Category Archives: Picasa

What Photoshop?

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Not long ago I took Adobe to task for a poorly executed upgrade path from their expensive Photoshop CS5 to Photoshop CS6. Today, I am calling them on the carpet for their most egregious mistake:

Confusing the H*LL out of their potential clients with an armada of similarly named, poorly differentiated, expensive products. To the casual observer the cost of that fleet of products ranges from expensive to “I have to forego buying a camera so I can edit my photos” expensive.  Nearly daily my students ask me whether they should buy Photoshop and WHICH ONE!

The discontinuation of sale of Photoshop through normal sales channels has simplified the picture considerably since this article was originally written. The choices are:
Photoshop CC (through Creative Cloud), Photoshop Elements, and Photoshop Lightroom (Creative Cloud OR retail sales).  However it’s worth reading through the rest of this article for some historical perspective. 

Isn’t Photoshop Too Expensive?

Let me weigh in on the expensive part first.  Photoshop CS6 Standard Edition (I’ll try to disentangle what that means in a moment) ranges from about $600 at Amazon to $700 directly from Adobe it sure sounds expensive.  But if you think of it as you would  say a sweet new lens for your camera it suddenly sounds less outrageously expensive. If you are willing to invest in Adobe’s future by taking a chance on their wobbly Cloud offering you can “rent” Photoshop for as low as $50 per month (or $20 per month depending on the plan – or even as little as $10/month).

So yes, it’s expensive. The question is: will it make your photos more impressive like a $600 lens might? My answer is yes, if you’re willing to do the time learning Photoshop’s incredible awesome power and escape Photoshop’s maddening quirks.

And for the kind of photography that I do: night photography with layers and complex operations there really is no equal that I am aware of.  GIMP is a free independently written Photoshop alternative. At the moment it is limited to 8 bit operations – though a 16 bit version is in beta. For many years I couldn’t bear the outrageous price of Photoshop so I used PaintShopPro with great success. Eventually I realized that the power I wanted required a payment so I stuck my toe into Photoshop CS3. Later it was CS5 and most recently CS6.  Of course since it is my business to produce prints and teach students about night photography, I get to deduct Photoshop as a cost of doing business. That doesn’t make it cheaper, though, does it.

What Version of Photoshop?

As I noted in the opening paragraph, Adobe has really made a mess of their products.  Here is a PARTIAL list of Photoshop choices for the LATEST version and the cost of each as reported on Adobe’s website. Costs are rounded to the nearest tens.

  • Photoshop CS6 $600
  • Photoshop CS6 Upgrade $200
  • Photoshop CS6 Extended $1000
  • Photoshop CS6 Extended Upgrade $400
  • Photoshop Elements 12 $100
  • Photoshop Elements 12 Editor ?
  • Photoshop Elements 12 with Adobe Premiere Elements $150
  • Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 $150
  • Design Standard CS6  $1300
  • Design and Web Premium CS6 $1900
  • Production Premium CS6 $1900
  • Master Collection CS6 $2600
  • Creative Cloud $240/year OR $350/year OR $600/year

The underlined items are bundles that contain Photoshop in them, that’s why they are more expensive.  The items in italics are in fact not really Photoshop except in name.  Think of them as Photoshop Light with simpler interfaces and fewer features. And the above does not show the Student/Teacher pricing which is yet another kettle of smelly fish.

In a nutshell for the kind of photo processing I do, Photoshop CS6 (not Extended, and definitely not Elements) is the tool of choice.

If you’re wondering whether you need the latest version: probably not. CS3, CS4 or CS5 will do just fine if you find them discounted somewhere and are careful to buy the FULL package, not an upgrade. Beware as there are many counterfeiters and scams – only buy from a reputable company.

What Adobe Tool Do you Need?

