Picture Post, Sunday August 19, 2007

Younger Brother is doing OK. His facial surgery was pushed back from this past Thursday to this coming Tuesday, August, 21.

They are just going to repair his nose. To operate on and repair a broken cheek requires going into the head near the ear and working through the head forward to pushe the broken cheek back outward into place. It's apparently a horrible thing to have done, so since his is broken but isn't pressed back much, he's decided to not have the cheek worked on, and only get his nose rebuilt.

Thank all of you for you comments, thoughts, and prayers for him. I would also be grateful if y'all would continue to pray for him, the upcoming surgery and his recovery.

Number Two Daughter is having surgery this Wednesday and I would be thankful for y'all's prayers for her too. It's a surgery to correct a female problem, and it's supposed to be a pretty long surgery as well.

Thanks all!

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Since I haven't been out doing any photography lately, I don't really have any new stuff for y'all.

I'm posting a couple of before and after photos. Each of these took me a while to get into good shape. They weren't as bad as some, but had a zillion dust specks and things that had me enlarging them to massive size and working on them one tiny section at a time to clean up.

This first one makes me laugh even after seeing it many times over the years. Too bad my Photoshop skills don't extend to replacing the stupid looks on my, Big Sis's, and Big Brother's faces. (And dig Big Sis's home brew haircut!)



This next photo is one of me when I was four years old. That's my little stuffed dog that was my constant companion and sleeping buddy when I was a wee lad. This was a really small photo, and was blurry, grainy, and had the remains of scotch tape on it. I worked to clean it up as best I could, but finally got to the point where I figured I was coming up against the law of diminishing returns and stopped.


Visiting others will probably be spotty in the near future with Number Two Daughter's surgery and work, but I haven't forgotten y'all and I'll make the rounds as soon as I can.

Have a great Sunday.

Photo Repair With Photoshop Elements

This past weekend, I did very little writing, having decided to work on photographs some more.

That's on thing that's nice about having several interests. If the weather is too bad and I feel to bad to get outside, wander, and take photographs, then there are hundreds of photos that I have taken that can use touching up and/or experimenting with in Photoshop Elements to get exercise my artistic muscles.

I was in the mood to take some more of the photographs that I scanned on a flatbed scanner when Lovely Wife and I were in Louisiana this past December, and that had my interest when other things didn't. Each and every one of those photos I work on, repair, and archive makes me feel better. Like I'm saving some family history in the best way that I can.

The photo I want to show you today, is one of my parents when they were young newlyweds and the original needed lots of help. I've been putting off working on this one knowing it would be a tedious job.

Without further ado, here's the before and after of one of the photos I tried to repair and archive this weekend instead of writing.



The original photo had been cut to fit into an oval frame and I created a black vignette from the oval edge outward.

Give 'em a click and let me know what y'all think.

Daddy's Little Man

I worked on a few photos last night. More of the one's I scanned on the trip we made to Louisiana after Christmas.

My Younger Brother is seven years younger than me. He was born in 1970. He always had, and still does, a great imagination and flair for being funny. He kept us all laughing with his original characters that he would "become" when playing.

We used to call him Daddy's Little Man. They were buds.




I was able to do some nice repair and color correction using Photoshop Elements on all of these. It's a lot of fun and it's gratifying to take photos that only exist in one fading print, scan them, bring them back to life, and archive them for the future.

And it allows me to do something productive when I'm not in a writing mood.

Camera RAW

Warning: Boring camera stuff ahead!

This is what I did instead of coming up with blog ideas, so here's today's subject:

I've gotten into the habit of leaving my Nikon D70s in the RAW + JPEG mode. Every time I take a photograph, the camera actually puts TWO photos onto the memory disk; one is a JPEG image and the other is a RAW image. Both are of the exact same thing.

A JPEG image has already been processed by the camera, and is ready to look at on a computer or whatever. JPEG compresses the image file, and this image has lost some data in the compression.

The RAW image that the camera also creates, is the actual, complete, data dump of what the imaging sensor saw when I took the picture.

If the JPEG looks great, or almost great, I can tweak it in Photoshop Elements and save that image as the one I want to use.

But I learned really fast with this new camera, that Florida's incredible contrast in many sunlit scenes can "blow out" the highlights, or the whitest portions of a photograph. The image sensor was overloaded in these areas, and the detail of, say, the feathers on the back of a white bird, could be lost forever.

RAW images, being ALL of the original data from the imaging sensor, has the potential to give me a way to get back much of those lost details.

So, that's what I do. I shoot in the RAW + JPEG mode, and if the JPEG is good, cool, if it's over or underexposed too badly, I can use the RAW image to create a better image.

Each camera manufacturer handles the data in the RAW image files in their own, proprietary way. The Nikon software that came with my camera cannot open a RAW image from a Canon camera, and vice versa.

But the RAW files can be almost magical. I've been playing with some RAW files lately to see what I could do.

With a JPEG image from the camera, Photoshop, or Elements, or whatever, can only change the image a certain amount, but the image starts to look fake and weird really quick if you try to lighten or darken a photo very much.

Enter RAW.

Opening a RAW file will allow me to change the exposure several stops in either direction, of the image AFTER the image was taken, on the computer! You have no idea how marvelous this is to me, after 30+ years of dealing with slides and negatives that had an incorrect exposure. With filmIt's just pretty much too stinkin' bad pal. With film, you can burn lots of film with various exposures, hoping that one is really good. (That's called bracketing.)

For example, I'm always playing with the settings of my camera and trying new things, and on Christmas day, I inadvertently left my camera set at -2 stops of exposure compensation. All of my Christmas photos received 1/4 of the light they should have to create a properly exposed image.

Each and every Christmas photo I took was really dark.

But, I did still have the camera set on RAW + JPEG, and went in using Photoshop Elements and completely corrected each and every underexposed Christmas photo. You would never know that I did this if you saw the photos! Amazing.

AND, digital cameras have very good automatic white balance firmware/circuitry, but they aren't foolproof. You can still end up with a yellow image indoors, or an overly blue one outdoors.

Processing the RAW files in Photoshop Elements, I can change the white balance AFTER the photo is taken, and on the computer!

Anyway, I know this is a big yawn to most everyone (both of you) who read this blog, but I'm still reeling from the possibilities this opens up.

Last night, I played with an image I took from the fourth floor of a building, overlooking Melbourne, Florida, and the western sky.

The sky is kinda dark, which is what I was trying to capture, the sky, but the city below ended up too dark.

Using Photoshop Elements and multiple versions of the same photo, with different after-the-fact exposures thanks to RAW, I sandwiched two images, a darker and a lighter one, that lets me end up with one image wherein the sky is like I want it, but the city below is also lightened, so that you can see details of the city.

This first one is the image, exactly as it appears straight from the camera. I wanted to keep the sky dark and moody, but increase detail in the city below.

This next image is the "light" one I created so that I could use the better details in view of the city in my final image. I didn't care how the sky got too light in this one.

This next one is exposed only for the sky, to get it pretty much like I wanted it.

Using the layers on Photoshop Elements, I put the images on top of one another. Essentially, I put the light one on the top, and the dark one on the bottom, and "erased" the sky on the lighter one to let the darker one below come through. Only in the sky part though.

Now, OK, I know the photo isn't perfect. The city is too light, it doesn't look natural, but this was my very first shot at trying this. You can also see a line where the two different images meet, so it's not great.

But the potential for creating photos exposed in ways that would be truly impossible with just the camera itself makes my head spin.

That is all, carry on.