DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY 1
Class #15: Monday April 18
Advanced Digital Darkroom techniques: Filters
Assignments for Spring Break:
Due April 27th: ESCAPE! Shoot at least 50 pictures thinking about the idea of 'escape.' It can be literal or figurative. Use this assignment
Due Monday May 2nd: Using the advanced techniques, creatively enhance / manipulate 3 images. Make prints on the laser printer or on your home printer.
SPRING BREAK APRIL 19-26
EXPERT DIGITAL DARKROOM TECHNIQUES
Now it’s time to really get into the fine details and begin to consider every square inch of your photograph. There are a few techniques that can further the dynamic range, or enhance the emotional tone, quality, and feeling of your images.
DODGING / BURNING
Dodging and burning refers to a technique in the darkroom, in which you would expose the image onto a piece of paper, and cover up a portion – dodging, to prevent light from hitting the paper, or uncover a portion of the image to allow the exposure to go on for longer – burner.
Remember that lighting is one of the most important aspects of your image. The illumination helps to shape the scene and give definition to the subject. It can render an image flat or carve out distinct depth and dimensionality that lets the image pop!
Burning and dodging allows you to selectively enhance the tonal quality of your image to add depth and place emphasis on certain areas, darkening the tones in certain places and lightening the tones in others.
- Go to LAYER > NEW LAYER (or Shift / Command / N)
- When the dialogue box opens, change the MODE to SOFT LIGHT
- Check the box below to “Fill with Soft-Light-Neutral-color (50% gray)”
- In your tools, select the paintbrush, make sure the color boxes are set to black and white.
- When the black color box is on top, you are burning, making the image darker. When the White color box is on top, you are dodging, making the image lighter. To switch between them hit the “x” key.
- Start with an opacity of 15% and a flow of 100%, and begin to burn and dodge!
FILTERS
Duplicating the Background Layer
When we are working with filters we need to first duplicate our background to create another layer with which to apply the filter to. These are destructive tools so we never want to work directly on the background or we will not be able to go back and make adjustments later.
- In your layers palette, click on your background layer.
- At the top of your screen go to “Layer” – “Duplicate Layer”. This will bring up a window.
- Here you can choose what to name / label this layer, so Sharpen or Blur accordingly.
- Once you apply a sharpening or blurring filter, you can then add a layer mask to that to selectively determine which portions of the image you want to apply these filters to.
BLURRING
All blur filters can be found in Filter > Blur > … You can play around with these filters to get the desired effect, and as always you can adjust the opacity of the layer as well as apply a layer mask to selectively choose which parts of the image you are applying the filter to.
- BLUR and BLUR MORE apply a direct effect to the image, without giving you any control or options. You are better off choosing a filter that gives you the ability to determine the effect on your image.
- GAUSSIAN BLUR: This filter is used to blur details in the image, either slightly or dramatically. You can use this to throw backgrounds out of focus, or blur something to the point of abstraction. There is a single control for Gaussian blur, a Radius slider, making this a very straightforward tool.
- MOTION BLUR creates a blur along a straight line, the angle of which you can determine.
RADIAL BLUR creates a blur that radiates in a circle, with the center being more in focus and the sharpness decreasing as the circle goes outward. You do not get to preview this while making the specifications, so it will be a bit of a guessing game – but a fun one!
SHARPENING
Sharpening exaggerates the difference between the pixels in your image, so when you have dark values next to light values, you will be enhancing those tones in either direction and making the image appear much sharper to the eye. What sharpening does not do is take an out of focus image and put it in focus, Photoshop can not make something out of nothing, but can enhance what you have captured in camera.
There are a variety of tools you can, some of which apply an auto sharpening filter. I like to use either a HIGH PASS layer or the Smart Sharpen Feature:
HIGH PASS SHARPEN
- Go to FILTER – OTHER and choose HIGH PASS
- A window will pop open and show you in tones of gray the effect you are having on your file. The radius sets the amount of sharpening around each pixel. The higher the radius, the sharper the image. But you don’t want to go TOO sharp because the image will look over-done. Start with a Radius of .7 and move up and down accordingly.
- After you click OK you need to change the BLENDING MODE in your layers palette to OVERLAY
SMART SHARPEN
- Go to FILTER – SHARPEN and choose the SMART SHARPEN option.
- Your cursor has turned into a small square that will allow you to choose the detail in the image you want to have appear in your preview box.
- Once you have chosen an area that you want to examine, start by setting “Amount”, think of this like a volume control. Start by setting the max of 500%. This is an over the top effect but is important in determining your radius.
- The “Radius” setting determines the width of the sharpening halos to the pixels. A wider halo results in a more pronounced sharpening effect. If the halos are too wide the image will look over-sharpened and typically you want to keep this very low. Start out with a radius of 1.0
- The best “Remove” setting for digital files is lens blur, though “Motion blur” is good if you are working with a file that has some camera shake. if you are working with a scanned in file you will want to select “Gaussian” blur.
- Now you can bring down Amount to a percentage that looks and feels more realistic and remember to click on and off the preview button to see the difference in the before and after.
CONVERTING TO BLACK & WHITE
There are several methods to achieve this.
- DESATURATE: This is the least useful but simplest of all the conversion methods. It will take all the color out of your image but you will lose information, particularly tonal range.
- STANDARD GRAYSCALE CONVERSION: This creates a grayscale file by blending the grayscale versions of the color channels together into a single gray channel. To do this go to IMAGE > MODE > GRAYSCALE. This method also does not produce optimal results.
- CHANNEL MIXER ADJUSTMENT LAYER: With channel mixer, you can create a custom blend of the existing grayscale tonal information that is found in the red, green and blue color channels. This method gives you the most control over the conversion process by allowing you to take advantage of the color values in an image and use them.
o Look at the individual color channels by clicking on their names in the Channels palette. Each channel is a different grayscale version of the image. When you’ve finished click back on RGB.
o Add a channel mixer adjustment layer. In the dialog box, click the Monochrome check box in the lower-left corner. This will give you a version of the image that is make up of 100% red channel. Now you can change the mixtures of each channel until you arrive at something you like, in the end the percentages of each channel should add up to 100%, no more, no less.
- BLACK & WHITE ADJUSTMENT LAYER: As we saw in class on Monday, this will allow you to customize your black and white even further, by choosing the tonal range of every single color available, not just each channel. This gives you even more control!
TONING WITH HUE / SATURATION
Now that you have a black and white image, you can tone it just like you would in a darkroom. Add a hue / saturation layer to your image, in the lower right corner of the dialog, click the COLORIZE check box. This adds a color tint throughout the image. Move the hue slider either way until you get the desire tone, and then adjust the saturation of until you get the desired intensity.
*** Note: If you used the standard grayscale conversion you will NOT be able to tone!! ***
