Creating Zoom effect on Photoshop

In my last article I gave you an introduction to the zoom effect on digital photography and showed you how to shoot it with your camera. This effect however is very difficult to master and can be recreated in photoshop with practically identical, or even better results. This is what we're going to learn today.

First of all choose a suitable picture. It can be anything with a subject you want to make stand out. I chose this picture of my bike standing aside a bike trail.

Now you only have to go to filters->blur->radial blur. Here you select the amount of blur, you have to select zoom and you have to select the center of the blur effect (this is the point you want to be in focus). Also I recommend setting the quality to optimal.

Now take a look at the image, if you're satisified with the result then that's it, if not you can try changing the amount and the center of the blur until you like the result.

Also there is a way of making your whole subject stay in focus. If you only follow the steps detailed above, you'll end up with only a small focused point. If you're subject is large however, it will probably be out of focus. But don't worry there is a very easy way to fix that. Select your subject and copy it to another layer, now apply the effect on the background layer and your subject will remain in perfect focus. To select the subject I recommend using quick mask mode (pressing Q) and then painting it all. Once you're done get out of quick mask mode (Q again) and invert the selecion. Now you only have to copy that selection to another layer and you'll have your subject isolated from the background.

Now when you apply the effect on the background, your subject won't be blurred since it's in a separated layer. This is what it will look like:

And that's how you fake zoom effect on photoshop! I hope you found this tutorial useful, also I let you another example here:

Zooming technique

And on we go with the slow shutter speed effects series! We learned how to do panning, how to fake it on the pc, and now we're going to learn how to use the zooming technique.

This is a very simple technique but can achieve some neat results when applied correctly. It consists of zooming your lens in or out while the shutter is open. This creates a kind of tunnel effect towards the center achieving a sense of speed.

Similarily to panning this technique requires the shutter speed to be the correct one. Slow enough to create the zooming blur, but fast enough to allow for a sharp image in the center. As always this speed will depend on your hands stability, focal length and whether you have image stabilisation enabled. I recommend you to use something between 1/10 and 1/60, take into consideration, that the faster you set the shutter speed, the faster you have to zoom in or out to make the image appear blurred in the corners.
If you have the time you can set a tripod and a slower shutter speed, say 1/2 por example and zoom in slowly, which will give you more stability.

Once you have set the correct shutter speed (Use shutter speed priority mode ) set your subject, or whatever part of the scene you want to be sharp, in the center of the image. Now click the shutter and zoom your lens in or out while it's open. This will blur the edges of the image, creating the zoom effect.

Also, you can combine the zooming in with panning to change the part of the image that remains sharp. For example, if you zoom in while pan the camera to the right, the sharp area will be on the right side of the image. Combining both effects however can be too difficult to the point that it becomes frustrating, so I would recommend you to reproduce the effect later on on photoshop if you want the sharp area not to be in the center. In my next post I'll show you how to do that easily, so stay tuned!

Faking panning on the pc

In the last post I showed you how you could use the panning technique to give your subject a sense of speed and make it stand out from the background. I hope I have given you enough time to experiment a bit with the effect before showing you the easy way: creating it in photoshop.

Let's take a look at how it works.

We'll take a picture where both the subject and the background are sharp, I've chosen this one:

With the scene so bright and the helicopter moving so, relatively, slow it was impossible to use a shutter speed slow enough to create motion blur. So I decided to recreate it on Photoshop.

Firs thing you want to do is select your subject. I recommend going to quick mask mode (pressing Q) and then "painting" your subject with the brush.

Once you're done click Q to get out of quick mask mode and invert the selection. It's a good idea to copy the helicopter to a new layer.
Now all you have to do is select the background layer and go to filters->blur->motion blur

Here you can select the direction and the amount of blur. The direction will have to be the same as the on of your subject and you can vary the amount if you want to make it more or less blurry , I used 30 pixels, but it will depend on your photo so try different values until you're satisfied.

And that's it now you can recreate the motion blur in your photos without having to use panning. My advice however is to try and make the panning effect straight out of the camera, it will look more realistic and most important it will be much more fun!

Panning

Some days ago we talked about how we could make our subject stand out using selective coloring. Today we're going to learn a technique that will make it stand out and give it a sense of speed. This technique is called Panning.

As you probably know when we shoot a moving subject with a slow shutter speed the subject will appear blurred on the picture. This is something you usually want to avoid, since you want your subject to be in sharp focus. The panning technique however, allows us to benefit from this effect by making the moving subject sharp and the background blurred. How does this technique work? This technique is very simple although it might require some practice. What you need to do is follow your subject with the camera, as long as the sutter is open. This will cause the subject to stay in the same position of the shot throughout the exposure, thus remaining sharp and will cause the background to have motion blur.

