Hills Alive

I hope to be posting an article on my visit to Saint Peter Presbyterian Church in Bristol and Mendota, Virginia.  However, while waiting for opportunities to get to know the brethren here, I’ve decided to get caught up on posting some things, some of which may answer questions that were asked which I haven’t had the time or opportunity to address.

Some of you know how much photography meant to me in my youth. My son Benjamin has inherited this interest, and I’ve been blessed to have something in common that we can talk about. He owns more cameras than I do, and is interested in wet photography as well as digital. We’ve had some good long talks about things lately.

I’ve just now begun to get into digital photography. In the past all of my experience was with film. I’ve developed an interest in PhotoShop, and Ben has access to the biggest and best package: CS3. I only have PhotoShop Elements, but at present it does more than I’ve had time to explore. Recently I started asking Ben questions about what I can do with PhotoShop, and he waxed eloquent for a long time using terms I’m not familiar with, yet.

After he visited my site recently I asked him which photos he liked the best so far. His favorite: the picture of my mother and father sitting together in the hospital and watching the fireworks in Sixty Years with Love, Strokes and Fireworks:

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I think he was touched by the idea that they were holding hands and enjoying the show together. I was surprised that this photograph would catch his attention, as I didn’t think much of this difficult shot. The light level was very low, and the exposure was 30 seconds. In hindsight, I should have used f16 or f11 instead of f22 (if any of you have software to read the metadata, I’ve been careful to preserve it in the JPGs that I upload to the site). I guess I was trying to get more depth of field, and didn’t fully realize that Mom and Dad would not sit still for 30 seconds. If I’d used f11 I would have had enough depth of field, yet a shorter exposure of less than 10 seconds. This would have produced a better result.

He also mentioned that he liked the sunset picture in the same post, and thought it had possibilities that were not fully realized in the untouched version I posted. He agreed to take the original RAW file and do some of his PhotoShop magic on it. So while at a rest stop in Northwest Missouri I emailed the 11MB file to him. He worked it over and sent back a similar sized PSD which arrived in my inbox soon after I reached Bristol.

Here is the one I posted in Sixty Years with Love, Strokes and Fireworks:

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And here is the one produced by Ben:

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I’d also like to share what he wrote about what he did to produce this much more pleasing and presentable result:

Hey Dad,

Here is a version of that .nef that I quickly worked on. I just dropped the resolution enough so that I could send it over Gmail, it should be a good enough file for you to examine pretty closely.

Basically my process was as follows:

Open the original raw file twice, roughly emphasizing the sky in one, and emphasizing the hills in another.

Create a mask which divides the two regions; in a case like this, the process is relatively easy, but it is still a detailed piece of work. Basically it goes like this: Magnetic Lasso the dividing line between hills and sky. Then convert the selection to a layer mask. Then use a combination of gaussian blur (to broaden and soften the edge transition) and Image>Adjust>Threshold to exactly place the transition line where it works the best. Then finish with a smaller amount of guassian blur (to make the transition feel more natural) and a low-opacity paintbrush on the mask to fix any problem areas.

Then we have both of the areas divided and ready to be manipulated individually. At this point I created a high-contrast curve in order to emphasize the light trails that you spoke about. Basically this entails using the Curves dialog’s eyedropper to locate the data which encompasses these light trails, then placing a high contrast curve on those areas without tweaking the other areas too much.

Then you’ll be able to adjust the blackpoint of the hills layer to get the most separation and contrast with the least amount of grain and noise visible.

Then voila! You have something that is (in my opinion) a lot more finished in feel.

Keep in mind that a lot more time and attention to detail would result in a higher quality result; but hopefully this shows you what you can do with all the advanced tools in photoshop CS3.

Lord willing I’d like to get to know PhotoShop more and try to do what Ben did, and more.

Written in Bristol, Virginia