It has been a LONG time, but I finally decided to re-work the website so that it better reflects what I am doing these days. Gone are the static pages and the junk that I had written up. Now I have a WordPress site that is much easier to maintain and adds a great deal of flexibility.
Author: Matthew G. Schmidt
I had the pleasure of getting invited to judge and speak at Charlottesville Camera Club on September 13, 2012. Charlottesville is a bit of a drive from Northern Virginia, but I have been assured that it is worth the commute.
CCC has a competition and presentation on the same night, so I get to judge the themed competition “A SLICE OF SOMETHING” and I am also going to present a program titled “Montages, Interpreting Reality” in which I demonstrate some of the montage Photoshop Actions that I have developed and show how to change documentary photographs into something with a little more depth and feeling.
This Lightroom Export preset will export images at the best resolution for a 1400 x 1050 projector. It applies “Screen” sharpening to the image as it exports.
Use NVPS Competition Preset
We have saved a Lightroom Export preset that automatically configures settings for NVPS competitions. This should simplify the process of defining all of the correct export settings. You can download this preset at NVPS Competition.lrtemplate.
Installing the LR Export Preset
After downloading the NVPS Competition.lrtemplate file, copy the file to the following directory based on your operating system
- Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Presets\User Presets
- Windows Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Presets\User Presets
- Mac OS X: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Export Presets/User Presets
Applying the LR Export Preset
Select the image(s) to be resized, then select File, and Export. When the Export dialog opens, select NVPS Competition under User Presets in the Preset section of the Export dialog. This will automatically apply the appropriate competition settings.Press the Export button and a Windows Explorer window (or Finder window on the Mac) should open with the resized images in it.
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Painting with Light and Shadow
Gordon Campey referred me to an article by Mark Johnson that is in the Member’s area of the NAPP website that deals with painting light and shadow onto an image to give it more depth. When combined with the Orton Effect, it can make that technique even more interesting.
With some input from Gordon I created a Painting with Light and Shadow action set. I’ve got two actions in the set, one that simply creates a layer to lighten and layer to darken the images. Select the layer mask of the appropriate layer and paint with White on that mask to lighten or darken an area of the image.
Not the greatest example, but I had this shot of a fender from a tricycle:
To add some depth and contrast into this image, I applied the Paint with Light action, and painted Light onto the yellow areas and Shadow onto the blue, red and black areas.
You can see how much darker and more saturated the reds and blues are, and the yellow becomes more yellow and less orange.
The Paint with Light action simply creates a layer with a Screen blend mode (makes things lighter) and a Multiply mode (makes things darker). The layer masks are filled with black, so they do not apply any affect to the image. By selecting the layer mask and painting with a soft brush with White, it will reveal some of the lighter color underneath. I’ve seen a number of people use brushes with differing opacities, but I personally like a very low opacity, in the range of 20 – 30%.
I normally paint in Light first, then follow that up with Shadow, but a different approach may work for you.
I thought that I would show this one again, using this alternative to the Orton Effect technique from my earlier post.
To this one:
This action creates a blur layer, then adds a single Levels layer that will probably require adjustment in terms of both the White point and the mid-point sliders to achieve the desired neutral effect. It creates the same Paint with Light and Paint with Shadow layers as the above action, and the same adjustments should be applied here.
In this image I needed to lighten the trees in the background, and darken the barn and the foreground bushes and flowers.
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Post Processing Adjustments
After running the Overlay and Orton Effect actions that I have created, there are still a number of adjustments that need to be made before the images are complete.
When I created the actions, I inserted some Levels layers that brighten each layer about 1 f/Stop. This is a simple estimate and may not work well at all for a given image.
Take this image, which is pretty bright
I wanted to add some texture, so I added this cracked paint to give it a more worn feel:
When I ran the Overlay action, it created a composite that looks like this:
This adds the feel, but the color saturation is off and the strength of the texture is really more harsh than I wanted. The action set the following levels:
Overall Levels
Texture Levels
Background Levels
So starting at the Background Levels, I started making adjustments. Because I wanted more saturated color, I wanted to darken the Background Layer. Moving the mid-point slider (grey triangle) to the right (lower numbers) will darken the image.
Adjusting the Background Levels layer to a mid-point of 1.16 gives me slightly richer colors.
Next I make an adjustment to the Texture Levels to lighten the mid-point so that it will soften the texture a little.
Moving the mid-point slider up to 1.89 lightens the texture and makes the effect just a little bit softer than the default. The image is getting closer to where I want it, but it is just a little bit lighter than I wanted.
Then slightly darkening the Overall Levels by moving the mid-point slider down to 0.94 and resetting the white-point slider to 229 finalizes the image for me.
The changes that I made in this image are pretty minor, but the end result is significantly better in my opinion. The point is that some adjustment is not only desirable, but necessary. The actions do not necessarily produce a finished image, but they significantly reduce the amount of work that you have to do with each image.
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Where Do You Go For Inspiration?
When you are feeling unmotivated about photography, where do you go for inspiration?
More and more I have been reading books from some of the more abstract photographers. Just last week I read Michael Orton’s Photographing Creative Landscapes, and it brought me a whole new list of ideas of things to try.
I have been so inspired by the book, I went out first thing Saturday morning and shot a series of images that I had not imagined taking before reading the book. I shot a series of images that Michael Orton terms “washes.” Like many people I am familiar with washes in painting. My wife uses them to create texture when she paints miniatures (very small models). The washes accentuate the texture of the models by collecting in the low areas, giving an appearance of a shadow.
