Sky control is fundamental to landscape photography. The term refers to ways in which a photographer manages the disparity in exposure values between the sky (which is often bright) and the foreground (which is often dark). The “balancing” is necessary because film can’t record the full range of tonal value (dynamic range) that the human eye is able to distinguish.  Filters called split-graduated neutral density filters, are used to help balance these differences. I used them frequently when I shot film, but in shooting digital, I’ve found they are often not needed. If you use these filters I’m not saying to get rid of them completely, since there are times when they can still be used, but I’d like to show a few examples of when I would have previously used them, but chose not too, and ended up with a very pleasing looking image without them.

Since the edge of a split grad ND filter is straight, they work best when an edge in your scene is equally straight.  I shoot mostly in Alaska and with all the mountain and glacier scenery most of my compositions lacked that necessary feature. I found it often ineffective using  the split grad ND filter.

Today, getting by without one is largely due to the excellent noise-free low ISO of digital camera sensors, and the option to apply a digital split grad filter in a RAW processing software like Lightroom. I’ll use 3 examples from my recent trip to South America, since it is a current subject. Two of the examples below are reasonable candidates for the old physical split grad ND filter, since the demarcation line in exposure difference is pretty straight. The last one however, of Machu Picchu, would present some problems.

I prefer to shoot landscapes with the camera in manual mode so I can carefully tweak the exposure to a slightly overexposed state, yet recoverable within the RAW processing software. I do this in order to maximize detail in the shadowed areas. It is ideal to shoot at a low ISO, and with my camera’s that is usually ISO 100. In Lightroom, if you click on the little white triangles at the top corners of the histogram in develop mode, it activates the highlight and shadow warnings. The red color represents highlights that need to be recovered (they would be blinking on the back of your camera LCD, and are depicted in the histogram as touching the right hand wall. The blue represents shadows that are black and lacking detail, and are touching the left hand wall of the histogram. You will soon learn to ignore your camera LCD monitor and pay attention to your histogram. And you will also learn what can be restored through basic exposure adjustments.

This screen capture represents slight tweaks that let you control the highlights and shadows of your file. You can see with a few minor adjustments, the highlights and shadows are appropriately recovered. Nothing is touching the wall in the histogram now.

After that, the application of digital split graduated filters within Lightroom, in conjunction with some specific burning and dodging using the brush tool,  contrast, clarity and vibrance, the image comes to life. Note that I did not use the saturation slider.

Because the sky is slightly overexposed in this image it looks washed out and featureless. Again, you have to ignore your camera LCD monitor and trust that you can recover the detail in post production. Reducing the brightness in the sky will bring back the color and clouds.

This screen captures represents all the adjustments made to balance the image. I used a split grad in the sky to reduce brightness, and a reversed split grad on the foreground to increase brightness.

At the time of the image capture, I prefer to push the exposure as far to the “bright” side as possible, as this gives the greatest ability to recover the shadow areas without introducing noise or posterization. It’s a style of shooting called “expose right”, which proves useful in situations like this. To show how well both the shadows and highlights held up with the adjustments applied to this image,  I’ve included this 100% crop of the center of the frame which shows smoothness in the shadows, even after significant fill light adjustment.

In this scene of Machu Picchu, the center mountain precludes the easy use of a split grad filter, even in Lightroom, so I used the brush tool which enabled me to create the filter in the shape that corresponds with the landscape.

A few basic adjustments correct the exposure and balance the brights and darks of the histogram. In images which require a fair amount of  post production exposure adjustment, it is all the more important to begin with sharp lenses, and have your depth of field appropriately set. Blurry edges, either due to poor lens quality, slightly out of focus, or chromatic aberration, will enhance any edge oddities when stepping hard on the Fill light, or other adjustments in Lightroom.

Once the overall exposure is balanced, then its time for tweaking contrast, clarity, and vibrance, etc., to meet your desired result. There is usually some back and forth tweaking with overall exposure and brightness, once localized brushes or split grad filters are applied.

The degree of exposure balance achieved within just one photo is amazing. Of course, you can always blend two or more different images, but that gets more complicated when there are moving objects in your frame, and the workflow is a bit different, since a .psd or .tif file will need to be generated and worked on in Photoshop. I like the clean and simple method of one file, whenever possible. When absolutely necessary there is the option to blend images or enter the world of HDR.

