritone, included for reference.

Once you’ve created a duotone (or tritone in this case), you can copy it back as a layer to the original, again setting it to a Hue blending mode.

The duotone gives you an extra element of control over method 1 because it allows you to define the colour at different ranges (i.e. curves of shadows, midtones & highlights). However, you can clearly see that the resultant colours can’t be judged by those of the tritone you’re using: compare the colours here to the previous image in the set (the very tritone used to set the hues).

Technique 3: Using a Saturation-based Mask

Here’s the fun bit: thanks for my friend Marcus for the first part of the recipe.

We’ve created a channel based on the saturation of the original image and used it as a mask for a HSB desaturation of -90.

This is perhaps not the best sample image to show the effect (which loses a lot of effectiveness at small sizes), but if you look closely you can see that the center of the daisy is still a bright yellow.

‘Saturation Channel’ Recipe (Tom’s version of a Marcus original):

1. Duplicate the layer(s)
2. Hide the original layer(s)
3. add a layer of solid red, blend mode Hue
4. add a layer of solid red, blend mode Luminosity
5. Flatten visible (this should leave you with an image that goes from gray to red).
6. Use the channel mixer: I used red+150 constant-30 with the monochrome option checked to give a grayscale result
7. copy the layer and paste it into the quickmask to create a selection
8. Save the selection.

In this particular image I mucked about a bit further when using the selection as an image mask with brightness and contrast.

Technique 4: Posterizing the Saturation Mask

The Saturation-based Mask is a basis for a lot of experimentation: In this case, I posterized the mask on the HSB adjustment layer.

I think the result is remarkably subtle.

Thanks to Ian Tindale for the suggestion.

note: I originally posted all of this as a set of six pictures on flickr, but I decided it was wrong there: it cluttered up my photos, used up a valuable set (free accounts only get 3). Besides, I’d want to do a comparison like this, and it’s a discussion, not a portfolio.

So I’ve replacing the flickr stuff with a composite image and a link here.

it always seems that I stop posting more often because I have something interesting to talk about that I want to take my time in posting about. Then nothing else gets posted in case I dislodge the other thing. There’s a moral in there somewhere.

Anyway, something not-as-interesting: I’ve put a lot of old photos up in my photodump. Mainly stuff I took with my first digital camera (a Fuji S602Zoom), but a few bits and pieces that have surfaced from the photo/fileserver consolidation thing I’m doing at the moment.

What, you want a link? It’s right there in the sidebar under ‘photodump’.

I still can’t find my photos from the DBS photography session St3f and I did at Bunsfield the week after the petrol depo there exploded. Grr.

Some of these guys over at Flickr have come up with an interesting effect

It uses a setting called ‘Vibrancy.’ Vibrancy is a Saturation based parameter. As far as I’m aware, this is only available in Adobe Lightroom and the latest Adobe raw converters. I don’t have either of those, so I’m guessing that increasing the vibrancy will preferentially increase saturation of the least saturated parts of an image, whilst increasing the saturation of already heavily saturated parts of the image less drastically.

The effect that the guys on flickr are using involves a decrease in vibrancy, which desaturates all but the most saturated parts of the image, and then an increase in plain ol’ saturation, which normally (or almost normally) re-satuates those parts of the image. In other words, the grey bits get greyer, the bright bits get brighter or stay the same.

The challenge, in a nutshell, is to reproduce this effect with a jpeg.

Bonus marks for explaining to me how to do it with traditional film

Actually, if you can get photoshop to do this, it raises a more general, interesting possibility: “A ‘contrast’ control for the chroma channel” (Ian Tindale’s description of it, not mine)

Ow ow ow… I tripped up running for the little green man at the crossing on the way home from work.

I was holding the new camera.

Touch wood, the damage is limited to a small scuff on the bottom of the body of the camera: I rolled as I fell, but the impact knocked it from my hand.

Worst case scenario is that the casing has buckled slightly, which will cloud the top left of the exposures (bottom right of the camera). I think that’s unlikely though, thanks to the plastic construction of the camera (sometimes plastic’s a good material).

My new film-based SLR body arrived this morning:

(had to take the picture with my shit lens, but you can just about make out my ‘I’m a mac’ mouse - there’s an ‘I’m a PC’ one, too )

One of my work-mates managed to find some old black and white film, so I’ve even taken a couple of snaps - fun fun

You may notice a new link to my flickr page

I’ve been meaning to put a selection of my better pictures on Flickr for a while: the photodump is just that, a dumping ground, diamonds and slag all together. Ian (Tindale aka Rods Tiger) has been using it for a while, and I’m impressed with the level of a lot of the photography on there.

So I’ve been having a little play, and my good impressions extend to the interface of flickr itself. I’ve even created a little “Drive By Shooting” group that any flickr users can pop their photos in once it takes off

I seem to have bought an SLR film body…

Want a picture? Course you do:

Looks in fantastic nick, and looking at reviews, the price is a bargain. Of course, it’s an el cheapo body, but I’m OK with that: it’ll fit the lenses I have, and at the end of a day everything else in a camera is a fancy box. I’m fairly familiar with a lot of its shortcomings, as my el cheapo digital body (a 350D) has a number of them in common.

I was initially a bit wary that I wouldn’t be able to play about (as easily) in photoshop, which I enjoy and was really the reason I first got into photography, but having a second body can’t be a bad thing, and restrictions in photography often end up forcing you to overcompensate, and create some special shots. Plus it can do multiple exposures, and that’s something I quite fancy playing with.

We’ll see when it arrives next week!

Check out the Cardiff/Glasgow Photomarathon

What a fantastic idea! I think this would make a great drive-by-shooting day: unfortunately it’s not free.

£10 before May day
£15 after

Plus I need to find a 35mm film body for my lenses… or I could borrow one of St3f’s pentax ones I guess.

Anyway, I hope I can persuade some of you guys to come along!