Tag Archives: enhancement

The 5 Most Used Photo Enhancement Techniques

We have been watching ourselves over our shoulders – yeah, kinda weird, right? Our goal is to figure out what it is we do the most to fix and beautify our photography – night photography in particular.  We cover nearly all of these topics in greater detail in each of our NP150 – Photo Manipulation Webinars but we will hit the highlights here. So what are the 5 most used “tricks”?

  1. White Balance / Color correction
  2. Noise Reduction
  3. Exposure and Contrast enhancement
  4. Sharpening (and de-sharpening)
  5. Healing and Cloning

The first two topics are tackled below. The next two in the following article.  Healing and cloning will get it’s own short article.

First to be clear our goal is usually to make a compelling photo, not merely to represent reality. We do prefer realistic over bizarre, but we are not opposed to removing telephone wires and other distractions.  We DO prefer natural looking scenes and eschew the over-the-top contrast and color saturation that seems to be the rage these days.

White Balance

We hate to be the first to break the news, but your camera is pretty clueless about what color white is. The camera will take its best guess. Our experience with night photography is that the camera choice is usually wrong – or at least unappealing. At its core white balance requires adjusting the red, green, and blue colors so that an area that should have a neutral gray or white color is actually gray – not tinged red, blue or green. When shooting at night, understand that every light in the scene – including stars – has a different color bias (tint). Sodium vapor lights for example are horrendous. Sodium vapor lights used in many streetlights are predominately yellow-brown and almost monochromatic. Under sodium vapor lights it will be impossible to achieve a natural color spectrum. You may want to adjust different parts of a night image separately.  You may have to compromise and have a scene that has a bias of a pleasing kind rather than the ugly variety.

Correcting White Balance

The easiest way to make the adjustment in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw is with the White Balance tool.  It looks like an eye dropper. You click the tool, then click a gray area of the photo – if there is something that should be gray in the photo, that is. Even a white area is fine (but not an overexposed white). Stars are generally not good choices for gray-scale selection both because they are often over exposed and because many of them are NOT white! In the example below you see a photo of the Ocracoke Lighthouse which is definitely white, not the orange that resulted from sodium vapor lights.

LR_WhiteBalanceExample

The White Balance tool in Adobe Lightroom

ACR_WBtool

Adobe Camera Raw White Balance Tool

The dubious result of getting the lighthouse to its proper color via the white balance tool appears below. The sky and stars are unnaturally and artificially blue.  There are several solutions to this problem: color correct the lighthouse separately or compromise by warming (increasing the temperature) of the selected balance. Or try again by clicking elsewhere!

LR_WhiteBalanceExample_After

By selecting a different location for the gray sample tool a better compromise can be achieved as shown in the photo below. An examination of the scene reveals that the lighthouse is directly lit while the shed (near the bottom of the shot) is not. The shed and other areas in shadow are lit by ambient light reflected from many sources – including sky glow. After selecting the shadow area the remaining white imbalance of the lighthouse can be handled by desaturating using the local adjustment brush – or leave it like it is.

LR_WB_ChoiceB

 

White Balance Correction in Photoshop

The same eyedropper style adjustment can be found in Photoshop, but you’ll have to hunt for it because the “Color Balance” Adjustment is not where you’ll find it!

PhotoshopWB_a

White Balance (gray point) selector of Curves in Photoshop

White Balance (gray point) selector of Curves in Photoshop. The gray point selector is also in the Levels adjustment.

Note that in Photoshop you have two ways to go: use an adjustment layer, or use an Image -> Adjustments -> Curves (or Levels). We recommend using an Adjustment Layer because you can paint on the mask to control the effect and that makes it easy to adjust different parts of the image separately.  To adjust areas separately in Lightroom, use the Local Correction brush and adjust the white balance slider.

Selective Color Balance Correction

Consider the following photo. With the new flight rules, you can use your camera while the plane is taking off or landing.  Here the plane is landing at San Jose International Airport. There are two things about it that are good candidates for fixing. The first is the distracting glare of reflection from light inside the airplane (that’s due to Virgin America’s “Purple Ambiance”).  We’d like to get rid of the distraction and it’s clear we will not be able to simply crop it out without giving up some of the interesting details.

