split toning effect (click to enlarge)

So this weekend I spent some time taking pictures of my cats, I forced myself to use my little 14mm pancake lens for that, I just love this lens. Turns out using a wideangle lens for cats has one drawback – all the distracting shapes and colours in the background are very visible. Unlike normal or telephoto lenses which nicely blur everything in the background and show a much smaller portion of it, with wideangle you get much more clutter in your pictures.

But I found that split toning helps to draw attention away from the distracting backgrounds. The picture I’m using here as an example doesn’t actually suffer from that much clutter but the tree still has enough detail to be distracting. And the colours are quite dull, no warm sunlight, the whole picture looks pretty uninteresting.

original photo

Making the photo greyscale is already a big improvement but that’s a little boring, right? I like black and white photography too but I wanted to do something a bit more creative than that with this picture.

greyscale

So I’ll give you a very short step by step guide for split toning. It’s easiest if you shoot raw instead of jpg (which you should always do anyway)*. And I use Photoshop CS5. If I remember right the previous version(s) had the same functionality but not 100% sure if it’s exactly the same, but you’ll figure it out I’m sure.

Step by step

1. drag your raw photo into Photoshop and the camera raw dialog will appear (see bottom of this post for the extra steps if you can’t shoot in raw format)

2. do whatever exposure/recovery/fill light/blacks etc adjustments you need to do on the Basic tab page to make sure it doesn’t look over or underexposed

3. go to the HSL/Grayscale tab and turn on Convert to Grayscale (feel free to do this before step 2)

4. now go to the Split Toning tab and just copy these settings:

You can tweak the Balance slider to get more of the blue or yellow showing, the right “mixture” changes depending on the overall brightness of your image. Other colour combinations are possible too, but I find yellow highlights and blue shadows very nice for giving the impression of warm light, especially if your original photo didn’t actually have any warm light like in my example.

And that’s it!

Another little tip:

For some photos this adds an interesting tint even if you don’t convert it to greyscale. It really depends on the photo how much of the original colour you want to keep. Just use the Vibrance/Saturation sliders on the Basic tab page to have more or less of the original colours showing.

before and after - split toning on top of original colours

This one actually looks good with original colours and the split toning effect applied on top (and some splotches removed). This effect works very well for architecture and landscapes too. Now to dig out some of my older raw files to see if I can do something with all those photos I discarded for looking too dull…

*If you can’t shoot in raw format, you can still use the camera raw dialog to edit your images. Open Adobe Bridge, browse to your jpgs (or tiffs, other image formats might work as well), select the image you want to edit and go to File > Open in Camera Raw. Then you can apply all the same effects and settings as you would with raw images (the difference is that raw images contain more data like extra dynamic range for example which results in less quality loss if you process them).

HDR landscape

Ever since I got rid of all my heavy, clunky and not even all that good dslr gear and bought myself a Panasonic GF1 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera and a bunch of manual lenses for the money, my photo collection has been expanding at an explosive rate. I could probably fill a whole page with how the micro four thirds system is perfect for me (fits in my already cluttered handbag for one thing) but I won’t, because that’s boring. Less talk, more pictures!

my precious

One area that I’ve always liked is landscapes. I just like going outside and taking pictures, and I like landscapes and nature. To take nice landscape pictures you’re very reliant on the light and weather. I never liked going outdoors midday when the sun was too bright. Either the sky just turned bright white in my photos or the foreground too dark. Grey skies? Even worse, impossible to take nice landscape photos or any photos at all in that weather, everything was just colourless. Sure you can add more colour and contrast to your photos but there’s not much you can do about over or underexposed areas and total lack of cloud detail.

I had to hope for a sunny evening where the light was less contrasty, the sun less powerful, to actually take usable photos. And that time frame in a day is usually quite short (and forget about getting up early for the sunrise, that’s just not going to happen with me), so my opportunities to take nice photos outdoors were very limited and only popped up when I was in the right place… at the right time… in the right weather… oh yeah, and if I didn’t have my camera with me I’d kick myself. This was one of the lucky situations:

lucky weather with dark sky and sunlit foreground, no real need for HDR

However, recently I came across HDR photography – a technique where you take multiple exposures of the same scene and blend them together with something called HDR tone mapping. I’d seen some (to my eyes) very ugly photos, with an overprocessed look popping up here and there. I started seeing them more and more, it seemed almost like a plague.

"art" (or how to mangle a photo)

But there were also some good ones, particularly of landscapes. The funny thing is that most people probably don’t even realise when a good landscape photo uses HDR (neither did I), it just somehow looks special, better than the rest. Just has something about it you can’t put your finger on. I figured these people were just a lot more skilled.

So I was intrigued by HDR (also by the fact that so many people managed to produce such horrible results, pardon me) and I got reading and experimenting, trying the various presets in a HDR tone mapping app with flakey results. I’m guessing that’s how a lot of people arrive at their “creations” – clicking a preset and calling it “art”. Then I came across this very old but very detailed and informative tutorial. It’s from 2006 and the software he talks about now has many more options, but generally it’s all still true:

http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/index.php/articles/189

I didn’t actually read it all the way to the end, shame on me, I got carried away taking pictures… But to summarise, the goal of using HDR photography and tone mapping is to capture and represent as much of the original range of brightness of a scene in  one photo – the sun being the brightest point and the shady forest floor the darkest for example. With just one exposure you can only choose one – either a blown out white sky or an underexposed forest floor. And that’s what’s been plaguing my landscape photography.

completely overlit sky - a situation where HDR is needed

Now my workflow is to take 7 pictures using the exposure bracketing of my GF1 (you can also do it manually with exposure compensation, most cameras will let you do that, and you can use as few as 3 images – one underexposed, one normal and one overexposed) – in raw format of course, because that contains a little extra dynamic range compared to a jpg. I let Photoshop merge these into one HDR image (File > automate > Merge to HDR Pro in CS5) and then convert that to a 16bit image with Photoshop’s HDR tone mapping. And that’s where a lot of the magic happens. The most important bit is the toning curve, here you can very precisely control the shadows, highlights and anything inbetween.

the main control in the process

The truth is that there’s no single preset that works for all your HDR photos. Every single photo requires it’s own finetuning, but that’s part of the fun. At one point it just all falls into place, then I press OK. From there on the work isn’t done yet of course, there’s still plenty of tweaking you can do with adjustment filters, selective dodging of dark areas, etc (that’s also why it’s important to convert it to 16bit and not straight to 8bit.)

Here are some before and after pics of HDR photos I made recently, as you can see, the original photos were just your average type of boring photo – over/underexposed and lacking cloud detail. HDR tone mapping and additional Photoshop adjustments add the magic:

Before and after HDR treatment, click to enlarge

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

HDR opens up a whole new world of options for landscapes and architecture. You can turn literally anything into something appealing. You can use it to reveal prettiness and detail in something that not even your eyes noticed. You can find the photos from this post on my Flickr page.