Post Processing

Why and how I print my images

I like looking at my photos. There is really nothing like having a big print of your finest work in your hands. Before we get to printing, I also have my photos up on all of my devices. Each of them have backgrounds and screen savers rotating my best photos from the last year. I've done this for a few years now, so I'm at the point of being able to choose if I keep looking at the pictures or not. Regardless, they remind me of photography all the time, and make me feel proud of my own work. 

For the prints, I mostly do two different things. At the start of each year, I take my 50 to 80 best images and create a photo book. I've done this for 5 years now, and the newest is the biggest yet. I started with books from the most popular camera shop in Finland, Rajala. The book was a 28x28cm 'quality paper' one. When I got the book, I noticed the print issues almost immediately.

28x28cm with blue cloth covers, 30x30cm with black, and an A3 with print cover.

This banding is present on almost all pages. The detail is very nice, though.

Now comes the stupid bit. I didn't return the book. And what's worse, I bought the same model the next year. Yeah. Proper Finnish behavior there, being too bothered about complaining. The year after that I decided to change company, and went with the popular European choice Cewe, which is sold in Finland through Gigantti Kuvapalvelut. I chose the same format book in approximately the same size, to make the books similar to the years previous.

No banding issues with this one, or the one next year. The print quality, other than that, is pretty much identical. So, great.

The reason I chose a square format is that a lot of my photos are in portrait orientation, even among the landscapes. With a square format both are printed the same size, without you having to turn the book while you browse through it.

So, after 4 years I had a nice set of books that looked similar to each other, and I was happy with the print quality of the last two (that's fine since my photos have gotten a lot better over time :) ). Then, this year, I was starting to create the yearly book, when I noticed something; Cewe had discontinued the square book with cloth cover. So, I had a choice to make. 

Trying to find the same format of book from another service (ifolor), I noticed that I liked their editor program better than the one from Cewe. Also, I could choose a bigger size book, and get it for cheaper! The only compromise was that I couldn't get the cloth cover on that one either. In the end, I just said 'F it', and ordered the new bigger format. And boy, am I glad I did.

Closeup from one of the pages, this is an area of approximately 2x3 cm.

The height of the books are the same, but the new width is amazing. The A3 page also works incredibly well with the standard 2:3 image ratio of my camera, almost filling the full page. And as you can see, panoramas fill an entire fold-flat open. Portraits are obviously smaller, but I can fit two on a page with the same print size in my old books, so it's fine. As a bonus, the print quality is absolutely amazing. The only issue i have is that the pages are plastic, where I'd like paper. I could have missed a setting somewhere for that, I'll have to try harder next year.

So, what if A3 is just too small? What if you want something on your wall? Then you get out the big guns that do big prints. I've thought about buying a big image printer, but I can't really justify it for the number of images I print. Also, I've found a nice, affordable non-paper alternative.

That right there is a 40x60cm aluminium print from iFolor. I have a few of those, and let me tell you, they are ridiculous. There is really nothing like it to look at one of your high-resolution landscapes printed that big and hung on a wall. I'd love nothing more than filling up my entire flat with these. Long-term, that might just happen, but for now I only have them on two walls. First, I have a set in my kitchen of the few food-related pics I've taken. The wine image was the first I took, the two others were specifically set up and taken for the purpose of going on the wall.

Crayfish, Spaghetti Bolognese, and last but not least, a lovely french red.

The second set is in my home office, where I've filled a whole wall. There's a few very old paper prints taped up in the corner too, from before I realized I couldn't get cheap frames for that size paper prints locally.

A big pile of inspiration.

The head is 6 cm in diameter, with very nice detail.

The prints are 3mm thick, quite light, and have built-in wall hanging hooks. Just put two screws in a wall, and hang. Couldn't be simpler.

For the future, I have a few plans. I'm going to continue with the yearly books. They are great for summing up your photographic year for yourself, to look at your skill progress from year to year, and if you're inclined to show your images to visitors, they work for that too. For prints, I'm toying with a few ideas. The 40x60 isn't the biggest size these prints come in. I also have a good spot in my flat for a bigger one, a 90x60 vertical. The plan is to get a photo from Lofoten in March to put there.

The second plan is for my living room. I'd find a 1:2 panoramic image and print that on three 60x40 verticals, hanging them side-by-side. I could supplement that with 3-4 other landscapes on a nearby wall. Lots of plans, but I'm in no hurry. Let's see what I find in Norway first :)

Finally, a few words about the technical side of prints. It is slightly different than posting your pictures online, mostly because you don't have a preview and can't re-do the print once it's done. When I order prints, I always double-check the post-processing of the image and I export using different settings (sharpening is set to high, print). I double-check for sensor dust spots, and make sure the exposure is what I want using the histogram. I also fine-tune the colors since it's usually been months since I did the first edit. My main monitor is color-calibrated and I use 5000K light bulbs in my office, so the color on the screen is the same it will be on the print.

As far as resolution goes, all of my wall prints are uncropped 24 megapixel images. I have some cropped images in my books, mostly the bird images. If we do the math, you don't actually need a lot of megapixels for a big image. At a very decent 150 pixels per inch, you need 8,3 megapixels to print 40x60cm. With 24MP, it will give you more than 60x90cm. More important than the number of MP is the quality of the pixels, though. A smartphone might give you 16 MP, but a 16 MP DSLR image will typically give you a lot better quality. I also use the lowest ISO I can, use a tripod, and make sure my horizon is straight when taking the image so I don't have to lose pixels in post. The last part is to have good-quality lenses and the biggest sensor you can afford, but I'm still working on that part. For the record, I use a crop sensor with consumer-level lenses for all my images, and I bet you can't tell that from the images on this blog ;)

That's it for now, I have a lot of things to plan for my next trip. Expect a similar report from that one as my previous trips. With good luck I might get out for some local birding inside a few weeks as well to tide me over.

Using HDR in Lightroom to increase Dynamic Range of your camera

Before we get started, just a few words about High Dynamic Range (HDR) editing. There are a lot of different ways to apply HDR processing to an image. All of them have their pros and cons. The way I use HDR in this post is the most basic use, and I'm sure that the more advanced of you think it isn't the right way to do it. But for you who don't know what HDR is, and why it's useful, I hope you'll find the following a useful stepping stone into expanding your toolbox. You can use this technique with any camera (even the one in your phone!), and it is especially useful on older and/or smaller cameras that don't have a very good Dynamic Range to begin with.

So, what is HDR and why should you care? Simply put, your camera is not as good as your eye at recording big ranges of light versus dark. If you stand in your back yard in the summer, you will note that your eye can see the blue in the sky, as well as the dark under the trees. Similarly, during e.g. sunset, your eyes and brain have no difficulty in seeing the last rays of the sun in the sky, as well as the dark ground in front of you.

For the camera, this poses a problem. Even though camera sensors have come a long way in recent years, they still can't compete with your own eyes when it comes to dynamic range (the range of brightness from black to white). Modern cameras can detect up to 15 stops of dynamic range at most, while your eyes are in the range of 20 or so (combined with your brain that range increases by a significant amount). If you are not familiar with the term 'stop', you might want to google that first, as it is a very fundamental measurement in how cameras tell you how bright something is. For now, I'll just tell you that each stop is a doubling of the amount of light. So, increasing the stop by one doubles the brightness, increasing it with two doubles the brightness twice, etc. A difference of 10 stops is actually a brightness difference 1024 times to the original. 

So, cameras can capture highlights that are around 4-8000 times brighter than the shadows, in theory at least. In practice, this range is smaller; the shadow range of that number comes with a lot of visible noise that you typically wouldn't want in your image. Of course, it doesn't matter what the numbers actually are, we are interested in the result. So, let's take a look.

The image above is a scene from the Finnish archipelago, during a nice sunset. It is processed to convey the feeling of serenity; but it is also processed to maximize dynamic range. When I took the image, I realized that the dynamic range of my camera wasn't going to cut it. The sky was much too bright, and the ground was much too dark in comparison. It's not what my eyes saw, but unfortunately my eyes don't take the picture. Here is the raw output of my camera with no processing:

The camera chose to expose more of the ground in this particular instance. As you can see, the ground is visible but still dark, and the sky is almost white. There is another problem as well; the sky doesn't only look white, it is white. Going to the 'Develop' Module in Lightroom and clicking on the highlight warning triangle in the histogram confirms this:

The area marked with red is pure white; that are was simply too bright for the camera to capture. The data in that area is gone; no colors, no contrast, no anything; it is just white. Because of this, reducing the whites or highlights doesn't work. The area isn't white anymore, but is still just a blob of the same color.

That does not look right. The sun and clouds around it are a solid block of color, no detail what so ever.

Typically, you can fix this by deliberately under-exposing your image by a stop or two. You can do this either in Manual mode or with Exposure Compensation, it doesn't matter; the point is you tell the camera to make the image darker on purpose, so that the camera has a chance to capture more of the highlights. So, let's try that:

Raw image, under-exposed by 1 stop (half as bright as the original). The sun is still over-exposed, but it is a lot better. The ground, though..

Now we have another issue; the ground is way too dark. Depending on your camera, it might not be a problem. Many modern cameras (Nikons especially) have amazing shadow recovery that let you get the detail back when processing a RAW file. But many cameras don't, and in this image, my trusty Nikon doesn't fare too well either. Let's try increasing the shadows and taking a detailed look at what it does.

Shadows at +100, nothing else. Too good to be true?

3:1 magnification of a shadow area. See all the noise? That pixelated mess is very typical when you raise deep shadows on most cameras.

So, we got the detail back, at least when looking at the image from a distance. But we paid heavily. When we increase the shadows, we are asking Lightroom to amplify the brightness in an area where our camera was struggling to get enough light. As a result, we see very clear noise in our image. Not good if we wan't to publish a high-resolution image online, or hang a print on our wall.

So, finally we arrive at what HDR actually is. To fix the problems we are having, we need more dynamic range. We need more information in the highlights and the shadows. Using HDR, we accomplish this by taking multiple images and combining them to a single, data-packed image. We take images that are darker so that we get a nice sky with all the detail preserved, and we take images that are too bright, to get more data for the shadows, reducing noise in those areas. Then we feed all of them into the Lightroom HDR tool and let it combine them. 

You can take as many photos as you like, but typically you would use 3 or 5 shots. The middle one is 'correctly' exposed, or at least what your camera thinks is correct. This will be your average. The other ones are spaced out both ways, with a difference of for example 1 stop. So with three images would have values of -1, 0 and +1 stop, and five would have -2, -1, 0, +1, +2. I took three with a difference of 2 stops (-2, 0, +2) because of the big range I was dealing with; the more images you take the better the end result will be, but the longer it takes to process. It helps to use a tripod when taking the images, but it isn't strictly necessary. Just remember that your bright shots might be 2 stops over-exposed, lowering your shutter speed by a factor of 4. In the series below the bright shot is at 1/6th of a second, making it tricky to hand-hold. I just used a tripod so that I din't need to worry about it. I'm lazy that way ;)

-2 stops, 'correct', +2 stops. The left one has a nice sky, the right one has no noise in the shadows, and the middle one is a good average.

Select the three images in Lightroom (e.g. using the ctrl key), right click, and choose 'Photo Merge' > 'HDR'. Lightroom will build a preview and show you some options.

Let's go through the options real quick.

  • Auto align: Always tick this, even when using a tripod. It makes sure the images are aligned, pixel-by-pixel.
  • Auto Tone: Leave this off, we want to process our image ourselves. Leaving it on is OK though, as you can reset those changes later if you don't like them.
  • Deghost amount: If your image contains moving subjects (people, vehicles, moving branches, etc.), chances are that those objects have moved between shots. This setting lets Lightroom detect that movement, and remove it. I typically use 'Low' or 'Medium', but with this particular image Lightroom was misbehaving and only let me choose 'None'. 

When ready, select 'Merge'. Lightroom will start the merging process. Note that the original images will not be touched; instead, a new file will be created. Lightroom can even merge RAW files, that external applications typically can't, and produces a HDR RAW file which is very convenient. Here is the new file, opened in the Develop module:

Doesn't look like much, does it? There are changes, if you look closely; the sky is a little bit darker, and the ground is a little bit lighter. The beauty, though, is in the data. Even though Lightroom doesn't tell you, it has a lot more range to play with now. Let's start opening up the shadows and checking the noise:

The noise is completely gone. Good riddance.

You'll see the same effect when processing the highlights; the detail is now back. From this point, you can edit the image as normal. I dropped the total exposure, added contrast, clarity and vibrance, and cropped some of the top and bottom (they weren't that interesting, and now the image is 16:9, fitting nicely into e.g. a Full HD screen).

Note how I cropped the leaves in the corner; you don't want distractions in the corners. The horizon is also close to a 3rd-line.

The I added some more vibrance to the overall image (from 15 to 30), and created a graduated filter to darken the sky a tiny bit, also adding a hint of saturation. The last thing was removing all the dust spots I had on my sensor/lens; go to 'Spot Removal' and turn on 'Visualize spots' and play with the slider until you clearly see the spots. Then just click each of them.

3 spots down, one to go (top right of the image).

And there you have it. I hope this tutorial helps you when you stumble on a great scene, but your camera doesn't want to play. Using the HDR function in Lightroom is really easy, as long as you remember to take the additional pictures. With it, you don't need the latest and greatest camera to produce amazing, high-range photos.

Next up, creating Panoramas in Lightroom, see you then :)

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Creating a dramatic Black-And-White Landscape image

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I've shown you a lot of landscapes so far on this blog, but I haven't shown you how they end up here. Some images are simple, requiring minimal editing to produce nice results; some take hours. In this post, I'll show you how I edited one of the images I took in Norway, all the way from raw capture to final result.

I use Lightroom CC for my editing, but you can do all of this in Lightroom 5 or 6, or even pure Photoshop (as long as you have the Adobe Camera RAW plugin installed). Since I shoot all my landscapes excplicitely with post-processing in mind, I always shoot in 14-bit RAW format. JPEG simply doesn't allow me to do even half of the edits I usually do. I always take care to expose for the highlights when I take a photo. That means making sure that no areas of the photo are blown out (the sun being an exception). If you want to take landscape photos, and don't have the highlight warning blinkies turned on, shame on you! :)

Without further ado, here is the final image:

And here is the RAW file exported to JPEG with no processing whatsoever:

Note that the ground is a little bit dark; this is normal when exposing for the highlights when it's cloudy. Don't worry. As they say, we'll fix it in post ;)

OK, let's get started. The very first thing I do, is go to the 'Develop tab' in Lightroom, and go down to 'Lens Corrections'. Here, I check 'Enable Profile Corrections' and 'Remove Chromatic Aberration'. The first setting makes Lightroom correct for any deficiencies in my lens (in this case it was the Nikon 10-24 DX), mainly vignetting and barrel distortion. The second removes unwanted colors around high-contrast edges, which is also a defect of most lenses.

Corrections applied. Not a big difference on the final image, but especially chromatic aberrations show really well in prints if you don't remove them.

There is quite a big difference between the light and dark parts of the image; especially the mountain on the right is too dark. In real life the mountain was very dark, but it doesn't translate that well to the image. In my opinion, it's OK to modify your images. I'm still going to keep it natural, just not the way it actually looked ;)

To lessen the dynamic range (the difference between light and dark) I'm going to use a trick I learned from Sergio Ramelli of YouTube fame. He is very fond of the method, but I think it doesn't always work; in this case, it does. First, go to the 'Basic' tab. Take the 'Highlights' slider, and drag it all the way to the left. This makes light areas darker. Then, take the 'Shadows' slider, and drag it all the way to the right. This lightens up dark areas. The end result looks like this:

What we did was squish all tones towards the middle, making the picture look a bit washed out. Next, we'll fix the blandness using the 'Whites' and 'Blacks' sliders. You can drag these by just looking at the image and seeing the changes, but there is a better way; using the Alt key on your keyboard. Press down the Alt key and grab the 'Whites' slider. You'll notice the image goes black; don't worry. Move the slider towards the right, until small specks of white appear in the image area. Let go of the slider and the Alt key, and you'll see your picture again.

Tiny hint of blue where the clouds are, this is good.

Now, do the same with the 'Blacks' slider, but drag it to the left. The image will be white; stop when you get some black areas, and release.

You can go a bit farther with the black than the whites. As you can see, the lake is the darkest part in this image.

What we did was change the white and black point of your image; the lightest part, and the darkest part. When using the Alt key, Lightroom shows you the areas that are pure white and black, respectively. You always want a little bit pure white and pure black in the images, this helps with perceived contrast. Let's take a look at our image after the adjustment.