Landing

Glare from internal reflections leaves a blue cast. There is also noise in this one second, ISO 1600 exposure.

The second thing that is noticeable in the 100% (Zoomed view) is the colorful noise in the dark (and light) areas of the photo.  No sky has grit in it – at least not like that!

gs_2014-01-28_085553

100% View of the noise near the wing.

We can tackle both problems separately or at once.  Selectively desaturating, and slightly darkening the blue glare is simple in Lightroom.  Select the adjustment brush (it looks like a face powder brush right below the “Histogram”), dial down the saturation, and slightly dial back the exposure. Then paint on the image where we want the change to occur.  It may be useful to adjust the brush size, density and feathering. Here some feathering is important. We will not try to also increase the noise processing here, because the whole image needs some despeckling.

Below the mask shows where we painted – and not particularly carefully, either!  The Saturation was turned down to -69, and the exposure by almost a full stop. In a brighter sky we might not have been able to darken the touched up area as aggressively.

Attacking the Glare with Local Adjustments in Lightroom

Attacking the Glare with Local Adjustments in Lightroom

The next thing we want to address is the noise. It’s everywhere in this photo. As we will learn in the next article, we often use noise reduction for smoothing things like blue (or dark) skies and in shadows where you would not expect to find details.  Using Adobe Camera Raw for saturation, exposure and noise reduction works the same way as in Lightroom it’s just that the adjustment brush is shaped differently and found in a different place.

The adjustment brush in Adobe Camera Raw

The adjustment brush in Adobe Camera Raw

Out Darn Noise

In Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw), there are two simple – and effective ways – to reduce noise in photos. One is to selectively reduce noise using the “Noise” slider of the adjustment brush as we saw with our selective saturation adjustment. Moving the Noise slider to the right increases the amount of noise reduction but does not give you control over what KIND of noise reduction is performed. ACR and Lightroom have specific controls to reduce Luminance noise (dark and light speckles) and Color or Chroma noise (colored speckles). The noise reduction slider with the Local Correction brush does not let you control which type of noise reduction is applied. Sometimes correcting only the luminance noise is the best approach.  Both methods of correcting noise result in some blurring of the photo. How much blurring depends on how severely the sliders are adjusted. There is no formula for getting noise reduction to work well except to be careful not to over do it!  Surprisingly, a little bit of noise makes a better photo. Indeed, there is an option to ADD noise in the “Effects” panel (called Grain). One thing to beware of: using the color noise reduction aggressively will result in loss of star colors in your night sky. In the examples below we’ve brightened the image to make the changes easier to see.

Before any Adjustment

Before any Adjustment, Turning off the default sharpness enhancement.

The noise reduction portion of Lightroom is found in the Details section. Any controls used in this section will apply to the entire image – which is one reason adjustments should be made carefully and deliberately.  The first step we usually take is to eliminate the default sharpening that Lightroom wants to apply.  We would rather selectively sharpen what needs sharpening than doing indiscriminate global sharpening. Next zoom in to 1:1 view of an area (Z key) where noise reduction is needed. For this pick a dark area where some details should be observable. It is also helpful to pick a dark area adjacent to a lighter area where sharpness is desired so the effect of noise reduction can be seen on two elements at once.

We slowly bump up the luminance until we see less “grit”.  Be sure to wait long enough to see the changes made in the image.  We do not generally notice much difference with the detail and contrast sliders, but if we find ourselves adjusting as far as halfway on luminance and not getting what we want, we play with those sub-sliders.

If we still have not achieved the correction we want, we bump the color slider as well… only much more carefully. If there is a LOT of color noise the color noise correction may be the slider to bump first.  Once things are “almost” where we think they look right we choose another area to take a look. It  is important to select an area of the photo that did not need much adjustment – usually a bright area. If the brighter area has become too blurred, we back off on the overall adjustment and then use a local adjustment to add still more noise reduction selectively.

All adjustments made - note that perfect smoothness is not a goal.

All adjustments made – note that perfect smoothness is not the goal!

