2018-09-12: Wordless Wednesday
2018-09-10: Monochrome Monday
Just a quick single image post for Monochrome Monday this week.
A zebra stopping traffic on one of the roads through Etosha National Park in Namibia. The zebra were very abundant there, and quite chill around vehicles making for some nice opportunities for images. I’ve had lots of experience with zebra taking off in the other direction as soon as they realized you were looking at them.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead.
2018-09-09: Topic for the Month – Topaz Studio
As I mentioned in my August in Review post, I am going to spend the month of September diving into the Topaz Studio system. I had the full suite of Topaz plugins that I used to use with Photoshop, but the primary resources I used were the Impression and Remask plugins, and I never really spent the time learning the ins and outs of the others. I could utilize them, but I was never familiar enough to be sure which one I needed or to be able to use them to their full potential.
I spent some time this week watching a few tutorials to get a feel for properly using the Studio interface. I had found a few things were not intuitive for me, and watching the tutorials definitely helped. Studio comes with 10 free basic adjustments, and several of the Pro adjustments are included if you previously owned other Topaz products. They also have an option to try Pro adjustments for 30 days before you buy them, so I am going to trial a few additional adjustments that I have seen on the tutorials I have been watching. I have a feeling that may be a bit costly for me, as I have watched and now tried the AI Clear adjustment (which is pretty amazing), but we’ll see how things go once we get to the end of the month.
Below are links to tutorials I have watched so far. The Topaz Labs page on Youtube seems to have a lot of information and taped webinars, so I’m sure I’ll have more to share as the month goes on.
Topaz Studio can do a lot of things, including edit Raw files and save in multiple formats. But there isn’t an option for exporting and resizing for web, so while I am going to try and do all my adjustments through Topaz, I still have to take the files back into On1 to export at the proper size for uploading to the blog or to my Instagram page.
A few other differences to On1 Photo Raw and Luminar that I have noticed are the colour temperature under the basic adjustment is a simple temperature and tint slider, rather than having to opportunity to quickly try different colour temperature presets (daylight, shade etc).
I’ve not had a chance to edit as many photos as I would like this week, but I am impressed with the results of what I’ve had the chance to work on. I’m posting 3 before and after images for reference; if anyone is interest in the adjustments I used to create the final images, please let me know and I will post screen shots.
Here is a steenbok spotted near the Hoanib Camp in Namibia:
An oryx, also spotted near Hoanib Camp:
A springbok spotted while on a game drive in Etosha National Park:
The springbok image is the only one that I tried using some presets with. Topaz products such as clarity have the presets for the plugin available for the app. Using a preset, and then carrying on with other adjustments, was something that I had struggled with on my first pass with the program, but the key is to hit the apply button after working with one preset before moving on to the next. If there are any other Topaz Studio users that are struggling with that, I can post a couple of screen shots, but I found the answer while watching the Youtube presentation linked above featuring Hazel Meredith.
Well, that’s all for this week. I am hoping by next week to have had lots more options to put studio to the test and see what I can come up with.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead.
2018-09-05: Wordless Wednesday
2018-09-03: Monochrome Monday
Wishing everyone a great week ahead!
2018-08-26: Elephants edited with Luminar
Since it has been far too smoky to get out shooting, I decided I needed a theme for my Luminar editing this week, and I decided on elephants (surprise!). I’ve not watched any more Luminar tutorials this week, but I have decided for the balance of the month I am going to search out resources on Luminar for Windows, as the program is a bit less advanced than the Mac version.
I actually tried to edit an image on my Windows computer using Luminar, but got frustrated with a clone and stamp issue and gave up. Currently, I’m letting that computer download the latest update while I write this, so perhaps the issue will be resolved with the latest version.
Editing elephant images has given me a chance to work with a variety of tools to bring out texture and contrast. An elephant’s wrinkly skin is such a wonderful feature, and raw files really need to be worked with to bring that back to life. I’ve found that Luminar does an excellent job with this, but you definitely need a gentle hand with the adjustments as they can go up to 11 very quickly. The other feature I am enjoying on Luminar is the Accent AI slider. It analyzes an image and tries to adjust automatically for exposure, contrast, clarity, saturation… but like the filters that affect details, I find it it needs to be used with a gentle touch, otherwise the image starts to look overdone.
I hope you enjoy my selections for the week. Wishing everyone a great week ahead.
2018-08-21: Flamingos – Before and After
I had flagged this image to include with my Monochrome Monday post yesterday, but when I started editing this in Luminar, I was so impressed with the transformation, I thought it would make for a good before and after post.
