Complete post-processing tutorial, DRI, blending, lightroom, photoshop

Photoshop File (1600px) with all the layers

Download complete photoshop file that was created in the tutorial above. The image size is 1600px on the longer edge and the file size is around 100MB.
You can download the file for 3 EUR or more (name your price).

1600px Photoshop file with all the layers and channels - complete tutorial

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Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Life Street Festival, Limassol, Cyprus, 27th of April 2013

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Things you will need:

1. Tripod
2. Cable release
3. Camera

Not necessarily in that order, but all 3 are important. Fast lens will be also useful especially for capturing skies. You can argue that cable release is not that really important. True, but I  still recommend it as it gives you the ability to expose for more than 30 seconds. Releasing the shutter is much more convenient than using camera built-in timers. If you don’t own one, it’s not the end of the world but get one – the simplest one is cheap and will be useful for many other situations too.
One more thing that is very useful when you are out shooting in the night – flashlight! Or your smartphone – with a cool app should be enough.

Light pollution

Shooting Milky Way in the middle of the city is usually a bad idea. Unless the city is abandoned or there’s an electricity outage. Otherwise you will get the light pollution and the only thing you will capture is the light coming from the city, not from the sky. The best places for taking breathtaking night sky pictures are the places far from the cities, far from the civilization. And by far, I mean really far. Even a distant city may create quite big light pollution over the horizon.

Moon is not cool

Moon is cool, when it’s the subject of the photo. When it’s the only subject of the photo. However if you are willing to take a picture of the sky, moon is not cool at all. It’s another light pollution we talked about in the previous paragraph. So basically if you are going to take night pictures of a sky check on the web when the moonrise is, and choose the time when the moon is not visible.

Photographing the moon is fairly simple. As long as you have a stable tripod and long lens you should be able to capture a nice moon details regardless of the light pollution – moon itself is bright enough. The picture above was shot using 200mm lens + teleconverter 2.0 on APS-C sensor which gives 600mm full frame equivalent. Exposure parameters were ISO 250, f/7.1 1/250s. Always use manual settings, automated modes will give you overexposed images and you will lose all the moon’s details.

Star trails

Stars move. Actually according to Copernicus earth is the one which moves. And we can clearly see that movement when we set the shutter open long enough. On the image we will see lines (curves) instead of stars. If this is not what we want to achieve there’s a quick formula which tells us what the longest shutter speed is for a given focal length. What we need to do is to divide 600 by the focal length and the result is the maximum amount of time which will give us sharp stars without any trails.

600 / 24mm = max 25s
600 / 15mm = max 40s

So, the wider you go, the more time you have for a single frame before you start to notice star trails.

The picture above was exposed for 4-5 minutes, and we can notice very obvious trails.

Camera settings

For the best results you should use aperture not bigger than f/4. During the night there’s so little light and you shouldn’t limit it even more with small apertures. You can experiment with ISO, but probably the native value is too low and you will need to crank it up, sometimes even to 3-6k to be able to capture all the light without having star trails. Fast lens and camera with good noise performance on high ISO is the best for that kind of pictures.

Summary

Having the last paragraphs in mind, it’s pretty clear, that wide and fast lens is the best for photographing the skies and trying to capture the Milky Way. Wide angle gives us more time and fast lens saves us from using very high ISO.

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I think that this long exposure of drowned church intensifies the impression of calmness and loneliness.

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Let’s start off with what you really need.

Required equipment

1. Tripod
2. Cable release

To be able to capture a long exposure shot you definitely need a very stable support for your camera. It’s vital, and every even the slightest movement will ruin your photo so it’s very important to have a solid and good quality tripod. In a windy weather you might want to load the tripod with additional weight like backpack.

Cable release is another required tool which allows you to expand the exposure time beyond the 30 seconds limit. You can say that 30s exposure is long enough, and you will be right, but for me the real fun with long exposures starts way after that time. But if you don’t have a cable release at the moment, you can experiment with shorter times too.

Recommended equipment

1. ND filter/filters
2. Viewfinder cover

ND filter (ND stands for Neutral Density) is a filter that reduces the amount of light coming to the camera sensor giving no changes in hue of colour rendition. This is theory and unfortunately in reality it’s not really true, because every filter introduces more or less colour cast to your photos. It depends on the length of exposure is and directly from the quality of the filter. Even the most expensive ND filters leave colour cast on the images. For the cheaper filters the colour cast might be very difficult to correct in post-process though. So again, the quality matters. If you don’t have any ND filters right now, remember that increasing the f-stop and lowering the ISO will give you the longest exposure time.

A viewfinder cover is a very useful tool used to basically cover the viewfinder in order to block any light that might reach the sensor especially when the sun is behind the camera. This little cover can prevent uneven exposure and unwanted artefacts.