In Photoshop there are many more ways to reduce noise than those provided in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. Our experience is that the noise controls in ACR and Lightroom are very good – better than any specific filters you will find in Photoshop.  We do use Topaz Lab’s DeNoise photoshop plugin quite a lot however.  The best noise reduction method – when possible is to use the Simple Astrophotography Processing Technique. A photo like the one shown here is not a candidate, however, because that Astro technique requires multiple frames of the same image – that wasn’t possible here with the aircraft coming in for its bumpy landing.

Finished Image

Finished Image

In the next article we will take on the remaining subjects, but you may have already figured out one of the techniques we use for desharpening – aggressive noise reduction!

Blobulous Revisited – Part 2

Last installment we covered the basic idea behind creating a star trail where a foreground element is moving. In this case the moving element is a radio telescope peering into the sky to discover planets and black holes.  A normal “lighten mode” stack produces the image at the left, below, while with just a little bit of work we can get the image on the right.

Before_After

To recap, we use a single frame from the sequence and some careful masking to remove the blurred part of the image. For effect, we also don’t use the stack in 100% mode. See the prior article for details.

In this article we’ll show you step-by-step how we achieved the total look.

Of course we start with the stack.

Illustration_A

Then we layer in a copy of the stack and a single frame (the last or nearly last frame).

Illustration_B

Here we have set the background (stack) to 36% Opacity, effectively darkening it. The single frame is 100% opacity and in Lighten blend mode. What we want to do is to remove the blurred part by replacing it with the unblurred single image. It’s easy to do. Select the STACK, create a “Reveal All” mask, and then go to town painting black on it (be sure to select the MASK, not the image). When done, the mask we create will look something like this:

Illustration_C

Notice how we used a slightly soft brush to “blend” the background and the still frame. We could stop right there, but I notice that the ground and the telescopes are a bit too bright, and I’d like to make the stars pop out. So the next course of action is to apply a curve, select the “Increase Contrast” option. Here I’ve adjusted the result just slightly.

Illustration_Ca

Next we want to tone down the bright stuff. We add another adjustment layer, and a “Hide All” mask and then paint white back on the mask to tone down what we want. You’ll notice that in the process, the colors intensify a bit.

Illustration_D

The next step we’ll want to take is to reduce the saturation – our radio telescope is moving from white to yellow. So the next step is to add a Hue and Saturation layer. As before we mask off everything, and then paint in only the radio telescope. We could cheat and use the same mask from the Brighten stack layer – and just invert it, but it’s not a complicated thing like a tree, so it’s pretty easy to change the mask to only operate on the radio dish and pedestal.  At the left, you can see how strongly we moved the saturation – and we upped the brightness a bit, too.

Illustration_F

If we didn’t mask off the telescope and instead applied the saturation adjustments globally, we’d see this – not what we want. (Shift-Click on the mask turns it on or off – in this case we see that the mask is off by the red X through it)

Illustration_G

You won’t notice in the small size, but the large image has a number of Hot Pixels (red, and blue) that stand out. To solve this problem we use “Alt-Ctl-Shift-E” (Command-Option-Shift E for you Mac-o-philes) to make a copy of the layer. I named the layer “Heal” because I then used the spot healing tool to fix up those little problems.  I recommend making the healing tool diameter just slightly larger than the area to be healed.

Illustration_I

To make the Radio dish pop just a little more, a little sharpening is in order. In fact, sharpening the ground will work, too.  Duplicate the Healed layer (Ctl-J or Command-J). Name it Sharpen then use Filter -> Sharpen -> Smart Sharpen.  However I don’t like sharpening my stars, they look harsh. As before we’ll create a Hide-All mask for our Sharpened layer and use a white brush to reveal the areas we want to have sharpened. This is called selective sharpening.  In the small image here, the effect is not as obvious as in the larger image.

Illustration_J

To get just a bit more pop, a little more contrast is in order. I created a curve and pulled up the midtones a fair amount while making minor negative adjustments to the highlights and the darks.  But, that adjustment brightened some areas a bit too much so I created a reveal-all layer mask and painted black on the areas that were then too bright.

Illustration_K

Et Voila, we’re done!