These flamingos were far away; I had the Panasonic at full 400mm zoom and they still are really small, so I shot this mostly as a proof image. With a digital camera, there is little downside to snapping a photo or two even if you don’t think they will be great.
At least you have a record of what you saw, and it might actually turn out okay. Needless to say this isn’t getting printed to hang on my wall, but it is a great example of how far you can recover a rather drab image.
As I said, I brought this into Luminar planning to include it with my black and white shots, but all it took were a few sliders to bring to colour and texture of the image back to life.
I saved a split shot with the before and after (I really like this view option, I find it much more helpful than toggling before and after on and off). You really get an idea of how flat and lifeless the image was out of camera, and how much detail and colour be recovered.
I edited this in under five minutes, so it definitely wasn’t a big time investment to play around and make this image the best it could be.
2018-08-20: Monochrome Monday
I was inspired by my post yesterday on white balance to continue editing images from my time at the Skelton Coast in Namibia. Given the flat light in a lot of the images, I thought black and white edits might be a good option. I am quite happy the way the turned out.
All of the images from my time at the coast were shot with my Panasonic FZ1000, which I have mentioned before is a great and capable camera, but sometimes the quality is a bit lacking when comparing to the files I got out of my Nikon or that I now get from my Fuji. But these were shot at the start of a long trip and I thought it would be wise not to subject the Nikon to blowing sand, given its terrible habit of picking up dust particles. So, I’ve done the best with what I got that day.
2018-08-19: Creative white balance
I recently watched a Luminar editing tutorial discussing technically correct vs creative white balance. Since I am almost always shooting outside, in changing light conditions, I don’t have a shots with a grey card in it to actually come up with the technically correct white balance. I tend to leave my camera on auto WB, and then adjust it as needed in post processing. But the tutorial still got me thinking about the different mood and feel that an image can have, depending on the choice of colour temperature.
I decided to play around with this concept a bit with a few images that I took on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia. We took a short flight from camp to the coast and took a drive through the dunes, where it was warm and sunny with clear blue skies, but once we were at the coast line, low cloud and fog swirled around in strong winds, causing subtle, but rapidly changing light conditions as we visited a seal colony, explored a few of the wrecks along the coast, and enjoyed a picnic lunch on the beach.
On a previous trip I had flown over a portion of the Skeleton Coast, and found the abandoned buildings and shipwrecks fascinating to see, so having the change to see some of the wrecks up close was really interesting for me. The different colours and textures of the rusted, twisted metal against the natural sand, rock and water provided lots of options for photos.
2018-08-13: Monochrome Monday
I’m a little later than normal with my Monochrome Monday post as I have been playing around with using the MacPhun (now Skylum) Tonality plugin with Luminar. I must say, I am really enjoying using Tonality again!
Tonality was my go-to for black and white conversion when I was using Lightroom and Photoshop. I found I could dial in the vision I was imagining much faster than using other black and white methods. Now that I no longer have Photoshop, I am glad I have a way to integrate the plug-in back into my workflow when I want to.
I’ve started watching some Luminar videos on YouTube by Jim Nix, and one of them really resonated with me today. It had nothing to do with the image or the edits he did, but just the concept of revisiting old work to re-edit photos, to experiment with new software, filters and combinations of tools to keep your creativity and interest peeked. A lot of that is why I am enjoying this theme so much, as the lack of familiarity with the software has caused me to think a lot more critically about what I want to achieve, so I can figure out how to do it, but it has also allowed me to just open random filters to see what they do, sometimes to great result, sometimes awful. If you are interested, you can find the Luminar video by Jim Nix here.
Now on to the images for today.
For this giraffe image, I did an extra step to start, and from Luminar opened Topaz Studio and then the Topaz Remask plugin. I find Remask is excellent for complicated situations like these tree branches against the sky. The sky was very grainy, and I wanted to apply some noise reduction, and I thought that would be the best way to go. I shot this image with my Panasonic FZ1000, which is a very capable little camera, but I do find skies are generally quite noisy regardless of the ISO. There was also a lot of airborne dust so it could have been that rather than a limitation of the camera. After I created my mask in Remask, I ran the noise removal filter in Topaz Studio and sent the image back to Luminar, and then onto Tonality for black and white conversion. If Luminar had an option to adjust luminosity masks so I could isolate the sky, I would have gone that route and saved some steps, but right now its not an option.
Things were much simpler for the next two images. I edited both using the Tonality plug in, though I am sure I could have arrived at similar results just using Luminar. As with most photo editing programs, there are a lot of different paths to get to the same place. It’s all about what works for you.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my selections for the day 🙂