Tag Archives: technique

HDR Panoramas

Another one of my processing technique posts today. For those of you interested in pictures of places, today will probably be one you pass on. You have been warned. This is about my first venture into the realm of HDR panoramas. I know at least one of you who knows exactly how to do this sort of thing and does it on a regular basis. You also will probably skip the rest of the post. However, you have some specialized tools for doing the job and I am playing with Lightroom and Photoshop so here is how it goes.

My initial thought having taken the shots was which order to carry out the processing. HDR first or pano first. I concluded that it had to be pano first. All of the pano exposures were consistent and would stitch properly while I wasn’t convinced that each of the pano frames would be consistent if I had done the HDR blending first. However, this left me with a second concern. Would the pano merge produce images that would align for the HDR merge. I use the pano tools built into Photoshop and, while I select the algorithm it uses, I did not have confidence that it would produce an identical alignment for each set of exposures. However, this was the route I tried.

Stitching the panos was straightforward enough. I created each of them from Lightroom and ended up with five panos with differing exposures. At this point I could have taken them directly to HDR Pro within Photoshop but, since I wanted everything to end up in the Lightroom catalog, I decided to save the files and go to HDR Pro from there.

Here I encountered my first hiccup. As expected, the panos produced were not identical. There were very close but not identical. HDR Pro only works on files that are the same dimensions. I imagine some more specialized HDR applications might be able to handle this but I was stuck with Photoshop. Since the panos were thousands of pixels across and only a few pixels different, I opened them back up in Photoshop and changed the canvas size to be identical in each case. HDR Pro is able to manage alignment of slightly misaligned shots anyway so I wanted worried about the positioning. Also, with such small changes in dimensions, I didn’t fear that I would have distortion.

With this change made, Photoshop went to work and created the HDR file. Amazingly, it worked just fine. I didn’t have any problems with the files being distorted relative to each other and it did a great job of blending them. All that was left was to crop everything in to clear up the empty corners from the pano creation (I didn’t get rid of those in the first instance since I was trying to keep the pano files identical in size and alignment) and then a few tweaks back in Lightroom had the job finished. I was pretty pleased with how it worked and, with the experience of this time, should be able to turn them around quite quickly next time.

Boeing 777-300ER Main Gear

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When Boeing launched the 777-300ER, they took the stretched fuselage of the 777-300, a model that didn’t sell particularly well and married it to the updated wing that made use of the fuel capacity of the outboard portion of the wing that had been left when the original concept of a folding wing was contemplated. The increased the weights of the jet, added far more powerful engines and, with the increased fuel capacity, came up with a winning formula that has done a very effective job of killing off the 747.

One problem that they had to deal with during development was runway length requirements for takeoff. Even with the bigger engines, the long fuselage limited rotation angles at takeoff and meant a higher takeoff speed was required which meant a longer runway requirement. Boeing came up with an interesting solution (after dumping some slightly more curious ideas). The main gear on the 777 has a triple axle bogie. Previously this had rotated about the pin attaching it to the main gear leg. Boeing’s solution was to lock the bogie level during takeoff.

The result of this is to have the rotation of the jet at takeoff to take place around the rear wheels of the bogie rather than the gear leg pin. The slight aft movement of the rotation point allows the aircraft to rotate slightly more nose up and gain a greater angle of attack. This gives slightly more lift for a given speed. This means an earlier takeoff and a shorter runway requirement.

I have tried many times to witness this at work. First, it happens pretty quickly. Second, I am often in a poor position to see the rotation point. Recently I was at SFO to pick up some people. I was getting a few shots prior to their flight arriving and a Singapore 777-300ER was taking off. The rotation point is quite far away (although, if you are in the terminal, you might have a good view) and the heat haze is a problem. However, I decided to get a sequence of shots anyway. Now, how to use them.

Heat haze is crappy on stills but less of an issue with moving images so I decided to animate the sequence. I imported all of the shots into Photoshop as layers in a single document via Lightroom. The hardest part was aligning them. I started at the bottom layer and then progressively made each layer above visible. I then changed the latest top layer blend mode to difference. This makes aligning them a lot easier since everything is black unless it is different. I was focused on the gear so used that as the reference as the fuselage rotated. Once each layer was in place, I changed the blend mode back to normal and moved to the next layer up.

Once they were all aligned, I used the animation timeline to make frames from each layer (and reversed the order since every time I do this they seem to be the wrong way around). Then I could crop in to get the overall view I was after and save the file. A Save for Web allows the generation of the animated GIF and we are done. The image at the top is the final result. It does allow you to see a bit of what is going on if you look closely although it is still a bit hard given the distance, the angle to the ground and the heat haze. I guess I will have to find a location closer next time.