Common mistakes

1. Autofocus
2. Vibration reduction
3. Camera mode

The first thing I do before I start the long exposure is to make sure I have turned off the autofocus. Long exposures are taken in dark conditions or with a dark filter in front of the lens so in most situations the autofocus sensor is not able to detect the focus properly. When you try to focus just before taking the photo, focusing system will jump in and will not be able to focus correctly. As a result you will end up with a picture which is out of focus.

Vibration reduction or image stabilisation of your lenses should be turned off anyway for the tripod use. The low amount of light coming to sensor during long exposure will only make things worse, so keep it in mind to check that setting too.

Another mistake is the use of automated camera mode like aperture priority. In this mode camera will try to calculate exposure time by itself, but again, the amount of light is so low that in many cases this calculation will be wrong, especially for longer exposures. For long exposures the right choice is only manual mode.

Examples

The following examples will show you the same scene taken with different settings. The first photo is a regular exposure taken without any filters:

The exposure time for this image is 1/4s, ISO 100 and aperture f/16. Now what happens if we try to make the exposure a bit longer:

This image was taken with the exposure time of 15 seconds (the same ISO and f-stop as the first one). To achieve that I used ND 1.8 filter which basically reduces the light by 6 stops (1/4s, 1/2s, 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, 15s – 6 stops).

Now let’s try a really long exposure. For that I used ND 3.0 which is 10 stop filter. The following picture was taken with the exposure of 250s, ISO 100 and f/9:

Now, the time used here created this nice effect, the clouds and the sea are really blurred.

You probably noticed that the aperture for the last shot was changed from f/16 to f/9. It’s because I used a very strong ND filter (10 stops) and I had to compensate with the f-stop so that I wouldn’t end up with the exposure of over 1 hour. Why? Let’s see how to calculate exposure times.

How to calculate exposure times with ND filter

Calculating the correct exposure time is a mathematical task. It’s the balance of light that comes to the sensor. The less light goes in, the more time is required to properly expose the image. To be able to calculate the exposure time we need to know how much the shutter time changes for every stop of light. The strength of ND filters is measured in stops, so having a 2 stop ND filter will take 2 stops from our shutter speed.

Now, step by step:

1. Put your camera to Aperture priority mode.
2. Set your ISO and aperture.
3. Read the shutter speed that camera calculated.

Let’s say it’s 1/250s. Now we attach the 6 stop ND filter, which means that we need to prolong the shutter speed by 6 stops. To do that let’s use the standardised list of shutter times:

1/8000 1/4000 1/2000 1/1000 1/500 1/250 1/125 1/60 1/30 1/15 1/8 1/4 1/2 1 2 4 8 15 30 1m 2m 4m etc.

Take the time that camera calculated (1/250) and move 6 places to the right – 1/4s. That’s the correct shutter time with ND filter attached to the camera and will give the same “brightness” as a picture taken without a filter with 1/250s time.

There’s an app for that!

If you have a smartphone you can download apps for the exposure time calculations – Longtime Exposure Calculator for iOS and Exposure Calculator for Android.

If it doesn’t work

Now, again this is theory, and in reality this not necessarily might be true. First of all, the quality of ND filters may vary and the 6 stop filter might stop the light a little more or a little less. Another issue is changing light – during an exposure of a few minutes it is possible that the light changes, especially when you take pictures during the sunset or sunrise hours. By the time you finish your eight-minute exposure the sun might not be in the sky anymore and the calculations are no longer right. How to solve that?

Experiment

Use the calculations at the beginning to have a general idea of the correct exposure times, but try to play with them. Keep the exposure a bit longer. If the picture is too bright, try again for a shorter amount of time. After some time you will be able to predict more or less the correct shutter time without any tables and calculations.

The advantage is that with long exposures it’s harder to make a mistake in calculation of shutter speed. If your correct exposure time is 8 minutes and you expose for 7 minutes the picture will be all right. If you expose for 9 minutes – again, the difference will be very small. It always takes a double amount of time to change the exposure by 1 stop. So to make the picture 1 stop brighter you would need to expose it for 16 minutes. That’s quite a difference.

Hope this article will help you with your long exposures. If so, let me know and send a link to your work!

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Below you can watch two productions entirely shot with the Nikon D800. Of course the amount of gear used to actually shoot these movies is overwhelming for a regular photographer, but the core behind all this is just a camera we all know from the photography world.

The first movie is “Joy Ride”:

You can also watch the behind the scenes here.

Another one is called “Broken Night”:

And there is a project’s site with additional footage from behind the scenes, interviews with director etc.

In both productions you can see very difficult scenes to shoot, low light situations, different lighting conditions, action shots, various angles impossible for traditional cameras – all this shows that Nikon D800 gives absolutely new opportunities in the movie production area and the results that can be achieved with it are stunning.

Another interesting fact is that the very same camera was used in one of the Dexter episodes (you can see that in the featured picture above this article).

Featured image found on http://www.definitionmagazine.com/journal/2012/11/22/nikon-dlsrs-in-hollywood.html

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Straighten a photo tutorial

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Pick and Reject flags

Pick and reject flag in Lightroom is a tool which basically marks pictures as picked and rejected. The current state of the photo is indicated by the icon in top left corner – either black for rejected and white for picked. I used to use star ratings for the same purpose some time ago marking rejected pictures with one star, but since I discovered pick and reject I have never looked back. There’s one important difference between both solutions. Pick and reject has another built in functionality – Delete all rejected photos under Photo menu. This means that after selecting all the accepted photos, and marking the ones that we are not interested in, we can simply tell Lightroom to remove all the rejected photos from the drive.

Getting efficient

How to use this feature efficiently? Use keyboard shortcuts! For picking and rejecting use p and x keyboard keys accordingly. You can press the shift key while marking the photo if you want to proceed to the next one. To improve the process have caps lock enabled so the Lightroom will advance to the next photo each time you make a decision automatically and every time. If you want to undo your decision press u key to remove the selection flag.
If you belong to the group of people who doesn’t remove pictures from the drive you can still use this feature. There’s an option to Hide Rejects in the filters and you won’t see rejected photos in your collections but the photos won’t be affected in any other way.

Summary

• p – pick
• x – reject
• u – undo/unflag
• ⇪ caps lock – advance to the next picture after setting the flag when on
• ⌘⌫ – Delete Rejected Photos (ctrl+backspace for windows)

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Jury has graded 1829 photos and those with highest ratings went to the final stage where best pictures were awarded with medals and nominated.
All the pictures are simply amazing and I cannot believe that my photo made it!

Here’s a video presenting all the winners photos:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Fotoferia International Exhibition 2012 Nomination

The gallery with all the photos can be found here.

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Yeah, it looks pretty bad and actually it’s not that easy to fix. To be honest, you should really avoid getting your tripod to this stage, but if you have already done so I’ll try to give you some hints what can be done.

First of all you need a proper screwdriver to disassemble the whole thing. For my Manfrotto tripod this screwdriver does the job:

These two guys will help too. The first one will deal with some rusty hinges and whatnot, the other one will be used after the cleaning to all the moving parts. You can use whatever lube you can get from your DIY shop.

While disassembling try not to get too depressed when you see something like that:

And here’s my tripod (actually only legs) in pieces:

Nuts and screws require special treatment. Put them with some water mixed with a cheap descaler (for kettles, coffee machines, etc) in a small cup. Leave them for a few minutes (not more – it can cause damage). After that time all the salt should be gone. If not, try extra few minutes.

Clean all the leg parts with warm water and soap. Accumulated salt won’t disappear completely and you will need to scratch it manually. Takes some time, but it’s doable. All you need is some piece of plastic that will not scratch the carbon-fiber surface (screwdriver handle in my case). You can cover it with some cloth to be safe. Then start removing salt coating by rubbing it gently. Here’s my before and after:

After cleaning and assembling all the parts put some lube or grease around the joints so the movement is smooth:

Here’s the final result:

As a regular maintenance it should be enough to clean your tripod with warm water as soon as you get back home from the shooting even if your tripod wasn’t exposed to the salty water or sand directly.

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Today’s challenge is to process a photo using only one type of ajustement. I’m presenting this mainly because I want to show you how powerful this operation is and stress how important role it plays in my image processing workflow. In many cases it’s the most visible adjustement of all, especially when comparing the before and after picture.

To comply with the initial rule I will skip all the initial steps like cropping and straightening the horizon, so keep in mind that it is literally one type of adjustement.

Here’s what we start with and the result:

Which one is it? Watch the movie below to find out!

And here is a list of most used keyboard shortcuts in the video:

• b – brush tool
• [ - decrease brush size
• ] – increase brush size
• cmd+d/ctrl+d – deselect
• cmd+h/ctrl+h – hide current selection
• cmd+I/ctrl+I – invert (mask)

What’s more?

From what I’ve noticed there are two group of people. The first one uses curves for the contrast adjustments, the other one prefers levels. I’m definitely a fan of the latter. The workflow I presented in the video is just a basic approach which might be extended by using separate channels and focus on specific colours  Levels might be also used to correct the white balance on your photographs. I don’t really use the auto button, but for the beginners it might be useful too, especially for initial adjustments.

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After switching to FX sensor camera I almost forgot about this lens. An then one day I thought about shooting some very long exposures. I was using Nikon 14-24 at that time as my ultra wide lens and the main disadvantage of this lens is a very well-known problem with filters. Even after purchasing LEE fitter kit we are unable to use filters like big stopper. So I was reminded about my old Tokina as I read somewhere that it still might be used on FX sensor to some extent.

