Maybe it's obvious for you, for me it wasn't. When you shoot in conditions where there is alot of a sun - make sure you have a lens hood! You could say: "Well its only to remove some flares and i know how to avoid it so who cares". It's not completly true and I learned this a hard way - having photos from one session quite much broken.
When you have a Lens Hood on your camera it might help to DEHAZE your image in those conditions! Haze usually means that a tonal range on a photo is smaller and less interesting to a viewer. Fixing this in Post-Process is pretty hard and almost always will lower the quality of your photos!
If you're more interested, check this out:
Some discussion about lens hood:
http://forum.manualfocus.org/viewtopic.php?id=10166
Some comparsions with and without lens hood:
http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/reviews/ef-s_10-22_review_4.html
And some wiki about lens hood
Keep in mind that a lens can catch sun from bigger range - even if its not on a photo it might directly shine onto a lens area.
You might want to search for a flare on a small LCD display of your camera. However it might not be visible - contrast seems to be all right during a photosession, but it's not! It's because in strong sun normal LCD camera does not have strong contrast to show you what is happening on photo.
Friday, 30 August 2013
Wednesday, 28 August 2013
White balance tips & tricks
Probably most of you sooner or later will get into point where colors of your photos look weird. Probably you've already read some ideas about how to make it correct. I will not try to explain how it works and why (again - plenty of usefull information in the web) - I will just focus on some less known ideas how to fix it.
1. Grey Card.
Well it's most common way of solving problem. You just have to shoot a first photo with an object that is 18% grey (usually a special grey card, white paper might work too), on a non-auto white balance mode with proper exposition (this object cannot be black or completly white on photo) . Then you shoot all session on same temperature setting. In post-process just take first photo with grey card on it and using proper tool in most of the graphic programs set white balance by clicking on the area on grey card. Then difference between a normal and corrected photo needs to be applied to all photos from session and... wuala! There is of course little problems if your session takes a bit longer outdoors (where sun position changes constantly affecting temperature), or if a light condition change (for example moving from indoor to outdoor, etc.). If you shoot in JPG not in RAW, there might be some cases where you could not fix colors so in that case I would suggest to use:
2. Grey Card and Custom White Balance.
This is almost identical to a 1. point, except that you use a built in camera setting that says "from now on use a white balance from this picture". Probably you would need to take look into a camera manual that says how this WB is accuired and used. For example in Canon 50D when you take a look trough viewfinder there is a circle in a middle - you need to make sure that object you shoot is completly covered by that circle. When you set a custom white balance, from now on all images should have more or less correct colors. This way your JPG-s should have proper color out of camera and slight temperature changes will still be possible.
3. No Grey Card. Before photo is done.
There are few modes in camera that could help decide about white balance. However I would advice in that case to shoot in RAW-s, as in that case you will have much more information about color that you can get out of photo in post-process. Anyway if you still want to shoot in JPG, automatic mode still should give you quite good option. Keep in mind that if you can select any other mode than automatic and have more or less good results then in post-process you can apply white balance difference from one shoot to all of them. When you use automatic WB it be different each time you make a photo.
4. No Grey Card. After photo is done.
There are cases where you don't have proper WB on your shoots. What options do you have? Well its not yet lost completly, however its not as simple. For sure having calibrated monitor helps decide what looks correct, but its still doable to a certain level:
- Is there a human on photo? We see people everyday so in seconds we can say that something is wrong with photo (even if not exactly sure what). My trick here is to have at least few reference photo that you can open next to your photo that you know that skin there looks correct. By changing temperature of you image you can find something in the middle that might look like correct skin tone. You could always check by color picker what are relations of Red, Green and Blue values of a skin - for white skin usually it's good if distance between red and green is similar to distance between green and blue, and they are in relation R > G > B (red highest, blue lowest).
- Is there something white on the photo? Just use this as reference! The problem with this method is... well are you sure that its white? Not a cream, or little pinkish? Anyway still worth to give it a try. Use then a white balance tool, or change temperature to a level where this white area's RGB values are the same.
- Do you remember taking photo? If you have good calibrated monitor then you might be able to reproduce scene "from your mind". Tricky but possible.
- Recently I use a technique with quite good results - together with reference photo, set additional layer with vibrance and saturation to maximum, try to balance that photo and then remove vibrance layer. This way even very small change of color you can see immediately during transforms.
In all of those cases I follow one rule. Get back to the image after post-proces after a while. Colors that you change might look ok when editing, but eyes have nice (but not in this case) adaptation mechanism that will change temporarily your feeling of a correct color balance.
5. Light sources with different temperatures.
This one is pretty hard to fix. It requires some more manual work on a photo, but results are quite often much more appealing that you would guess. Most of the time this problem appears during a shoots with strobe and natural light (daylight?) - if you don't use a strobe gel, then areas that are hit by strobe light will have different temperature. In that case I advice to first set temperature to one of light (usually daylight), then create a separate color balance layer with mask and paint regions where color is different than should. Bit of practice will help you understand the concept.
Let me know if you know any better methods, as I found quite many on the web, but those are the one that works for me most of the time. I'm also interested how you're doing your WB setting, please share with us!
1. Grey Card.
Well it's most common way of solving problem. You just have to shoot a first photo with an object that is 18% grey (usually a special grey card, white paper might work too), on a non-auto white balance mode with proper exposition (this object cannot be black or completly white on photo) . Then you shoot all session on same temperature setting. In post-process just take first photo with grey card on it and using proper tool in most of the graphic programs set white balance by clicking on the area on grey card. Then difference between a normal and corrected photo needs to be applied to all photos from session and... wuala! There is of course little problems if your session takes a bit longer outdoors (where sun position changes constantly affecting temperature), or if a light condition change (for example moving from indoor to outdoor, etc.). If you shoot in JPG not in RAW, there might be some cases where you could not fix colors so in that case I would suggest to use:
2. Grey Card and Custom White Balance.
This is almost identical to a 1. point, except that you use a built in camera setting that says "from now on use a white balance from this picture". Probably you would need to take look into a camera manual that says how this WB is accuired and used. For example in Canon 50D when you take a look trough viewfinder there is a circle in a middle - you need to make sure that object you shoot is completly covered by that circle. When you set a custom white balance, from now on all images should have more or less correct colors. This way your JPG-s should have proper color out of camera and slight temperature changes will still be possible.
3. No Grey Card. Before photo is done.
There are few modes in camera that could help decide about white balance. However I would advice in that case to shoot in RAW-s, as in that case you will have much more information about color that you can get out of photo in post-process. Anyway if you still want to shoot in JPG, automatic mode still should give you quite good option. Keep in mind that if you can select any other mode than automatic and have more or less good results then in post-process you can apply white balance difference from one shoot to all of them. When you use automatic WB it be different each time you make a photo.
4. No Grey Card. After photo is done.
There are cases where you don't have proper WB on your shoots. What options do you have? Well its not yet lost completly, however its not as simple. For sure having calibrated monitor helps decide what looks correct, but its still doable to a certain level:
- Is there a human on photo? We see people everyday so in seconds we can say that something is wrong with photo (even if not exactly sure what). My trick here is to have at least few reference photo that you can open next to your photo that you know that skin there looks correct. By changing temperature of you image you can find something in the middle that might look like correct skin tone. You could always check by color picker what are relations of Red, Green and Blue values of a skin - for white skin usually it's good if distance between red and green is similar to distance between green and blue, and they are in relation R > G > B (red highest, blue lowest).
- Is there something white on the photo? Just use this as reference! The problem with this method is... well are you sure that its white? Not a cream, or little pinkish? Anyway still worth to give it a try. Use then a white balance tool, or change temperature to a level where this white area's RGB values are the same.
- Do you remember taking photo? If you have good calibrated monitor then you might be able to reproduce scene "from your mind". Tricky but possible.
- Recently I use a technique with quite good results - together with reference photo, set additional layer with vibrance and saturation to maximum, try to balance that photo and then remove vibrance layer. This way even very small change of color you can see immediately during transforms.
In all of those cases I follow one rule. Get back to the image after post-proces after a while. Colors that you change might look ok when editing, but eyes have nice (but not in this case) adaptation mechanism that will change temporarily your feeling of a correct color balance.
5. Light sources with different temperatures.
This one is pretty hard to fix. It requires some more manual work on a photo, but results are quite often much more appealing that you would guess. Most of the time this problem appears during a shoots with strobe and natural light (daylight?) - if you don't use a strobe gel, then areas that are hit by strobe light will have different temperature. In that case I advice to first set temperature to one of light (usually daylight), then create a separate color balance layer with mask and paint regions where color is different than should. Bit of practice will help you understand the concept.
Let me know if you know any better methods, as I found quite many on the web, but those are the one that works for me most of the time. I'm also interested how you're doing your WB setting, please share with us!
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
Outdoor white balance based on... time of a day?
Well i just had a crazy idea for white balance in outdoor. As a sun is quite predictable, it should be possible to exactly predict a scene temperature outdoors at given time at given location on the earth without any clouds on sky. Probably clouds might affect this value by some small percentage, however I can't find any usefull information on the web about that idea. If anyone heard about that concept before and maybe got any calculator for that, please let me know! It sounds like an interesting idea of easily correcting white balance in post-processing.
Aperture and shutter - Sweet Spot
There are tons of usefull information about those basic camera parameters. I will not explain them any better that any other webpage on the web did already. As I'm mainly concerned about quality of images (maybe you too?) then I would like to share some less known aspect of those. Probably you already know that shutter speed affects how blury will be your image during movement (you, or your subject) - so to keep it sharp usually you want to make it as small as possible (usually 1/125 is enough to freeze normal body movement). Lowering this parameter however reduces amout of light that is comming to a camera, so to increase that light you have few options: raise aperture, raise ISO or add additional light source. Raising ISO will usually degrade image quality (especially in shadow areas), so natural option would be to raise aperture (by lowering aperture number), usually to maximum of lens capability (thats what I was usually doing).
Important part here is something called "sweet spot" - you might not notice this at first shoots, but lenses on their highest aperture do not perform very well - they can work OK, but by the cost of a defocus (more at Optimal Aperture at wiki).
What if you want to shoot in sweet spot, and have not blurry image because of small movements? Here comes why most photographers shoots with strobes (even outdoor). You can minimize this effect using tripod, however best results you will get using additional moving light source. Usually Sweet Spot is around f4-f8, for example:
- Canon 17-85mm f4-f5.6 typical Kit Lens - Sweet spot around f8,
- Canon 50mm f1.8 - good quality starts from f2.8, sweet spot from f4,
(Click on a photo above to check author of photo and its description)
Conclusion of this post would be - take a look at lens tests to know at what aperture you might get best results. But dont stick to it always - sometimes you need to open shutter to max. However when you have good light condition - it's worth to give it a try.
Zoom lenses also adds some quality variation (they are not same in whole range of zoom) - so again, a good advice is to check image quality for given lens across different focal length set. Example for a Canon 17-85 you can read here: http://www.lenstip.com/12.4-Lens_review-Canon_EF-S_17-85_mm_f_4-5.6_IS_USM_Image_resolution.html
What if you want to shoot in sweet spot, and have not blurry image because of small movements? Here comes why most photographers shoots with strobes (even outdoor). You can minimize this effect using tripod, however best results you will get using additional moving light source. Usually Sweet Spot is around f4-f8, for example:
- Canon 17-85mm f4-f5.6 typical Kit Lens - Sweet spot around f8,
- Canon 50mm f1.8 - good quality starts from f2.8, sweet spot from f4,
(Click on a photo above to check author of photo and its description)
Conclusion of this post would be - take a look at lens tests to know at what aperture you might get best results. But dont stick to it always - sometimes you need to open shutter to max. However when you have good light condition - it's worth to give it a try.
Zoom lenses also adds some quality variation (they are not same in whole range of zoom) - so again, a good advice is to check image quality for given lens across different focal length set. Example for a Canon 17-85 you can read here: http://www.lenstip.com/12.4-Lens_review-Canon_EF-S_17-85_mm_f_4-5.6_IS_USM_Image_resolution.html
How to start a journey with photography. My case.
Nowadays entering to a photography world can't be simpler! You don't need to spend tons of cash to get proper equipement to start your photoadventure, and still have lot of joy out of it.
I had a bit easier way to enter this world, as my father is also photoamateur - he had a camera and he taught me all basics about analog photography, how to set aperture and shutter where there is no "automatic" setting, etc. But that is like ages ago, and those simple basics you need you can find on the web. My real passion starts at the moment I start to use a digital camera. I was shooting mostly my family, trips, parties, friends - photos that most of you probably did (with simple camera? with phone? doesn't matter). But I also love to experiment, I chase my "precious rabbit" - to get better and better quality of each photo I make, to correct small things, making photoworld more perfect.
Soon I realized that my current digital camera, even with a Manual mode where I could set settings similar to an analog camera, is not enough (However all images in this post are done before DSLR). Time has come to buy my first DSLR camera and my first lens - Canon EF-S 17-85 mm f/4-5.6.
It was great experience and I was really pleased from the very first results. However after some time I noticed (especially when browsing other users photos using same camera) that quality might be even better. Again I started experimenting, reading, practicing. All over again to get to the point im here now. I realized that my passion to get best image quality is entering really difficult and complex details of photography that might not be simple to everyone to understand - even to myself. Because of that I decided to create this blog, explain things that might not be interesting at very begining of photojourney, but maybe in time you will realize that this is something that you miss in all your photos for ages.
Some series of first post will be pretty much basics, but soon we will go deeper into more and more complex concepts.
I had a bit easier way to enter this world, as my father is also photoamateur - he had a camera and he taught me all basics about analog photography, how to set aperture and shutter where there is no "automatic" setting, etc. But that is like ages ago, and those simple basics you need you can find on the web. My real passion starts at the moment I start to use a digital camera. I was shooting mostly my family, trips, parties, friends - photos that most of you probably did (with simple camera? with phone? doesn't matter). But I also love to experiment, I chase my "precious rabbit" - to get better and better quality of each photo I make, to correct small things, making photoworld more perfect.
Some series of first post will be pretty much basics, but soon we will go deeper into more and more complex concepts.
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