Tag Archives: photoshop

Focus Stacking and Backyard Arachnids

I’m sure a bunch of my relatives will look away for this post. Maybe they aren’t fans of focus stacking but it could be the spiders that put them off. My macro lens has been out a lot during the pandemic since it provides something to photograph close at home that is a bit different. In fact, I have got so used to having it available, when I am out with a normal lens and come across something small and interesting, I am a bit frustrated to realize I can’t get a close up shot.

The problem with the lens is that it is not a very advanced one and the autofocus on it is pretty crap. When I am trying to hand hold the lens and something is moving and so am I, things get a little unpredictable. We had a few spider webs in the backyard with the owners sitting in the middle. The afternoon sun provided great illumination so I figured I should give it a go. I tend to go to manual focus and move to get the shot but with the breeze moving the web a lot, things are pretty tricky. This is what prompted me to try cheating.

I figured that focus stacking does a good job of increasing the area in focus and it manages to align images and make use of what is already in focus. If I can be straight on to the spider and stay reasonably still and roughly at the right focus point, let the web move towards and away from me and fire a bunch of shots off hand held. Ignore the ones that have nothing in focus and then let Photoshop work on the remainder.

It isn’t a perfect solution and some weird things happen at the edges of the frame but the center works out pretty well and you can crop in a little to address the edges. I was quite pleased with the outcome to be honest. It is making the best of a few bad elements but it did do quite well. You don’t get to control what is in focus for each shot so getting a complete set to work with is unlikely but overall, not a bad experiment.

Experimenting With Avoiding Heat Haze

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Summer weather means lots of sunny days but also means lots of heat haze. I was at Boeing Field one sunny afternoon and there were two jets parked across the field that I wanted shots of – one was an Illinois ANG KC-135R and the other was a Falcon 20. Looking through the viewfinder, both of the were shimmering in the heat haze that a warm and reasonably humid day brings. This is the downside of summer in the Pacific Northwest.

Not long before I had watched a video on YouTube about photographing Saturn through a telescope. The image of Saturn was all over the shop but they were using a software technique to take multiple images and build a more stable and sharper final image. It worked reasonably well and this got me thinking about how to do something similar. In the past I have used Photoshop to blend together multiple images to remove the moving elements of a shot like people or traffic. I wrote about it in this post.

I thought I would see if something similar could be done. I put the frame rate on to high and steadied myself before firing off a few seconds of shots. I wanted a lot of images to provide the best opportunity for the statistical analysis to find the right solution. Importing this in to Photoshop as layers and then auto aligning them allowed the analysis tool to do its thing. I don’t think the result is quite what I want and I may experiment with different analysis methods – median versus mean for example – to see which ones are most effective. However, there is clearly a smoothing out of the distortion and, if I needed to get a shot on a hazy day when there wouldn’t be another chance, I would definitely fall back on this approach to see whether it produced something more usable.

Variations in HDR Processing

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While scanning through some images, one of the shots that showed up in my catalog was an HDR processing of some shots of a US Army Chinook. It had been processed with a plugin that I had previously experimented with. I thought it looked over vibrant but I was impressed with the way the dark interior of the helicopter had shown up while the outside was also well lit. I decided to have another go at processing the images.

I used Lightroom initially to do the processing. It came out surprisingly well and looked not unlike the outcome from the plugin. However, there was some ghosting on people in the shot and there was a lot of chromatic aberration. I have noticed issues with Lightroom making a worse job of it than Photoshop so I decided to try HDR Pro in Photoshop as well and use Camera Raw for tone mapping. The outcome was very similar from an overall perspective. However, the ghosting was virtually eliminated and the aberration was not apparent either. It clearly is still a better bet than Lightroom.

Facial Symmetry

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After four months of no hair cut, I finally managed to get some clippers and set about cleaning up my head. I won’t share the awful look that I had developed (and the current look might not be that great either) but I did have Nancy take some pictures before and after. While she was taking the after shots, I asked her to take a couple that were directly head on. I was interested in facial symmetry.

I had seen articles in the past about how some people have quite symmetric faces while others didn’t and I had been meaning to try this out for myself. I got a shot that was nice and head on so took it in to Photoshop. There I duplicated the layer and flipped it horizontally. Aligning it centrally was a bit of a choice because you can move it around a little and just widen or narrow the face. I got it to a place that seemed about right. The fact my face is asymmetric means that there isn’t an exact center to align against.

I then added a layer mask to two versions of the image to blank one side or the other out. The result is two versions of my face using either the left or the right side. The difference between them is quite stark. My jaw is slightly lopsided as is my nose and so one version has a far broader look to it while the other is a lot thinner. It’s like two different people.

Lightroom Craps Out With Videos

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This is a tale of a problem I got in to with Lightroom. I Googled solutions for this and got a bunch of suggestions but none of them worked. In the end, Adobe sorted out the issue but I wanted to share what happened in case anyone else experiences the same issue and ends up Googling like I did. Maybe this post will help someone out. The source of the problem was an MP4 video file that apparently had some corruption within it. This screwed up stuff within Lightroom that needed some detailed work to fix. First, I shall tell you what the main error was. This might be what someone is searching for.

Dynamic Link Media Server Failed to Launch

The result is that video files don’t import and then you seem to struggle to preview videos at all. When you are in the Import dialog, the video preview doesn’t show and an icon of a camera comes up instead. Some of the recommendations online were to delete the Dynamic Link Media folders in the App Data section of Windows and restart but that didn’t help. I also tried that and deleting the media cache but no luck. Next was to delete the Preferences folder for Lightroom which can often be a solution for unexplained problems but that didn’t work either. That is when I got Adobe involved.

The support engineer tried a bunch of things. Eventually, he created a new user on the machine and opened up Lightroom in there. We tried importing a new video file from the same camera and that worked. He then set about deleting the Lightroom related app data in my user profile and replacing it with the data from the new User. We then tried importing the new file and it worked fine. Next was the previous file and that caused the same problem as before. Now we knew the file was the problem we could isolate that from everything we did afterwards.

Of course, I had damaged Lightroom again but now we knew what was required, it was a simple task to copy the folders across again. The only downside to this was that all of my presets and information got deleted. However, I had copied the old Lightroom folders before starting all of this. It wasn’t too tricky to replace my camera profiles, develop presets and plugins. At first I thought I had lost some functionality that I really like. I have a plugin called LRInstagram which allows me to post from Lightroom to Instagram directly. Facebook has turned off the ability to do this so, if you install the plugin now, it won’t work. However, something about my legacy setup meant I had still been using it. When I tried to set this up again, it failed to work. However, my old Lightroom folder had a sub folder for the plugin which contained something like a cookie and, when I copied this across, I was back up and running!

All of this is to say, if you have a similar problem to me, there is a solution. I won’t lay out the files that are involved because it is a bit tedious and there are some other things to bear in mind but, if this happens to you, get in touch and I will talk you through what we did.

Air to Air With United Jets – Or Is It?

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When putting together some images for a group online that I am involved with, a dug out a couple of shots of jets departing O’Hare I shot years back. When coming off 22L, some of the jets make an early turn to the south and you can get a view of them that is either quite level with the wing line or slightly above. When shooting them, they are climbing so it is obvious what you were shooting. However, as I looked at these shots, it occurred to me that they looked a lot like an air to air position except the angles were wrong because of the climb. Since I had shot quite tightly, re-cropping the shot required some Photoshop work.

Taking the image out of Lightroom and in to Photoshop, I selected the crop tool and rotated the image to be the sort of angle that an air to air shot might be. Doing this crops off the nose and tail of the jet. However, one feature of the crop tool in Photoshop is that, if you then drag the edges of the tool back out, you can expand the canvas size. You now have the whole plane in shot but have added some white space in each corner where no image previously existed.

It is a simple task to then use Content Aware Fill to add sky back in to these areas. The result is a shot that looks almost as if you had been flying in formation at altitude. Would you have spotted it? Having done it with an A320, I then had a go with a 757. The light angle makes it look a bit like we are flying along towards a setting sun. I was rather pleased with the trick.

Focus Stacking Issues

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There was a meeting of the IPMS northwest branch at the Museum of Flight recently. My friend Jim had given me a heads up about it taking place and, with a day free, I figured I would pop along. The display as a whole gets its own post but this one was about my experimenting with focus stacking. I went to this a previous year and took some focus stacking shots handheld to see how it would go. This time I went prepared and took a bunch of shots.