Waves

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There is a shot that I am on a quest to get right one day. I don’t know whether it is from growing up by the sea or not but I can sit and watch waves crashing ashore for a very long time without getting bored. One thing I particularly like is the way a wave that is just starting to break has a smooth shape to the top and backside that, as the light comes in from the front of the wave, glows a green color.

This appears for a brief time and then quickly disappears as the wave collapses in on itself. The smoothness and the color contract with the normal appearance of the sea and the waves and maybe this is what I like so much. I was down on the Pacific coast a few weeks back and the waves were pretty good with quite a swell coming in. The green glow was showing up a lot but this time I actually manged to catch some of it before it went away.

It still doesn’t replicate the image I have in my head from watching the waves but it is a lot closer than I have managed before. I will keep working on it so, if I get something better, don’t be surprised if it shows up here. The one below is from head on so doesn’t show the effect but it does give an idea of what it looks like from underneath.

Night Shoot at SFO

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One idea that Paul had was for us to have a go at shooting some light trails at SFO after it got dark. This sounded like a good plan. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any tripods or cable releases with us. No matter. Target was around the corner so we popped in there and bought a couple of $15 specials. Hmm, these were quality items indeed. Given how much a good tripod costs, can you imagine what a $15 tripod is like?

However, we made the best of it. Getting perfect alignment was tricky so some post processing cropping to level stuff up would be required. The camera wobbled a lot on the tripod when touched so I chose to trigger it with the shutter button on a 2 second delay. This allowed some wobbling to stop and, on a long exposure, any lingering wobble would be lost.

We got some stuff but it wasn’t brilliant. However, a short while later, I had to go to SFO to pick up some family members arriving on an evening flight so I decided to go a little earlier and try again, this time with some more appropriate kit in the form of a decent tripod and a cable release. This time, I was able to control things a bit better and get a few shots of interest. There wasn’t a huge amount of traffic so I didn’t get too many trails but I did get a slowly taxiing British Airways 747 which left an interesting smear across the frame.

The alignment with the moving planes is not fantastic from where I was but it was okay. Coyote Point looks like it might be better but I think it closes at sunset so I’m not sure whether that will be possible or not. We shall see.

Playing with Blending Layers

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I have been making some shots with multiple exposures to overlay. This is something I have posted about before and the shots here are similar to those from before. However, this post is less about the shots and more about the post processing I used. Previously I opened up all of the shots as layers in a single file and then auto-aligned them. Once done, I then used the Auto Blend functionality to show each shot o the aircraft in place.

This was a lot quicker than my previous approach and was something I picked up from posts on photographing star trails. However, recently, I have not been as happy with the results as I should have been. Some of the planes, particularly those near to the edges, had some odd artifacts appearing. Also, if there were any overlaps, the blending masks could give some weird effects. Therefore, I have taken a different approach for a while. This is slower, I admit, but I think it gives a better result.

Once the alignment of the images is done, I hide them all except the bottom layer by Alt clicking on the eye beside the last layer. Then I add the next layer up back in but mask it out completely. A white brush on the mask then allows me to paint back in the new aircraft positions. This is a bit laborious but it does allow you to decide exactly what you want in and what you don’t. if one file is not helpful to the composition, you can easily ignore it.

If the layers are not all exactly aligned from shooting on a tripod, you will also get gaps at the edges on different layers. You can also fill these in by brushing in the layers that provide the right coverage and get a complete image. Once you are happy, flatten the whole thing and you are done.

Changing My Approach to Panoramas

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Ever since Adobe got their act together with the Photomerge function in Photoshop, it has been my default for creating panoramas. Previous versions were a little unreliable but they cracked it a few versions back and I have not changed my approach since. However, a recent bit of YouTube exploring has changed that again. Russell Brown had a series of videos on making panoramas from aerial shots and, while I was watching them because they were aerials, the stuff he came up with on stitching panos was actually more useful to me.

Instead of using Photomerge, he uses the same functionality of Photoshop but in individual steps. The technique involves opening all of the shots as layers in a single file (something you can do straight from Lightroom which maintains the re-import linkage that I like about Photomerge). Then you select all layers and use Edit>Auto Align Layers. This gives you the same options as Photomerge. Apparently, according to Russell, if you have a series of shots where you have rotated position but are looking horizontally, Spherical works best. If you are looking up or down, use Circular.

The result can be quite distorted if you use Circular but it will all get better soon. If you aren’t happy, you can undo the step which is a lot easier than starting from scratch which is what you would have to do in Photomerge. Once the alignment is done, Edit>Auto Blend Layers while take care of the rest of the stitching and blend everything together nicely. It defaults to a Panorama blending option.

