Tag Archives: processing

Reflection Removing – Choose Settings Wisely

A previous post had looked at what was, at that time, a development feature in Photoshop that removed reflections from images. Adobe puts development items in Photoshop first to get user experience with them before rolling them out to the software suite. Since Camera Raw and Lightroom’s develop module are basically the same, once it becomes a production item, it also makes it into Lightroom. Such is the case with the reflection removal tool.

I have used it a few times on shots, and it does work pretty well. It isn’t perfect but can be effective. I tried it out on a Typhoon that was refuelling from a Voyager. Shooting through the windows of the Voyager can be a bit tricky and the reflection removal tool can really help. I gave it a go, and the reflection was swiftly taken out. However, when I checked the rest of the image, I saw that a lot of detail in the shot was gone. It was at this point that I realised that the tool has three settings. I was on Preview. I switched to Best and, while the processing took a lot longer, lo and behold the detail was restored.

I have the overall photo above with the before and after versions for a comparison. Beneath I have two crops of the larger image with the Preview and Best settings. I won’t say which is which, but I think it should be pretty obvious. The tool defaults to Preview when you use it so, if you give it a try, don’t be put off if the initial results are disappointing. Make sure to experiment with the settings.

National’s A330 Moving Some Troops

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Another one from the archive. National Airlines has made a few appearances in this blog over the years. I do find their livery very cool and a welcome change from the norm on airlines. They had one of their A330s in Boeing Field on, I believe, a troop transport flight. I don’t know that for certain and don’t know why it wasn’t at McChord but I’m not complaining.

The light was better on the aircraft when they were loading it up on the Modern ramp. Unfortunately, departures were towards the north which meant the only option for a takeoff shot was going to be over by the terminal building and that would mean quite strong backlighting. Nevertheless, I figured it would be worth a try. You can get quite a good angle from that location on a rotating aircraft provided that it uses a reasonable amount of the runway.

However, there are two downsides to the images that you get. First, the aforementioned backlighting is not going to make for an easy job processing the image. The latest masking tools in Lightroom do give you more flexibility with what you do but there is only so much you can do before things look really funky. The second issue is that the Boeing ramp is going to be in the background which makes for a very cluttered view. In hindsight, I should have tried going with a very low shutter speed to try and blur as much of that distracting material as possible. Guess I won’t be trying that out for a while!

What a Difference the Angle Makes

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I shared some shots from a brief visit I made to Feltham to get some airliner departures from Heathrow when they were on an easterly flow. Some of the planes turn to the south shortly after takeoff giving you a view that is not quite a topside but is close to it. When photographing them, you are naturally shooting them at an angle as they are climbing quite steeply. However, if you want to play around with the shot afterwards, you can change the impression of the shot quite a lot. Rotate the fuselage until it appears horizontal in the shot and now it looks a lot more like you are flying alongside the aircraft. This is cheaper than sorting out and air to air sortie! Here are a couple of before and after shots to show what I mean.

Recovering a Fence Shot

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In an earlier post, I had shared some images of and A340-600 operated by European Cargo that I saw at Bournemouth. What I didn’t include in that post was any images close to the rotation point, despite me having been well positioned for that. When I say well positioned, I omit one key element which is that there was a fence between me and the plane, and I wasn’t able to photograph above the fence. Shooting through it was the only option.

I tried a couple of things to mitigate the issue with the fence. First, I was as close to it as possible to take the fence wires as far out of focus as possible. I was also shooting wide open – again to try and throw the wires out of focus. The last thing I tried was to go with a low shutter speed to smear the wires as I panned. With this combination, I was hopeful that I wouldn’t really have the wires in the shots. I was wrong.

When I took a look at the shots, the fence was very obvious. I did start to wonder whether it would have been better to have the wires well defined as maybe that would be easier to remove. However, too late for that as the shots were done. Now to see if there was anything I could do to recover them to something usable (and by usable, I mean that might be shareable but nothing that was going to be a great publishable image).

I tried some of the healing tools in Lightroom to see if that would work. I was getting nowhere fast – possibly a sign of how little I understand the capabilities of the tools or maybe they are just not the right thing. Then I decided to try something else. Because of the way I had shot the image, none of the airframe was obscured. There was just the grey overlay from the fence. That made me think that it was more like a darker area of the shot. I decided to use the brush tool in the masking panel and draw some lines that were heavily feathered across the lines that the fence wire created. Having made a grid of these, I then bumped up the exposure for the mask.

The result was surprisingly effective. However, I then ended up with some overly bright areas at the edge of the mask. A rework of the mask to change the size and the feather amount and this time the result was pretty good. There were a few areas that were still a touch dark and I used a large, soft brush to address those parts. If you know what the original image looked like, you will probably spot the remnants of the work. If you had never known before, it’s possible that you might not notice how much work had been done on this.

Fat Albert Takeoff and Video of Return

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When I was up the tower at Boeing Field for Seafair last year, I got to play around a bit with what I shot of the Blue Angels C-130, Fat Albert. The takeoff was a straightforward as it was departing in our direction so photographing it as it left the ramp and then rotated and climbed past was the obvious choice for me. However, when it came to the return to landing, I was wondering what to do.