One more frustration for me is that Adobe does a very poor job differentiating its products.  You have to be a student of Adobe to understand how Illustrator differs from Photoshop from In Design, from Lightroom, etc. Or worse if I want to make a timelapse video which tool is the best one: Premiere Pro, Premiere Elements, After Effects, Photoshop, Photoshop Extended, Encore?  It’s hard to say unless you have an PhD in the Adobe marketspace – I don’t.

But You Haven’t Mentioned Lightroom!

You noticed that, eh? I own it, but I don’t like Lightroom. The photo editing interface for Lightroom is much more intuitive than the one in Photoshop, and Lightroom lets you sort, tag, organize and catalog photos with some really great features. My pet peeve is that Lightroom is slower than a frozen slug in a snowstorm and it forces me to “Import” everything I want to work on. Lightroom doesn’t do layering which is the key thing I need for optimum photo results.  The free Picasa tool (from Google) does the cataloging, sorting and keywording I want along with less impressive, but passable photo editing.  The Picasa method for straightening photos is awesome, quick and dead simple. Besides, most everything Lightroom can do Photoshop or Photoshop plus Bridge (or Adobe Camera Raw) can do more powerfully – if you can figure it out, that is.

Still, Lightroom does provide some pretty powerful features and allows non-destructive editing. But at a cost both in $ and time.

Bottom Line?

Photoshop is powerful. You can go farther with it than without it, and best of all there are a LOT of resources around to help you learn Photoshop – like StarCircleAcademy.com and books by Harold Davis (and many others).  Unfortunately lots of resources are needed because while Photoshop is a powerful weapon it is also a many-headed monster that requires developing some good wrestling skills.

 

More Star Stacking Tricks: Use the Bridge

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Red Rock Cometary [C_009865-76+79brC]
Perhaps the most popular thing we’ve done at StarCircleAcademy is to provide a stacking action for Photoshop.  What can you do with it? Alas, you can’t use it to end hunger, or create world peace. However, the action allows you to automate the task of creating star trails from individual images. You can create the trails from JPGs, TIFFs, or even RAW files in fact from any file that Photoshop is able to load.

You have to capture the images in the first place, so we humbly suggest you begin with understanding How to expose, how to shoot, what settings to use, and even what to consider to create a more compelling image. Or if this is all new, start at the beginning and learn about night exposures and the kinds of star shots that are possible.

Beacon [C_069244-92]

Curious about the circle? It is formed by shooting north in the Northern latitudes.

If you have already used the Stacking Action as we previously described you are all set to put on your big-boy pants and do more advanced stacking tricks using, of all things, the lowly Adobe Bridge. Bridge is a lighter weight version of Lightroom (sort of) and it comes with Photoshop and other Adobe products for no extra fee.

Why would you want to use Adobe Bridge as the front end?

  1. Bridge allows you to do mass corrections to raw files before they are used by Photoshop. Anything that Adobe Camera Raw can do, Bridge can do to a number of files all at once.
  2. Bridge has an operation called, uhm, “Stacking” which is a way to group images together in a nice memorable way.
  3. Bridge allows you to SEE and select specific files to operate upon – unlike the “folder” method you may have been using previously.
  4. Bridge is relatively lightweight and doesn’t need preloading as Lightroom does.

It is slightly more complicated to use Bridge for stacking, but do not worry. We will make it as simple as possible.

Suppose you have a number of files to stack and they are located in a single directory along with a number of files that you don’t want to stack. Below I’ve navigated to a big directory full of CR2 (Canon Raw Files) and I’ve used the Ctl Key to select the first four images of a star trail sequence.

AdobeBridgeCR2.bmp

As is my customary practice I used a number of colors and lighting methods to begin my star trail and I can tell I don’t like C_066715 or C_066716 (which is too green).  So instead I’ll start with image C_066717.CR2.  Scanning forward, the clouds start to become a problem by image C_066739 so I have picked images 717 through 738.  I won’t be describing how to use it here, but if you look on the lower left side of the Adobe Bridge screen there is a “Filter” window where you can choose images based on ISO, exposure time, keywords, etc.  That may come in handy if you want to only select the 24 second exposures in a sequence.

Getting back to my quest… Though I don’t have to, I will mark the images I’ve selected as a stack.  NOTE: Images can only be in one stack.

AdobeBridgeGroupAsStack.bmp

And then I will select ONE of the images to decide what “develop settings” to apply. That is, what to do with the image before stacking it.

AdobeStackSelect.bmpHere is where I’ll give you a hint to keep you from banging your head on the wall. If you click the “image” of the stack you will only select the first image.  However if you click on the count of images (where the yellow arrow points) it will select the whole stack. Here I’m selecting only the first image by double clicking it. My primary interest is getting the color balance about right.  There are lots of ways to adjust the white balance including using the white balance tool or adjusting the color temperature. This is also a potential departure point because there are two ways I might want to address my set of images:

  • I may want a nice clean star trail with gaps as small as possible, OR
  • I may want to produce individual frames for an animation or timelapse.

ACRSettingsSave.bmp

If my goal is a star trail, then I will set all of the sliders to zero, set noise reduction to zero, and set the curve to “linear”. About the only thing I’m likely to do is vignette correction – leave lens correction for later, it may cause bad things. In fact, I have created an ACR preset to do exactly that I call it “linear”.  If, however, my goal is a timelapse, I’ll try to beautify the image as much as possible including sharpening, noise reduction, and exposure corrections.

For this example, I am taking the beauty route. I made the adjustments I want and saved the settings as a preset called “TronaStack”.  Next I will apply those settings to all of the images in my stack.  What really happens is that Adobe Bridge creates sidecar (XMP) files for each of the images and re-renders the file in Bridge to approximate the changes.

Mass Applying Settings

AdobeBridgeDevelopSettings.bmp

With all the raw settings applied, I want to do the stacking operations exactly as described here – but we will be using “Bridge” as the source.

AdobeBridgeToolsPhotoshopBatch.bmp

NOTE: Your menu might look a little different especially if you haven’t installed Dr. Brown’s Services.  As you might have guessed, using “Photoshop -> Batch” invokes Photoshop.  The next screen you see will look familiar except you’ll notice the Source is Bridge.

PhotoshopBatch.bmp

As the instructions state, you should run the “Do This First” operation. It creates a properly sized black background using the dimensions of the first photo in the stack.  You then re-run it with the operation you want. Here I’m using the comet stacking option of the Advanced Stacker.  It is important to make note of the output options. If you don’t override them, the intermediate result will be written over itself repeatedly.

PhotoshopBatchOverides.bmp

The Advanced StarCircleAcademy Stacking actions will create “Comet_” documents but you’ll need to add a unique number as shown above. If you don’t like the base name, you can substitute whatever you like instead of “Document Name” above. E.g. “MySequence”. I often set the starting serial number to the first image number in the stack since I try to make sure I uniquely number every image I capture.

After stacking the output appears in the “C:\tmp\StackTest” folder like this:

BridgeResults.bmp

What is especially cool is that I’ve directly stacked the RAW files into “comets” for an animated sequence.  I could then create a timelapse out of those images if I wish.  Of course there is one hitch. The huge files are too large to easily create a meaningful timelapse. It would be so much nicer if all the images were straightened, downsized and cropped to a specific format like 1920 x 1080 (HD) or 800 x 600. That is a topic for another column, but Adobe Camera Raw can do the trick. And it’s also possible to do the deed with the Advanced Stacking action.

If you’re wondering how you can get your hands on the Advanced Stacking Action with comets and more see the Store.

Can I Use Mini Bridge?

Well, yes, you can, though Mini Bridge only works if Bridge is open so it’s not really very mini!

MiniBridgeStacking

Star Trail Creation – Step By Step

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Originally Published: November 19, 2012
Last Revised: March 3, 2017

I dredged this one up out of the archives. Many people ask me “how do you do those star trails, Steven.”  If you want a grand overview of the process, my Treatise on Star Trails is a good read. However here I reveal step-by-step how I create a star trail image from the first shots to the finished image. The method shown below is for creating simple (lighten mode) star trails. If you want to do some fancy effects, please take a look at our Advanced Stacker Plus.

Here we go.

South Side [C_009842-75br]

Photo 1: Quickly stacked image which is a composite of thirty-three 6-minute 500 ISO exposures and one 30 second, ISO 2000 exposure.

The above is my first quick attempt at creating a star trail, and following is summary of how I created it.

It starts with the test image and continues with the exposure set. For background on how to navigate the various shooting choices, see: the summary Stacker’s Checklist. The theory about selecting exposures may help.  And there is a two-part series that addresses the difficulties you may encounter. See Part 1 and Part 2. If you’re curious how I get the stars to form circles, this article will provide the information.

I usually start with a short (30 second or less), high ISO exposure to gauge several things: 1. How well framed my subject is, 2. How sharp the focus is, and 3. What I may need to adjust to control the sky-glow.

Photo 2: First, image: ISO 2000, f/2.8, 30 seconds.

After taking the first image, I realized two things: one is that the trucks passing were providing helpful light on my foreground – but not always illuminating the entire thing.  The other is that the exposure (ISO 2000, f/2.8, 30 seconds) was under exposed.  I needed to at least double the exposure to 1 minute. Let me stop for a moment. Those of you who don’t do much night photography are thinking “Whoa from 30 seconds to 1 minute is a huge difference.”  But no, it’s not. It’s only one f-stop. It is no different from changing a daylight exposure from 1/200 of a second to 1/100 of a second.

Starting with an exposure at 1 minute, 2000 ISO f/2.8 as a starting point I calculated an  ISO 500, 6 minute exposures at f/3.5. Here is how: A 1 minute exposure at ISO 2000 is equivalent to a 4 minute exposure at ISO 500 (500 is 1/4 of 2000).  Changing the aperture from f/2.8 to f/3.5 drops the light by about 33%, so I increased the exposure from 4 to 6 minutes.

I set my camera to record in RAW and my interval timer to take 5 minute, 59 second exposures every 6 minutes. I pulled out my reclining beach chair, a sleeping bag and slept while the camera clicked.  Below are a few of the shots. Note how the light changes from passing trucks!  You can also see the counter-clockwise rotation of the Milky Way. The last shot was taken as twilight approached is too bright to use because the sky is losing contrast and the light on the cliff is looking flat. I did not include that last shot in the stack.

Photo 3: Collage of some of the photos used in the stack.

I downloaded all the images from my card to my Incoming folder which is organized by date.  I used Digital Photo Professional to pull up the images, applied a bit of contrast enhancement, a slight exposure increase (1/3 of an f-stop), and a very slight noise control over the entire image. I exported in Landscape style which adds a slight saturation increase (Photoshop Saturation and Vividness) and modest sharpening. I cloned the recipe to all the photos and exported them into a “RedRockEast” folder in a temporary directory.  I could have done all these things with ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) or Lightroom.  In this case I didn’t have to do any white balance adjustments because I had preset the camera to approximately 4100K.

I then dragged and dropped all the exported (JPG) images onto Image Stacker which took about 3 seconds per image – less than two minutes to create a result. My option for Image Stacker was “Brighten” mode. I could have used the Star Circle Academy Stacking Action in Photoshop instead and the result would have been identical.  The stacking action takes about the same amount of time, but is more versatile and can even use raw images. (Note: StarStax is a program that supports Mac, Unix and Windows and works well, too!)

Photo 4: First Results stacking 34 images in Image Stacker by Tawbaware – this is effectively a 3 hour, 24 minute exposure.

The result was a little dark and flat so I used Picasa 3 to increase the exposure (called Fill Light), highlights and shadows – each by about 1/4 of the scale, and I warmed the photo by slightly tweaking the white balance (Color Temperature). That was all I needed to get the image shown in Photo 1.