Only following the subject with your camera however won't cause the background to be blurred. First you have to make sure that there will be motion blur in your shot. To do that you have to set a slow shutter speed, I recommend using shutter speed priority mode. Setting the correct shutter speed is not easy, set it too low and you'll end up with an overall blurred shot because you won't be able to follow the subject precisely enough.

1/2--------------------------- 1/2

Set it too high and the whole image will be sharp, spoiling the speed effect.

1/495

I recommend using something from 1/6 to 1/60, but it will always depend on your subject's speed, proximity and your focal length.

1/60--------------------------------- 1/25

But setting the right shutter speed is not everything. You have to be able to follow the subject precisely, how do you do that? There is no perfect technique for that, you can use a tripod if the movement is completely horizontal, but I rarely have a tripod by me so I always do it handheld. What I recomemnd you is to start following the subject with your camera moving your whole upper body so that the movement is stable, when you feel you're moving at the same speed of your subject, click the shutter and keep moving with it until the shutter closes again, then stop moving. The most important thing of course is to keep the same speed as your subject while the shutter is open.

You can always use your flash together with the slow shutter speed to ensure you freeze your subject perfectly, but remember not to freeze the whole scene or the sense of movement will be spoiled. Also if you want to have more probablities of success use the burst mode of your camera and keep shooting as long as you can follow the subject.

And that's all I can teach you about panning, if you want to learn more go outside and practice, practice a lot, that's the only way to get this technique right!

PS: I'll write an article soon about how to fake this effect in photoshop, but don't rely on it, keep practicing, it's nicer and much more fun!

Photos by me and ttstam

Understanding Histograms

If you've been using digital cameras for some time now, chances are you have already seen lots of histograms. They are shown by most cameras and imaging software and they are a very powerful tool to review your exposure. Today we are going to take a look at them and we're going to answer the question:

How do I interpret a Histogram?

A histogram is a graphical representation of a series of data, it's not only used in digital photography but also in many statistics representations. Every column in a histogram represents a case and its height represents how often this case is presented. Translated into digital photography, every column represents a tonal value, while its height represents how often this value is present in our picture.

The light values in a histogram go from 0, at the left meaning completely dark to 255, at the right meaning completely white.

This means, if a picture is dark the columns in the left will be higher, because a bigger part of the image will be contained in them.

It might sound complicated but let me show you some examples to make it easy.

This is the histogram of a normally exposed image. The tones are well distributed along the histogram from the darker to the lighter areas, there is a very high peak at the brightest end of the histogram showing the overexposed area caused by the light at the lower right corner of the image. These peaks are something to avoid, since parts of the image with so bright tones will end up just white without any appreciable detail. In this image though this is tolerable since the burned area is quite small. Also, we can see a wider peak in the bright area of the histogram caused, that shows the bright area on the wall that's being lit by the light.

What this histogram is telling us about the image is that it has a burned area, it has well distributed tones and an important area of the scene is brighter than normal.

Let's take a look at a completely different Histogram.

This image is was intentionally underexposed to give it a different mood, which is clearly visible in the histogram. If you look at its darker end, you will see how it contains a big part of the image. The brighter end is very low, filled only by some of the light rays and the clouds on the sky. Another important detail we can recognise in this histogram is that there are parts of the image in the very dark end of the histogram, as opposite to the image before, this shows that a part of the image will be shown black without any appreciable detail, once again this is something acceptable in this photograph because it creates the silhouette at the bottom of the picture. However you should try to avoid having values at the lower end of the histogram if you don't want any part of the image to be completely black.

So summing up, we have seen that a Histogram allows us to see how bright or how dark our image is, without having to rely on its brightness on the LCD screen, which can be affected by other factors like ambient light. It will also show us if we have burned or dodged any part of the image, so that we can notice if we have lost details in our picture, which is very difficult to see on the LCD screen only.

I hope this was a clear article, if you have any doubts or suggestions, don't forget you can let me know in a comment. Thanks!

Post-Processing: Sharpening

In this article, I wanna show you an easy but essential post-processing technique: Sharpening.

Why do images need to be sharpened? Because of the digital sensor's nature areas with high contrast, like edges, are not recorded properly. This is because every pixel records only the average light that hit it and not the exact pattern. When a pixel in the sensor records an edge it won't record half a pixel black and the other white but will only record a grey pixel. I know this is a very simple explanation but getting into this topic would take a lot of time and all we want to do today is learn how to sharpen images, so how is it done?

Sharpening is something most comeras do automatically after taking a shot. In point and shoots the sharpening is usually enough, allowing the user not to post-process the image at all.
DSLRs though are designed for advanced photographers who want more control over their results. This is why they're configured to do a much softer sharpening in Jpeg and no sharpening at all in RAW files.

