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How to enhance details with Structure

Explaining structure is a hard task and better demonstrated with the right image. I have tried to explain it before in earlier blog posts but I believe this image is perfect for showing the enhancement that a structure adjustment can give.

This is a lemur, right?

Due to my recent faux pas with the robin and chaffinch mix-up , I am using an animal, which I can confidently identify! Therefore I hope I am right when I say this is a lemur?

As well as using Structure to really define the fur and make it stand out, I used quite a few Local Adjustment layers along with an obvious Black and White conversion

The unadjusted file was nearly passed over, but I am glad I spent the time to produce the final image.

The Original

As I said, I nearly missed the original image. The crop is not particularly interesting and the lemur is not standing out so well from his other friends in the huddle. I think when I took the shot I somehow expected this to be the case.

Before making any adjustments I tried to see if a better crop could improve things. I felt that a square crop could work in this case, so I chose the Crop Tool and defined a 1×1 Aspect Ratio by clicking and holding on the crop cursor icon.

This makes it very straightforward to get a square crop.

I figured that the crop helped the composition quite a bit, so decided to move on with some adjustments. I immediately thought that a Black & White image would work nicely, so I used the excellent Black and White Tool in Capture One Pro 7 to do the job. I normally start with one of our factory Presets and settled on the ‘Panchromatic 4’ Style.

I treat this as a starting point for further adjustment. Next I made some adjustments to the basic tools in the Exposure tab as you can see here.

It’s getting closer but there are some brighter areas which I think are a little distracting. For example, the white fur around the ear and the left leg. Even though I have a pretty strong Vignette on, I still think the top part of the image could come down a little. And of course, we still haven’t exercised Structure to bring out the full potential of image detail.

Therefore, this is a great opportunity to use some Local adjustments.

To tackle the brightness of the top part of the image, I’ll use a simple Gradient Mask (The Gradient Mask Brush is circled on the left) and draw from the top of the image down.

This gives the perfect mask for bringing down the exposure in just the top of the image.

I find it helpful to rename the Adjustment Layers in case I want to return to them to adjust later. Just click on the name to edit it.

I also added another gradient mask at the bottom of the image to bring the exposure of the grass down a little more. (not shown here)

Most importantly, I felt the ear fur was a little too bright, so a quick dab of the Draw Mask brush and a reduction in exposure fixed that.

I added a final Local Adjustment to the eye, just to brighten it up a little. My Adjustment Layers palette ended up looking like this.

Now we get to the all important Structure Tool, which I will add to the Background layer.

To try to explain Structure, think about this analogy. Consider an image of a tree and you have the option of using Clarity, Structure and Sharpening.

Clarity will enhance the tree trunk and the large branches

Structure will enhance the smaller branches and leaves.

Sharpening will enhance the structures on a leaf itself.

Hopefully the analogy will help you to think about what Structure can do for your images. If we compare the lemur on the left (Structure set to 40) with the one to the right (Structure set to zero) you can quite clearly see what Structure is doing in this case.

Structure really helps to bring out the details of the fur in a way that applying extra sharpening might not. If I was going to print this image out I could probably push it a little more. It’s worth experimenting with the level of Structure you can apply for your own needs, whether it’s for screen or print.

Here is the image also in color. What do you think works best?

Best regards,

David

Steve Gosling’s 3 P’s of landscape photography

This loch sits on the edge of Rannoch Moor – a vast expanse of open land that I frequently cross on my way to Glencoe and beyond to the Scottish highlands and islands.

Adds to the challenge

This area on the west of Scotland has become one of my favourite parts of the UK for landscape photography. It’s a rugged, wild landscape that I find very inspiring. It can also be an incredibly frustrating place to work – the weather is very changeable (as mentioned in a previous post, they say in Scotland that if you don’t like the prevailing weather then just wait twenty minutes as it will inevitably change).

But that adds to the challenge and makes it all the more rewarding when everything comes together in a successful photograph.

The three P’s of landscape photography

When I am running photographic workshops or giving talks I often refer to the three P’s of landscape photography:

Planning – to work out the right time of day and year to be at a specific location (with reference to sun/moon position, the presence or absence of foliage on the trees, tide times etc) as well as keeping an eye on weather forecasts to increase the chance of getting a successful photograph;

Patience – as all landscape photographers know, rarely are we able to just turn up at a location, get out the camera and take a wonderful image. The old adage, ‘if you’ve seen it, you’ve missed it’ normally applies. My usual approach is to set up the camera, fine- tune the composition and then wait for the light, weather conditions, cloud formations and so on to come together in a way that supports what I want to say about the location (based most importantly on what I feel about the location, not just what I see). This requires a lot of patience – I frequently spend hours standing around waiting for all the elements to coincide to give me what I’m after. And of course success is far from guaranteed – going home empty handed is not uncommon.

Persistence – which brings me to the final ‘P’. Revisiting locations is part of the job – sometimes I’ll keep returning to a location over a period of years before I get a photograph that I’m completely happy with.

And that is certainly true of Loch na h’Achlaise. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been to this spot and up until my last trip (when this image was taken) I’ve previously taken only one photograph that got close to reflecting the nature and the spirit of the place.

“Then I had my shot”

On this visit the loch was frozen, the distant mountains were covered in snow and an interesting cloud filled sky sat above them. I set up and waited. Luckily as the day was drawing to a close (and as I was beginning to fear that this would be another wasted visit) the sun broke through the cloud and gently illuminated the mountaintops. I had my shot.

The RAW file below showed that I had managed to record all the required detail in shadows & highlights and also revealed the potential for a successful colour image as well but that’s for the future. My first interest was to get a Black & White print.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog I like to get a good quality colour file as a starting point for the conversion process to monochrome.

I began by cropping the image to remove the edges of the frame and concentrate attention on the distant mountains.

I then used the exposure tools (in this case Levels and the Contrast slider) to brighten the image, particularly in the highlights, again to draw attention to the light on the mountains.

I also increased clarity and structure to enhance the detail in the foreground stones (these can be seen in the screen grab below and the result is in ‘the Final Colour Image’ also below)

The next step was the conversion to B&W. For this image I again used one of the presets available as a download for Capture One Pro 7 from Capture One Complete.

In this case I used ‘B&W Style 7’ – although I’ll usually look at the effects of using the other styles and presets, this remains one of my favourites. As is my way I use these as a starting point and then I fine-tune the result to suit my own vision and adapt them for each individual image.

I then added a vignette to darken the corners and adjusted the exposure curve to alter the contrast and lift the midtones.

The penultimate step was to darken the sky through the use of a gradient local adjustment layer,

before cloning out dust marks, sharpening and then exporting for printing.

Image Title: ‘Frozen’

Location: Loch na h’Achlaise, Rannoch Moor, Scotland

Equipment: Alpa TC Camera, Schneider 36mm lens, Phase One P45+ digital back, Gitzo tripod with Manfrotto 410 geared head, Lee 0.6 stop ND graduated and 6 stop ND filters

Exposure details: f22, 1mins 29secs, ISO 50

All the best,

Steve Gosling

Ramp up your efficiency with Local Adjustments

I hope by now you’ve had the chance to explore using Local Adjustments on your images. It has certainly brought the ‘darkroom’ back to my photography.

Capture One Pro 7 allows you to add up to ten different local adjustment layers with individual changes to Color, Exposure, Clarity, Moiré and Sharpening.

The so-called extra features that I am going to describe here are the ability to Copy, Invert and Fill a mask. These three actions can help you save time, and aid in the creativity of your images.

The not-so-red robin

The title image here is a little colorless and flat with no adjustments made in Capture One Pro 7.

My plan for this image is to improve the saturation and clarity of the robin and make it stand out more from the background. I’ll also apply sharpening to only the robin itself, as there are no details to sharpen in this shallow depth of field image.

I’ll start by drawing a mask on the robin. I have selected a fairly hard brush so I can get a good accurate edge.

I am drawing the mask with a Wacom Pen and Tablet, which I find much easier. I wrote about this in more detail in a recent blog post if you want to know more.

It was pretty straightforward to draw this mask so far, but I’ll need to reduce the brush size and add in the beak. I can use the Wacom tablet’s Precision Mode to help with drawing this small area.

To save a bit of time, I don’t need to brush in the centre of the robin (see the first screen grab of the mask) as I can just use the ‘Fill Mask’ command. This will fill in the ‘hole’ in the centre of the mask.

Access this by clicking on the small arrow in the top right of the Local Adjustments Tool. The mask is now automatically filled in.

If I need to, I can clean up the edges a little, but I am pretty happy with the first result! You can also see I have named the layer ‘Robin’ so I can keep track of what layer does what. This is very useful if you have several layers to keep track of. To name a layer, just click on the default name.

Now I can set my adjustments for the robin itself.

I have increased the Saturation, applied some sharpening (I had disabled all sharpening in the Background layer, simply by choosing the Preset ‘No Sharpening’ in the Sharpening Tool ), increased the Clarity and Structure and finally made a selective color correction of the chest feathers with an increase in Saturation and reduction of Lightness.

It looks much better now.

Now to work on the background. It would be a waste of time to mask out the background as I already have the inverse – the robin. First of all, I will make a new empty layer by clicking the plus icon, and call it Isolated Background.

Then copy the mask from the Robin layer to this new layer in the same menu.

Now, the Robin layer and Isolated background layer match, so the final step is to invert it, so I just have my background masked.

Now, the mask looks like this.

Perfect! For the background I have decided to desaturate and darken it a little, soften it with some negative Clarity and make sure no sharpening is applied.

Here is the final result alongside the original image. I hope you agree it is somewhat improved.

Conclusion

Fill, Invert and Copy mask functions are simple but can certainly shave a few minutes off here and there when creating multiple layers. Don’t forget that even after copying or inverting masks, they can still be edited with the Draw and Erase mask brushes.

Best regards,

David

How to fine-tune your Black & White images

The first blog post I did was about converting a fairly simple image (processing wise) into a nice Black & White image.

This second post is based on a more complex image requiring more input and manipulation at the processing stage to achieve a beautiful result.

“If you don’t like the weather, wait 20 minutes”

I am known as a landscape photographer but a lot of the time I’m really a skyscape photographer. Frequently I look for dramatic skies and then find a suitable landscape to go underneath it. Perhaps it’s because I’m based in the UK and although we curse the changeable weather we experience, it does bring with it some wonderfully dramatic cloud formations. And nowhere is this more true than in Scotland (where the common saying is ‘if you don’t like the weather, then wait 20 minutes because it’ll change”!).

A passion for the Scottish Highlands

I love photographing in the Scottish Highlands. It’s a rugged landscape characterised by craggy mountains, open moorland and picturesque lochs. And one of my favourite locations is the Glencoe area. I try to visit two or three times a year, preferring the unpredictable weather and the sometimes theatrical light that occurs in the spring, autumn and winter months.

Great conditions

This photograph was taken in March at the side of Loch Leven facing towards the magnificently named ‘Pap of Glencoe’ (not that it can be seen in this image as it was shrouded in low hanging clouds). It was dusk, the light was fading fast and a strong, cold wind made the clouds sweep across the sky: Just the sort of conditions that I love to work in.

Looking for movement and dynamism

I decided to make the most of the scudding clouds so I fitted a 10 stop ND filter to my lens and selected an aperture of f16. This combination resulted in an exposure of just over 2 minutes – I knew from experience that this would add to the drama in the sky. I use long exposures a lot in my landscape work – I like the sense of movement and dynamism it can add to an image like this.

When I’m intending to convert to Black & White I like to start with a relatively flat original and add the drama at the processing and printing stage.

My aim is to ensure that I record the whole range of tones in the final file so the histogram is a much-used feature on my camera.

In the fading light I didn’t get time for more than 3 exposures but chose this one to work on because the swirl in the water added some interest and echoed the movement in the sky.

Getting the best starting point

Before converting the image to Black & White I always prefer to make basic adjustments to get the best colour image I can as starting point. In this case that involved:

cropping (I removed the foreground shoreline to emphasise the swirling water)
adjusting exposure to lighten the image by adjusting the levels and using the HDR Tool to protect highlights and shadow detail
increasing contrast using the Exposure Tool.

For this image I used one of the presets available as a download for Capture One Pro 7 from Capture One Complete (see http://www.captureonecomplete.com/uk/ ). I often use the available Styles and Presets as a starting point and then I fine-tune the result to suit my style and each individual image (I’m not a fan of taking the same approach to the processing of every image).

I used ‘B&W Style 7’ as my first step.

I then added Local Adjustments. I really like that feature and the ability to make selections in Capture One Pro 7:

I created a graduated Local Adjustment Layer over the water area at the bottom of the photo and increased the exposure to +0.93 to lighten this area.

Finally I spent some time carefully selecting the water with the Brush Tool before lightening it and increasing the contrast.

For the final stages I added a slight exposure vignette to darken the corners, cloned out any dust marks and sharpened prior to printing.

All the best,

Steve