Screen Shot 1: Picasa Adjustments

One obvious problem with the result is that the combination of the early short exposure with the sequence of shots left a gap. There really was no reason to include the first shot.

I want the cliff to pop a bit better, so my next course of action was to work on improving the foreground.  I found all the brightest shots of the cliff face (e.g. when the trucks were lighting them), and combined them using additive stacking to brighten them and averaging to reduce the noise. Remember that “brighten mode” (Lighten in Photoshop) does not brighten anything – what it actually does is select the brightest pixels at each location from each of the images in the stack.  The brightest pixels may also be noise! Using averaging reduces the noise significantly – but it will not remove “hot” pixels; we will address those later.  Fortunately Image Stacker has an option to stack and average. All you need do is specify the divisor.  If you have 10 images and specify a divisor of 10 then you are simply averaging. But if you specify a divisor of, say 5, then you are averaging AND effectively increasing the brightness by about 1 stop.  I used 12 images and a divisor of 3. And I made the same adjustment to the result in Picasa as I showed in Screen Shot 1. But I wasn’t happy with the result – the foreground still wasn’t bright enough.

Next I took 10 of the brightest images and Stacked them (additive).  After tweaking shadows and brightness in Picasa I got this:

Photo 4: Additive stack of 10 images.

Now my foreground is better, but I have created a new problem. The sky is over-bright and the hot pixels and the noise are significant as shown in a 100% crop below.

Screen Shot 2: 100% view showing Hot Pixels and noise (white speckles)

The hot pixels here have a purple fringe to them. Sometimes hot pixels are tinged red, green, blue, white or gray. I will fix hot pixels in my next to last step using the clone stamp (Picasa’s retouch) or the healing brush in Photoshop.

While the noise is obvious at 100% I think it will be fine so I am not going to address it.  If I later find the noise intolerable I will go back and stack more images and average them. Or I may return to the original images and apply stronger noise reduction in Digital Photo Professional and re-export them.

My next task is to remove the over-bright sky from the Photo 4, above. Sky removal is rather easy with the wand selection tool in Photoshop. I select all the sky and fill with black after making a few more tweaks to contrast and color.

Photo 5: Sky removed and replaced with black.

Since I now have a black sky version with the foreground as I like it, I can include this frame in any other stacks I make, and my foreground will be just as I want it. If I were working entirely in Photoshop, I would not have to fill with black, I could just use the result as a layer with only the foreground revealed by a mask.

To complete the process, I restacked 33 images together with the sky-less foreground image (Photo 5). Some more minor shadow and color temperature tweaks and some spot corrections of the few hot pixels (there were about 15), an addition of my copyright and this is the result:

Photo 6: Final Image

Since I had all the images for the stack, I was challenged on Flickr to also make a time-lapse video. This video below also helps to illustrate how stacking works. I collected the original thirty-three 6 minute exposures and cropped them to HD format (1920 x 1080). I then created and a sequence of stacked images using the intermediates option of Star Circle Academy Stacking action and joined them into an animation complete with a lovely snippet of the song Kidstuff by Acoustic Alchemy. In my next column, I’ll show how to create the time-lapse animation.

Red Rock Dancing *Explored 03-03-2011*

If you would like hands on experience and instruction, you can join us at a StarCircleAcademy Workshop

Creating a Timelapse Animation Part 2 of 2

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Foundations

Hopefully you’ve already read Part 1 of this column where we showed how to get started with a timelapse animation: choosing exposures, frame rates, etc. Now we’ll get to the good stuff and show several techniques for animating the resulting star shots.

Simple Timelapse – Picasa Movie Maker Option

To do a simple animation using Picasa (free tool from Google) here is how you go about it. Organize all of your identically sized and processed frames into either a single folder or a Picasa Album.

Illustration 1: Picasa with a set of images captured in an Album. Would work the same if a directory were used.

