Jonathan a Tad Closer, originally uploaded by TimDD.

I stumbled across this crop while working on the larger image. The full-frame has this fantastic white vignette… but the intensity yet gentleness of this close-up convinced me to produce it separately.

Please share your comments below!

Jonathan in July, originally uploaded by TimDD.

Is there any mystery what this gentleman is doing in December?

Jonathan’s site.

Flagpole near Woods Hole, originally uploaded by TimDD.

I really loved that gnarly tree, but went for the traditional flagpole shot as well.

Julie doing Vermeer in Gruyere, originally uploaded by TimDD.

I know we go for the natural side light and the unnatural twisted neck typical of Vermeer ALL THE TIME, but I never tire of it. My Julie once again, this time amongst the painted wood panels of Gruyere castle on a cloudy, natural soft-box afternoon.

Cold-Glory, originally uploaded by TimDD.

A good friend and former colleague recommended that I submit this photo to a boston.com photo contest. The theme is “Cold,” and the voting is open this week. Please help me win! Here’s the link: you vote for three of your favorites, out of 50 finalists.

Vote now!

There are plenty of occasions when I simply don’t have the tripod, or perhaps even the time, to set up the perfect HDR. I have had this image on my hard drive since August, and I hadn’t yet uncovered the techniques that would transform the raw file into a better reflection of what the scene had ‘recorded’ in my memory.

Here’s the “after” [by "after" I mean after the image has been recorded on the sensor. In my lexicon, "before" is what I saw and persists in my imagination, i.e. like the image above].

There are several issues we will address one at a time.

First, the shadows on the porch. This porch has a fantastic compass rose painted on the surface, and one of those sky-blue ceilings (to keep the bees away, I’m told). As captured by the sensor, the compass rose looks like a weather-worn indoor outdoor remnant from railroad salvage, and the ceiling is just too muddy. I also find that wood features like shingles, the decking, and the white fence love the effect of the LucisArt or Topaz Adjust filters.

In this case I worked with Topaz Adjust. But first I had to isolate the sea, bluffs, sky and clouds from the hotel structure, so I turned to the Polygonal Lasso Tool in Photoshop, and created this selection, which I hastened to save as a channel. I won’t go into details (experiment! try! err!), but the Refine Edge dialog is essential, and is an option introduced in CS3 and available when any selection tool is active.

I tweeked the “Adaptive Exposure” slider, and its “Regions” slider to .4, and 14 for this project. I also boosted the “Highlight” slider to .06 in order to protect that beautiful railing.

The “Details” settings were: “Strength” 1.8; “Boost” 1.1. This enhances local contrast, giving the wood surfaces the texture that I think of when remembering New England cottage style buildings.

I “stamped” the layers to consolidate the work so far: (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E).

Second fix is the sea, sky, clouds, and bluffs in the distance. In the original RAW file, they simply lack the saturation and richness I remember from the moment I pressed the shutter release.

This one was an easy fix — and I’ve used this loads of times since I first experimented with it. I grabbed my selection (highlighted it on the channels panel, clicked on “load channel as selection”, then went to my new top “stamped” layer, and clicked on the “Create Mask” icon in the layers panel. This creates a mask and applies the current selection — the area outside that selection is masked “out,” the selection area is now available for adjustment.

After experimenting, I found that simply applying the “multiply” blend mode did the trick. It restored the vibrance I remembered without introducing the extreme pixel damage of heavy saturation adjustments.

Final tweek: adjust that horizon line to make the final composition look just right.

So: If you have an extra $6,000,000, this is a great real estate opportunity! If not, you can see why Block Island is one of my favorite places by checking out the BI sets on my Flickr photostream.

Totally Cool On Black
The recent storm left these smooth and cool undulations on the snow in our back yard. So as the sun set, the shadows became deeper and deeper blue. This got a kitchen sink full of processing:
1) seven frame HDR to start
2) photomatix with white point, black point, luminosity jacked pretty high
3) one original exposure blended to restore sense to the sky
4) Topaz Adjust to trick out the moguls
5) Surface blur to mellow out the distraction of the tree line at the edge of the property
6) slight (yes… slight) saturation boost to reds and yellows to make that sun just weep with sadness as it leaves this beautiful setting.

As for the Kinkade reference: my landscaper’s wife commented on some processed photos I made for his sight: “These look like a Thomas Kinkade painting.” I’m just listening to my customers…

Rachel at 35, originally uploaded by TimDD.

We celebrated with Rachel and her mother on Rachel’s 35th. This was a simple on-camera flash shot, bounced off the ceiling; significant surface blur and a good half-hour of brushing to bring the key details back. We’re going to gallery-wrap this one for Rachel’s mother, Susan.

First observations: A great expression, but lack of dramatic punch — and several distractions in the background. Oh and there’s that nagging eyelash over the subject’s left eye. So I got out the clone stamp tool to remove the eyelash — no problem. I wanted to get rid of that pink area over the subject’s shoulder — so I matched the color of the surrounding background as the foreground color. I used the magic wand to select the pink area — then the “refine edge” capability to improve the selection. I picked up a soft-edge brush and started painting at low opacity — 20% — and increased until I was comfortable the area would match.

I also wanted to remove the upper right area reflection — and it started out pretty ugly. Here’s an interim version:

I continued to work on that area until it was properly brushed into irrelevance. It takes some experimenting to get it just right.

Next I went to the channels palette and selected the “blue” channel — it has nice contrast and detail in the beard and skin. I copied that channel, than returned to the layers palette and pasted that selection into a new layer. I changed the blend mode to “overlay,” and then applied the Sharpen / Unsharp Mask filter. Here’s the result, after selecting the “Soft Light” blend mode:

A bit stronger than I am looking for — so I pulled out the “Lorton” trick: take a copy of the original layer, place it on top of the layer stack, apply a heavy Gaussian blur, and apply the “multiply” blend mode. Add a curves adjustment layer (but don’t make any adjustment), apply the “Screen” blend mode. Adjust the opacity of each of these layers to your liking — I also added a “Hue / Saturation” adjustment layer to address the ‘cumulative saturation’ phenomenon of the activities so far.

Again: the final:

What a fine morning walk we had with the new Gitzo tripod. This final image is the result of four vertical five-frame exposures, stitched together in photoshop. Cropped. A channel selection used to create a mask, and a couple of blending layers used to, well, undo some of the magic that Photomatix sometimes gets carried away with. Topaz helped provide some nice crunchy detail to the tree line, and a nice gradient vignetted the foreground.  Orig post on flickr.