At yesterday’s ice hockey game, I used Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM
I corrected the images in Lightroom
Generally, I found that the 300mm f/2.8L
Retouching portraits of children
Retouching children’s portraits requires a surprising amount of skin smoothing. Baby’s skin is a proverbial reference for smoothness. This is why it is expected that skin in a child’d portrait would be impeccably smooth. In reality, children have very thin, quite translucent skin, so an unretouched portrait shows variations of colour, as well as small blood vessels under the skin. While this image is technically accurate, it appears unnatural, because of our expectations of smooth baby skin.
I have just finished post-processing a series of photos that my associate Armando and I took last week for an advertisement campaign of a dance school. I used Portrait Pro Studio 12
- Turn off face sculpting and lighting effects. Children’s faces are rather round and flat; the Portrait Pro
- Reduce the default amount of skin smoothing (controlled by the Master Fade slider under Skin Smoothing Controls) by half.
Before applying the Portrait Pro
Portrait retouching: skin smoothing in Photoshop
In order to make skin in portraits appear smooth, I have been learning skin painting using “sample and paint” method in Photoshop
Here is a step-by step-procedure:
- Open the image in Photoshop.
- Make a new layer (Shift-Option-Command-N). Let’s refer to it as Skin Painting Layer. We will be painting on this layer.
- Above the Skin Painting Layer, make another layer (Shift-Option-Command-N). Let’s refer to it as the Texture Layer, since it will be used to add texture to the areas of the Skin Painting Layer that will be re-painted.
- Create “Stamp visible” on the Texture Layer (Shift-Option-Command-E).
- Change the blending mode of the Texture Layer from Normal to Overlay.
- Desaturate the Texture Layer (Shift-Command-U or select Image > Adjustments > Desaturate from the top menu bar) because we only need to add texture to the Skin Painting Layer, not the colour.
- Make the Texture Layer into high-pass layer, which will enable extracting the details. From the top menu bar, select Filter > Other> High Pass.
- Select the Radius value of around 4 pixels. This can and should be adjusted later, when the Skin Painting Layer has some painting done. The goal is to match the texture of the painted-in skin areas match the texture of the rest of the skin.
- Clip Texture Layer ayer to the underlying layer (Skin Painting Layer), making it visible only where the underlying layer is visible. Right-click the Texture Layer and select “Create clipping mask“. The shortcut is Option-Command-G. This will add the texture from the original image only to the areas of the Skin Painting Layer that have been re-painted.
- Switch to the Skin Painting Layer by clicking on it.
- Select a brush tool and choose a soft round brush.
- With a brush tool selected (the shortcut is “B“), hold Option key and click the skin area to sample the colour. Release Option key and paint the neighbouring skin area (that needs smoothing) in a couple of short strokes. Repeat the sampling and painting procedure everywhere, where skin smoothing is required. I find it convenient to use the brush size that is approximately equal to the area that is being retouched (e.g. large for the forehead, smaller for the eyes, etc.) Other brush settings are as follows:
- Mode: Normal.
- Flow: approximately 10%. This low flow value makes each bush stroke add only a very subtle effect, making the whole process more controllable (it is very easy to inadvertently go overboard with retouching and ruin the image).
Note: I am using a Wacom Intuos Tablet
Recently, I have been using a combination of this technique and some high-level retouching using Portrait Pro
How to deal with closed eyes in Portrait Pro
I have been experimenting with Portrait Pro
The workflow in Portrait Pro
For example, sometimes the subject has closed eyes, such as in the shot of my friends’ newborn daughter (see above), whom I met a couple of days ago. The problem is that Portrait Pro
The solution is to follow the step-by-step guide and specify the corners of the eyes (this defines the general outline and the angle of the face) and skip the eye outline adjustment steps by pressing Spacebar repeatedly. After finishing refining of the nose, the mouth and the overall face outlines, simply toggle off the Eye Controls group of adjustments at the bottom right panel.
Another feature comes into play if you want to retouch a skin area, which is not a face. In order to do this, press “Enhance Skin Only” button at the initial interface, below the gender and age selection buttons and paint in the skin area. However, this button is not shown by default. In order to activate it, you need to start Portrait Pro
In general, I find that Portrait Pro
Making math look good: advertisement photoshoot for a calculus course
Last summer, my wife was involved in designing a short course in calculus for incoming first-year students at UVic. To help promote this course, we set up a staged photoshoot with current students and instructors as models. Armando and I set up the lighting (studio strobes with softboxes
The key image, shown above, is a composite of two photos: a shot of the student pretending to be writing (he was holding the marker in mid-air) and a shot of the math formulae written on a white board with a blue marker.
Here is how I made it:
- Opened both photos in the same Photoshop
- Created a Curves adjustment layer above the top layer.
