A Scenic World

I was asked to explain the post-processing steps to Day 37, so I chose to do the self-portrait side, since it has the most done to it. And in a bid to show just what post-processing can do, I decided to explain it backwards :) I hope that this works out, and if it’s confusing or nonsensical, please let me know! I also decided to not do the side-by-sides, since my diptych-software does some pretty bad artifacting. Hopefully it all still makes sense.

First, the final, heavily-processed photo:

And now the original:

You’re probably thinking, “Wow, this photo has had a lot done to it!”  To be fair, the original is pretty heavily underexposed, but I find that it’s best for a backlit shot to either start really underexposed or really overexposed; there is usually no middle ground (or “perfect exposure”) for a backlit shot, just due to the nature of the lighting situation. But in this photo, almost EVERYTHING from the original photo was changed during the post-processing: the white balance,  the colors’ saturation and hues and luminances, the contrast and the exposure settings. Split toning and vignetting was added as well. So how do those changes effect the outcome?

If we take the final shot with all the other edits but keep the white balance the same as the original, we get this:

As you can see, the white balance made a pretty important difference. The original white balance reflects the sunny day, with all the golden hues you can expect. But I changed it to a cooler, more tungsten white balance. Blues in general tend to make my eyes take on a shimmery look, and while I like the gold tones, those can be added with split toning. In fact, they were added with that step. If we keep all the other edits the same (so we’re using the edited, cooler white balance) and take away just the split toning, we get this:

Now, with that underexposure, we obviously needed some way to lighten up the photo. We could do this either with curves or with bumping the exposure. I pushed the curves part almost to the max, bringing up the “lights” to 88 out of 100 (but pushing the highlights themselves down so that the photo had that flat, vintagey look). This seemed to do the trick. Without those changes, even with the exposure pushed, we get this:

In fact, I pushed the exposure +1.43 stops, but if we take away that step and keep all the other edits the same, we get this (so basically, this is without the exposure being pushed at all). Here you can see what those curves I talked about above really did:

I also fiddled with the colors. Overall vibrance (which I’m going to be honest and say that I don’t really know what it does: I just know that it affects the colors without affecting the saturation) was pulled back. For individual colors, I brought up the luminances in the yellows, oranges, reds, and blues. So if you look at the final photo with the color settings of the original, it looks like this:

That’s pretty much it. I actually did crop off a bit from the top and I cloned out some really funny hair that had strayed across my upper lip, making it look like I had a moustache, but otherwise, what you see is what you get :)

Whew, what a job! I’d already done most of the work on a compilation of my self-portraits when the laptop died, so I had to start from scratch with my new computer. But I am happy to report that all is well and done and hopefully done well :)

You can see the details for the book here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/758966

And the preview is here: http://www.blurb.com/books/758966

Any proceeds will be going directly toward a K7 =)

I feel like, instead of July 1st, it’s January 1st. Just as if yesterday were New Year’s Eve, Jens and I celebrated. I made a lemon torte, and we popped up bottles of our favorite beverages – ginger ale for me, tonic water for Jens. We clinked glasses and exchanged cheers as our computer displayed “Upload Complete!” After we added our photos to the group, I lit the 3-6-5 candles I’d put on the cake and we blew them out together.

Another year of 365 self-portraits was complete!

After I was sure that the card wasn’t going to fail before I could get the photo off or that the computer wasn’t going to blow up before the photo got uploaded, I finally went to check out the “Congratulations Keitha and Jens” group that my awesome friends had put together on flickr. Fifteen people joined the group, and Ben (luzartphotography), Jan (Rosember), Thorsten (TheBrumReaper), Betsy (betsypdx), Mike Autry (mikeautry1) and Laree (lareecb) even made congratulatory photos for us! It really made the moment special for both of us.

Of course, we only had the one computer to use since my laptop died, so we were both vying for computer time to get our thank yous and to post our stats, and Jens was supposed to be reading a student’s thesis, so, yeah.

But then luckily today I got my new computer! It has a dual core processor, 4 gigs of RAM, a terabyte worth of space…Can you believe that most of the photos I processed and posted in the last 3 months were done on a machine with only 512 MB of RAM? I usually sat down to process with a book, because I could read about 5 pages while waiting for a photo to load enough for me to edit.

Of course with any new computer comes all the lovely software installs. We bought one with no operating system since Jens had bought me an English version of Windows XP earlier in the year, so I had to install that (and it takes a long while to format a TB) and then find the CD with the proper drivers for the PCI slot (it was hidden in a guide for the monitor) and finally, I was online. Then I had to install iTunes and Lightroom and download Chrome and Filezilla and Irfanview and .NET 2.0 and Winrar and Dipstych and….

And then I still had to decide whether I wanted to do a third year of 365 days. Last time, I took a month off between projects, but part of me wishes I had gone non-stop. And of course once you miss one day, you can never go back.

So of course I took a self-portrait today. Last year, a friend suggested that I take two shots every day, one a self-portrait and another “matching” shot. I’ve interpreted his “matching” to be something in the same tone or processed the same or a piece of the scene. At any rate, I think I’m going to give it a go. I don’t want to necessarily commit to doing 365 days worth, but I’m going to give it a try!

And now….

Day 1.