But I had never heard of the concept of using color washes to create more beautiful, vividly colored images using photographs.
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Orton Effect Action
I’ve been impressed with some of the Orton Effect montages that I’ve seen over the years. I have seen many methods on the web for producing the effect in Photoshop, but was happiest with the method that André Gallant taught me when I was attending his workshop.
I was later introduced to another Canadian photographer, Gordon Campey, by a fellow student at the Freeman Patterson and Andre Gallant workshop. Gordon introduced me to an NAPP article that added a unique, but critical in my opinion, step to the creation of the Orton Effect. That step was an increase in the size of the blurred layer of 1% – 2%. It helps to give that larger “glow” in the overlay that so often occurs when creating this technique with slide film. I have incorporated that transformation of the blurred layer into this action.
The Orton Effect allows you to take a relatively bland image like this:
Into something like this:
There are two separate actions in the Action Set to account for Smart Objects. In the default action I used a Smart Object so that you can adjust the Gaussian Blur that is applied to blurred image after the action is complete. To account for Photoshop prior to CS3, I included a version that does not use the Smart Object, but it requires you to set the Gaussian Blur appropriately when you run the action.
After you run the action, you may need to set the White Point on the Levels 1 copy layer as it has a tendency to be pretty dark. That is the only adjustment that I made to the above image.
I have to give credit to Michael Orton for creating this technique. Although I have not read it yet, I recently purchased his book “Photographing Creative Landscapes, Simple Tools for Artistic Images and Enhanced Creativity”. I look forward to reading it.
Multiple exposures are something that are relatively easy to do with many Nikon cameras, but are not available at all with Canon. I am a Canon shooter (too much money in Canon glass to change now) and I was intrigued by the multiple exposures that I had seen Freeman Patterson produce, like “Rudbeckia Swirl” and “Maple Spiral”.
While I am no where near that proficient at creating the spiraled multiple exposure images, I have made a number of attempts, and developed a series of actions to build multiple exposure images from 9, 10 and 16 images.
To create them you start with a series of images with a zoom and rotation (you can work with different camera movements to create other effects that are also pleasing) with the rotation working around a point of interest.
When you stack these images you create an image that looks more like this:
Definitely quite a departure from the original series, and it creates an impressionistic interpretation that I find very appealing when done well.
You will find 2 separate series of actions. The first stacks the individual images as layers and then uses a formula of 1/# of layers to set the opacity of each additional layer. I find that this Opacity method produces somewhat flat colors at times, so I will frequently use a Lab color adjustment layer that I adapted from Dan Margulis’ technique. This generally produces WAY too much color and requires a reduced opacity and frequently a layer mask to shield some of the color. I’ve include a Lab Color Boost action in this Action Set.
The alternative method uses a blend mode of Multiply and brings up a Curves layer that is a rough estimate at a one stop lightening of the image. Individual images generally require an overexposure of the square root of the number of images, so with a 9 and 10 image stack the action creates 3 of these Curve layers (one stop each) on top of each image, and in the case of a 16 image stack the action creates 4 of these layers.
Either series of actions can be used on fewer images, but it will attempt to close the background image when it runs out of images to process, so if you get a dialog with an option “Don’t Save,” press the “Cancel” button and the “Stop” button when it appears. If you are using the Multiply methods, you may need to delete some of the layers that lighten each layer.
As always, please provide some feedback or suggestions so that I can improve the actions.
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Mirror Montage Action
Like so many people, I tend to be deadline driven, and these first few posts are definitely that way. On Tuesday this week I am scheduled to give a presentation on Montages at my camera club, NVPS. In preparation for that presentation, I’d like to have a number of my actions posted so that people will be able to download them following the presentation. So that is why the double post on Sunday.
I had never even heard of a Mirror Montage until a couple of years ago when one of our members did an entire portfolio of Mirror Montages. I believe that all of them were glass and steel buildings, so lots of mirrored glass and strong lines running out of the frame. If you’ve never seen (or noticed a Mirror Montage) before, you essentially create bookends by duplicating an image and flipping it over, then butting the two halves together.
I took this image of a building with the highlighted tree:
And created a Mirror Montage with it to get this:
Many might argue about the rotation of the final image, but I liked the broader base holding the decreasing width building better than having the dark colors at the bottom and moving to the lighter colors. Flipping it also has the benefit of creating a strong “peak” with the converging lines of the building. Oh well, you just can’t win them all!
The action set has 4 actions in it, depending on whether you want to mirror on the Top, Left, Right or Bottom of the existing image. How you rotate the image after that is really up to you.
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Overlay Montage Action
Another action that I have been working on a for a while is an Overlay montage action. I love a well done overlay, but I have difficulty myself determining which pairs of images will really compliment each other. Over the last year I have found myself very attracted to shots of pure texture, and I’ve been working at merging those with appropriate images to produce nice overlays. I’ve developed an action that creates the overlays by prompting you to open a second image, and then overlaying the two images.
Here is an original image, just some nice Babies Breath in front of a Rose:
Here is the texture image, a close up of a canon from the Yorktown Battlefield:
Here is the resulting overlay montage:
To run this action you do the following:
- Open the subject image.
- Run the action.
- You will be prompted to open the overlay image.
- Press Continue and an Open dialog will be displayed.
- Select the texture image and press Open.
- Use the Levels layers to adjust the relative brightness of each of the images, and the overall brightness of the image.
There is a “Stop” function at the end that displays a dialog with my website and blog address. You can disable this by opening the action clicking on the check mark next to the Stop step.
For that matter, you can turn off the Stop function between images too if it is slowing you down.
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