Much better than the last, right? It is basically the same as the first image, but we've added contrast. Now, you could do this with the 'Contrast' slider, but I find the results aren't nearly as good. Still with me? Good, then lets do the last bit of global adjustments before we pause and take stock. I do this by adding a touch of 'Clarity', 'Vibrance' and 'Contrast'. How much depends completely on the picture. I usually just eyeball it until it looks good, then take away about 10-20%. Your eyes deceive you into thinking you haven't gone too far, but trust me, you will. If you can pause at this point and come back the next day, do it. It will help you dial back on the heavy processing you are doing right now. I typically try to do two passes, where the second is during another day. Very often I realize my settings are too strong. For now, you can see my eyeballed settings for the three down below, with the end result.

The difference is again quite small. Editing is often about adding small changes, letting the sum of the changes have a big impact. 

So, at this point we have a nice image, that could be printed and hang on the wall. But when I edited this, I had a couple of thoughts. One, I really liked the road form going down toward the lake and round it. Two, the scene is dramatic, but could be made more so. Three, There is not a lot of color information in the image. Granted, the colors are true to life, but I ended up trying something I usually do when there isn't that much color; I go black and white.

B&W is great for showing form and light; by not having colors in the image, the brain has less distractions to worry about. However, it also means you have to pay much more attention to the light and dark areas (contrast) of you picture, as well as the relationship between lines and forms.

You can go back and forth between color and b&w by clicking the captions. By default, Lightroom chooses the shown mix for black and white conversions; it looks more natural than a flat curve. You can of course change the mix if you prefer.

You can go back and forth between color and b&w by clicking the captions. By default, Lightroom chooses the shown mix for black and white conversions; it looks more natural than a flat curve. You can of course change the mix if you prefer.

OK, I can work with this. First thing I did was pump up 'Contrast' and 'Clarity'¨. These sliders work extremely well in black and white, so you have more leeway in using them without the image looking unnatural. Increasing the values for both give us much more contrast, which translates to mood:

The next thing I wanted to fix was the road. I love the form, but I can't really see it. The rocks are a bit too distracting, and the road itself has the same tone as the rocks so it doesn't separate from the clutter. There are a couple of ways to solve this, but I chose a simple method. To reduce the clutter of the rocks, lower contrast and clarity on them. To bring out the road, increase contrast between the road and the rocks by making the road darker and the rocks brighter.

Time for the brush tool, then. For those of you not familiar with brushes, don't worry. Basically what I'm doing is localized changes that you can edit after the fact. If you mess up, you can undo anything. I'll start by selecting the brush tool and making sure the settings for the brush itself is OK. The effects do not matter at all at this point; I can change them in any way I like afterward. With brushes, you want to have a light touch, so I chose values around 75 for 'Flow' and 'Density'. For the size, I adjust it continually with my mouse wheel while I'm painting; big areas get a big brush, while small areas need a smaller brush. Lastly i press the 'O' key to turn on 'Show selected mask overlay'. You can also do this in the toolbar below the image. Now, start painting:

You can see the painted area above. Each click and drag will add a little more color. Remember, you are not painting the color, the color only shows you what you selected for your adjustments that will be done later. Carefully go through the area you want to change, in my case I started with the rocks in the foreground and between the bends in the road. When done, the selection looked like this:

If you paint on something you didn't intend to paint on, it's easy to fix; In the brush menu, you can select the 'Erase' brush, which does exactly what you'd expect. The same exact thing can also be found using the Alt key; when pressed, you are using the erase brush. To turn off the red mask, press 'O' again.

Now, the next thing is to do the actual adjustment. Remember, what I wanted was to reduce the contrast and make the rocks lighter, so lets do exactly that:

Add a bit of 'Exposure', drop 'Contrast' and 'Clarity'.

Add a bit of 'Exposure', drop 'Contrast' and 'Clarity'.

Next, let's do the road. We will need a new brush for this, because we don't want to mess up the changes we just did to the rocks. In the top right of the brush panel, select 'New'. This allows you to start painting a completely new area, that will have different settings. This time, paint only the road:

I wanted to darken the road, so lets do that:

'Exposure' and 'Contrast' darken the road, while 'Clarity' helps keep some of the detail.

'Exposure' and 'Contrast' darken the road, while 'Clarity' helps keep some of the detail.

There are a lot of things I could still do; the rocks in the foreground could have even less contrast, the water in the lake could be smoother, etc. I spent around an hour on the real version of this image, fixing small things like the reflections of the snow in the lake. I've ordered a big print for my wall, I think It will look amazing :) For this post, I think I'll stop here.

Thanks for reading, and please join me in the next one, where I create a high dynamic range (HDR) image!