This configuration gives the end user the widest range of possibilities, because a sharpened image can not be desharpened, while an unsharpened raw file can be sharpened at will afterwards. Now we're going to take a look at how it's done.

If we're processing a RAW file in Lightroom or Photoshop the process is slightly different but the adjustments required will be the same. In this example I'm going to use photoshop.

Once you're done editing your image (sharpening should be performed the last), go to filters->sharpen->unsharp mask and you'll find something like this:

The first setting is amount. This determines the amount of contrast this filter will add in the borders. The higher the setting the more aggresive the sharpening will be, be careful though because it will come to a point where the image start to look odd.

The second setting is radius. This determines how many pixels around the borders will get the extra contrast treatment, same as before, the higher the setting, the more aggresive the sharpening.

The third setting is threshold. This lets you preserve smoother areas of being sharpened as well as the sharpening of noise. However this setting will affect the general sharpening negatively so i would preserve the smoother areas and the noise more selectively, by copying it to another layer for example. My advice is keep this setting low

As to the other 2 values there is no setting I can recommend you that will work on every image. You'll have to find out yourself which is the best for your shot. To do that start by raising the amount to around 400%. Then tweak the radius until the image is sharpened without visible artifacts, like halos around the sharpened objects. Keep in mind that the higher the resolution of the image, the higher the radius value has to be. Once you find the adecuate radius, lower the amount to a more reasonable value.
You can view the results in the small preview window or on the normal photoshop window. Keep in mind though, that to view the sharpening effect properly the image should be displayed at 100% or 50% zoom to avoid issues with aliasing of the images.

I set amount at 94% and radius at 1.8 and threshold at 4

I selected such a small radius for 2 reasons. First this image was at 6Mp which is not a very high resolution. Secondly there were small subjects with high contrast against the snow like the brown bushes, that would give a strange look if the sharpening radius was bigger than the details themselves, this something you will just realize when you try sharpening an image yourself.

These are my results

Before

Full image:
Before: After:

100% crop

Before: After:

As you can see the sharpened images have clearer details, which gives them a more realistic and "professional" look, while the unsharpened ones have a hazy effect, making them look unrealistic.

Tip: If you've read through this tutorial and found sharpening is way too complicated, you can always set you DSLR to sharpen the images automatically, which is done differently depending on the camera. Doing this, however, will give you much less control over the sharpening and can result in badly sharpened areas. What I recommend, as always, is shooting in Raw and then applying Lightroom's default sharpening settings, if lightroom gets it wrong you can effortlessly change the settings and the photo won't be ruined as would happen with in-camera sharpening.

Summing up I would say that sharpening is an essential post-processing effect, that should be performed on every image. I recommend applying a default sharpening filter in lightroom for your regular workflow and tweaking it when there is a special shot you want to sharpen perfectly or the lightroom's adjustments don't work well.

Post-processing: Selective color

Now that we know how to convert photos to black and white I'm going to show you how to use selective color in your pictures.

Selective color is a very aggresive way to make your subject stand out by converting the rest of the image to black and white.

We're going to learn how to use it in photoshop.

This is the image we'll apply the effect to:



The stones have a very similar color to the background sand and rocks, making them stand out less than I'd like. To solve this we're going to convert all the background to black and white.

First of all we have to select the background, there are many ways to do this but I recommend using quick mask mode (by pressing Q), then going to brush tool and "painting" the stones, like this:

Press Q again to get out of quick mask mode and you'll have the background selected. What I like about this tool, is that using brush makes the edges of your selection soft, allowing some imperfection in your borders. Now you can go to the Channel mixer, like we learned in our previous article and do the black and white conversion.

Remember that the addition of all 3 levers has to be 100% if you want to keep the original luminosity of the image.

And there you've got your selective color effect! Now you can play with contrast, brightness and other options until you've got the image you want. Here's my end result.

Now the stones really stand out against the background, making the image much more interesting

This is another example of selective color

Is there any technique you'd specially like to use? Feel free to post a comment about it!

Post-processing: Converting to black and white

When I created this blog, I wanted to write articles about photgraphy alone, but several users have expressed their interest in digital post-processing too, so I'm going to start a series of articles about basic post-processing techniques and programs.

Probably the most known post-processing effect in digital photography is converting to black and white. This may seem like it's an easy process but doing it well may require some practice.

What is Black and White good for? Sometimes the colors in an image don't express anything or don't serve to create the effect we want, in those cases converting into black and white can be the perfect post-processing effect, freeing our image of all those distracting colors.

First I will explain how to do this effect if you're using lightroom, which I recommend and will talk about in future posts.

We'll take this image as an example.

Open it in developing mode in Lightroom and click on grayscale and you get this result.