I took a tripod and my macro f/2.8 lens to try and get detailed shots while isolating the background. There were lots of models on display, some of which were really good. However, they didn’t all make good subjects since many were displayed in amongst lots of other models. I picked the ones I liked as a wandered around and them went back to shoot them. Many of the stacks worked out just fine and I include an example or two of what worked well. However, some of them just confused the software.

I use Photoshop to do my focus stacks. However, on one of the shots that I really wanted to work well – the FW190 which had a diorama – things didn’t work well. I decided to Google other software solutions and came up with two other applications for focus stacking. I downloaded trials of both but neither managed to do a good job of it. I guess this combination of shots just made it too hard for the software to make it work. I can see the rear fuselage markings of the FW190 showing through the wing of the aircraft. Maybe this is a function of the narrow depth of field of the f/2.8 shots. The wing gets blurred out a lot when the rear fuselage is in focus and it decides to take that area as the one to give preference too.

All of this is to say, I have found a new aspect of this technique that needs further investigation. My earlier experiments with focus stacking probably made it easier on the software. I have now started to make it a bit harder. Maybe I need to control the aperture to get things to behave the way I want. That might have to be tailored to make sure I don’t get the background coming in to focus too much since that separation is something that I want to preserve. If you have experience with this, I would welcome advice.

HDR Tech Comparison – What’s Up Lightroom?

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A while back I saw a Scott Kelby video on YouTube about the HDR functionality in Lightroom and that in Photoshop. I had assumed that they were the same prior to seeing his video but he showed that the Photoshop version of the HDR was significantly cleaner than that in Lightroom. I was interested in how this could be but I wasn’t too concerned. The Lightroom version was so easy to use I figured the impact was not so much that it would show up in my shots.

Then, I found out I was wrong. I was in the cockpit of the Comet at the Museum of Flight’s restoration facility at Paine Field. I took a sequence for HDR because the cockpit is very dark but the view out of the windows is much brighter. It isn’t particularly important since the view outside is nothing special but I did it anyway since I was there. The lighter shot had quite a bit of shadow noise and, when I created the HDR in Lightroom, the noise was very conspicuous on the finished version. I decided to try it in Photoshop to see what happened. The difference was significant. I include both of the full shots as processed along with the section of cockpit shadow so you can see the impact.

Lightroom 8.2 Detail Enhancer

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Updates to Lightroom come along relatively regularly and they tend to include new features along with fixes and performance tweaks. The latest update, Lightroom 8.2, includes a new addition called Detail Enhancer. This is a feature that is designed to provide some better small-scale detail as part of the raw conversion process. It creates a new DNG file based on a more complex calculation of the demosaicing of the sensor data.

I saw some videos about it and figured it wasn’t going to be of much use for the type of thing I am working on. However, it did trigger one possible area of interest. The algorithms are supposed to be designed to make better calculations around the different color pixels that sensors have. Sensors are set up in a Bayer Pattern where different color sensitive sensors occupy different pixel spaces. They each record in one color and then software interpolates between them to create colors for each pixel irrespective of which color was originally recorded at that location.

In a post from a while back, I mused on the way in which the colors of the Southwest Livery and the registration clashed and seemed to provide a distorted image even when everything around them was sharp. I was pondering whether this was artifacting caused by the different colors and the way the sensor was recording the data. If this was the case, maybe this new functionality would change the way things were rendered. I dug out a few of the shots that had previously demonstrated this effect and ran the process on them. These shots show the wide shot, the original rendering of the close up and the revised rendering using Detail Enhancer.

As you can see from the comparisons, Detail Enhancer does not suddenly render a perfect registration for the aircraft. However, to my eye at least, it does appear as if the results are noticeably better then they were with the original rendering. For completeness, the original rendering is done with the latest process version of Adobe’s raw converter to make things as fair as possible. It does appear to make a difference. This makes me think my theory about whiny things looked wrong might have some merit, even if this update has not fully resolved things.

Focus Stack Animation

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In some previous posts I showed the results of experimenting with focus stacking. In those posts, I would combine one of the individual shots with the finished effort to show how shallow the depth of field could be on individual shots and how deep the focus was on the final image. I was pondering whether this was an effective way of communicating the concept to someone when it occurred to me that animation might be a better way. I created a new stack of images for a different subject but this time I used Photoshop to animate the movement of the point of focus through the shot and then show the final image. This can then be an animated GIF. I wonder, does this provide a better demonstration?