With the blend done, flatten the layers and open Filters>Adaptive Wide Angle. This will default to a panorama setting and, if you have the distorted output from the Circular settings, now you will suddenly see everything come back to what it should be. You can tweak this filter to get verticals and horizontals aligned as you wish and then you end up with a good pano output. Some cropping and filling of blank areas with Content-Aware fill and the job is done. I shall be taking this approach for all my panos from now on. If you don’t use this approach already, you might want to give it a try.

Also, you can go to the original source on this and check out Russell’s videos on YouTube.

RescuePro Deluxe

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Today we have something of a product review combined with a workflow experiment. None of this was something that I wanted to do but circumstances dictated it was time. I had been out for the day shooting some wildlife including some sea otters – that will show up in a future post – and, one returning home and downloading my images, a few of the shots showed up strangely with no preview in Lightroom when I started to import them and were apparently corrupted on the card. Not sure what the cause of this was. The body had just come back from an annual service at Canon and the card was a new one. However, they both worked fine for the majority of the day with just some minor problems with a couple of dozen shots. I shall try and sort that out later.

So, to the problem at hand. I use Sandisk Extreme cards and have had virtually no problems to date. Therefore, I was in new territory. One thing that I do have as a result of using these cards is a bunch of coupons for RescuePro Deluxe. This is software for retrieving lost files from cards. I had used it once many years ago when recovering some shots that had been deleted on the card but not formatted and it had worked well. That was my issue then. Now I needed it due to a problem I hadn’t created.

My first minor problem was that the software defaults to recovering the images to a folder on the C: drive. Since my desktop has an SSD running the OS and everything else on other drives, it isn’t overloaded with space so dumping 32Gb of images on to it caused a minor hiccup. A kicked out of the program, restarted it and found how to change the output directory and then we were off and running. However, now I came across my next issue. It found all of the files on the card, not just the ones that were lost. This is where the brain had a small “doh” moment. I figured if I opened up the card in Explorer and deleted the good shots, it would mean the search would be a lot quicker. Of course, if you are using software designed to find files that have been deleted, it still finds them all. Why didn’t I think of that at the time? Oh well, no big deal since this was all running in the background.

The result of the scan is that all files on the card are now stored in a folder. Unfortunately, they are named sequentially File001, File002 etc. This makes working out which are the missing files a bit more tricky. So, two things were needed for the next step. First, find out the filename for the first file on the card. Then import all of the files into Lightroom by adding them where they are rather than copying them to a new location. With them in Lightroom, it is a simple task to rename them all to their original names using the rename function and making sure you start with the filename of the first file that we found a moment ago. Now all the files have the right name and are still in the recovery folder.

The next step might seem counterintuitive. I delete them all from Lightroom. I don’t delete the master files; just remove them from the catalog. Next – trust me, I haven’t gone mad – I them re-import them all. At this point, Lightroom sees the files with the right names and details and so automatically recognizes which ones are already in the catalog. It then will pick out the ones which were the original missing files and you can import them properly to wherever you want them. Now the recovery folder can be deleted (subject to your normal backup protocols). It sounds a bit complex but, if you work through the process, the longest part of it is the scan of the card for the files in the first place. After that, it all happens pretty quickly.

While RescuePro Deluxe is not the most user friendly piece of software, it did do what was required and I got it free with the cards I have. You don’t own the software. You get a one year subscription with the coupon. Hopefully I won’t need it again this year but it is there if required. I have a bunch of these coupons from various card purchases so I imagine I will be in good shape as long as required. If you have gone through something similar and have a better way of dealing with it, please do let me know. It is always good to learn from the experiences of others.

Blur That Prop!

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Ask any aviation photographer about camera settings and they will quickly turn to shutter speed for prop aircraft. The goal is a nicely blurred prop and no frozen blades. This requires a slow shutter speed and this can have downsides. If you are using a long lens, getting a sharp shot of a moving target with a low shutter speed can be tricky. A bit of spray and pray with the shutter button can be required. Interestingly, if you are closer to the aircraft and using a shorter focal length, things are not necessarily better. When you are close in, the different parts of the airframe are actually moving at different speeds and angular rates to you so one part might be sharp when another isn’t. Sometimes this looks okay but often it just looks crap.

I have become less focused on gaining the great blur for ground shots. Air to air it is something a lot more worthwhile since the other plane is not moving relative to you – well, hopefully not that much. Therefore, you can experiment going slower with hopefully some good results. Similarly, when I am shooting helicopters close in and hovering, I will give it a go too.

Recently, I was at the Waukegan show and I decided that, since what I was shooting was not something that I had to get (either I would have other chances or I wasn’t so bothered anyway), I would play with some really low speeds. I ended up shooting at 1/80^th of a second which, on a 500mm lens is a stretch. Needless to say, you are not going to see the failures. When I have played like this before, I have had times when not one of the shots was of any use. However, this time I did get a few lucky results – yes, they were luck. You can have great panning technique (which is not always true for me) but the math is not in your favor when doing this. Therefore, I shall be happy with the results this time around. I won’t be doing this all of the time but playing around is an important thing to do when you have the chance. Just don’t do it when you really want to have a shot you can keep.

