A Scenic World

I’ve posted this picture before, but I feel it warrants another view. This is how I looked one day after some serious macro shooting:

Macro shooting isn’t easy. Lots of shot require you to get seriously down into the dirt so that you have the most interesting vantage point. Of course, that doesn’t apply if you’re shooting in a controlled environment with subjects you control, but I like to get out into the countryside and shoot things in the “wild.” And I don’t like carrying around a tripod, so usually it’s just me, my camera, and my lens. There’s always the wind to contend with, and sometimes I sit or lie in the most ungraceful and uncomfortable of poses to wait for everything to be still only to have a mosquito start biting me just as I need to take the shot (important note: it’s possible to ignore mosquitoes that are biting your face. Not recommended, but possible). And then once you’re there, all settled in the mud, you still have to find that one angle that works. A half-inch move to the right can make all the difference. I was reminded of that when I was shooting the little purple flowers that I’ve been posting about here.

I started with this, which is a pretty typical shot for me. I was shooting in aperture-priority @ f/2.8 with my 100mm macro lens. With an ISO 200 and shutter speed of 1/200th, I set the EV compensation to -.7  (almost a full stop darker than the camera thought it should be):

I tend to like slightly underexposed macro shots because I can do so much more with them in the post-processing stage, but looking at this one, I thought that there might be a more interesting angle. I tried to get a little lower to get that flower on the left to take a more prominent role in the picture, but that dark spot that you can see in the top of the photo above became even more prominent. Since I personally subscribe to the idea that backgrounds are just as important as subjects, this wasn’t going to work:

So that meant there was only one thing to do: move to the next flowers. The background looked slightly more promising at a group of three flowers that were to the right of these two. So I took a test shot with my camera still in aperture-priority mode. It’s also important to note that I use spot-metering, so the camera chooses its settings based off a relatively small area in the center of the frame rather than try to expose for the entire frame. So with those settings and with my first attempt at framing these artfullly, I got this:

Meh. Not much I can do with that.

I changed my EV compensation to +.3 and moved around the flower so that the highest bloom was even closer to the camera. At 100mm and f/2.8 and ISO 200, I got a shutter speed of 1/400th for this shot:

Better, better, but that bloom in the back was driving me nuts. Time to rotate around even more and see what I could do about getting a composition I liked. Of course, that meant that the background would change too…

…which it definitely did. It’s almost black, and just a bump in contrast would have made it nearly completely so. But this is definitely one of the benefits of spot metering: because the camera didn’t try to expose for the entire dark frame, the flower I wanted to be well-exposed is (well, slightly under-exposed, but I told the camera to do that). That bloom in the back is still making it hard to let that forward bloom really pop out at you, so time to move again, this time an inch or to clockwise.

NOW we’re getting somewhere! I like how the light is filtering in, but I’m a little worried that the bloom is pointing to the left and the light is to the right. When I think about how I want my eyes to rove over the finished picture, I’m a little worried that the two might compete for attention – the bloom will naturally draw the eyes to the left while the bright portion will draw them to the right. So let’s move up an inch or so and try to put that bright portion behind the blooms:

Well, the bright portion is more where I want it, but leaving the camera set to -.3 EV was obviously a mistake. But look at how you can see the curl of that back bloom now! All that’s needed is to change the EV compensation to +.3 to make the scene brighter…

…and the camera responds exactly the way I want it to. Instead of a shutter speed of 1/1000th, I got 1/250th. Compositionally, the bright bit leads up to the top left, just like the flower. So all I have to do is add a little Lightroom magic (take a look at the two previous posts if you have a strong stomach and lots of free time), and voilà!

If you happened to read the post from yesterday, you’ll see that in all the settings, I never once mentioned camera calibration. Quelle horreur! It wasn’t because I didn’t play around with those settings just as much as the others; on the contrary, the effects were so dramatic that I decided to devote an entire post to the camera calibration settings.

In yesterday’s post, I said that I actually preferred the “ghosty silvery” version with little color, and that’s the one I’m going to be working with today. Here it is, with the split-toning and vignetting added and with the default camera calibration settings:

There are 7 sliders under the “Camera Calibration” menu: Shadows, Red Primary Hue, Red Primary Saturation, Green Primary Hue, Green Primary Saturation, Blue Primary Hue, and Blue Primary Saturation. I like to play with all of them. And in fact, all the changes you see today will be made by ONLY adjusting the camera calibration settings.

First, let’s hit the “Shadows” slider. Just pushing it to +88 toward the magenta end makes a pretty dramatic difference:

Now THAT’s a vignette! But contrary to popular opinion, I’m not necessarily looking for the darkest look possible. So with that in mind, I’m actually going to go the other way with the Shadows and put the slider at -43. This kind of brings out the greens in stems:

Now time to go wacky with the color sliders. They’re all inter-related, so an adjustment to one tends to lead to an adjustment to another one, ad infinitum.

First try. Settings:

Shadows: -43
Red Hue: +5
Red Saturation: +100
Green Hue: -98
Green Saturation: +100
Blue Hue: +74
Blue Saturation: -24

Second try. Settings:

Shadows: -38
Red Hue: +74
Red Saturation: +100
Green Hue: -14
Green Saturation: +29
Blue Hue: +26
Blue Saturation: +12

Those are subtle differences, but hopefully the format of the blog allows you to see how the petals in the second version pop more in the second one.

Now let’s get really crazy.

Settings:

Shadows: -38
Red Hue: +74
Red Saturation: +100
Green Hue: -14
Green Saturation: -62
Blue Hue: -69
Blue Saturation:  +12

How’s that for a fine romance?

The Blue Primary channel is where you can really make some magic happen.

Taking the settings above, I made only one change. I moved the Blue Hue to -100:

Now we’re working with golds.

If we move the Blue Hue to the other direction, to +100, we get this:

Quite a difference, eh?

Now let’s put the Blue Hue back to where we started (-69) and play with the Blue Saturation slider. The starting value is +12. If we take it all the way to -100, this is what we get:

That’s quite a heavy background we’re working with now, and even though this shot was taken with ISO 200, it suddenly looks very noisy. Taking the Blue Saturation slider to the opposite end, to +100, gives us this:

This made me wonder what would happen if we made the Blue Hue -100 and the Blue Saturation +100, since the results were so similar when we changed each value by itself. The result?

Now, time for some full disclosure. While I was writing this up and playing with all those sliders, I realized that I really liked the above version but that it needed some modifications. So I went back and played with EVERYTHING – the white balance, the basic tone, the individual color settings, etc. This is actually how my post-processing process works: one change leads to more and more and more until I have it exactly the way I want it.

So all the settings in this post and yesterday’s are kind of moot, but the basis of the settings is still the same.

Anyway, this is what I ended up with in the end:

I’ve always thought that purple flowers were one of the hardest photos to process. Almost any deviation in post-processing results in odd-looking, supernatural, or ugly flowers. I’m sure there’s a technical explanation involving color gamuts and sensor capabilities, but in the end, I just want to be able to play with my photos of purple flowers (and blue, and violet, and lavender, and all the colors in between) the same way I play with all my other flower photos and not end up with some technicolor monstrosity.

So yesterday I hit on a pretty nice approach in Lightroom that I’d figure I’d share here.

Here’s a photo of some of my favorite weeds I took last week:

A small white balance change towards the blue end of the spectrum results in this:

A few quick edits to some of the Basic Tone settings gets us going further down the path I want to go. To wit, I pushed the exposure to almost a full extra stop (+.73), added some highlight recovery, and pushed the blacks just a tiny bit. I also kicked up the brightness to +57.

Playing with the tone curve by pushing the Highlights to +36, the Lights to +33, the Darks to +38, and taking the shadows all the way down to -100 gives us this:

I think that this is actually quite a lovely improvement to the original, and all done without touching global saturation or tweaking any of the individual colors. But let’s face it: this isn’t quite my style, so I am going to touch saturation and tweak all the individual colors.

First, I’m going to pull the Vibrance down to -7 and the global Saturation down to -15 – hardly rebellious moves, to be sure. It’s in the individual colors’ settings that I’ll really achieve the look I’m going for.

I desaturate almost all the colors to -100. The one exception is Blue. When we changed our white balance, we changed what colors the flowers were, and while they started out a healthy Purple, they’re now skewed toward the blue side. By changing the Blue Hue toward the purple end of the spectrum and keeping some saturation, we can get a very similar color for the flowers that we started with. And for extra pop, we can set the Blue Luminance to +100.

I made quite a few adjustments to the luminances of various colors as well. For instance, a lot of the background was made up of Greens and Aquas. I adjusted the Green Luminance to +62 and the Aqua Luminance to +79.

All those changes took our photo to this:

Quite a dramatic difference, eh? I actually like this ghostly silvery look, but by bumping up the saturations of the Blues and Purples, we can get that color of the flowers right back without introducing anything else to distract from the blooms:

A bit of split-toning highlights added (Hue: 60, Saturation: 15) and some minor vignetting (Amount: -48, Midpoint: -27), and we end up with what I think is quite a nice photo: