Amersham Beyond Group - 3rd Jan 2019

Meeting Notes on Creative Photography and Photo-Art
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spb
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Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

Amersham Beyond Group - 3rd Jan 2019

Post by spb » Sat Jan 05, 2019 2:56 pm

INTENTIONAL CAMERA MOVEMENT (ICM) - Gill Morgan

Gill kindly gave us a talk on the art of ICM which involves moving the camera during the exposure to deliberately create a blurred image. She made the point that there are no rules and nothing is repeatable - it’s all delightfully random. Gill showed us some beautiful results from this technique and shared some tips to get good results;

- camera movement can be subtle or dramatic. It can change direction. Ideally the movement should start before opening the shutter and continue after closing it.
- manual settings on the camera give controllability with exposures of between 1/10th of a second and 2 seconds being typical.
- a dull or wet day will help to control excessive light levels combined with low ISO and small aperture settings. A neutral density filter, or polariser, can also help with this.
- pre-focussing the camera will help to keep some details distinct and avoid a blurry mess.
- post-processing of the results is often required eg to crop or clone out undesirable areas and adjust the exposure. Experiment with conversion to monochrome, negative (invert) etc.
- try combining both sharp and blurred exposures with Photoshop layers or by multiple exposure in the camera.
- the normal ‘rules’ of composition will still apply if hoping to impress a judge.

MONTHLY CHALLENGES

#1 – BLUR AND/OR OUT-OF-FOCUS

We enjoyed 25 images from members for Challenge #1. These were a mix of intentional camera movement and blurring by post-processing.

A few issues were raised in the process;

- Filter>Blur>Radial Blur>Zoom (or Spin) in Photoshop is centred at the mid-point of the image (or selection) by default. However this is not always the best place. For example a zoom blur on an escalator should normally be centred at the vanishing point of the image. This can be achieved by dragging in the Blur Centre box in the filter dialogue box. There is no preview and the required result may take several attempts. In Photoshop CC, convert a copy of the layer to a Smart Object (Layer>Smart Objects>Convert to Smart Object) then apply the filter. Now by clicking on the Smart Filter layer it can be adjusted and re-adjusted quickly at any time.
- with Filter>Blur>Motion Blur the direction of this linear blur can be similarly adjusted eg horizontally for a road, vertically for trees etc.
- when motion blurring eg trees behind a car, it’s difficult to stop the edge of the car blurring into the background unrealistically. A selection excluding the car should stop this but it does not. There are two solutions; a) select the car and put a copy of it on its own layer above. On the original layer below, clone trees over the edge of the car so that when motion blurred the car colour will not contaminate the background beyond the edge of the car. Alternatively b) with Photoshop CC only, apply the car selection, invert it, and apply Filter>Blur Gallery>Path Blur to the trees. Set the blur direction arrow as required and the amount of blur. This filter obeys the selection and will not blur the edge of the car.

CAMERA TOSSING
Apparently this is a thing. Patrick Hudgell showed us four images created by tossing his camera in front of his computer screen for 15 seconds whilst a pulsating slide show was displayed. The results were surprisingly good. Many videos can be seen on YouTube etc of people tossing and spinning their expensive cameras and smartphones high in the air and (mostly) catching them again, during a timed exposure.

#2 – ICE OR WATER CLOSE-UP

This could be indoors or outdoors; dew on a leaf, water in a stream, flowing tap water, ice on a pond, ice cubes, frost etc etc. New images, or at least newly processed images and no general views of the seaside, please. Expensive lighting is not necessary and don’t forget that smartphones are surprisingly good at close-up macro work.

Send one image prepared as per the FAQ to me by midnight on Monday 4th February, please. Don’t forget that you can submit one per challenge per month so you could have another go at a blurry ICM for #1 and also one ice or water close-up for #2.

OTHER CREATIVE WORK

We also looked again at Topaz Simplify which has now moved into the (somewhat confusing and unhelpful) Topaz Studio. Topaz Simplify can remove fine detail and replace it with areas of flat colour, thus simplifying a busy image. Offers of up to 50% discount are often available on the Topaz suite.

VIDEO FRAME GRABS
Margaret Chung asked if it was possible to extract a single frame from a video for enhancement in Photoshop.

This is certainly easier with some video players than others. I used the popular VLC Player which is free to download. When playing the video, pause it (spacebar) and advance one frame at a time (E) until the required frame is on screen. Then select Video>Take Snapshot. The frame will be saved to the Pictures folder as a PNG file to process further as necessary. 4K video is possible with many cameras and smartphones these days and that should produce an 8Mpx single frame of high quality.

Rod Eva also pointed out that a command line interface in VLC Player gives some interesting capabilities for example to extract every tenth frame which could be used for interesting purposes such as focus stacking.

COLOUR SPACE
A few members sent images to Challenge #1 in colour spaces other than sRGB. Although the world’s default is sRGB, larger colour spaces are often recommended for photographers to encompass a greater range of colours. In my opinion the benefits are marginal and the disadvantages are significant. An image in Adobe RGB will be noticeably desaturated when displayed in non-colour-aware software (such as our PDI software). An image in ProPhoto RGB similarly displayed will look truly terrible. Personally I set my cameras, Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop to sRGB and sleep soundly. If you want to be all macho and use another colour space, you must convert it to sRGB unless you know that recipient software can handle it properly, in which case it must be tagged appropriately.
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THE BACK OF BEYOND – DIARIES

SD CARD PHOTO RECOVERY
APS member Ken Batchelor tried to recover images from an SD card that had been corrupted by being removed whilst it was in use. Sandisk freeware proved unsuccessful and then paid software flagged up an alert with the credit card company. Success was finally achieved by Stellar Photo Recovery. Although £55, this provides an initial free preview of what photos or videos can be recovered. It also repairs corrupted files.
If any member has a similar problem Ken is willing to try to recover it for you.

GOOGLE CHROME IMAGE CORRUPTION
APS member Steve Smith mentioned problems that he was having with images displayed in the Google Chrome browser on his PC. Black shadow areas were displaying bright green and blue. This was tracked down to a problem with the graphics driver. It was cured by turning off Hardware Acceleration in the Chrome settings and then re-starting Chrome.

Photoshop is also vulnerable to graphics card or driver problems. These often manifest as a wrong, missing or misplaced cursor display. Updating the graphics driver can often fix this and switching off Edit>Settings>Performance>Use Graphics Processor can help with diagnosing a problem.

Cheers, Steve














Cheers, Steve

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