If you have been tracking the development of RAW image processing programs, then it should be getting increasingly more clear that the need to generate derivative .tiff or .psd files of your master RAW files is getting increasingly less necessary. In the beginning days of processing RAW files, it was cumbersome, slow, and in general a painful experience. I used to generate tiffs from RAW files and finalize them in Photoshop. But that took a lot of time and hard drive space. Furthermore, with each successive advancement in RAW processing algorithms, tonal control and other global and local correction options, I found myself redoing files over and over.

At this point I use RAW files almost exclusively as master files, the exceptions are for blending multiple images or stitching panoramas. I use a two stage process:

1. A general processing effort aimed at making the file look excellent on my website–at this stage it is not necessary to stamp out every piece of dust, correct chromatic aberration, etc.
2. “Perfecting” the file happens when the image sells as a stock photo or art print. This lets me capitalize on the newest and latest RAW file processing techniques and algorithms available at the time the image leaves my office. Read more about my digital workflow here.

I use Photoshop infrequently these days, and often for correcting lens distortion–something not fixable in the current version of Lightroom. I shoot with zoom lenses often because I like the flexibility they afford in composition. They are often notorious for various types of lens distortion and chromatic aberation.  The ability to fix this on a RAW file has been on my wish list for a while, and I’m excited to learn that Lightroom 3 will offer this very useful feature. I’ll be able to correct for things like pin cushion, barrel distortion, and other optical nuisance within the RAW working environment! . Watch Tom Hogarty, Adobe Systems Product Manager, in this short demo of the upcoming Lens Correction feature that will be part of Lightroom 3 and Camera Raw 6.

These new lens correction tools, in conjunction with the existing ability to maximize dynamic range from one single RAW file in Lightroom, will make it an even more powerful tool in effective, creative and efficient RAW file management. The latter three reasons are why I think every digital photographer should use it, or it’s equivalent in some other platform. Next post I’ll discuss a technique I use to maximize the dynamic range of a single image, avoiding the need for an in-the-field, split graduated neutral density filter.

Some hate sitting at a computer working on images, which is a dislike I can understand in the context of time, and the value of time. However, it is this very aspect that completes the circle for me, and affords an additional layer of artistic expression to any given image. Do you think Ansel Adams would give his negative to someone and say here, go make a print for me? It is the creative element of photography that lures me and excites me. I enjoy the natural world and being thoroughly immersed in it, but it is the desire for creativity that keeps me inspired. The universal art of my youth keeps leaking out.

The fast, localized image adjustments, in a simple format made me a convert to Lightroom. While similar artistic effects could be applied in Photoshop, the process was far more complex, time consuming and data intensive. This image of a rearticulated whale skeleton was made on an overcast and very moody day, lending to the somber reality of what happened to the Blue whale during the commercial whaling era. (For an interesting read on the subject of whaling, I’d recommend Ahab’s Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling.)

The earth’s largest mammal, at a population of nearly 300,000 animals in pre-whaling days was reduced to 1,000-2,000 prior to controls placed on the whaling industry in the 1960′s. Wow! That is hard to believe.  In my “grading” process to this image (See my previous post for some RAW work flow terminology) I tried to convey a sense of retrospective peril, through shadow and contrast.

Below are examples of the original capture and my brush painting local adjustments in Lightroom (that would be similar to the dodging and burning in the darkroom days). Other “global” adjustments (as noted at the bottom), are applied along the way but the brush strokes are easily seen by the red mask. The brushed areas can include any of the following adjustments: exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness or color. Of course, you won’t know the individual combinations but you at least get the idea.

So, below is the original capture as a RAW file without any adjustments. Rearticulated whale skeleton, Port Lockroy, Wiencke Island, Antarctica. Canon 5D Mark II, 16-35mm f/2.8L, 1/80 sec., @ f/13, ISO 200

List of additional “Global” adjustments in Lightroom:

Temperature: warmed from 5450 to 6208
Brightness: +59 (default 50)
Contrast: +54 (default 25)
Vibrance: +17 (default 0)
Saturation: +18 (default 0)
Red Chromatic Abberation: -12
Graduated filters: 2 (local adjustments)
Brushes: 6 (local adjustments)

The final version and I added the other one right below for easier comparison.