- Clipped the adjustment layer to the layer below it. To do it, I clicked the left-most icon at the bottom of the Curves menu, which looks like a square with an arrow pointing down. This makes the adjustment layer affect only the layer immediately below it, not all underlying layers.
- Increased the exposure (by dragging the midpoint of the curve in the layer menu upwards). The purpose of this is to over-expose the image of the white board, so that everything, except the text, becomes solid white.
- Selected the layer with the board image, and clicked on the white colour with the magic wand selection tool (activated by pressing W). I held Shift key and click inside all areas enclosed by the blue lines, such as the areas inside the loops of 6’s. This created a mask containing everything, except the blue text.
- Pressed Delete key. This removed the white board and left only the blue text.
- Removed the selection by going to Select > Deselect in the top menu bar (or pressing Command-D).
- Selected everything in the layer (i.e. the text) by going to Select > All (or pressing Command-A).
- Went to Edit > Transform >Flip horizontal to create a mirror image of the text.
- Selected the move tool (by pressing V) and dragged the image of the inverted text to align it with the marker in the student’s hand.
- That’s it! I saved the Photoshop
Converting a noisy photo to black-and-white
I wrote in another post about reducing noise in low-light photos, but sometimes the amount of the recorded light is just too low to yield adequate results. Suppressing the noise in those situations would lead to the loss of details that would not be acceptable. I particularly dislike colour noise – random occurrence of alternating red, green and blue pixels in close proximity to each other.
Sometimes, a very noisy image can be salvaged by converting it to black-and-white. The reason why the resulting monochromatic image looks better than the original is that the colour noise now appears as luminance noise. In other words, there is no longer a visible variation in the colour of the neighbouring pixels – just in their brightness.
Another important advantage of black-and-white conversion for low-light photos is that a monochromatic image would actually show more detail than the colour one. This is because all three RGB channels (red, green and blue) are now contributing information about the contrast and brightness gradients that can be perceived visually. In an extremely low-lit scene, such information is very limited, and any single colour channel might not carry sufficient amounts of it to be processed by human brain. Incidentally, this is why we see night scenes mostly in black-and-white. Any colours that we do perceive at night are either very desaturated or actually produced by our brains based on our prior experiences of adequately-lit objects.
Finally, noise in black-and-white images is more acceptable than in colour ones, because digital noise looks like physical grain in black-and-white film emulsion, which is associated with fine art images. In fact, there are many plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop
How to convert a photo to black-and-white
There are many ways of doing the actual conversion, but perhaps the most important this to remember is that it is more than simply desaturating the colour.
Using a channel mixer (go to Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer and click the “Monochrome” box at the bottom of the menu) provides great control, but is a bit difficult to master due to a large number of possible adjustments.
Personally, I use a packaged solution – a Nick Collection module called Silver Efex Pro
Sport photography: noise reduction in post-processing
Sports photography often requires very fast shutter speeds in order to freeze the action. In my experience, a minimum of 1/800 sec is required for basketball or soccer. My typical setting, which I save as a custom function in the camera is 1/1000 sec. Since lighting is often quite dim, particularly during indoor events or night games, fast shutter speeds require very high ISO settings, even with “fast” lenses (i.e. lenses that have large maximum aperture). As a result, the images become quite noisy, even when shot with state-of-the-art cameras, such as Canon EOS 5D Mark III
Noise becomes more noticeable when viewed at high magnification as random variations in brightness and colour between neighbouring pixels. These variations can be smoothed out in post-processing using fairly sophisticated algorithms implemented in various image-editing software. However, ultimately, this noise reduction causes loss of detail, which appears as lack of sharpness.
The good news is that in sports photography, relatively high levels of noise are considered acceptable. In fact, certain amount of noise adds character to the photo and conveys the sense of extreme effort exerted by the athletes.
Also, noise reduction is not nearly as destructive to the sharpness of the photo if the image is down-sampled (reduced in size) to be shown as a thumbnail on screen, for example. The counter-intuitive fact is that when the size (in pixels) of an image is reduced, the apparent sharpness is increased. This is because the small details that are lost due to noise reduction processing would not be visible anyway in the small image, so it appears both sharp and with low noise. The same is not true about the noise level, however. When the image size is reduced, the apparent noise is at best appears the same and often looks more pronounced than in the original, high-resolution photo.
Here are my typical strategy for noise reduction in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
- If the noise level is relatively low, I find that Luminance settings between 0 and 10 (in some arbitrary units used by Lightroom – they are really just relative indicators of the amount of noise reduction applied) do not cause visible loss of sharpness.
- If the noise is extreme, I set Luminance to around 30 and sometimes up to 50. Above that, the loss of detail is quite severe, and would be noticeable if the image is reduced in size.
