Easy trick dramatically improves pictures

After a long silence, I'm back ...

In the past few weeks when observing some friends and familly members taking pictures at different social events I started realizing that most of them do not move! They just see an interesting scene, pick their camera and shoot. Just like with many things in life the result is somehow proportionnal to the effort you put in. This may sound like common (photography) sense to many others, but one needs to move to take good shots. Move up and down (knee on the ground to take that wonderfull kid' shot at his eyes level, not at yours; bent your legs to take poeple's shot while they are sitted at dinner table, again, be at the same level as their eyes), move left and right to find an unusual perspective or get the best lighting, move back and forth because your super zoom lens will never provide quite the focal range that would be ideal for all shots.

Frankly this makes an amazing difference. I was with a friend at a birthday party a couple of weeks ago and when looking on her DSLR screen at the pictures she had taken, I realized she'd shoot everything while she was just standing up. What a dirrence!

Having said so, this reminder is mainly addressed to me. I'm too often lazy ... and disappointed by the results.

Photoshop stuff

A brief post to start tracking a few interesting Photoshop tricks, techniques, tutorials, ...

Painting with light
Duplicate background layer: Ctrl-J
Blend mode: Screen
Create black mask: Alt-Add Layer Mask icon
Set foreground color to white
Pick a soft-edged brush, verify that its opacity is 100% and paint
Adjust layer opacity

Remove shine
Video tutorial here (The Viewfinder blog)
Select Clone Stamp tool
Mode: Darken
Opacity: 30% to 40%

Whitening teeth’s
Video tutorial here (The Viewfinder blog)
Duplicate background layer Ctrl-J
Select Brush tool
Select Quick Mask tool (rectangle with circle at the bottom of tool palette)
Brush the teeth’s
Click Quick Mask icon to select
Inverse selection (Shift-Ctrl-I)
Adjust Hue/Saturation (Ctrl-U)
Select Yellow only
Decrease saturation
Increase lightness

Color management samples

I finally posted the scanned photos related to my color management post. Along with clear conclusions. Enjoy ... here

ISO : How high can you go with a Canon EOS 400D ?

Hi everyone (I know there isn't many poeple reading ... yet!),

Have you ever wondered whether all this noise about noise in your picture really matters ?

As I said before, I am shotting a lot indoors and therefore need apertures as wide as possible. On top, I recently stopped shooting in P mode with the flash and now shoot most of my indoor flash pictures in either Av or M mode which basically means that the camera (or myself if in M mode) will try and expose the background correctly while the flash will expose the subject. Now ... when doing so in low light situations and with moving subjects (kids), if you do not want the background to be all dark, you need to go to rather slow shutter speeds (you can also increase the aprture but my lens does not allow me to go very low : Sigma 18-200 3.5/6.3 DC OS). This is good to get a correctly exposed background but not very good for the moving kids! They are often blurred in my photos. Theoritically, the flash could fix their movements but I still have not found a way to get satisfactory results with that. So I'm left with only one option (the other option would be to buy a more expensive lens that allows wider apertures ... ) raise the ISO so that I can increase the shutter speed.

I have thus been wondering how high I could go with the ISOs on my 400D with satisfactory image quality. There are a lot of tests out there on camera review sites but most are focussed on very theoritical or technical stuff : I don't want to know how my camera compares to camera X or find out about some measuring systems for amount of chroma and luminance noise.

So I did the test myself. Before testing this, you need to know what your output is going to be. In my case, most of the pictures that I like end up being printed in 10x15 cm (about 4"x6"). So this is what I will test. If you frequently print in larger sizes, the results of the following test could be completely irrelevant. Also note that your monitor may NOT be a good way to assess how much noise will be in your printed photos depending on their size. I found that out myself and just got it confirmed here.

So, the test now : I set up my camera on a tripod and simply took a number of pictures in my house, increasing the ISO setting each time. I shot in RAW and manual mode, increasing the shutter by 1 stop each time I increased the ISO. After importing in Lightroom, I started by comparing noise on screen : things are looking OK for me up till ISO 400, ISO 800 is borderline but I really did not like the look of the ISO 1600. So I printed these pircture in 10x15 size. The result is simply that you can hardly distinguish which one is which when printed at that size ! Both from a noise and details point of view, all pictures are looking very similar.

I then went back to the on screen comparison and wanted to check how good Lightroom is at eliminating noise via the Luminace and Color noise reduction slider that are found below the Details section in the Develop module. Without spending a hell of a time on it, I figured out that
(1) The default Color slider position of Loghtroom (25) is good enough for all ISO settings for the 400D (at least on screen - I know that I would need to make print tests to fine tune this). Increasing the color noise reduction does not bring any more visible results beyond 25.
(2) As for the Luminance setting, I will use 0 for ISO 100, 25 for ISO 200, 40 for ISO 400, 80 for ISO 800 and 100 for ISO 1600.

Here are the scanned pictures. Not an ideal way for you to judge the results as the pictures were scanned and then compressed into jpegs, but better than nothing. You need to trust me when I say that I cant' see much difference in the prints ;-)

ISO 100 (Luminance 0)

ISO 200 (Luminance 0 and 25)

ISO 400 (Luminace 0 and 40)

ISO 800 (Luminance 0 and 80)

ISO 1600 (Luminance 0 and 100)

I probably could get better results by using a third party sofware (Noise Ninja or other) but one of the things that I really like about Lightroom is the capability to do a lot without moving out of it. For me, the extra benefit of such a sofware is not worth the extra hassle of having to get out of LR for each photo. May be I'll move there once I start printing more regularly in larger sizes.

Conclusion is that for small prints (10x15 cm or 4"x6") one can really use the full range of the 400D ISO settings up to 1600 without significant decrease in image quality. I have run this test more than one months ago and I still have a problem moving beyond ISO400, I simply don't feel good about it. I will need to get used to it and really start using ISO 800 and 1600.

Flash photograhpy links added

Well, I must admit that I'm a little disappointed by the number of visitors here (as tracked by Goggle Analytics). But this is my first blog and I really did not know what to expect. I'll keep on updating it and time will tell if anyone out there is interested.

In the meantime I created a little corner right here in the right column to star gathering interesting links about flash photography. Enjoy ...

580 EX II Lessons learned (tips and tricks)

I'll keep on updating this post as my learning progresses.

- When reading the manual, I've immediately been wondering why not leaving the flash on High Sync Speed all the time. There seem to be quite some consensus in forums that this is the best setting and that it does not have any drawback. HSS does consume more power but ONLY when the shutter speed goes above the max. camera sync speed (1/200 for my 400D); in other cases it would not consume more power and simply reverts back to normal mode of operations. So, ... mine is going to stay on HSS untill I find a reason not to do so.

New 580EX II

Hi. I got myself a new 580EX II flash yesterday.I have only been able to shoot a few shots with it but my first tests are quite positive. It DOES make a serious difference as compared to the camera built-in flash.

I'll start another post which I will populate with lessons learned for the 580 EX II usage.