Black and White Flaming
Mike Johnston from The Online Photographer does not like color:
More often than not, color ruins pictures. And here’s why: photographers are color junkies. Give the average Herman or Gertrude a color camera, and all judgment flies out the window. Suddenly, all kinds of things previously recognizable as not being a picture become flat-out irresistible. Why? Why, just because it’s a color.
I would say that I have a tendency to prefer monochrome versions of my photos. That’s where I think Mike is right: it’s more difficult to make a great color photo than a black and white one.
(Interestingly, like some commenters, I happen to like the color version more than the black and white version of the first photo he shows to make his point.)
New Gallery: Chinese New Year 2008
A new gallery of photos of the Chinese New Year celebrations in Paris last February has just been added:
These photos are also available on flickr.
New Wallpaper Galleries
I just added three new galleries of photos available as free wallpapers for your desktop: Architecture, Landscapes et Nature.
Some sample images:
Happy downloading!
Lightroom 2 Public Beta
The first public beta of Lightroom 2 is available for download from the Adobe Labs. Support for localized corrections seems like a great new feature. Not for production use, though:
While data loss is not expected, this is a very early ‘beta’ quality build and you should always work on duplicates of files that are securely backed up.
[...]
Develop settings applied in Lightroom 2.0 beta are not guaranteed to transfer correctly to the final version of 2.0. This is particularly true for localized corrections.
Incorrect Photo Sort Order in Lightroom 1.0
The upgrade to Lightroom 1.0 went smoothly. The thirty gigabytes of photos neatly imported and managed by Lightroom since its first beta release in January 2006 were still present in my library after the upgrade, and the shoots structure of the beta releases, replaced with folders in version 1.0, had been saved as a new collection.
Everything looked fine, yet something was wrong.
While browsing the new folder organization, I realized that the TIFF files created by Lightroom from the original RAW files were always listed at the end of the grid view when sorted by Capture Time. Investigating further, it appeared that the Date Time metadata field of these TIFF files was set to the modification date of the file and not to the date the photo was shot:
I then opened the Edit Capture Time dialog box for one of these TIFF files by clicking on its Date Time value in the Metadata panel. This showed the same correct value for both the Original Time and Corrected Time fields. Strange. I then shifted the Corrected Time field by one second and dismissed the dialog box by clicking its Change button. After that, the Metadata panel for the TIFF file showed the shifted time for the Date Time Original field, yet the Date Time field was still set to the modification date of the file:
OK. Don’t panic. After shifting the Corrected Time of the photo back to its original value, I launched a Google search: surely I wasn’t the only one encountering this issue.
Indeed I wasn’t, according to this thread on the Adobe Lightroom forums. The posters in this thread suggested a few solutions to get the sort order back to normal. Someone auto-stacked his photos by capture time then unstacked them, and this seems to have been enough to fix the sort order. Unfortunately this didn’t work for me.
Someone else assigned a color label to his incorrectly sorted images then set the sort order to File Name; after that he reverted to the Capture Time sort order, and luckily for him this fixed the problem. I tried his solution on my library, but unluckily for me this didn’t change anything.
At the end of the day, none of the proposed solutions worked on my Lightroom library. Whatever the cure, the edited TIFF files always had their Date Time field set to their modification date, pushing them at the far end of the grid view.
Until Lightroom 1.1 is out with a proper fix, I’ll sort my photos according to their file name. The resulting order is correct given that, since I’ve been using it, Lightroom has been configured so that imported images are renamed using their capture time, in the form year-month-day, followed by a sequence number.
Lucky me.
Sharpening a Photo with the High Pass Filter
I originally found this technique at Luminous Landscape. It gives better results than the unsharp mask and its effect can be removed from the picture at any time.
Proceed as follows:
In the Layer palette select the layer to be sharpened (most probably the background layer).
Duplicate this layer (Layer > Duplicate Layer).
Give a name to the new layer, e.g. High Pass.
Ensure that the new layer is selected in the Layer palette, then apply the High Pass filter (Filter > Other > High Pass).
Set the filter radius to 10 then click OK.
Select Hard Light in the blend mode drop-down menu (the one in the top-left of the Layer palette).
Play with the Opacity slider until you’re pleased with the result.
The following two pictures show the effect of high-pass sharpening with a radius of 10 and layer opacity set to 50%:
 Original picture |
 High Pass sharpening |
To disable the sharpening effect, simply click the eye on the left of the layer in the Layer palette. To remove it permanently, delete the layer.
Some references:
- High Pass Sharpening Tutorial (Luminous Landscape)
- The High Pass Way to Sharpen in Photoshop (Earthbound Light)
Sharpening a Photo with the Unsharp Mask
This is the simplest technique that can be used to sharpen an image.
Proceed as follows:
In the Layer palette select the layer to be sharpened (most probably the background layer).
Open the Unsharp Mask dialog window (Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask).
Play with the Amount, Radius, and Threshold settings until you’re satisfied with the result, then click OK.
The following two pictures show the effect of an unsharp mask with amount set to 125%, radius to 1.5 pixels, and threshold to 1:
Original picture |
 Unsharp mask |
Note that once the unsharp mask has been applied onto a layer, it’s effect cannot be reverted after the file has been closed. The unsharp mask also increases noise in the image (play with the Threshold setting to attenuate this).
Some references:
- Behind the Unsharp Mask: The Secret World of Sharpening (Earthbound Light)
- Understanding the Digital Unsharp Mask (Luminous Landscape)
- Sharpening: Unsharp Mask (Cambridge in Colour)
Convert a Photo to Black and White with a Gradient Map Layer
This is a variation of the desaturate technique. It uses a gradient map instead of a hue/saturation layer with saturation set to -100. This often yields better result.
Here’s how to proceed:
In the Layer palette select the layer containing the image to convert to black and white (most probably the background layer).
Ensure that the foreground color is set to white and that the background color is set to black (default values).
Create a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer with the default settings; call it Hue.
Create a new Gradient Map adjustment layer; let’s call this one Gradient Map.
Select the Hue layer in the Layer palette.
Double-click the Layer thumbnail of the Hue layer; this opens the Hue/Saturation dialog box for the Hue layer.
Play with the Hue setting until you’re satisfied with the result.
Click OK.
The following pictures show the effect of the gradient map technique with various Hue values:
 Original picture |
 Gradient Map, Hue +0 |
 Gradient Map, Hue +40 |
 Gradient Map, Hue +180 |
Convert a Photo to Black and White with a Desaturate Layer
This is a simple black and white conversion technique that yields good results. Thanks to Marc from TTLTT who summarized it to me.
Proceed as follows:
In the Layer palette select the layer containing the image to convert to black and white (most probably the background layer).
Create a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer with the default settings; call it Hue.
Create another Hue/Saturation adjustment layer with Saturation set to -100; let’s call this one Saturation.
Select the Hue layer in the Layer palette.
Select Color in the blend mode drop-down menu (the one in the top-left of the Layer palette).
Double-click the Layer thumbnail of the Hue layer; this opens the Hue/Saturation dialog box for the Hue layer.
Play with the Hue setting until you’re satisfied with the result.
Click OK.
The following pictures show the effect of the desaturation technique with various Hue values:
Original picture |
 Hue +0 |
 Hue -30 |
 Hue +180 |
This technique is explained in more details at DigiDaan, which also provides a Photoshop action to automate the process.
