TopazDetail

Photo: Bunny Blur

Photo: Our bunny Star in the process of launching out of her cage.

“Bunny blur” almost sounds like a technical term, doesn’t it?

Since Star here is unofficially becoming the site mascot when changes are made or things go wrong, I figured it would be fair give her the spotlight every now and again.  I’m also in the process of touching a few of her and our other rabbit – who has since passed – to move over to my photonelly flickr account, so I’ll probably have a few more uploaded in the days/weeks to come.

For now, check out the bunny tag for more photos of our furry friends.

- Kris

Before and After: Cana Island

While my main darkroom laptop is awaiting repairs, I felt another entry in the Before and After Series was in order. The image from this post is an aerial shot I took while doing a photo shoot over the Door County peninsula in Wisconsin last October.

After two incredible helicopter tours over Maui, this shot was from my first aerial shoot from a two-seater airplane. To say I learned a lot would be an understatement, and if you’d like to read more, checkout my Above Door County post.

Now, onto the photos!

The Before Image

Not the most technically sound image I’ve captured from the air, but given the conditions, I was happy with it. I really liked the composition, so I felt it was worth saving.

The After Image

Not too drastically different at this size, but there are more subtle things to discover when viewing them at the next size up – which you can do by clicking each photo to view on Flickr.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that the color is different, which I took care of by altering the White Balance. My original intent of the entire flight was to capture the autumn colors from the air, but the first pass was just too yellowish/orange for my taste. I decided to tone it down.

The other main difference in the after shot is the additional detail I recovered using Topaz Detail. That’s another plug-in I’m still learning my way around, but I’ve been happy with my first few experiments.  In this case, I used the Micro Contrast Enhancement preset with a few minor tweaks around the detail levels.

When looking at the larger version of the image, you’ll see more definition in the lighthouse itself and the trees behind it. I tried to suppress the additional noise the best I could, but given the rewards I saw in the main subject of the photo, it was worth it.

Thoughts?

As always, let me know what you think about this latest entry in the series. Also, if you’ve played around with Topaz Detail or similar tools before, please share your experiences there as well.

Thanks,
– Kris

Before and After: East Maui Sunrise

The edition of the Before and After series is an anniversary of sorts. It was exactly one year ago today that I took the before image that you see below, and it was during our overnight stay in the heavenly town of Hana along Maui’s east coast.

Being able to view the sunrise in Hana was a special moment for me personally, so now that I look back one year later and relive those moments, I wanted to make this image a little more special.

The Before Image

This image does a pretty fair job as-is for taking me back to that moment. There were a few things I wish I had done differently back then, and here’s a short list.

• Scout out a location the day before – it was a pretty long day driving all the way to Hana, but I still could have taken 15 minutes to find a spot before we went to dinner that night.
• Remember the tripod – left it in our cottage, and by the time I realized that I needed it (because of the low light), going back to get it would have meant missing the moment.
• Shot bracketed exposures – I wasn’t shooting HDR at the time, and I’m not necessarily saying it was a strong HDR candidate. If I had bracketed shots – and that tripod – I could have used a few other multi-RAW techniques in post.

Okay, enough with what didn’t happen and onto the after image.

The After Image

Although I may still go back and try to recover some of that orange glow around the sun, this image is where I’m leaving it for now. Wanting to make this one special, I played around with a few tricks to get to this look.

• First up was a little cropping. It ended up putting the sun closer to the middle than I prefer, but there was too many distractions in the foreground otherwise.
• Next was multi-RAW processing in ACR using a gradient layer mask to blend separate exposure adjustments for the sky and the foreground.
• To bring in more detail, I used two different tools from Topaz Labs. The first of which was Topaz Adjust by applying the Clarity preset and tweaking the Noise tab to clean up the clouds a little bit.
• Topaz Detail was then used by applying the Feature Enhancement preset to add just a little more definition to the clouds and the surface of the water.

Thoughts?

Let me know what you think or if you have any other suggestions of things I should try differently. I like the after image being a little brighter, but tried to avoid getting to bright so that it didn’t feel like dawn anymore.

– Kris