Adobe introduced a digital photo workflow program a while back called Lightroom. Since v1.0, it has improved considerably and although v2.6 has room for improvements, it remains my software of choice for grading digital imagery (FYI, a beta version of Lightroom 3 is available for download. I’ve been experimenting with it a little and look forward to its full release perhaps in April of 2010).  My current Lightroom database is about 45,000 images, and my main complaint against Lightroom is that it lacks the speed to navigate through that many files. Lightroom 3 is purported to address that issue in particular. But in spite of that, Lightroom is amazingly powerful, digital darkroom tool. I rarely open Photoshop much anymore, save for blended images or panorama stitching.

If you are like me, and tend to settle into a habit of working with a program and in so doing fail to tap into its full resources, this is a provocation to learn some of the shortcut keys to reduce your mouse clicks and boost the speed of your grading. I know that some people prefer a mouse over the keyboard, and in some cases, that works best. But I have two 30 inch monitors, and that is a lot of screen real estate to travel over with a mouse. I find that a blend of mouse and keyboard shortcuts works best. An entire list is of keyboard shortcuts is available at Adobe, additionally, they are listed next to each function in the top drop down menus. But too many at one time equals none in the memory bank. Every one’s workflow is a little bit different but here are few that are critical to my workflow and they save me a lot of time:

WHILE IN GRID MODE

• B–Add to Quick Collection
• D–Open file in Develop Mode
• E–Enter Loupe view
• Ctrl + G–Group into stack
• R–Open image in Develop Crop Mode
• Space Bar–Enter Loupe View

WHILE IN DEVELOP MODE

• E–Enter Loupe view
• G–Enter Grid Mode
• K–Activates Brush Tool
• M–Activates Gradient Tool
• N–Activates Stamp Tool ~When viewing at 100%, space bar toggles hand tool and stamp tool
• Space Bar–While held down shows image at 100%

OTHER

• Tab–Show/Hide the side panels
• Shift + Tab–Hide/Show all the panels
• L–Cycle Lights Out modes
• 1-5–Star Rating
• 6-9–Set Color Label

There are a few websites out there devoted to lightroom tips, I’d recommend checking them out:

1. PhotoShop Lightroom Killer Tips
2. The Lightroom Lab

The day the cell phone became more than a phone, is the day I started to desire one. The phone itself, is my least favorite part of the device. In a nutshell, the IPhone is a movement toward a micro computer, and as such, is host to an abundance of software applications spawned in our binary age. I use my IPhone more and more in practical and functional ways,  and a few particular applications are especially helpful when out on  photo adventures. I thought I’d list a few of the applications I use and why I like them.

• Stanza: Free

  An E-book reader for the IPhone. What does this have to do with photography. It has nothing to do with the act of photography specifically, but everything in between. That includes the option to read stimulating books when waiting for sunset light, or standing in line at a myriad of poorly functional retail outlets with bad Fung Shui.

• Planets: Free

  Visual presentation of the night sky with planet visibility data. A very simple and easy to read/understand software with visual display of planets and their visibility status on a nice graph. Lists rise and set time of the planets as well.

• Focalware: $10.00

  Shows GPS linked sun and moon rise/set and time based location in the sky, including azimuth numbers. It is really nice for the fact that you can explore ahead in the calendar to see what the sun or moon is doing at a later day in the month. A great research tool especially valuable in Alaska with such variation in the sun’s presence. A powerful tool.

• Shralp Tide: Free

  If you are ever on the coast and forgot your tide book (like I always seem to do), this little app will give you tide information for many, although not all, US locations.

• Pocket World Maps: $.99

  In my travels I meet people from all over the world and it is convenient to have a little set of world maps to access in order to see where someone lives. This little App does that well, although and even deeper zoom capability would be nice.

• Trainer Lite: Free

  GPS based tracking program which logs hikes linked to google maps. Need WiFi or data to show map, but will log your route and save it for later viewing. Most interesting and annoying is the voice that speaks to you as you travel noting your distance traveled. The first time it spoke from backpack, it scared me, I was hiking in silence for a full mile in the arctic and then came a woman’s voice. One point zero miles!

• GeoLives: Free

  A little stepped up GPS trip mapper that lets you email your route which then links to view it plotted on Google Earth. Pretty cool.You can send someone your latest venture and invite them to see your journey in three dimensional Google earth.

• Star Walk: $4.99

  My all time favorite so far. Shows visual real time, GPS based constellation info when pointed at the sky, very, very cool program. Includes constellations, galaxies, date information for meteor showers, and other cool stuff. Get lost in this one, I learned more about the night sky in a few hours with this program than years of prior stargazing. You can even search for night sky subjects and it will locate them for you.

• EZ level: $.99

  For parking my van on level ground when selecting a camp spot.

• WordBook Dictionary: Free

  If you are too far from a dictionary, well, you are too far.

• WordRoll English/Spanish dictionary: Free

  I’m headed to south America soon. Quick access to elusive Spanish words.

• Ibirder Pro: $29.00

  A bird book with sounds, pictures, range, and other information. It wont replace a bird book completely, but is amazing. In particular the similar tab will list birds that are similar with the one your are viewing. The sound recordings are very clean. A fantastic tool when in the field. I used it often on a 10 day river trip in Alaska’s arctic this summer, and continue to use it both around the homeland and when traveling. Even my 3 year old nephew likes it. He wants to hear more birds. His favorite is the American Bittern, if you have ever heard one before, you will know why.

• TweetDeck: Free

  If you are a twitter socialphite.

• Amazon Kindle for IPhone: Free

  An E-book reader, although I like Stanza better, this will sync with your Kindle books if you have an account with Amazon.

• DOF Master: $1.99

  Calculator for quickly finding Hyperfocal Distance per lens and and f/stop. I use it for reference, but the whole subject of HD is a complex and seemingly imperfect one for absolute accurate focus. You can either buy a $4000. Tilt shift lens from Canon or take two frames at varying focal points and Open as Layers/Image align/gradient tool blend, in Photoshop and get a better file and it is a whole lot cheaper.

So now that you have drained the battery by using of all these apps, here is a solution to charging when in remote areas, off the power grid:

A USB Solar charger:  Most devices charge in 2-4 hours, using a USB port.  I used a similar version to charge my IPhone once and it worked fine. I’m not positive about the time to charge a fully dead battery. It is lightweight and you can strap it easily to the back of a backpack and charge your device while hiking on a sunny day. I do a lot of travel that is off the power grid so one of these is critical. $$115.00 at REI

I’m sure there are other apps out there that serve a fitting purpose in the photo-working-world, I’d be curious to hear of one that you find particularly useful.

If you could care less about an Iphone and came here to look at pictures, I’m including this one just for you.

A few comments about photographing white subjects in white environments; in particular the issue of exposure and post production adjustments in Lightroom 2.5. Let me first state that I’ve always utilized an expose-to-the-right shooting style (you can explore that concept on luminous-landscape if you are unfamiliar with it). To summarize that briefly, it is a method of maximizing the signal to noise ratio in a digital file. The result is an out-of-the-camera RAW file that tends to look washed out and overly bright, so it will need a little adjustment in post production software to look good. Shooting this way has the advantage of maintaining more detail in shadowy subjects, not necessary reflected in this particular frame. Exposing to the right may slightly reduce your shutter speed/aperture, and a judgment call is needed based on your accepted exposure setting minimums. Sometimes, if you are already at your high ISO maximum, a file slightly underexposed but shot at 1/500 sec., to stop motion is better than the proper exposure taken at 1/250 sec, which would have some motion blur. You would then boost the exposure in post production and sacrifice some potential grain for a sharpness. In this series of shots, some were a touch blurry from motion since i was only at 1/320 sec, I would have been better served by increasing the shutter speed slightly to 1/500 or 1/640 sec. Oh well, I squeaked by.

Back to exposing white subjects. I prefer to shoot in manual mode for the utmost control, but use other modes when appropriate. It is actually fairly easy to properly expose a subject like a polar in the snow on an overcast, flat-light day. Take a shot and look at your histogram. Since snow is white, or very near white, you should expect to see data on the far right of the histogram, which represents your white levels. If it is more in the middle, then your snow will look gray, and you will want to tweak your exposure to compensate for this. Compare the histograms above to see the difference. Pure white is all the way to the right.