Select the Album (or directory) and click the Movie option.  You’ll get a default title screen.

Illustration 2: The Movie Creation Option of Picasa

Click the “Movie” tab, and change the transition style to “Time Lapse”. Set the slider to 1/10th Sec (or shorter if you wish) and click “Create Movie”.  After a short while you might have something like this:

Now that was simple!

Getting More Advanced – Titling, Credits, and Sound

The Titling and “Slide” options of Picasa are rather limited, so I prefer to add my own titling.  Here’s how:

  1. If still in “Movie” mode select “Clips” then “Get More” which returns you to the “Library” mode.
  2. Select the slide to use for your Title – e.g. the first, last, a composite, or something altogether different. Make sure it’s the same size as your time lapse.  I usually use the first or last slide and use “File -> Save a Copy”.
  3. Load the desired slide.
  4. Use the Text Tool in Picasa to add the text you like sized, angled and colored as you please.
  5. You can animate the title by changing colors, and other effects, but don’t go overboard just yet – as this is not a very efficient way to create titles!
  6. Duplicate the title slide “File -> Save a Copy”.  For each second you want the text to appear you’ll need to have enough frames. So, for example for a 1 second appearance at 1/10th of  a second duration, you need 10 frames.
  7. NOTE: If you want to make the text appear for 5 seconds, you don’t need to make 50 frames, you can make 10 or fewer and reuse them (see step 9 below).
  8. In this example I used the first frame, added my text and saved it 6 times (File -> Save a Copy).
  9. I selected the 6 identical title frames, and clicked “Back to Movie Maker” at the bottom.
  10. I made sure the movie was at the beginning by dragging the slider beneath the window all the way to the left.
  11. Next I drag my “clips” onto the beginning of the movie.
  12. If I need more title frames, I select “Get More”, reselect the same slides and repeat step 11 until happy.
  13. Credits/closing titling can be done the same way as the titles.

After adding credits, and a “The End” (animated in color!) final slide set my movie now looks like this:

Oh, and I added music too. Any MP3 file should work. Just use the “Audio Track” option to load it.  If you want to start the music at a particular point and do fade in, fade out, or cross fade different audio tracks Picasa is not the tool for you.

NOTE: When you add an audio track, be careful that you also have the “Truncate Audio” selected or Picasa will want to extend your movie for the length of the song. You might also need to change the slide duration to your desired speed. Picasa Movie Maker has a bug where it sometimes resets the speed to 24 frames a second (as it did above – did you notice how much faster the newer version was?!)

Getting Even Fancier

What if you want to do something really cool like have the star trails “grow” (or shrink)? Well we’ve got you covered there, too!  Hopefully you’re already familiar with the StarCircleAcademy Stacking Action – if not, give this a read.  We don’t tell you in that blog article, but there is an option available in the Stacking Action (Version 5) to “Stack in LIGHTEN mode creating intermediates“. What that does is super cool. Each time it adds a new frame to the stack, it saves the current results with a unique file name. The final frame is the same as the “Load and Stack in LIGHTEN mode” but every frame along the way is squirreled away where you specify. You can then animate those just as described above. Here is a simple example:

A more interesting example shows what happens when I start the animation near the middle. I then stack ten frames at a time (using Image Stacker) and animate them. I then stack the stacks of 10 into stacks of 50 (which makes it look like it’s moving faster) and finally I then repeat all the frames from beginning to end. It LOOKS like the movie is getting brighter but what is really happening is you are seeing the moon rise!

For another similar example, take a look at this. Be patient though as the good part is toward the end.

If you have only a few frames, you can use other modes to create your timelapse, for example this one uses “cut” mode with photos every 1 second.

If you want to go even farther, there are still more free tools that you can use, like Windows Live Movie.  With Windows Live Movie you can do more advanced titling, have music that fades in and out (only one track at a time, however), and more.

Here is an example using Window Live Movie together with YouTube’s annotation options: