The photo above was taken a few days ago during my annual Venice photo-

graphy workshop. This is a 17th century palace, and the interior of the room

is much darker than the bright daylight seen through the windows.  Due to

the extreme contrast — in other words, the large discrepancy in exposure

between the model and the windows — I had three choices in dealing with

this situation:

1.  I could expose correctly for the model and the interior and allow the

windows to blow out.

2.  I could expose for the windows which would make the model very dark

and the room would also be underexposed significantly.

3.  I could use an artificial light source, like a flash, to lighten the model

and then expose for both the windows and her — but then the high ceiling

and the walls would be very dark. In order to light this cavernous room, I

would need an enormous number of lights and it would take two days to do

it correctly.

I opted to expose correctly for the model and the room and allow the

windows to blow out.  Usually, blown highlights are something to avoid.  In

this case, I feel that the very light curtains and the overexposed daylight adds

an ethereal quality to this picture.  I like it a lot even though, in most cases, this

is usually something I avoid.

If you are not shooting landscapes at sunrise and sunset, you are missing the best photo opportunities.  I’m not talking about early morning or late afternoon; rather I’m specifically referring to the first few minutes after the sun peeks above the horizon and the last few minutes before it disappears in the evening.  It is these magical times that the golden light is spectacular, as you can see in the sunrise shot on Torres del Paine in Patagonia, Chile.

It is certainly disappointing if you get up before dawn, drive somewhere in the dark, and wait for what you hope will be a beautiful sunrise, only to see a cloud cover that obliterates the sun.  But when nature cooperates, it’s true magic.  It’s worth the hassle because you will enjoy the wonderful images you’ve captured forever.

I just got back from leading a photo tour to Chile.  The photography was varied and dramatic, from penguins to exotic wild parrots to some of the most incredible mountains on the planet.  I hoped to see and photograph an Andean condor, and I got one decent shot of one (below) sitting on a rock ledge above a glacial lake.  This was taken with a 500mm f/4 IS Canon lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter — and I hand held the monster lens on a boat!  I raised the ISO until the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze the inherent movement I had to deal with.  To insure the sharpest pictures with a telephoto lens, the shutter speed should be at least the reciprocal of the focal length.  In other words, if you are using a 700mm lens (as I was), the shutter speed should ideally be 1/700th of a second or faster.

When you shoot in the RAW format, you must process the picture files in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom before they can be opened directly into Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. There is a tool in these RAW converters that I consider one of the great advances in photographic technology. It is the fill light slider, and it allows you to open up the shadows in a picture, thus revealing detail that was either very dark and muted or simply invisible because it was so underexposed.  Sometimes black shadows contribute to the graphic nature of a picture, but most of the time the ideal is to reveal as much detail as possible throughout an image.

How far can you go in lightening shadows? Don’t you increase digital noise when you do this? The answers are you can go quite far, and yes, you do increase noise. However, you can mitigate the noise so it is basically irrelevant, allowing you to do amazing things as I demonstrate with the pictures in this article.

I took the picture of the ship I was sailing on in the Falkland Islands, above, as I was on my way down to Antarctica a year ago. My group had gone ashore to photograph rockhopper penguins, and we stayed until dusk. On the way back to the ship, I thought the vessel looked beautiful in the late twilight illuminated against the dark, cobalt sky.

To say the situation was dark, though, is an understatement. I could hardly see anything except the lights on the ship and their reflection in the surface of the ocean. I was in a dinghy bobbing up and down in the waves, and this meant that I was in an impossible photographic situation — too much movement in a very dark situation. I had nothing to lose by taking some shots, however, so I went out of my comfort zone and bumped the ISO to 6400 just to see what would happen. To be honest, I had never used an ISO setting this high before because I hate digital noise, and I thought the images would be totally useless. Even with 6400 ISO, my shutter speed was only 1/5th of a second with my f/4 lens wide open. I thought there was no way this could turn out to be a sharp picture, and at the same time I was certain the noise would be so large and offensive that I’d trash the images when I got home – or sooner.

I was both right and wrong. The pictures all had horrible noise as you can see in a small portion of the image captured at 100% magnification on my monitor, above. For my own sense of aesthetics, this makes the picture unacceptable. I wouldn’t want a print of it, and I couldn’t sell it. However, I was shocked that out of the dozen images I took, this one was surprisingly sharp. This was luck, not skill, because a 1/5th of a second exposure from a bobbing dinghy is a guaranteed formula for a blurred picture. Image stabilization would be of no help at all in a situation like this. I took the shots of the ship when we crested on a wave or when we were in a trough in an attempt to shoot with minimum motion.  Still, I was really lucky to get an image that turned out to be fairly sharp.

Ok, so I had an underexposed picture of the ship with little detail, and the noise ruined the image even if I accepted the underexposure, which I didn’t.

 When I opened the image in Adobe Camera Raw, I used the fill light slider to open up the shadows (knowing the results would be terrible), and you can see in the screen capture, below, how far I moved the slider to the right.

This provided incredible detail in the ship and in the water – much more than I could see with my eyes from the dinghy — but the digital noise became even more pronounced. In another screen capture, below, you can see that the price I had to pay for the additional detail was giant noise in the shadows, and the night sky, which now has great color and exposure, is so noisy that to make a print of this would be ridiculous.  If I had a choice between showing a print of this to a client or eating worms, I’d take the worms!

Ok, here is where the plot thickens. To save this image, I opened up Nik Software’s Dfine 2.0 and I let the program loose on this shot. I used the automatic function, letting Dfine 2.0 do its magic. When it was finished, I applied it a second time, and look at the results in the below image. The picture is amazing. The noise is gone, the colors look great, and there is unexpected detail in the shadows that

were so dark one would assume there was no way to salvage those areas of the image. To reinforce my point, study the screen capture of the ‘after’ image taken at 100%, below. You see no noise.  While the picture isn’t razor sharp like it would have been with a fast shutter speed and a low ISO, it’s quite acceptable, especially under the circumstances. The fact that it’s not tack sharp has nothing to do with using the Nik Software. That was caused because of the extremely slow shutter. Having said that, it is definitely sharp enough to be reproduced in a magazine.

What a great time it is to be a photographer!

If you buy Dfine 2.0 by Nik Software or any of their products, use the discount code JZUCKERMAN and you’ll save 15%.  I consider this software essential gear.

There are two things about this picture that are good and one thing that’s

terrible.  I like the low perspective from which took the picture, and I also

like the ears flared out.  Both of these make the huge elephant seem even

more impressive.  The terrible aspect of this image is the white sky. It’s

very distracting.

To replace this sky is impossible using any of the selection tools in Photo-

shop because the fine grasses blend with the background in such a way that

they can’t be separated.  None of the other software programs like Topaz

Remask 3 or Mask Pro 4 by onOne could do justice with this scene, either.

I could make the sky a solid blue color with Nik Software’s Viveza 2, but that

wouldn’t be appropriate.  The diffused light calls for an overcast sky to make

this look believable.

There is only one solution.  I used a layer mask in Photoshop to pro-

duce the image below.  Here is the process.

1.  Choose a sky full of gray clouds.  It should be similar in resolution to

the elephant photo.

2.  Copy the clouds to the clipboard with Select > all, and then Edit > copy.

3.  Paste the clouds on top of the elephant photo with Edit > paste.

4.  Make sure the foreground and background color boxes at the bottom

of the tools palette are black/white, respectively.

5.  Make a layer mask using Layer > layer mask > reveal all (or use the

shortcut — the small icon immediately to the right of the fx icon at the

bottom of the layers palette).

6.  Choose the gradient tool.  Drag the cursor from the bottom of the

clouds to the top.  The bottom portion of the clouds disappear gradually,

as you can see, leaving the elephant and the grass exposed but covering

the sky.  You can vary the demarcation line between the clouds and the

clear bottom portion of the image by varying how long you drag the

cursor in the photo. If you drag it an inch, the line will be hard.  If you

drag it four inches, the line will be softer, more gradual.

7.  There will still be some clouds on the elephant, so now choose the

brush tool and brush them away.  If you make a mistake and brush

some of the sky away, reverse the black/white color boxes so they are

now white/black and paint the clouds back.  When you do this touch

up, work at 200% or so.

I like very few images from my early days in photography.  As one’s visual

maturity develops, our standards are raised and initial attempts at creativ-

ity seem, well, somewhat embarrassing as we look back.  One of the pictures

I have always loved, though, that I took within two years of owning a

camera is this double exposure of a candle flame done with color infra-red

film.  I used two different color filters over the lens — an orange filter that

produced the yellow flame and a blue filter that produced the magenta

color.  This was taken about 1971, and I don’t remember the camera data.

But color infra-red was one of my favorite tools for creating unusual color

relationships.

You could also cross-process color infra-red.  It was an E-4 chemical

process, and if you used C-22 chemicals (designed for color negative film),

the results were a negative image plus complementary colors … but com-

plements of the wild infra-red colors.  The image below is a shot of a reflec-

tion in water of a group of school kids leaving an auditorium after seeing a

play.  I took it with color infra-red that was processed in C-22 chemistry.

I haven’t shown either of these images for 30 years.

One of my favorite techniques I use when working in Color Efex Pro 4 by Nik Software is to apply Tonal Contrast to an image. This is one of the many filters that make up the suite of filters in this program, and I use it all the time to enhance my work. It gives images a powerful and dynamic look that makes the photo seem like it can jump right out of the computer monitor.

In the right-hand side of the dialog box (pictured below) you have several sliders that are simple to use and quite intuitive. You see the results immediately in the generous preview window (not shown) so you can decide how much or how little effect to apply.

You can see in the before and after shots of the Blue Mosque I photographed from my hotel room in Istanbul that the original picture (below) is good but the tweaked version (above) is outstanding. This one filter alone is worth the price of Color Efex Pro 4 because it’s a powerful tool and it can make your photography more than you could ever have imagined.

I like using the Nik filters so much that I wrote an ebook titled Creative Techniques with Nik Software. I demonstrate my favorite filters and ways of applying them that are very creative and that will produce endless numbers of incredible pictures with photographs that you’ve already taken. Here is a link to the ebook if this might interest you.

One of my favorite techniques I use when working in Color Efex Pro 4 by Nik Software is to apply Tonal Contrast to an image. This is one of the many filters that make up the suite of filters in this program, and I use it all the time to enhance my work. It gives images a powerful and dynamic look that makes the photo seem like it can jump right out of the computer monitor. Within the dialog box (pictured below) you have several sliders that are simple to use and quite intuitive. You see the results immediately in the generous preview window so you can decide how much or how little effect to apply. You can see in the before and after shots of the Blue Mosque I photographed from my hotel room in Istanbul that the original picture is good but the tweaked version is outstanding. This one filter alone is worth the price of Color Efex Pro 4 because it’s a powerful tool and it can make your photography more than you could ever have imagined.

I like using the Nik filters so much that I wrote an ebook titled Creative Techniques with Nik Software. I demonstrate my favorite filters and ways of applying them that are very creative and that will produce endless numbers of incredible pictures with photographs you’ve already taken. Here is a link to the ebook if this might interest you. Scroll down — it’s the second ebook listed.

http://www.jimzuckerman.com/ebooks.php

I’m very impressed with my first look at the free upgrade, Topaz 5. There are new
presets, many new features, and you can now apply more than one effect before you
hit OK. If you haven’t tried Topaz Adjust until now, I highly recommend it.
If you haven’t upgraded to Adjust 5 yet, it’s free and it’s well worth it.

http://www.topazlabs.com/downloads/index.php

The above photo was done with the preset ‘faded glory’.

At my frog and reptile workshops, I tell participants Photoshop is necessary
to clone out the reflection of the flash in the eyes of the animals. We most-
ly use a ring flash to provide the soft, diffused lighting that envelopes the
small subjects beautifully, but this leaves an unattractive reflection in the
eyes. In an animal like the red eye tree frog, this is obvious and very dis-
tracting. Using the clone tool, it took me about 10 seconds to clone out the
reflection in both eyes.

If you aren’t adept at using Photoshop or Elements, in my opinion you are doing
photography with one hand tied behind your back.

When I visit a place more than once, as I do when I lead photo tours, I try to come up with different ways of photographing subjects that I shot previously.  A case in point is the stone carving at the archeological site, Ephesus, in Turkey.  I photographed it in the shade two years ago, so this time I used off-camera flash.  This created texture and depth, and at the same time the rocks, dirt, and weeds that could be seen behind the ancient artwork became black and therefore unobtrusive.
I triggered the flash with a Pocket Wizard and had another person hold it at about an 80 degree angle.  I wanted to largely eliminate the effect of the ambient light, so I used the LCD monitor on the back of the camera to help me determine the exposure.  I increased the shutter speed and reduced the size of the lens aperture until the ambient light was only contributing a small amount and the primary light source was the Canon 580 flash.

Don’t think that professional photographers know exactly what settings to use in a situation like this.  We don’t.  Since we can’t know exactly what we will like until we see it, we simply use trial and error until it looks good.

Photoshop can solve problems that would have been impossible just a few years ago when we all shot film. A case in point is the picture of the beautiful mosaic I took a couple of days ago in the ancient site of Ephesus in Turkey. There is a group of houses that have stunning mosaics that date from the first century A.D., and the modern walkway that tourists use to observe the artwork isn’t positioned to be photographically friendly. Instead of being able to look straight down on the mosaic, which would be ideal, the people in my photo tour and I had to stand on stairs about 15 feet to the side. As a result, the back of the camera (i.e. the plane of the sensor) was oblique to the mosaic on the floor. This caused the rectangular shape of the design to appear skewed, and it looks like a trapezoid complete with a diminishing perspective, as you can see in the original image, below.

The photo at the top of this blog shows the changes I made to make this look as it should. The yellowish color comes from a huge translucent roof put in place to protect the ancient houses from the elements, and the oblique angle from which I had to shoot created an unattractive distortion of the mosaic.

Here are the steps I took in Photoshop to correct these problems.

1. In Adobe Camera Raw, I moved the ‘temperature’ slider toward the blue to mitigate the yellow cast. This totally corrected the color.

2. I opened Image > adjustments > levels and increased the contrast.

3. I opened Image > adjustments > hue/saturation and added saturation to the color.

4. To correct the shape of the rectangle, I used Select > all and then opened Edit > transform > distort. This placed a box around the photograph with handles, and I dragged the corners of the image to distort the trapezoid into the rectangle it should be.

The picture now looks as if we are looking straight down on the floor mosaic from a ladder.

Finally, I used Image > image rotation > 180° to turn the image upside down so it appears right-side up.