After mounting the lens on my Nikon D700 I was surprised that on 16mm I didn’t see any vignetting! Unfortunately that’s the only focal length on this lens that doesn’t produce dark corners on the picture. But hey – we have a wide angle prime of 16mm with the ability to use filters.

I took many long exposures with this setup and was quite happy with the results. Quite recently I have had the chance to use another wide angle, but this time FX lens – Nikon 16-35 1:4G ED VR. I thought that it’s a good opportunity to test both and see how the Tokina performs compared to proper FX wide angle from Nikon.

Comparison

I’m not going to go too deep with my comparison and analyse all the tiny details on every possible setting. I prefer to focus on the results I get from both in my usual landscape environment.

Below you can see two shots I took the other day. Both on 16mm, using B+W ND3 filter with the exposure of ~60 seconds.

Tokina 11-16 f/11 @16mm

Nikon 16-35 f/11 @16mm

I was trying to frame exactly the same picture, but removing and attaching a lens moved slightly my tripod and they are not exactly aligned. but I don’t think the difference is big enough to affect the results. When you right click on the image and select open in new tab/window you will get the full resolution picture.

At the first look on the 700px images there’s hardly any difference. Opening two full resolution pictures and switching from one to the other will give us a bit more details but still it’s not really that big difference.

First thing that caught my eye was slightly bigger contrast on the whole image with Nikon, a bit sharper corners and a bit less distortion visible on the straight elements in the frame. Another thing I noticed is the reddish colour cast on the picture produced by a filter on Nikon, which doesn’t occur on Tokina’s.

On the other hand Tokina is more likely to produce chromatic aberrations, we can clearly notice that on the 100% crops below around the lanterns.

Tokina 11-16 Crop 100%

Nikon 16-35 Crop 100%

Here’s another shot taken with both lenses:

Tokina 11-16 f/16 @16mm

Nikon 16-35 f/16 @16mm

Again, comparing picture side by side I noticed a bit more contrast on the picture produced by Nikon lens. Tokina produced some CA around the edges and distorted the geometry a little bit more.

Here are some details at 1:1 crop:

Tokina 11-16 Crop 100%

Nikon 16-35 Crop 100%

Clearly, the corner of the frame is much sharper on the picture produced by Nikon. If you look closely Nikon produces CA as well, but on the Tokina’s image it is much more visible.

SUMMARY

To be honest I was expecting Nikon to be performing way better. Surprisingly, Tokina does a really good job on FX camera. After using Lightroom to deal with geometric corrections and removing chromatic aberrations the output image quality is very good. If you don’t need big resolution images, you won’t even notice the lack of sharpness in the corners.

Let me also remind you that Tokina gives you aperture of f/2.8 which might be useful in low light situations where Nikon would perform worse. Lower f-number brings up more difference between the two lenses in terms of sharpness, but as I mentioned in the beginning – I’m comparing the lenses from my landscape-photography point of view.

If you have Tokina 11-16 and you’re switching from DX world to the full frame and you are wondering what ultra wide angle lens you should be getting instead – you can keep it in the beginning, and the switch will be less pricey.

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And here is how I took that shot. As usual, I was using my tripod, manual mode, B+W ND3 filter together with Hoya Circular Polariser. I used remote shutter release too especially to be able to achieve 217s exposure.

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I thought that maybe restoring iPad from the backup which was created by the older device caused some configuration problems so I reset it completely and set it up from scratch. 
It didn’t fix the problem either. From my online investigation it seems that a lot of people have the same issues and even apple support doesn’t know how to solve the problem. Possible solutions posted by many people suggesting reseting the device, rebooting it, relogging etc. obviously didn’t work. I gave up a few weeks ago but for some reason decided to try one last time. And it was worth the effort.

Solution

Error in my case came from the mismatch of my home address connected to my Apple ID and the international settings on my iPad. Setting them both to UK solved the problem. If you are not sure what your address connected to your Apple ID is follow these steps:

1. Go to the following link: https://appleid.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyAppleId.woa/
2. Press Manage you Apple ID button
3. Enter your user name and password and login
4. On the left side go to Addresses
5. You can add a new address or edit the current one here

Now you need to change you International settings on your iDevice to match your Apple ID address, or put the address matching your international settings on your device:

1. Go to Settings
2. General
3. International

Now log in to your iMessage application and it should be working just fine!

I don’t really understand the reason behind that, as for example my address was set to my home address in Cyprus, but my international settings were set to UK. I don’t speak Greek and don’t want to have dates, day names etc. displayed in Greek but in English. Honestly it’s quite annoying. To overcome that I just specified a fake UK address to be able to keep my international settings as before. On top of that the error message given by iMessage is completely confusing and misleading.

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