Image editing: an easy way of applying adjustments to a selected area
One of the most basic, but most useful techniques that I use in Adobe Photoshop
Let’s consider the photo of the young dancer above as an example. Suppose that we want to increase the exposure of the girl, but leave the background as is. Note that increasing the exposure here is just an example of an effect. Similar things can be done with saturation, contrast, blur or other effects. The point is to show how to apply the effect selectively. Here is the set-by-step procedure:
1. Open the file on Photoshop. The image will be place on the background layer of the Photoshop document (as shown in the Layers panel at the bottom right of the Photoshop window).
3. In the Curves Properties window that appears, click in the middle of the curve and drag the handle that appears upward. This makes the entire image lighter, but at this point, consider only the dancer’s figure and mentally ignore the background – it will be excluded later. Also, you don’t have to be very precise with the degree of the adjustment either – it can be easily tweaked later (see step 7).
4. Select the layer mask of the curves layer and press CTRL-I. This fills the layer mask of the Curves layer with black colour, hiding all adjustments.
5. Select a soft round brush bush and with the layer mask selected paint with white colour, revealing the areas that are supposed to be affected by the Curves adjustment.
Couple of notes:
- I use a pressure-sensitive Wacom Intuos Pro graphics tablet
for these edits – it makes an enormous difference compared to using a mouse. In fact, I would not attempt this with a mouse, unless there would be no tablet available.
- There is a very useful keyboard shortcut for changing size and hardness of the brush: With the brush tool active, press Shift-Option (or Alt)-Control and drag left-to-right to adjust size or drag top-to-bottow to adjust hardness. A red image of the brush will appear to serve as a visual guide for these adjustments.
- There is no need to be very precise at this step. If you paint part of the background next to the girl, just ignore it – it will be taken care of at the next step. If you make an obvious huge mistake, paint the area black to hide the Curves adjustments there.
6. Now, the roughly painted-in selection can be refined in one easy step. There is no need to spend time selecting every individual hair around the dancer’s head, etc.
Instead, Double-click on the Curves adjustment layer anywhere to right of the layer mask. This opens a Layer Style menu.
At the very bottom, where it says “Underlying Layer”, press Alt (or Option) and click on the left (black) handle. This slits the handle in half; drag the right half to the right while observing the effect of the photo. Doing so makes the the Curves adjustment layer visible only in the areas where the underlying layer is brighter. Incidentally, if you Alt (Option)-click the right (fray) handle and drag one half of it to the left, you make the adjustment layer visible in the areas where the underlying layer is lighter. Once you’ve adjusted the slider position(s) to achieve the desired effect, click “Ok” in the Layer Style menu.
7. If the adjustment is too strong, it can be tweaked again in theCurves Properties menu – you can open it by double-clicking the Curves adjustment layer just to the right of the visibility icon, which looks like an eye. Alternatively, you can adjust the opacity of the entire adjustment layer to mute its effect.
8. This is it! Go to File > Save as… and save the file in a format that you need.
Using crop tool to improve composition
Often, it is not possible to perfectly compose the photo at the moment of shooting. This is particularly true for action photography, but it is quite common in most real-life situations when we don’t have total control of the model, the background and/or have limited time to take the shot.
Post-processing can dramatically improve a photo, and one adjustment that has the highest impact is cropping. Cropping affects composition, which is the most fundamental element of a picture. It allows us to emphasize the subject and remove non-essential or distracting parts. In Adobe Lightroom
Recently, I have been taking increasingly more pictures with my iPhone. Before sharing them online, I often make some rough adjustments using the editing mode of the built-in Photos app. Cropping is usually one of them. Here is what I typically do to improve composition:
- Straighten horizon.
- Cut off unnecessary/distracting elements that do not contribute to the story I am trying to tell in the picture. When in doubt – crop tighter.
- Try to use “the rule of thirds” (position the mail element of the picture at the intersection of imaginary vertical and horizontal lines that divide the width and the height of the picture into thirds). for example, in the image above, the face of the fisherman is positioned 1/3 of the frame height from the top of the frame and 1/3 of the frame width from the right side.
- Crop the image so that any diagonal lines intersect a corner of the photo – it helps leading the viewer’s eyes into the frame. Again, in the image above, the strings lead from the bottom left corner of the frame towards the middle. Also, the diagonal planks on the hull of the boat lead from the bottom right corner.
Note: It is a good idea to keep these points in mind during the shoot itself to avoid excessive cropping in post-processing, which reduces the number of pixels (i.e. resolution) in the final photo.
Recently, I was taking headshots of the faculty members of my daughter’s dance school for their website, and looked into various ways of cropping the portraits. One rule of thumb for cropping a headshot is that cutting off the top of the model’s head makes the portrait more appealing. It may seem counter-intuitive, but this kind of close crop emphasizes the person’s eyes and make her/him appear engaged with the viewer.