Updates to the Workflow

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A while back I wrote a piece about how I manage my workflow when bringing in new pictures from a shoot. If you are so inclined, you can read the original post here. I thought it might be appropriate to bring the topic up to date since I have tweaked the workflow a bit since then. As I mentioned before, this is not all original thinking from me. I have picked up suggestions from a number of places and then adapted them to my own needs. If they are useful to you, that is great. All of this is based on using Lightroom as an image management tool.

The basic process involves creating a series of Smart Collections for a given shoot. I have adapted these collections a little and have a basic set, not all of which are required for every shoot. However, what I have done is exported these collections to a folder on my computer so I can re-import them for each shoot and tweak them rather than start from scratch each time. For example, they all have the keywords section blank so that I can paste in the required keywords for the shoot easily.

I will initially create a Collection Set for the topic and, if this is an event that occurs more than once, a Collection Set within that for the specific date. Then, within that, I shall import the Smart Collections from my templates. In the first instance, these will have lots of files in them since the criteria have not been narrowed down but I shall then edit each one to have the appropriate keywords and, if required, the specific dates. Date Taken is the criterion I will use then, either with a specific date or a range. Of course, this does require me to have put the appropriate keywords on all of the images first including whether they are HDR, panorama or time lapse images.

The following are the smart collections and a description of what they contain. To avoid repetition, it can be assumed that they will all fit the keyword and date range criteria.

Not Rejects – All images that have not been rejected, are not marked as HDR or panoramas and are not video clips
Picks – All images that have been marked as a Pick and are not video clips
HDR Originals – All marked as HDR that are RAW files
HDR Edits – All marked as HDR that are not RAW files
Pano Originals – All marked as panoramas that are RAW files
Pano Edits – All marked as panoramas that are not RAW files
Time lapse – All marked as Time Lapse (Duh!)
Not Geotagged – All files that do not have GPS coordinates associated with them
Videos – All video files not marked as rejects
Rejects – All files marked as rejects (again, duh!)

The reasons for some of these are obvious but others are less so. The not rejects file specifically excludes any shots I have marked as HDR or panorama since, when running through the edits, it is easy to see a shot that makes up one of those processes and think it is boring and delete it. Keeping them separate from the start is important. I keep the originals and the edits apart since, when I come back to them later, it is a lot simpler to look through the finished versions without having to find them amongst the originals. Previously, they ended up in the same smart collection and, after getting bored trying to find the finished one, it occurred to me that they could be kept apart easily.

I now try to geotag all of my images. Having the folder that shows that they haven’t been done reminds me to do this if I have not done it straightaway. I have found that Lightroom has a bug (I have found more than one!) that, when you have imported a bunch of stuff, if you go to the map page, it gets a little lost and keeps the map view looking like the grid view. You can get back out without any problem but have to restart to get back to map view. If you go to map view before doing all of the importing, it seems fine then. However, this folder makes sure I don’t forget to do it at some point.

With all of this set up, it is then easy enough to get into the process I have outlined before. I go to the Not Rejects folder and render 1:1 previews of all of the files. This can take a while so I will often start it off and then go and do something else for a while. I can then come back and run through the images. I will have a full screen version on one screen and the zoomed 1:1 image on the other. This allows me to easily see which shots are not sharp or have an obvious flaw like a pole through the foreground or someone’s head in the way. A quick “X” and that shot disappears from the smart collection and I am on to the next. If it is okay, right arrow and I am moving on. This kills a lot of shots quite quickly.

Then it is a simple case of looking at the shots in Grid view, usually quite large, to see the ones that are duplicate or just plain crap. I can select which to get rid of and “X” again has them consigned to the trash. Once all of this is done, I will run a BluRay backup of all of the shots including the XMP files after which I shall delete all rejects. Hopefully that leaves me with a lot less shots to play with. I can then pick the ones I think are the best and mark them as Picks. It then leaves me with a smaller smart collection which I can go in and pay some attention to making more detailed edits.

This process continues to evolve. Maybe I shall write another update in a couple of years. In the meantime, I hope it might be helpful to someone for me to have shared it. Happy shooting!

Skies With Menace

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This time of year can get a bit stormy. We had some interesting skies rolling across the city with cloud layers heading in different directions at different heights. I thought a time lapse might be good for this so had a go at a couple. The sky didn’t turn into anything too dramatic in the end but it is still fun to watch the way the levels were moving. Here is a clip of what there was.