To compensate for the expose-to-the-right settings which I used to capture this image, I used Lightroom and selectively brought the brightness down a bit using the brush and gradient tools to give a little more detail in the snow. The result is subtle, but presents the scene a little more accurate to what the eye sees. Compare the before and after files below.

This image of a brown bear catching a red salmon at Brooks falls in Katmai National Park is comprised of three independent images, stitched together to generate a panorama or 3:1 format image. This offers a high resolution file that embodies a wider format more suitable for some reproduction uses, for example, a billboard. In this case, I had the panorama concept in mind, but needed to capture the fish shot first. Once that was successfully completed, I then swung the camera to the right for two successive frames, with enough overlap to offer a reasonable seam. The moving water confuses photoshop’s automatic stitching program, but because of the somewhat blurry nature of the background, one can manually stitch it with very little difficulty. It was taken with a 500mm lens, which is a tight frame but it worked out well given the location of the bear in the distance at the base of the falls.

In the old days of film, I used the photography standard “Split-graduated neutral density filters”. Essentially, they are thin pieces of glass or resin, that have a graduated pattern that blocks out light in varying stops (degrees of exposure value). They are clear in one half, and dark on the other. They come in different stop values with different degrees of gradients-usually described as hard or soft edge. You pick the right one for the specific scene and slide it down over the end of your lens and it makes the foreground and the sky the same exposure value.

I really disliked using those filters! First of all, they are not truly neutral in my opinion, they are difficult to get lined up correctly, they scratch and get fingerprinted easily, if it is raining, get out the umbrellas!, and finally, you are adding layers of stuff on the end of expensive, high quality glass, inevitably causing some quality compromise. Well, welcome to the digital world! I got rid of nearly my entire filter collection, including the Split ND’s a long time ago. But what is the approach now? Below is an example of what/how I approach this issue today, using a digital camera, RAW files, and photoshop gradient filters.

It was a dark morning with mostly cloudy skies. The thin clear area in the east looked promising for a splash of sunshine, so I quickly found a place that might work for a daybreak landscape. The tundra was in its prime crimson color, and I knew the warmth of it would explode at first light. When the sun is rising over a horizon with quickly moving clouds, there is little time to waste. In this scene, I knew that I needed to balance the exposure using two or more frames–one exposed for the sky and one for the foreground, so I set the camera to a 3 set auto-bracket sequence of 1-2/3 stop increments (that’s about 5 stops total) I set the self timer to a 2 second delay, (I was on very soft tundra, not the best for stability). Once the sun appeared I shot a test shot and looked at the exposures, made sure the histograms looked o.k. for each scene. Oh by the way, being in manual exposure mode is a must.

There is however and additional issue that arises: Lens flare. I used a 24-105mm zoom lens for this shot, and zoom lenses are pretty well known in general for flare, since there are so many internal glass elements for light to bounce off of. I own 5 lenses in the 24mm range, which is ridiculous, but they all seem to have a purpose. I did not however have my little 24mm prime, which would have handled the flare much better. So, what is my work around? Well, it’s a little more time consuming, but pretty simple. For one frame, I just hold my finger over the sun so it reduces the flare on the bottom half of the image. Depending on the situation, you might need to reverse this for the sky image as well. What would be handy is a little articulating arm on the tripod that had a small dodge tool on the end of it, and one could bend it in place. But then, it’s likely I’d forget that occasionally anyway! I always have my fingers, and working fast is the critical issue.

Lightroom 2.0 was released three days ago on July 28. The upgrade is $99, and it has paid for itself already.

There are a number of improvements, but the most important to me is the localized correction feature. These are non-destructive adjustments, meaning they do not modify the original RAW image data, and they add virtually no size to the file. The new tools are more intuitive and faster than using Photoshop for similar results, and now it is unnecessary to make a Tiff file for these adjustments.

Nowadays, digital composites are everywhere. While editorial images should be honest and unmodified, there seems to be no limit with advertising and promotional works. We received a recent example of this when we got our copy of a Russian calendar featuring some of our polar bear photos.