Now, you might be happy with this result but it's also possible that this is not the mood you were looking for in the image.
To me, for example the sky and the grass looked too bright. To change this you can go to the channel mixer and change the luminosity of those specific tones. This will make everything with that specific tone to appear darker or brighter in the final image. I changed blue, green and yellow and this is how it looked like in the end.

Lastly, you may want to change some of the general settings, I modified exposure and contrast, it's always recommendable to have the contrast lever higher than the brightness one.

This is the end image:

If you want to reproduce the results in other Image editors like Photoshop or the GIMP you have to look for the channel mixer feature (Image -> Adjustments -> Channel mixer, in Photoshop), then select grayscale and make the adjustments you like like I did in this tutorial.

In the next tutorial I'll teach you how to use selective color to make the subject stand out. Stay tuned and keep experimenting!

Video on DSLRs?

I think I'll take a break from the tutorials and write an article about a topic, that is on every photographers head lately. Some weeks ago Nikon presented its D90, successor of the D80 with HD video capabilities, rumors say Canon will present a similar feature in one of its future cameras too and many users are asking themselves:

Should video be implemented on DSLRs?

This is a very complicated topic and I think many of us have formed an opinon without really thinking twice about it, so I'm going to try and write down all the positive and negative aspects of this new feature.

The first many people, including myself, thought when they heard about this new feature was, what for? DSLRs are specialized in taking pictures and don't need the video capabilities.
This answer however isn't really based on any facts or arguments but rather in our feeling about digital photography. But are there arguments against implementation of video on DSLRs? Let's analyze what negative points video might bring to DSLRs:

• Size, the size of a video processing chip is ridiculously small.
• Battery consumption, probably close to none when feature is idle.
• Cost. Here's the only argument I think would be worth taking into consideration:

The cost of the video processing and encoding chip isn't probably too high. Maybe this chip will be embedded in the next generation of EXPEED processors in the future so it will sink even further. The development of the hardware and software necessary for recording video though can get more pricey. Considering Nikon has got no experience with video, putting its developers to work on that feature costs the company time and money, that they could be invesing in other features. This is something we can't deny, but we have to think: Is video really such an uninteresting feature?

Most of us probably have multiple devices able to capture video: Videocameras, Point and Shoots, mobile phones... but all of them lack a lot of things that video-enabled DSLRs will have:

• Quality: Probably the most important difference between the devices mentioned before and the D90 is the quality. The resolution recorded by state of the art mobile phones and typical point and shoots never goes beyond 640x480 or 0.3 megapixels. The D90 however will record in 1280x720 pixels (around 1 MP) and the roumoured canon camera might go even further with fullHD, that's 1920x1080 pixels. A constant stream of 2 Mega-Pixels shots at 30 frames per second. Now, we are sick of saying megapixels don't matter on a digital camera. That is not true at this level. The difference in quality between a 6 megapixel and a 25 megapixel shot, won't be even noticeable in a computer monitor or a TV set, that is because a monitor or TV can display a maximum of 2 megapixels at the same time, and we're talking about very high resolution devices. The difference between 0.3 and 2 megaxpiels though is a very different thing. A good (FullHD) TV set will be able of displaying those 2 megapixels recorded by DSLRs, making the 0.3 megapixels of Point and shoots look ridicolous. Most videocameras also record at 0,3 resolution, except for the new HD video cameras. But the D90's sensor has some other advantages apart from the resolution, its ISO capabilities are much better than the ones of any of the devices mentioned above, allowing for shooting in very low light.

• Versatility: What do Point and shoots, mobile phones and most videocameras have in common? They have 1 lens, may be prime lens may be zoom lens, but that's it. If you want any other lens or effect you've got no upgrade possibility. Changing lenses is something DSLRs are well known for and this capability will prove valuable in video shooting just as it does when we shoot pictures. It's not the same to record a sports event where we want to have a wide angle lens to record the whole scene as to record wildlife where we want to be able to stay as far away as possible using a telephoto.

• Convenience: Have you never been outside shooting and wanted to shoot a video? Do you take an extra camera just to take short videos on your trips? With video on the DSLR you just need 1 device that will take pictures and videos, and both with outstanding quality, the D90 might have some issues like the lack of autofocus but those issues will be solved for sure in the future, a problem we can't forget so easily though is the size of the videos, that will only allow for shorter clips unlike with videocameras.
  
• Creative Possibilities. A similar point to versatility, changing lenses allows for more creative videos and so does the small depth of field created by DSLR lenses that will allow you to make your subject stand out while other devices will just have all the scene in focus

In my opinion those advantages will in the future make video capable DSLRs well worth the extra price, and even more considering that price will get smaller with time. Also the user base of HDTVs capable of displaying HD video is growing bigger every day, which will accelerate the process even more. What do you think? Will future DSLRs all come with video or will this just be a forgotten feature? You can leave your opinion on the comments or vote on the poll.