Sundries

I’ve recently been getting the photography bug again and I’ve been watching some training videos recently.  One of them was on panoramic photography and how to correctly take them and put them together in Photoshop.  I’ve never done any panos so I figured I’d give it a shot.  I went outside my condo, not the most photogenic place I could go but it gets the job done.  I took a series of about 15 photos, 7 across and then did another row above that to capture the sky.

I set my camera (Nikon D60) to manual mode with a Nikkor 50mm 1.8 lens and set the exposure to f11 at 1/100 of a second.  I brought the images into Lightroom and made my basic adjustments and synced them to all the images and then imported them into Photoshop’s pano-merge function.  It only took about 2 minutes to take all the pictures but about 10 minutes for Photoshop to work on them and show me the final merged image.

I cropped the image and adjusted lighting further till I was happy with the overall look.  To add some sharpness I used a nice little trick I recently learned.  Make a copy of the entire image in a new layer and then go to Filters – Other – High Pass.  Adjust the levels to something between 4 – 8 depending on what give you the best selection of edges and then run the filter.  Then change that layers blend mode to either Overlay or Soft Light to see the effect and sharpening it gives to your image.  I like to go a little stronger than I think I need because I can easily lower the opacity on that layer to adjust the amount of the effect.

Finally, I made another copy of the entire image on a new layer and applied a levels layer adjustment to really push up the rich blues of the sky.  I then used the layer mask to first apply a ‘black to white’ gradient to get most of the effect on the sky only.  Then I finally went in and used the brush to mask out the building and trees a bit.   I didn’t spend hours working on the mask, maybe 10 minutes, so it’s not perfect but it works.  I applied a slight blur to the mask to smooth out the edges.

The final step was creating a blank layer and setting the blend mode to Soft Light.   I then painted with black and white brush set about 25% opacity to help darken and brighten select spots of the photo.  The blacktop of our parking area isn’t as black as the photo from the sun bleaching it out a bit so I darkened that down as well as a few other select areas.

So, finally the image.  You can view the FULL SIZED image by clicking on it but it is very large, almost 5 megabytes in size and sized at 5571 X 1200 pixels.

I really enjoyed taking this image even though the parking lot isn’t very attractive.  I’m goin to look for more chances to take some more panos in the future.

**James.

As you may have noticed from mylack of WOW updates, I’m not really playing it at this time.  It’s funny how I stopped right before the big expansion came out.  I’ve loaded it on my PC and have played for a few hours but haven’t really enjoyed it.  Not that the expansion isn’t good, it looks great.  The probelm is I just got burnt out again on WOW so I’m taking a small break again.

I’ve been spending my time with Photography and with that comes working in Photoshop some more.  I’ve been watching a bunch of Lynda.com training videos which are fantastic.  I was just playing around trying to simulate depth of field on images that don’t have it to begin with.

Most point and shoot cameras produce pictures where both forground and background objects are mostly in focus and it tends to give a flat look to the images.  Higher quality cameras, such as SLR’s, can produce a very shallow depth of field where your subject is in focus but the background/foreground is out of focus.  This produces a much more natural looking image.

The picture fo the flowers below is an example, where the flowers (the subject) are sharp the you get a nice soft blur on the background:

This example is almost a little too extreme as it’s a shot of a small object with the background very far away in comparison but it helps to explain it.

You can simulate this in Photoshop.  The results are not 100% realistic but they do help add a little something to an image that didn’t have any depth of field.  To play around with this I took an image with no DOF at all, screenshots from a video game:

You may want to click the images to make them larger.  You can see how the dinosaur and hill in the background have a blur to them as well as the ferns in the foreground but my character and her pets “in focus”.  I did the same with another picture of my mage after she got her elite riding mount and was riding through Elwyn Forest:

Since my character and her mount took up more space in the screenshot I had to manually paint in the mask for the lens blur effect to help her stay in focus but have the background blur out.

To make this effective I first opened the image and made a duplicate of the main layer and then applied a rather strong lens blur effect to that new layer.  Now add a layer mask and grap your gradient tool.  The trick is to add the gradient to the mast so more of the layer is revield (blured) as it goes back into the distance.  In the image of my character on the horse, that would be the trees in the distance.

You can then go back with the brush, still in the layer mask, and starting making sure the main subject is fully maked so it’s not blured out.  My character and the head of the horse are in front of the background trees so if you didn’t do this, the top of your character would be blured out with the background.  You have to think three dimensionally.

You can then add partial masks to objects in the mid ground such as the large trees to the left and right of image, they aren’t as far back as the farthest tress so they shouldn’t be as blured.  I masked them with a mid gray tone so they would only be partially blured.  I also gave a slight blur to the forground, including the horses front leg.

Finally, I applied some level adjustments using curves and also adjusted specific color channels in the curves dialog box to add a slightly warming tone than the original image had.  This technique could be useful for photographs of real people and things but since video game images are almost always so flat this really seems to make them “snap”.

**James.

I don’t have my new camera in yet but I’ve been playing around with my little Canon A60 point and shoot just getting a feel for manual mode.  It also gave me something to play around with in Lightroom 2.0 which I just installed.

I figured I’d start with some of my painting supplies as subject matter.  I have a little box setup as a still life area and I’m using a natural color fluorescent light that puts out the equivalent of 100 watts of light.  I’m trying to soften the light with some sheets of toilet paper hanging in front of it, it looks very ghetto.  LOL  For a fill light I’m using a blank 8″X10″ white oil painting canvas on the far side.

I’m not very happy with the quality of the images, especially with all the noise in the color, but I think taking these will make me enjoy my new Nikon just that much more!!!

**James

It’s almost a week after Hallows End completed on WOW and I almost didn’t make it.  I spent the last 5 or 6 days of the holiday working to get the Squashling pet but didn’t think I’d be able to get one.  On the last day of the holiday I got together with a few guilmembers to go kill the Headless Horseman a few more times and BING, I got lucky:

He’s not really that cute but if you don’t have one now, you can’t get one till next year.

Thankfully I got him when I did because over the last 4 or 5 days I’ve really lost interest in playing WOW.  It’s partially due to Wrath of the Litch King coming out in a few days and I don’t want to burn out but mostly it’s something else…..  A new hobby.

I’ve been very interested in photography but there were mainly 3 things that kept me from getting into it.  The first is that Ialready have WAY TOO MANY hobbies right now and if I have extra time I should spend it painting or building my resin models.

The other reason is that I really didn’t know any of the technical aspects of photography such as aperature, exposure, shutter speed, or ISO.  What are these things?  What do they do?  When and how should I adjust them, and why?

The final reason is money.  I have a cheap little Canon Power Shot A60 point and shoot camera that really leaves things to be desired when trying to do certain things.  It’s not that easy to learn on and doesn’t offer many controls to work with as well.

Out of curiosity I check out the This Week In Photography podcast and was instantly hooked.  I spent the next 4 or 5 days researching a good digital SLR camera that was in my price range.  I finally settled on the Nikon D60:

I got it as a brand new camera from a dealer on Ebay.  It came with a number of extras such as a soft case, tripod, screen protectors, wide angel lens, 2x telephoto lens, and a 4 gigabyte memory card.  All for under $600!!!

I’ll be sure to post when I get the camera in the next few days, too bad I won’t be able to use the new camera to take a picture of the camera.  LOL

I’m thinking of starting a new domain name with a blog to start posting my pictures to as I start to learn but maybe just posting here would be fine as well.  I could also just start a photography page on this blog I guess.

**James.