The threshold is a long way from the tower, so any shots of the landing were going to be quite distant and, given the heat haze, unlikely to be that good. I figured I might try video and, with the 200-800 having such good stabilisation, thought this might be practical. It turned out surprisingly well with the original video being pretty stable. I did apply a little extra stabilisation in Resolve afterwards. The worst elements are down to operator error where I had a few moments where I ended up moving the camera very jerkily and there is nothing that the post-production can do to fully disguise that! Shame I didn’t plan ahead enough and avoid having that happen when near the flare!

Comparison of a Couple of Edits

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Every once in a while, while I am searching for something specific in the Lightroom catalog, I will come across a previous shot that catches my eye for some reason. This might be because it was something interesting, something I had forgotten about or just something that I think might benefit from a re-edit. Sometimes I have changed the way in which I approach edits and in others there is a new tool that has been added which I think will benefit the edit. This image was exactly that. I thought that the masking tools now in Lightroom would make for a more flexible approach to balancing the different parts of the image. I played around with it for a while. Because Lightroom allows you endless virtual copies, you can try something new out without having to lose what was there before. I then created a combination of the two edits to show how differently the same raw file can end up.

Taking Out Reflections – Photoshop Experimental Features

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I have been using Lightroom since the initial version was released. It used to be quite a simple application and anything complex was undertaken in Photoshop. As Lightroom has got more and more capable, the number of times I go into Photoshop has reduced. What I didn’t realize until recently was that Adobe uses Photoshop as the proving ground for some of the features that will ultimately make their way into Lightroom. I thought that Camera Raw and Lightroom’s Develop module were identical and they almost are. However, not quite.

In Photoshop, they have a check box to allow you try experimental features. I found out about this related to a feature designed to remove reflections. Anyone who has taken a photo through a window will know that you can get reflections off the glass of things your side of the window and these can ruin an otherwise usable image. (Photographing through a window is not a great option but sometimes it is all you have to work with.)

This feature analyses the image to see what it thinks might be artifacts from inside the window and allows you to remove them. Interestingly, the slider that comes with it can be moved either way. You can fully remove the reflection or can fully remove the rest of the image and leave only the reflection. This can be rather fun to play around with.

I was interested in what this would do for some shots I had got while inside the airport at Narita a few years ago. It was a dark and rainy day and I did try to avoid reflections but was not always successful. Some of the shots I liked most from an action point of view were the ones with light from inside intruding into the shot. These were the ones I worked with. You can judge the results. As I have the before and after versions here. It isn’t perfect but it does work rather well for an experimental feature. I hope it gets productionised soon and finds its way into the Lightroom Develop module too.

Early Morning Breeze Departure

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I’ve seen a couple of Breeze airliners, but they are not operating in our neck of the woods, so they are still a rarity for me. When one of the A220s came to Boeing Field on a charter for a sports team, I was hoping to catch it. They were due out early one morning, so I was able to go before heading to the office. This did mean that conditions were going to be rather restricted with the sun only just above the horizon (assuming clouds weren’t there as well) but this would actually suit me since I didn’t want the jet to be backlit.

Sports charters have a habit of not going even close to the time that they are scheduled so I wondered whether I would be able to get the takeoff before needing to leave. Imagine my surprise and delight when they called up pretty much on schedule. Soon the jet was crossing the runway for taxiway Bravo and then heading to the departure end. As they rolled and rotated, there was just enough light in the sky to make for some rather pleasant colors, and I was really pleased with how the shots came out. The actual light levels were very low, so I shot at high ISOs. The cameras do a remarkable job of this these days but there was still a bit of noise to deal with and the latest noise reduction algorithms in Lightroom dealt with that very effectively.

Hawk and the Moon

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My El Centro wildlife encounters continued after the owls had been photographed. A hawk showed up on a utility pole close to us at one point and, since no jets were landing, I was happy to take its photo. Then I realized that the moon was rising not far away, and a short movement allowed me to bring the two into closer alignment. With the long lens, the focus depth was narrow, so I took shots of the bird and shots of the moon. When I got home, a little focus stacking allowed me to make both sharp to show how it looked to me at the time I was there.

Experimenting With Enhance Levels in Lightroom

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In one of the bigger updates of Lightroom and Photoshop, Adobe introduced the Enhance functions adding either resolution or noise reduction. The noise reduction has been very effective for some of the shots I have taken with very high ISO levels. I decided to edit a shot with varying levels of noise reduction to see how things look. Since I had a bunch of cheetah shots taken in low light, I figured that would be a good subject.

You can vary the noise reduction level from 1-100. I made five edits with one unchanged and the remainder at 25, 50, 75 and 100. I then layered them in to one file to show the comparison. The unchanged edit is on the right while the 100 noise reduction is one the left. I felt like my previous experience had been that a level around 50 was a good outcome for much of what I had shot. When I looked at these results, I again concluded that the middle level was the best compromise. The 100 was just too much and 75 looked like things were a bit smudged. You can judge what you think. I shall experiment with levels each time I use it but it does give me a good idea of what to start with.